Most public libraries I’ve belonged to pride themselves in starting every series of books with the second one. My current library goes one better: it starts every series with the third one. I only realised when I got home that this was the third in a trilogy but I was so looking forward to reading it that I didn’t care. One day, I decided, I would read them all in order. Providing they were worth reading, of course. And they are! From the first page, it was love at first sight! I’m not the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes fan but I have somehow managed to read every single story, mostly because someone once gave me a compendium (in teeny tiny print). I’m also hugely enamoured with H.P. Lovecraft, particularly since something I wrote once was compared to his work (at a time when I’d never heard of him). My most favourite adaption of his work comes in the form of a radio drama called The Lovecraft Investigations (no, not the Chronicles – that’s something else) which I’ve listened to so often that I have a very close familiarity with the world of Lovecraft, leading me to explore yet another giant compendium of everything he’s ever written. Combining the two worlds is, for me, just genius. The crossover concept is wild! I loved the feel of the book, the setting, the characters, the action-packed chapters, even the decorated chapter titles! Despite wanting to devour the story in one go, I read it slowly and deliberately to savour the superb use of language, the style, the descriptions, the wonderful atmosphere of the whole thing. James Lovegrove is a confident writer who knows his stuff.
This question came my way recently from someone who enjoyed writing and wrote a lot … but didn’t know when to stop the story. So he just kept on writing and writing and had a number of novels and short stories to his name that he’d never finished. I didn’t even have to think twice about how to answer him. For me, there is only one way to finish a story:
You have to know the ending before you start.
I’m sure there are other opinions on this. I haven’t googled* it yet but I’m sure, when I go off in a minute to check it out, that I’m going to find all sorts of advice. Some of it might be good. Some of it I might disagree with. Everyone has a different way of writing. It also depends on how well the story is developed in your mind before you start. Or how fabulous your imagination is – the one that miraculously produces exactly the right thing to write at the right time and comes up with a fantastic twist or ending that just works perfectly even though you had no idea that was where you were going. Well, that’s just great! Lucky you if you can work like this! For the rest of us, it’s a slog. And if you don’t know where your story is going, the slog is even worse.
If you don’t know where your story is going, the reader will know and they’ll stop reading.
If you let the story peter out, the reader will be left dissatisfied and disappointed.
If you cobble on some fantastic twist that you just made up, the reader will toss the book aside in disgust. Because readers know. They might not know WHY they don’t like the ending. But they’ll know if it doesn’t work.
This isn’t about creating the perfect ending. It’s just about actually managing to end a book well. I taught myself to structure novels with the book Teach Yourself Screenwriting. Yep. I use the template for a screenplay! I had actually wanted to write screenplays so studied this in minute detail and had a go at it, writing several (I even sent one to a favourite actor at the time – dear me, how embarrassing! Hopefully it was binned before it was ever opened!). The structure of a screenplay really appealed to me. It ordered my thoughts. It forced me to do a great deal of pre-writing, which meant that by the time I sat down to begin a novel, I KNEW the story. I don’t work out every single scene. And I certainly don’t stick to my treatment like glue – if while writing I see something doesn’t work out after all, then I’ll change it and work on the story shape a little more. The thing with writing is that your characters come alive, the story starts to live, relationships grow, it all feels real. Sometimes the way a character develops will dictate changes I might need to make to a story. But it’s very, very rare that I will change an ending. I’m wracking my brains here and I don’t recall a time I changed a planned ending – and they are planned!
I’m going to quote directly from Teach Yourself Screenwriting.
WRITING BACKWARDS
Screenplays are written backwards. That is: the prime focus for both writer and audience is the final climax at the end of Act III. So, having decided on your end climax – where you need to get to – you work backwards to make sure that everything in the plot – other climaxes, set-backs, decisions made etc – work 100% towards that scene and moment. However, don’t get too disturbed if your end hasn’t come to you yet – it will. (Raymond G. Frensham)
Yes, I know novels are different. You probably don’t really need to break the story up into Acts. For me, however, this works. The tight structure of a screenplay gets my story moving. It pushes me away from waffle. This doesn’t mean my novels are short. I used this method with my novel “V. Gomenzi” which is over 190 thousand words long! I mean, it’s massive! It had three threads in it which I had to juggle to keep straight. But in the end, I knew, the focus would be on the main character himself, Vincent Gomenzi. He needed to wrap up the story with a big bang. The loopy timeline of another character (who will one day the main character of the 5th novel in the Fleet Quintet series) had to be wrapped up as well. This was all fine and dandy. I had no problem heading towards this spectacular ending. But I wasn’t going to END the book with these Big Moments: I needed a quiet, thoughtful ending. SPOILER ALERT but I needed him to get back with the girl. It was the moment I most looked forward to. This bloody novel proved to be immensely difficult to write. Totally my own fault for having such complex timelines, those three separate threads which had to wind together, and a massive story. But the spark that kept me going was that final scene. When I got to it, eventually, I screwed it up monumentally. I had her open the door. I had him go into the flat. I had him them talk in the lounge. She was cross and spiky. He was exhausted and had experienced way too much in his battle against evil. The conversation between them was a disaster. I couldn’t get it right. It all went flat. My cherished ending, which I’d so looked forward to, died on the page. And then I realised that, while this was indeed the proverbial happy ending, it was out of step with the rest of the novel. I had to put the future into the reader’s mind, let them imagine it, not work it out for them.
So this is what I did. When our heroine (she was the main character of the 2nd in the Fleet Quintet) sees our hero, she hugs him. He hugs her back, relieved. And then I go into future tense. This is what it looks like:
When she opened the door, she stared at him, speechless. He could not think what to say. He could not say hello. It was too little. He put down his bag on the doorstep. Warm air flooded out onto the cold landing. It smelled like freshly baked biscuit. Then she stepped into his space and wrapped her arms around him, tightly and fiercely. Relief ran through him, through every vein, down every neural pathway, and he pulled her close, his hands in her hair.
In another moment, she would step back and invite him in.
That conversation they are supposed to have in the lounge? It’s all in future tense. You know what she’s going to ask him. You know how he’s going to have to answer her. But then their embrace breaks and he realises he’s going to have to ask for her forgiveness on the doorstep. So now we have the thought: oh, he’s not going to get to go and sit in her lounge and explain stuff. He has to do it here, on the doorstep, where it’s cold. Then a small child appears in her nightgown, the daughter our hero did not know he had. While our heroine puts the child back to bed, he steps into the apartment and closes the door. The future has arrived and we’re no longer sure if it even contains that proposed scene in the lounge.
This is my favourite ending of all my novels and I love it because I worked towards it through TWO novels so it took YEARS to get there. It had gathered so much poignancy along the way that the fewer words I used, the better it was.
Let me give you a much simpler example. Not everything I write is huge and enormous and takes years! A short story I wrote recently called “The planet with too much zap” comes in at under 2000 words. For me, that’s barely a paragraph! I didn’t have to do much structural work to it and it didn’t require weeks of editing. But I knew the ending before I started. I knew it even before I sat down to write the “treatment” which was all of 500 words long, barely a page. The whole story leads up to that ending. Without it, the story would have fallen flat on its face.
Another successful example: I recently started work on the 4th in a series of seven. Before I began I already had a whole lot of notes and ideas, written down as they occurred to me while writing the previous books in the series. I already know what each book is about and I definitely know how the whole series ends. I have a Huge Reveal in the final novel which I’m really looking forward to! But I don’t know the fine details of each book’s story until I sit down and begin the pre-writing. I was doing just that when I reached the paragraph in my textbook: WRITING BACKWARDS. Aargh, I thought. I don’t have my ending! I had to go off and think about it for a day or two. At that stage, I barely had the story. I knew who was in it and what the bad guy does and the amazing find in the book – but I had no idea how to bring all these factors together.
So I worked on that Act III climax. This was not to be the final scene but it would most certainly dictate what the final scene will be. As it was, the ending came to me quite easily – I decided to go for a big action climax and managed to find one. The most important thing to note here is that by working on the ending, the story itself – still an amorphous mass of unrelated ideas at that point – suddenly began to form.
Find the ending and you have found clarity for your story.
What if it all goes wrong? This happened to me recently and it still hasn’t resolved. (I’ve written about it in another blog – see link below). Why did this story go wrong? Why have I abandoned it? Why was I tortured by it for months, losing sleep over it, losing my confidence as a writer, losing focus on what the story was supposed to be about? In retrospect, I know exactly why: I never knew the ending. I thought I did. I knew the main character had to meet up with another character and that they had to, um, talk. Gosh wow exciting. Not. So despite some good writing in it and despite many rewrites and much editing, it still doesn’t work. I still can’t get the ending. Ironically, it’s the last story in the second collection of Exodus Sequence stories, so NOT being able to find an ending for it is absolute disaster!
My advice? Walk away. Do something else. Write something else. Leave it alone. Don’t go back to it until you know. And then consider how much pain you would have saved yourself if you had thought up the goddamn ending FIRST!
*I have now googled this concept but Google has decided to misunderstand my question no matter how I phrase it. So I think I should probably take a moment to emphasise that this blog is NOT how to end a story by finding the perfect ending. Nor does it discuss all the different types of ending. This blog is aimed specifically at those writers who tend to waffle on and on with no know goal and how to prevent that from happening. If you know where you story ends, you’ll know how to end it.
I can’t understand why I’ve never read P.D. James before. It might have to do with an adaption of one of her books on the radio which – at the time – I couldn’t get into. I thought it sounded dreary, wordy, not enough action. Oh, how I love to be proven wrong!! I was wandering around my library desperately one day, heading for the same old authors, uninspired by everything, when I ordered myself sternly to try something new. A different author. Someone I wouldn’t consider. As P.D. James is quite well-known (and gave the most intelligent interview I’ve ever heard a few years before she died) I decided to give this book a go. The rest of my selection turned out to be very disappointing. After reading one extremely bad book and abandoning two more because they were so badly written, opening the first page of this book came as a huge relief. I knew at once that I was in the hands of a master. Here was someone who could paint poetry with words. Here was someone who could tell a story and tell it well. Here were characters fully developed with believable lives and a thrilling plot. Here was a policeman I actually liked. No gore, no horror, no detailed autopsies. A crime story that didn’t rely on tricks to tell its tale. Discovering P.D. James was a revelation in my reading life. Because this was my first book, it’ll always be the best. I can’t wait to read all the others!! (Oh, and by chance, that radio adaption turned up on BBC 4X once again – and this time I loved it!)
For reasons which quite escape me, I’ve somehow managed to miss the two sequels following Chocolat, an error I will rectify as soon as possible. Although, to be honest, once I’d finished this book I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the 2nd and 3rd volumes as I really didn’t enjoy this one that much. The story felt thin, somehow, and the characters annoying and weak. Vianne was particularly boring, her character chiming consistently on one note. The various threads seemed to peter out pointlessly and the ending felt dissatisfying. I have since read a number of other reviews and they seem to be quite mixed. The general consensus, however, is that Lollipop and Peaches are both excellent. So I’m not quite sure what happened between the creation of those two sequels and this one. I wonder if the publishers pushed Ms Harris too hard? Still, other reviews have decided for me that I will indeed read Lollipop and Peaches…..and perhaps just forget that this one exists.
I am prepared for fame. I’ve got my Oscar speech written (best adapted screenplay), I’ve got my glitter makeup ready, and I’ve been practising my look of delight (better than the look of crawling gratitude). I’ve thanked all sorts of people for a variety of books. “Season of the Falling Sun” has won the Booker Prize every year for the last ten years, so often have I thanked the panel of judges. “The Exodus Sequence” has been turned into a TV series although I’m still trying to decide which streaming service deserves it best. And the “Honeysuckle Rage” series is being optioned for a seven movie deal. Not forgetting “The Fleet Quintet” (now actually a quintet in this famous future of mine) suddenly becoming a cult classic.
Fame, from what I’ve observed, involves a lot of interviews. Being somewhat excruciatingly shy, I’ve been working out how to deal with these interviews. No TV, for a start. Radio is fine. But even that I’m not sure about because I don’t like my voice. That leaves print. Lots of print, then. Obviously no one can come into my crummy council flat – oh, but wait, by then of course I’ll be living in my luxury mansion. Hang on a sec, I don’t actually want a luxury mansion (too much dusting). A quick check on Google and it seems I can pick up a nice house with a turret (i.e. a bit of a castle) for less than £1m in Wales. That’ll do me. But who’s going to want to come out to Wales to interview me? In the meantime, I’ll be happy to meet up at my local Costa.
