Good morning, London! Great excerpt from an interview of novelist William Boyd in this week’s @ft_weekend “He offers one specific storytelling tip: “Young writers say, ‘I’ve got this brilliant idea for a novel,’ and they start telling me, and I always say to them, ‘How does it end?’ ‘Well, I haven’t thought that out yet but . . . ’ And I say, ‘Well, figure out how it ends and then work backwards.’ That would be my recipe. That’s why I take so long figuring out, because if it ends well, that classic cathartic moment delivers and detonates. If it ends with a whimper, you might forget everything that’s gone before that was good. Often, I’ve written the end of a novel before I’ve started page one. I’ve blocked out the final paragraph. The novel, film or play has to have its momentum, and that’s driven by the destination. You can see novels where the first half is great, and then [the authors] throw it away because they can’t figure out how to finish it. I think that’s why novels get abandoned; I’ve never abandoned a novel.”
WOTW | verb. “To uproot (someone) from their natural geographical, social, or cultural environment.” Nearly a week later and we’ve come out of the other side, though what a state our poor Hong Kong was in, after super typhoon Mangkhut ravaged the territory with gust speeds of over 220KM/hr. This storm was the worst I’ve experienced personally and not the duvet day we all expected. The most common sign of Mangkhut was all the lovely trees that were down all over HK. One article suggested 1,500 fell but that sounds rather conservative - when I look around my neighbourhood alone where this photo was taken. In some ways this is not surprising. Look at the size of the plot this tree was given to grow in. No roots can thrive surrounded by all that concrete. A pessimist may say ‘how very Hong Kong...’
