The Invisible Exoskeleton

In my teens, I spent a lot of time playing an interactive fiction game called Hamlet: The Text Adventure. I enjoyed the snarky little additions the creator, Robin Johnson, made to the Shakespearean story (there's a room where you come across a character from another play, Othello, muttering about a "brazen tart") and the option to try and give Hamlet a happier ending. But what I liked most was having to hold a plan of Elsinore in my head to make any headway with the game.

At every juncture, the game spits out lines of text describing the surroundings and telling you which ways you can make your character, Hamlet, move. He can go north, south, east, west, up or down. Every movement is a choice, and the need to choose is constant. If you don't want to spend all your time in an endless loop or bouncing back and forth along the same corridor, you need to remember which doors go where and how to get back up to the balcony to chat with your father's ghost. Later, I got into management and building sims like RollerCoaster Tycoon, Caesar III and Pharaoh, where a continual awareness of the game map is also key to success. In those, however, you have the advantage of being able to scroll around and see your whole domain on the screen. Mastering Hamlet via text alone flexed an otherwise dormant muscle in my imagination. It was a nice feeling.

That Hamlet game was released in 2003. I hadn't thought about it for over twenty years. Then, in 2025, I started writing a novel — something I had never done in earnest before. It was an idea that I had been toying with for a couple of years, so the plot and characters were fairly fleshed out by the time I started typing. Dialogue, too, flowed quite easily. I could make my characters stand still and talk to each other for pages and pages. But even though the physicality of the world they inhabited was clear to me, every time I tried to make them move around in it, everything became very stiff and awkward. I found myself spending hundreds of words needlessly describing what it felt like to descend stairs or run down a garden path, just so that I could move them from A to B. Writing a plausible exit from a room was an ordeal. Eventually, I realised. I was back in front of that blinking cursor, trying to remember with no visual reference whether Hamlet needed to walk north or turn east to have his crucial encounter with Ophelia.

I started drawing maps. Of rooms, of houses, of whole neighbourhoods that exist only in my head. Anywhere that I needed a character to pass through, I scribbled a wonky diagram of it. That way, the decision about whether they would go north, south, east or west had already been decided before I started typing my sentences. All I had to do was describe their passage. I am very bad at drawing and none of these maps will ever see the light of day. Everything is out of proportion. I doodle all over them, trying to get a character's trajectory correct.

It has helped, though. My illegible squiggles curb my tendency to write like Arnold Bennet in the Virginia Woolf essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown". He, she contends, will describe any amount of geography and other minutiae — whether the suburban villa is freehold or exactly what role the flour mill plays in the local economy — all the while completely missing the fascinating character of Mrs Brown, the actual inhabitant of this place. My version of this was the long discourse I wrote about the depth of pile on a staircase someone was descending. There was even a historical digression about the merits or otherwise of Axminster carpets. That is not still in the book.

I was reading for my job at The Browser recently and came across an image of a map drawn by Vladimir Nabokov that he drew as a teaching aid for a class he was giving on Ulysses. He superimposed the events of the book and the different characters' passage through them on a map of Dublin, so that you can track Leopold or Stephen through the city and through time. Further investigation revealed that he did this for several books, including Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. I began to feel better. His plan of the house and what its inhabitants are doing in chapter thirteen looks rather like one of my own drawings.

Drawing diagrams of the physical spaces I'm trying to people, rather than writing like I'm spinning a text-based adventure game out of thin air, has kept the novel inching forwards. The process of describing movement still feels laboured to me, even if the sentences I settle on in the end are not especially ponderous. E.M. Forster said in Aspects of the Novel that in fiction people "come into the world more like parcels than human beings". Sometimes I still feel like the postmistress, hefting sacks of heavy mail and managing the flow of post around my book.

Connections rarely announce themselves in the present tense. Parallels and associations are revealed with hindsight. I spent much of last year dealing with a health problem that limited my ability to move about. It's not a recurrence of the cancer I wrote about in A Body Made of Glass — I'm still cancer-free. I'm keeping the details private, but the fatigue and pain does remind me of chemotherapy. That feeling of being strapped into an invisible exoskeleton that I have to move about the world in addition to my own body.

When you feel like this, the way you move through the world changes. People with disabilities and chronic illnesses, who use spoon theory to manage their energy, have always known this. Where once I was Hamlet, dashing back and forth across the castle with abandon because the person playing him (me!) kept forgetting to pick up important objects, I once more needed to be aware of how many times a day I could feasibly climb the stairs. It changes what your environment looks like, too. Little piles mount up everywhere, because it's not worth going to the kitchen until I have a full armful of things to take.

Towards the end of 2025 I was able to start some treatment that somewhat improves my energy levels, albeit with side effects, while I wait for my turn at the top of the surgery waiting list. I'm lucky even to have a potential resolution on the horizon. It was only once I was no longer planning my trips around the house with quite so much care that I realised that I had been stuck like one of my own characters, unable to leave a room or climb the stairs without pages of thought and planning. They moved as I moved: slowly and with care.

I'm writing more quickly now, in part because I'm not so tired. I'm walking again and have permission to try running some very slow intervals soon if I feel up to it. I'm not as static as I was three months ago. And so I'm trying to give the same shift to my characters. To leave the diagrams behind and just move. Instead of looking at the door and thinking about whether to open it, we simply slam it behind us as we leave the room.