A Bit of Hope

21/07/2021

Today I submitted my second novel to Dark Edge Press. It’s a bit scarey. In February 2019 I suffered a brain injury. Before that, I had finished a Masters in 2017 and had been looking forward to a ‘second career’ as a writer. I was hoping to retire next year, in May 2022. I wanted to teach Therapeutic Writing to health care professionals, and was looking at how to get started. I wanted to go back to university and study for a PhD so that I could teach Creative Writing as well.

I think I wanted those things because I had no expectation of being published. I’ve always felt that writing should be about craft and process rather than the end product. That isn’t to say that the beautiful writing that transports you and sends you to another place isn’t the aim; but beautiful writing comes from craft and process. If the only thing you’re trying to do is ‘write the great novel’ you probably won’t get there. If, however, you write and put all of your heart, soul and imagination, into the book you most wish someone else had written, then just maybe there is the chance of writing something special.

A good novel should change how the reader sees the world. That was my intention with This Place of Happiness. I wanted to tell the story of the brave and strong Algerian women that I had read about. I wanted to make their history accessible. I wanted people to take a second look at what colonialism had done to North Africa, and to Algeria in particular. 

The novel submitted today is quite different. It was written about choices. I am a little in love with the four main characters. I am happy with who they are and where their story took me while I was writing. I didn’t expect to meet Daisy or Jacob when I started writing. I just started typing. The research, and the details came later.

I wrote All The Way Home after my brain injury. It is different. My writing has changed. The plot isn’t so complex. I have had to accept that; but the novel is my baby in exactly the same way as This Place of Happiness. 

In my second novel the world I write about is based in the town where I went to school, the area where I was a nanny in my teens, and a sheep farm that I visited as a child. It draws on my own faith, and draws upon my experiences as a midwife, when I cared for women who had come through the care system themselves and were unable to cope with motherhood. Daisy is based on a young woman I met who described love to me, when she talked about her baby’s father, but didn’t know that what she was describing was love. She didn’t have the personal experience to teach her what love looked like. 

In the end All The Way Home is about our Father God, and the prodigal. It is about the people who find themselves a long way from home, who can’t remember how to return, or move forward into the future. It is intended as a message of hope.

It also represents hope for me. I can still write. I can still move forward as a writer. There are challenges that have slowed me down; but I am finding ways to embrace the different future that I am inhabiting. There is so much joy to be had, and I find an awful lot of happiness in telling my stories and writing my novels.