Dual Timelines, Authentic Voices, Memories, and Misdirection

My new novel, When We Were Evil, tells two stories, 25 years apart. In one instance we have 15-year-old Ruby Wilcox, who in 2004 was involved in one of the most notorious and atrocious murders in the country’s history. Then, in modern day, we have a traumatized and severely damaged adult version of Ruby, who is offered the chance to recount the much publicized and mythologized crime to a documentary crew for the first time ever.

(Building and Maintaining Tension in a Thriller Novel.)

Writing the same character from two different timelines came with a set of obvious challenges. As a male author writing from a first-person female POV, my main priority was to ensure that the voices sounded authentic. Having a sister that is five years older than me felt like an acceptable cheat code for getting into the mindset of a teenage girl; there were things I could borrow from when we grew up in the 90s/early 00s, such as her fashion, her taste in music, the syntax and slang of overheard conversations between her and her friends. This provided enough of a template for me to color in the rest, adding flesh and scars to Ruby.  

The London that this version of Ruby inhabits was a patchwork pulled from memory, and while mobile phones are present in this portion of the story, their dominance over social interaction is largely absent. London has changed a lot in 25 years. I know because I was born, raised, and still currently live here, and yet, many things stay much the same. The vibe of the city remains unaltered; it’s still a hectic, fun, historic, metropolitan melting pot, but I’d be remiss to ignore the impact that social media and mobile phone usage has had on the way we communicate. The absence of mobile phone and social media hypnotism allowed me to explore a certain breed of teenage boredom that could only arise back then and isn’t present in the modern teenager.

The crime in the novel occurs during an age when the average child didn’t have hundreds of TV channels, a plethora of streaming services with uncountable content, and the constantly expanding galaxy of YouTube videos to keep them entertained. At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous old man berating the youth of today for not knowing how good they’ve got it—back then, a lot of the time, you had to make your own fun; summer was spent with gaggles of kids swarming the parks, roaming fun fairs, or aimlessly walking the streets. Within the context of the story, it is partly this urban exploration which offers the perfect parameters for mischief and ultimately violence to occur. 

The easier of the two polarizing characters to write was Ruby as an adult. She sat firmly in present day, where there was less of a need to stretch the memory, or the imagination. The task here was to ensure that adult Ruby sounded different—and yet reminiscent—of her teenage counterpart. This was an adult bogged down with bills, the drudgery of dead-end jobs, who was living in a constant state of animal panic. As an adult on the wrong side of 30 at the time of writing this, I could relate to—and sympathize with—a lot of it.

As someone who is easily confused when reading, the dual timeline narrative in When We Were Evil left a lot to keep track of. Despite the story jumping between decades, I wanted to ensure that the story was still easy to follow. The framing device of the novel has Ruby recounting the crime to a documentary crew, with the director often asking for clarification on certain key points; the director in this instance serves as the reader, whose questions enable Ruby to drip feed exposition that helps fill in any important gaps. Yes, on one hand, this breaks the coveted show-don’t-tell rule, but on the other, it helps create uncertainty in the reader; can the director—and the reader—trust Ruby’s account of the murder? Is this dialogue exposition or misdirection?

Being an author that never plots out a story ahead of time, When We Were Evil ended up challenging and surprising me in almost equal measures. Up to a certain point, I was sure I knew Ruby’s story, and her motivations, but the manuscript began to grow a mind of its own and had a sly way of twisting things. I felt sure I could trust Ruby—adult Ruby, at least—but it turned out she was a damn sight more unpredictable than I could have imagined. She threw tricks at me that wouldn’t have occurred if I’d plotted out the finer details, and this took the story down dark and suffocating alleyways that I wasn’t always comfortable with.

The book remains one of the most intense and disturbing things I’ve ever written, and I can only hope that readers enjoy the journey as much as I did.  

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