Ruminations on Time
I started writing The Bubble Gum Thief in 2006. After writing a dozen drafts over three years, I got an agent, and then reworked the book. My agent passed away. I got another agent. I reworked the book some more. We sold it. It went through editing, and then more editing, and then proofing. Now, we’re less than a month away from publication, six years after I started writing the book.
A lot happened in those six years. In my personal life, I got married. We had a boy, and then another. We moved back to Cincinnati. The world changed too. The economy fell apart. We had two presidential elections. Justin Bieber.
Sometimes, when things change, you have to change your book. Six years ago, Larry King, Lou Dobbs, and Keith Olbermann all had television shows. Each had to come out of the book as they retired.
Dagny is the type of person who would have an iPhone, but there was no iPhone in 2006. Over the years, I repeatedly toyed with the idea of changing her cell phone to an iPhone, but it would have been too difficult to make sure I caught every change. (I did remove every reference to flipping open her phone).
In 2006, Dagny was able to connect her laptop to the internet with a Spint EV-DO card, the workings of which I explained in now-comical detail. By the final draft, she was connecting to the internet with a 4G connection that I didn’t have to explain at all. It’s funny how time can make explanation unnecessary.
Time can change things about your characters, even if all of the words stay the same. There is a teenager in the first chapter who wears a faded Arcade Fire T-shirt. This detail tells something about the character to the reader. But this detail means something different now than it did in 2006, and so the kid changed a little, without me doing anything at all.
Dagny eats a meal at a steakhouse called The Waterfront, which closed in 2011. The restaurant floated on a barge on the Kentucky side ofthe Ohio River, so its patrons had a fantastic view of Cincinnati. Even though the restaurant closed, it’s still in the book, because that’s where I wanted Dagny to eat, and what’s the point of fiction if you can’t keep a place you liked alive. And who knows?—maybe the story takes place in 2011.
Overall, the passage of time is mostly a pain in the neck—it forces you to scour your work for references that have to be changed or modified. It’s a good reason to write Fantasy.
