Most authors have one. It isn’t a bad book, exactly. It’s a book you finish and then realise, too late, could have been told a different way.
Mine is Blackout.
Here’s the premise. Marcus Caine turns forty at a family dinner in Tallinn. He goes to wash his hands, and when he comes back the table is empty. His wife and both daughters are gone. Within hours he finds out the restaurant doesn’t exist, his house is a derelict shell, and the national database has never heard of any of them. Not his family, and not him either.
That’s because it’s 2016. Marcus won’t move to Estonia for another four years. He has woken up seven years inside his own past while his body lies in a coma in a London hospital. Meanwhile the quiet old doctor next door, a man the whole country adores, has just buried his wife. She is the first of many.
That’s the book. And for almost half of it, I didn’t tell you any of that.
What I thought a novel should do
Blackout started out as a screenplay, my second. Like Salva before it, I then turned the script into a novel. I’d always believed novels reward holding things back: hide what’s going on, keep the reader guessing, let them work it out alongside the character. So that’s what I did. Marcus doesn’t know it’s 2016, so neither do you. The reveal comes in chapter twelve of twenty-six.
The manuscript went to my editor, who liked it and said it was ready to go. While she had it, I sat down with a screenwriter.
What the screenwriter told me
The point was simple. A movie script has to state its premise in the first ten minutes. That’s ten pages, roughly the first eight per cent. It can’t just hint at the premise. It has to state it.
My first reaction was whoa, hold on. Hiding things is half the fun. But I knew the screenwriter was right, and the longer we talked, the clearer it became that this wasn’t only a rule for film. If you know from the start that Marcus is in the past and that a killer is about to begin, the question changes. It stops being what’s happening to him? and becomes can he stop it? The second question drives a thriller far better.
Eight per cent against nearly half the book. That’s the gap.
The version I’d write now
I’d cut between the two years from page one.
In 2016, Marcus is a stranger in a country he hasn’t moved to yet, trying to persuade a detective and a psychiatrist that he isn’t losing his mind, while the man next door gets started.
In 2023, there’s the hospital in London, the machines, and his wife at the bedside waiting for him to wake up.
That one change does a lot of work. It gives the book two clocks instead of one. It keeps the family on the page the whole way through, instead of leaving them as something Marcus has lost and is trying to get back to. And it makes Marcus someone with a job to do from early on, not someone things simply happen to.
At the time my mind raced with it: more jumps, past to present and back again, until I threw my hands up and decided it was too much to bolt onto a finished book. So I explained all this in the acknowledgements and published the novel as it was. It works as it is. My team thought so, and I still do.
Why I’m telling you this
This summer I re-read all thirty of my books (I wrote about that here). Blackout was the one where I kept catching myself thinking about the other version.
I haven’t decided what to do about it. Rewriting a finished novel takes weeks I could spend on a new one, and I have a new thriller well under way. Still, the idea hasn’t gone away in three years, and that has to mean something.
So I’d like to ask you.
If you’ve read Blackout, would you want the version that tells you the premise up front and cuts between 2016 and 2023?
If you haven’t, which would you rather pick up: the mystery, or the race against the clock?
Leave a comment, or just hit reply if this reached you by email. I read every one.
And if you want to see the version that exists now, Marcus is still waiting to wake up in 2016: Get Blackout.