Here’s how I came to write, and importantly finish, Proud Hearts and Strong Wills .
For years my mother told me that I should be a writer. For years I replied that I had nothing to write about. Instinctively I knew that writing a full length novel is a big deal, a massive task; in order to get to the end of the story a writer has to be obsessed. It’s the only way to get to the finish. No idea obsessed me enough to drive me to write until one day in 2006…
On that day I learned about some personalities that infiltrated my mind, demanded I write about them and refused to leave until I did. I resisted; I had a life, I was too busy, but still they invaded my thoughts when I was walking the dogs, gardening, anytime my mind wandered.
Let me take you back to 2004. I was, as I am now, living in Tasmania and every Sunday my mother, in the UK, and I would chat on the phone. During one conversation she mentioned that she had always been curious about the death of her grandfather. She indicated that it was a bit mysterious and there were conflicting stories about how he died. We agreed that I would do the genealogical research online and share the results with her. Which we did. Two years later while visiting her in the UK she arranged for us to meet her cousin and his wife for lunch. Her nephew, my cousin Chris, collected us and together we drove from Oxford to North London where we had a delightful family lunch with her cousin Arthur, his wife Joyce, their son Ian and his wife Gladys. After lunch we had coffee on the patio and listened to Arthur, Joyce and Brenda, my mother, reminisce about their maternal grandmother. And Arthur told how their grandfather died, not the sanitised story my mother had been told by her mother but the real one, handed down to him by his mother, the eldest daughter, who was about eleven years old at the time.
I couldn’t get the stories out of my head. Chris dropped my mother home and I continued with him to Bristol to stay for a couple of days. I slept badly, my mind wouldn’t stop churning the stories over and over. The only remedy was to write down the tales, get them out of my head and down on paper. Fortunately, Chris had a laptop I could borrow so while he very happily communed with his other computers, I committed the family stories to virtual paper. When I saw my mother again, I showed her what I had written.
‘You can’t say that, darling.’ Pause as she read further. ‘Nor that.’
‘I will have to write a novel, then.’
‘Yes, I rather think you should.’ I couldn’t mistake the faint note of triumph I heard in her voice. I gritted my teeth.
My mother helpfully suggested that I just ‘write something every day, even if it’s just 300 words’. I gritted my teeth again and did 300 words in a month; just to spite her.
Gradually the story grew, the characters developed a life of their own. I discovered that something magical can happen when fiction is written regularly. I enter a different world where time speeds up and two hours can pass in an instant. It doesn’t happen every time. Some days putting words on the virtual page on my laptop can be a chore, a struggle but persistence pays off in the end. Again, my mother was right.
So some years and a few drafts later it’s time for you to discover why and how my great grandfather died. And what it took that formidable woman, my great grandmother, to raise her children up from the tenements of London’s West End to middle class respectability in the suburbs of North London.