A guest post for Curious Daydreams in 2015.
When people ask me what inspired me to write my YA series The Ceruleans, I can talk easily – and at length – about scenic Devonshire coves, and music that moves me, and artworks with soul, and the age-old exploration of light versus darkness, good versus bad. All of these things, and many more, inspired Death Wish and the subsequent four books. But lying beneath them all is the main inspiration, the foundation for the series, and it’s not a subject I shout about. (In a whisper) I’ll explain…
I believe that to write well, you have to write from a place of knowledge. That’s not to say that if you’re writing a tale of werewolves, you need to be a werewolf. But when you write the pain of the hero’s transformation into werewolf, that needs to come from a place of knowing physical pain. And when you write all the emotions that the hero struggles with, you need to really understand those feelings. Bottom line: you need some experience of ‘the deep stuff’.
The Ceruleans is a series that explores plenty of highs, but also lows: suicide, disability, illness, loss, death, separation, violence, family strife and an overriding struggle with self: to be who you are at your core, and loved and accepted for that. For me, as an author, the series was a means of exploring all sorts of questions and emotions my own life experiences had thrown up: therapy, of sorts.
Ernest Hemingway wrote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” That’s what writing The Ceruleans felt like to me at times. Of course bleeding means there’s a wound there, and the wound is painful – but the bleeding is release, and it’s cathartic.
There were days during the writing process that the words flowed out of me easily and quickly, and I had no trouble shutting the laptop and stepping straight back into being a fun and cheery mum. But there were other days that it felt different; days when writing about loss made me ache, and after I finished writing I’d take my kids on my lap and hug them tight for a little while and tell them how much I loved them.
An easy choice would have been to quit writing books so full of emotion – to write something light-hearted and fun instead. But when there are books in you that clamour to be put down on paper, turning your back on them is no simple matter. The only way out is through.
Writing what’s raw takes a willingness to surrender, to be vulnerable – and it takes faith. My writing mantra is this: trust the process. If you’re true to yourself, if you write what you really need to write, you’ll be happy with the finished manuscript. And just maybe, there will be readers out there who’ll see how deep you went in the writing, and who’ll respect you for that.
