Photographer: Basile Morin Source: Wikimedia Commons Licence

THE HOOK

Here are some examples:

· A plane crashes on an island then weird things start happening on the island…

· A family drive into a village but wherever they turn, they can’t leave…

· A flight takes off, lands five years later and none of the passengers have aged…

· A mysterious message is received from space that creates a hive mind of almost everyone on Earth but a handful of people are mysteriously immune…

· 2% of the world’s population randomly disappears without trace one day…

· A man undergoes a procedure to sever his work self from his home self, but his workplace is not all that it seems…

· Two children disappear from a small German town and the investigation leads to a mystery surrounding time itself…

Any of these sound familiar?

In order, they’re the very popular TV series LOST, FROM, MANIFEST, PLURIBUS, THE LEFTOVERS, SEVERANCE and DARK.

And notice that all of their one-line hooks finish with an ellipsis. Those three dots do a lot of heavy lifting. They are the result of the inexplicable question that our minds are itching to solve. We’ll start watching because the premise is so interesting and so difficult to explain. We’ll keep watching because we must find out the answer. And that answer isn’t coming anytime soon. MANIFEST and FROM have 4 seasons, THE LEFTOVERS and DARK ran for 3, PLURIBUS has a second season coming and SEVERANCE has its third, while the mighty LOST ran for 6 seasons. Evidence, if we needed it, that folk will keep watching to work out the mystery.

So, we know that the hook gets people ‘through the door’, as it were. It gets people interested. Ooh, that sounds intriguing, we think. Our minds instantly start to formulate possible answers – maybe the plane crashed in hell…or the village is in purgatory…or it’s a conspiracy by an evil corporation…etc etc. Our brains are prediction machines, after all, and if we can’t predict something, it bothers us. Prediction equals survival, especially in the early days for humans when life was generally more dangerous for the majority of us. Times have changed since then but our brains haven’t. We’re still obsessed with solving mysteries, perhaps because at some point in the past we might die if we didn’t. That’s a good vein to tap into for storytellers. Mysteries drive us nuts until we know the answer.

Thus, once a premise has hooked you, what does the story have to do next to keep you in your seat?

THE OPENING

There are a hundred ways to tell any story, a thousand, or more. So, what choices did the writers of these shows make about the opening few minutes of their stories in order to maintain your curiosity that the hook created into staying to watch the first episode itself?

Some begin with the weirdness, some with characters, and others with shock:

· PLURIBUS starts with the signal arriving from space. We meet nameless scientists who decipher the signal as something biological, then move to a lab where we see them experimenting with the substance, then one of them gets bitten by an experimental rat. And then the whole shitshow begins…Only later do we get to meet the show’s protagonist, Carol Sturka, a romantasy novelist.

· MANIFEST starts with an ordinary family waiting at an airport, narrated by the protagonist cop who’s at a crossroads in her life. Their plane is oversold, so 3 of the family get the next plane, and that’s the one that lands 5 years later, separating the family from those who went back to normality, and those who disappeared.

· FROM starts not with the family in the car getting lost in the village, but with a child looking out of a window, where her grandmother is beckoning her to let her inside. But there’s something weird about the grandmother and then when the girl opens the window, everyone gets ripped to pieces, blood everywhere…

Three different approaches to the opening minutes of a mystery box story – why did they do it that way? I haven’t read interviews with the writers or anything, but I’m guessing it’s something like this:

· PLURIBUS starts with genre: the scientific side of things is presented to us first, to make it clear to the audience that this is a sci-fi story and to expect the kind of deep questions that sci-fi often asks us: why are we here? Who are we anyway? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all got along? What if we were all of one mind and the whole planet cooperated peacefully? But what the hell would happen about free will? In a light-hearted tone, the scientific opening starts throwing these questions at us, allowing us to understand the nature of the mystery before we meet our main character.

· MANIFEST starts with character: we meet the whole family, we’re told what’s happening by a friendly narrator who welcomes us into her story, we find out what issues the family has e.g. her nephew is suffering from cancer, plus the narrator had something sad happen to her in the past plus she’s trying to decide what to do about a marriage proposal while everyone persuades her to say yes. This is character stuff. We find out all of this before they even get on the plane. The writers want us to care about the people before the mystery begins.

· FROM could’ve started with the family in the car, driving round and round, unable to leave the village – that’s the central mystery, so why didn’t it start that way? My hunch is it’s about genre again – FROM is slightly different from some of the examples in that it’s unashamedly a horror version of the mystery box type of story. It’s pretty darn grisly at points. So, instead, we start with a homicidal grandmother tearing her family apart. Nice! It sets the tone. And adds a deep foreboding to when we first see the family in their car – are they next?!

Why didn’t PLURIBUS start with character, instead of the science? My hunch is that Carol Sturka is a brilliant protagonist yet also potentially deeply unlikeable. We soon realise that, basically, the whole world hates her! She’s bad-tempered, objectionable and does not suffer fools gladly. But she’s also lost, lonely and desperately sad and angry. Many of us can identify with that in our lives. But we only truly understand that about Carol as the story progresses, as we get snippets of her backstory – namely her relationship with her wife, who died in the takeover. So, seeing as Carol is so grumpy, it might’ve been a hard sell to start with her as our first port of call.

Next, let’s think about what the ending needs to do in order to satisfy us.

THE ENDING

So what happens once we do know the ending? You know what, I’m not going to spoil it for people. I’m not going to break down the endings of each of these shows, because, if you haven’t seen them, you should give them a go. They’re all really interesting. What I would say is that the endings seem to fall into two camps:

• everyone hates the ending

  or

• most people hate the ending but quite like some aspects of it and then everyone argues about it on social media.

That happens the majority of the time, in my view! It’s pretty rare that an iconic series ends and everyone agrees that the ending was perfect. People get mad about it too – just look at how angry some folk got about the ending of GAME OF THRONES! (I’m not gonna lie – I did too.) Or STRANGER THINGS. The same happened with LOST, and I’m predicting that the same may well happen with SEVERANCE and PLURIBUS. But why does this happen? Why do we all fall out about the endings of these mysteries?

I think there are two main reasons for this:

· We’ve spent years in the company of these characters. We don’t really want it to end but we know it must. We’ve dedicated big chunks of our lives to this story and we want it to be absolutely pitch perfect, or we’re going to feel cheated. We make a contract with the writers - don’t fuck it up!

· We don’t really want it to be solved. The mystery is far more interesting than the solution, in many cases. So, it’s probably almost destined to be disappointing to at least some of us, because the actual ending can’t possibly live up to the feeling of that unknown spectacular yet shadowy solution we’ve cooked up and hoped for in our own minds.

This is almost impossible for storytellers to achieve, to create the ending that everyone wants. It’s the old adage: you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

So, those are my thoughts on mystery box narratives. What do you think?

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Here we go:

I went on holiday to Yorkshire & took my books to Raven Hall

You might know by now that I have chronic illness and one of my conditions is called MCAS. This means I react to random things in the environment, like foods, medicine, weather and travel. That last one is a particularly crappy one. It’s meant that for the last few years I’ve hardly gone anywhere, barely left the house for months at a time. But I’ve had some progress with some new MCAS meds recently and so, I thought, stuff this, I’m off on a mini-holiday. Was I scared? Yes, I bloody was. I’ve been very ill on holiday before. This was before I knew I had MCAS, so I had no idea why I was so ill. This time, I was on medication and knew to take it easy. And…I didn’t get ill! Yayyyy! I had the best time. We stayed in Robin Hood’s Bay and visited Whitby and Ravenscar.

Clem and I at Robin Hood’s Bay

My favourite street in Whitby

Three bookish things happened:

• I found one of my older books Divorced Not Dead in a bookshop - 3 copies! The staff of Great Reads Whitby were lovely and let me sign their copies.

• We watched a play of Dracula at Whitby Abbey which was HILARIOUS! It’s still running there and performed by Time Will Tell theatre - honestly, it was SO GOOD! Go catch it if you can.

• I took my Raven Hall trilogy of books to Raven Hall itself, nowadays renamed as the Grand Villa Heights hotel. I stayed there first with my daughter in 2020, when it was called the Raven Hall Hotel - on its clifftop position with incredible views across Ravenscar and over to Robin Hood’s Bay. I was immediately inspired to set a saga there, which became the Raven Hall series as Mollie Walton.

  

  We gave them to the manager and he was so kind to us, and said he’d love to raffle the copies. We also took 3 copies to the Ravenscar tourist information and the two ladies there were absolutely lovely. But I was very sad to hear that it’s closing down! Nooooo! Bad decision, National Trust. Get your act together! Keep this beautiful little shop and café open - it’s so useful to ramblers and tourists alike.

My 17th and 18th books arrived

Once I’d got back from holiday, the next cool writerly thing happened: my author copies arrived of two books I have coming out on the same day! And guess what?? That day…is today! Hurrah! Yes, today is publication day for The French Resistance Hotel, my first book as Ava Miller. Oh, my story addict friends, I am so excited for this novel to come out! I absolutely adored writing it. The topic of the French Resistance in WW2 is one of my favourites - everything about this brave band of people is thrilling and romantic to me. Plus I loved the romance in this story - between shy Eloise and dashing André - and I can’t wait for you to read it and let me know what you think. It’s out TODAY in hardback, audiobook and ebook. (The paperback is out next February.) And don’t forget, you can also borrow it from your library (and authors earn a bit from each loan, so it really helps us).

You can buy everywhere online:

Waterstones

Amazon

AND you can order from the fabulous indie bookshop Lindum Books - plus I’ll be popping in there soon to sign their copies, so get your signed copy imminently!

Lindum Books

There is a fascinating true story behind this book. On the border between France and Switzerland, there stands the real-life Hotel Arbez, a building that stands half in France and half in Switzerland - literally! You can go and visit it and stay there today. Watch me talking about how this strange location became extremely important in WW2 and how it inspired the fictional story in my novel:

My other book out TODAY is the paperback of The Suffragette of Ironbridge, under my pen-name Mollie Walton, set in 1911 about young Jo, who marries her childhood sweetheart Alfie, only to find motherhood and wifedom isn’t everything she dreamed it would be. She finds her path when her mother-in-law invites her to a suffragette meeting, which changes her life. But then war looms - can she find courage in her darkest hour?

You can buy everywhere online:

Hive

Blackwell's

Amazon

I was asked to appear in an online book club

Celebrating the release of my 18th novel, Fabulous and Furious as Harper Ford, this lovely evening is run by the wonderful independent bookshop Tea Leaves and Reads. I’ll be interviewed about the book and will probably end up ranting about my own rages and much, much more.

If you want to attend the live book club, it’s on 29th October at 8pm and you can get tickets here - just scroll down their Events page until you see my event:

Tea Leaves & Reads tickets for book club

Plus you can pre-order a signed copy of the book from Tea Leaves and Reads, either on its own or with a super gift box including a bunch of other goodies here - and you’ll automatically get an invite to the book club when you buy a signed copy:

Tea Leaves and Reads signed copy

So that was my exciting week. Honestly, stuff like this doesn’t happen very often! I’m back home and, now it’s too hot to work in bed, I’m mostly to be found ensconced on the sofa with a fan trained on me, either writing chapters of my 20th novel We’ll Meet Again (the final Raven Hall book) set in WW2 Yorkshire and Singapore (and out next April), or I’m doing editing and book coach services for my clients. Something else to celebrate: I only started my editing business last year and right now I’m booked up until mid-October! Another yay!

So, things are good right now. I may be a sickly child (I’m about to start a new protocol of meds which I know will make me very ill - but at least it’s only for a few weeks and after that, hopefully, I can come off them), plus I’m still awaiting surgery (60 week waiting list…) but I AM HERE! And I am writing like mad, and editing like mad, and coaching like mad, and sharing my writing life with you, my lovely story addicts.

Let me know by replying to this email or sending me a message

or commenting on this post.

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And to answer the question at the top of this article, no, my life is not always this exciting, but at least I have my new cats Moose and Minka…and they’re always exciting (even when they’re lying around doing fuck all)…

See you soon, story addicts…

One month today, my 17th novel The French Resistance Hotel will be out in the world.

To celebrate, here’s an exclusive preview - you can’t read this anywhere else!

I absolutely loved writing this novel - it’s a sweeping war story, full of danger and deception, an epic romance and a reminder of how brave the French people were in their secret war against the fascist invaders.

I’m endlessly fascinated by WW2, plus my partner Clem is French and translated a big chunk of an obscure book on the Resistance of the Jura region for me, bless him. I’ve dedicated the novel to Clem and his people.

🥲❤️

So, it’s a book that’s very close to my heart. If you enjoy the extract, I’d be so happy if you’d pre-order a copy so it’ll arrive on publication day. I hope you love this novel as much as I loved writing it.

Before we dive in, here’s a bit more about the story…

On the border between Nazi-occupied France and Switzerland sits a small hotel. Inside, the staircase marks the divide between the two countries. For some, this staircase will become the difference between life and death...

France, 1940: Eloise arrived at the Hotel Cordier several years earlier, in the eastern town of Sainte-Béline, straddling the frontier between Switzerland and France, looking for an escape.

But when the Nazis invade, everything changes.

Trapped under occupation, Eloise finds herself drawn to the local resistance - and to André, its charismatic leader. André is determined to use the hotel's unique position to save as many refugees fleeing persecution as he can.

It doesn't take long before the Germans start closing in. Facing the threat of discovery and the shadows of her past, Eloise must decide how much she is willing to risk to save innocent lives. Even at the cost of her own...

I cannot express how utterly in love with this cover I am!!

So. without further ado, here’s the opening of The French Resistance Hotel, exclusively revealed to you, my dear newsletter readers…

Pre-order now

Thanks so much for reading, dear story addicts. See you soon for more storytelling musings…

I’ve also been obsessed with aliens since I was a kid too. I wrote my own lone-alien-lost-on-earth story when I was twelve and wished it could happen to me. From the age of around ten, I lived in a tall house with my bedroom on the top floor and I was an insomniac for most of my teens. I’d sleep when I got home from school, then wake up, have dinner, do homework, watch TV and then go to bed, and stay up till 3am listening to the local radio station and staring out of my window. It was an old-fashioned sash window and I’d shove it up and lean out and gaze up at the stars, or look down below at the line of gardens to the left and right, watching the nocturnal animals come and go and just…think. I did a lot of my thinking at that time of night. I’ve never got out of that habit. I’m still a night owl.

I started reading books about UFO sightings and alien visitations. When I was an older teenager and in my early twenties at university, I become wrapped up in the concept of crop circles (I even did my final year Spanish language speech exam by giving a talk on crop circles in Spanish. The examiners knew absolutely nothing about crop circles so they couldn’t ask me any questions afterwards - genius!) I scared the bejesus out of myself by reading the book and watching the movie Communion with Christopher Walken, and the most scary thing I think I’ve ever watched in my life: the movie Fire in the Sky, both supposedly true stories about vicious alien abductions. I read more and more books about alien visitations and lay in bed thinking, what if it happened to me??

I grew out of all that eventually (sort of) but I still kept the fascination, the wonder and a vestige of the fear.

So, when I heard that Spielberg, after so many years, was making another alien movie, I could not contain my excitement. I had visions of an updated, older, wiser version of Close Encounters, which I had watched again recently for the umpteenth time and still adore. Spielberg himself said that he’d made the film before he’d had kids and if he made it again, he would never have allowed Roy Neary to skip off into that spaceship and never see his kids again. I wondered what all of Spielberg’s years of maturity would bring to the screen in this new alien adventure. It felt like we’d matured together, over all the years since those UFO-obsessed 70s and alien abduction obsessed 80s and 90s.

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And then I watched Disclosure Day.

And I was so utterly underwhelmed by the whole thing…

Okay, so…why? Was it a bad movie?

I mean, yes. And no. It’s serviceable. It’s basically a chase thriller. There are some bad guys - headed inexplicably by Colin Firth with hair like a Mr Whippy and a cold sneer - who are rich and powerful and there are the little guys - pretty boy maths genius Josh O’Connor (with his random nun girlfriend - yes, you read that right - she was until recently a nun) and Emily Blunt, a chirpy weather gal who can now speak any language in the world and read people’s minds suddenly. They have access to the truth and are trying to free it into the world. The bad guys are chasing after them, trying to stop them.

All well and good. Sounds exciting. I’m watching this and thinking, okay, good start, nice and pacey and chasey. And the premise of the movie is brilliantly intriguing: what would happen if Roswell and Area 51 and all that stuff about secret UFO spaceship crashes in the desert was true and there were survivors and the government kept it secret from the world for all these years? What if that got out? What would happen next?? That last question was the most interesting of all. What on earth (literally) would happen once we knew categorically that we are not alone in the universe? And that the US government had known about this for decades and kept it from us?? The mind boggles. It’s a great idea. And I couldn’t wait to find out.

Except…spoilers incoming…

…we don’t.

We don’t find out. Any of it. Because virtually the whole movie is a bunch of people in cars and trains rushing around Kansas or Missouri or both and getting into scrapes and missing each other by inches (including the most incompetent agents you’ve ever seen - you think stormtroopers in Star Wars can’t shoot straight? These guys are just fucking useless at everything!), using weird alien technology which is random and nonsensical and never explained or clarified, with thinly drawn characters whose relationships are so fleeting as to be virtually non-existent, and a logic that actually makes little sense as to why these two people have been chosen for this epic task at all. Even the CGI is a bit embarrassing. And oh yeah, the world is on the brink of World War 3. Someone says that in passing. And we see some Korean soldiers at one point and a vague mention of it on the news and some people panic buying at a petrol station. No explanation, no detail, just telling and no showing.

And then there’s a trippy bit about childhood alien abduction (with more bad CGI of animals who are actually aliens) where the good guys have reconstructed Emily Blunt’s childhood home from scratch in a warehouse (How? Where did they get the details from without talking to her? Her dad’s dead and if her mother is still around we never meet her and why would she tell them all the details of her daughter’s childhood home and not tell her daughter Hey these weirdos are building our home in a warehouse?…anyway, never mind). Then they escape in invisible fire trucks (yes, you read that right.)

And then, after all that chasing around for about two hours of the film with not one single solitary alien in sight, they finally rock up at a local TV news station to deliver the news to the world. Because…why? Because…I don’t know. Nobody seems to have working phones or access to YouTube or TikTok or the myriad other ways to disseminate information quickly to millions of people. No, instead they use local TV news (okay, so maybe it’ll be taken more seriously on the ‘proper’ news but that’s about the only bit of the plot that makes a scrap of sense and even then I still think Joshy boy could’ve stuck the whole lot on Instagram days ago and it could’ve been verified eventually) and then they show a bunch of old cine films depicting alien crashes and experimentation, except we don’t even see that properly, because the characters keep talking over it, and we keep seeing reaction shots of people with tears in their eyes, and the whole world stops at the same moment as they all stand stock still on streets and subways and battlefields watching their phones - like, EVERYBODY. Nobody was on the phone to their doctor, or in the car wash, or in Tescos deciding which oven chips to buy, or sleeping, or having sex. No, everybody in the world was on their phone at that moment watching their local TV news station. As one does.

And then…oh dear, the most embarrassing bit…an old alien - the classic grey with the big black eyes, yet inexplicably about 8 foot tall when the ones on the old cine films were the size of kids - is wheeled in, in a wheelchair, and is all wizened and wrinkly and whispers something we can’t hear in the hero’s ear and he whispers it to the heroine and she says “Listen” to the people of the world and that’s the end.

That is the end. We never get to see the proper footage. We never find out anything about why the aliens came, why they chose these two people to deliver their message decades later, what their purpose was and is, where they’re from, what they think about anything, or what the alien whispered to the pretty boy. We never find out what humanity’s response is. We never find out what actually happened on Disclosure Day.

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Disappointing, Steven. So disappointing. You had all that time, and money, and SFX, and writers, and philosophers, and scientific experts, and beautiful cinematography and you squandered it, mate. And why was it so bad?

Because it broke just about every rule of good storytelling there is:

• characters were never developed, so we didn’t care about them

• the key info (WW3, alien landings etc) was conveyed by telling and not showing almost all the way through

• the vast majority of the film felt like Act 1, where the inciting incident kicks off a chase…which goes on and on and on

• none of the questions set up in the premise were answered - the what if question was tantalisingly held up to lure us into watching the film…and never played out

• the plot had so little logic, with so many gaping plot holes (Why did that guy disappear and reappear when he held the alien thingy? Why didn’t that happen to anyone else? Why were those two kids chosen out of billions and then waited until they were nearly 40 to reveal their part in it? Why was Colin Firth the only one who could do that astral projection thingy? Why did Colin Firth’s hair look like an ice cream?) it failed the first test of storytelling: the willing suspension of disbelief.

So, there you go. That’s why I’m so pissed off about Disclosure Day. But Becca, you might say, that’s just your opinion, man. And yes, it is. But I know I’m not alone. And to prove my point, let me tell you about the perfect feat of storytelling that Spielberg himself brought off to perfection, when he was in his mid-twenties, back in the mid-1970s.

Photographer: Terry Goss.

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Jaws is the perfect story. It works perfectly in 3-act, or 4-act, or 5-act structure. It hits every beat to perfection of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat structure, Robert McKee’s Story structure, John Yorke’s Into the Woods, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey - all those narrative structure guys.

I’m going to break it down for you, how brilliantly this story plays out, and why we still watch it now. It’s not just the shark. It’s not just John Williams’ iconic theme music. It’s the story. It’s the characters. It’s the interplay of story and characters that makes you care, and makes you gasp, and follow their progress to the very last seconds of the movie.

Here, in 4-act structure (which I think suits it best) is why Jaws is so utterly brilliant…

ACT 1

OPENING IMAGE

A deadly shark is hunting.

It’s a 1^st-person p.o.v.

You are the shark, in dark, murky waters, looking for your next victim.

INCITING INCIDENT

An innocent young woman is viciously killed by the shark. We don’t see the shark. It’s scarier that way.

INTRO/SET-UP

Brody is the new police chief on Amity Island, a nice guy with wife & kids and he used to be a city cop on the mainland. His main character flaw? He’s scared of the ocean.

So, a shark has attacked the island. They’re all stuck on there with a tourist economy and the 4th of July imminent. They can’t and won’t escape this. This is their island. But a deadly stranger has come to town. And it’s not going away. Thus, it’s a siege narrative. Someone has to break the siege.

Brody wants to close the beaches.

SECOND THOUGHTS/DEBATE

The wily Mayor persuades Brody to keep the beaches open, for the good of the tourist trade.

ACT 1 CLIMAX/TURNING POINT 1

But a young boy is killed & now we know the girl wasn’t an unfortunate one-off and it was certainly no boating accident - it’s a killer shark and it’s not going to stop. The town is now under a deadly threat = STAKES ARE RAISED.

ACT 2

OBSTACLE 1/B STORY

The town is now in crisis and the boy’s mother sets up a reward to catch the deadly shark. We meet Quint the salty tough-guy shark-hunter, and we meet posh-boy educated oceanographer Hooper from out of town.

OBSTACLE 2/FUN & GAMES

Now, the town sets off in their little boats without a hope in hell of catching monsters, having their larks on the ocean wave. And behold, a big shark is caught! Story over! But no…Hooper the expert proves it’s not the same shark. But nobody believes him, the out-of-towner, the rich boy stranger.

ACT 2 CLIMAX/MID-POINT TWIST/POINT OF NO RETURN/TURNING POINT 2

On 4^th July, all the beaches are open. And the shark comes back and kills a guy, then threatens none other than Brody’s own son… = STAKES ARE RAISED.

ACT 3

OBSTACLE 3/BAD GUY CLOSES IN

Brody’s not messing around any more. This time, it’s personal.

The first half of the film has been set on land.

Now, it’s time to go to sea (Brody’s greatest fear = his internal battle).

Brody, Quint & Hooper go to sea & engage in endless battles with the shadowy shark, who we never quite see clearly.

DISASTER/ALL IS LOST

Brody feeds chum into the water and the massive shark’s head lunges at him out of the water. Brody finally understands the behemoth of a monster he’s up against.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he tells Quint.

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL/ACT 3 CLIMAX/TURNING POINT 3

But Quint the shark hunter has problems of his own. He has a wound, a deep trauma wound…

That night, there’s a drinking scene where the 3 men bond over scars and drinking songs. But then all goes quiet and we hear Quint’s haunting origin story: he was on the USS Indianapolis delivering the Hiroshima bomb, when the crew went into the water and were left surrounded by sharks for days, picking them off, one by one. That is why Quint hates sharks so much. That is why he’s devoted his life to killing them. This shadow of a monstrous shark has been hunting him all his life. And now it’s back…

That night, the sea black as pitch, the shark attacks the boat = STAKES ARE RAISED.

ACT 4

FINALE

The final battle with the shark is brutal. Hooper is lost on the sea bed from a mangled shark cage & poor Quint meets his final nemesis the mighty shark and is bitten in half and killed. Only Brody is left alive on a sinking boat.

RESOLUTION/WRAP-UP

The boat sinks & Brody takes the only weapon he understands - a gun, which he knows well from his days as a cop on the mean streets of the big city. He shoots at the shark, chewing on an oxygen tank as it approaches for the final kill…and Brody hits the target and the shark explodes into a hundred pieces. The battle is over, Brody has faced his fears and won.

FINAL IMAGE

Hooper appears from the depths where he’s been hiding and with Brody, they paddle back to land in a benign, sunshiny, sharkless sea & Brody has conquered his fear of water = the binary opposite of the dark, threatening opening image of the movie.

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So, there you go. Perfect storytelling. Perfect characters, who we care deeply about. Perfect logic to the plot, where the internal logic of every single character plays out to the inevitable yet surprising ending. And what a perfect ending it is. Steven Spielberg knew that fifty years ago. And Disclosure Day did none of it. And that’s why I’m so disappointed. Love you, Steven. But this turkey? Could do better. 4 out of 10 (if that).

Are you working on a story? A novel or screenplay? Want some advice on your plot, structure and storytelling? Want to make it better than Disclosure Day?? You can work with me here at Becca Novelista, as your writing mentor, book coach and developmental editor.

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See you soon for more storytelling musings, story addicts…

Me talking earnestly about my first novel at the festival, alongside novelist & Mslexia founder Debbie Taylor and host, journalist & writer Julia Eccleshare. (Author’s own pic)

But before I went on that adventure, something else happened which was just as interesting: because I was an Edinburgh Festival author that year, I was asked to take part in a study being conducted by Durham University, The Guardian newspaper and the Festival, called the Writers’ Inner Voices Study. In a long phone call with a fascinating researcher, I was asked a series of questions about my relationship with the fictional characters I create.

It was a long time ago and I’m 55, so don’t expect me to remember every word… but here are two of the key things I do remember discussing, as they’ve always stayed with me, and I still wonder about them to this day.

· Can you hear your characters talking to you?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, my first novel The Visitors was the perfect example. I’d been researching elements of the book for several months, including such diverse topics as hop farming, oyster farming, Kent dialect, the education of deaf-blind children at the end of the nineteenth century, cataract eye surgery and even family history. You can read another newsletter about the writing of that novel here.

During that time, I was developing my character Adeliza, it felt like she was waiting for me to be ready. I’d learnt that, because deaf-blind children at that time were often neglected or even abandoned by their parents or carers, due to being assumed to be ‘idiots’, their language was often severely delayed and almost non-existent when discovered. This was the case with the famous Helen Keller, and so it was for my character Adeliza. I was busy researching not only how late language development affects the learning of communication for deaf blind children, yet also I was looking at Kentish dialect, for the teacher of Adeliza was a Kentish hop picker called Lottie. Once I’d come up with a schema for how Adeliza would learn language and what idiosyncrasies this would create in her narration style, she started talking to me, inside my head. And she wouldn’t stop!

From then on, my characters have spoken to me at various points. Dawnay Price in Song of the Sea Maid was also very gobby! She wouldn’t shut up! She was so desperate for me to hear her story. But not all characters do this. When I was researching my third novel, The Wild Air, I was waiting for my pilot protagonist Della Dobbs to start talking to me, as I’d assumed that this was what would happen with all of my novels, because both Adeliza and Dawnay had done that so far. But Della wouldn’t speak. I got a bit worried about it: had I lost my authorly voice?? What I realised, as I continued my research into the personalities of great pilots, was that Della was an introvert, one of life’s observers, who listen and learn, and get on with things without having to talk about them ad infinitum. She was a doer not a talker, and I suddenly realised that I needed to write that novel in 3^rd person, via Della’s point of view. She was never going to tell me her life story! She was too shy for that. And because she was an observer, I would look through her eyes and hear her thoughts, but she wouldn’t speak to me. 3^rd person would work perfectly for her. So, this taught me that not all characters will talk to me.

Signing books in Edinburgh Waterstones during the festival. (Author’s own pic)

In fact, not everybody has an inner voice at all. This is called anendophasia, where someone has little or no inner voice. Some people have the broader perceptual designation of anauralia, where they don’t hear music, or voices, or other sounds. Some people are on the opposite end of the spectrum, where they have incredibly clear sounds in their head in extremely clear detail – this is called hyperendophasia and hyperauralia. Everyone else is somewhere on that spectrum, with a hyper-sensitive inner radio or no radio at all, or somewhere in-between.

(And I tell you what: there are days where I wish I were a bit more at the anendophasic end of the spectrum, because my inner voice can be a right bitch!!)

So, if we all have different kinds of radios in our heads governing what we can hear inside, what about what we can see in there?

And that leads me onto the next question I clearly remember discussing with the Durham Uni researcher, all about your inner movie camera.

· Can you see the faces of your characters?

No, absolutely not. Until this researcher had asked me this question, I had never considered this for a moment. Could I? I had to think hard about it, trying to visualise the faces of characters I’d written about up to that point. I could see their hair, their bodies and clothes, the way they walked and held themselves. But, try as I might, I could not see their faces – not one of them! If they turned towards me in my mind’s eye, their faces were a weird, greyish blur, with no features. To this day, twelve years later, I still can’t see the faces of my characters. At that time, I was embarrassed to admit this to the researcher, thinking it was some dreadful flaw on my part as a novelist. But she then kindly revealed to me that most of the authors she’d interviewed had said the exact same thing! I was amazed and also relieved!

Now, why could it be that many authors cannot see the faces of their characters?

I asked Professor this question when I interviewed him here on Substack – here’s a short clip about that exact question:

The inner eye is different for everyone. As David explains, it is a spectrum, just like your inner radio. Some people have hyperphantasia, where they can see everything playing in their minds like a movie. Others have aphantasia, where they have no inner visuals at all, and everyone else is somewhere on that spectrum. I met a chap once who had aphantasia and it was the first time I’d ever heard of it. He didn’t know that other people could see things in their heads until he was in his forties. He was reading a bedtime story to his son and when they finished, he said goodnight, and his son said that he’d keep seeing the story in his head once the lights were off. And the guy went downstairs and told his wife this quirky thing his funny little son had said and his wife replied, I do that too. Everybody does that. And our man said, Well, I don’t! And that’s when he learnt about aphantasia.

David is aphantasic too, and it just so happens that several of the top artists at Pixar are also aphantasic, which David discusses in his podcast episode of Inner Cosmos here:

What’s even more fascinating about that is the idea that not having an inner movie playing in your mind could actually make you a more precise artist – how, I hear you ask? Surely, having a more acute visual imagination would make you a better artist. But no, it’s more counterintuitive than that.

I’ll give you an example: I was awarded an Arts Council grant last year to write a graphic novel. During that period, I also learnt to draw. I used to do these classes on Instagram - Drawing is Free with Chloe Briggs - where a group of people would gather on Zoom and draw each other for the length of a song – it was brilliant fun. And being forced to sketch a portrait of someone’s face you’d never seen in only around three minutes meant you didn’t have time to use your memory or how you thought they should look according to your inner eye. You just had to get on with it.

But also, something else happened: when somebody was looking straight at the camera, or a similar position where the face was straight on and a familiar angle from portraits, my drawings were not great. But when someone, looked up or at an awkward angle I was not used to seeing faces at, with no symmetry and all the angles all over the place, my drawings were MUCH better.

How could this be?! I realised it was all about my inner eye. When I saw a familiar stance, such as the face looking straight at me, my inner eye was confident or even a bit cocky: oh yes, I know what a face looks like and it looks like THIS. And instead of looking at precisely what I was viewing with my eyes, my inner eye took over and drew what I thought a face should look like. But when I was looking at someone with an unconventional angle, my inner eye was like, WTF? I can’t draw that! So, instead my outer eye – my actual eyes! – took over and drew precisely what I could see in front of me, copying the angles and lines as shapes rather than my own predisposed inner vision of what a face looks like. And that made me a better artist. Something similar is happening with the Pixar artists who have aphantasia – they have to be super-precise illustrators of real life, because they have no inner eye to fall back on, and that can make their drawing more precise and more like real life.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story when it comes to some novelists not being able to see the faces of their characters…

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When I was discussing this with the Durham researcher, we talked about why it might be that I couldn’t see them. The only thing I could think was that it was related to how I need to inhabit my characters when I write them, so therefore I’m inside their heads, looking out, and therefore never get to see their real faces other than through reflections, just like my own face. Perhaps that was the reason why. I become the characters – they are me and I am them. And none of us can ever view our own faces, except through a proxy version. That’s one possible explanation. Being somewhere on the spectrum between aphantasia and hyperphantasia also plays its part. But is there something else going on here? I don’t know! But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

How clear is your inner eye?

How precise is your inner ear?

Why do you think some authors can’t see their characters’ faces?

Let me know! You can reply to this email, or you can comment on this post on Substack.

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And here’s some further reading on the Inner Voice project if you want more detail: the research article published on this fascinating subject here.

That’s all for now. More storytelling musings in a couple of weeks.

See you soon, story addicts…

My official author photograph taken at the festival, hanging out beside Mark Billingham, no less! (This pic, author’s own. Festival pic, Chris Close.)

You were a crime writer or a romance writer or a horror writer. I knew about sub-genres and I could see that some very famous writers wrote under different names, like Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. But for some reason, I thought only famous authors could do that, because their fans would read them whatever they wrote. But for lowly newbies like me, I assumed I’d have to choose my book type and stick to it forever. It’s weird what corners imposter syndrome will box you into.

But then, in my mid-twenties in the mid-1990s, I discovered Ian McEwan. The first book I read of his was First Love, Last Rites, his debut short story collection from 1975. It was STRANGE. Really strange. And fascinating. And dark. Then, I read his other short stories and his first novel The Cement Garden. Even stranger! So, I decided, this guy writes weird stories about fucked-up people. Okay, that’s his thing. Then, I read The Child in Time (1987). But hang on, that was set in the near future, so it was speculative fiction. He can’t just turn around and do that, can he? Isn’t he that weird writer? Well, he did. And I loved it. And then I read Enduring Love (1997). What?! A novel that starts with a hot air ballooning accident and morphs into a tale of unrequited love by way of the delusional disorder erotomania. So, he’s allowed to write about that now, is he? Okay!

Then, Atonement happened.

(Author photo)

It came out in 2001 and I read it straight away. I remember not putting it down, reading through mealtimes and late into the night. It starts in the 1930s and there’s also a section set in 1999. It’s a classic historical novel. No magic realism, no weirdness, no speculative themes. Just pure historical fiction and it was about love and secrets and envy and classism and storytelling. That last one, THAT was the one that blew me away the most. All this time, I’d been reading Ian McEwan novels and stories and suddenly here, in his most conventional novel so far in many ways, he was actually speaking to me about something quite different: the nature of storytelling. I wrote about Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin in another newsletter, which was also about the nature of storytelling. And so was The French Lieutenant’s Woman in last month’s newsletter about John Fowles. I realised recently that many of my favourite books of all time are about storytelling.

It then occurred to me, that Ian McEwan was just a bloke who wrote books. Yes, he was a brilliant writer who I admired. But also, he was just another person, like me, thinking up stories and writing them down. If he can write whatever he likes … maybe I can too! It was a revelation. The gates opened and I could run headlong into the wilds, if I wanted to. I could write whatever damn thing I liked. To date, I write under four pen-names and four different genres: historical fiction as Rebecca Mascull, historical family sagas as Mollie Walton, romantic comedies as Harper Ford and historical romance as Ava Miller. Right now, I’m writing something else in a slightly different genre, which may or may not ever see the light of day, but whatever happens with it, I’m absolutely loving it.

So, the message is:

write whatever you want.

Yes, not all of us have Ian McEwan’s prestige so that he can keep his name for whatever genre he writes. And if you want readers to find your books easily, you may need to use different pen-names and key words and so forth. That’s fine. But however you do it, it doesn’t really matter.

The fact is:

don’t ask permission.

I often get editing clients who say to me, Am I allowed to write like this? As a writing mentor, it always makes me a little bit sad that so many emerging writers feel they need permission from some kind of cultural authority to write what they want to write. There’s a seam of snobbery in the writing world – which I loathe, by the way – and many writers are put off by it and think they have to write to some kind of rule of law drawn up by the writing police.

But, as I tell my clients:

there are no writing police.

There aren’t really any rules of law in writing. As long as there is clarity of purpose for the reader, and they can understand what you’re trying to convey, you can write however you damn well please. Remember that, emerging writers and established writers.

DO WHAT YOU PLEASE.

In tribute to Atonement opening up the gates of writing freedom for me, here’s some thoughts on its opening pages, and how cleverly McEwan sets up its theme of storytelling.

(Author photo)

Atonement is a beautiful novel from McEwan (made into rather a beautiful movie too), shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. A novel of various viewpoints, it begins in the hot summer of 1934 in an English country house, with a child writer:

The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsals before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed.

This opening introduces us to the central figure of the book, Briony. Here she has been writing a play and planning a performance. She is its sole playwright, and an obsessive one at that. She has written it ‘in a two-day tempest’; the picture of the committed artist, yet also a bit of a control freak. Briony is in charge of every aspect of the performance. She has ‘designed the posters, programmes and tickets’ and even built a ‘sales booth’ and ‘collection box’. These aspects of the project suggest her childishness, so that we are in little doubt that she is not an adult playwright. The story of the play too suggests an immature notion of love, with a heavy-handed moral at its heart: ‘love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed’. There is no subtle understanding of relationships here, but plenty of self-absorption: Briony has missed two meals and ‘has nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft’. We are given a picture of a serious artist obsessed with her work; yet we also receive the impression that this is a singularly self-absorbed girl. This quality – of Briony’s conviction of her own opinions - is the key to her character and will later lead to disaster. In one paragraph, McEwan has sown the seeds of Briony’s central trait and thus everything that follows is guided by this character flaw.

The other major theme introduced from the very first words is that of storytelling. We begin with ‘The play’ and continue with other words associated with the creation of texts: ‘designed’, ‘constructed’, ‘finished draft’, ‘told a tale’ and ‘rhyming prologue’. We are dealing with a writer here, and the idea of how stories are made and performed, as well as their inherent power: ‘At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad’. We are to discover the terrible authority of storytelling, when lies are told and corroborated, misapprehensions left unexplained and unchecked, all of which will cause an appalling chain of events for everyone involved. It is that old chestnut: that storytellers are born liars - that writers invent the worlds they prefer rather than face the real world - which McEwan is playing with here. Most writers have considered it, either rejected or embraced it, or rest uncomfortably between the two. Here the debate goes beyond the academic to the point where Briony’s stories – her version of events – will destroy lives. And so an innocent childish pastime – a play, an act, a game – becomes deadly.

Later on in the opening pages, we are told this of Briony, imagining herself being spoken of by her older brother Leon:

There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon…there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, surely you must have heard of her…

So, amidst the normal passions of adolescence, we reach the height of Briony’s imaginings – that she will be a famous writer, lauded by all, especially her beloved brother. Here are more allusions to invention: ‘fantasies’ and ‘playlets’, all of which point to her desire for self-actualisation as an author: ‘Briony Tallis the writer’. And once she is a writer, of course, all her fantasies and inventions and imaginings will be given credence and meaning and legitimacy. For now, her overactive imagination creates summer playlets, but soon – when she is faced with the blunt truth about her sister’s sexual relationship with a family friend – her ‘luminous, yearning fantasies’ will be twisted to ruin lives.

You can’t trust writers, you know…

What if a girl went deaf and blind in Victorian England? What would happen to her? How would she be treated? How would she learn to communicate? What if she didn’t learn to communicate? What would people think of her? Would she ever find love?

There’s my first novel, The Visitors, in a nutshell. What if? questions are fun to work with. They throw up lots of other questions, and one can structure a plot around answering those questions.

Here’s another example:

What if a ground-breaking scientific discovery were made a long time ago but the person who came up with it was poor, with no connections, basically a nobody? Perhaps an orphan, perhaps a female, in a time where women were seen as intellectually feeble or at least not half as clever as men? Would their idea be taken seriously? Would it even be heard? Or would it be lost forever? Those are the questions that came to me when starting my second novel about the character Dawnay Price who eventually becomes a scientist, Song of the Sea Maid.

Answering such questions can lead to a cause and effect structure e.g. in The Visitors, my protagonist Adeliza Golding loses her sight and hearing after a fever in her early years and is assumed to be an idiot. How does she react? What does she think about? Can she think? Of course she can, but how? What does she do to comfort herself? How does she express her frustration? What if she lived on a hop farm and what if one of the seasonal hop pickers knew some finger spelling, and what if they come across each other and this visitor to her farm reaches for her hand and spells into it? What would happen then?

And so forth! And your characters don’t have to be curious historical anomalies like Adeliza and Dawnay in my examples above. They can be ordinary folk anywhere at any time. Everyday What if? questions can still lead to all sorts of fascinating possibilities. For example, what if someone runs out of milk? Ostensibly not the most inspiring of story openings, but what if your character is forced to go out for milk, then gets hit by a bus, then ends up in hospital and meets a nurse who tries to kill them…etc…etc…Great stories can come from seemingly inauspicious beginnings! So, whether your protagonist is a deaf-blind Victorian child, or an 18th century orphan girl scientist, or an estate agent who’s run out of milk on his day off, the possibilities for what any of these people do next are endless. Their mere existence naturally creates another great tool for a writer: obstacles. What do they want? What obstacles are in their path to prevent them getting what they want? How do they overcome them?

Therein lies your character arc and a good portion of the plot. But before you get carried away, you’ve got to understand their setting, the environment through which they move and live their span i.e. their time and place. Every setting has its own limitations on a person’s life, its own rules and regulations. This is where research comes to the fore. For example, with Dawnay, my 18th century orphan, I knew I wanted her to be taken to an orphanage, a bit like the Coram Foundling Hospital whose museum I visited. But when I started researching 18th century orphanages, I discovered that these orphans were often taught only to read and not to write. They were being educated to a level to prepare them for service or to be a soldier, so it was felt there was no need for them to know how to write. I didn’t know this. My research had done what it often does: thrown me a nugget of hidden history that becomes an obstacle for my character, an obstacle that I didn’t know existed until I bothered to go and find out about it. And every obstacle begs a question: what if she’s determined to write? Well then, she must get her hands on some writing materials – quill, ink, paper, a knife to sharpen the quill – where’s she going to get this stuff from? What if she steals it from the orphanage owner? Will she get into trouble? And we’re off…

Thus, a character who has a tricky situation or desire, questions to answer, obstacles to overcome, research to be done, and there you have the seeds of a novel. The fun part for me is to take this character and place them in the restrictions of their setting and watch them navigate it. When I imagine this process, I always picture the gods in Clash of the Titans, picking up little statues of the mortals and placing them in the arena. What will they do now? Don’t worry, I haven’t any illusions of grandeur about myself, but when I’m writing a novel, I am somewhat omnipotent to begin with at least, in that I place these characters in their situation. But what’s really astonishing is that novelists often feel that they have little control over what their characters choose to do next; just as the gods are thwarted by the vagaries of human free will. Once created, characters have an infuriating habit of doing precisely what they want, or following their own internal logic that the novelist has seemingly no control over. You want him to marry her, but he’s far more interested in her over there, that one, who was a minor character that was supposed to die early, but now she’s taking over the whole story and wants to do this outrageous thing…

Hera & Zeus making trouble for humans on Mount Olympus

Giovanni Lanfranco ‘Council of the Gods’ 1624-5 Source & Licence

And so forth…The mysteries of story writing! Endlessly interesting to me and why I can’t stop myself from writing stories. And why I love editing other people’s stories as well. As a writing mentor and developmental editor, I absolutely LOVE getting my hands on other people’s work and having a good read, then deciding how I can help them make it the best story it could be. What’s the heart of their story? What’s the internal logic of their characters? What does each character desire and what are the obstacles that stop them? What if we threw this in their way? What if we picked them up from here and plonked them over there? What if everything they thought they knew was wrong? What would happen next?

These are the fun things I can do as an editor when I’m working with my clients – I’m trying to help them take their story to the place that’s going to have the most effective outcome for readers, something that keeps them turning the pages, desperate to know what happens next. Some great advice I heard from another writer once was as follows: if you’ve already got a basic storyline worked out, as a good test of it, take your ending and instead make the ending the middle of the story – what happens next?? I love that. So often, first ideas may not quite go far enough – we can test those characters more! And more! Take them to the limit! Ask those characters – you think everything is sorted now, don’t you? Wrong! What if this happens instead?? This is the stuff that makes readers gasp. And it all comes down to one simple question: what if…?

So, if you’re a writer, and if you can’t find your way forward, ask yourself the question: what if…? And look, the thorny branches part, and through the gap you can see a path snaking away into the forest, its end hidden from sight. Step in and find your story.

If you want to start writing stories or novels, or if you’ve finished one and want some feedback, or you’re ready to send to agents and publishers, find out how I can help you as a mentor or editor here at my editorial website, Becca Novelista:

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The Cobb at Lyme Regis

Photographer: Steve F; source & licence

I started reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles on a flight back from America in my early twenties. I didn’t want to come home – I’d had a fabulous time visiting a friend in New York City and wanted to stay there forever – but come home I did, back to the little flat I lived in alone in Exeter, finishing my final year of university. After the thrilling streets of New York, it was a strange choice of a book to read, a complete mismatch, but it was the book I happened to have with me and so I began. And within pages, I was absolutely hooked.

I’ve always liked Victorian fiction. I love writing it as much as reading it – I’ve written 6 novels set during Victoria’s reign. There’s something about the carriages, the corsets, the industrial revolution, the queen who ruled for much of a century, the appalling poverty, the age of Dickens … I’m a big fan of the whole damn lot of it. So, when I started reading Fowles’s book, I assumed I was reading another modern writer writing a Victorian novel (published 1969). But there was something odd about the book in the first few chapters, something subtle I couldn’t quite put my finger on. This was a Victorian novel, surely, about a young gentleman fossil-hunter called Charles, his fiancée Ernestina and a mysterious woman who appears suddenly in his conventional life and blows it up.

Reading through those early chapters, I was drawn into Charles’s story of meeting the enigmatic woman in a dark cloak standing at the edge of The Cobb, a sea wall at Lyme Regis in Dorset, watching, waiting and utterly fascinating and iconic. Her name is Sarah and she defies convention in all the ways I love Victorian women to defy the strictures of their time. But once the novel reaches Chapter 13, something extraordinary happens. The day I found out what was really going on in this book, I was sitting on a train, reading the novel. At the end of Chapter 12, the narrator asks a question at the forefront of Charles’s mind:

Who is Sarah?

Out of what shadows does she come?

And I turned over to Chapter 13, and after twelve chapters about Charles and Sarah’s conventional Victorian love story, Fowles suddenly does this:

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.

It’s not easy to convey to you the utter shock of those statements, the profound effect it had on me as a reader in my early twenties in the early 1990s. I’d never read anything like it before. What the hell was going on?! I’m reading a Victorian novel and suddenly the writer turns around, looks at me and goes off on one about what it’s like writing a Victorian novel. I suddenly realised that it felt similar to something else that amazed me a few years earlier, and that was the moment in the TV detective comedy Moonlighting, when Bruce Willis turns to the camera and starts talking directly to the audience, to us – to me. I’d never seen anything quite like it. These days, breaking the fourth wall (as I later learnt it was called) is pretty commonplace. Think of Fleabag and House of Cards. But back then, this was different, this was spooky and unsettling, and (if you had as big of a crush on Bruce Willis as I did back then) thrilling.

