Please refer to
the preface to Only Consenting Adults
for a guide to all the connected storylines.
"When asked for a recommendation for a book on [X] for the generalist, I recommend Alice in Wonderland because it's the best book on anything for the generalist." - Unknown
Now that the work is finally completed, I have been asked about the process behind constructing the Wonderland universe of connected stories, questions that have given rise to this brief response. It isn't about the stories themselves, but about the basic mechanics of putting together a coherent storyline that has spanned a million words in 176 chapters, 11 books and various side-stories. I hope it gives a useful insight into one way of constructing a large, self-referential store universe. Is it the right way? All I can say is that it worked for me.
But first, a note on scale and the problems it brings.
A five thousand word 2-pager is a fairly easy thing to write by the seat of your pants (a pantser), even going up to twenty or thirty thousand words. At all times, you are able to see the end from the beginning, or still recall the beginning from the end. A change in a plot point can ripple through the text with some amount of rewriting; a character's background or motivations can be tweaked as required in a fluid self-feedback loop.
A novel-length work (anything upwards of fifty thousand words) can be written in the same way, but with the larger scale come benefits from structure, plotting, character notes, (a plotter) because rework becomes much more arduous and editing more fraught. A glaring plot hole in five thousand words is a lot harder to miss and a lot easier to patch during a re-read than in fifty thousand words. On top of this, as a writer it often requires there to be a narrative framework and pathway to get the story to the end, a set of guard rails to motivate and inspire the effort. Meandering after forty thousand words can often be the death of a story before it's even completed.
Passing five hundred thousand words forces a change again. It's no longer possible to hold all elements together in one place, and while the end may be known as well as the start, the path between them is not. There is an element of meta-pantsing, where the stories are laid out and structured, but how they interact with each other is not, or whether it will turn out that they are even required in the first place once the last sentence is written. There is an overall narrative architecture and a degree of blind faith that the hundred thousand words of a particular character's storyline is going to be able to fit when everything comes to be assembled together perhaps years down the line. Despite the urge to control all the variables, it becomes impossible at a certain scale and instead, adaptability becomes the most important thing. The characters and the stories take on a life of their own and there is an element of blind trust that they're going in the direction you want them to go, without having to commit the sin of Deus ex Machina to jump them back onto the rails.
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke
Before the best laid plans are set out, there needs to be something that seeds the story, a spark of an idea that just won't go away. How do you go from those bright fragments into a coherent narrative? How did the Wonderland storylines come about? Let's dive into those origination points, the verbal orogeny (or as it felt sometimes, the teratogeny), as an illustration of that creative process.
Before we start, a warning: if you haven't read the Wonderland series of stories, the below text will contain spoilers: proceed at your own risk. This is also a formal notice that Wonderland is considered by me to be an open forum for other authors if they wish to explore and take characters on new journeys, within the bounds of fair use, substantive accreditation and acknowledgement that copyright rests with myself.
The Wonderland series started by accident, with a rough idea about a man going into a woman's hotel room on the morning of her wedding. Within a few sentences, they knew each other intimately, within a few more their relationship was founded, coming out organically from their conversation. The words brought up more questions: it turned out that she wasn't marrying him, she was marrying someone else. Then, the pathos of his bittersweet feelings as he accepted it, opening up the question as to who she was marrying instead and why he wanted her to be happy. By the conclusion of the piece, Jen was taking Anya as her wife while Henry doomed himself to the unofficial party in their relationship, an attempt by the three lovers to legitimise their unconventional union when the laws didn't permit or recognise the true nature of the relationship between them all. In all, it took a couple of thousand words to condense a whimsy into something more substantial. The driving factor, I believe, in story generation is curiosity, the willingness to explore the reasons behind the thing that was shown.
So, multiplying now, there were more questions to be answered. Why didn't Jen's parents turn up to the wedding of their only child to another woman? Was Henry a pushover, letting himself be set aside by the two women or was he making the sacrifice because he was the most appropriate of the three of them to bear it? Why was Jen's father actively campaigning for traditional marriage if his own daughter was going to be one of the most disadvantaged?
