Bringing The Workplace Alive In Fiction

Bringing the workplace alive in fiction

As a reader, do you feel short-changed when a fictional character is an author? While it can be an avenue for exploring the creative process, it sometimes feels like a store-cupboard staple, the tinned tomatoes of a character generation tool. It sometimes reads as if the author’s never had a proper job.

Many women writers do have ‘proper jobs’; books rarely pay the bills. These jobs can provide a wealth of material that fascinates readers, but fictionalising the day job isn’t straightforward.

We write to escape the day job

I once had a summer job in a pickle factory in Germany. To relieve the boredom, I imagined transforming the experience into a novel, along the lines of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing, but I never did. I had neither the skill nor the stamina, but mostly I didn’t want to dwell on the noise, the tedium, the smell.

Years later, when I salvaged a day a week from my ‘proper job’ to focus on writing, I needed to keep the two separate. Working as a clinical psychologist meant helping others articulate their neglected stories. Writing allowed me to play with mine.

Will our colleagues disapprove?

Some authors fear shocking their mothers. Others fear offending their colleagues.

When the protagonist of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, declared herself a psychologist, I wasn’t pleased. But at least she didn’t trespass onto my particular territory. Or she didn’t until an identity issue sent her to a clinical psychologist. Chris Edmonds has only half a dozen lines, and I’d retired before he uttered them in public, but I still cringed at the thought of former colleagues reading them.

I must be getting braver, or more foolhardy, because my next novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is set in a fictionalised version of the long-stay psychiatric hospital where I worked for over a decade. Although I enjoyed that job, I never imagined I’d want to write a novel about it; had I realised, I’d have taken notes. 

Former colleagues helped plug some gaps in my memory, but all errors are mine. Although they haven’t yet seen the finished product, I’ve felt less anxious about their verdict since receiving prepublication endorsements from authors who have worked in mental health.

Fictional truth doesn’t equate to fact

An author’s prime allegiance is to the general reader. I don’t expect mine to be familiar with the business of twentieth-century psychiatric care. I aim to make my prose both authentic and entertaining; where I have to compromise, entertainment wins. Along with my editor, beta readers without a mental health background have helped make a complex work setting comprehensible.

Even the simplest jobs have elements that outsiders don’t immediately understand. But a workplace instruction manual is the last thing a novel needs. I found that, by presenting the asylum through the eyes of a long-term patient, and from the point of view of a new member of staff, I could highlight the absurdities of a system in dire need of change. Even so, a crucial scene involving a painstaking behavioural assessment required several painstaking rewrites.

Then there are the numbers. An employee working across several departments of a large organisation will have more colleagues than a novel can handle. A real-life version of my character, Janice, a recently qualified social worker, would interact with thirty or more members of staff a week. I allowed her under ten.

Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is published 29th May 2021 in paperback and e-book by Inspired Quill. You can check whether I’ve succeeded in fictionalising my former day job by reading an extract. Or find out more, including where to buy a copy, here. I’d love to know what you think.

MATILDA WINDSOR IS COMING HOME

In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

Henry was only a boy when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; approaching sixty, his life is still on hold as he awaits her return.

As a high-society hostess renowned for her recitals, Matty’s burden weighs heavily upon her, but she bears it with fortitude and grace.

Janice, a young social worker, wants to set the world to rights, but she needs to tackle challenges closer to home.

A brother and sister separated by decades of deceit. Will truth prevail over bigotry, or will the buried secret keep family apart?

In this, her third novel, Anne Goodwin has drawn on the language and landscapes of her native Cumbria and on the culture of long-stay psychiatric hospitals where she began her clinical psychology career.

Bio

Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is inspired by her previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital. 

Website: annegoodwin.weebly.com 

Twitter @Annecdotist

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: How To and Tips