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The infamous Chapter 13

(author photo)

To be transformed, as a reader, from observer to confidant, from bystander to participant, merely by the act of the author turning to you and including you: it was a wonderful moment. It’s happened before, much, much earlier of course – Reader, I married him, Charlotte Brontë has Jane Eyre tell us i.e. direct address of the reader, a classic literary convention as old as the novel. But what was happening here felt different, because Fowles’s authorial voice wasn’t just addressing the reader in character, he was talking about being a writer, about how difficult it is to write a Victorian novel, the reasons writers write, and so on. It gave me a shiver up my spine. I felt as if the author had stepped out of the page and was sitting next to me in the train carriage and wanted to have a chat about what it was like, being a novelist. Funnily enough, Chapter 55 of the same book has Fowles, dressed in disguise as a Victorian gentleman, sitting in a train, watching Charles and deciding what on earth he’s going to do with him next. And here I was, on a train, having this existential moment about Chapter 13 – the fateful number 13! – and suddenly everything about writing changed for me. It made me realise that writing was an act, a performance, a creation that did not draw attention to itself as a creation, until now, until Chapter 13.

Chapter 55, which contains one of my favourite lines of the whole book:

But what the protagonist wants is not so clear;

and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment.

(Author photo)

I’d been dabbling with writing short stories at university and had the inklings of a novel in my mind, but now was the point where I started to think seriously about being a writer, about what it is to be one, how novels work, how structure and plot and characterisation works, all of the building blocks of fiction. I owe that to many wonderful books I read during my youth, but perhaps John Fowles was the first to take me by the hand and step through the looking glass, to the world of the novelist on the other side.

In tribute to Fowles’s clever writing, let’s have a look at the novel’s opening that reveals more than one might realise about the novel itself. The whole novel is a tour de force, with a great movie scripted by Harold Pinter that brilliantly uses a film set instead of a novelist to show the act of creation of a work of art, and how those boundaries can become blurred. (Go watch it! It’s brilliant! Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons young and beautiful and wonderful!) Fowles’s novel explores the nature of historical fiction and further, of the novel itself, and despite its conventional opening, even in these first few paragraphs we get a subtle hint of the revelation to come…

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay – Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched south-western leg – and a person of curiosity could have at once deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

The Cobb has invited what familiarity breeds for at least seven hundred years, and the real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old grey wall that flexes itself against the sea…

…Primitive yet complex, elephantine yet delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michaelangelo; and pure, clean salt, a paragon of mass. I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little since the year of which I write; though the town of Lyme has, and the test is not fair if you look back towards land.

…The local spy – and there was one – might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind. On the other hand he might, focusing his telescope more closely, have suspected that a mutual solitude interested them rather more than maritime atmosphere…

But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that sombre, curving mole. It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon-barrel up-ended as a bollard. Its clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

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The third-person narration of this ostensibly Victorian novel begins conventionally enough with a reference to the weather, the ‘disagreeable’ east wind, spoken of so disparagingly by Mr. Jarndyce in another great Victorian novel, Bleak House, as a harbinger of bad news. So begins our acquaintanceship with the setting of this story, from the weather to the location - ‘Lyme Bay’ in ‘south-western’ England – to the quay at Lyme Regis, and here walk two characters to whom our attention is drawn (who we’ll come back to in a moment). If we don’t know Lyme, we’re given a beautiful rendering of its most famous landmark, the Cobb – to the locals merely a grey wall that stretches out into the sea, yet the narrator offers it as an object worthy of study, comparing it the work of great artists. Once we’re clear on our sense of place, we are also given a clear indication of time, through the revelation of a date – March 1867 – and the fact that the Cobb had been there for seven hundred years. The placing of a narrative within geography and history is highly conventional and to be expected from a Victorian novel.

However, there’s a moment early on which reminds us that we’re not in an actual Victorian novel, we’re outside of it, as the narrator states: ‘for the Cobb has changed very little since the year of which I write’. Now we get the sense that we’re looking back from a more modern era to this time, that we have an all-seeing narrator who’s able to range over centuries. This omniscient view is common in Victorian third-person narrators - see here George Eliot’s narrator of Adam Bede:

This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

Fowles plays on this by stepping outside the text for a moment and this sense of distance from the action is heightened by his reference to a viewer watching these events from afar: ‘The local spy – and there was one’. This mysterious ‘telescopist’ watches the two figures introduced in the opening paragraph as they walk along the quay, and we are told that this observer would have been able to make some assumptions about the couple, that they were ‘people of some taste’ and that they want to be alone. But even this sharp-eyed observer would not have been able to fathom a far more mysterious figure (not revealed as either male or female) to be found at the very end of the Cobb – standing alone, dressed in black, motionless and staring out to sea. Indeed, we are told this figure appears as if removed from the ordinary world of Victorian Lyme, instead stepping from the special world of ‘myth’: static, nameless and unknowable. Now we have a story: a setting, a time, a couple, a stranger.

But who is this ‘spy’? Who watches the couple and the figure in black? There are various characters who later might fit the bill – such as Mrs. Fairley who spies on her mistress’s companion; or the doctor who admits he watches the young ladies at the beach. It could be either of these. Yet perhaps here on the very first page we are subtly being introduced to the figure who turns up large as life in Chapter 13. This author-as-narrator goes on to discuss how little control he has over his characters, how they do what they like. And he makes no apology for smashing the illusion between reader and story, that bargain they make when turning the pages of a novel – the willing suspension of disbelief:

I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken.

And he’s right, for whatever Fowles or his narrator or anyone else might say, that figure in black – the enigmatic and beautiful French Lieutenant’s Woman – became real to me the moment I first heard the name of the novel, and I see her still standing there, looking out to sea, as she will forever. And that is the puzzle that Fowles examines and reveals in this remarkable book: the powerful magic of storytelling.

My new(ish) copy of the book,

seeing as the old one fell apart years ago.

(Author photo)

When she was six years old, Jo Darlington secretly watched from the darkened hallway outside her parents’ room as her mother held a pillow over the face of Jo’s father and ended his short brutal life. He’d been lying on their bed in a drunken stupor after he’d beaten his wife in the kitchen. Mrs Darlington never knew that her little girl had seen her murder him. When the morning came, men in black coats and hats arrived at the house and Jo sat on the stairs eavesdropping on them talking with her mother. She didn’t understand what they were saying in their gruff, grown-up voices but it was something to do with the word ‘misadventure’. Her mother didn’t get arrested and didn’t go to prison. Nobody mentioned the pillow and people talked about how much Bob Darlington had had to drink that night, as he could barely walk home across the iron bridge and vomited over the side into the fast-flowing River Severn beneath, a witness had said. A doctor mentioned something about his liver and everyone said he’d lived a bad life.

So begins my 16th novel for publication, The Suffragette of Ironbridge, out today!

It’s a pretty brutal opening but then, that’s the kind of history I like. Hidden histories are something I’ve always loved writing about, the ordinary lives of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, hidden from the statues built of great men of the past, hidden from the history of kings and queens.

I’m going to tell you about the themes and characters of the book, as well as my own love of Ironbridge. In case you don’t know, I started writing the Ironbridge books because I went on a family holiday to Shropshire to visit my brother. In 2016, my agent and I had just started planning a new series of books under my new author name Mollie Walton. My remit was to come up with a three-book series that we could pitch to publishers with just a synopsis and the opening chapters. I’d just become a lone parent and had to go back to full-time teaching, so I didn’t have time to write a whole book. My brief from my agent was to create a family saga that would grab readers and keep them hooked, with heartbreak, poverty, industry, betrayal and more. I was standing on the iron bridge, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, looking down onto the River Severn flowing by, thinking of all the industry that blossomed along the river banks in the nineteenth century, and I knew this was it: this was the place for my saga. A rich family and a poor family begin a deadly feud that leads to destruction for some and survival for others.

Author photo of the world famous iron bridge of Ironbridge, the first bridge made of iron in the whole world.

Author photo of the bridge and the Severn below, with the date the bridge was completed.

I started writing as soon as I got home, planning out the three-book storyline for what became The Daughters of Ironbridge (1830s), The Secrets of Ironbridge (1850s) and The Orphan of Ironbridge (1870s), featuring the poor Woodvine family and the rich King family, each book separated by around two decades. In the past couple of years, my saga books went back to Ironbridge and continued the story of the Woodvine family, picking it up in the 1890s with The Shopgirl of Ironbridge (inspired by my love of Mr Selfridge!), So, I knew the next book had to be twenty years later to continue the pattern and that brought us up to 1910. I was thrilled - the Edwardian period is one of my favourites - and the two historical events that leapt out at me from that period were suffragettes and the Great War, both of which I decided to include in the story.

Jo Woodvine, the heroine of our story, in front of the great iron bridge

Ironbridge, 1911: Childhood sweethearts Jo and Alfie Woodvine couldn’t be happier to finally be married with a home of their very own. But when their son, Harry, arrives, Jo finds herself quickly cut off from the world. Though she loves her baby, she hadn’t anticipated the confines of motherhood - the long nights and the loneliness.

This aspect of Jo’s life would nowadays be called post-natal depression and I know all about it, because I suffered from it for several months. It’s pretty much one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to deal with. In the first ten days of my daughter’s life, the breast feeding failed and I knew something was terribly wrong. But the midwives didn’t listen to me, telling me that everything was normal, but I knew in my bones it wasn’t. When she was found to have lost a huge amount of weight in the first ten days, they finally believed me and I began to bottle feed her instead. Things improved hugely after that but those first ten days, when my baby only slept for 40 minutes at a time and I basically had no sleep, hugely knocked my confidence and this period of feeling dreadful about everything lasted a few months. It only really passed when I was able to start weaning my daughter and felt more in control of things again. I wanted to show how a woman like Jo, living in the 1910s, would have no such language to define what she was going through. Noticing her distress, her mother-in-law Maria (our Shopgirl, twenty years on) takes her to a suffragette meeting to cheer her up and, oh my, does it do the trick.

Mabel Capper and Suffragettes with a petition 1911

Source & Licence

What fascinated me about the history of the suffragettes was that not only was their cause frowned upon but they were also vilified as unnatural by the media of the time. See these two images from the 1910s, where the much more ladylike suffragists - an alternative group to the more revolutionary suffragettes - were pictured as angelic and ladylike, whereas the suffragettes, were shown as inhuman harpies.

John Hassall, Source and Licence

The suffrage movement had been going for decades by the time the suffragettes came along and their whole point was that being nice and ladylike about it wasn’t working. More extreme measures were needed, hence the image below of the suffragette holding explosives.

Source and Licence

Jo Woodvine joins their ranks and we follow her progress in becoming a committed suffragette for a while. But it wasn’t to last long, as at the height of the suffragette era, 1914 came along and the whole movement was halted in its tracks by war, as we call it now, World War I.

War Diary from the National Archives, which shows mention of my grandfather 2nd Lieutenant A. L. Chadwick in the middle of the page, at Ypres, having just returned from a divisional course in sniper training.

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My grandfather fought in WW1 and I’ve always been fascinated by it. The novel shows how huge societal pressure was put on men to join up, being called cowards and worse if they didn’t. We follow Jo and the Woodvines in their progress through the war, on the home front and on the battlefield.

One aspect I really wanted to look at in wartime was the phenomenon of the Belgian refugees. After Belgium was invaded by the German army in 1914, waves of refugees fled the country and many of them came to Britain. I was astounded to discover that a quarter of a million Belgian refugees came to Britain at the beginning of the war, the largest influx of refugees in British history. I didn’t know that, did you?! So, I created two Belgians - a mother and child - who flee their home country in terror of war atrocities, ending up with the Woodvine family in Ironbridge.

Belgian refugees on the road, 1914

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And that’s where I’m going to leave it, because if I tell you any more, I’ll be bordering on spoiler territory! It’s a bit like those long trailers you watch that show the whole damn story and you can’t be bothered to watch the movie after that!

You can buy The Suffragette of Ironbridge anywhere online, in hardback and ebook. If you want the paperback or audiobook, they’ll be out in August.

Buy the hardback

Buy the ebook

So, that’s the story of how my 16th novel came to be. Get a box of tissues ready - it’s a heartbreaker…!

See you soon, story addicts…

For me, one story stands out that did this. I first read it in my twenties. Before that, I’d read a lot of classics, and Booker Prize winners, and a range of other random stuff. Plus my own fledgling writing style was flowery, descriptive and trying desperately hard to be poetic. I thought you had to swallow a thesaurus to be a good writer. But then, one day, I read this story. And everything I thought I knew about writing changed, in an instant.

I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written … and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative … Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.

This is Raymond Carver and he is referring to his story Cathedral.

My own beloved copy of Carver’s stories.

(Author’s own photo)

When I first read it, I had a moment where I felt like this was one of the best stories I’d ever read. James Joyce called it the epiphany, for Virginia Woolf it was a moment of being. I had never read anything like it. I went on and read every other Carver story I could find. I mourned the fact that he was already dead and I would never get to meet him. Then I came back to Cathedral and read it over and over. Why is it so good, I thought? Later, I chose Carver as a key text in a course I taught to English Literature undergraduates. I analysed Cathedral with them, and these are some of the things we found out.

Firstly, I read somewhere that this story was written on a train. I love that. I wonder if Carver had to rush to finish it before he reached his stop. Sometimes the best things are written quickly. The opening is simplicity itself:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.

The narrator goes on to tell us that his wife worked for the blind man, Robert, one summer, reading to him, and that she kept in touch through sending tapes. When Robert comes, they drink whiskey and eat a large dinner. Back to the sofa, Robert and the narrator’s wife talk about the last ten years. When she goes upstairs to change into her robe, Robert and the narrator smoke a joint together. After the wife has returned and fallen asleep between them whilst the television is on, they ‘watch’ a programme about cathedrals. The narrator explains to the blind man what a cathedral looks like and feels he has failed. Robert tells him to get a pen and some heavy paper. They draw the cathedral together, Robert’s hand over his hand. The wife wakes up and asks what is happening. The narrator closes his eyes and feels like he’s somewhere else.

The opening page of Cathedral.

(Author’s own photo)

The style is colloquial, vernacular and conversational, and it carries on this way throughout the story: “She read stuff to him … that sort of thing.” There is a lack of obvious imagery or metaphor: “In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed.” There is repetition – “this blind man”, “a blind man”, “the blind man”; and overuse of pronouns, with many instances of ‘he’ and ‘she’. It is flat and spare: “His wife had died, so he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives.” There is a sense that the prose is somehow constricted, as is the narrator himself: the restrictive style mirrors the narrator’s restricted views on life. Carver said of his prose style, “Prose is architecture. And this isn’t the baroque age.”

Of the three main characters, only the blind man is given a name. The narrator is ‘I’ and ‘me’, his wife is “my wife” and then there is Robert. He is not restricted by his condition, visiting friends and relations, and uses ham radio to connect with people all over the world. The wife is open-minded and creative: “She was always trying to write a poem.”

The first-person narrator – our window into the story – is insular with a limited world of experience: “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit.” He is narrow-minded, selfish and prejudiced – “His being blind bothered me” and passive to events surrounding him: “Arrangements were made.” Later Robert opens his mind for him, opens the inner eye: “A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.” Symbolically, the narrator is the blind man in his own house.

Through this brief vignette, Carver manages to explore some profound themes. Liberation: the narrator feels secure “in my house”, yet his experience with Robert allows him to be free of the walls of his existence: “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” The vehicle for this expansion is the cathedral itself – a spiritual structure, of course – yet also a large, spacious enclosure, a place flooded with lovely coloured light and big enough to really stretch your legs. It is still enclosed, and therefore safe, but expansive enough to allow the spirit room to breathe.

The story is also about connection – “She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose – even her neck!” – and communication: “But she and the blind man kept in touch”, something the narrator finds it hard to do. But his epiphany at the hands of Robert transcend talk – it is a physical and mystical moment – “It was like nothing in my life up to now”, experienced with his eyes closed and with no words to truly describe it: “‘It’s really something,’ I said.”

