Trial and Error: A Guest Post by Kaliane Bradley
Every so often, a book comes along that defies genre. Part romance and adventure, part thriller and mystery, part speculative and literary, The Ministry of Time is a story that keeps on giving. Kaliane Bradley has penned an exclusive essay for B&N readers on her creative process and all that led to writing her debut novel, down below.
Hardcover $28.99
The Ministry of Time: A Novel
The Ministry of Time: A Novel
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Hardcover $28.99
Escapist and relatable, poignant and funny, this genre-bending novel is firing on all storytelling cylinders, and is a terrific pleasure to read.
Escapist and relatable, poignant and funny, this genre-bending novel is firing on all storytelling cylinders, and is a terrific pleasure to read.
I’ve written a lot of short stories over the last ten years. I’ve had around twenty published; I’ve written perhaps twice as many that have never seen the light of day. My stories vary in quality, length, and even in style, which is, I think, standard practice: part of the process of finding a ‘voice’ that works is a lot of cringe-inducing trial and error. But whatever the singular virtues and flaws of each story, they tend to have one thing in common, which is that, for a period of three hours to several years (story-dependent), I have fixated crazily on something and have had to exorcise my crazed fixation by writing it down.
I like listening to other writers describe their impetus to create, because some of them are engaged in a very beautiful endeavour. I love the writers who are reclaiming narratives, who are filling silence and shame with music, who are clearing the dead bracken of cliches from the plots where their legends lie. You know when you’re reading a writer like this. They almost make you feel like you’ve been granted an extra hour of daylight.
Sadly, I write because I had a brain problem about something and I decided to make trouble for everyone. Each time I get a story out, I feel a clarity and relief, as if I’ve been sick in a storm at sea and the waters have finally calmed. (The first time I wrote this paragraph, I wrote: as if I’d had a bunged-up nose and had finally managed to blow all the snot out, so there you go – cringe-inducing trial and error). I rarely re-read my stories. The fixation is finished.
To give you some examples: I went through a period of watching a lot of supernatural horror films around the same time as I fixated a little too long on the Berlin Wall – a structure that was still standing when I was a baby – so I ended up writing a horror story about a girl who lives on one side of a mysterious, divisive wall. I re-read some old fairy stories and fixated on the fable of ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ – so I wrote a story about what it might be like to meet the troll on its own terms.
When I first ran across the real historical figure Graham Gore – a man about whom there is very little archival material – I could actually hear the ‘click’ of my fixation falling into place, or maybe that was just my poor brain finally breaking. Well, I’d been exorcising fixations for several years by this time. I knew all I had to do was start writing, and the fixation would eventually leave me alone.
Except, oh dear, it didn’t. Graham Gore was an endlessly renewing fixation – because the deeper I dug, the more there was to write. Because he didn’t really exist, I had to invent him, so I fixated on this new, fictional Graham Gore instead. As part of the process of writing, I fixated on Britain’s imperial legacy (ghastly), on historic Arctic expeditions (ghastly), on James Bond films (mixed). Help! This story was getting longer and longer! Thirty thousand words! Forty thousand words! Fifty thousand! Sixty! When will it stop? Won’t someone think of the children?
I’d also written novels before, but every time I’d sat down with the intention of producing The Great British Novel – with no fixation – I produced content hardly worth printing on toilet paper. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the first version of The Ministry of Time that I realised that I’d only gone and done it. I’d intended to write another fixation-fixing story – just to clear the tubes, as it were – and I’d come out with a novel.
