I graduated from the University of Cambridge in June 2006. Dressed up in a fluffy hood and gown, parading down the street under the eyes of fascinated tourists, I felt caught, not for the first time, between the past and the future. For eight hundred years, Cambridge has been pumping out household names: writers, actors, scientists, comedians, world leaders. As a wannabe writer stepping out from that bubble into the world, it was hard not to feel the pressure to immediately and spectacularly succeed at my chosen vocation.
It’s easy to look back and laugh at myself. With the benefit of age and experience, Cambridge’s self-mythologizing becomes clear for what it is. But for a twenty-one-year-old caught in the system, it was hard to completely ignore that sense of expectation. And as I moved home and began to look for jobs, the thought turned into an idea for a book. The protagonist came to me fully formed: Joe, hapless student and aspiring poet, staring down the barrel of his final year at Cambridge. Like so many others, he dreams of future greatness. But unlike the rest, he knows his dreams will come true, because a time traveler just appeared from the future and told him so.
What interested me in the premise wasn’t the wish fulfillment—what twenty-year-old wouldn’t want to know their future was guaranteed?—but the complications that came with it. If Joe has already read the poems that will make him famous, how can he still write them? When he meets the woman destined to be his muse and the love of his life, how will his knowledge of the future affect their budding relationship? And what will he do when he finds himself falling for the time traveler instead?
Joe’s story, and the story of Esi, the time traveler with an agenda of her own, took on a natural shape in my mind: it was a romantic comedy. I knew how romantic comedies worked; I’d seen or read plenty of them. How hard could it possibly be to write one?
If I wanted to make a change that didn’t fit with what had gone before, it wasn’t going to cause a paradox.
By this point I was twenty-two, back in Cambridge working my first graduate job. (Side note: I wasn’t really back—university Cambridge and town Cambridge are two largely non-overlapping universes, like the parallel realities in China Miéville’s The City and the City.) Freed from the mammoth reading lists and weekly essays that had defined my undergraduate years, I had plenty of time to write. So why wait? I got out my laptop and started enthusiastically typing.
My twenty-two-year-old self knew a lot of things. She knew what it feels like to fall in love at that age, the fear and the euphoria and the world-ending immensity of it. She knew what made her laugh. And she was close enough to her student years at Cambridge to remember them in her bones: at times magical, at times frustrating, and at times deeply alienating.
But there were things she didn’t know. She didn’t know how to structure a novel, much less a romantic comedy. (Turns out, under the fluffy, seemingly effortless surface lurks some complicated structural engineering. If that first draft had been a bridge, it would have killed anyone who set foot on it.) She didn’t know how to write characters who grow and change and chase their goals, instead of just sitting there while a series of things happen to them. And she didn’t know the difference between what she thought was cool or interesting or funny and what actually belonged in the story.
But she wrote it anyway. It was only the second manuscript I’d ever completed. I printed off what was then called The Letters of Joseph Greene and Diana Dartnell (yes, I’m terrible at titles) and read it through. I must have had some level of self-awareness about the unholy mess it was, because I never showed it to anyone except a few trusted friends. Instead, I moved on and wrote the next book, a YA fantasy that would eventually land me an agent. That book would never sell, but my agent would stick with me, as I wrote another book and another and another and another, eventually selling my eighth finished novel, Meet Me in Another Life.
Anyone who has been published knows how quickly the joy and excitement over your debut gives way to anxiety about what comes next. I was trying to figure out which of my existing ideas was similar enough to appeal to my current publishers when one of my friends said, “What about your Cambridge time travel book?” It wasn’t a bad idea: while much lighter in tone than Meet Me in Another Life, it tackled similar themes of destiny versus free will, and had an equally close focus on character relationships. I knew the manuscript was a mess, but I was confident that the concept was sound: surely it wouldn’t take too long to polish it up.
When I got my first, sixteen-page edit letter, I realized I’d underestimated how much work there was to do. I was now thirty-six, married with a child and another on the way. I stepped hesitantly into the manuscript like a time traveler walking through a portal, emerging fourteen years in the past.
In the book, Esi the time traveler is terrified of the butterfly effect. Laser-focused on the specific change she wants to make to the past, she avoids making any other changes in case the unintended consequences bring the whole future crashing down. I realize now that my approach to that first edit was like Esi’s approach to time travel. I added scenes, deleted characters, tweaked dialogue, but a lot of the underlying plot points stayed the same. I was afraid that if I made bigger changes, I’d lose the spark and emotional authenticity that my twenty-two-year-old self had brought to the story.
My next edit letter was only twelve pages. (At this rate, I’d be done in three more drafts!) Like the first, it was kind, insightful, and thorough, but the underlying message was: try again. I don’t think I have ever felt creative despair like I felt at that moment. But after sitting with the notes for a while, I understood where I’d been going wrong. When I was editing, I wasn’t trapped in a single timeline: if I wanted to make a change that didn’t fit with what had gone before, it wasn’t going to cause a paradox. I could simply create a whole new timeline containing the version of the story I wanted to tell.
It feels appropriate that time travel spilled over from that initial idea into becoming a key part of the writing process.
I started from scratch. I went back to the original idea, of a young man faced with the future he’s always dreamed of, and the cascading effects of that revelation on his life in the present. I read up on story structure, the beats of romance, all the things I’d assumed I didn’t have to learn. I made a new outline, then rewrote the book from start to finish. I kept the old version in case I needed to reuse any of the existing material, but it was surprising how little of it was necessary. The spirit of the story remained, but its outer form was almost completely different from my first stumbling attempt all those years ago.
The Acknowledgments of Love and Other Paradoxes (a much better title, thanks to author Julie Leong) start with “This book is a time traveler.” I think of it weaving through space and time, shuttling back and forth between a shared house on the edge of a graveyard in Cambridge and the home where I live with my family in Edinburgh sixteen years later. The final result is effectively a collaboration between my twenty-two and thirty-eight-year-old selves.
Given the two and a half years it took to fix the broken draft, it’s reasonable to ask if my younger self made the wrong choice. Instead of pouncing on the idea as soon as I had it, should I have waited to write the book until I had the skills to do it justice? As difficult as the editing process was (both for me and, I’m sure, for my long-suffering editors), I don’t regret the way the book came together. The finished novel is less of an unfiltered view into my Cambridge experience than that chaotic first draft, but the ghost of my twenty-two-year-old self still lingers, in the way the characters feel things, in Joe and Esi’s passionate wants and deep insecurities. And, for a book about how our past and future selves collide and intersect, it feels appropriate that time travel spilled over from that initial idea into becoming a key part of the writing process.
The central question Joe and Esi debate during the course of the book is whether we can change our fates, or if the course of events was always set in stone. I don’t have the answer, but I do know that looking back, it seems inevitable that a time travel book was the only novel about Cambridge I could ever have written.
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Love and Other Paradoxes by Catriona Silvey is available from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
