While I don't believe we can ever fully understand what drives social trends, I do think the answer to why we love the new Grip Lit genre lies within the fact that we are moving, as a world culture, toward more complex and non-linear forms of entertainment. Because of the overwhelming amount of devices and applications, we often have numerous things running all at once. We can follow them all if they are simple and moving in a straight line. But this takes away from the pleasure of certain types of entertainment, books in particular. Most of us want to be so engrossed in a story that we live and breathe it and forget our own lives.
Wendy Walker
Today's psychological thrillers are structured in a way that makes us close our screens. By using an "unreliable" first person narrator, a new layer of suspense is added. Not only is the reader trying to solve the mystery or guess the ending, he or she is having to figure out when the story teller is being truthful or not. This requires far more attention than a reliable narrator structure. Also, writing in the first person gives an author numerous techniques such as word choice, sentence structure and cadence, to deliver subtle, even subliminal information to the reader about the narrator. This, too, pulls the reader in. When I was writing All Is Not Forgotten, I thought carefully about every passage - whether Dr. Forrester would use profanity or clinical terms. Whether he would come across as thoughtful or angry or sad or just stirred up for some reason. And would I get that across by making his words harsh or flowery? Or would I make the sentences flip, or very short? The unreliable first person narrator allows the author to create very complex stories!
In All Is Not Forgotten, the structure attempts to create that feeling of total escape by telling the story in a way that is new, but that is as seamless as an engrossing conversation with a friend. It has a first person narrator who is unreliable, which gives the reader that new layer of suspense. I also designed it to move in different directions, backwards and forwards and sideways, but in a fluid, conversational way. It was my goal to grab the reader, make him or her stop everything else, put away computers and phones and televisions, and focus on the characters and the story and emotions they contain. I wanted reading this novel to feel like those times when you get lost in a story by a friend to the point that you don't open the menu, don't order a drink and wave off the waiter because you just have to hear the ending! It is my hope that All Is Not Forgotten will give readers everything they want from a book - total escape, emotional connection to the characters, and a thought provoking topic.
All Is Not Forgotten is out on 14th July (HQ, £12.99)