Writing through grief...

My unpublished book and the lessons I took from it...

It’s kinder to think of it as sitting in a drawer. A thick wedge of paper, dust gathering between the sheets. Perhaps it’s in an antique desk, with clattering steel handles, waiting to be discovered - long after I’ve gone - its genius emanating from the pages.

The reality of its fate is a lot less romantic. It feels so much more like a failure to think of it as a simple doc.x file, languishing in (or most likely deleted out of) agents and editors inboxes.

It would be over dramatic to say that writing this first, unpublished book of mine saved me. The book is not my Jack Dawson. But the process did cleanse me of something. Washed out of me a murk I didn’t even know was there. It must have been, God, eight years ago, I don’t really understand time. I’d just started at LOOK magazine, a fashion weekly now lost in the way that many magazines are now lost, and I knew I wanted to write fiction. But while others around me (you find in journalism there are a lot of people wanting to write fiction) spoke in plots, had strong character arcs and were, in general, a lot more together in their writing, I wasn’t. I didn’t have any ideas. Yet these scenes kept landing in my head, that I had to get down on paper, in the notes section on my phone, on my hands and arms, scratched on in biro pen on nights out. Fictional scenes created entirely out of the fired up neurons of my imagination. Except… They weren’t fiction. Not really. 

The book, you see, is about a 19-year-old girl whose mum is dying. Sound familiar? But it’s not a memoir. More of an over exaggerated patch work of the months that made me. Some things happened, others absolutely didn’t. Before I wrote it I could only speak of that time in a detached, factual way. This is what happened, this is when it happened. “No, I’m fine, really, I’m absolutely fine.”

I couldn’t acknowledge the true grimy guilt-inducing elements of my grief. The anger, the black outs, the over-the-top crushes and fixations and… the part that makes me feel sick, even now, to type… the nights where I’d look at her puffy, unrecognisable face and think ‘why are you not dead yet?’ There were so many moments where I blamed her breathing for my pain. I vomited all of that held-in shame out onto paper, then I edited it, pieced it into a vague structure and, during that process, a process I told myself was simply so I could become an author, I began to face up to the reality that I had been swallowing. I began to see myself in the main character. How young she was, how unprepared. I could forgive her… and therefore I could forgive myself. 

I’ve been thinking about creativity a lot lately and why I write. Where I want to go next. Partly because the brilliant Projecting Grief interviewed me recently, but partly because - as I type this - I’m staying in an artists residence, on the Isle Of Mull. I’ve been trying to re-shape my life of late, focus more on the work that I enjoy. Work that isn’t for a promotion, an award or the impressed look on someone’s face when I tell them what I do for a living. Setting up camp where artists are invited to create new pieces of work (I’m helping my friend Heather with hers, you can check her out here) feels exactly like how I want my life to look. Travelling, being creative, meeting new people. Were I the vision board type those three elements would be right in the centre of the cork. 

But I also feel a little like I did in the early days of working in magazines. Back then, I felt an unremarkable blob, my presence in this shiny world an unwelcome, unpalatable stain. I don’t feel like that here. This blob has evolved. Today I feel splattered across a canvas. I lack focus. Why can’t I hone in on one project, one ambition? Instead of flitting from poet to journalist to author to newsletter ‘creator’? In magazines I thought I had to be click-clack heeled, blow dried perfection. Now I’m thinking I have to be tortured, focused, creating a masterpiece. They’re both cliched ideas of success. I need to stop thinking this way. I’m trying to leave being someone else, for everyone else, behind. 

Yet, as part of that mission I tend to shame myself for wanting people to like me, to like my work. There’s good reason for this. If I pay too attention to the numbers, whether that’s on an Instagram poem or how many people opened this newsletter, I shut myself down. Words become twisted and ugly the more I envision others reading them. But, were I to abandon that altogether, I’m not sure I’d get anything done. 

As, with that first book, I wrote it because I was chasing something. I envisioned being published, becoming a literary success. I wanted a movie premiere! People to come up to me in the street and tell me how much the book meant! To be in Paris and have someone recognise me, and excitedly throw a party for me! (that last one is for any Sex and The City fans)

No one wanted it.

It was first rejected by multiple agents, then when I did get an agent, multiple publishers. It had nothing to do with the creation of what I call my second novel that I guess, in the eyes of the publishing world, is my first.

I’ve been calling this first book - named We Could Fall Apart - a book, when really it’s simply a manuscript. I was embarrassed by this for a long time. How glorious I thought this novel was! How much it spoke to me! How sure I was that everyone else would feel the same! I wanted these feelings to be validated by the people that mattered. Now I can see that book for what it was: therapy. My past had been polluting me and I had to sweat it out. 

That’s not to say it’s this tangle of unreadable, messy emotions. I still think, in many ways, it’s better than my published book (which is really good, please buy it!) But that’s because We Could Fall Apart was written entirely for me. The Matchmaker was written to be commercial. This is the tug-of-war many writers have. They say ‘write the book that you want to read’ but what if no one else wants to read it?! Or rather, it doesn’t fit in with the trends the publishing world are looking for at that moment in time. This happens a lot. So much, out of the writer’s control, dictates what gets published and what makes a book a ‘success’. It leaves those of us who don’t have huge, six-figure, Bookseller article worthy deals (or indeed any deal at all) feeling as if we’ve failed. 

I can now see that writing something you love will never, ever be a failure. Before I wrote We Could Fall Apart I didn’t have any ideas for books. Now I’ve written one, am currently writing another and have a few more ideas that I’m so looking forward to moving onto. Paul Auster once said that your first few pieces of work are simply “clearing your throat” and that’s exactly how I feel about this book. 

But, much more importantly,  it taught me about myself. It taught me about grief. How my writing is unraveling my feelings, sometimes never coming up with any answers, but learning all the same. Something I do each week on this newsletter. I’m learning that it’s possible to write for other people but also write for myself. I guess I like being a messy blob smeared across a canvas. I can find myself in all of that colour. 

What do you think? If you’re a writer, why do you write? Or if you want to write something about your life then please do get in touch. I can help you! Also, I’ve been floating the idea of publishing that first book, right here, for paid subscribers. So if you’d like that please let me know or sign up! Thank you!