Years ago, Stephen King talked about how he used to get so sick of answering the question ‘where do you get your ideas?’, that he started to answer with the name of a pawn shop near his house in Maine.
He doesn’t anymore – his website just gives a pat answer about ideas coming from everywhere and adding the question ‘what if?’ – which is true, but not as much fun.
You get story ideas from things you read, things you see, people you talk to or see on the street, random things that occur to you in relation to something else and anywhere/everywhere besides. Sometimes a story presents itself to you, sometimes you have to tease it out of something. I once dreamed a very Lovecraftian short horror story and somehow remembered it all in enough detail to write it down in its entirety.
The kernel of Falling was given to me one day in 1991. If I’d known I’d still be working on it all this time later and that it would come to be not only a huge writing project but a defining artefact of my life, I’d have taken notice of the date.
There’s a passage in Part 1 that’s stayed pretty much the same through every draft and rewrite, and it goes like this;
A dozen or so steps later, the path shook – hard.
It was probably no more than a strong gust, but Dale’s hand shot out to grab the rail in fright.
His heart lurched in his chest for a second. When you’re only centimetres from a hundred and sixty foot drop, sudden movement can be scary.
If you’re at all curious about where the idea for Falling came from, the above is a true story. I worked at 105 Miller St on the corner of the Pacific Highway in North Sydney. Having grown up in the Sutherland Shire, south of Sydney’s central business district, I used to catch a train on the Illawarra line to work, changing at Town Hall to join the North Sydney line that goes across Sydney Harbour.
Occasionally if the weather was nice or I was just in the mood, I’d get the train from North Sydney Station to Milsons Point (the southernmost station before you cross the water) after work and walk across the Bridge to the city station of Wynyard to get another train home.
I did that one day, enjoying the view and the air, when the above happened. In my case it was a heavy truck that passed on the road just a few feet away, but if it’s particularly windy you can feel 52,000 tons of steel sway in the breeze – quite unsettling for something so huge and seemingly unyielding.
The ‘what if’ Steven was talking about when asked where he gets his ideas came in the form of a question that subsequently occurred to me; ‘what if this whole thing fell down with me on it?’
The original idea didn’t even have anything to do with ghosts or even the aftermath of the bridge collapsing. I just liked the idea of a character who’d been through the horror and trauma of barely surviving the Harbour Bridge falling down and wondered what kind of guy he’d be decades later.
Somewhere along the way the paranormal leached in, and somewhere after that the science and science fiction leached in after it to make it about the bridge, the collapse, the aftermath and the survivors. The next ‘what if’ asked what might happen if they built a new bridge but it was haunted with the souls of all those who’d died so horribly on the old bridge.
It seemed like a good premise for a grand, gothic haunted house story, the kind with dark, musty rooms and parapets with grotesque gargoyles looking down on spiritualists in Arthur Conan Doyle’s day.
But this time, what about setting it in a major modern city (like Sydney) in a time when secular pragmatism enjoys a deeper penetration across society than spirituality or religion ever has (like today), among a practical, self-effacing people who have little time for high-minded science or metaphysical theory (like urban Australians)?
The seed was planted and I sat down and started to write in longhand in a foolscap notebook, my first ever PC still a couple of years away. I wrote an introductory coda about how some famous people become well known for much darker reasons like Dale has, not from being a prominent or talented public figure but because they’ve survived a great tragedy.
The story proper opened back during the time of the Second World War, chronicling the events that led to the bridge being weakened that would cause its collapse decades later and the men who were interrupted carrying out the repairs. You can read it as a deleted scene amongst these very pages.
I moved to the UK for a year and continued to write (filling up a second longhand notebook), half a world away from the bridge but with the tastes, textures and memories of city life and the Sydney surrounds on easy recall after growing up among them.
I can’t remember if I finished the first draft entirely in longhand but I got my first computer in 1993 and somewhere along the line I transposed the whole longhand version into digital form in a Herculean effort I’d throw myself off a cliff to avoid nowadays. It was all done in WordPerfect 5.1 – among the many memories attached to Falling is the clean blue screen.
In the original story, the main action was set in the far-off year of 2017, the time of the bridge collapse around four in the afternoon on a day in October 1998. I was driving to work at a video store in Sutherland at the appointed minute, so I knew the current draft of Falling was useless. I had to rewrite it so it would happen a few years hence.
It was quite a task. The word count of the eight-part book was at that stage a little over 250,000 words (most commercial fiction is around the 60-100,000 word mark), and it meant a lot more than just searching and replacing for mentions of the year.
There’s plenty of mentions of the day of the week, for instance, so in moving the action a few years forward I had to go right through and flag every mention of a date, day, month and year because plenty of scenes that had previously taken place on weekdays were now on weekends and vice versa. Not only that, plenty of historical events had found their way in, like the opening of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel in 1992 or, in much later drafts, the September 11 terrorist attacks.
After that I spent the next five or 10 years occasionally trying to get Falling published. It wasn’t yet the era of ebooks and the self e-publishing revolution, and the commercial fiction market in Australia for unknown Australian writers was miniscule. American writers like John Grisham and Stephen King (later JK Rowling and Dan Brown) got the lions’ share of fiction sales like they did everywhere, and fiction has always been a tiny share of the whole market anyway.
There were a handful of Australian writers like Matthew Reilly doing popular fiction rather than hoity-toity politically correct stories for social workers and grant winners, and at some point I decided to do what he did – get his own novel edited, designed and printed and take it to bookstores around Sydney hoping they’d stock it.
