It was my wedding anniversary last week and, despite shying away from romantic fiction, I thought I ought to read a novel with a heart at its centre. Thus Jill Dawson’s novel made its way to the top of my TBR pile and, because of its thematic parallels, Rebecca Buck’s novel followed on.

Patrick Robson, a history professor with thirty-odd years of over-straining both his literal and metaphorical heart, wakes up in hospital following major surgery with his ex-wife at his bedside. Two hundred years apart, two teenage boys experience their sexual awakening under the wide skies of the Fenlands, and discover how the odds are stacked against those not born into wealth in cash or land. What connects the three main characters is that Drew Beamish was carrying a donor card when he was killed in a motorcycling accident, and Patrick has received his heart, while Willie Beamiss, only just escaping hanging or deportation for rioting, is one of Drew’s ancestors, and commemorated in the local museum.

In a recent post, I explored how the experience of terror and trauma can have lasting repercussions for the individual concerned. I’m also interested, both as a reader and writer, in how the impact can reverberate across the generations. Would a parent’s exposure to unspeakable horrors make them overprotective towards their own children? Would the struggle for survival render them so emotionally blunted they’re unable to give the children the love they need? Would their pleasure in the easier life they’ve created for their children be marred by envy?

Stephen is in trouble, suspended from work after a violent outburst that’s left him shaken and his wife concerned for their shared future.  She wants him to talk about his childhood; he is terrified of resurrecting the ghosts of the past.  Yet when he gets a phone call telling him his mother is unwell, he decides it’s time to pay her a visit in the town where the events of a single day shattered so many lives.

You know you’re in safe hands with a writer who uses the word crescendo¹ correctly on the first page, and comes with an endorsement from Alison Moore.  That Dark Remembered Day bubbles with elegant descriptions from the Cornish coast to the windswept Falklands as the past is uncovered layer by layer until the full horror of that day’s events are finally revealed.

Well, the challenges are mounting: the prompts for 99-word flash fiction are announced on Wednesdays and bite-sized memoir every Friday afternoon. This week it’s travel horrors for flash and childhood jinks and japes for memoir – or is it the other way around? My secret¹ ambition is to write a piece that satisfies both simultaneously but, until I get there, I’m making do with incorporating my separate responses into the one post; it gives me another excuse for navel-gazing on the writing process from memory to memoir or not.

Time was when I loved to travel, although now I much prefer to stay at home. But I have lots of cherished memories; I even have a stack of travel diaries I could use to check my facts. Charli’s prompt sparked off a stream of reminiscence, of thrills and spills and moments of, if not quite terror, some pretty dodgy stuff. Were I better raconteur, my travels would make for some great dinner-table storytelling, but my adventures have made only a rare appearance in my fiction and, when they did, I got confused as to what was memory and what imagination. When it came to my 99-words I was overwhelmed with possibilities, yet none seemed strong enough to demand their moment on the screen.

Charli²: But it’s fiction, you’re allowed to make things up!

Annecdotist: Yeah, but somehow I don’t want to this time; I want a story that stays faithful to the things I’ve seen and done.

Lisa²: Ha ha, you’re being converted to memoir.

Annecdotist: Only for this particular topic.

In the end, an idea bubbled to the surface and I grabbed it before it could sink back down again and another take its place. I don’t know why it chose me, but here it is:

I was scared as you were, believe me, but I smothered my anxieties with thoughts of tulips, van Gogh and canals as we bedded down with the down-and-outs in a dusky recess of the shopping mall.

A perfect plan in daylight: a lift halfway to Amsterdam. We’d pass the early hours in the waiting room and catch the first train out. No-one mentioned that the station closed its doors at night.

The police beamed torchlight across our faces. I thought they might relax the rules for two sisters, strangers to the city, but they ushered us into the night.

For someone who considers herself averse to memoir, I’ve been edging perilously close to it of late.  Memoir was what drew me into taking part in Charli’s flash fiction challenge although, like several other participants, I chose to produce a memoir for a fictional character rather than myself.  Then I hosted a post from an actual published memoirist: a beautifully moving piece from Janet Watson on the process of rediscovering her teenage self in order to let it go.  When Lisa Reiter launched her bite-sized memoir challenge, I didn’t think I’d be joining in.  Yet School at Seven got me thinking about my first best friend, and he wouldn’t go away:

My First Best Friend

We sat side-by-side at the front of Mrs B’s classroom.  Together we learnt cross-stitch and joined-up writing, drank stove-warmed milk from a squat glass bottle through a paper straw.  Together we held out trembling hands as our teacher progressed from child to child, brandishing a wooden ruler.  Together we progressed from Blue Book 1 all the way to Blue Book 6.

On Saturday afternoons I’d ride over to his house to watch Batman and Robin dispatch the villains of Gotham city on his black-and-white TV.  On Sunday mornings we’d seek each other out at church.

I thought we’d be best friends forever, until the day he biked round to my house with another bunch of friends.  Boys, every one of them.  I stayed in my garden, watching till they rode away.

In the end, I enjoyed this exercise and was happy with what I produced.  Yet where it’s been most helpful is not so much in converting me to memoir, but in nudging me a little further towards formulating my reservations about the form. 

Good writing relies on specifics: a crimson tulip rather than a red flower; a curly-haired Bedlington Terrier rather than a medium-sized dog.  In writing fiction, we can choose our details to fit with a picture in our head, to suit the rhythm of the prose or to mirror an underlying theme.  In writing memoir, we’re supposed to stick with the facts.  Janet Watson had her teenage diaries to guide her but, more than twenty years on, they wouldn’t tell her everything she needed to know to complete her book.  Even in my short piece of under 150 words, I’m conscious of gaps in my memory, points where I may have strayed from the truth.  I feel uneasy that I might be wrong about the year we learnt joined-up writing, and it’s only an assumption that back in 1965 my friend didn’t have a colour TV.  I’m not even sure he was my first best friend.  It could be I’m unsuited to memoir because I’m too uptight about these minor details, or too lazy to undertake the meticulous research needed to check them out.

Charli Mills wrote that a memory can send a writer down one of two paths: fiction or memoir.  I’d love to know what makes some of us prefer one path to the other.  On her blog, Writing My Novel, Teagan Kearney wrote recently on the virtues of fiction and mentioned her surprise at discovering that a friend couldn’t read novels because she was unable to suspend disbelief.  I also have a good friend who doesn’t get fiction but the idea is so alien to me we’d been friends for around twenty years before I was aware of it.  However this friend does enjoy memoir, which strengthens my belief that some people are more suited to one than the other.

I’m hoping to discover more about this preference for fact versus fiction as the memoir challenge continues, although I can’t guarantee I’ll join in next time.

HAVE you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to your teenage years? To your first love? Close friends? Not just as an idle thought, but to really immerse yourself in those years, actually talk to those people and see whether their memories match yours?

Dusty Springfield sang about Going Back – the song was played at her funeral – to “the things I learned so well, in my youth”. I carried my story with me for many years but what was it I learned back then? When I started writing notes for a memoir, I knew I too had to go back.

Moving away from home was something we all did after school. In the sixth form we were a close group of nine friends, sharing the boredom of school days, waiting for the excitement of the sort of nights everyone recalls from those vivid, growing-up years; high on the future, bonds strengthened by alcohol, and a new awareness of selves and sexual power.

Then it was university, new lives, friends, marriages, children. But I never forgot the feeling of belonging I had with those friends. Had they felt it too, those three girls and five boys? And when a tragic death ripped the heart out of the group, could we ever be together again and feel the same?

With Grace Winter, heroine of The Lifeboat, now on board the author interview section of annethology, I'm wondering how to introduce her to the two characters already there: Satish and Futh.  She's certainly got food issues in common with both of them but, having survived for a couple of weeks on raw fish and hardtack, I imagine that's not something she'd be keen to discuss.  The power of memory, and questions of its validity, is an issue explored in all three novels, but, fascinating as it is, I've blogged about memory already, so I've decided to celebrate my third author interview with a quick look at some of the ways these writers have made things harder for their heroes and heroines.  This is especially useful for me, as it's something I find quite difficult: I've no problem with bleak, I just don't like making it bleaker.    So let's have a look at how Alison Moore, Shelley Harris and Charlotte Rogan have gone about it.

1.   Send them on a journey.
This can be a journey through geographical space, such as Grace's trip across the Atlantic, or a metaphorical journey back to the past, as Satish faces with the Jubilee party reunion.  Or it can be both, as for Futh, with a walking tour that recreates an earlier holiday with his father.  Not only is your character stepping out into unfamiliar territory without their familiar props, but there's so much potential for things to go wrong.  While most luxury ocean liners don't have to be abandoned, lots of us have had the experience of getting lost and arriving at our destination much later than we'd hoped, or being mentally dragged back to a place in our lives we'd rather leave behind.

2.  Foist other people on them.
We all know that every protagonist needs an antagonist, someone to thwart their story goals.  But they don't need to be much of a villain to make life difficult, they can just be other people being themselves.  When Satish's childhood friend pushes him to attend the Jubilee reunion, she can't possibly understand the trauma she's rekindling.  Okay, the proprietor of the guesthouse where Futh begins and ends his circular walk isn't a bundle of laughs, but he isn't to know that Futh doesn't understand how other people's minds work and has no idea of the suspicion his behaviour, in all innocence, is arousing.  Grace, on the other hand, perhaps stemming from a lifetime of economic dependence in the days before women had the vote, never in my opinion completely loses control, despite relying for her very survival first on her new husband, then on the shifting power dynamics within the lifeboat, and finally on the opinion of the jury about the part she played in the murder of Mr Hardie.  The much quoted truism that we can't live with other people and can't live without them either applies as much to novels as to real life.

