On Writing a Backwards Book

© Andrew Braun

® Andrew Braun

There we go.  Now it’s my idea.

That is, I think so.  There’s always the possibility that somebody else thought of this first.  Actually, that’s quite likely.  But I thought of it now, so everyone else can just be quiet. 

Now, if you would all be so good as to mentally sign a waiver saying that I am entitled to your firstborn children if you steal “my” idea….

And it's in German.

 Sign it!











 There.  Lovely.  Read on.

Introductory banter aside, I was walking to the mailbox—to and back is about a half mile, so I have plenty of time on these occasions—and I was thinking, which is sort of a hobby of mine.  A little like blinking and breathing.  But that is neither here nor there.  The point is that I was thinking, and I had some ideas, which tends to happen when I think, and I forgot all of them except for one which kept coming back:  what if you wrote a book… backwards?

                You would start with the ending and end with the beginning.  The events would take place in reverse sequence.  You would learn the resolution before you learned the conflict.  Could this possibly work?  So then I started imagining how I might write such a book.

                First of all, let’s get some nomenclature straight.  If the end is at the beginning, is that now the beginning, or do you still call it the end?  And now that the beginning is at the end, what do you call it?  I thought of making up new words for these paradoxical conundrums, but then I just decided that this was my idea, so I was just going to call the place where people start reading the end and the place where they stop the beginning, being as the whole point of this exercise would be to turn traditional writing and reading styles on their heads.  The middle would still be the middle.  I think.

                With that past us, I now find that I have several choices about how to sequence this book:

I.                    I can write the book entirely backwards, sentence by sentence.  I would start at the end…

“Oh, we’re going to have lots of adventures together,” said Aidan.

“Do I ever see you again?  I mean, in your own time.  Do we have another adventure?”  Sandra looked at Aidan hopefully.

Though on second thought, writing a backwards book about time travel would get very complicated.  Especially done the way I just showed.  You learn the answers before you learn the questions.  You’re forever having to backtrack so you can sort out even little things.  I tried writing a quick two hundred word sample like this, and it was a disaster.  It’d surely be incomprehensible to a first-time reader, because it was almost incomprehensible to me!  My verdict:  writing a book like that would be a bad idea.  With the right stuff, it could make a clever short story, but it’d take more genius than I can ever hope to possess to make it into an entire novel.

II.                  I could write the book backwards scene by scene.  This is much likelier.  Each scene would need to be at least partially wrapped up before I proceeded so that readers could remember them as packages and relate them to events that move towards the beginning.  Each scene would be written normally, the sentences in conventional order.  The book would be written in reverse by virtue of timeline only.  I might do it this way:

Beginning:  Lyle and Lyra find the song that opens the painting they’ve been trying to get into.  They play the song and live happily ever after.

Scene two: The old violinist breaks his violin because he can no longer play.  Sheets of music spill out.

Scene three:  The old violinist is in the hospital, and has found that his left side is paralysed.

Scene four:  Lyle and Lyra hide in the art museum for the third night, searching the paintings for clues, but find nothing.  They go back to the old violinists’ small house only to find that he’s had a stroke. 

Poor old violinist.  The lovebirds lived happily ever after and he’s left alone, without his music and without the use of half his body.  I would fix that in the actual story, of course.  Lyle and Lyra would be very unlikable if they were such jerks.  I think I would kill the old violinist with a broken heart or something.

Being a writer is a brutal business sometimes.

But this method could actually be interesting.  It would take extensive planning and a very detailed imagination to make sure that even though they’re backwards, the scenes would connect and make sense in at least a retrospective way.  Best-case scenario—the reader is gripped all the way to the beginning despite already knowing the end.  The best bet for a book like this is a vague, mysterious beginning, with the characters’ pasts forming a necessary link to the rest of the story.  As you go farther and farther back, you begin to understand why they do what they do and why things turned out the way they did. 

Though when I put it that way, it begins to sound like something people have already done.       

III.                I could use the characters and their memories to flash back, beginning with how it ended and ending with how it began.  It could be done through telling a story, through writing a diary, interrogation, et cetera.  I like this idea a lot, but it seems to me that I’ve read detective stories with a disturbingly similar premise. 

And there are countless other decisions and niggling little things that writing such a book would entail, but as I’m nearly up to a thousand words, I’ll leave them for now, perhaps to continue my musings at a later juncture.  Though there is one more thing that I thought of doing.  It’s an idea apart from writing backwards, though not so far removed as all that.  Writing a book so that it formed a perfect circle of events, where you could read it from beginning to end; then, after the last sentence you could turn back to chapter one and continue reading as if the story wasn’t over.  I didn’t put as much thought into this idea, but it seems feasible to me.  The fun part would be making the beginning and the end scenes sync up.  The hard part would be making all the scenes in the middle non-specific and very repeatable, but still interesting.  You wouldn’t be able to rely on coincidences, no one-in-a-million chances, no bright ideas brought on by the tiniest things—you couldn’t write anything that wasn’t capable of happening twice, unless you explained it something like the movie Groundhog Day did.  Great movie, by the way.  I could watch it over and over.  And over and over and over and…

And time travel would be a good idea so you could explain the endless loop. 

So this has been my bright idea for the day.  Remember…

© Andrew Braun