What do I remember about Chapter Five? After re-reading it, what instantly comes to mind is the locket. I wrote its mystery into the story quite early on—I think as early as Connecting—without really knowing why. I suppose it was a mix of inspiration. First, my daughter said I needed more twists—she’s basically responsible for turning my original concept of writing perhaps a fifty-thousand-word short story into a 400,000-word saga—and second, the idea of George’s family being ‘touchers’. Of course, throughout the story, George denies this, while at the same time he has secret but tender memories of being with his mother.
Where the idea of having George’s father deliberately estrange himself from his son came from beats me; I have no idea. This theme of the ultimate sacrifice—asking if a father would sacrifice his only son—is an unusual and, biblically speaking, potentially confrontational one. It is not a new idea; it can be seen in the successful Walt Disney presentation of Mulan, only there, the daughter sacrifices herself to protect her father. In real life, fathers have often sacrificed themselves to save their children, yet such people rarely get their story told.
This part of the book, although it felt like an uncontrollable part of the story, still had to be written in a believable way as the strange tale of the locket came to the foreground. This tale appears continuously throughout all seven books and plays a vital role. It is strange that even as the author, I didn’t know the whole locket story until the end of the seventh book, Disconnecting. By that point, the story was writing itself and my job was to lyrically capture it, which was not easy. The signals never came in one clear flow; they came in a swirling cloud, like a bunch of kids all wanting to tell you what they did over the weekend.
By now, in Ei8ht, the story had its own momentum. The characters and twists developed in Books One to Three were growing like the magical beans in Jack and the Beanstalk. As for the relationship between George and Evylin, I remember spending a lot of time trying to make their dreadful misunderstanding believable. I focused on the fact that their words were being misinterpreted on both sides and how, instead of speaking, George in particular was listening to his own thoughts, which were spiraling into a completely wrong conclusion.
Funny enough, throughout all seven books, I’ve never really ‘liked’ George. Somehow, I have created a protagonist who is not particularly nice and certainly not a hero. Sometimes he does kind things, and then other times he’s completely childish; he is neither brave nor loyal. His treatment of Evylin in this chapter verges on being spoilt, as he thinks the whole world spins around him. He lies simply because he feels intimidated by the idea that he might, after all, be a toucher—not to mention his fear of finding out that someone he cares for doesn’t care for him.
Finally, one more element in this chapter that was not my idea—the story by this time having gained its own momentum—is the city of Philadelphia. Everything about it fits, from the sewage system to the Liberty Bell. As for Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of The Gates of Hell, I didn’t even know it was in this city! Even now, I find it super odd to see how perfect the city is for my story, with its bridges, its rivers, and the social movements of the time. As a Brit, we don’t learn this stuff in school; I’d only seen Philadelphia Police Force the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks. It is amazing how later in the story, the history of the fits completely.
So, yes, what I remember most about this chapter is not trying to write it, but rather trying to understand what was going on and presenting it the way it should be told. While things like developing Evylin’s and George’s characters were in my control, introducing the plot concerning why George’s dad makes the ultimate sacrifice was always like searching through sand to find a splinter of gold.