Some of these interviews are going to take a bit of work. Desert Island Discs, for example, means you have to get eight tracks ready for discussion. Naturally, like everyone preparing for fame, I’ve had my list ready for decades. It’s changed several times. Sometimes it’s all classical music because the pop picked by celebrities often shows up their phenomenal naffness. One must, at all costs, take care not to appear naff. However, you can also tell when the person just wants to shock everyone, like the wankerdoodle actor who picked some utterly rubbishy punk rock thing (not even a good punk rock thing), claiming he was listening to this when he was five years old. Show me a five year old in 1982 and I’ll show you someone who is still singing “the wheels on the bus.” You can also tell when the person doesn’t actually listen to music at all. This will be the person who chooses all the obvious stuff: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, some crap disco thing from the eighties, Coldplay and a rap thing someone told them would make them look cool. People who are not trying to look cool usually have the best music. And the people with the best music are almost invariably NOT the actors, pop stars and sportsmen. It’ll be the unknown name. The scientist. Someone who did something amazing but no one has heard of them. So in other words, someone who is great in their field but not a household name. Those Desert Island Disc episodes are rare now. It’s all about celebrity, not about work.
Naturally, having practised a lot, I’m NOT going to fall into the celebrity trap of trying to look cool. Because, frankly, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. I used to. But then I got old. It’s one of the fab things about being old. Or older. You just don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. It’s very freeing.
Anyway, I thought I’d entertain you with one of my imagined Desert Island Discs playlists. I thought an all-classical one (does anyone remember the good old days when it was ALL classical?) would be quite hard for me to pull off, although I will give it a go…on another day. I’ll also have to do an all-soundtrack list because soundtracks have played a huge part in my life. For the moment, this is what my pop playlist would look like.
Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen
I first heard this when I was around seven or eight, when my mother’s boyfriend moved in with us. He was much younger than she was so we were three awkward generations in one house. He was mad about Bob Dylan and ran a folk club at the time. This was my favourite in his record collection. Yes, I know, it sounds really pretentious saying that I was listening to Leonard Cohen at the age of eight but it’s not like I knew how to use the record player. It was just that when he played music for my mother and I, I would always pick this one. At the time I had no idea what it was about, but it was very evocative. For a long time, I wanted to live in New York because of this song.
Fears of Gun by the Birthday Party
I grew up in Pretoria which was very much cut off from the kind of music I wanted to listen to. The radio (I only had FM, no SW) played nothing “indie” and my local record store didn’t sell this stuff either. Then I discovered a record library. It was brilliant. You could rent the kind of LPs I’d been dying to hear – The Banshees, the Cure, Joy Division. I still listen to A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Pornography and Closer: they are my go-to 80’s albums (now on CD rather than worn-out tape). But the band that blew me away was the Birthday Party. I’d never heard anything like them. Nick Cave was a revelation. I used to blast out the Bad Seed EP daily, probably freaking out the neighbours in suburb-land. I had to wait until my parents went out though and one day was extremely embarrassed when my mother came home early from work and heard this. It’s not something you’d want your mother to hear.
Papa don’t preach by Madonna
When I was twenty, I escaped Pretoria and ended up living in hellish poverty in London. When I escaped the coercive control relationship I was trapped in, I vowed to only ever listen to the kind of music I wanted to listen to, no matter how bad or silly it was. I think I liked the lyrics of this song because it was about a young woman taking control of her life. Also, it just sounds great.
The Big Sky by Kate Bush
I first heard Kate Bush in my very early teens. I was gobsmacked by “Wuthering Heights” – I’d never heard anything like it. Who had!! No one I knew liked it but I was charmed by it and still know all the lyrics. The Kick Inside was one of the first albums I was ever given. I asked for it for Christmas and still remember unwrapping it. I really wore out that album! But my most favourite Kate Bush album was, and still is, Hounds of Love. I’ve never stopped listening to it. It’s full of exquisite moments, each as perfect as a droplet of heaven, and in one line she even says: “I put this moment … here.” One example is the male choir that appears in “Hello Earth.” I want them to go on singing forever. My favourite track has mostly been “Cloudbusting” because I want it to be about rain (it isn’t, really) but the one that is full of wild energy is “The Big Sky.” She just lets go on this one – the joy, the freedom, the wildness! The best version remains the album track, in my opinion, which appears not to be available on Spotify. It is on YouTube though. But honestly, just buy the whole album. It’s hilarious that “Running up that hill” is a hit all over again because of Stranger Things. Hopefully new fans will explore the album further.
