![]() The police think Theo has the answers, that he knows what tore our family apart. ‘They are looking for him,’ the nurse told me, ‘but the storm is slowing down the search.’ Now my husband is fighting for his life and my little one is missing. Something big and dark, something suffocating. My husband telling our son, Theo, to run.īut the rest is a blank in my memory. ![]() The hospital bed, the white walls, my hand tethered to a drip, rain lashing against the window. I look around, the room coming into focus. Please keep him safe, I silently beg, please, please just keep him safe. Where is he? Where’s my precious child with his father’s blue eyes and a halo of golden curls? My little boy is out there on his own. That’s how I knew it was right and I am hoping that readers will feel the same way. This novel came quickly, the characters speaking for themselves and the story threads joining up effortlessly. I was already working on another novel, on the novel that has become Bring Him Home. It was, in the end, almost a relief to have my editor tell me it needed a huge rewrite and I didn’t have to think twice about sending it to the bottom drawer. Last year, during COVID-19 lockdown, with my teenage son next to me, I wrote a novel that I struggled through. It is a terrible thing to sit in front of your computer and hate the work you’re doing and yet I still find myself in that position sometimes, even after all these years. This cannot be forced and when it is-I do not enjoy the work. Sometimes when I have an idea, I imagine a whole lot of loose threads floating in the air and I wait until I can find a way to connect them all. It is frustrating and sometimes terrifying to throw away thousands of carefully crafted words but I have learned that even though writing is mostly about sitting down and doing the work, some novels, some stories simply want to exist. Even now with eleven published novels and the twelfth about to be released, I can still begin a story-get ten thousand words in and then abandoned it because it isn’t right. I have written novels over the years that I dreaded working on, that I laboured over and slogged through until the end and those are the novels that are in the metaphorical bottom drawer. I have found that if it comes quickly, if the story is there and the characters are real from the beginning, the novel is meant to be. A one-minute story on the news, the headline of an article on the internet, something I overhear in the grocery store and from there, from that small thing-a novel emerges. Today’s teenagers have the internet and millions of connections available to them but young adult literature is a gigantic part of the publishing industry because they are still, many of them, seeking a way to understand themselves through the lives of characters in a novel.įor me, a novel begins with a moment. As a teenager, seeking a way to navigate the world, I turned to books to find characters who were living the same experience. There is no more wonderful discovery in the world than the discovery that you are not alone. I am drawn to those of us-all of us at some stage-who are living lives of quiet desperation. But I am a story teller who attempts to reflect my life and the lives of those around me. ![]() I believe I have found my purpose and it only took a decade of trying and failing before it fell into place. We are told, by the great teachers of the world, that we need to find our purpose in life and pursue it with passion and then everything else will fall into place. I write because I know what it means to me to be able to read. I write to take you away from your day, from your own world just for a moment. ![]() I write for connection, to explain, to understand, to inspire, to help, and entertain. If you write for yourself, it is simple to finish your novel and then stick it in the bottom of a dark drawer and only bring it out occasionally so that you enjoy your own words. I’m always slightly irritated by writers who say they only ever wrote their novel for themselves and they are shocked that it has somehow become a bestseller. The fictional world I could create held much more interest for me than the real one. They were written for me by me and I would have hated anyone else to see them despite the slight curating of their content.īut what I really wanted to do, what I always wanted to do was write a novel. I was actually quite relieved to destroy them when I got older. I hesitated to criticize friends or family in case my notebooks were ever, horrifyingly, discovered. Even before I wrote my first novel, my teenage diary entries were written as though they might be viewed. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.’įor me it is not so much a matter of ‘bleeding’ but rather of ‘needing’. Hemingway is reported to have said, “It is easy to write. National Emerging Writer Programme Overview. ![]()
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