I've had a few months away from writing for various reasons, but I'm slowly getting back to it. Today I've been putting the finishing touches on a new gay male story called Other People's Houses that I'll be submitting very soon.
This one started out as a short, heated single scene, but as I was writing it I discovered that what it really wanted to be was more like a romance.
Often the themes of a story reveal themselves to you as you’re writing. I’m a “pantser”, so I don’t always know where my stories are going when I begin them. I let my characters take the lead, and follow them to see where they end up. An easy way to reinforce theme is to hunt for an image at the beginning of the story and call back to it at the end. This is often something that’s done in drafting, but sometimes you come to the end of a story to find that it’s already perfectly set up for you. This is one of the most magical parts of the process, and possibly my favourite thing about writing. And it’s something that happened here.
Here’s the opening of the story:
I’m standing in someone else’s empty house with Marcus, waiting for the estate agent so that we can again pretend we actually intend to buy the place. The agent isn’t here yet. That suits us just fine.
We’ve been doing this six weeks now. Every Saturday, a different house. Different postcode. Always expensive enough that they take us seriously. Always empty enough that we’re left alone “to get a feel for the space”.
This one’s in Dulwich. Four bedrooms, period features, “needs work”. Everything at this price point needs work, it seems.
And here's where it all ends up:
As he drifts, I think about estate agents. About their endless optimism. About potential. About how they always say the same thing about places like this. Places like us.
Everything at this price point needs work. But some things are worth the effort.
Perhaps it’s a little on the nose, but I like it, and I had a real sense of closure as I came to the end of writing this piece. I hope that you enjoy it once it goes live.