Blackhawk by Emmylou Harris
When my marriage was crumbling, I decided to try a whole new genre of music, having worn out all the rock I’d been listening to for years. Country music seemed to be the exact opposite of everything I’d ever listened to although I began to realise that I’d been subject to quite a lot of it in the 70s. I also realised that I didn’t like modern country music that much. I did discover Nancy Griffith though and loved her early albums. I even went to see her live! I was heartbroken when she died. The “country” music that endured from that part of my life can’t really be called country music at all, although Emmylou Harris is known for folk and country. “The Wrecking Ball” had quite mixed reviews, apparently. People either loved or hated it. I thought it was a work of genius. It was produced by Daniel Lanois whom I was vaguely familiar with having listened to a lot of U2 (once). I never get tired of this album. It’s so grungy. It’s so grown-up. It tears your heart out.
Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson
I cried for six months after my mother died. And then I got angry. It was rage I’d never before experienced. I wanted to stand on top of a hill and scream my lungs out. It was the point in my life that I stopped taking bullshit from people. Having spent my entire life trying to be NICE to people, it was time to just be me. And the real me was raging. So when this track popped up on a “Stargate Atlantis” episode called “Vega” (the second last ever episode), I was blown away. I rushed out to buy “Antichrist Superstar” and I was transformed. I was addicted to that album. I listened to it two or three times a day. I couldn’t get enough. For the first time in my life, I understood the ugly part of my early twenties, years that I’ve never confronted and never understood. I began to understand rage. I began to understand what I was rebelling against – I’d never worked it out. I’d never been able to express it. This album had a profound influence on my life. I found myself but better than that, I found my writing self. It took many years for the rage to abate and I don’t much listen to Marilyn Manson anymore, although I still feel a frisson of excitement when I hear his voice. I think he is an extraordinary artist. His music at its best is brutally honest. (I try not to think about the rest and I also loathe his videos, in fact, he is quite loathsome so don’t judge me here. It’s the music. Forget everything else.)(The original music video is “cleaned up” but I managed to find this one.)
Silver Lining by First Aid Kit
When my mother’s boyfriend (the young one – they never did get married) died, I had to fly to South Africa and sell up the house. It was the most nightmarish three weeks of my life I have ever lived through. I was in such a state of shock that I’d lie sleepless every night unable to stop shivering. Losing the house I grew up in – the very house I ran away from at 20 – was truly awful. For years afterwards I’d wake up in a state of panic that I’d lost my house, my home, my foundation. The irony that I loathe every ounce of my South African-ness hasn’t been lost on me. The house was the last memory I had of my mother and having worked through all the rage, I found that I could, with the death of my “step” father at last begin to truly mourn her. My daughter and I had a terrible time of it, the details of which I’ll spare you. We watched a bit of TV each evening, a ghastly old set, rather small, and utterly saturated with colour. There was nothing to watch but the ads were great. One of them – I can’t remember what ad it was now – used this song by First Aid Kit which I’d never heard before. The lyrics seemed to reflect everything I was feeling, not least of which the search for the silver lining I’ve yet to find.
White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
I’ve always loved this, it seems. I still do. There’s no story attached to this at all, perhaps that’s why. At the end of Desert Island Discs, when your music choices wash away and you can only save one, it would be this one.
Like most days that end up being tumultuous, the 7th of July 2005 began like any other. I walked my daughter to school. Then I headed off to the west end for a few small purchases. Walking home, I noticed the traffic was gridlocked, which was unusual. Then I noticed that there were far more pedestrians than usual, many of them talking anxiously into their mobiles, which is what we called phones back then. People nowadays call those phones bricks but they weren’t. They were too small. And not very good either because the people I saw seemed to be stabbing at their mobiles rather frantically. The air itself felt frantic.
It was obvious that something that happened. It just wasn’t obvious yet what it was. When I reached Tavistock Square, about a block from where I live, it was cordoned off. So I went around the corner, thinking to reach my street from the bottom end. That was even more heavily cordoned off. I stood on the corner of Russell Square and panic hit me. What was going on? Why were there so many police about? And how was I going to get home? Since I had nowhere else to go, I went to see if I could get into my local church. Fortunately it was open. The vicar, who lived locally and only needed to walk down the road to get to work, was already there. He told me he’d heard there had been a bomb on the underground. The curate arrived, in quite a state, as he’d had to get off the bus he was on and walk, so bad was the gridlocked traffic.
