The ancients didn’t just predict the end of the world: they caused it

I recently watched the clever low budget Duncan Jones sci-fi film, Moon. On the DVD case was the line ‘250,000 miles from home the hardest thing to face… is yourself’. Every great film has a short distillation of its theme splashed across its poster or DVD box. They call it a ‘tag line’. Good ones include ‘Reality is a thing of the past’ (The Matrix), ‘The greatest fairy tale never told’ (Shrek), and ‘He’s the only kid to get into trouble before he was born’ (Back to the Future).

Fiction publishers tend to prefer a more sophisticated approach to book covers, using quotes from friendly critics or mentioning any awards won by the book or the author, but sometimes they use a tag line to create a kind of subtitle for a novel. Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl has the tag line ‘She’s having the time of her life’. Robert Harris’ Lustrum has the lines ‘Blinded by ambition, seduced by power, destroyed by Rome’. So I reckoned it wasn’t unreasonable to give my book a tag line. And I think I’ve come up with a corker:

The ancients didn’t just predict the end of the world: they caused it.

Is that the sort of thing that would make you pick up the book out of curiosity? What it’s saying is that something was set in motion many thousands of years ago that will affect us today. The race to find the exact nature of this threat and to prevent it from coming to pass is really what The Sphinx Scrolls is about. It’s not easy to guess how anyone from eons ago can create a modern disaster, which is why I hope people will want to read this book.

I think publishers can learn a lot from the film industry. Why shouldn’t all great fiction have a tag line? If you let Hollywood publicists loose on the classics we’d see George Orwell’s Animal Farm with the obvious tag line ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge would be ‘He sold his wife, and bought a tragedy…’ Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables would be ‘Feeding your family can lead to a ‘loaftime’ of trouble’. Sorry about that one. Feel free to add your own literary tag line suggestions in the comments link below.

Does the subject of tag lines have anything to do with my editing progress today? Not exactly, but having that sense in your head of what the book really boils down to is helpful. I’ve just been working on the scene where Dr. Ruby Towers is told by Guatemala’s new President that she must work for him under duress. He hints that important archaeological discoveries have recently been made in his country. This man is obsessed with healthy living and boasts that he hasn’t had a cold in 15 years. Remember that boast: it plays a crucial role in the dénouement. Anyway, this scene originally contained revelations that I decided should be kept under wraps a little longer. It’s a much more exciting read now that I’ve revealed less in that chapter.

I’m starting to see how important it is not to spoon feed too much information to the reader too soon. Keeping the reader guessing is a crucial part of making a novel a real ‘page-turner’, and one of the problems that needed fixing in my earlier drafts of the book was that I gave information away far too early. I now know that it’s better for the reader to discover what’s happening at the same time as the protagonist (or sometimes even later than the character), rather than to be told straight away, Columbo-style, who did it. Certainly the movie Moon wouldn’t have worked for me if I’d known that the guy on the moon was something that rhymed with a ‘moan’. I won’t give it away in case you haven’t seen it, but the tag line says it all if you think about it enough.

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