Writing my debut novel: Part 1: A moment in time
2013. An American armoured warfare training facility in Germany.
Weeks spent fighting a fictitious enemy – played by Americans – through rain-soaked valleys and across muddy plains.
I think we ‘won’.
But are there really winners in the wars of the future?
Perhaps a pyrrhic victory.
You win, but the losses that you sustain are such that, in reality, no one really wins.
Having returned from combat of a very different kind in Afghanistan, I found the training exercise so far removed from recent warfighting reality that I felt slightly disengaged.
It seemed the Wars of tanks versus tanks and artillery versus artillery were over.
I asked my Commanding Officer, someone with an immense military record, why we were preparing for wars long past.
Like all good leaders, he respected the challenge.
What he told me felt implausible at the time.
He said:
“In our lifetime, there will be war on the European landmass again. It will involve armour and artillery. It will be all-out War.”
At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
The only war on that scale in Europe would be one with Russia.
In the real world (not the simulated one of military exercises), across Germany that year, we had been preparing for the drawdown of UK forces, closing bases established after WW2 and expanded during the height of the Cold War and beyond.
European politicians made it clear that Russia was our friend, someone we could do business with. The first Nord Stream pipeline (Nord Stream 1) for Germany had come online a few years earlier (November 2011), delivering Russian gas directly beneath the Baltic Sea, bypassing traditional transit countries like Ukraine. Germany had scaled down its nuclear power, decommissioning reactors, and thus increasing its dependence on Russian gas.
Back in the early 2000s, Putin was a Chess Grandmaster.
So, back to my conversation on the fringes of our fictitious war with a simulated enemy.
I vividly recall studying the man before me. My Commanding Officer. Part of his ear was missing. I wondered how that had happened. Some secret mission behind enemy lines in Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps. I knew his career had taken him into the shadows. The novelist inside me was already mentally shelving moments, although I didn’t know it yet.
I looked at a small wooden crate by his camp cot and noticed a Penguin Classic. Jane Austen. I had expected to see Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Or Achtung Panzer! by the WW2 German Tank Ace Heinz Guderian.
Who really was this person? I wondered.
I left that conversation and, whilst continuing to work hard in my role, questioned whether it was all the view of an outlier.
At that time, the UK Ministry of Defence was focused on its vision – Future Force 2020 – under which the maximum future deployment of UK troops would be three brigades, with maritime and air support (around 30,000 personnel) for one-off, limited-duration interventions.
To put those numbers into context, Russia has over 100 combat brigades deployed in Ukraine (over 700,000 personnel).
Who was this man before me who saw a future radically different to the one his own Government were preparing for? Some form of mystic, perhaps.
I left the Armed Forces later that year, ready to move on with my life. I had seen enough of war in Afghanistan never to want to see any more again.
As I was leaving my life in uniform. I sent him one final email thanking him for everything. We had worked well together and seemed to develop a mutual respect.
He sent one promptly back.
When the War comes, call me. You can join my unit.
I rather liked that telegram-style response. It felt like something from days of old. But it all felt a bit implausible, so I brushed it off and dove headfirst into my new career in technology.
Fast forward to December 2021, and I was staying with my family in an old hotel on the UK’s storm-battered southwest coast. At breakfast, one table away, sat a retired Army-colonel type, grey hair, tweed jacket, and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers. The Times stretched out before him, obscuring his wife, who was vainly trying to engage in conversation around plans for the day.
I then heard him gruffly say out loud:
“You know this isn’t an exercise when they’ve got the blood wagons lining up at the border.”
He was referring to the masses of field ambulances visible in satellite imagery beamed from the Ukrainian border and broadcast worldwide in digital and print media. They had big red crosses on their roofs against a white background to deter targeting.
I looked across to my wife and four-month-old son.
So, he was right after all, I thought…
My old Commanding Officer had seen what was to come.
In the new year of 2022, 24th February to be precise, I vividly remember seeing the news break that Russia had crossed the border into Ukraine on their special military operation. It had begun. The world would never be the same again.
