Afterword
If you’re not the type of person who likes movie commentaries or behind-the-scenes stuff, then you should probably stop reading now! But if you’d like to find out about my writing process for the Silver Blackthorn trilogy then keep reading …
At some point when I was around ten or eleven years old, I read a book called The Time Warrior. It was a Doctor Who novelisation written by Terrance Dicks, based on a four-part television serial that aired seven years before I was born. I loved collecting the Target Doctor Who books, picking them up in charity shops for ten pence here and twenty pence there. I ended up collecting all 150 or so of them but, for whatever reason, there was a little idea in The Time Warrior that always stuck with me.
The story involves a leather-skinned alien named Linx – a Sontaran if you know anything about Doctor Who – crashing in Britain of the Middle Ages and hiding in a castle. As he tries to repair his ship, he appeases the castle’s owner by providing him with ‘magic’ weapons, which are really from the future. I don’t actually remember much more than that – I’ve never read the book since and I’ve not seen the television version – but the idea of Medieval castles and futuristic technology is always something I thought was pretty cool.
And so we come to Silver Blackthorn. I live in the northwest of England, which can be – and frequently is – pretty grim. It’s overcast, wet and windy, a lot of the time. My other series, a more grown-up set of crime books, are set in that grey, grimy world. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that I came up with Silver when I was on holiday.
I’d been working full-time and writing the DS Jessica Daniel crime series for around a year when I went away for my first break since I’d started. Working the equivalent of two full-time jobs for twelve months really does take it out of you. I thought I’d have a fortnight’s rest, but as soon as I had a bit of a lay down in the sun, Silver’s story began flitting through my head – so I started writing again. Over the course of those two weeks, I sketched out by hand the entire plot for the first book over seven pages of notepad paper. Yes, that’s what I do on ‘holiday’.
The following pages contain some of my original notes for the first book in the Silver Blackthorn trilogy. It would’ve been in a much rougher form than this, but at some point while I was still on holiday, I put everything onto one sheet.
On this first sheet, there are small ideas which became much bigger ideas. For instance, around a third of the way down, it reads: ‘Meets prev Offering’. That, of course, refers to Hart – who, in the end, became a big part of Reckoning. To a large degree, this is how my notes work. Three words can turn into thousands.
Lower down on the page is an example of the way this planning process works in reverse. It reads: ‘Alert over other countries?’ At the time, I thought this would be a large development – that Britain would be at war with other nations – but, in the end, I didn’t really have anywhere else to go with this idea.
At the top, I’ve drawn a triangle. At the time, I was thinking of the Reckoning/Offering system as being top-down, like a triangle. There are far fewer Elites than any other rank, so they’re at the top. It didn’t really work out like that when I started writing, because Trogs are the lowest rank but not the predominant one. The system is more of a diamond-shape.
On the line below, you can see my N, E, S, W doodle, which is how it worked out. Both the Silver trilogy and my crime books include elements about the north/south divide in Britain. I was born in the south but live in the north, so it’s probably something with which I have too much of an obsession.
This is the next step of my planning. That first page is a lot of unformed ideas – a few words here or there. Sometimes even just one word, like ‘Monarch’ at the top of the page. Here, I started plotting things out more or less chapter-to-chapter.
In the top left is the triangle I never ended up using – but the numbers of Elites, Members, Intermediates and Trogs are the same in my initial notes as they are in the book. On the top right was the structure of the overall book. The first act is Silver’s realisation of what the system is, the second is the escape from the castle. As it was, the escape ended up being my final act in this book. It’s more introduction/realisation/escape.
In my first draft, the book started with Silver being distracted by Opie. I say she is fishing here, but that never made it into the final draft. Also, I hadn’t worked out Opie’s name – he’s just a line. The Reckoning was called the Awakening and the Offerings are called the Chosen. Neither of those made it into the first draft. The notes are still a bit scattered but a lot of the plot points exist in the final book – such as the King skewering someone at a feast.
At the top of this third notepad page, much of the conversation with Hart is exactly how it happens, some of it word for word. This was always going to be the moment where Silver realises exactly what’s going on. Before that, she doesn’t really know what to think. The idea of the King’s ‘public face’ is what gave me the ultimate ending of Reckoning.
Imrin is introduced on this page in much the same way as in the actual book, although I have him working in electronics rather than textiles. I was unsure about everyone’s roles here and didn’t really know what sort of jobs would be on offer around the castle. That all came later when I was actually writing. There’s also the first aborted escape on here too.
I don’t really know where the idea of the hidden zoo came from on this fourth page. I liked the idea that the castle, and therefore the King, had all these wonderful creatures, Noah’s Ark style, and then wasn’t bothered about it.
Pietra is rather tactfully called ‘girl’ here but Silver ending up in the hospital again happens almost exactly like the actual book. After the first quarter of this page, most of the beats of the story are untouched.
The idea next to the ‘XX’ at the bottom is something to which I didn’t quite get. I wanted to show what a ‘normal’ day was like when you were working in the castle. I couldn’t make it work because Silver’s day is different to what the others’ was like; Porter isn’t as horrible to her as some of the other Head Kingsmen. Most of the ideas noted down still crop up, just not how I’d originally thought.
The top line of this page is perhaps key to the core message of the books: people can have power without knowing it if they work together. I know that sounds a bit socialist! The point was supposed to be that the King might expect his Kingsmen and Head Kingsmen to betray him, but he’d never expect the people at the bottom of the chain to try.
The ending is sort of here but not really, which gives you the clue that I didn’t have the exact finish. Broadly, it’s there: ‘Run for it’ – which pretty much sums up what happens. The intricacies around that came through writing the rest of the book.
Before I started writing Reckoning, I wanted to make sure I knew how the world had got to the point at which it started. The first three words on this final page spell out a lot of that – ‘Oil ran out’. After that it is general odds and ends. Some of this fed into the main book but some of it doesn’t really matter. For example, ‘Most of Mid East wiped out’ is something to which I never quite got.
When I write, it’s entirely electronically. I send myself emails, I write plots in Notepad and back them up on pen drives and through things like Dropbox. This is more or less the only thing I’ve ever plotted with pen and paper. The only problem was trying to decipher it when I got home – my handwriting is appalling, as you can see.
After all of that, the existence of this series is down to two things: the fact I love Doctor Who and the sunshine. The reason it’s got this far is, for the most part, down to two people.
Firstly, there is my agent, Nicola. I say ‘agent’ but it’s hard to think of her like that. We talk, text, or email pretty much every day. She was the first person to read the Silver books and instantly set out to get them into your hands.
Secondly is the person who edited these books: Natasha. I have a barely concealed secret that I am awful at being edited, which is the irony of ironies considering that was my day job for a decade. It’s not that I mind people tinkering with my words, or that I think I’m always right. It’s that I hate looking backwards. I always want to be working on the next project, not bothering myself with things with which I’m done. Most of the time, I can’t even remember large amounts of the plot. Frequently, I’ll have to re-read something I’ve written in the editing process and I’ll be surprised by the twists because I don’t remember writing them. What that means is that when an editor asks me a question about something, I’m as blank as they are. So the editing process for the first Silver book was a long and, for me, frustrating one.
Anyway, the truth is that if it wasn’t for Natasha championing the character and the series, and putting up with my complaining, then it wouldn’t be in your hands now. For that, we should all send her tweets and emails saying she has good taste. She does.
RENEGADE
the second book in the Silver Blackthorn trilogy
BY KERRY WILKINSON
Silver Blackthorn is on the run.
All she really wants is to be reunited with her family and friends but the time for thinking about herself has passed. Now the fates of eleven other teenagers are in her hands – and they are all looking to her for a plan.
With an entire country searching for the escaped Offerings, Silver is under pressure to keep them all from the clutches of the Minister Prime, King Victor and the Kingsmen. As expectations are piled upon the girl with the silver streak in her hair, she realises that life will never be the same again.
Huge changes are on the horizon and Silver will be forced to face them head on …