How long does it take to take a story idea and turn it into an actual story?
I first had the idea for a series of books called “Valentine and Milo” back in 1995. When I realised that 2020 would be 25 years since I’d first had the idea, I knew it was time to either finally do something with it, or let it go.
But here’s the thing: Valentine and Milo never let me go. No matter how many years had gone by since I first came up with them, there they were, still hanging around in my head-space, reminding me that they didn’t exist yet.
Well, now they do. At last.
Sometimes an idea will arrive fully formed and all you have to do is write it down as-is. Those moments are rare, when a character or a scene or a moment pops up, all ready to go. On the rare occasions when that happens, writing feels more like dictating than creating.
Most ideas aren’t ready to go, straight out of the box. They need workshopping, refining, polishing. Most of the ideas you come up with aren’t even very good, but the good ideas are the ones you don’t forget. They’re the ones you remember, even when you forgot to write them down.
I never forgot my idea for Valentine and Milo. They were always there, just on the edge of my awareness, waiting for me to wrangle them, and all the other ideas I had, into a story worth telling.
The most over-used piece of writing advice is Write What You Know. Personally I prefer Write What You Want To Read. Which is what I did.
I wanted to read a book like the one I’ve just written. That’s why I wrote it. Well, one of the reasons…
Where did “Valentine and Milo” come from, back in 1995? I was twenty-nine that year, which was a year before Paul McGann made his For One Night Only appearance as Doctor Who. The show had been off the air since 1989. If you were a fan, the fact that it was finally coming back, in 1996, was a big deal. I’d been a fan since 1972…
But 1995 wasn’t 1996. 1995 was the sixth consecutive year with no new Doctor Who on the telly. Since it looked like it was never coming back, I started thinking about writing my own stories instead of watching someone else’s.
What if, I thought to myself, I could come up with something that was like Doctor Who, inspired by my love for it but not just another time machine story?
I knew I wanted to write something to do with time travel, and I knew I wanted a love story at the heart of it, rather than simple adventuring.
If you’re going to write a time travel love story, the thing you need to do, after creating the central characters of Him and Her, is work out how the time travel in your story works.
The first and most obvious option is an H.G. Wells time machine. Not only did that not appeal to me at all, there’s no time machine you could conceive of that could possibly top the TARDIS. For a start, it’s a spaceship and a time machine in one, so that wasn’t an option.
Another option was your hero character magically being able to teleport themselves into the past naturally, either by using the power of their mind or via some sort of McGuffin. That didn’t appeal either.
Which left me with the other standby method of time travel, the good old portal.
Unlike a time machine, a time portal is usually fixed in one place and is either sentient or some other natural phenomena.
If a time portal can be thought of as doorway between one time and another, simply having a door that allows your hero to pass between two or more fixed points isn’t that dramatic. It’s simply a plot device to get your characters from A to B.
But what if there was a way to make that time door more than just a plot device? What if there was a way to attach some jeopardy to it?
What if a time door was like the front door of your house? To open your front door, or lock it, you need a door key. What sort of key would open a time door?
If your hero needs a key to open the door and pass through it, that’s a lot more dramatic than having it permanently open for him to use any time he likes.
If you’ve ever locked yourself out of your house, or arrived back home only to realise you’ve left your keys at work, and I’ve done both, then you you know how problematic that can be.
Now imagine a character being pursued, making for the time door, his escape route, only to realise that he has lost his key. Instantly, the jeopardy in the story gets elevated. Did he leave it behind? Can he get back to it? Will it still be there? Did he drop it by accident? What if his enemies find it first? Did somebody steal it? Who could have done that? Has he put his trust in the wrong person?
A time door that needs a key simply allows for a lot more drama and jeopardy than a time door that doesn’t. Which, in turn, makes for a much better time travel story.
There are actually two types of portal based time travel in the books. Both utilise time crystals in order to work.
The time crystals are the keys to the time doors and they were one of the ideas that I had quite early on. However, they were only part of the reason why “Valentine and Milo” took so long to make its way out of my head and onto the page.
If time crystals are the key to time travel, where did they come from and how do they work?
Besides the concept of the time crystal, I’d come up with some other characters besides Valentine and Milo, had some ideas for plot points, knew what the story was really all about and had a vague idea for how it might end. But the thing that I spent the most time thinking about was the world where the story would take place.
A story is a combination of different things for different writers. For me, it’s the three-sided triangle of Plot, Character & Theme sitting inside the circle of World.
All that world-building I had to do in my head, working out the mechanics of how time travel worked, why it worked the way it did, who could do it and why they were doing it, figuring out all that cosmology was the reason why it took me 25 years to make my idea real.
As the years went by, I gradually built up a concept for how time travel would work and developed the backstory to its discovery. But a concept by itself isn’t the same thing as a story. It’s merely a place to set stories in. I needed stories to tell in the story world I’d created. Coming up with them would take time…
The starting point for all of that was the time doors. Why do they exist? How did they come into being? How can they be used, for good or for evil? Do they only take you back in time, to the past, or can they take you to the future too? And, once you’ve gone through one of these time doors, how do you get back?
Then there was the question of what different people might do in different situations. What would a criminal do with access to a time door? What about a grieving husband, someone fleeing persecution, someone out for revenge or desperate for a second chance at love?
Think about it. If you had access to a time door, what would you do? The future or the past? Right an earlier wrong? Reverse that decision you regret? Take up that missed opportunity? Or just find out next week’s winning Lottery numbers?
Which brought me back to Valentine and Milo. Why are they time travellers? What are the consequences of them being time travellers? And, since every Hero needs a Villain, who are the opposition and what do they want?
Until I’d worked that out, I wasn’t able to write down anything other than my ideas. As a result, by the time I was ready to start writing, I had plenty of them.
I also didn’t feel ready to start writing until I knew for sure how the story ended. Once I’d worked that out, once I knew where everything was going, that’s when I knew I was ready to begin.
And so I finally started writing “Valentine and Milo” 25 years after I’d thought of it. Only now it’s called “The Paradox Club” instead.
I hope you enjoy reading “The Valentine Trap” and want to know what happens next. There are things being set up that, trust me, will be paid off in future books.
I know where this is going. I’ve got it all planned out. I know how it ends. What I don’t know is how many books it will take for us to get there.
But I do know one thing.
Valentine and Milo is an idea I never forgot, an idea that stayed with me for 25 years. I think the reason it stayed with me that long is that I’m meant to write it. Either I’m meant to write it for you, or I’m meant to write it for me, or I’m meant to write it for both of us.
Whichever one of those is the right answer, one thing’s for sure…
This is the story that wouldn’t die.
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