Nobody is sorted in advance

I did not want a chapter to tell you who to trust. That sounds like a small ambition until you try to build a book around it. Most of what makes a story easy to read exists to tell you who to trust before you have any evidence. A tone shifts when a character enters the room. A first appearance is staged to signal what kind of person this will turn out to be. I wanted both of those quieted. What you decide about a person should come from what they do on the page, not from the shape the book puts around them the moment they arrive.

The book rotates through several heads, one chapter at a time, and that turned out to be the mechanism that makes this possible and also the one that makes it hard. A chapter written from inside someone's head does not describe that person. It hands you their reasons, in their own words, and reasons are persuasive from the inside in a way they are almost never persuasive from the outside. Write a chapter from someone's point of view and you are obliged, for as long as that chapter lasts, to make their logic hold together. I could not write a head I did not also make followable. That includes the head of the person who does the thing that starts the whole book, and it includes people you will be sure about within a few chapters and never change your mind on.

I have written here before about why a hunter in this book is frightening for being good at the job rather than for being cruel. What I did not say then is what that refusal costs, which is page time, everywhere it applies. There are a great many people in this book who had to be given a whole scene before they meant anything at all. Every one of those scenes had to be found room for somewhere.

The harder version of the same discipline sat with the pursuit at the centre of the book, which begins as conquest and turns into something that costs the man doing it. I had to write the wanting honestly while the book never once agreed with it. And I had to keep charging him for it on the page even after he understood what it had cost her, rather than letting his understanding buy anything back. The same discipline applies to a life a character had to leave behind. It would have been convenient to write that life as a costume she was glad to shed. The book mourns it instead, because a life someone built is not a disguise just because another person needed her not to have one.

None of this makes the book harder to read. It makes it slower to write, because every head needs its case made honestly before the story is allowed to complicate it. And I could not lean on a narrator's aside to hurry you toward the verdict I already held myself. The deciding had to stay yours the whole way through, which meant I could not do it for you in advance, even on the days I already knew exactly where I stood.