Carver’s characters have ordinary, difficult lives and are trying to see some meaning there, to connect. His spare prose style, peopled by inarticulate characters who struggle to connect, is indicative of this need to communicate. Carver’s minimal, non-literary style is almost saying – See? Literature can’t do it either. He doesn’t see himself as different from these people, just because he’s a writer: “Essentially, I am one of those confused, befuddled people.”

Oh, how keenly I felt this, when I first read that story! I changed my writing away from the flowery style I thought made ‘good’ writing. I realised that my favourite kind of writing was not seeking perfection, it was seeking something real and authentic. We all have our own confused, befuddled lives. Writers aren’t ivory-tower geniuses who have all the answers. Mostly, we only have the questions. We use these strange collections of symbols on paper or on a screen to try to figure out some of this complicated stuff called life. And we mess up, we get it wrong, we reach for moments of insight. It makes me think of the final verse of the Philip Larkin poem High Windows.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

That’s where I feel writers are reaching out for, the blue skies of meaning. But we only ever get glimpses of it. We never get through those high windows, as the glass will always stop us. But we try, goddammit, we try! And our tools are words.

Yet, with words – those blunt tools – Carver and his characters manage brief, fleeting moments of transcendence, just beyond our understanding, just out of reach, yet beautiful and transformative. In my own way, that’s what I’m always trying to do with my books: reaching for something true.

I’ve written about Edwardian women and about WW1 before, namely in my third novel as Rebecca Mascull. The Wild Air is set in the early days of aviation and tells the story of Della Dobbs, a young woman whose ambition is to learn to fly. Edwardian times were an extraordinary period in the history of women and I’m consistently drawn to it. It was a time of immense change, from votes for women and the actions of the women driving the suffrage movement pre-WW1, to the rise of women taking over absent men’s jobs during the war itself, all of which proved that women could do what men did in many professions. This strengthened arguments for equal pay and the rights of women’s suffrage. I’ve often thought that if I were forced to live in any period of history, I’d choose the Edwardian period (and the hats were great too).

Suffragettes in 1911

In public domain/source/licence

The Edwardian period created many nameless women who were pioneers in their field, unheard of and unsung, but crucial in the history of women nonetheless. When I look back at these women of the Edwardian period, it blows my mind at how brave they were – whether they were suffragettes choosing to go to prison to further their cause and thereby be subject to force-feeding and terrible treatment, or the women who become pilots in the often lethal days of early aviation, which I wrote about in The Wild Air.

Let me tell you about the real-life female pilots who defied convention and risked all for their passion. When writing The Wild Air I chose to create my own main character, Della Dobbs, but her experiences and ambitions are typical of many an aviatrix I read about.

Firstly, the real-life aviatrixes who play cameos in the book:

Hélène Dutrieu – this Belgian aviatrix known as the ‘girl hawk’ was the first woman in her country to earn her pilot’s licence. She was a champion cyclist, stuntwoman and all-round speed freak before becoming an aviatrix. During the war, she became an ambulance driver and director of a military hospital.

Hélène Dutrieu, champion cyclist before she became a celebrated aviatrix.

In public domain/source.

Hilda Hewlett – the first British woman to gain her pilot’s licence, Hilda also opened the first flying school in England. She became a highly successful aircraft manufacturer and businesswoman.

Hilda Hewlett’s portrait may be typical of its period, yet the woman herself was most definitely atypical in her life as a pilot and aircraft manufacturer.

In public domain/source.

Melli Beese – an extraordinary woman, the first female German to get her licence, she was an ace pilot and aircraft designer with her husband, just as she is in my novel. However, the Great War did for both of them and their story ends in tragedy. Imprisoned as an alien and as wife to an alien, both Melli and her husband grew ill and weak throughout the awful years of WW1-era Germany. Their business was also taken by the government, so that after the war they were penniless. They later separated and Melli ended her life. A terrible fate for a brave, heroic young woman who was beaten by the system. But history bears witness to her glorious career and her role as a pioneer in women’s aviation.

Melli Beese with her own plane, dressed in her bespoke winter flying gear.

In public domain/source/licence.

Other aviatrixes of the period:

Lillian Bland – an Anglo-Irish journalist who designed and built her own aeroplane from scratch. It didn’t fly far but it’s the effort that counts. A pioneer of aviatrices and female aircraft designers, she deserves her place in aviation history. In The Wild Air, Della and Aunt Betty plan to design and build their own aeroplane and fly it from Cleethorpes beach. Their ambition finds its inspiration in figures like Bland.

Lilian Bland in smart and practical flying gear.

In public domain/source.

Katherine Stinson – an American aviatrix, who was known as the ‘Flying Schoolgirl’. She was a flying instructor and the first woman to perform a loop. Amongst other feats, such as being one of the first women to carry airmail, as well as night flights and skywriting, she toured China and Japan giving demonstrations of her aeroplane, an extraordinary accomplishment in any time, for woman or man.

Katherine Stinson during her ground-breaking trip to Japan.

In public domain/source.

Marie Marvingt – a French aviatrix who disguised herself as a man and fought on the front lines for a while until she was discovered. Then, while serving as a nurse in 1915, a tale is told that she treated a pilot patient who was upset because he was going to let down his crew on a mission that day. The story goes that she took his place and flew several missions over German-occupied territory. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Marie Marvingt, unofficial war hero

In public domain/source.

There are other stories, some real, some perhaps apocryphal, of unofficial aviatrices flying in France, Italy, Germany and Russia during WW1. Women pilots were refused in their bid to join the air forces of many countries, including Britain. We’ll never know what effects there may have been on the lives of the men in the trenches below if those women had been allowed to fly for the British Royal Flying Corps above them, but it could only have helped. What a waste.

I’ve listed just a handful of the many pioneering women who learned to fly during the Edwardian and Great War era, most of whom are long forgotten now. Mention female pilots and if anyone has anything to say it’s usually Amelia Earhart or Amy Johnson, about whom Hollywood movies were made and countless books written. And those women certainly were fabulous figures in the history of flying females. However, they were flying in the wake of earlier heroines, many of whom died in their pursuit of flight. In the history of the suffragettes, many suffered appalling treatment in prison, also being beaten and sexually assaulted in the streets by the police during their marches demanding votes for women. In The Suffragette of Ironbridge, you’ll read about Jo experiencing one of these marches herself, and its violent end. These quiet, largely unnamed heroines of the Edwardian period – suffragettes and pilots alike – may not have statues built of them, yet their bravery laid the foundation for women everywhere to think, If she can do it, so can I.

You can pre-order The Suffragette of Ironbridge now, out April 9^th:

Pre-order here

And you can buy The Wild Air anywhere online now:

Buy here

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Let’s go back a few years. My mum wrote stories and planned novels. When I was a teenager, I started two novels, one about a radiologist and another about a cowgirl. In my early twenties, during my university years in the early 90s, I started planning a novel. A few years later, my mum asked me to go with her on a week’s residential summer school in creative writing at Rewley House in Oxford. It was the first time I really started to take my writing seriously.

The beautiful courtyard at Rewley House in Oxford, where we’d sit & talk.

Source: Stephen Griffin, Creative Commons.

Our tutor was the Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Ann Schlee, one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, a beautiful writer who encouraged and mentored countless writers over her career. Years later, Ann read the first draft of what would eventually become my WW2 novel The Seamstress of Warsaw and she told me to cut the first 25000 words. And she was absolutely right. A wonderful writing tutor and a very special person.

I met some other wonderful people at that summer school too: I was in my late twenties and was paired up in class with a woman in her seventies called Allison, with two Ls. We had to write letters to each other as a writing exercise and we could choose to be anyone, at any time, and write about anything. I started, choosing completely randomly to write a letter from prison as a condemned witch. I begged for “clemency” from the judge. My letter-writing partner Allison was amazed, as – unknown to me – not only was she a bit of an expert in the history of witches, she had also named her daughter Clemency. We became instant friends. We wrote letters to each other for years after that summer school (as us, not as a witch and her pitiless judge).

I also met one of the best friends of my life at that summer school, my dear friend Kathy Kendall, now a Sociology professor at the University of Southampton. Just the other week, she invited me as a guest to a menopause book club with her colleagues via video as they’d all read my menopause romcom Hot Not Bothered. She helped me a lot with that book and I dedicated it to her. She’s Canadian, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and both she and her father helped me with the Canadian section of my novel The Wild Air. She’s been a staunch supporter of my writing for nearly thirty years. I’m so lucky to know her.

My mum also made great friends with a witty older Scottish chap called Tom, who had us all howling with his dry humour. He was also a genuinely sweet man and my parents stayed friends with Tom and his wife Kirsty for years after.

And last but not least, another friend was made, another Alison, much younger than my witchcraft Allison and with only one L, a woman in her 40s called Alison Bonnington, also from Scotland, like Tom. She was hilariously witty too, and she and Tom entertained us endlessly with their particularly Scottish brand of humour. The five of us – me, my mum, Kathy, Tom and Alison – hung out together all week.

Some of us: from left to right, me, Kathy, Tom & Alison, with Ann in blue looking on.

Alison was also a lovely person, great at listening and drawing you out. She was writing a novel and had got pretty far with it. I only had an idea for one, but hadn’t written a word. Somehow, I was too scared to start it. I had a vision of what it would be in my head but if I started writing it, what if it didn’t live up to the rich tapestry of it in my mind?

The imposing building of Rewley House, where we spent our residential week.

Source: David Kemp, Creative Commons.

One lunchtime during that week, Alison and I were sitting at a canteen table and she asked me to tell her the story of my novel. I started off quite broadly but she kept asking me questions, to draw out the story. It was like a viva voce of my novel, in the most supportive way possible, making me prove that my story had legs. Lunchtime came and went, and still we sat at that table, as everyone left, as the canteen emptied out, leaving only the two of us, still talking about my novel at that table. When we’d finally finished, she told me to get up and follow her. She more or less frogmarched me to the computer room (yes, these were the days before laptops). She told me to sit down and type out Chapter 1 immediately, no prevaricating, no bullshit, just get on with it. So I did. It was the first chapter of the first novel I ever wrote. And it was Alison Bonnington who made that happen. I shared that chapter in Ann’s class the next day and had great feedback. I’d broken the ice and I was on my way.

After the summer school, Alison and I also wrote letters to each other. I was always excited when I received a letter with her handwriting on it from Scotland. She was writing her second novel and I was still trying to write my first, haltingly. At work, I was the Deputy Head of English at a school and was being encouraged to go for Head of English jobs elsewhere. I was unhappy, in so many ways, unsure of what to do next, feeling like somehow I was on the wrong path, but I didn’t know why.

Let’s go back now to that morning of the interview. I was living in Lincoln at the time and going for a job in Retford, Nottinghamshire. I was dressed up and ready, standing in the hall gathering my things and feeling sick about it, though I wasn’t sure why. Then, that letter came through the door. I saw the postmark from Scotland and was excited to read another letter from my lovely friend Alison, when I realised that I didn’t recognise the handwriting. It wasn’t hers. I frowned and opened the letter. I turned over the letter to see the name Alistair Bonnington at the end. I turned back quickly. It was Alison’s husband. He was writing, with great regret, to tell me that Alison had died of cancer. She hadn’t told anyone but her close family that she had stage 4 cancer and thus it had fallen to him to write to everyone in her address book to give them the awful news. I could not believe it. Not Alison. She was so young. So alive. So vital. And a wonderful writer. And friend. I thought we had years ahead of us, as friends, as writers, supporting each other. But that was all over, as this wonderful woman, friend, mother and wife had died, so young. It was one of the saddest moments of my life.

And then I had to leave and drive to Retford for that bloody interview, a job I didn’t even want, a career I didn’t believe in. And my friend was gone. I left with a ridiculous amount of time to get there, as I was always paranoid I’d be late if I didn’t. I remember driving through misty country roads, the fog rolling over the car, the grey-green fields dipping in and out of view. I got to the car park super early and sat in the car and sobbed. I rang Interflora and sent flowers to Alison’s home, addressed to Alistair and their children. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to dry my eyes and walk into that school and do that interview. I recall following the Headteacher around the school tour with the other candidates, them all keen and interested, me like a ghost, my surroundings utterly unreal. What the hell was I doing there? I went through the interview panels and said all the right kind of things, feigning smiles, forcing interest. I did my best. But my heart was far from in it. My heart was in Scotland.

After the interviews were done, we were sent to the staff room. The Head came in and told us that the decision would be made there and then, after a discussion in a separate room between himself and the governors. We were told to wait in the staff room until he came through, at which point he would speak the name of the person who’d got the job, and that person had to follow him, and everyone else had to go home. It was the weirdest little power move I’d ever seen! All of us candidates looked at each other after he left the room and burst out laughing. And then the nausea set in. What if he calls my name?? I knew at that moment that I couldn’t think of anything in the world that I wanted less than to be Head of English at that school in Retford. I’d be trapped, in that place, in that career. I didn’t even know what I wanted but I knew in my soul it wasn’t that. All I could think of was Alison, that day she made me tell her my story at lunch. And then the Head came in and we all looked up. He paused. I felt like my throat was closing.

He said someone else’s name. The relief flooded over me like a tidal wave. I watched the others traipse out disappointed and I fairly ran to the car. I drove off into the darkness of the evening, seeing the headlights beaming towards me. I came back to an empty house, my relationship on the rocks, my partner not there. I called into work sick the next morning but I wasn’t sick at all. Or maybe I was, maybe I was soul-sick. I walked the ten minutes up the road to one of my favourite places in the world, Lincoln Cathedral. I’m not a religious person but I do love churches, especially cathedrals. I knew the building inside out as I’d lived in Lincoln for five years and walked there most weekends. I went straight to the back, where the candles were, not far from the little statue up high in the ceiling, the Lincoln Imp, watching over me.

I stood by the candles, lit one with a taper and placed it on the tiered table, surrounded by other candles lit by other people, making their own silent, burning prayers. I sat down on a pew near the candles and watched them flicker and glow. I sat on that pew for hours, thinking about Alison, thinking about my life. Life was short, I realised, a cliché, I know, but the thing about clichés is that they’re based on truth. Alison’s tragic, early death taught me a harsh lesson that day, that wasting your life was a crime, that being unhappy for so long was all wrong. And I had to do something about it. That day, watching those candles, thinking of my friend, I made a decision. I was going to end my relationship, I was going to leave my job, and I was going to do a Masters in Writing.

And I did all three. I finished writing my first novel during that Masters course. A few years on, in 2014, I dedicated my first published novel The Visitors to Alison, on p282.

The story doesn’t quite end there. There’s a coda, which has a sprinkling of magic about it. When The Visitors came out, I wrote to Alistair about the dedication to Alison and sent it to the same address, as that’s all I had. But I never received a reply. I figured they must have moved house. I scoured the internet for a contact for him. I even left a message on a legal website linked to his career in the law, but still couldn’t get a lead.

Then, 3 years later, out of the blue, I received a message on Facebook from their daughter. She kindly told me how she’d found out from her father about the dedication to her mother in The Visitors and wanted to thank me. I asked how on earth he’d finally heard about it and it was pure coincidence: a colleague of his had happened upon my book by chance and spotted the dedication and told him about it. I told you there was a little magic to end our story…

So, from that first published novel, I’m now writing my eighteenth for publication. And it all began with Alison, at that Oxford canteen lunch table nearly thirty years ago, drawing my story from me, watching it unspool into the air like many-coloured yarn, weaving something beautiful.

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Here I discuss the problem in my Author’s Note, which can be found at the back of the novel:

One of my main ideas behind the novel was this: what if a poor woman made an important scientific discovery in ages past? Would this idea be heard or remembered? Charles Darwin, a century after Dawnay, did not develop his wonderful ideas in isolation. His work built upon that of many others over the centuries…Darwin was a man of independent means who was able to put forth his ideas, eventually, though of course even in his age he met with considerable obstacles. Yet largely he was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Dawnay Price – an C18th woman and orphan – was the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The reader may like to consider how many other important ideas have been lost throughout the history of humans which were likewise thought of by the ‘wrong’ people, and this may well continue to this day.

