Susan Green

The NHS gives the official definition of  carer as ‘anyone, including children and adults, who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction and cannot cope without their support. The care they give is unpaid.

All the same, it’s a tricky word. It’s a noun freighted with meaning and requiring qualification. It brings with it a hint of transaction, of an inequality, which is all the more uncomfortable if the person you’re caring for is someone you love. By using it, however accurate it might be in terms of the day-to-day realities, there’s a risk that it redefines a partnership, a balanced give-and-take relationship, and turns it into an obligation; carer and patient, carer and client. One is active, the other passive, whereas every carer knows there’s nearly always come kind of reciprocity even in the darkest hours.
You are still you, and they are still they.

An Extra Pair of Hands by Kate Mosse
Profile Books/the Wellcome Collection, London, 1921

My sister-in-law gave me An Extra Pair of Hands by Kate Mosse for Christmas. Subtitled A story of caring, ageing and everyday acts of love, it’s a memoir interspersed with reflections on the ‘invisible army of carers holding families together’.

I think she gave it to me because it echoed my own experience, and because of my recent stint of working in the aged care sector. Mosse, a best-selling novelist (the Languedoc series), non-fiction writer and playwright, describes caring for her parents Richard and Barbara. She helped her mother care for her father as he declined with Parkinson’s Disease, and then supported her when she was widowed.
Mosse and her husband had a large house in Chichester, in Sussex; her parents came to live with them. This is what we did too, though in reverse. My husband and I, with our 18-month-old son, moved in with my parents in 1998. Dad had Parkinson’s, like Mosse’s father, and also cancer. After he died in 2002 (it was the 20th anniversary of his death on the 5th January) we cared for my mother until she died in 2008. Ten years; all of my 40’s.
Not only Mosse’s parents, but also her mother-in-law Rosie joined the family. Rosie sounds like a force of nature; unstoppable, vivacious, life-enhancing. Plenty of Blitz spirit there. Rosie and Barbara, two very different women, even forged an unlikely but close friendship after Barbara was widowed. I enjoyed Mosse’s descriptions of their outings, their travels, their conversations. Importantly, as well as detailing the crises and difficulties of care, she celebrates the joys and pleasures of being with older people.

Mosse talks about guilt, tiredness and boredom, about juggling priorities, about the struggles of navigating the health system and managing in the times of covid. But this is not an incisive or challenging book. It doesn’t set out to be. It’s gentle in scope. Mosse says explicitly that she did not choose to write about anything too personal. The book has a slightly sanitised feel to it; there is no bum-wiping here, but neither could there be. Suffusing her story with love and respect, Mosse preserves their dignity. If I wrote about my parents, I suspect it would be much the same.
She wants the reader to think about ageing not as something that happens to generic old people, but to real people, loved people, with histories and personalities and gifts still to give. It happens to families. As the jacket blurb says,”…most of all, it’s a story about love.”

I had ten years as a carer for my parents.
My experience with strangers, as a home and community carer, was brief. Three months, if you count my placement. I got sick, I had to have some time off, and now I am unsure about going back to it. I might be too old.

It was intense, physically and emotionally. You go into people’s homes and you see, intimately, up close and personal, how they live. They are completely vulnerable – literally. They are naked as you help them to shower and dress.

Bodies. Skin. What a surprise; under the old-lady nighties can be beautiful old bodies, sturdy and strong with gorgeous folds and curves (the clients were mainly women, only a few men). Maybe it’s my early years at art school, my life-drawing class; I thought they’d be wonderful to sketch. “You never saw much sun,” I commented to one lady with perfect skin, but, “Oh no,” she said, and reminisced about her first bikini at fifteen. Her father was outraged but her mother over-ruled him. She came home from the pool lobster-red. “I told you so.”

But ageing is not always pretty. You see tissue-thin skin that’s breaking down, ulcerated, bandaged, inflamed; occasionally you have to try to keep hands, arms or feet dry with plastic bags and tape. You see arthritic deformities, bones sticking out with emaciation, protruding swollen joints, scars and wounds.
Or obesity. Even morbid obesity. Incontinence. Smells. I’m not on some higher plane, I noticed these things, observed them, was moved by them. Does this sound like lack of respect? I don’t mean it to. Before I did my placement, I was worried that I’d feel disgust, that I’d  react, even (beyond my control) retch. But finally, when I was there and performing intimate care for people, it was just so human. It was fine. It felt like a privilege. I mean that.
You see the pain and effort of living in an old body. Moving in and out of baths and showers takes time. There’s courage and endurance and willpower involved. I met with  good humour, no humour, profound grumpiness. No judgement. I think my lecturers taught me well, or perhaps I worked it out for myself. This is who they are, where they are; you do what you can. You do it for lovely, kind, welcoming people who reward you with smiles and thanks, and others who are not lovely, who are withdrawn into pain and despair. You are there also for the carers, the spouses or family members. Sometimes there was a cup of tea or a chat, and sometimes not. You see loneliness, frustration, embarrassment, exhaustion. You see love.
In the end, it’s just so human.

I’m going to pass An Extra Pair of Hands on to a friend my age, a daughter who is caring for her 97-year-old mother. Though there is little on the nitty-gritty of care, Mosse depicts the conflicting emotions of carers so well. The relief and yet the grief and profound sense of loss when the role ends. I think it will help my friend feel validated, and understood.

Three books in three days! When your beach holiday turns cold, you read.

Apples Never Fall is Liane Moriarty back to form. When Joy Delaney, the matriarch of a famous tennis family, goes missing, her husband Stan is the prime suspect. But what about that strange young woman who insinuated herself into the family home? Where is she now?  Her four adult children, frightened and worried, find themselves in the middle of an investigation, and dreading what they might discover about their parent’s marriage. Moriarty has superb command of her material – families, variously dysfunctional; marriages and relationships; secrets and lies. The book has ‘can’t stop reading’ pacing, twisty plot plus the bonus of intelligent and thought-provoking insight. It’s also (darkly) quite funny.

I went to the bookshop expecting to buy Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Orwell’s Roses. Out of stock. So I bought Mexican Gothic instead. Because of the great cover.
Not exactly the ‘like for like’ substitution but after my last outing into current horror, I guess I was primed for more. It was absolutely what I was looking for.
Deliriously creepy, begins with the classic Rebecca/Jane Eyre ‘young woman in a house of secrets’.
Mexican socialite Noemi is called to visit her sick cousin, Catalina, who’s married into a secretive family whose decaying mansion, High Place, is set above the defunct silver mine that made their fortune. The family is unwelcoming; Catalina’s husband is tall, dark, handsome and rude; his mother limits Noemi’s access to Catalina; and Catalina herself seems changed. The only sympathetic member of the High Place family is pale, delicate brother-in-law Francis. Family secrets, a deranged patriarch, forbidding family retainers, fog, cemeteries, wallpaper that moves, nightmares, fungus… The climactic chapters got more and more bonkers until the whole thing shifted into truly bizarre HP Lovecraft territory with the added twist of Mexican colonial history, and indigenous religion and folklore.
Loved it. Can’t wait to read more.

My third book was Anne Patchett’s new book of essays, These Precious Days. They’re engaging, intelligent, easy to read, like listening in to the inner conversation of a dear friend.
It’s a quiet book. There is nothing too difficult or challenging about these pieces. And I kept noticing the cushioning effect of Patchett’s success, fame and wealth, her happy marriage to a lovely, eminent doctor (who, by the way, flies planes as a hobby). Fortunate circumstances.  Then there’s her whiteness and middle-class-ness and (do I have to use the word? Yes, I do…) ‘privilege’. Shall we say, these essays are not gritty. At times I found myself wishing I’d been able to get hold of the Rebecca Solnit after all.
But you know what? What’s my life if not privileged? (Not wealthy, though. Dammit.)
Easy to read can be good. Can be absolutely fine. In this case, it meant easy to love. These Precious Days, the longest essay, is about Patchett’s experience of taking a relative stranger, Sooki (who just happens to be Tom Hank’s personal assistant) into her home while she is undergoing an experimental cancer treatment. A beautiful, moving and illuminating exploration. This isn’t sharp or forensic writing (Helen Garner’s The Spare Room; compare and contrast); it’s suffused with warmth and emotion, and I was left thinking more deeply about friendship, suffering, love, death… You know, the big stuff. I’m sure this collection will be deservedly, widely popular.

Reader: beware. This is a big ol’ whinge. I’m around 27,000 words which is half way, or maybe even a bit more, through a new novel. Up until the last thousand words, it’s been – if not exactly a breeze; it is work, after all – fun to write. Flowing. I’ve known where I’m going and it’s been a straight path to get there. A big sigh of relief that I’ve got my groove back.

And now? Well, I keep stuttering and stumbling. Stopping and starting. Feeling stuck. Like a little boat that’s been bobbing merrily down a river but now is snagged, high and dry, not going anywhere.

I know my destination (as in, the end of the story) but stranded, high and dry, I’m obviously struggling with how to get there. This is what I could call a ‘mid-book slump’. What was begun with such high spirits now feels dreary and dull. Where’s the bounce? The fun?  If I can’t find them, how will the reader?

Comparing the two states – flow, and this – I’d say it’s like pleasure and pain. And though I know that the pain will stop, I don’t quite believe it.

So what do I do? There are a few choices.

1. Just keep writing. Slog along. Plow through. No matter how dreary and wretched it seems, keep going. Don’t judge, just do it. Words on paper; get started, keep going and don’t revise. Set the timer at one hour. Do it again. Again. Again.

2. Radical, this one. Don’t care. It’s like sketching. Don’t even form proper sentences; words and fragments of sentences are OK. Sketch out action, dialogue, plot lines. I’m not someone who draws or diagrams, but I guess if I was, I’d do this now. Set the timer. God, this feels hard…

3. Re-read. Start at the very beginning. Re-read and revise as I go, trying to immerse myself again in what I loved enough to start the project. I’ll often realise with surprise that it’s OK. A first draft, and rough, but OK. I can fall in love with the story again. I can hear ‘the voice’… and get back on the writing horse.

4. Take a break. A week is good. Two is better. Don’t look at it, think about it, worry or fret. Come back to it refreshed and ready to go.

5. Wait it out. Patience is a virtue, so they say.

I am reading Charlotte Wood’s The Luminous Solution. I like finding out about how other writers work, how they see their own process, their thoughts about the art and craft of making stuff up, their thoughts about creativity and literature and art. It’s the right book at the right time; it’s helping me keep my courage up. Courage? I feel like giving up at times. It’s just a silly kid’s book, says a negative voice inside my head. It’s nothing; there are too many books in the world anyway, and it won’t be missed. Why do you bother? Why do you care so much?

In an essay called The Grumpy Struggle (yes!) Wood writes:

In the midst of this gloom, to create is an act of enlargement, of affirmation. It lights a candle in the darkness, offering solace, illumination – maybe even the possibility of transformation – not just for the maker but for the reader or viewer, which is to say all of us. Art urges us to imagine and inhabit lives other than our own, to be more thoughtful, to feel more deeply, to challenge what we think we already know. Art declares that we contain multitudes, that more than one thing can be true at once. And it gives us a breathing space, in which we can listen more than talk, where we can attentively question our own beliefs. It gives us a place in this chaotic world in which to find the sort of meaning that only arises out of the stillness, deep within our quiet selves.

If I can think that even though it’s only a silly kid’s book, it is also a candle – a possible candle –  for some kid, I can wait it out. The water will rise, the boat will float, and my little floating craft will start bobbing along the river again.

When I asked my old editor what her publishing company had been excited about in 2021, she recommended two books, one junior fiction – A Glasshouse of Stars –  and the other, House of Hollow,  YA.  I ordered them both. And both are amazing.

The three Hollow sisters – Grey, Vivi and Iris –  disappeared as children. Just like that, on the street in Edinburgh; they were there and then they weren’t. The trio reappeared, naked and with small wounds at the base of their throats, a month later. They were never able to remember what happened to them.
Skip forward a decade. Grey is now a world famous model with her own fashion label and her face on the cover of Vogue magazine. Vivi is a rock star. Iris, the youngest, who narrates the story, is in her last year at school. All three girls are strange; not only arrestingly beautiful, but possessed of a kind of glamour – in the old sense of enchantment. They cast a spell, even when – like Iris –  they don’t want to.
When Grey goes missing, Iris and Vivi go looking for her. Only to find out that someone – or something – is on the hunt, too.

And that’s where I should stop, for fear of spoilers. Except to say that this book introduced me to a new sub-genre;  body horror. The flowers growing out of live flesh were especially disturbing. The words dark, haunting and chilling come to mind.

I don’t read a lot of YA fiction. I don’t read a lot of horror. I must change my ways. House of Hollow was addictive; a darkly twisted fairytale, an inventive mixture of archetypal and mythic themes entwined in modern lives, written in gorgeous, lush prose. Never have decay and putrescence seemed so deliciously sensual.

You can’t judge a book by its cover.
The really lovely illustration by Cornelia Li for A Glasshouse of Stars speaks of sweetness, magic and whimsy. Which are certainly here in Shirley Marr’s new junior novel. But it’s a much meatier story than you might expect.
Meixing Lim, her father and pregnant mother have been left a house in the New Land by First Uncle. As soon as they arrive from their island home, problems arise and multiply. Everything is different and strange; language, food, money, school, shops. There’s racism to contend with. Anti-Asian posters are plastered in the street; her father can only find a labouring job, and he’s bullied on the site. Money is tight, and her parents begin to quarrel. Stressed and anxious, neither have much time for their daughter’s fears and worries. Meixing’s trying to cope with the new language and a vastly different school system, as well as nasty girls and no friends, but it’s a struggle.
However when she comes home, another reality awaits.
The house, which Meixing names Big Scary, seems to be alive. Rooms change in size and colour and location according to mood and need; a window is an eye, the carpet is fur. The abandoned glasshouse in the garden is even more magical.

The first thing you think is that it is much bigger in here than you thought it would be…
Spread out before you is an entire orchard. You stare in surprise at what is in front of you…
A pink serpent, looking for all the world like it escaped from the neon glow of Big Scary’s wardrobe, hisses at you as you approach. You take a step back and it disappears into the branches of a tree. You aren’t scared because the sun is spreading reassuring rays over to you from the east. This is a sun you can stare straight at, and she has a beautiful face.

The glasshouse contains the sun and the moon and the stars, First Uncle himself and a library of magical seeds. It’s more than a bit psychedelic, but makes perfect sense. Meixing is (adult-speak here!) suffering trauma, dislocation and loneliness. She’s a child burdened with outsize responsibilities and challenges. She’s also brave and very imaginative. Her magic greenhouse is healing, consoling and uplifting.

For all the beauty of the magical greenhouse, there are some dark and difficult themes. Meixing’s family endures a shocking tragedy, her mother’s mental health unravels, there’s  racism and bullying – including an attack on Meixing and her mother –  and an unplanned home birth. There’s also a lovely optimism. A kind teacher, who makes a real difference. A principal who believes Meixing and Kevin rather than the white girl. A firm friendship with Kevin and Josh, also from immigrant families. The loving embrace of family (those amazing Aunties!). And the magnificent power of creativity and imagination.