Information rolled out very slowly and without much accuracy, at first. You have to remember this was a time of no smart phones, no social media outlets, considerably fewer websites than we have now, and even less in the way of satellite connections. The vicar and curate set up an ancient television in the church with a bunny aerial (so the picture was lousy) in an attempt to catch up on the news. It was at first thought there were six bombs. One image I saw that haunted me was a woman clutching a white bandage thing to her face because it had been burned.
And at this point I have to go away from this blog and make coffee because I CANNOT get through this story without crying. Every year when this anniversary comes around, I cry. The bombings were awful. All bombings are awful. I wasn’t part of them, I wasn’t injured, I know no one personally who was. But I live in the area where it happened and I saw terror. But I also saw unbelievable kindness. In a state of some shock, realising that I couldn’t go home and didn’t know if and when I would be able to, I resigned myself to staying in the church all day and making tea. All the doors were opened and all the staff and volunteers, like me, helped everyone who came through them.
People came to the church for all sorts of reasons. The main one was that they were lost. They had been turfed off their buses or their tubes or their trains and they were bravely trying to walk to work. Some walked for over an hour. What was interesting was that no one thought to turn around and walk home – they kept going. The trouble was, they didn’t actually know how to get to work because they were usually on a bus or tube. No smart phones, remember. No google maps. No GPS. And no one carries an A-Z in their pocket. So they came into the church most to ask for directions. A battered old London A-Z was peered at quite a lot that day. The curate fortunately knew where everything was and could give clear, concise directions. I knew to get to places in the area – but I didn’t know the street names (I still don’t). People also came in, on the way to work, to use the loo because they were desperate and had been walking for ages. Others came in for comfort and support and ended up watching the TV all day, which I didn’t think was a good idea. One of the BBC channels had cancelled all their programmes and had non-stop news. None of it was good. A big factor was that the phones that day were almost useless. Almost all the networks went down at one point or another. Even the church landline didn’t work half the time. It was the briefest flavour of what an apocalypse would look like: you don’t know what’s going on, nothing is working, and all communication networks are down. Not knowing what was going on was the most terrifying. The fact that it was so close to where I lived was even more terrifying. The sense of shock never left me all day, yet I worked through it all, feeling rather distant but not saying anything of much importance.
I also spent all day worrying about how to get home. I worried about my daughter but decided she was safest in school. I went to ask one of the police officers guarding the nearest bit of cordon whether I’d be able to get home. She didn’t know. This was not reassuring. The day was interminable. It was grey and sticky and humid – exactly as it is today, in fact. Around four o’clock, I decided to see if I could get my daughter and myself home. I went to fetch her from school and discovered that most of the kids had been picked up by parents during the day. There hadn’t been any lessons and they hadn’t been told much. We took a different route home, skirting the cordon, until we got as close as we could to our street a block away. I told the policeman there that I lived in a street within the cordon and he escorted us virtually to our front door, perhaps to ensure that we were safe, but maybe also ensuring we weren’t fibbing. Strangely, this is the only memory my daughter has of that day. Well, she was only five. Years later in secondary school, she met someone from a different primary school who had actually felt the rumble of the bomb under her school. Because the school was so close to Kings Cross, they were evacuated at once. I’m grateful to this day that my daughter was safe. That I was safe in the church. Indeed, that the church was there at all. Where else would I have gone?
It took days for that cordon to lift but the reminders never left the area. There was a tent near Russell Square tube where one could sign a book. There were flowers everywhere. School was shut the next day and my daughter and I helped out in the church again. I went because I couldn’t stand being at home with the thought of this act of unbelievable evil so close to my doorstep. The bus that was blown up was one block from my front door. Another of the bombs was just blocks away from my local tube station. Everything was closed for a long, long time. I walk past reminders of that day every day. On Russell Square itself, on the spot where so many flowers were left for the dead and injured, an oak tree was planted, with a plaque. I find this the most respectful commemorative act I’ve seen. The commemorative “thing” on Tavistock Square is, to me, very ugly indeed. At the spot where the bus’s roof was blown off, they cleared away the gardens and laid down a flat metal sheet with the names of the dead on it. Not only is it ugly and thus disrespectful of the dead, but it’s depressing. The oak tree signifies life and hope and reminds us that we must go on and we must live our lives. The Tavistock Square memorial makes you want to lie down and die.
Years later, it’s the kindness shown on that day that stays with me. The vicar and the curate went out to see if they could help anyone near to where the bombings took place. Everyone in the church spent the day helping others. Not forgetting all the stories of bravery I’ve since heard, people helping others on that day without thought to themselves. The day is being “remembered” less and less as the years go by but I still hear stories that have me in tears. On Saturday, I listened to an interview on the radio with Daniel Biddle who had been severely injured in one of the bomb blasts. His injuries were appalling and as I listened to him speak so clearly and with such amazing presence about the difficulties he’s suffered with since, I not only ended up in tears but also felt amazed that someone could go through such hell and wind up at the other end a truly inspiring individual. My heart goes out to everyone who was injured or who lost loved ones. (Link below)
On the thirteenth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, I began writing a story called An Angel in the Mirror. A friend had begun a publishing house which produced anthologies of various topics: literary, sci-fi, flash fiction … and Christian. I felt inspired to write something for the first Christian anthology despite, at the time, no longer feeling I could adhere to any fixed religion. I’ve tried a few. I tried Christianity. I believe in God but I have problems with doctrine, ritual and approach. So while I regard the years I spent attending my local church and trying to be part of the community as good years with good memories, full of good people, I’ve never really felt part of the Christian faith. I’ve sometimes regret this. I’ve never really been part of anything. It seems it’s in my nature to always be apart. However, the story I wanted to write had at its centre the church I’d come to love so much. The entire story appeared instantly to me – I had no problem with the plot or characters, although I did have to edit it down considerably. It was, basically, an easy story to write. But it was also excruciating. It begins with the day of the bombings, the events unfolding as I remembered them. I had to do a great deal of research to get my facts right and found myself reliving the terrible events of that day. So it was a tough ride. It was also the hottest summer I can ever remember, temperatures reaching 40C daily and not dropping below 30C at night. The plant life in Bloomsbury died. The squares were brown. No one slept. It was a fraught time.
The story tells of a middle-aged, or older, woman who works in the church and her experiences of that day and the days and years that follow. Most of it is about the relationship she develops with a homeless guy she finds asleep in the doorway of the church on that fateful morning. The friend who runs Clarendon House Books sent me a copy of the email sent to him by a reader for the Christian anthology, which states that the story was perhaps too long BUT to grab it with both hands because it was that good. I was gobsmacked. It was probably the first opinion I’d heard of my work by someone who didn’t know me and whom I didn’t know. The story was accepted for the 2018 edition and appeared a second time in Gold: The Best from Clarendon House Anthologies. I have since also published it in my own collection of short stories: The Nightmarist and Other Stories (Links below)
I gave a copy of The Inner Circle Writers’ Group Christian Stories Anthology 2018 to my vicar when he left the church, thinking he might enjoy the stories, that he might even like mine. I was mortified when he wrote me a brief note later to say that it had made him cringe. I realised this was because he thought I was the main character and that her thoughts were mine. I wanted to write back and tell him that this is not how writers work. Her opinions about the church are not mine. She is my creation but she is not me. Worse, he may have though the vicar in the church was based on him. It wasn’t! I made up a completely different sort of person. In fact, no one I know ended up in the story at all. This is not how I work. I never put people I know into stories. They’re stories. It’s made up. Only the bombs were real. The church exists but the name has been changed. I was never able to apologise to my ex-vicar for embarrassing him. I thought I’d just end up embarrassing him, and myself further. So I left it.
The pain of that day has never left me. I wish it could be undone but it can’t. One finds a way to go on, like the amazing Daniel Biddle has found a way to go on, but it doesn’t undo the traumatic memory and the scars never fade. I don’t have any wise words to end this blog, only to say that all that counts in the end is kindness.