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So, my main character has three main problems to overcome in terms of her setting: she’s poor, she’s female and she’s a nobody. Put these three together in the 1750s and you have the perfect recipe for obscurity and even subjugation. My narrative had to find a way for her to negotiate these challenges, to fight her way through them to make her ideas known.

If you know anything about the 18th-century, it may well be how dirt poor the poor were, how filthy rich the rich were, and due to rigid social structures, how hugely difficult it was to move upwards or make any changes to that system. Add to that being female – in an age where women were generally thought of as children of larger stature – and it seems impossible to manoeuvre within such strictures. But some women managed it, albeit largely of independent wealth, and there are notable examples of female scientists in the 18th-century - and before and beyond - detailed beautifully in the book ‘Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century’ by Margaret Alic.

This excellent example of hidden history reveals the many forgotten examples of female scientists throughout time, as Alic states:

From the earliest times women contributed to the development of scientific knowledge, yet most of the women in this book remain unknown – even to historians of science – and most of those recorded here were women of privilege; as such, they represent only the surface of the history of women in science. Thousands of other women scientists have undoubtedly been forgotten forever.

A great example of this is Sophie Germain, a gifted mathematician born 1776, whose will to learn and succeed in her field from an early age influenced how I created the personality of my main character, Dawnay Price. Germain was actively blocked from studying maths initially by her parents and later by scientific institutions of the day, yet she persevered and began by teaching herself, later corresponding with other mathematicians.

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Sophie Germain

(source in public domain: WikiMedia Commons)

There are many more examples discussed in Alic’s book who influenced my writing, such as Anne Conway, Lady Mary Lee Chudleigh, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Somerville, Margaret Cavendish and Émilie du Châtelet. Many of these scientists are largely forgotten by history and arguably this is largely because they were women. Émilie du Châtelet once wrote:

Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage…I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them…

I love that. But also it annoys me that often, when Émilie du Châtelet is mentioned, she is remembered only as the lover of the French writer Voltaire, which reduces her again to an appendage, just as she demanded quite rightly that she should never be.

Émilie du Châtelet

(source in public domain: WikiMedia Commons)

Researching the history of female scientists, it was quite surprising for me to discover that there were so many examples of them, including doctors, chemists, astronomers, physicists, biologists, naturalists etc. etc. — few of these women have statues or plaques or dedications to them and their ground-breaking work. Also their work was habitually published under a male colleague’s name, or a husband, father or other family member, with some nefarious examples claiming these women’s work as their own. Remember too that many of these women were lucky enough to have a bit of money and it was this that gave them the freedom to practise their specialisms. Thus, the poor throughout history – female or male – may have come up with the most extraordinary ideas were it not for their circumstances – perhaps some of them have, but we just never hear about them. The intersectionality between being female and being poor also extends of course to other now protected characteristics throughout society, such as race, disability, sexual orientation and so forth. The possibility of being heard in a society dominated by a wealthy white patriarchy decreases exponentially when you are a member of these groupings. One could ask, how much has changed in our current times? What if the next genius we need doesn’t build their career from their daddy’s money and instead is classed by society at large as a ‘nobody’? Will we ever hear their ideas and have them acted upon? I hope access to social media and education is improving this for many, but when it comes to money and access to funding, perhaps one might argue that not much has changed…

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To find out how or whether Dawnay Price manages to circumvent her setting, you’ll have to read the book! Suffice to say, it ain’t easy! But I like a good challenge, and I like reading stories – and writing them – about characters who must face their own dragons and overcome them.

So, the next time you see a statue of a grand name in any field of human endeavour, spare a thought for the nameless millions who could have made the world a better place if the world had indeed been a better place in the first place! That sounds like a pretty decent goal for all of us, let alone a novelist: giving voice to the voiceless. Let’s hear it for the voiceless, the nameless, the nobodies. If we give them the chance, they might just change the world.

I asked my question: How do you go about the process of historical research when writing a novel? Do you do all of the research before you start writing or do you look up things you need to know as you go along?

The first thing she said in reply was this: Well, I can tell that is a writer’s question.

Oh my God, I could’ve been struck dead at that moment and died happily. Atwood called me a writer!! I was bowled over. I’d been researching my own historical novel for several months and was deep into it before I’d written a word of fiction. Atwood explained that she did very little research to begin with. She just started writing. The character and plot came first and she’d get cracking on those and the research would present itself as and when needed. It was a great insight into her process. And I immediately assumed it must mean that I was doing it wrongly. Because I wasn’t doing it the Atwood way. But I knew deep down it was just the way my brain worked and I couldn’t change that even if I wanted to. So I resigned myself to being a fallible human being, unlike the writing gods of the likes of Atwood. What I didn’t know yet is that all writers are different, and they all write differently, and their processes are all different, and it doesn’t matter a jot how you write. It doesn’t matter what your journey is like to the destination of finishing a novel, as long as you get there one way or another. If I’d had a chance to talk it through, I know Atwood would’ve have told me that herself. Every writer is unique.

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I sat down after that and thought life couldn’t get better. Atwood was doing a book signing afterwards so of course we went along. And the queue was HUGE. I wanted to buy a couple of books for friends who were big Atwood fans and get them signed, as well as a book for myself and get that signed too, which I guessed I wouldn’t be allowed to do, so my partner at the time agreed to split them between us. During the wait, I kept thinking about how I was teaching at a college that year, and only part-time - so I’d have time for my writing. And I’d just been offered a promotion. More money, more responsibility, and full-time. Most people would take it. Promotions are meant to be taken, gratefully, aren’t they? But I knew I’d lose all my writing time. I didn’t know what to do. I’d been worrying about it all week before the festival and had to let them know when I got back. As we approached the table, I could see that a minder from her publisher beside her grabbed the books proffered and kept saying, One each only! After waiting aeons in the queue, we finally arrived at the anointed table.

This was the book I was clutching that I wanted her to sign.

My partner managed to get two signed for my friends and then it was my turn. I was there, right in front of one of my all-time writing heroes and I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to her while she was signing because the minder said so, but I couldn’t resist and I just launched into this:

I’m having a bit of a dilemma. I’m writing my first historical novel and all I really want to do is be an author, but I’ve just been offered a promotion at work and I’ll lose all my writing time. I don’t know what to do.

Margaret Atwood looked up at me from the table, gave me that famous Atwood wry smile and said, with the equally famous twinkle in her eye:

I think you already know EXACTLY what you should do, don’t you?

And she signed my book and handed it to me. And that was that.

We were ushered off and I walked away, dumbstruck. My life changed forever.

And dear reader, I did not take that promotion. And here I am, currently writing my eighteenth novel for publication. Thank you, Margaret.

So you see, Margaret Atwood really did change my life. She gave me the confidence to make that choice, knowing it was right. Because if you’re a writer and Atwood tells you to write, you bloody well do it.

One of my most treasured possessions.

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In celebration of my love for Atwood’s work, I want to share with you my own thoughts about the opening of my favourite ever book of hers, The Blind Assassin (also one of my favourite books of all time).

The opening of a novel isn’t just about hooking the reader, though that’s crucial. If you read novel openings carefully, you can often find clues that lay out the themes of the book, the protagonist and their world, and even the thesis of the story.

I’ll be trying to unearth the secrets the opening of The Blind Assassin reveals about the book itself. I’ll do my best not to include spoilers, as if you haven’t read this book, I hope this will encourage you to do so. Instead, I’d like to look precisely at how it is this brilliant novelist manages to grab the reader and convey the novel’s salient themes in just a few opening lines.

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood, the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.

I was informed of the accident by a policeman: the car was mine, and they’d traced the licence. His tone was respectful: no doubt he recognized Richard’s name. He said the tires may have caught on a streetcar track or the brakes may have failed, but he also felt bound to inform me that two witnesses – a retired lawyer and a bank teller, dependable people – had claimed to have seen the whole thing. They’d said Laura had turned the car sharply and deliberately, and had plunged off the bridge with no more fuss than stepping off a curb. They’d noticed her hands on the wheel because of the white gloves she’d been wearing.

It wasn’t the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else’s reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way.

Our first experience of the world of this novel is one of death: a car is driven off a bridge by the narrator’s sister. Not a peaceful death, nothing comforting here. It is a violent and unnatural death, characterised by intense damage. In fact, this theme recurs throughout the opening and some of the images are violent and shocking: ‘fatal’, ‘smashing’, ‘charred smithereens’, ‘burst into flames’, ‘Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it’, ‘plunged off’, ‘the plummet’. Even the bridge itself has already been damaged – ‘The bridge was being repaired’. Atwood has said, ‘Some people in a novel…will die’, and here she wastes no time in that respect. In fact, there are many deaths to come in this novel: righteous and unrighteous, sad and indifferent, peaceful and violent. And there are survivors of damage too. This novel tells us a lot about how it is to live through the wreckage of our lives, and go on. Indeed, the fifth word of the novel is ‘war’, and there will be wars aplenty in this story, real ones and fictional versions, as well as internal, psychological battles and class warfare. The mention of the war presents some useful social context, yet it also sets us up for a tale about conflict and destruction.

The way this opening death is described gives us much insight into the relationship of the narrator to her sister. Remember this narrator is talking about her own sister’s death, and yet she does not use omission or euphemism to soften the blow. She tells it exactly how it would have happened – and this tells us something about the relationship between the two sisters, that perhaps it was not a happy one. The narrator confirms this later when she comments on her sister’s character: ‘She was completely ruthless in that way’; this does not sound like a compliment to her deceased sister, rather an honest and perhaps even bitter criticism. Thus already we are set up for a troubled bond between two sisters, a theme of the difficulty of relationships that echoes throughout the book, with bad marriages, bad parents and opposition within families.

And not only within families; this theme extends to the society beyond. Consider the words of the policeman who tells the narrator about her sister’s death: he relies on the evidence of two witnesses – ‘a retired lawyer and a bank teller’ who are characterised from their jobs as therefore being ‘dependable people’. This implies that there might be certain professions that would render the individual as undependable and unreliable as a witness. There is also evidence of social class in the way the policeman speaks to the narrator: ‘His tone was respectful: no doubt he recognised Richard’s name’. Though we are told the car belongs to the narrator, the suggestion here is that she is married to an important man, someone who garners respect from the local police and perhaps society as a whole. The narrator is also being defined in relation to her husband, and potentially not as an individual in her own right. These themes of the position of women and the battle between the classes will recur significantly throughout the novel, where Atwood analyses the issue of power – who has it and who hasn’t, and how our lives are restricted by our access to power, and also how we can subvert and escape its stranglehold.

Lastly and most subtly, we find a theme which is perhaps the most important to me and tells us something profound about the very act of reading a novel, of reading anything for that matter, and certainly of the process of telling stories and listening to them. The narrator who is telling us this story is in fact not even present at the very event she describes. She was not there. She tells us a third hand account of someone else who was not there – the policeman – who reports on two further accounts of people who saw it happen, but were not in the car. Indeed, the only person who really knows what happened on that bridge is dead, and not merely passed away, but ‘charred to smithereens’. The truth went careering into that ravine with the car and its driver and was burnt to cinders. All we can do is wonder. Throughout the novel, we are presented with various versions of reality: the narrator’s own (‘It wasn’t the brakes, I thought’), newspaper reports, magazine articles, bulletins, scribblings in exercise books, science fiction stories and photographs. As readers we stand outside these and have to make sense of them; we have to read the clues (like the bridge’s ‘Danger sign’) and decide for ourselves what the truth is. And yet we are reading a work of fiction. And that is the magic of novels, especially such a complex and clever one as this, which plays with time, reality, perception and truth and yet leads us steadily through its world and draws us in through a compelling opening and a central mystery which we are bound to follow to its end.

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Much of my childhood was dominated by the imagery, characters and stories associated with Star Wars, largely as a source of escapism. I suppose I never really grew out of it, that sense of enchantment sitting there in the dark, being taken on this overwhelming journey, far, far away, following the fortunes of a young hero, the obstacles and gatekeepers in his path, his triumphs and failures, his ultimate reconciliation and redemption.

My mum bought me two of the original little plastic figures - of Princess Leia and R2D2 - and thus began my obsession with Star Wars merch and more or less anything to do with the films. My brother and I even attempted to start writing the sequel to The Empire Strikes Back, hoping to beat creator George Lucas to it, so he’d do our version instead. We started with the haunting opening line: Boba Fett fired his retro rockets…We didn’t get much further than that. In those days of the late 70s/early 80s, we didn’t have video players yet and so we had to wait years for the next two films to come out. In the meantime, I expanded my Star Wars collection and displayed it against one wall in my bedroom. Here’s a terrible photo of it, the only visual record I have of my grand devotion.

Years later, in my 30s, I found a book called The Magic of Myth by Mary Henderson, all about how Star Wars is structured around an archetypal story structure known as the Hero’s Journey, something I’ve mentioned before in my newsletters and I’m going to expand upon it here. Reading this book by Henderson, as she took me through each story stage and character archetype in the 3 movies, mapping them onto dozens of examples of mythic storytelling, confirmed everything that my sub-conscious had already figured out, that there was indeed a deep structure to the Star Wars story, and not only that story, but all the other stories which really move us, the ones that leave a profound mark on our lives, the myths and legends and tales which shape our cultures and make us laugh, cry and stay rapt at the screen or keep us turning pages.

Later, I found another wonderful book called The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which details this exact structure of the Hero’s Journey in a range of films and stories, and said all the things and much more that I’d been pondering about Star Wars. Let me clarify: not every great novel or movie needs the Hero’s Journey structure to be successful. There are scores of stories which use no such thing, have far more episodic or non-sequitur structures, yet still move us tremendously. But I knew that, for myself, this series of events arranged in this age-old pattern was the one for me. As an experiment, I went on to write a children’s book with this exact structure & it worked pretty well (as yet unpublished, though I’d love to turn it into a graphic novel one day).

I’m going to share with you a few highlights from the stages and archetypes found in the Hero’s Journey story type, which is a mixture from the Henderson and Vogler books I mentioned earlier. You can find all of the stages by searching online and also go to the source material, which is Joseph Campbell’s seminal book on the subject, The Hero’s Journey (which hugely influenced George Lucas while he was writing Star Wars). I’ll use the original Star Wars Trilogy for examples, plus other movies that come to mind. These are my interpretations of these elements of mythic structure – I’d imagine some theorists might not agree with me – I’m not really bothered! This is what they mean to me.

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The Call to Adventure – this is the moment where the main character (MC) is invited in one way or another to leave their ordinary life and follow a new path. For Luke in Star Wars (SW), this is when he meets Ben Kenobi. Another name for a similar moment in the story is the inciting incident, the moment where everything changes for the MC from their boring, ordinary existence. In this case, it’s Luke’s droid R2D2 going missing – he has to leave the farm and search for him. That’s the break in his routine and it leads to meeting Ben, from whom he hears the call. But it’s not just in stories we find this phenomenon – one of the reasons it works so well is because we experience these calls in our own lives. Think back to when you were tempted by a new path out of your humdrum existence – did you take it? What repercussions did it have on your life, good and bad? These moments are by their very nature life-changing, which is one reason why we respond so deeply to these moment in stories too. Personally, I feel that watching Star Wars for the first time in early 1978 was my own primordial Call to Adventure as a storyteller and the novelist I would one day become.

This moment is often followed by the Refusal of the Call – in SW, when Luke Skywalker says to Ben Kenobi, I can’t go off with you to rescue a princess. I have the farm to see to! This creates tension for the audience because they’re thinking, we know they’re going to go on this adventure or that’s the end of the story right here – but how is their decision going to be overturned? In Luke’s case, his family are killed and he is thrust upon the road to adventure as he has nothing to stay for. Next time you’re watching a movie or the opening episode of a new TV drama, look out for the Refusal of the Call – you’ll notice it happens all the damn time and is really fun to spot. Examples include Billy Elliot refusing ballet lessons from Mrs Wilkinson and going back to boxing; Neo in The Matrix on the ledge refusing to follow Morpheus’s instructions and instead going back inside to be captured by the Agents. They may try to wriggle out of it, but in story terms they will always eventually come back and take that first step into the special world.