At the end of the book, Meixing says:

When Big Scary is sad, she shrinks. When she is happy there is no limit to how big she can get. I have realised she is only a reflection of ourselves. She is not prefect, but she is only human. I am thinking of changing her name to Little Scary.
I have a magical greenhouse in the backyard that is filled with magic seeds of the imagination. You only need to plant them for ideas to grow. I go there when I’m feeling sad. I’m not scared when it gets dark inside, as that’s when the stars shine the brightest. Maybe one day I won’t need to go there any more, but I hope that I always need to dream. Even when I’m an adult.

Shirely Marr has written a really special book, blending the trippily magical with a gritty immigrant story. I won’t be surprised if A Glasshouse of Stars wins numerous awards; it deserves to be widely read and appreciated.

My second holiday book, read in a day and an evening.

A Town Called Solace is set in a small town in rural Northern Ontario during the 1970s. It opens with seven-year-old Clara keeping a vigil at the living room window.  All day. The only time she willingly leaves her post is to go next door, to feed her neighbour’s cat.

She’s watching and waiting for her older sister, rebellious teenager Rose, to return. Rose has run away before, but this time, it’s different. The police, local and provincial, are involved. There are articles in the papers. But her parents, trying to protect Clara from their terrifying and realistic fear that she has harmed or even killed, won’t tell her the truth about Rose.

Or about their elderly neighbour and Clara’s good friend Mrs Orchard. Clara believes she’s looking after Moses the cat until Mrs Orchard, who’s in hospital, recovers and returns home. But Elizabeth Orchard is already dead.

She’s given her house and willed her estate to a man called Liam Kane, who she briefly cared for when he was a child. Liam is newly divorced, has quit his unsatisfying career in accountancy, and is at one of those junctures in life when everything’s in flux. Cleaning up and selling the house will occupy his time, so he travels to Solace and moves in.  Clara is outraged.

That’s the setup. Told through the eyes of three characters – Clara, Liam and Elizabeth – A Town Called Solace takes the elements of a humdrum domestic drama and spins it into a moving, profound and deeply involving novel. Longlisted for the 2021 Booker, no less. Past and present loop backwards and forwards for the dying Elizabeth Orchard, and as the novel ends the mystery of her connection with Liam is solved. As Liam tries to solve his own mystery – the failure of his marriage, his discomfort with emotions –  his initially tentative connection with the Solace community blossom into real relationships.  I thought it was in her depiction of Clara that Lawson’s perception shone. Clara, increasingly desperate in her attempts to reconcile her child’s understanding with the mystifying adult world, adopts increasingly extreme measures in order to keep fear and anxiety at bay. And Lawson treats Clara’s struggles with personal honour – keeping secrets, keeping promises – with a beautiful seriousness.

As an exploration of love, both familial and romantic, A Town Called Solace complements and contrasts with my other great holiday read, Sarah Winman’s Still Life. That book was rambling and rambunctious, with larger than life characters, a dazzlingly beautiful setting and writing that oozed with wit and wordplay and style. A Town Called Solace is a quiet book. Constrained by its characters ‘ordinariness’ and the rural setting, with no stylistic bells, whistles and fireworks, Lawson’s writing has so much precision and clarity that I barely noticed it. Of its kind, perfection, like looking through clear water to the bottom of a lake.

Both novels were loaned to me by my dear friend and partner in crime Kirsty, who told me I’d love them. I did. So a shout out to your very fine taste in books, KK.

Returned from five days in the Grampians. First holiday with my husband (except a one-night camping trip at a friend’s farm) for over 18 months. Plans during lockdowns just kept falling through, and with our ageing dog, it was all just too hard to get away.
Being away from Castlemaine felt novel and just a bit surreal. There’d been a Tier 1 exposure site in Hall’s Gap so that some of the eateries were shut and the town and National Park were quiet but we weren’t there for cafe society or crowds. The weather was marvellous.
Rocks and mountains, trees and wildflowers, lakes and streams and waterfalls, clouds, sunsets…the full catalogue of natural wonders. Spent a lot of time looking through our window to watch joeys almost too big for the pouch nevertheless scrambling in and out, hop-skip-and-jumping (and tumbling head over heels) as if mad with joy. And duck parents superintend their babies’ progress around the property with possessive zeal. Laugh out loud stuff. One morning early, a deer and I eyeballed each other under the carport of our cabin. Emus left incredible amounts of poo. Ducks; smaller deposits, but everywhere. The manager’s husband was out with a pooper scooper twice a day.

I came back home with an extra kilo (snacks), a sore back (overestimating fitness) and two novels under my belt. I haven’t read much adult fiction lately, but my two holiday novels have kicked me off into what may well be a catch-up binge.

Sarah Winman’s Still Life was a great dive back into fictional worlds. A gloriously big, sprawling. loose novel, spanning thirty odd years, about life and love (familial, platonic, sexual; for art, literature, beauty) – and Florence.

She felt like a ghost. She woke in the night. What was that music? Some troubled beast? Some strange bird of the night? Some lost soul wandering on the moors? Just her dreams?
What wild and weird things existed here?
Sylvia got up from her narrow bed, went to the window, held open her thin curtains, dared to peep.
Nothing. Darkness everywhere.
Darkened street below, darkness of the undulating land, blackness of the forest at the village’s edge, light of a farmhouse far, far off, pale glow on the southern horizon, immensity of stars above.

Sylvia is stuck in a village in the wilds of Northumberland, a place of hills, forests and moors with appalling mobile reception. Her mother needs a break from the city, but Sylvia doesn’t want to be there. She misses her bestie Maxine, she misses her circle of friends, her city life of music, gatherings, protests.
But a different kind of life calls to her.

The first she knows about it is the music in the night, played by the strange boy Gabriel on a bone flute.

As their friendship develops, Sylvia finds herself responding to the ancient landscape as if she belongs to it. As if she can go back and become a girl of that time.
Almond shows Sylvia discovering the wildness and beauty of nature alongside the ugliness, violence and brokenness of today’s world. For some readers, passages like this may be too explicit:

She felt the closeness of the trees to herself, of the earth to herself, of the air to herself. She was not just Sylvia. She was these things too. They were her. She was the forest, she was the earth, she was the air. They gave each other life. She wanted to love them and they wanted to love her. Why did we not realise that when we do things to the earth, we do things to ourselves; when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves?
It was like a veil had fallen from her eyes.
She was seeing beauty like she’d never seen it before.

But I felt it captured the clear-eyed idealism of the young climate campaigners. A kind of sad and bewildered non-comprehension. How can we keep doing this to our world? I thought of the young girls in our hometown who organised the school strikes.

This is a beautiful YA novel. Would young adults like it? I don’t know.  Many reviewers have remarked on Almond’s singularity; his books really are like no others, written with the immediacy of poetry and a strange and otherworldly flavour all his own which may not be to everyone’s taste.  Bone Music is short, and for some readers it may also be short on story – it’s more atmosphere and feeling than plot.
I loved it.

Poets seem to be able to capture the flash, the illuminating instant, the second when an emotion – in this case, joy – pierces the heart.

Walking yesterday to pop a note in a friends letterbox, I noticed blobs of white in the greenery along the fenceline of an empty block. I waded through the long grass to look. Turned out to be these single roses on a rampant climbing bush. And I was surprised by joy.

Not an original phrase. I looked it up – Wordsworth; “Surprised by Joy”; a poem telling of his impulse to turn to a beloved person to share something wonderful, only to be hit by the realisation that he can’t. They are dead.

Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom
But thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Not the right joy poem, then.
Joy and William Blake go together, right?

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Not quite. I am not clutching the moment, though I did photograph it with my mobile.

I turned to one of my notebooks. I used to scribble down little scraps of poetry, though sometimes I didn’t note the details. Like the name of this poem, from which I’d excerpted a few lines

….and still and still my sense of joy persists.

Yes. That’s it. My sense of joy persists. Still.

I did note the poet’s name, however. He is Vivian Smith, born in Tasmania in 1933, for many years a professor at the University of Sydney, author of many collections of poetry and books on literature.

…and intertwined with every rooted ‘why’ 
such tenderness, such joy exists.

At present, with a “rooted ‘why'” at every turn, there are so many reasons to despair or rage. Or just be incredibly grumpy and turn to chocolate.  So it astonishes me that I am still capable of being ambushed by this feeling I call joy. It’s usually small scale. Often, a response to looking at the plants or insects or stones I see on the ground. That goes back to my earliest memory. Three? Four? Squatting on my fat little legs to study bugs in the garden. My source of joy persists, too. I thank and bless the star sign or deity or genetic happenstance – whatever it was – which  implanted in me  this capacity for finding joy in small things. May it continue in its persistence.

Thank you, Vivian Smith, and I am sorry that I did not note the name of your beautiful and appropriate poem.

Writers don’t need rules as much as we need the freedom to take risks and to make simple decisions for simple, practical reasons. If a piece of writing is a kite that the strong winds of feeling are blowing across the sky, we need a string to grasp. We need freedom above all, but we also need control

I’m reading about writing, because I’m writing again.
I’ve read a lot of books on the topic over the years. Perhaps I’ve been longing to find the holy grail, the ultimate guide to better, quicker, more efficient fiction writing. Certainly, some of the books I’ve read market themselves this way. Story engineering; nuts and bolts manuals; if you do this, and this, and this – voila! not just 65,000 words but a shapely, structured, novel. It’s seductive.
I have tried. I really have.  I love the idea of sitting at my computer for my writing session knowing exactly what’s going to happen and happily tap-tap-tapping away until it has.

Alas, my few experiments with this kind of superior planning have been notable failures. I’ve felt constricted. My characters veer off the straight and narrow plot paths into unexpected and unplanned-for directions. I had to ditch a disappointingly large chunk (around 15,000 words and many, many hours of research) of one of the Verity Sparks novels because my sub-plot didn’t work. I mean, for me. It was exciting and mysterious and dovetailed beautifully into the main story but it just wasn’t right. Disappointing, but as I always tell myself, in writing nothing’s lost. (This is the compost theory of creativity!)
I also know that outlines, timelines, story maps, story blueprints, diagrams, character arcs and all of the other planning tools can be useful to me once I’ve got started, if I’m in a mid-book slump, and especially when looking over a messy first draft. I’ll give a little shout out to Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel by Lisa Cron. I’ve found some of her pre-writing exercises really helpful, even if I’ve done them post- instead of pre-writing.

I guess that really, I know what to do – it’s bum on seat, mainly – but it’s always good to have a little wind in your sails.
This book – subtitled How to Write with Spontaneity and Control – and Live to Tell the Tale – by Alice Mattison is like having a long conversation with a kindly, calm, ‘older and wiser’ fellow writer. A mentor. She wants the reader/writer to approach their work with ‘more confidence, excitement and hope’.

 The qualities a writer primarily needs, both you and I – not just in order to sit down on the chair but to produce good work – are emotional as much as intellectual. Often the next task is not to learn a technique but to find the courage to use one you already know. New writers speak of the need to find the courage to write, but once they’ve shown up at an MFA program or a writer’s conference…they may think that the emotional work is done and they can now follow prescribed rules…if only they can find out what those rules are.
Writers must be at peace with the process, so they trust themselves when they come up with an idea for the next scene – which may well turn out to be wrong, but which may suggest something right. We need the courage to waste time, even though we have so little of it. It takes time to discern what’s obscured in the dark at the back of the mind, but it is what the piece needs…

I’ve come away from reading this book encouraged to persevere with my own process, even though it’s often messy and time-wasting. Courage, mon capitaine! as my dear old Dad used to say.
Bum on seat, Susan – you’ll get there in the end.