Writing about Clare Abshire from The Time Traveler's Wife for this week's heroine, I came across a lot of information about the author, Audrey Niffenegger which I thought fascinating, so I thought I'd share it with you.
Like Clare, Audrey is an artist as well as being a writer. She also teaches writing, letterpress printing and fine edition book production. Her visual novels, paintings, photographs and prints are shown at the Printworks Gallery in Chicago.
The Time Traveler's Wife started life as one of her visual novels. Audrey had the title first, but soon realised that this was a story that couldn't be told by painting alone, so she chose the traditional route for this story instead. Five hundred plus pages later, it was published after a bidding war in 2003 to resounding success, and after four and a half years in the making.
The story is so complicated in the way it jumps around in time, that you wonder (or at least I do) how Audrey could have put it together in the first place. Well, after starting with the title, she then wrote out the end, then the middle and finally the beginning. She also storyboarded the whole thing, very similarly to the way the artists do for a visual animated film, and moved the pages around a lot. "At one point it was assembled in a completely different order," she has admitted.
The Time Traveler's Wife is Audrey's debut novel and has spent over twenty weeks in The New York Times bestseller list. The rights have been sold in many countries, and as we now know the film rights have been sold with the film now in post production stage, to be screened in December.
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