Threshold Guardians – these characters are there to stop the MC from getting where they need to be. They can literally be gatekeepers (I have my own gatekeeper theory of our lives in general, which I’ll tell you another time!). Or they can be people who merely bar our access to the next stage of what we need and want, in life and in stories e.g. a doctor who won’t refer you to a specialist or an administrator who won’t let you talk to their boss. We find these guardians throughout stories e.g. in Return of the Jedi, C3PO and R2D2 need to get into Jabba’s Palace and C3PO uses his language skills to talk the gatekeeper into letting them in. That’s an obvious example, yet there are more subtle ones, for example, the cute furry Ewoks initially stop our heroes from getting on with their mission to defeat the Empire, but by learning to respect their ways, our heroes are instead accepted into the tribe and end up being helped by their new allies to win the day. In The Wizard of Oz there’s an annoying gatekeeper too who at first refuses Dorothy’s entrance to see Oz and in Jaws, it’s the Mayor and the town’s bureaucracy that stops Brody from his aim of saving the town from the threat of the shark. In Titanic, it’s Lovejoy chasing Rose and Jack around the ship. They’re all over stories and they’re all over our lives. We must get past them somehow – charm them, go around them or under or over, or kill them…personally, I’ve found charm is usually the best bet.

The Wise and Helpful Guide – this is an obvious one for SW, as it’s Ben Kenobi, played by the inimitable Alec Guinness, the old Jedi Knight who once fought alongside Luke’s father and then begins Luke’s training. In Clash of the Titans (another favourite from my childhood! The original 1981 film, not the travesty of a remake), it’s Ammon, played wonderfully by the late great Burgess Meredith, who guides Harry Hamlin’s Perseus, giving him the advice and tools he needs to go off on his adventures. Often in stories these guides later die or are separated from the hero, called Losing the Guide, just as Ben is struck down by Darth Vader in SW. These figures mirror our own mentors in our own lives, how they’re with us for part of the way, but we will always lose them one day. They can be parents, or teachers, or bosses, or anyone older and wiser who guides us – one of my own was my first Head of English when I was a new teacher, Dr Chris Sutcliffe. He died recently, which upset me greatly, as he was a wonderful friend and truly was one of the most important people in my life. He was the one who told me to develop my career as a portfolio worker, so I wouldn’t have to stay in classrooms forever, and when I went to him to say I was thinking of leaving teaching and doing my Masters in Writing instead, he was bloody delighted for me and urged me to go. Thank you for everything, Chris. (You can read my tribute to him in the Dedication at the beginning of The Shopgirl of Ironbridge.)

The Ordeal – this is the darkest moment in the adventure, or as the journey is sometimes called, The Road of Trials. Think of your favourite stories/books/movies – there is usually a bit where our protagonist is facing the worst moment of their lives, when everything feels like there is no way out, no answer, no escape. Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat - about screenplay structure - splits it into two, called All is Lost and Dark Night of the Soul (I’ve had a few of these in my own life, as I’m sure you have too!) For Luke, it’s the moment in The Empire Strikes Back where he faces his enemy Darth Vader and learns the truth about who his real father is… no spoilers, as if any of you haven’t watched the original Star Wars Trilogy yet (don’t bother with any of the other 6 canon films, they’re not worth your time – ooh controversial!), I’m holding out hope that you’ll rectify this oversight.

If you’re interested in storytelling, the original Star Wars Trilogy is like a primer in how to perfectly structure a three-act story around the stages of the Hero’s Journey. It’s a masterclass in story structure and I think that’s one of the reasons why it reached into my goddamn soul when I first sat in that cinema and gazed up at the screen. I was lost to it and I’ll never get over it. The thrill of sitting in that dark room and being whisked away into an amazing adventure is still with me, every time I start writing a new novel. Somehow, I’m always trying to reclaim that magic, to get back into the mind of that 6 year-old-girl and her state of absolute wonder.

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And don’t forget, if you’re an emerging writer and you want help crafting your own story structure, look no further than my book coaching service at Becca Novelista:

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See you soon, story addicts…

Good things:

• I was awarded an honorary degree

This was the highlight of my year. University Centre Grimsby awarded me an honorary degree for services to academia and creative writing. I’m not a native Grimbarian - I was born in Oxfordshire and I’ve lived all over the UK - yet I’ve lived here in Grimsby for just under 25 years. I’ve worked as a teacher here, including being one of two people who set up and wrote half the units for the Professional Writing degree at the UCG back in the early 2000s, which course I’m proud to say is still running today. To be honoured in this way was incredible, plus the day itself was a dream from beginning to end. I was treated like a queen, including photographs and interviews, plus a speech being given about my career which brought me to tears. It was amazing and I’ll never forget it.

• I was a Keynote Speaker for the first time

(Photo by Lamar Francois)

I was asked by Writing East Midlands to give the keynote speech at their Writers’ Conference at the University of Lincoln, my first ever time giving a keynote speech. I was dead nervous and worried I’d get ill and not be able to attend. But I didn’t get ill, and I did attend, and I gave my speech about how to try to make a living as a writer. I was on a panel for another event too, met loads of lovely people and again was treated wonderfully all day. It was very special and I loved every second of it.

• I was nominated as a finalist for the Romantic Novelists Association The Romantic Saga Award 2025 for my Mollie Walton book, A Sister’s Hope

This was my second time as a finalist for this prestigious award and I was so thrilled to be shortlisted again, for a book that’s very close to my heart, as Connie’s tale in this book is a pretty dark story and it took a lot out of me to write it. Thus, I was so happy to see it honoured in this way. I was too unwell to attend the ceremony which was a shame but I was there in spirit and so delighted to be listed alongside such a hugely talented group of writers.

• I had two books published: The Shopgirl of Ironbridge & Live Laugh Leave Me Alone and they both got into supermarkets

& also I had 2 large print editions published, of The Shopgirl of Ironbridge and A Sister’s Hope, both as Mollie Walton. It was so lovely to be able to go back to Ironbridge with this Shopgirl book; as much as I’d loved writing about Raven Hall, I truly adore Ironbridge in Shropshire and it felt like coming home to write about it again, even though I’ve never lived there or anywhere near there! It’s just a very special place where I feel at home, though I have no idea why. It’s really, really hard these days to get a book into a supermarket, as shelf space is shrinking and supermarkets are very risk averse. So I was delighted that both my books got in this year. It’s never easy and certainly not guaranteed, so hats off to my publishers’ sales teams for getting this done.

• I wrote 2 and a half novels

Writing nearly three traditionally published books in a year is bloody hard work, I’ll be honest. Four months per book, no breaks, no time to dwell on anything. You’re either drafting one book, planning the next or editing the last, all year, all three at the same time. I must admit I’ve decided I can’t keep it up! It’s too punishing a schedule. But I’ve more or less managed it this year, despite the threat of burnout! The year began with writing Live Laugh Leave Me Alone (as Harper Ford) which came out in September, plus I wrote The Suffragette of Ironbridge (out next April), set in the years leading up to WW1 and throughout WW1 itself - it’s a real tearjerker, this one - get a box of tissues ready! Also, this autumn, I’ve drafted a chunk of the next Harper Ford (as yet untitled) which is about female middle-aged rage. None of my novels are autobiographical but let me just say that I’ve definitely had enough fuel to write the rage into this one, seeing as rage is my primary emotion these days!

• I was awarded an Arts Council grant to write a graphic novel script and I started learning to draw

It’s nearly a year since I started this wonderful project and six months since I finished it, funded by a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. I’d applied for 3 ACE grants over the years before this one and been turned down each time, so I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be successful and was blown away when I got the letter saying I was being awarded. My grant was to learn about the art form of graphic novels and to write a script of my own graphic novel about my chronic illness of MCAS. I met fantastic mentors, including Maureen Burdock who persuaded me to start drawing. I had no intention of producing the art for my script before that moment and yet once I started to draw, I realised I had some facility for it and, more importantly, I LOVED IT. When I’m drawing, everything else disappears. It’s the one time in my current life when I’m not thinking about all the difficult stuff and instead get to focus on this joyous thing alone, totally for its own sake. I did write my script and I’m still learning to draw. It’ll probably take me years to produce my own graphic novel and maybe I’ll never do it myself - maybe I’ll collaborate with an artist, who knows - but the important thing was the grant gave me the time to think and learn about something completely new to me, which was invaluable.

• I started my own business as a writing mentor and book coach

Until 2024, I’d been working for the Royal Literary Fund as a Fellow at the University of Lincoln, teaching academic writing to students. I knew this was coming to an end last year, so I panicked a bit and sat myself down and made a 5-year financial plan of how to earn a living next. I planned to continue to write books for trad publishers (if I get the deals!), plus two key things: start my own business and start an author newsletter. I also planned to start self-publishing, alongside my trad publishing. So far, within a few months of making that plan, I set up my own website Becca Novelista, with my new business of being a writing mentor/book coach and editor, as well as other services for readers and writers, including virtual visits, academic writing tutor and buying signed books. I also sent my CV out to a big bunch of companies and charities who provide writer services, and I’m delighted to say that since starting this business in April 2025, I’ve worked non-stop ever since for a range of providers and via my own website with dozens of clients. And I am LOVING IT. I now work for Curtis Brown Creative, Writing East Midlands, Professional Writing Academy, The History Quill and Reedsy, as a mentor and editor for emerging writers. I get to read loads of interesting stuff and meet fascinating people via video meetings. I’ve been booked up weeks ahead for months.

Honestly, I could never have predicted it would take off so quickly BUT what I’ve realised is that it was just the ideal time for me to launch this business, because I’ve reached a point in my writing career when I’ve written in 3 genres and been publishing for over 13 years, having had 15 novels published and currently writing my 18th novel for publication, as well as being a teacher for 30 years, and, basically, I know my stuff now. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to writing novels. And that gave me the confidence to know that I was legit in offering my services. I earn far more per hour/day/week than I do for writing novels and with that brings a sense of accomplishment and trust which has given me so much more confidence than I ever imagined, before setting this business up. It’s been a huge learning curve yet I’ve loved it and I’m still loving it. Every new client is a new literary soul to get to know. I know people throw around the word ‘rewarding’ about certain jobs but I really mean it. And to be paid decent fees for it too, as a struggling freelancer? Even better. It’s never been easy to make a living. I’ve lived off grants and benefits at times, I still do. So to find another way to earn - that’s all from home, which I need with my chronic illness - has been a revelation. I’m so glad I swallowed my nerves and set it up 9 months ago and can’t wait to see where it goes next.

• I started this Substack newsletter

So yes, this was part of my business plan too and again, I was nervous about it (I even did a couple of online courses in how Substack works, as I am not a fast learner about techy stuff!). But I decided to just start it up and see how it goes and I could always drop it if it didn’t work out. Well, again, it turns out that I just love doing it. I’m not one of these people on Substack who are obsessed with the algorithm and publishing every week or every day scouting for subscribers 24/7. Good luck to them and I wish them well, as they work very hard. But for me, this newsletter was always about finding the readers who wanted to read it, for those who don’t mind me banging on about stuff I find interesting, particularly storytelling, which really has been the obsessive love of my life.

To be able to share my thoughts about stories with lovely folk like yourselves, who open my emails and send me replies, and comment on Substack and kindly subscribe, has been an absolute pleasure. I don’t know exactly how this newsletter will develop, so I’m playing it totally by ear. I started out with a template and it wasn’t long before I abandoned that, because I would rather just write whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like it. I did some fun live interviews with a bunch of fabulous writers and loved that, but my health has put an end to that for the time being, as I just couldn’t be reliably well to keep doing them. But I’m so glad I did them anyway. I learnt so much from those writers - and I hope you enjoyed them too. Maybe one day I’ll be well enough to start them up again, who knows.

Thank you to every single reader, whether you subscribe or not, for reading my thoughts this year in this newsletter. I’m beyond grateful. And I hope to continue sharing my ideas with you here for as long as I’m able. Thank you for subscribing - and if you feel like supporting my work for only £5 a month, then do consider moving to paid subscriptions, if you fancy, just to help out a freelancer in a tricky economy. Either way, all of my newsletter content will be free to read for everyone. :)

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Bad things:

• My health got worse. I’m too ill to travel or even to leave the house some days.

• I had to fight against a medical establishment that didn’t believe I was seriously ill.

• After being diagnosed with MCAS in 2024, this year I was also diagnosed with adenomyosis and endometriosis.

I could write a book about my chronic illnesses (and maybe some day I will) so I’m not going to go on too long about it here. Suffice to say, after decades of ill health that have gradually got worse and worse, I more or less diagnosed myself with the illnesses it’s turned out I’ve actually had confirmation of via investigations and testing I insisted on being given. It’s been such a long fight. My gynaecologist told me I’ve probably had adenomyosis all my life, and it makes sense of 40 years of symptoms since I started my periods in my teens. I have seen countless numbers of doctors, many of whom have dismissed me, gaslit me, ignored me, told me I was imagining the symptoms and the pain, told me I was depressed and should take Prozac, told me I had a mental health condition instead. FORTY YEARS. I’m angry. I’m tired. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s coming next - most likely surgery, maybe multiple surgeries, who knows. But at least I have answers now.

And I have a righteous rage that’s been growing in me for most of my life, of the way the medical establishment is not designed to cope with complex conditions, is not equipped to see human bodies with a holistic view; how it dismisses chronic illness as hypochondria, how it has a hugely limited ability to liaise with different specialists within its own structure; and most devastating personally, the way it is riven with systemic misogyny. I have a radar for this now, after decades of being told there was nothing wrong with me. I see how male and female doctors both are trained in this misogyny - women written off as whiny, weak, complaining, making a fuss, being ‘hysterical’ (which as I’m sure you know comes from hyst = womb). And so it goes on, the countless women with conditions like endometriosis (where it’s estimated 10% of women have this crippling disease) and yet so few GPs and even gynaecologists seem to know much of anything about it. I can forgive doctors for not knowing much about my other condition of MCAS - that’s quite a new player in the medical world (not the condition itself, of course, but the naming and recognition of it). But I cannot forgive the ignorance of endometriosis and adenomyosis, where tissue similar to that which lines the womb grows elsewhere in the pelvis and even beyond. So many women have it, the symptoms are so clear. Yet women’s pain, time and time again, is dismissed. I remember a doctor saying to me, as I had tears running down my face in agony, looking at me like I was an insect, she said, “It shouldn’t hurt that much,” and dismissing me with no help. I will never forget that, nor all the others who sent me away with coldness and zero empathy. Doctors are hugely overworked and many will suffer from empathy fatigue, I know that. But I cannot forgive lack of empathy for people who are in pain and come back, year after year, with the same and worsening symptoms with no help.

So, chronic illness may rule a lot of what I can do in my life, but I haven’t give up; I will still fight to get what I need, against a system which has its fair share of kind and expert individuals who will do their best to help me, and yet the system itself is designed to fail me and countless others like me. I’m still here though and I will be heard. And if you are going through something similar, don’t you dare give up either. My advice is polite persistence. Never be rude, never raise your voice. But never give up, when you know you’re right. And we know our own bodies better than anyone. Don’t ever let any medical professional make you doubt that. Keep fighting, my friends.

And to end, here are some more cheery thoughts about the year to come of 2026, one I’m embracing with open arms…

Hopeful things:

• At least I’ve finally got a diagnosis after decades of illness and pain plus I’m on my way to a treatment plan.

• I’ll be publishing 3 new books in 2026; plus 2 large print editions (A Mother’s War & The Suffragette of Ironbridge); plus a Portuguese edition of Divorced Not Dead.

• One of my new books that’s being published in 2026 is a bit of a secret…under a new name…I can’t say much about it yet but will presently…All I can say is that it’s set in WW2 France…Can’t wait to share it with you soon!

• I’ll be writing 1 and a half books in 2026 (so I’ll get a bit of a break after writing 3 books a year for 2 years).

• Hopefully my mentoring business will continue to grow.

• I’m going to keep learning to draw.

• I’ll be here writing newsletters for you lovely people.

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Future things:

• I want to self-publish my own books (alongside my trad contracts).

• I want to write a book about how I write.

• I want to do a PhD by Publication on narrative structure and the subconscious.

• I want to write and draw a graphic novel about chronic illness and the systemic misogyny in the medical establishment.

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Grateful things:

• my family and friends

• my virtual fam online

• my readers, including you!

