On Trusting Your Gut

My book, Don't Go To Work, The World Is Ending, is a fantasy novel, and, like all good fantasy novels, has a wise fortune teller about a hundred pages in. Stories are told of his power and wisdom. Respected and feared in equal measure, getting an audience with him can change your fate. His talismans for peering into the future? Five playing cards, turned over one after the other. Depending on if they are higher or lower than the last, tells him what the future has in store for you. This wise man’s name? Bruce Foresight. Is this a pun? Yes. Is it funny? Debatable.

Bruce was a joke, first and foremost. He came to me on a Christmas afternoon after one too many Morecambe and Wise specials on iPlayer. However, when I wrote the scene where our plucky heroes meet him in a fancy restaurant in London, I knew he was important. He was worth more than a cheap laugh or two. I just couldn't tell you why yet. 

Writing Don't Go To Work, The World Is Ending was an exercise in blind faith. I thought it would be a short story, then a novella before it became a fully fledged novel. Bruce, with his steak tartare and glass of champagne, was with me the whole time. Always one scene, no more, no less, practically untouched from the first draft. My gut said he was important to the story. 

Countless drafts and rewrites later and the story took shape. I had figured out what it was about, but Bruce knew all along. He was exactly where he needed to be, doing and saying the right things at the right time. You'd expect no less from a fortune teller. 

Writing, like all art, isn't always about the rational, but it is always about expressing an idea. If you're anything like me, you won't know why you're telling a story until you've told it. Along the way, however, a character might do something you weren't expecting or events seem to be going in the wrong direction. That might be ok if your gut says to keep going. Planning is important, plotting is helpful, but sometimes, you'll need to do something without knowing why first. Trusting that feeling can be good for your writing.

When my characters met Bruce, with his bare-faced confidence and strange rituals, they were witnessing the key to unlocking powerful magic far beyond anything they should be able to do. I wrote Bruce, having no idea what my characters would need to do later in the novel. I knew they were going to change and grow; I knew they were fearful and full of doubt and would need to become sure and confident in order to win the day. Magic, in Don't Go To Work, The World Is Ending, is about changing the world and to change the world, you need bare-faced confidence and strange rituals. Both are also useful in writing. Having the confidence to trust in your characters and see where they want to go, who they want to meet, and what strange rituals they come up with will help you realise what your story is about because it’s their story really.

After completing an art degree, Paul Dalton got a job in a bookshop and then a library. His storytimes were legendary. Through his writing, he explores climate change and the questions that go with it. He set his novel in the present day, as climate change is a story for now, not the future. He puts jokes in his writing, as sometimes all you can do is laugh. He grew up in Kent but now lives in Yorkshire.