Tomorrow for the Last Time is a historical romance novel, set in gloomy post-Second World War England and telling the story of the soldiers who returned from the war, only to face harmful laws prohibiting sodomy and homosexuality. For my Independent Study, I decided to use an extract of the first four chapters, though it should be noted that the entire text is both longer and makes use of epistolary form between chapters.
Playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry became one of my biggest inspirations while working on Tomorrow for the Last Time. During my research into texts with similar themes and settings to my own, I discovered Days Without End and was immediately impressed by the lyrical, almost poetic nature of his prose. Barry’s narrative voice and characterisation in Days Without End are shaped greatly by the geographic and socioeconomic origins of the characters. Much like Barry, I strived to use my prose to build and substantiate my characters and make them more relatable to the reader. I knew from the first planning stages that I wanted to make use of first-person perspective, but that I also wanted this text to tell the stories of both Jack and Sam. Marking that one chapter has a different narrator to the last is easy, but I was adamant on making each character recognisable simply by their use of language — to build the individual narrative voices, I had to first build their individual syntaxes. In addition to this, as mentioned in the introduction, the longer text from which this extract was taken is partially epistolary in form. This meant that I would not only have to capture the internal voices of Sam and Jack, but I would also have to capture how each character would translate that voice onto paper.
Barry’s story is told from the point of view of an Irish immigrant in the United States of America in the 19th Century, who falls in love with a boy he meets under a bush and ends up fighting and suffering at his side through the Indian and American Civil wars and attempting to build a life afterwards. The inspiration for Yesterday for the Last Time came from one question: what if this was England? That question became the basis for my research.
During my research, I came across a story that would inspire both the setting and the use of epistolary form in my writing. In the midst of the Second World War, a soldier and his sweetheart would exchange some 600 letters1. Discovered in their entirety in 2017, museum curator Mark Hignett initially thought the letters were between a man and a woman2; it was only upon discovering that the initial ‘G’ actually stood for Gordon that he realised the historical significance of the writing.
The significance of this discovery, to me, was not the act of homosexuality. Queerness has existed in every society since society began, and it doesn’t surprise me to hear stories of homosexuals in history. Instead, there were two things that caught my attention. Firstly, this was potentially one of the only honest and personal depictions of queerness from the time. Secondly, this story had a happy ending. Neither party was persecuted for their desires or their acts. These men didn’t get to live in peace, but they did at least manage to escape the law.
As my planning went on, this became more and more important to me. I recall reading and researching E.M. Forster’s Maurice for the first time and realising that Forster spent his entire life waiting for a time when he could publish his novel with the happy ending he would insist on it having. From this, there grew a sense of responsibility in me that I should use the freedom given to me by the patient authors and secretive soldiers of the past, and that I, too, should insist on my work having that sought-after happy ending. That, as Forster described, Jack and Sam should continue to “roam the greenwood”3 after the close of the novel. Forster described happiness as the “keynote” of his novel, and I adopted this for myself. No matter how much strife they may endure, I promised my characters that they would be happy.
This Independent Study gave me a chance to produce an extended piece of work with a wealth of resources and support at my disposal. As a queer artist, I took this opportunity to create something with my community in mind as my target audience. My aim with Tomorrow for the Last Time was to produce a historical romance filled with all of the joy and pain that you would expect of the genre, but to write it in celebration of the bravery and unending perseverance of a community which has faced almost nothing but opposition for centuries. Queer literature as a genre so often shies away from handling historical events, instead focusing on the present and future as a setting for its texts. Tomorrow for the Last Time became my own protest of that trend, and a nod to the LGBTQ individuals of the past and present who would’ve wanted to see themselves represented properly in the spaces they did, and do, inhabit.
The process of completing this Independent Study has been a long one. The first ideas of Tomorrow for the Last Time were not fresh for this assignment. Rather, this was an existing labour of love when the time came to begin my Independent Study. However, it was only at the beginning of the process for this module that I begun to comprehensively read around both the narrative I was producing and the act of narrative writing itself. Up to this point, I had developed my writing skills through reading other works of fiction. When I picked up On Writing by Stephen King for the first time, I realised there is far more to this practice than fiction alone can show you.
In On Writing, King seemed to humanise the writer. I had not previously understood myself as a writer, instead being simply someone who writes. I learned quickly from King’s honesty that I was not alone, or special, because I struggled to write on command. There have been many times during the development of this piece where it felt I had forgotten how to write entirely, and I worried I would never be able to complete it before the deadline. And then I discovered On Writing, which told me that to write anything, I’d have to put words on the page. King claims that “there is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter”4 and it was this that made me realise the flaw in my writing process: I was waiting for inspiration to come to me, when I should have been going to it.
Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices was the second major text I read that specifically regarded the business of writing. Pullman’s discussions of stories and how they’re constructed became invaluable to me over the development of this piece. He relates writers to “film people” and encourages us to think the same way; after all, telling a story is telling a story, and the details of the delivery only matter after the story is invented or found. Pullman describes “the basic storytelling question” as being “Where do I put the camera?”5. The principal of this resonated with me, and I began to apply it to my writing. Before writing every scene, I asked myself the same questions that Pullman poses to his reader: “Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What’s your stance towards the characters?” This framework made planning easier and the process of writing smoother, as I was no longer attempting to write a scene as I was imagining it. Instead, Pullman had written down for me all of the questions I had been asking myself without even knowing.
At the end of this creative journey, I read over the narrative I have produced with fondness. There are stylistic differences between the beginning chapters and the later ones, which were more obvious to begin with and have become less and less conspicuous throughout the drafting and redrafting process. As previously mentioned, Yesterday for the Last Time was not created solely for the purpose of this Independent Study and some parts of it already existed at the beginning of the Independent Study process. The original Chapter 1 had glaring stylistic differences to the much more recently written Chapter 3 and 4, and Chapter 2 was sitting somewhere between. Much of the redrafting process was a process of refining instead of rewriting, to ensure continuity of style where it was lacking. I found a lot of satisfaction in the act of revisiting my older sections of writing and being able to clearly see my progress as a writer and a storyteller.
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