It was a puzzle that required an answer. Why would you make your own child unhappy just to uphold your own viewpoint? It turned out that the answer wasn't found at the wedding as originally planned, or in the reception party afterwards. It could have been trotted out in a couple of paragraphs of drunken character exposition between the first course and the groom's speech and none of Wonderland would have happened, but for an unexpected arrival. Moran turned up in the story and took over; Anya's proud father provided the perfect counterpoint for Jen's absent parents, and suddenly the chance to tie it all up neatly inside twenty thousand words slipped away.
From a loose idea, a structure began to construct itself, a seat-of-the-pants story crystalising slowly into something much bigger, a seed around which other ideas were able to coalesce, and the nature of the undertaking began to change. It turned out that the answer to the puzzle wasn't found in The Monogamists at all. It had to wait until the end of Only Consenting Adults, a million words later, over a hundred characters later, with the revelation of a bitter betrayal, a dark secret and an unshakeable enmity dating back decades that gave rise to a devastating plot for revenge.
The books were not plotted out linearly, each twist and turn mapped in exquisite detail on a whiteboard with coloured lines and side notes, despite the fanciful portrayal in Critical Response. Instead, there was a space within which a series of ideas floated, snippets of scenes that sparked off further investigation. Henry and Jen in her hotel room on the day of her wedding was the first one; how would the other elements weave their way into the landscape that was beginning to form?
It began with that single thread: from the opening scene in the hotel room on Jen's wedding day to the grand revelation by Jen's mother in the sitting room of Jen's childhood home ten books and story-years later. There were other items that also required consideration. Each brief moment, like Jen's confession that her parents weren't coming to the wedding, added its own thread and began to entangle itself with that first strand.
The next spark of an idea was a scene set in a strip club, which was later written as the stage in the Lost and Found, with a housewife standing in front of an audience of men, slowly undressing for them. The curious thing was not how the men behaved, but her own reaction. She wasn't anxious or ashamed, two emotions that might be expected of a woman baring everything for the first time in front of strangers. Instead, she felt the rush of controlling the room by exhibiting herself, standing nude as a testament to her own empowerment, the final rejection of the role of dutiful wife and homemaker that she had been pigeonholed into.
Only when Jen was pursued by Damian at the charity ball, forcing Henry to step in, did the nude woman get a name: Cassidy Hayes, the wife of Damian, the mother of his two children, the target of Lily's domineering behaviour and ultimately the one person in all of Wonderland who held their ground while everyone else fell apart. It seemed entirely appropriate that one of the heroes of the saga would be an unremarkable suburban housewife transforming herself at last into something entirely breathtaking and unstoppable.
Another spark was a scene with two women talking in a coffee shop. A man joins them. One of the women picks up her cup of coffee, takes a sip, and then empties the contents of it into the man's lap, forcing him to sit there, scalded. That Quinn would go from that hapless, middle-aged, unremarkable lawyer to a central character in the space of three books was unexpected. That the woman watching it all happen would be Cassie, and that the inflictor of such pain would be Syn was also unexpected.
What was more unexpected was that, as Quinn is allowed to go and clean himself up, it becomes obvious that Syn did it out of a deep affection for the man she had inflicted the pain on, for the most extraordinary and touching of reasons. Why was he in the coffee shop in the first place? An envelope appeared abruptly on the table, sealed for a year. Who had sealed the envelope? What was inside? Why had it been given into Syn's safekeeping and why was she being so cruel? Other threads began to emerge, binding themselves around the core.
The next spark, of a man in a cage watching his wife being led off to a bedroom by a stranger, provoked more questions that needed to be answered, building out from that ending scene, which became Alena's End, into a sequence of events that explained her actions and the unbreakable love that bound together and then the tragedy that tore Quinn and his wife apart.
