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Author's Notes - Justin Richards' guide
to The Sands of Time.
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Instalment One
(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)
The Sands of Time was the third Doctor Who novel I wrote for Virgin publishing after Theatre of War and System Shock. Having done one book set in the future well away from Earth, and one in - near enough - the present day, I wanted to vary it again. But I didn't just want to set a story partly in the past, I also wanted to play with the whole notion of time travel, which I felt had been largely neglected in the books and for that matter on television. There is far more potential to the concepts and paradoxes than just using the TARDIS to go to different times and places.
I also wanted to write a sequel to Pyramids of Mars. Again, the whole of Egyptian mythology and the legacy of the Mummy movies from Universal and Hammer had not, I felt, been fully exploited. Rebecca Levene was the editor at Virgin, and she was happy for me to produce a proposal for a sequel, but warned me that she felt it might be tricky given that Pyramids of Mars did rather establish that the last of the Osirans was now dead. But, undaunted, I set to work.
I always start a book by deciding what it is about (as opposed to what happens). This book would be about time and about Egyptology. That decided, I then roughed out a relatively simple storyline which I could embellish and expand. I had read about the 'mummy parties' that the Victorians occasionally held where people were invited to an evening event with drinks and food and the centrepiece was the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy - ostensibly for educational purposes, but really just for the sensationalism of it. I loved the idea that the guests would gather, and someone would be late but they go ahead anyway - and when the decaying mummy is unwrapped, inside the genuine, ancient wrappings is the missing guest.
That idea obviously developed and evolved, and it gave me something to start
from - how could this have happened? What had to take place before that moment
for the story to work and where did it lead in consequence? Having got an idea
of the shape of my story, I started to add detail. Research is a lovely
academic-sounding term. In this case it meant I watched Pyramids of Mars to
decide what elements I liked and wanted to include and expand on. Then I got
myself copies of all the Universal mummy films and as many of the Hammer ones as
I could find, and I watched them. As I went through I made notes of the
sequences or ideas that really struck a chord with me and I wanted to include -
like the mummy attacking an encampment of archaeologists in Egypt, or the image
of the mummy carrying the heroine into a lake...
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Having got a very rough story and a list of things to include, it is then a case of fitting it together like a jigsaw - what happens when? How does it all fit together? There is a balance to be found between including things for the sake of it, and letting your imagination encompass those elements and benefit from the mental exercise of discovering out how it all works.Once you have a story, the next thing to decide is how to tell it. In this case it was made more difficult given that the events don't follow a simple chronological sequence. So whose perception of those events, whose experience of them should the reader be privy to?
There needed to be a central thrust of the narrative, from which I could then decide on occasion to depart in order to clarify certain points and to conceal others. The hardest thing was to decide how to mix it up so it intrigues along the way, and falls into place at the end. So the opening sequence is a defining moment for the story, but we only discover its personal relevance to Rassul at the end of his story. Equally, the Doctor's visit to the Cranleigh wedding might seem like a gratuitous character moment, but it is essential to remind (or inform) readers of certain things that will be necessary to their understanding of the finale...
Another consideration I took into account was that I had been given six months to write Theatre of War, five to write System Shock, and this time Rebecca was hinting that I would get four months - if I was lucky. And I knew that in the next four months I would be travelling a lot to the USA on business. Luckily, laptop computers had been invented and I had one for my work. So I needed to structure the story so that a large part of it was in the form of relatively short chapters or chunks so I could write a complete, discrete section whenever I got some free time while travelling. I can still remember which piece I wrote in a coffee bar in Miami airport, which was accompanied by weak, fizzy American beer and a plate of nachos in a Marriott hotel in Atlanta, which on an uncomfortable chair at the departure gate of Birmingham International... Most of the short sequences between chapters were initially written like this.
Rebecca was very keen on the proposal, but had three problems with it. One
was that she didn't like the title as she felt 'The Sands of Time' was a bit of
a clich\xE9. I liked it for the same reason, of course - and because it picked up
on the Egyptian theme and the notion of time itself and an hourglass. Jokingly,
I suggested we could call it Orion's Daughter and for a time it was going to be
called Child of Orion - which explains some slightly stilted phraseology late on
in the book. Luckily, rather than just insist, Rebecca asked her colleagues at
Virgin what they thought, and everyone else liked The Sands of Time.
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Her second problem was that Peter Darvill-Evans had said he wasn't sure it all worked and the various strands of the story fitted properly together. That wasn't to say that he thought it didn't, but that he would like us to be absolutely certain. So to fix that, I produced a flow chart showing the different storylines and following each of the main character's personal time line. It showed the intersections and dependencies. Having been writing a manual and an online tutorial on how to go about designing and writing event-driven and object-oriented program code that seemed to me to be the best way to check my 'narrative design'. What I didn't know is that Peter has a background in those adventure books where you choose the path through the book depending on what action you think the characters should take - and those are designed with a flow chart, not surprisingly. So Peter was well able to interpret what I sent in, and was so impressed he had this huge chart (I think it was about a dozen A4 pages taped together) hanging on the back of his door for several months. Probably so he could marvel at the insanity of the mind behind it.