His success is now industry lore – an editor for Pan Macmillan Australia saw and bought a copy and offered to publish it, and he now has the kind of success most kids who want to be authors dream about. If he could do it, I surmised, I could too.
It’s all in the rewriting
One day in around 2005, I realised the date of the bridge collapse had again come and gone. A friend had read Falling and enjoyed it but had comments that got me thinking.
I joined a critique group that took a cursory look over a document I put together to describe the structure (the whole book was way too long for most people to commit to) and they had questions and comments – some of them brutal, as people who don’t know or care about you are wont to do, and which is invaluable.
I’d even had a proper (albeit small) publisher ask for the whole manuscript after I sent them a query – a place in Queensland that’s no more.
By that time I’d written about 10 novels over my lifetime but I still believed in Falling. I resolved to get it perfect by rewriting it from beginning to end, publishing it myself and moving on.
But the plan of printing and distributing thousands of paper copies to bookshops around Sydney was by then far less workable since I’d moved to Perth, Western Australia.
It was also likely to cost at least several thousand dollars even for a short digital print run, and my career as a freelance magazine and newspaper journalist meant there was little chance of being able to afford that any time soon. Even if it did, I was often so busy on writing day to day assignments to keep my family’s heads above water I had little time for creative writing of my own.
The epublishing revolution was just starting to kick off (a mere sliver of the industry it today as I write these words) so it seemed like my chance. Authors like Amanda Hocking and EL James became self publishing phenomena, with readership numbers that put even the old names from traditional publishing to shame and in many cases with no apparent talent for writing. Surely I could do that?
And so began the third major rewrite, and this one was a doozy. I expected it to take me about a year, given the amount of actual paid work I had (and the seemingly paltry – and shrinking – sum I made every year from it). When I was preparing to move again a couple of years later, this time to Los Angeles, I wasn’t even close to finished.
This time around I had to do all the same day, month, year and historical accuracy stuff above, but I also made a list of everything I could possibly think of to improve, and added to it as I went through the process. That document (‘DO.doc’; right in there with the 14 documents comprising the manuscript) ended up 20 pages long.
I system carded the whole thing and did a new chronology. I recast characters. Amalgamated characters. Updated the technology to what it would look like 20 years hence from the viewpoint of the mid 2010s rather than the early 1990s. I did background documents explaining the appearances of paranormal entities, figuring out how to have characters do new things, how many times people move between work and home and much more.
I came up with better reasons for things like characters’ motivations by asking myself why they happened and making the answer ironclad in the context of the plot. I wrote out a rhythm of scenes to make sure I didn’t have too much action over exposition or vice versa. I storyboarded complicated scenes like the Part 6 expedition to make sure of where each character was.
Most parts in the story ended up with new documents dedicated to them to sort out the new structure, some of them long enough to be novellas themselves. I combined scenes, cut them, expanded them, moved them and moved them back again. I wrote backstories for characters, I killed them off. I even realised at one point I’d ended up plotting out and including the same scene in two different places.
I felt really sorry for orthopaedic surgeon and Dale’s friend Barry, who went from surviving the whole book and having a great marriage to suffering a terrible marriage and dying horribly, both fates originally attributed to another character.
I found tiny talismans amid the plot like the plastic loveheart and, I hope, creepy places for them to appear – in fact the loveheart ended up a lot more important to the story than just the scary object it had been in earlier drafts. I planted things early in the story that I hoped you wouldn’t guess would become critical later, like the killswitch code for Dale’s brace, hiding them in innocuous conversations about something else.
I referred to a million blog posts from agents and publishers online about what readers hate. I coloured a thousand sequences red and blue with accompanying notes for things I had to clean up when I’d done something somewhere else that was connected to it.
I flagged a hundred sequences with a big question mark, asking myself if they really propelled the story forward or if I could lose them. For example, I agonised over the scene of Tim and his research colleagues on the rural property a lot, never quite deciding whether to keep it or lose it until I found a way to relate it more closely to the core of the story.
A lot of it was mechanical. I had to search for every instance of ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ and make sure I had the right syntax in each place. I searched for every occasion I’d used the words ‘of’ and ‘or’ to make sure I had them right, because when I’m typing quickly they’re two words I tend to mix up.
I had to decide which break needed a ‘****’ and which needed a new chapter. After chopping and changing and moving so much I had to go right through and put the chapter numbers in sequence again.
I had to do a word count on every chapter and make sure they weren’t too long, because I’d made an artistic decision to keep the chapters short so the story feels more propulsive. The intention (and my hope) is that if you know the chapters are short and you’re really enjoying it you’ll want to read just one more, and Falling will have the most elusive and sought after quality in fiction; unputdownableness.
The hardest task was whether or not Vicki could really be Dale’s former girlfriend despite them having forgotten each other in the ensuing years (I lost count of how many sections were coloured blue and entitled ‘THE GIRL’).
I decided to blog about the whole experience of doing the rewrite and publishing the book, an ongoing endeavour you can read at falling.io.
And then it was time to unleash Falling on the world, the definitive version of which you now hold in your hands. In its quarter century-long development I’ve gone through 15 drafts (with multiple changes in each), something like 3,000,000 words and total manhours that probably add up to several months, maybe even a year or two.
It was a wild ride and I hope that – like your own relationship with Falling if you liked it – it’s only just begun…