3.  Get down to basics.
You know about Maslow's hierarchy, and our basic human need to address our fundamental physiological concerns before we can move on to higher-order issues.  I've already mentioned how getting enough, or the right, food had me worried across all three novels, especially The Lifeboat where Grace was at genuine risk of starvation.  This was also one of those rare novels where the characters get to go to the toilet – or not, as it happens, given that lifeboats aren't provided with such luxuries, so the poor women had to fiddle about with a bailer under their ankle-length skirts. 
Not exactly life-threatening, but I do know from experience it's extremely painful, so I did sympathise with Futh and his blisters, while cursing him for buying new walking boots before setting out on a long-distance walk, and I'm not sure that I could have done that to him.

Still, the Beatles got it wrong about Jude: it's not the author's job to make it better, we've got to take a sad situation and make it worse.  Or at least until the very end of the story.

Please share your views on this or any other aspects of the author interviews.  The next one, with Gavin Weston, author of Harmattan, should be launched fairly soon, with a post about the end of childhood following on not long after.

As for my own writing, June is shaping up to be my personal short story month, with several publications promised: one I've been waiting for for about a year (the contract's signed but I'm not holding my breath) while another two were only accepted this week.  I'll keep you informed.

Mmm, the smell of new-mown grass, the tang of rosehip syrup, and in a flash, your heroine's whisked back twenty years to that fateful night in Paris.  Don't do it – or at least think twice before you do!
Why not, if it was good enough for Proust,  surely it's good enough for you and me?
Well, according to the latest research on involuntary autobiographical memories, it just won't come across as natural that way.    Although such memories do spontaneously occur around 3 to 5 times a day in real life, they tend to be triggered by abstract verbal/linguistic cues more often than sensory/perceptual cues.  
Don't say I didn't warn you!    Jim Reeves is here to back me up on vocals and a virtual prize for the first person to spot where I haven't followed this advice in my own work.
What's next?    I still haven't produced the promised post on blogging, so maybe we'll have that, although, after Carlie's interesting feedback on my last post, I maybe ought to prioritise a thing I've got in draft on what qualifies you/me/us to call ourselves a writer.
On that point (both the last post and self-abasement), did you notice the gaffe in advertising today's post?    Something touching on the psychology of writing: were you expecting something poignant or something pertaining to?  English is such a complicated language, luckily we have our whole lives to learn to use it correctly.
If you haven't done already, do pop over to sit awhile with Isabel Costello on the literary sofa for a fabulous post and discussion on writerly and readerly frustrations.

Now that I’ve uploaded a second interview, it seems time for a proper launch of the author interviews section of annethology. Thanks to Alison and Shelley for your thoughtful responses to my amateur questions and I hope that others find the interviews an interesting and enlightening read.

While it might be premature to look for patterns across such a small sample, it would be a pity to throw up the opportunity to give it a try. Blame it on Shelley for introducing the idea of the unconscious, but was there a reason for kicking off with these two particular authors and their books? Two first novels by female writers, albeit very different in tone and style, yet both featuring middle-aged men haunted by the past. Books I’d enjoyed reading, and that had also intrigued me, made me think. Books that had done well in the marketplace, so other readers and novice writers might be curious too. I wasn’t thinking much deeper than that when I contacted the authors, unsure how willing they’d be to take part.

My story, Silver Bangles, is published today by Amarillo Bay. I wrote the first draft a few years ago, on return from a holiday in Madagascar, and, reading through the proofs last month, I couldn't stop myself from also checking my version of events in the story against the actual experience. 

Before I lose myself, and you, in a reverie of dancing lemurs, spiky botanics, beautiful beaches  and a fascinating culture of ancestor worship – this is not supposed to be a
what-I-done-on-my-holidays kind of blog – do take a moment to listen to the music …

… a haunting melody that had me in tears when I first heard it beautifully performed by these young people from a village in the middle of nowhere  (although the link takes you to a professional recording with a delightful picture of zebu that I doubt had much to do with producing it).

Anyway, it had me thinking, as is my wont, about how the boundary between memory and imagination is a lot more fuzzy than we might like it to be and, remembering something as having happened, is insufficient evidence that it actually did. I wonder how much writing stories about events close to our lived experience, about things that might have happened, but didn't, changes our memories and constructions of our own pasts and who we are.