Story timeline | The Doctor's timeline
Rebecca's third point was really that she agreed with something I had worried about. In my letter accompanying the proposal (on 26 January 1995) I had said:
The main concern I have is that there is no character other than the Doctor and Tegan who goes right through the book. One way to fix this is to set the story after Time-flight, and have just the Doctor and Nyssa. Tegan's role can then be taken by another character - either one we already have (Atkins or Lord Kenilworth), or a new one (museum curator, street urchin, whatever). The only real change to the plot outline would then be to send the character to Norris's cottage by train and taxi rather than by car (in chapters 11 - 12). There again, it may not be a problem at all.
Rebecca agreed we needed to sort this out - with all the temporal to-ing and
fro-ing, we really did need a point of view character for the reader apart from
the regular TARDIS crew. Without this the book would have been mechanically
sound and interesting, but somewhat cold and heartless. Luckily, I was able to
fix this as I produced my flow chart and be certain I had not upset anything in
the plot by having the character of Atkins travel with the Doctor for a while
and experience the story pretty much as the reader does.
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It also gave me a great character who I came to like a lot - my plan for him was that he should start out like the Anthony Hopkins character in The Remains of the Day but then his experiences soften and liberate him to the extent that I could give him the happy ending that Hopkins' butler is unable to achieve simply because of who he is. One of the problems of writing Doctor Who books (and to a lesser extent of any series fiction) is that for a novel to work, your central character has to learn and develop because of their experiences. Now, thanks to Rebacca's perceptive comments, I had a character who could do this in a way that the Doctor never can and his companions rarely manage.
As I told Rebecca when I sent her a final version of the outline (which ran to about 8000 words in all) on 10 March 1995:
The villain, Rassul, now survives the whole book (well, almost). Also,
Atkins goes with the Doctor and Tegan on their trans-temporal travels. The
outline does not reflect their character development much, but I see Rassul as
being a suave religious fanatic. He is rather like a 19th century version of a
crooked US evangelist preacher, with more concern for his own style of life than
for the after-life. Atkins I think will start off as Anthony Hopkins' character
from The Remains of the Day. He is sexually and emotionally repressed and
entirely devoted to his role in society to the exclusion of his style of life
(spot the contrast with Rassul). He will develop during his travels, as his mind
is broadened by exposure to futuristic science, alien menace, death, and -
especially - Tegan) into a more balanced individual - to the point where he may
even end up proposing to the otherwise dramatically-redundant housekeeper in the
final paragraphs...
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Instalment Two
(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)
Have set up a 'teaser' with the discovery that Nyssa has somehow been mummified millennia ago, this section of the book is to do with capitalising on the confusion of the readers and the characters. As the Doctor tries to work out what is going on, so the readers are on the same narrative journey.
That's not to say there isn't room for character work too. This confusion, and the situation, allowed me to explore Tegan's feelings. Without Nyssa and with the Doctor distracted she is very much alone - and Tegan is someone who I thought always puts on an act for whoever she is with. In this section she is in a daze, her world falling apart - in a later chapter she articulates that. It was a useful device later to be able to have Tegan alone with Nyssa's sleeping body in the tomb, thinking about who she really is and what's happening.
This is also a time when I could set up things for later pay-offs. We learn a bit about Rassul's background for example - both explicitly in the sequence where he is told of the grave robbing, and implicitly in his telling Nyssa that 'a father should not outlive his children.' This will be a key pointer to Rassul's motivation, a hook that helps us sympathise with the villain and realise that he, like everyone else, is being used by Nephthys...
It also mirrors the overall theme of time's circularity - Rassul tells Nyssa: 'I have heard it said that a father should not outlive his children.' He does not tell her that it was Nyssa herself who said it to him when he met her for the first time (in his timeline) in ancient Egypt. Nyssa recalls the phrase, and after she is sent back to ancient Egypt she says it back to him (watch out for that in the next exciting installment). Rassul's reaction is instructive, as is the fact that he still remembers her words thousands of years later...
One other thing to watch for - names. It's very difficult to think of names. I spend longer trying to come up with names for characters than anything else, it often seems. When I write an outline, just throwing down ideas and elements, I don't even bother now - it slows me down so much. So my initial outlines are full of people called Fred, George, Bert, Liz, Mary and Jane... Sometimes the name sticks (like George Wilkinson in Time Zero). Trying to find an 'academic' name for a translator I decided to reuse one I'd come up with for Theatre of War - Tobias St. John. I guess he gets about a bit. He's also taken from the first two names of my youngest brother...