Locating Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater in a particular time frame has been an interesting challenge, perhaps more so than in its sister books. Tennis Player played out against two main public events, the Wimbledon 2013 finals and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year broadcast of the same year and Footballer played out against the Brazil FiFA World Cup in 2014. Basketball Player took place over a mere 26 days of a fundraising campaign during the Covid pandemic. Placing those stories into those timeframes not only gave me some restrictions to work with: but some opportunities too and some liberties to take.
Figure Skater however is a different proposition. It starts in late 1966 at a time of personal and civic optimism, and ends some years later when we’re into the 1970s with all the civic and political disappointment that followed.
How to condense the story across that time period has proven to be a challenge: I’m not intending to write something of the scale of War and Peace but am trying to find the essence of the story and its themes in no more than about 30,000 words.
Someone once said that writing a short story is like flying a hot air balloon: it can go up very high but can’t go very far and can’t take many passengers whereas a jumbo jet will go much longer distances and you can pack it up with all sorts of strange cargo. At the moment, Figure Skater feels like a cross between a Jumbo and a hot air balloon so decisions on what gets thrown out is taking precedence at the moment!
Having said that, the book is also exploring questions of time and memory. The lead character starts his story with “One thing I know for certain is that England won the World Cup in 1966. Anything after that is guesswork.” which is giving me some leeway when it comes to what can be incorporated in the narrative, and what the sequence of events is.
Whether this leeway works for the reader is still be found out however!. You’ll be able to tell me that when it’s published on 6 May this year.