What would this mean for the UK? I wondered.
Fearful of the future. I lifted my pen. Could it be mightier than the sword?
Against a backdrop of innovation in Artificial Intelligence, growing misinformation in the public domain and an evident lack of trust in the institutions that govern us, I started with three simple questions:
1 – How far would we, as a nation, go to survive?
2 – What could the implications of that be?
3 – Could a story serve as a vehicle to share what I thought I had discovered with the world?
Those questions lit the touch paper for my novel – Seconds to Midnight.
One of the opening dedications in my novel reads:
I also dedicate this cautionary tale to the humans and machines at the very farthest edges of technological innovation. I cannot see what you see. So, I fear. With every step forward, I ask that you consider what might be the end.
Part 2: But what about competing with AI?
In 2026, it is not enough to write about AI; one must also confront it daily as a competitor to one’s work.
But I don’t fear Artificial Intelligence, even though as a debut novelist, I probably should…
You see, my view is that we all have our own unique, subjective experiences of the world around us. That is what it is to be human.
I write from those experiences.
It is my human senses of sight, sound, and smell that create an imprint on my mind, one that can only be achieved by actually being there.
When I write a novel, I picture the moments I have experienced. I will borrow and abstract from those as I go, but I will always start from something I know. A moment in time, if you will.
I read widely and regularly, and the descriptive powers of great writers will transport me to places I have never been and moments I have never experienced; I do love books for that…but for me, as a writer, there is no substitute for lived experience. It is there, not in the borrowed words of other writers, that I begin.
The authors I love: Ambler, Baron, Le Carre, Forsyth, Greene and Household all had a deep range of lived experience to draw on. It is that experience which flows through their every sentence.
Indeed, Le Carre, even as a bestselling author at the peak of his book-selling powers, would leave his remote Cornish clifftop home and travel around Asia to research The Honourable Schoolboy and Africa to research The Constant Gardener. It was that diligence, willingness to get his boots on the ground and a zealous drive to enrich his own life experiences that, I believe, will ensure his work lives on for hundreds of years to come.
To research Big Pharma, Le Carre didn’t lazily dispatch an assistant; he used his experience as a spy to meet with pharmaceutical insiders in Switzerland and extracted the information he needed to give his craft authenticity. Le Carre’s stories had to feel real. For that, he needed to see and hear the truths with his own eyes and ears.
I should be clear: Not every writer or every book needs this lived experience; it depends, in my opinion, on the genre and the subject, but writers and books that I love and want to follow do.
When I think of Le Carre, I think of him as a writer who started and then shaped global conversations through his writing. What greater epithet for a writer than that?
Could AI have done what Le Carre did?
Could AI have consumed all the world’s content and produced the visceral authenticity of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?
It could certainly read it now and create an imitation. Yes.
But I don’t believe it could create it from scratch without something that had gone before.
Why? Because AI, as it exists now, only regurgitates what it has already consumed.
It cannot commit the creative act.
So, for now, I do not fear Artificial Intelligence as it exists today. As a writer.
But Artificial Superintelligence ‘ASI’, an AI capable of free thought, free will, unencumbered from what has gone before. Well, that terrifies me as a writer and as a human.
For ASI might be able to write a modern-day equivalent of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and thousands of others like it, in an instant.
But how? Without the critical lived experience that I mentioned earlier…
I believe that ASI, once here, will be able to simply insert itself into rooms, places and times, through the connected technologies all around us today. Powered by unprecedented computing, it will be able to sense, process, think, and feel beyond any human ability today. It will be able to see all sides of the coin and synthesise objective and subjective perspectives into a compelling narrative that adapts for the reader, continuously optimising to keep you reading. The end product will be a unique book tailored to each reader. A book that meets you where you are. Takes you by the hand and guides you through. No two reader experiences will ever be the same.
I, as a humble human, will write what I know. Up to a point. And then, with what I know, I will take a leap.
Seconds to Midnight, my debut novel, is the manifestation of that leap.