If you’d like to read An Angel in the Mirror, here is a link to my anthology:
A masterclass in minimalism. I’ve not read Elizabeth Strout before and wonder if I may have benefited from reading earlier works which could have enhanced this story. However, even without them, this is a gem. I always open a book to the first page in a the library before committing myself and from the first lines I was drawn in. Elizabeth Strout is like an artist who is able to draw in only a few brief, bold strokes an image of startling clarity. I felt as if I understood every nuance of the Lucy Barton character, sharing her pain, her experiences, her life even. It’s a short but powerful read. Because the story wouldn’t let me go, I found myself setting aside an extra hour one afternoon just to read until I reached the end. Deceptively lightweight but supremely profound.
Someone commented on one of my blog posts recently. This was totally amazing because (a) I don’t get many/any comments and (b) the post was ancient. I mean, really ancient. I had to google it to find it because I couldn’t find it myself on my own website! Ugh, yes, I know, I’m not very organised. I blame my writingness for that. I’m VERY organised when it comes to writing. It’s just everything else I couldn’t be bothered with. Anyway, it was a nice comment, if a tad misspelled, but rereading the blog did get me thinking.
The blog post was about being a late bloomer. When you reach my age and you still haven’t made it, you can only pray that are a late bloomer. No one wants to think of themselves as utterly deluded. I quite often think my lack of success an as an author boils down to the fact that I know I haven’t got what it takes to push myself. It takes more than just writing a good novel. It’s all that other stuff, like promoting oneself if you’re self-published, then engaging on social media, taking out a second mortgage (if you’re lucky enough to have a first one) to pay for advertising, producing tweets that go viral, getting a hundred billion likes on FB, writing blogs that people actually read………the trouble is, I baulk at the “other stuff”. I’ve tried and found I’m not very good at it. I’d rather go off into dreamland and write another novel. In the olden days (in other words, everything prior to the digital era), a writer could get away with this. An agent or publisher did all the work for them. I don’t think they do anymore, other than get your book published for you and push it somewhat, but I’m going to presume they must be an asset otherwise I wouldn’t STILL be trying to find one. The other factor is that there seem to be an awful lot of writers nowadays. It never really used to be like this. My twitter feed is a flood of writers, all frantically trying to get everyone’s attention and sometimes succeeding too. There is nothing more disheartening than watching people who are a quarter your age writing absolute garbage and getting it gloriously published and/or made into a TV series. I don’t mean to say that I think I’m better than they are – I think I’m just the same. I write garbage too. But clearly it’s the wrong garbage because it doesn’t interest anyone at all, least of all an agent.
Anyway, before I get going on my huge self-pity rant, I’m going to reproduce the original blog here which was written in 2018.
I realised this week that I can at best be described a late bloomer. The fact that I haven’t actually bloomed yet makes it later still! After a horrible week, full of cruel disappointments and an appalling writing crisis, telling myself that I am still to bloom is about all I’ve got to keep me going. It’s the positive flip-side to “total failure.” It also helps (though not much) to alleviate the sickening green envy I feel when twenty-two-year-olds win major writing awards and publication deals because, obviously, I wanted to be that 22 y.o. when I was 22. I wanted to be a child star. And the rather lonely, neglected, nightmare-filled child inside me STILL wants to be that star.
So I’m having to placate myself with the fact that many extremely successful writers only found that success very late. I’m sure I’m not the first “ageing” writer to tell myself, again and again, like a mantra “late bloomer, late bloomer, late bloomer…..” in the vague hope that it will cheer me up.
After all, don’t late bloomers bloom the most beautifully?
Looking for “late bloomer” quotes online made me raise several eyebrows, though. Those quotes by people who say they only bloomed in their twenties……..how is that late blooming? From my positively ancient viewpoint, anything below 50 to me is still spring-chicken country.
Wikipedia got it right, though; however, did they have to put “child prodigy” at the top of their “see also” list – right under late blooming authors??!
While I enjoy a strange read, this was so strange as to be alienating. The science was intriguing but the story, I’m afraid, was not. Characterisation was virtually non-existent, except perhaps for the policeman who managed, at best, to be a cypher. There are always going to be problems when you read a translated work, but the translator’s note at the back seemed to embrace these problems and work with them. Despite this, I found myself indifferent to the fate of all and felt quite often unengaged. Everything that interested me when I first began reading the book seemed to fade away as the book went, very slowly, nowhere. There are a number of footnotes intended to help the reader through historical and cultural references and yet, oddly, I found I learned nothing. In a word, I think I could describe this book as cold.
Writing from Alter-Space 