Zero Sample

So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how Zero Sample came about.

Zero Sample began life as a very rough story idea about four or five years ago. It remained as such until a couple of years back, when I decided to try turning it into a YA novel. I wrote a rough draft of about twenty or so pages (which would later become the basis for Zero Sample: Feedback) and dropped the project. For whatever reason, it just wasn’t working (frankly, I thought it was crap) so I moved onto something else.

But I still liked the idea. It was simply a question of figuring out the right way to approach the material. Now, I’m always looking to experiment with my writing, to try something new, something a little different to challenge myself and improve. So in the case of Zero Sample, I had this idea to break down this larger story into three (two, initially) smaller pieces.

Three individual ZS stories, each with its own central character, plot and theme. Three protagonists – a teenage girl, a teenage boy and an adult male. The tricky part was to write them in such a way that someone could pick up any one of them, read it, (hopefully) enjoy it, but most importantly, understand it.

You see, I was writing all three with the overall knowledge of the situation in the stories. But could I keep each story separate and complete, giving away enough information so as not be confusing? Yet by reading all three stories, a reader would build up the ‘complete’ picture? Does that make sense?

Yeah, it kind of did my head in trying to juggle all three stories at once, but I think it turned out relatively okay. I drafted Feedback first (originally titled Subject 42) and then Fragments. Family was a tricky one as I wasn’t sure how effective it would be as a stand-alone compared to the other two. It jumps around a lot more, yet it’s also the one that ties the other two together. If I had to pick my personal favourite out of the series, it would definitely be Fragments. And one thing I’m interested to see is if people all agree on the ‘best’ in the series, or if they all have personal favourites and if that has anything to do with the order in which they read them.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with how this little experiment turned out. It was an enjoyable challenge to write, especially switching between three very different point of views, but also juggling three stories with quite different tones and themes. I see these three novellas as making up ‘Series 1’ of Zero Sample. Does that mean I’ll write a Series 2? Well, maybe, I haven’t actually decided yet. I’m considering whether I should do more shorter stories with new characters, or if I should continue with the existing characters, perhaps focusing on one (Cally, because she’s awesome) in a full novel. These three novellas would then form the ‘prologue’ as such to that larger story.

But yeah, I’ll have to give it some thought. In the meantime I’ve still got two full novels I’m trying to get published so we’ll see how that goes.