But what happens if your imagination isn’t enough?
The answer occurred to me on a long walk across Dartmoor in Devon: To cut through the noise in 2026 and beyond, I must write differently.
And so, SCEP was born.
SCEP writing – an acronym I have coined that captures part of my narrative style – stands for short chapters, economic prose.
Why have I taken that approach?
The National Centre for Social Research published data on the decline in average free time in the UK. In March 2020, UK adults spent 4 hours and 30 minutes each day on entertainment, socialising, and other free-time activities. By 2023, that was down to 3 hours and 44 minutes. A trend that shows no sign of reversing.
So? We have less free time, and thus, less time to spend reading…
And, when we do read…
According to the BBC, the average human attention span has now dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8.25 seconds in recent years.
So? It’s getting harder to concentrate. If something doesn’t grab our attention, we move on…
Connecting the dots: We, the people (and I very much include myself in this), are exhausted plate-spinners, constantly juggling as we rush from one thing to the next. And, if, at the end of a long day, we only have 15 minutes to read before our eyelids start their descent…let those 15 minutes provide a sense of enjoyment and accomplishment…a sense of movement forwards and time well-spent…not self-loathing and frustration as one wades through pages upon pages of overly descriptive verbiage on how someone drinks their tea or puts their shoes on.
What do I promise instead? Inspired by Ford Madox Ford’s progression d’effet, where every element of the story should serve to propel the reader forward…I leverage SCEP to take that a step further in the twenty-first century age of smartphones, social media and hectic diaries…making sure that every scant minute of someone’s dwindling free time counts.
In short, I promise to give the reader as much as possible in as little time as possible. By refining prose over and over, I focus on how much I can share with the reader before their eyelids close.
And, it seems, a happy byproduct of this approach, according to my incredibly kind and supportive early readers, is the creation of a kind of ‘shaky camera’ feel—an edge-of-your-seat experience that draws you in and forward, allowing the reader to fill in some of the blanks as they go. Everyone’s reading experience is therefore unique, based on their own perceptions, mental imagery, and lived experiences.
It was when I read those early reader opinions that I knew SCEP would be the way I write.
Some reviewers (interested agents and publishers) told me to lengthen chapters, fill out scenes, and add more – and in some instances, I have. I accepted that more was needed. But in some cases, I haven’t. I appreciate that’s a gamble…who am I, a debut novelist, yet to be published…to question prevailing wisdom…
So, when you read Seconds to Midnight, I would love to know what you think.
Am I on to something…or not? I want to hear what you think of SCEP – could it be a pioneering new narrative style, or a gamble that might not pay off?
The odds as a debut author are stacked against me…
But everyone will have their own opinion.
Reading is a subjective experience after all.
As is everything in life.
I guess we’ll see…
About Newton’s debut novel, Seconds to Midnight:
- Europe is on the brink. The Doomsday Clock ticks towards midnight.
Cyberwarfare, disinformation and public dissent rage across the continent.
Five humans enter the fray. Some are willing, some are not.
A retired spook forced back into the shadows; a journalist chasing truth through a fog of lies; a data scientist whose brilliance hides dangerous loyalties; a street fighter seeking purpose in chaos; and a veteran who swore never to fight again.
In the shadows, British Intelligence launches two Top Secret operations – IRIS and ARTEMIS – powered by Omnia, an artificial superintelligence designed to prevent war.
But is Omnia following the human script?
Is the AI saving humanity or replacing it?
Propulsive, chilling and disturbingly plausible, Seconds to Midnight is a high-stakes techno-thriller exploring control, conscience, and what happens when the future decides it no longer needs us.
About the Author:
Combat veteran and technologist. Newton’s work has taken him from the warzones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen to the leading edge of innovation in Silicon Valley. He now resides with his wife and son in rural Devon, England. An alumnus of the Faber Academy, Seconds to Midnight is his first novel.
Seconds to Midnight by David Orson Newton is published by Chiselbury and is available to buy now.
