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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Ideas that blow your mind

28/3/2014

8 Comments

 
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It could be something relatively minor, like discovering the show-not-tell rule, or being persuaded that there’s a downside to praise. It could be as colossal as learning that the world is round, but a new idea or insight can be so powerful it knocks us off our feet. We’re thrilled or terrified, or maybe a bit of both, as the old familiar furniture rearranges itself in our brains, altering the essence of our very being.

Naomi Alderman captures it beautifully in her novel The Liars’ Gospel at the point where Iehuda (Judas) is beginning to get to grips with Yehoshuah’s (Jesus) ideology:

Iehuda allowed his mind to follow, across the map of the wide world, across the empires and kingdoms that fought and tried to rule and subdue each other. And he imagined what might happen if these words travelled from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next, if this simple message – love your enemy – were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it could happen. (p85-86)

He could not stop thinking after that. His mind was rattling like a cart on a rock-strewn road, picking up speed, heading downhill helter-skelter, jerking and bouncing. He wondered if he were going mad.(p86)

Iehuda thought about it. His mind was so clear now, it was as if he had removed the top of his head and the starlit sky was pouring through him, into his heart. (p87)
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Sometimes these new ideas are so shocking we want to retreat from them, to go back to the time when we were secure in our ignorance. We are particularly likely to resist our new knowledge if it’s controversial or likely to be unpopular with the powers that be (including our parents). It’s said that Darwin (Charles, not Emma of This Itch of Writing fame, although there is a connection), a deeply religious man, struggled to accept that what he’d learnt from his voyage on the HMS Beagle didn’t tally with the biblical account of our origins. It’s also been argued – although others have disputed this – that Freud repressed or suppressed the histories of genuine childhood sexual abuse amongst his patients by relabelling them as fantasies.

In the traditional telling of the Oedipus myth, the hero is on a journey towards uncovering the painful truth of his having killed his father and married his mother. However, in an alternative version of the story, which I first came across in a paper by the psychoanalyst John Steiner, it’s all about a cover-up: each of the characters has a vested interest in turning a blind eye to the knowledge of who Oedipus actually is. We can all collude in hiding from inconvenient truths.

In my short story, The Invention of Harmony, I wanted to explore the dizzying sense of a new idea and the paralysing fear it can evoke in someone who lacks the courage or the social support to see it through. I found it challenging to set this story in the past (and blogged about my first attempt at writing historical fiction in the post Stepping tentatively back in time), not only because the daily life of my mediaeval nuns was so different to mine, but because of the everyday knowledge of which they would be unaware. But, of course, that was the whole point of the story: the discovery of and retreat from innovation. Although Sister Perpetua’s revolutionary idea was in relation to choral singing (any excuse – here’s a short clip of singing nuns – you'll see I managed the subject even in my responses to Norah's mind-blowing Liebster award questions), I’m sure the same could happen with any other form of creativity.

What do you think? Have you ever had an idea that’s blown your mind? Have you ever turned your back on your own creativity? Look forward to your thoughts, however challenging they might be.

8 Comments

What constitutes a good question? My Liebster Award  answers on my 100th post

24/3/2014

11 Comments

 
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Whenever the interviewees in my debut author Q&A’s complimented me on my questions, I assumed they were merely being polite. Well, they may well have been, but that hasn’t stopped me musing on what constitutes a good question since beginning to tackle the questions set by Norah Colvin for her Liebster Award nominees.

How do you define a good question? Despite a fair amount of experience of interviewing – as an element of both selection and therapy – in my other life, I find myself having to rethink the matter all over again for my blogging persona, Annecdotist.

From the perspective of a candidate in a job interview, a good question might be the one for which you’ve already prepared a good answer, one that enables you to showcase your skills and talents to good effect. But an interviewer who is genuinely curious is unlikely to be satisfied with a “here’s one I prepared earlier” response. Yes, we shouldn’t be looking to trip up the interviewee, but the interaction will feel more authentic if we are able to create something new in the space between us. So a good question can also be one that takes us by surprise.

One of the things I like about Norah’s questions is how well they reflect (what I know of her and) her interests, her passion for learning most of all. This also made them quite difficult to answer: although obsessed with my own thoughts, none of these are the questions that I routinely ask of myself. So I needed to give myself time to consider my responses, to do justice to the spirit in which the questions were asked. Hence the interval between receiving the award and posting my answers. So here are Norah’s questions along with my responses in italics. I’d love to know what you think.


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9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 6. The Good House by Ann Leary

21/3/2014

4 Comments

 
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I hadn’t known of this book until I won it in a goodreads giveaway, but what a wonderful freebie it turned out to be. Not only did I find the most endearing alcoholic narrator it’s ever been my pleasure to meet, but another flawed therapist for this series.

Peter Newbold is a psychiatrist. As Salley Vickers makes clear in The Other Side of You, this doesn’t automatically qualify him to practice therapy. I don’t know if Dr Newbold has had the requisite additional training – he’s published a book on attachment issues, so clearly knows about a bit more than diagnosis and drugs – but, if he has, it’s not enough to prevent him blurring the boundaries between his professional and personal lives. I’d like to be able to tell you that his behaviour is unbelievable, but sadly some psychiatrists do feel entitled to play by their own rules, even nice chaps like Peter.

We see Dr Newbold through the eyes of the narrator, Hildy Good; not a patient, but the estate agent from whom he rents his office. Perhaps through having known him as a child, perhaps through her own mistrust of experts on the psyche, Hildy is far from in awe of his profession:

I can walk through a house once and know more about its occupants than a psychiatrist could after a year of sessions. (p1)
In some respects, her own intuition, honed through a party-piece she learned from a “clairvoyant” relative, is more accurate than Peter’s, except, perhaps, as regards her own problems, and, in the final analysis, where it really is a matter of life or death.

The Good House offers the reader a fairly low-key version of a therapist: Dr Newbold is only one of a wide cast of vulnerable characters muddling through as best they can. Just like real life.

For another perspective on this novel, do pop across to A Life in Books. For the next post in this series I’ll be commenting on Therapy by David Lodge.

This being my 99th blog post, I'm delighted to be able to bring something a bit special for my centenary: I'll be answering the questions set for me by Norah Colvin as part of the Liebster award.

I’d welcome your feedback and, in the meantime, let’s have some 'house' music from Talking Heads.
4 Comments

An award for blogging

17/3/2014

12 Comments

 
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Miserable cynic that I am, whenever I see those award badges in a blog’s sidebar, I can’t help thinking of Boy Scouts or those chain letters we passed round as children. (Who would not be swayed by the promise of 6⁶ picture postcards or the threat of a pestilential curse on the whole family? The fact that I was lucky if I received one card in return didn’t stop me from diligently making six copies of the instructions and names and addresses in my best handwriting when the next incarnation of the chain letter appeared.)

Yet my adult cynicism doesn’t prevent me from craving one of those shiny things for myself. In the early days of this blog, when the modal number of comments accruing to my posts was zero, I even toyed with the idea of creating an award of my own – well they’ve got to come from somewhere – to bestow on the kindly few who deigned to visit. All that held me back was my husband’s refusal to knuckle down to the necessary artwork and the lack of a suitable moniker.

I’m pleased to announce that my moment has come and I’ve been recruited to that glorious congregation of lauded bloggers. Norah Colvin has passed on the Liebster Award, designed to recognise those beavering away with fewer than 200 followers. Having enjoyed interacting with Norah on Twitter, and reading her passionate posts about early-years education on her blog and her generous comments on mine, I’m honoured that Annecdotal is one of the blogs she wants to recognise. It’s all the more welcome when Norah isn’t a woman to deliver empty praise, but engages with the attentive curiosity which must be the blogger’s truest reward.

Even so, I’ve had to overcome my inbuilt anxiety about falling foul of the rules (so many ways to get it wrong) to embrace this with the appropriate sense of fun. But I’m looking forward to selecting another ten worthy recipients and setting them my own set of questions.


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12 Comments

The aftermath of terror

12/3/2014

16 Comments

 
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My recent post about the challenge of representing the reality of terror in fiction attracted some interesting feedback. I’m not alone in shying away from graphic details, it seems. In fact, my main interest in fictional terror is in its potential long-term impact, which is often more subtle. Like a plucked string, terror keeps on vibrating even when the original trauma has passed.

The enduring effects of the narrator’s imprisonment and torture are eloquently described in In the Orchard, the Swallows:

They took everything from me. My health, my family. They took from me the person I might have been, and returned in its place half a man, a shadow. Even now I am not sure I will feel lasting pleasure again. My capacity for it has been damaged. The suffering has retreated, but it leaves behind it an absence, a joylessness. If you are able, imagine breathing, and nothing stirring within. Yes, I feel relief that I am free, and it is a deep relief at that, but there is no joy. My pleasures have gone from me, like petals pulled from a flower head, or lost to a winter frost.  Peter Hobbs (p 109)

Life continues, but in an almost zombified state, the illusion of safety destroyed.

In Pat Barker’s Regeneration, the trauma of the trenches continues for the hospitalised soldiers in the form of hallucinations and nightmares and in hysterical symptoms such as mutism, paralysis and bodily contortions. What was then termed shellshock, we now label post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that grants sufferers more sympathetic understanding and access to treatment. Yet psychiatric diagnosis is always a dual-edged sword and perhaps runs the risk of pathologising an extreme, but normal, reaction to an abnormal situation.


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How to be a heroine

7/3/2014

7 Comments

 
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On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights, Samantha Ellis got into a debate with her best friend as to which Brontë heroine was best: Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre. The shock of finding herself persuaded by her friend’s argument sent her stumbling back to revisit the heroines of her thirty-odd years’ devotion to fiction. How to Be a Heroine, part memoir, part feminist literary critique, is the result.

When I ‘won’ a copy on Twitter, I thought I’d nailed this year’s blog post for International Women’s Day. Unlike last year, I wouldn’t have to do search around for my own fictional heroines. Samantha Ellis would do the job for me.

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Although I shy away from non-fiction these days (The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz a rare and exceptional exception), I quickly became engrossed in the book. I warmed to the voice, and the meticulous attention to detail balanced with touches of self-mocking humour:

When Rhett sees that [Scarlett’s] hand is scarred, rough from work, sunburnt, freckled, the nails broken, palm calloused, thumb blistered, he spits, ‘These are not the hands of a lady.’ (The most direct result of reading Gone With The Wind again is that I have become more assiduous about using hand cream.) (p88)

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You, me and we freebie

6/3/2014

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Among the myriad bookie happenings today, Chuffed Buff Books is giving away e-book  versions of the anthology You, Me and a Bit of We which includes my short story A House for the Wazungu. If you’ve been following my posts on pitching, writing in the second person plural and the ‘you’ narrator, all of which featured stories from this collection, but weren’t quite inspired enough to get your plastic out and order a copy, now’s your chance! Of course I’m biased, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G2BJON0

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00G2BJON0

and happy reading! I think the free offer extends into 7 March to accommodate different time zones so, if you’re interested, I do hope you manage to pick this up on time.

Comments on the collection or what you’re doing for World Book Day are welcome and I’ll be back tomorrow with a longer post in readiness for International Women’s Day.


0 Comments

How do you arrange your literary bookshelves?

3/3/2014

20 Comments

 
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The index for my debut author interviews is the only place I’ve knowingly arranged anything booky in alphabetical order by author surname.  It just doesn’t work for me out in the real world: when I’m scanning my bookshelves for a particular book, the name of the author is often the last thing that comes to mind.  My collection of novels is ordered geographically – since you’re asking, by setting of the book rather than author location – two shelves for Britain (subdivided into the various regions); a woefully inadequate single shelf for North America; one for Europe; another for Asia and Australasia; one for Africa, South America and the Caribbean.  It’s totally bonkers – I’m constantly reassigning the underrepresented parts of the globe when I run out of shelf space, and in rather too many novels the exact geographical setting is left unclear – but it’s the best system I’ve come up with so far.  I only wish I could persuade my husband to donate his shelf of thrillers to the charity shop and give me more room.

Of course there are more eccentric systems: I’m sure Leila, in Lottie Moggach’s debut Kiss Me First, isn’t the only woman to arrange her books by colour.  Is that really so wacky?  If book covers are designed to look attractive, why not give the same level of attention to their patterning on the shelves?  With a block of dark green Virago here and a patch of orange Penguin there, you’ve got a do-it-yourself Mondrian painting. If you really want to go for style over function, you could intersperse the books with interesting objects, but where do you put the rest of your books?

So come on readers, it’s time to fess up: how do you arrange the novels on your shelves? I'll be posting next on Friday with a look at Samantha Ellis's virtual bookshelves via our review of her literary memoir How to be a Heroine. Do join me.

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    Anne Goodwin's books on Goodreads
    Sugar and Snails Sugar and Snails
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    ratings: 60 (avg rating 3.17)

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    GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4 GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4
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    ratings: 3 (avg rating 4.67)

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