Two ways to start
Two openings for the same piece.
A. Everybody has moments in their life which they wish they would have done differently.
B. The change is small enough to state in a sentence. In September 2011 I get the 6.40 to Leeds instead of the 7.10.
Four questions.
1. What is impossible in A?
2. What else is wrong with A, once the grammar is fixed?
3. B uses the present tense for a past alternative. Why?
4. What has B given the reader in two sentences?
The model · 343 words
The train I did not get on
The change is small enough to state in a sentence. In September 2011 I get the 6.40 to Leeds instead of the 7.10. Everything else stays where it was: same interview, same suit, same three weeks of preparation, same hostile panel.
The mechanism is a woman called Dinah, who took the 6.40 every Tuesday and who I would have sat opposite, because four seats were free and I always take the window. She was, it turned out much later, the person who wrote the job description. I know this because I met her eighteen months afterwards at somebody’s leaving drinks, and she told me, with some amusement, that she had been on the earlier train that morning.
So the counterfactual is not that I get the job. It is that I arrive having spent forty minutes with somebody who knew what the job actually was, rather than what the advertisement said. Whether that would have changed the outcome is the part I cannot settle, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.
What I can say is what did not depend on it. I would still have moved north. I would still have met the people I met, because they were in the building and not in the job. The alternative life is not another life; it is the same one with a different two years in the middle, which I find both consoling and deflating.
I wish I had taken the earlier train. I do not wish I were a different sort of person — the version I told myself for years, and which cannot be tested or finished with.
There is one thing I would not change, and it is the only part I am certain about. If I had got the job, I would not have taken the evening course, and I would not now be able to do the thing I am actually good at.
One change, everything else held still. It is a much smaller story than the one I used to tell, and the only version that is true.
Four questions about the model.
1. What does paragraph two supply?
2. Why does the writer refuse to claim they would have got the job?
3. What is the fourth paragraph for?
4. What does the fifth paragraph do?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: the change, with a date · the mechanism — who, where, when · the narrow claim, and what you refuse to claim · what did not depend on it · the regret with a date, and the one thing you would not change.
Below, a second piece with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
The change is this: in April 1997 the drummer does not leave. Everything else is the same — same four songs, same terrible van, same manager who never answered his phone. [1]
The mechanism is the Tuesday session in Salford. With a drummer they record; without one they cancel, and the studio gives the slot to somebody else on the Wednesday morning. [2]
[3] It is not that the record would have been good. Half of it was not good, and everybody involved knows that now.
What would have changed is that four people would have had one finished thing with their names on it at twenty-three, instead of nothing at all. [4]
Which is the whole counterfactual, and it is a smaller and sadder one than the version the guitarist tells, in which they are famous.
From spoken to written
Rewrite each line for a written counterfactual piece. Fix the grammar, lose the speech, and keep the honesty. The words in the avoid list must not appear.
Spoken → written counterfactual
Honestly if I would have known I swear I would have said something.
Spoken → written counterfactual
It’s like, my whole life would have been totally different, you know?
Vague → specific
I just wish I was a completely different kind of person basically.
Spoken → written counterfactual
The guy on the train turned out to be like the actual boss lol.
Spoken → written counterfactual
At the end of the day you can’t change stuff that already happened.
Spoken → written counterfactual
I wish I would have taken that other job, 100%.
Three questions.
1. What must the first paragraph contain?
2. What is the fourth paragraph for?
3. What should you refuse to claim?
The piece
How the twenty-three minutes run. Five to plan, fourteen to write, four to exchange. The plan is not optional here: a counterfactual with no mechanism cannot be rescued by good sentences.
Stage 1 · Alone · 5 minutes · Plan
One counterfactual from your own life. It must take a single change and it must have a date on it. A train, a message, a form, a phone call, a Tuesday.
Five lines. The second one decides whether the piece is possible.
- 1 · The change, with a date. Write it in the present tense: In March 2018 I send the email.
- 2 · The mechanism: who does something different, where, and when. If you cannot write this line, change your counterfactual now rather than in ten minutes.
- 3 · The narrow claim — and, underneath it, the thing you refuse to claim because you cannot settle it.
- 4 · Three things that would not have changed.
- 5 · The regret, with its date — and one thing you would not change.
Stage 2 · Alone · 14 minutes · Write
Three hundred and forty words, six or seven paragraphs, one per move plus the close.
Fourteen minutes. Banned throughout: would have anywhere except a result clause · everybody has moments · nowadays · at the end of the day · any wish without a date unless you say why it has none.
- Open with the change and the date. Present tense for the premise, past forms for everything else.
- Give the mechanism a name, a place and a time. Say how you know it.
- State the narrow claim, then say plainly what you are not claiming.
- Write the holding-still paragraph. Three things at least, and be honest about how little moves.
- Close on the regret with its date, and the one thing you would not change. No summary of the piece.
Stage 3 · Pairs · 4 minutes · Exchange
Swap. Three jobs, in this order, and none of them is proofreading.
Four minutes. Hunt the borrowed form, then the mechanism, then the date.
- Circle every would have. Each one is legal only in a result clause; write the count at the top.
- Read paragraph two and say the mechanism aloud in your own words. If you cannot, the piece has a mood in the middle of it.
- Find every wish and check it has a date. Where one does not, ask when? once and see whether an answer arrives.
- Say which single sentence you would keep. It is usually in the holding-still paragraph.
What your partner found
Two questions.
1. How many of your would haves were in the wrong slot?
2. Could your partner state your mechanism in their own words?
Narrow, and true
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What makes a written counterfactual credible?
2. Where may would have appear?
Next. The unit task: a spoken counterfactual discussion and the finished piece, assessed on whether anybody else in the room can state your one change, your mechanism, and the thing you refuse to claim.