Perhaps even more so than some of the other chapters, I was conscious of creating something very structured when I wrote Chapter 6.

The most important feature of this chapter is the tale of Boo's origin. For two very good reasons, I didn't want to do another big flashback sequence here. I'll discuss the other of those reasons later but the first was simply a matter of composition. We'd just shown the second part of Doug's story in flashback and I felt it was important to return to the main narrative and move it forward.

Having deprived myself of the flashback as a way to show Boo's back-story, it was going to have to be narrated. The challenge, therefore, was how to include large sections of exposition without it becoming a tedious read.

There are a number of ways of trying to do this and, rather than rely on any single one of them, I very consciously tried to use two at once. The first was to cut back and forth between the narration scenes and something more dramatic. The second was to have the narrator (Stan) doing something interesting while he tells us Boo's story.

Personally, I'm rather pleased with the way it turned out!