I’m never entirely sure that I’ve got a new book till I get the first sentence.

Up till that moment, it’s only a thought taking shape in my mind—reams of research connected by characters tied to a timeline that simply won’t leave me alone.

So the moment that I hear that first sentence spoken within my mind is always special to me—and exciting—because it means I’ve got a story to tell. And since my books are told in the first person, that sentence shows me my narrator, who isn’t always the person I thought it would be.

“I was a younger man when I first met her,” was the first sentence that came to me from my novel The Vanished Days, which put me in a panic—I had never written first-person male viewpoint, and felt sure I’d never pull it off, but pushing myself well beyond my comfort zone has always helped me be a better writer in the end, and so I pushed the panic down and ploughed ahead.

I was a little more prepared, then, with the book that I’m now working on, The Lesser Stars, when the first sentence that formed in my mind was this: “Be grateful ye were born a man, my younger sister said to me.”

Aha, I thought. A 17th-century Scotsman. I’ve done this. Less panicked this time, I sat down and started writing, and got several pages in before the voice began to grow more stubborn, and then stopped. I knew it was the right voice, but I also knew from years of hard experience that when my writing stalls it means I’ve missed something, so I paused, and waited.

And one night, in the bath, an entirely different first sentence took shape, and was scrawled down in haste on the water-stained pages I keep at the side of the bath for that purpose.

To complicate matters, this sentence was spoken by a different narrator—this one a modern-day woman. A definite issue for me, since I hadn’t intended to bring in a modern-day storyline, not with the pandemic still going on. Both the storylines that had been coming together within my mind took place in the past.

But here was this new voice now, telling me clearly: “The problem with having been born with the Gift of my family was, sometimes I woke up just knowing the day would be one I’d remember for all the wrong reasons.”

And so I wrote her story down for a few pages, and then my 17th-century Scotsman regained his voice, too, and went on with his tale…

Meaning now I’ve got two of them, leading me forwards. Two first-person narrators, in different timelines—something I’ve never attempted before—and one additional third-person timeline that goes even further back that I have yet to discover.

Happily out of my comfort zone, pushing the panic down, ploughing ahead.

Do you like stories that blend the modern-day with the past, or do you prefer ones that keep to one time?