• storytelling in all forms brings me joy.

So, my dear newsletter buddies, thank you for following me on the beginning of this journey in storytelling. I am so grateful to have you here to listen to my thoughts on my favourite thing: stories.

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Happy New Year, story addicts!

See you soon…

My treasured Folio edition of the book.

I happen to share Liza’s admiration for Dickens. I’d first read A Christmas Carol as a child and kept rereading it for many Christmas Eves since. But until I was in my 30s, I’d read few other Dickens novels. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter Poppy, I set myself the joyous task of reading all of his work. Poppy arrived before I quite achieved it, but I did work my way through most of them (and read parts of them aloud to the baby bump!) I was fondest of David Copperfield, haunted by the intricacy of Our Mutual Friend, and considered Our Great Expectations as his masterpiece, the most perfect in the power of its imagination and patterns of imagery. Yet I still came back again and again to A Christmas Carol. There is something inexplicably magical and timeless about the story of the old miser and his redemption. When I came to choose a special book for Liza, I chose Mr. Dickens’s ghostly classic. But there was more to it than that; a remembrance of the extraordinary complexity – even in this little book – of Dickens’s power of imaginative description. I wanted Liza to feel the sweep of his mind, how he conjures many lives and many worlds with such a delicate and yet illuminating touch.

One passage in A Christmas Carol which glows with this quality is the sequence where the Ghost of Christmas Present transports Scrooge across England to see Christmas celebrated by people in all manner of situations, from miners to lighthouse keepers to sailors. It’s my absolute FAVOURITE bit of the whole book. It begins:

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed – or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse, rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.

It is a stunning piece of writing. The clarity of the description and rhythmic use of repetition – I can see that sun sinking down broodily below the horizon – to the personification of playful liberated water captured by ice. Dickens goes on to describe Scrooge led by the Spirit to a humble hut: spookily ‘Passing through the wall of mud and stone’, they see the miners’ families celebrating Christmas as they have done for generations; rushing on beyond the land out to sea, to another far more ancient tradition, of ‘the thundering of water, as it rolled, and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth’; this time the water is personified as an angry and jealous destroyer. Scrooge, even the great Spirit, and we readers, flying along with them on their coat-tails, are shrunken and insignificant beings beside this mighty swathe of nature and time conjured by Dickens. There is more lovely detail to come, as he imagines ‘storm-birds – born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the water’ and sees two lighthouse keepers wish each other Merry Christmas, ‘the elder…with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be’. Even the most minor of characters in Dickens’s books are treated to the dignity of a proper realisation. I can clearly picture that old keeper with his craggy face singing his hearty Christmas song.

We fly onwards over the sea to a ship and such a strange and yet warming image of their lonely passage is invoked:

They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it.

How succinct is homeward hopes with its comforting alliteration. So, even here in this curious and wonderful descriptive passage which seems to sit oddly with the rest of the London-bound story, the most fleeting of characters from a sea captain to the frost on the moor is given the breath of life by Dickens. It has been said of his writing that he creates caricatures, outrageous coincidence and twisted plots, a kind of cartoon version of life – but this is to overlook the extraordinary range and depth of his characterisation, his descriptive power and the huge freedom of his imagination. It feels as if he is indeed our Ghost of Christmas Present, we hold on to his sleeve and he takes us off to faraway places and extraordinary people, turns to us and says, ‘Look. Do you see?’

It is this quality that captured my character Liza, and has done the same to me. And why no Christmas is complete for me without a re-reading of this stunning classic, simple in its message, yet complex and beautiful in its rendering.

(All photos are taken by me of my Folio edition of the book with gorgeous illustrations by Michael Foreman.)

So, story addicts, I want to wish you a very Happy Christmas. And a huge thanks, for joining me here in my newsletters, started this year with no idea of whether anyone would be at all interested in reading them and yet, here we are, 9 months down the road, and my little newsletter is growing steadily every month. The truth is that, in the midst of a particularly difficult year of worsening chronic illness and hard work on my books and mentoring business, I look forward to every single newsletter I write, as a little bright spot in the midst of all the chaos, where I get to write whatever I want about stuff I love. I’m so grateful to all of you for reading, more than you know.

See you soon, story addicts…

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Firstly, these books are sometimes not even written by the celebrity and instead are penned by a talented ghost writer whose name will never find its way anywhere into the finished book, let alone on the cover. Then the celebrity flounces around claiming ownership over this story. They might win a prize or appear on the sofa of a morning show, talking about ‘their’ book. But it’s not their book. They didn’t write it. They’re pretending that they wrote it. They are lying. It’s wild when you think about it!

Secondly, it’s the idea that anyone can write a children’s book, that it’s somehow so simplistic and easy, that any celebrity with half a brain can chuck one together. Instead of the truth that writing for children is one of the hardest ways to write, largely because your audience is so demanding. No child will bother with a book that bores them. It’ll just get shoved aside. Tough crowd? The toughest. Plus the skill it takes to craft a narrative and language to express it that can be understood by this audience and yet at the same time keep a parent entertained, as they’re the ones that will buy the book more often than not. This takes immense skill.

And lastly, the thing that bugs me perhaps the most is that celebrity children’s book authors - who we all know are already famous - get the lion’s share of the publisher marketing budget to advertise their book, instead of the truly talented children’s authors who are struggling to pay their bills and are not boosted by being already famous and thus are largely unknown to a readership who would love their work. It’s so unfair. And pointless, because the celebrity’s book will sell anyway, whereas the lesser known authors really need that marketing, but don’t get it. It drives me nuts.

So, with all that in mind, I’ve found on my shelves a few of my favourite books for young children all of which I bought around 15 years ago, the ones that I read to my now 18-year-old daughter Poppy when she was little. Some of them are Christmassy and others are perfect for any time of year. I thought I’d share these with you, as a reminder that it’s the wealth of hardworking children’s authors who should be shared and lauded, not the latest celebrity bore who wants to add being a (pretend) author to their list of yet more money-making bullshit.

When my daughter Poppy was little, every Christmas, we’d take down from the shelf all of our favourite Christmas books we owned and make a display out of them. Then we’d read one every day leading up to Christmas, like a kind of book advent calendar. We’d also go to the library and get a few festive books out from there too. It all added to that special time of year. It’s one of the things I miss the most, now that she’s all grown up!

Here’s a selection of our favourite books - which I will keep on my shelves forever, by the way. Read to the end to see a VERY special book from when I was a kid that might just have a whisper of my own future as an author…

So let’s start my list of our favourite children’s books:

This is probably the first book that springs to my mind when I think of our favourite seasonal books. It’s an absolute beauty by Emma Chichester Clark, whose illustrations are as beautiful as her stories. A little crocodile comes to town to meet Santa, only to find he came last week, and now he’s alone in a strange place with no friends. Melrose the dog is new in town too. But how will they find each other..? The illustrations are charming, the touching friendship between these two unlikely companions…it’s just gorgeous.

We discovered the series of Frog books by Max Velthuijs via a book subscription service. We bought one and then were hooked, getting all the others we could find. Each one is a gentle story about Frog and his friends Pig, Duck and Hare, yet they all have profound themes about life underlying the deceptively simple plot. Expressed in easy-to-understand words and sweet, colourful images, these stories are really something special. In this one, Frog wakes up to see something he’s never seen before: snow - and it all goes downhill from there for poor Frog, until his friends come to find him. It’s just lovely and Frog books have been known to bring a tear to my eye…

This bloody brilliant story by the great Allan Ahlberg with hilarious illustrations by wonderful Bruce Ingman is an absolute corker. Banjo has a sausage every night for his dinner and one day, the sausage (called Melvin) jumps off his plate and runs away. A totally hilarious story ensues while Banjo tries to find his dinner. It’s bonkers and wonderful. True imaginative storytelling with no rules. We LOVED it.

We got this absolute beauty by legendary writer and illustrator Shirley Hughes from that same book subscription service. I must admit I still take this down from the bookshelf from time to time just to look at the incredibly detailed illustrations of the four seasons by Hughes which are staggeringly well done. Here’s an example of one of our favourite pages, which we would stare at for long periods, always seeming to find something new each time.

Zoom in and have a really good look. The level of detail is extraordinary.

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Another mention for Emma Chichester Clark but I couldn’t leave it out as the Blue Kangaroo books were some of our favourites of all time. The relationship between Lily and her blue kangaroo toy - who comes to life when she’s not around - are made even more magical in this special Christmas story. Lily is always so kind to Blue Kangaroo but how is he going to organise getting a Christmas gift for his beloved Lily, when he’s only a toy??

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I cannot even fathom how many hours Poppy and I spent poring over these puzzle books written by Susannah Leigh, with incredibly detailed illustrations by Brenda Haw. Each book involves an exciting journey with tricky puzzles of full-page spreads along the way, from mazes to searching for objects to riddles. So clever, so absorbing and all part of an imaginative story about children going on adventures. Absolutely adored these books and we never tired of them, even when we knew all the answers!

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Last and definitely not least is an unusual one - I’m sure many of you will recognise the name (and inimitable signature) of Roger Hargreaves, the creator of the Mr Men and Little Misses. This was one of his less well known books and belonged to me when I was a little girl (we’re talking more than 45 years ago). And here’s a little anecdote for you: my mum took me to a bookshop and there, at a table signing books, was the author of my beloved Mr Men books - yes, Roger Hargreaves, in the flesh. I took my new book over to him and he signed it for me and I was in absolute awe - a real-life author. My first ever meeting with someone who’d not only written a book, but a whole series of books which I adored. It was a wow moment of my early life.

And you might just spot at the bottom of the page there that Roger Hargreaves’ publisher was Hodder & Stoughton and that just happens to be the very same publisher who gave me my very first publishing contract as a novelist, around thirty-five years later. Was it a sign? Ooh, yes, I like to think so. A little bit of author magic…

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing our favourite books for young children. And don’t forget, I’m still running my Xmas special signed trilogies sale on my website, ends December 16th:

Buy Signed Books here

Merry Xmas, my dear story addicts. More soon…

Buy signed books with a personalised message as a Xmas gift!

Stuck for ideas for what to buy the bookish people in your life for Xmas? How about something really special they won’t be expecting? I can send you signed books with a personalised message for your gift recipient - you just tell me the message and I’ll write it inside the book!

And there’s a Special Xmas Discount for the trilogies above, plus you can also buy these books individually (& my other titles). Postage and packing are included in the trilogy special offer prices seen above. UK addresses only.

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Trilogies offer ends December 16th.

Interested? You can find out more plus order in these ways:

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All prices for individual books are listed on my website. UK addresses only.

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Thanks for reading this extra newsletter with news of my special Xmas offer. See you soon, story addicts…

I met Vanessa Lafaye through words before I met her in person. We read each other’s first novels at the same time and were soon in contact via Twitter, genuinely thrilled to find another writer who seemed to share the same preoccupations about history and delight in the same love of language. We also discovered a mutual passion for Dickens. We were part of the marvellous authors’ collective The Prime Writers together. For the next few years, we talked on Skype and on the phone and messaged and met up when we could, despite living at other ends of the country. She was smart, funny, wise and caring. She’d talk to me for hours about writing, love and life. She listened and advised. She talked and shared her thoughts. She helped me through some tough times. She was a wonderful friend. The whole time I knew her, she had cancer. It did not define her. She was too full of the wonder of the world to allow that to be so. Not long before she died, she was on a trip of a lifetime around New Zealand. She was messaging me from a ship, writing her final book, Miss Marley, a prequel to A Christmas Carol. We were discussing Scrooge’s timeline, his apprenticeship, his sister and so forth. I photographed some pages from A Christmas Carol and messaged them to her. We had a great chat about Dickens, as we often did. A short while later, we messaged about the book again. She said she would finish it soon. She said she wanted to talk with me about her next project. We arranged to talk the following week. She died three days later. I never got to have that talk.

When I wrote to her husband, I had no idea what to say. I thought I’d scroll through our old messages to see what we talked about when we first met. The scrolling got stuck and wouldn’t load any more. It had stopped at a years old message from V (I always called her V) that said simply, “We should start A Christmas Carol appreciation society!” I had no memory of that conversation I found. Not long after, V’s editor from HarperCollins – Kate Mills – got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to finish writing Miss Marley. Of course, I said yes. It felt absolutely right. Our similar writing styles; our mutual adoration of Mr Dickens (I’ve realised since that I mention him in several of my novels!); our discussions while she was writing the book and the fact that I collect copies of A Christmas Carol and I am somewhat obsessed with it – all of this made me feel that it was the right thing to do. I found out I had the blessings of her husband and her other close writer friends. The message about our appreciation society seemed to be a message for me to accept the challenge.

I read through the nine chapters she had already written. I loved her story, her characterisation, her use of choice Victorian details and beautiful language. I printed it out and covered it in notes, annotating for the elements of her style and imagery, her character motifs and plot points. I had a growing sense of where I felt the story should go. At my first meeting with Kate, we looked through V’s notes and realised there was very little on the ending. I discussed it with other writer friends of V and we all came to the conclusion that there was no conclusion as such. So, I had to go with my gut and write the ending I felt flowed naturally from the work she had already produced. I drew on our friendship and knowledge of her previous writing, but I didn’t overthink it. I let it pour out, as I’d heard V herself had done when she was writing those early chapters against the clock. I wrote chapter ten to the end in five days. It was like an act of channelling. It was exhausting and beautiful. Sometimes I felt as if she were very close by. I will never forget it. I will always be grateful. I hope I did a good job, V.

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My friend and hugely well-respected book blogger, reviewer, literary judge and blog tour organiser , was also Vanessa’s friend and adored her work. Anne has kindly written an account of her friendship with V here for us:

In December 2014, I reviewed a debut novel on my blog. Summertime by Vanessa Lafaye was due to be published by Orion Books in January 2015. I adored that book, I knew nothing about the author, I’d not heard of her before, but was entranced by her writing. It seems that my review of Summertime was the first review to be publicly published.

Vanessa contacted me via social media and told me that she received the notification of the review when she was out with her choir, and that she was terrified of reading it. Luckily, she loved what I said and that was the beginning of our friendship.

When Vanessa travelled to Lincoln to attend Becca Mascull’s book launch, Martin and I met her and her husband James for lunch.

Vanessa and Anne at my book launch for Song of the Sea Maid at Lincoln Waterstones

She was as funny and as beautiful in the flesh as she was online. When I met Vanessa, she’d been having treatment for breast cancer. Her hair was growing back and she was excited about plotting her next book, At First Light. That book was published and I reviewed it, and loved it.
Her next project was Miss Marley; it was Vanessa’s imagining of how and why Jacob Marley became that ghost. Tragically, her cancer returned and Vanessa died in February 2018 having completed the first nine chapters. Becca Mascull was asked, and agreed to complete the book, which she did beautifully. Miss Marley, and Vanessa, will always hold a piece of my heart. She was my friend, we were in contact almost every day. I still miss her, but she left such a legacy and I will re-read Miss Marley this Christmas, as I always do.

Here are some of V’s beloved group The Prime Writers at her posthumous book launch for Miss Marley, which became a beautiful evening of celebration of her life and writing.

You can read more here in my article for iPaper about my friendship with Vanessa and the writing of Miss Marley:

My iPaper article

And here’s the blurb of Miss Marley:

A seasonal tale of kindness and goodwill

Orphans Clara and Jacob Marley live by their wits, scavenging for scraps in the poorest alleyways of London, in the shadow of the workhouse. Every night, Jake promises his little sister tomorrow will be better and when the chance to escape poverty comes their way, he seizes it despite the terrible price.

And so Jacob Marley is set on a path that leads to his infamous partnership with Ebenezer Scrooge. As Jacob builds a fortress of wealth to keep the world out, only Clara can warn him of the hideous fate that awaits him if he refuses to let love and kindness into his heart...

In Miss Marley, Vanessa Lafaye weaves a spellbinding Dickensian tale of ghosts, goodwill and hope, a perfect prequel to A Christmas Carol.

Buy Miss Marley

So that’s my story of my friend and her beautiful Christmas book, which I urge you to read on Christmas Eve, just like its companion piece, A Christmas Carol.

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Seasonal Greetings to you all and more soon, story addicts…

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