Getting to know Jen Shaw, the Protagonist of On The Edge

The opening scene of On The Edge – a lighthouse in a storm with an unconscious and dreaming young woman hanging from its top – came to me one night when I stopped to watch one of the lighthouses that litter the dangerous stretch of coast where I live. The lighthouse came first but Jen Shaw, the daredevil protagonist of the book, arrived straight afterwards, getting in the car with me as I drove away and telling me about herself. By the time I reached home, I knew her. I don’t mean I knew all the details of her life – that was a more gradual process – but I knew how she thought and spoke and, on a very visceral level, how she felt. 

It is not the first nor last time a character has arrived in my head, fully alive. However, I still have to work at discovering their stories using the full toolbox of writer techniques, so that I can put words to my instinctive sense of who they are. 

Jen had lots of areas for me to explore not the least her strange family and her attachment to Cornwall. But it was her fearlessness that initially fascinated me most. I’ve always been interested in people who love taking risks and living life on the edge and Jen was my chance to explore them. Plus there seemed to be a great number of books at the time that portrayed women as victims and I was keen to write about someone with agency. And finally Jen was the complete opposite to me. I am physically very cautious and terrified of heights. Even going up the lighthouse for research was an ordeal. I personally find it liberating to work with characters who are markedly different to me so I was very excited when Jen rolled up into my life. 

Did I start by planning the novel and doing the research? No! Instead I sat down and started writing. It felt like the right thing to do and looking back it was. I think I was afraid that my sense of who Jen was might disappear as suddenly as it had arrived before I’d pinned her down a little so I wrote the first few chapters letting her dictate the action until I finally ground to a halt. But I adored writing those chapters – in fact I adored writing the first draft of all of On The Edge. 

By and large I followed the same working pattern throughout, blitzing out words in the morning and researching in any other free time, only stopping writing when I was completely stymied because of my ignorance about something. I’m not sure if I’d recommend it as a modus operandi because it took a huge amount of rewriting to tame that first draft.

I learned quite a few things about Jen while writing those early chapters:

– She was a passionate and skilled climber. Instead of being a gibbering wreck when she regained consciousness on the lighthouse, her years of practice snapped into place and she climbed her way to safety. 

– She had a history of daredevil climbing exploits. She thought her predicament on the lighthouse was her own doing. She loved risk. She loved the feeling of adrenalin rinsing through her body but it had got out of hand. Something very serious had gone wrong in her life.

So armed with this information, I started to read about climbing and its technical aspects. I wrote a few passages full of technical descriptions and terms and quickly deleted them. There was no point writing something nobody but a climber would understand. I made the decision to avoid any word not easily understood by a layman.

I realised there was more to climbing than technique. I discovered some of the heroes of the climbing world. People such as Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, who achieved the first free climb of the Dawn Wall, an iconic 3,000ft rock face in Yosemite National Park. In free climbing, although climbers are roped in case of a fall, they climb without using the ropes or any aids, using only their bodies and a scattering a chalk dust. The climb itself took 19 days although it took them years of planning and failed attempts. They slept each night in a bivouac suspended on from the rock and this horrified me more than the actual climbing. I began to feel that despite their careful preparations, a streak of madness ran through them.

I knew that Jen would have followed their every move while they were making the attempt. I knew she’d have read every blog about the climb and watched every piece of video footage. I began to understand her world and because I was writing at the same time much of my newfound knowledge permeated naturally into Jen’s life on the page.

I read what the climbers had to say about why they climbed. Driving themselves to achieve played a part in it but there was more. Many climbers talked about the beauty of their surroundings, of loving the views, of feeling at peace when they were climbing. I started to understand why Jen would use a climbing gym for practice but never see it as a substitute for climbing outdoors. That the glorious feeling of seeing the world from places no one else could get to was key to her.

Many climbers knew they were obsessed. Some of them had doubts about the wisdom of being so driven. Of devoting so much of their lives to climbing. But they knew they had no choice. They talked about the magic moments that nothing else gave them. The excitement that they felt in their bodies and the irresistible urge to climb even after days spent on the rock. I was amazed by how thoughtful they were and often philosophical.

From all this, a clear picture of Jen began to emerge. She was, in no way, based on any single climber. As I read I knew when Jen shared their feelings and opinions and practices and when she didn’t. Even within herself there were contradictions and conflicts.

And then I started to look at other areas of her life: her work, her family, her friends, her childhood and most importantly how her fearlessness and passion for climbing might permeate into these areas of her life and the effect she might have on other people…. And On The Edge began to take shape.

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ON THE EDGE

Jesmond explores the adrenaline rush of risky sports in this original mystery…a promising debut’
– Sunday Times (Best Crime Novel of the Month)

‘A promising debut’
– Times & Sunday Times Crime Club

Jen Shaw has climbed all her life: daring ascents of sheer rock faces, crumbling buildings, cranes – the riskier the better. Both her work and personal life revolved around climbing, and the adrenaline high it gave her. Until she went too far and hurt the people she cares about. So she’s given it all up now. Honestly, she has. And she’s checked herself into a rehab centre to prove it.

Yet, when Jen awakens to find herself drugged and dangling off the local lighthouse during a wild storm less than twenty-four hours after a ‘family emergency’ takes her home to Cornwall, she needs all her skill to battle her way to safety.

Has Jen fallen back into her old risky ways, or is there a more sinister explanation hidden in her hometown? Only when she has navigated her fragmented memories and faced her troubled past will she be able to piece together what happened – and trust herself to fix it.

BUY HERE 

 

On The Edge is Jane Jesmond’s debut novel and the first in a series featuring dynamic, daredevil protagonist Jen Shaw. Although she was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, raised in Liverpool and considers herself northern through and through, Jane’s family comes from Cornwall. Her lifelong love of the Cornish landscape and culture inspired the setting of On The Edge. Jane has spent the last thirty years living and working in France. She began writing steadily six or seven years ago and writes every morning in between staring out at the sea and making cups of tea. She also enjoys reading, walking and amateur dramatics and, unlike her daredevil protagonist, is terrified of heights!

Find out more about Jane on her website

Twitter @AuthorJJesmond

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing