How Bruce Springsteen, Adele and Magic Help Me To Write…

Every time I sit down to write I am mystified as to where ideas come from. In 2016 I was lucky enough to get an agent and a two-book deal with Corvus Atlantic Books and around that time I started to think about what that ‘magic ingredient’ is in a novel that makes it hang together and resonate with readers.

Before I became a professional writer I have been an accountant and a psychologist, both involving a lot of my beloved maths – psychology isn’t all chatting with patients, the research side of it requires a high-level knowledge of statistics. But when I came to do a PhD looking at the construction of the health identity, I stumbled upon what was going to be a lifelong love of storytelling.

I used a narrative methodology to look at the participants experiences and fell in love with their stories. I had written short stories and even a full novel in the past, but I knew I had to start writing fiction again.

I wrote a novel. I didn’t understand the publication process, but I knew I needed an agent so I sent it off and the first one I contacted wanted to see a full manuscript. I thought this was the normal procedure, but I know now that often takes years to even get someone in the industry to look at your work. I sent of the full manuscript but the agent never got back to me.

Meanwhile, the best thing happened. I joined a writing group.

I quickly found out the submission procedure, timescales and that I was trying to write in the wrong genre. I also found some fabulously creative people who I am still friends with today. This was when I started to look more closely at the burning desire to tell stories.

I instinctively know that writing is a form of abstraction. In the book “Sparks of Genius” the author gives the example of Picasso sketching his colleague Marie Therese Walter while she was knitting. The resulting sketch was not of Marie or the needles, but the movement of the needles. Unless you understand the possibilities of abstraction, the sketch could look like a scribble. This also kind of explains subjectivity and bad reviews – and the times when people just don’t get your work.

To me, all art is abstraction. It filters an author’s ideas through their own experiences and knowledge and puts them on the page in the shape of a story. So while there is a general recognizable shaped container, the content is as unique as the writer. But how does a writer make the reader really understand what they are saying? Where is that magic?

I love music, which I also see as storytelling, and this was my starting point. How did Adele invoke that strong feeling everyone got from her song ‘Hello’? The emotional surge that runs through all her songs? How does that translate to rock music and to classical music?

Bruce Springsteen recently played a show on Broadway. I didn’t get to go to Broadway to see him, but I watched the show on Netflix. Imagine my maths-geek delight when Bruce offered a formulae for ‘the magic’! In his autobiography he says this:

“When the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three.”

1+1=3. The extra bit of magic that connects us with something or someone, gives that resonance.

Until I started to write Perfect Ten I had been writing stories for myself. I truly believe that the first draft of my novel is me telling the story to myself, getting it on the page. Everything after that is me getting to know the characters and developing the plot. But, armed with my investigation into magic, Adele and abstraction, I decided to write with a specific emotion in mind. One that was common and would resonate with the reader. Revenge.  But inevitably, Perfect ten wasn’t entirely about revenge, but about psychological abuse and why Caroline, the main character, sought revenge.

The words flew onto the page and when I sent out to an agent I had the ‘writer’s dream’ experience. Judith Murray contacted me the same day and I signed with her the next week. Perfect Ten was sold to Corvus Atlantic books and came out in September 2018. The second novel is due later in 2019, this time written around the emotion of fear.

Had I created that magic? Had readers resonated? I don’t know. I hope so. But I am still learning. I still feel the burning urge to write every single day. I wake up hearing my character’s voices. I know enough about the theory of storytelling to structure a novel. I don’t have a writing qualification but I have a brilliant editor.  But I still don’t know where ‘the flow’ comes from.

My natural curiosity as a psychologist has led me to the subconscious and beyond, but in the meantime I am writing another novel where the main character, Kaye, is whispering the first draft to me, the story of her story, slowly. Only when it is complete and I show it to another person, probably my agent, will I know if that resonance is there.

I hope it is. Until then, I’ll continue my search for the magic and listen to Bruce and Adele.

—

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing