The Heart Behind My Words

I am still completely blown away that my first novel Her Greatest Mistake was taken on by my lovely agent, earned me a three book deal and has now sold over 50,000 copies. All this happened in less than a year. Is this real? Did this actually happen? I’d already launched myself into Who I Am my second novel before securing the book deal but for me the book deal changed everything with expectation sitting stubbornly on my shoulders.

And I, like many other writers suddenly felt the weight of second book syndrome. I’d read about this before and maybe even doubted it but it is very real. Her Greatest Mistake came straight from my heart and without appreciating it – without the weight of expectancy. And so without rules, guidelines and the practicalities of how to write a book. Goading me to question, judge, ruminate, procrastinate and doubt myself even more than I did before.

Probably more so because I have no formal writing qualifications but I do have a whole heap of life experience, professional experience (psychology) and a profound love for reading and spending time in my imagination. As a child, I was never happier than when alone with a book, writing stories and generally living in my imagination. Yet for some reason I didn’t pursue writing at university or as a career.

Often, in the last few years I have asked myself how much I regret my choices but hindsight is so easy, not to mention punishing. We do what we do for whatever reason at a point in time. And this is what I hold close when I write. Hindsight shouldn’t be something to beat yourself with more something to learn from and inform.

Each writer is different and it couldn’t be truer you should always do what works for you and not what you think you should do. I could read every available book detailing structure, plot and characterisation but I believe nothing could have advised me better than life and experience. Including all the mistakes and the not so great times.

So why did I turn to the dark side? People often ask – why psychological thrillers if you’re writing within the realms of personal experiences? Why are my plots so twisted, my characters seemingly complicated? So dark? Should I hear alarm bells ringing here? Has my life been so dark that I now think dark is normal? But here’s the thing – as much as I would love to say everyone has a life always full of joy, sadly this isn’t the case.

For most of us, it has stages of obscurity, periods of strain and moments forcing you on to the edge of your seat. Or have I been unlucky? So for me, I write about the complexities of life and the angst’s people sometimes face, okay so perhaps with a little extra warping for good measure.

By nature, I am a people watcher, I watch and wonder what is happening behind the obvious surface and what do we not know, what if things aren’t quite what they seem? Isn’t this often the case, it’s all about what we don’t know rather than what we do know?

What conflicts could be happening behind the scenes? Don’t we all have conflicts? Don’t we all have things lurking in the back of our minds waiting to pounce? Then what happens, what are the ever rippling consequences? Each and every thought, comment, response and behaviour holds a consequence.

My background and profession have fuelled a fascination of how the mind can become so iniquitous and I love to explore what ensues when people’s emotions are tested, strained, torn, when life throws its stuff at us, as it does. But sometimes it’s not the stuff itself to cause the damage but how we respond to it.

Human nature offers this ambiguity I love to write about. For me psychological thrillers simply push the boundaries of these ambiguities and emotional states to the limit and perhaps that little bit further beyond. Always questioning what happens when emotions stop working for us and what if they turn against us?

And this brings us back to the other edge of expectations. The expectations we hold for others and how they should behave in given circumstances. But context and perspective is everything. The human tendency to assume how anyone might behave in given circumstances interests me. Isn’t this something we are all guilty of, making comment on how we would act if in the position of someone else? Be them real or fictional characters? Yet, truly, this is so erroneous because none of us knows how we would behave in someone else’s shoes, without their context and perspective.

What I am trying to say is this – I hope my characters’ act and behave according to their context but also, the best part – out of context. That they surprise, shock and delight but mostly encourage the reader to drop personal perspective, allowing for the what if to be considered.

Across genres and life emotional states and needs are key and this is particularly reflected in Who I Am, where the characters are so diverse in many ways and yet the emotional needs remain the same.

How the characters go about satisfying those needs is what divides them. And this is also why I do little planning when writing, it allows me to drop my perspective, to enter the minds of my characters and the context they are determining to allow them to inform me how they need to respond. If I plan too much I feel like someone has shut in me in a square room with no windows and only one obvious exit route, so shutting down my imagination. Instead, I rely heavily on visualising the plights of my characters, for me this really helps build their credibility.

But to do this I need to be free from the structure of traditional plot planning.

So this is the heart behind my writing. It’s about what I know, the feelings I have experienced, the lessons life has shown me and the thought processes of what if… Maybe I didn’t follow the conventional route to becoming a writer but it in my mind – I was always gathering material, subconsciously making notes and on a subliminal level – living my research. I write with my heart, edit with my head and always aware of the sway of context and perspective.

I allow the characters to plan the story for me, to take me down their chosen paths and even sometimes to completely re-script the story I first drafted in my mind. I’m a firm believer, we should all step outside our comfort zone from time to time, try to consider differing perspectives and that hindsight is as fundamental as research is, in writing psychological thrillers.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips