Category: Closure

What’s your favourite novel about mental health?

8/10/2019

Having spent the bulk of my wage-earning life in mental health care, it’s not surprising that the theme crops up in my writing. But, as a reader, my professional experience can make me more picky. For World Mental Health Day this week, I’m asking for your favourite novels about mental health, sharing some of my own reading recommendations and illustrating how I’ve drawn on the theme in my fiction. Continue reading also for news of how to be in with the chance of winning a signed copy of my next novel, which is set in a psychiatric hospital in the process of closing down.

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Writing isms: would you risk causing offence in your fiction? #amwriting

13/5/2019

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Much as I despair of living in a country where the birth of a baby is headline news – ditto his naming the following day – I do try to bear in mind that the extended family I involuntarily support via my taxes is made up of human beings, and therefore worthy of my respect. I sincerely hope I’m incapable of channeling my rage at inequality and unearned privilege into a bizarre racist tweet, as a BBC DJ did recently. How could he not know, as he has claimed, that an image of the latest royal baby as an ape would cause offence? But, in reflecting the world as I see it in my fiction, with darkness as well as light, I do risk inadvertently offending my readership, especially in portraying the isms from which, in my other identities, I’m at pains to distance myself.

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Do you fall asleep reading?

28/4/2019

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A lot of people take a book to bed, confident a few pages of text will help them nod off. That’s not me. As a reviewer, I take my reading far too seriously. Yet, settling down after dinner for two to three hours immersed in a book, I often wonder how long it will take for the words to blur, or for that jolt into wakefulness that signals the end of a micro-sleep. Why oh why?

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Picturing identity: Mothlight & Trick

10/2/2019

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I wondered, initially, whether the fact that these two short novels include images would be sufficient reason to pair them in a post. But, while different in style, they’re both about identity (among other matters). In the first, a young man uses photographs he has inherited to try to understand the woman who kept them, as his own identity seems to merge with hers. In the second, an older man finds his identity as an illustrator losing out to his role as grandfather.

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Teenagers in exile: Shadows on the Tundra & The Key

23/1/2019

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Two books about teenage girls forced from their homes in what initially appear to be very different circumstances. In the first, a fourteen-year-old Lithuanian is transported to the Siberian tundra in 1940; in the second, a nineteen-year-old is compulsorily admitted to a psychiatric hospital in mid-1950s England. The first memoir, the second fiction, both books are about the struggle to survive in alien environments.

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Taking our characters to work

10/9/2018

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If there is one area where struggling-to-be-noticed writers have the advantage over those who’ve been published since they were barely out of school, it’s our inside knowledge of the world of work. Coming to writing later in life, or merely being part of the majority unable to support themselves through writing, we have the experience to bring our characters’ jobs alive. But there can still be challenges in taking our characters to work.

For example, while setting your novel in your current workplace obviates the need for a research trip, you might have to smooth some colleagues’ ruffled feathers once the book is out in the world. From another angle, if you’ve gained your work experience in settings crowded with colleagues, you face the challenge of rendering it authentically without overwhelming the reader with an overabundance of characters.

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Should I stretch this short story to a novel?

27/8/2018

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One moonless night, when her daughter was but a few months old, Eve clawed back her silken baby skin and planted a bomb in her chest. It wasn’t as difficult as you’d imagine; a baby’s body is more malleable than an adult’s. Getting under her daughter’s skin was rather like peeling an orange. Or picking at the flap of a sealed envelope to slip an extra something inside.

It was only a small bomb, the size and shape of a button battery, albeit large in relation to her daughter. It was bigger, for example, than her daughter’s dainty fingernails, bigger than the snub of her nose. But, like a school uniform, the child would grow into it, grow until the bomb was eclipsed by the face of her wristwatch or an ornament she might hang from her ear.

I wouldn’t blame you if the opening has put you off my most recently published short story (or the length at over 3000 words) but, if you do choose to read it, you might be able to help me decide where, if anywhere, to take these ideas next.

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How to have a fruitful research trip

19/8/2018

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Your characters are acquiring quirks and foibles. You’ve got an arc, however wobbly, from beginning to end. A couple of twists are lurking in your sleeves and you’ve got a sentence, or maybe more, that sings. But your setting’s an empty stage, or weighed down with enough clutter to break the boards. Perhaps it’s time for a real-world site inspection visit to check out what your novel does and doesn’t need. Read on for my reflections on how best to go about it, stemming from my (not-so-)recent trip to Cumbria to soak up the atmosphere and check a few facts for my hopefully third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.

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Celebrating the small successes

28/7/2018

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I concluded a recent post on mourning our writerly disappointments with a reminder that we need to celebrate our small successes too. But do I heed my own advice? Well, maybe sometimes, but standards can slip. If we’re not careful, our small achievements can be diminished by our much bigger ambitions. We need to beware of viewing them as if through the wrong end of a telescope. But how to make them matter without aggrandising every little thing?

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Teenage fugitives: The Shepherd’s Hut & Sal

6/7/2018

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When teenagers flee the family home to fend for themselves, they swap one kind of brutality for another. And while their troubled lives will have forced them to develop survival skills in some areas, they are often more vulnerable than their peers in others, such as emotional literacy. But real-life tragedy can make engrossing fiction as you’ll find if you let the young narrators of these two novels lead you into the wilderness: Jaxie in Western Australia and Sal and her younger sister in Scotland. For real-life youth homelessness, mostly in urban areas, Centrepoint (in the UK) is worth supporting.

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Come into my cave! #amwriting

24/6/2018

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As Britain hurtles towards the cliff edge of Brexit, and the President of the United States pays compliments to a dastardly dictator while referring to migrants as animals, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the run up to the Second World War. If politics were fiction – if only! – we’d be approaching the crisis point known as the cave.

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Psychoanalysis, friendship and failure: Jott by Sam Thompson

10/6/2018

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The world poses impossible questions and the future is in darkness, you have no claim on health or peace or the way that you feel things ought to be, you are required to live without knowing what comes next, you must carry on in hope as best you can, and you must begin by attending to one another.

Despite differences in lifestyle and temperament, the friendship between Arthur and Louis, begun as pupils at an Irish boarding school, has endured through university in Dublin to early adulthood in 1930s London. Arthur, a junior psychiatrist, has always been overshadowed by his friend, an unpublished writer with the flair and determination to live by his own rules. While Arthur is shy and socially awkward, Louis can charm anyone, including Arthur, such that the psychiatrist often finds himself sacrificing his own needs for the sake of his friend.

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Derwent Pencil Museum: a must-visit venue for writers and artists

18/5/2018

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When Janice, one of the viewpoint characters in my current WIP, and hopefully my third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, had a friend to entertain on a wet weekend in the Lake District, I sent them to the pencil museum in Keswick. Although I’d known of it since childhood, I’d never visited until, on a wet Wednesday at the end of my research trip to Cumbria, I had the chance to put that right. Entering into a single room through a rather kitsch mock-up of a graphite mine, I thought I’d be in and out in five minutes. Not so! I’m sure that anyone who writes or draws would find the museum fascinating.

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Gravity Well & The Gravity of Love

13/5/2018

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No prizes for guessing why I’ve connected these two novels; I don’t think I’ve ever read another book with gravity in the title – although The Weightless World is about a antigravity machine – and then I find two published in the same month. But rest assured, they’re very different reads: in the first, Lotte feels a stronger pull towards the stars in the sky than her earthly attachments; in the second, love is a force that can furnish reconnections across continents and years.

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Flesh on the bones: Beyond the 99-word story #flashfiction

27/4/2018

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I wrote recently about how practising the 99-word story strengthens my editing muscle. But, of course, the discipline can also have benefits in the other direction, planting a seed that can grow into a longer piece of fiction. The recently published Congress of Rough Writers Flash Fiction anthology contains five such expanded stories (including one of mine) along with the original 99 words. I not only relished reading the other four on their own merits, but I also wondered about the different ways we’d fleshed out our original bones. Would a closer examination of the authors’ process from flash to the longer story (or, in one case, from long to flash) help elucidate that enigmatic creature, creativity? Here’s what three of the other authors told me, along with my own 99 words. (Photos and links are from/to the relevant author page on the Congress of Rough Writers list.)

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What's the difference between a draft and an edit?

14/4/2018

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In my recent post My fast first draft three years on, I mentioned having done four subsequent drafts and an edit of the novel I’m currently calling Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. Now, I like to count drafts, but how do you define one? When does a read-through, picking up obvious errors, become promoted to draft status, and what’s the difference between that and an edit? When I put the latter into my search engine, the nearest I got – admittedly, I was too lazy to go beyond the first page – was a tangle of speculation on the difference between drafting and revising, none of which was entirely satisfactory. Pushed to come to my own definition, here are my thoughts, along with reflections on how I motivated myself to move from scrappy first draft to an edit.

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What’s in a name?

24/3/2018

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Despite some concerns about how I prioritise my time, I recently allocated several hours to a task that is either brilliantly forward thinking or the biggest waste of time since ironing underwear (not guilty: I struggle even to assemble the ironing board). In the process of editing the short stories in my forthcoming collection, Becoming Someone, I altered the names of a few characters to avoid duplication. So far, so sensible. But I couldn’t leave it at that. I also trawled through my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, my second novel, Underneath, and my current WIP, with the aim of abolishing overlaps across my published work. Is this evidence of a professional approach to my writing or an overly obsessive and perfectionist personality?

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Cultivating desired habits with if-then plans

15/3/2018

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Pi-day yesterday reminded me of my post last summer reporting on my audit of time spent at my desk (as, thanks to the wonders of Excel, I showed some of the results in a pie chart). Since then, without consciously making any changes, I’ve been fairly content with the proportion of my time I allocate to fiction, but I did give some thought to how I might cultivate desired habits if things should slip.

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“I was all right till I got to the nuns!”

5/2/2018

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These words could well have come from Matty, the main character of my WIP, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, but they actually belong to Mr A (as does this photo of nuns picnicking in the Forum in Rome). He knew of my character’s tragedy when he agreed to proofread my latest version in readiness to go to beta readers, but didn’t feel its emotional punch until towards the end. I’d better not give away my story’s secrets, but here’s how – at present – that scene is introduced:

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My fast first draft three years on

15/1/2018

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Three years ago this week, I completed my first ever fast first draft of a novel. Four further drafts and a significant edit later, it’s ready for beta readers’ scrutiny. So it’s an ideal time to reflect on the overall process, and ask myself whether that’s a good way to go about creating a publishable book.

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