How Negative Things Influence Your Writing…

Nobody likes negativity. It may seem like some thrive on causing misery to everyone, including themselves, but it’s just not true, take it from me. I don’t like being unhappy. I don’t like it when people I love die, when people hurt me, when people bitch behind my back and I get to hear about it. It’s nasty, it gives me acid reflux and insomnia and it puts me in a very bad mood.

BUT, and here’s a handy tip, you can Rumpelstiltskin that shit and spin it into gold. Lots of people do it. And lots of people do it to great effect.

On Desert Island Discs recently, Ed Sheeran talked about using his song writing as a form of therapy when he’s feeling down “because at least you’ve got a positive experience out of a bad experience.”

Now I’m no Ed Sheeran, granted. But I feel exactly the same way he does about creating good from bad or at least filtering negativity through the conduit of art in order to understand it or to rationalise it in one’s own mind.

I wrote five Young Adult novels before Sweetpea and each one was a catharsis. In Pretty Bad Things – a story ostensibly about a teenage Bonnie and Clyde who go on a candy store crime spree in Las Vegas in order to locate their dad – what I was actually doing was consolidating my feelings about my father’s death.

In Rockoholic, I was trying to get over the crushing experience of heartbreak. So too with my third novel Dead Romantic where I was making fun of Death and heartbreak by having two teenage girls create the perfect boyfriend using body parts.

In my fourth novel Monster I was bitter about being made redundant and I turned this into a boarding school horror story featuring a prefect who’s pissed off about not being Head Girl. And in The Deviants I was trying to make sense of deep-rooted feelings of unfairness over the surfeit of media stories about paedophiles. Each of my novels has been driven, in some way, by negativity.

My latest novel ‘Sweetpea,’ an adult crime thriller about a female serial murderer, was written in the months following my mother’s death and it’s not an exaggeration to say this book poured out of me. I was so angry, so grief-stricken, some days I could barely cry. Rage was the emotion that took over. I’d seen it coming for a long time but this did little to lessen the effect of it. I was just consumed. As always, writing was my best friend and offered me a way out of my world into another one – a world where my rage could play instead of feeding on me. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and through my fingertips came the truest words I’ve ever written.

My protagonist – Rhiannon, ‘named after a Welsh witch in a Fleetwood Mac song’ is negativity personified but she just can’t help it. By day – a mild-mannered, lowly-paid office assistant at a local newspaper but by night, she likes to murder people.

A lot. And in increasingly brutal ways.

In fact, she lusts after it. She thrives on it. She targets people who, in her eyes, deserve it – perverts, sex offenders, paedophiles, bullies. Rhiannon’s back story is one of unutterable grief – as a child she was the lone survivor of a brutal attack which left her partially brain damaged and ever since then, she’s become a sort of broken mess of child and adult. Grief has come at her in waves. First with the death of her best friend, then her grand-parents, then her mother, and finally her beloved father. I suppose she herself has turned a negative into a really strange positive – she has become a sort of mistress over Death. She controls who dies now. But of course, she will eventually reap what she has sown.

Writing a psychopathic character has been challenging but immensely interesting because I’ve had to go against everything I’ve done before in fiction – normally I have to empathise, feel emotion, feel love and pain and suffering as it happens. With Rhee, I don’t have to do that. I have had to find ways around this. Some things she feels – rage, a sense of injustice, and strange new feelings of what she believes could be love by the end of the book – but for the most part, she doesn’t care nor connect with other people. At least, not easily. I was very driven by the Nirvana song ‘Dumb’ when I wrote this, particularly the lyric ‘I’m not like them, but I can pretend.’

Sweetpea is, by and large, coming from two different places. It’s about a woman who turns to the monster within herself to make life better, and it also comes from my own personal sense of annoyance that it’s 2017 and I am still afraid to walk home by myself late at night. I’m sick of being afraid. Rhiannon is one of the few women who is not afraid. Rhiannon is turning the tables – the victim has become the victor. She’s a negative positive and I love her for that. I love her for being the woman I can’t be.

Even though she can never love me back.

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About SWEET PEA

This isn’t a book for the squeamish or the faint-hearted … think Bridget Jones meets American Psycho’ – Red

The last person who called me ‘Sweetpea’ ended up dead…

I haven’t killed anyone for three years and I thought that when it happened again I’d feel bad. Like an alcholic taking a sip of whisky. But no. Nothing. I had a blissful night’s sleep. Didn’t wake up at all. And for once, no bad dream either. This morning I feel balanced. Almost sane, for once.

Rhiannon is your average girl next door, settled with her boyfriend and little dog…but she’s got a killer secret.

Although her childhood was haunted by a famous crime, Rhinannon’s life is normal now that her celebrity has dwindled. By day her job as an editorial assistant is demeaning and unsatisfying. By evening she dutifully listens to her friend’s plans for marriage and babies whilst secretly making a list.

A kill list.

From the man on the Lidl checkout who always mishandles her apples, to the driver who cuts her off on her way to work, to the people who have got it coming, Rhiannon’s ready to get her revenge.

Because the girl everyone overlooks might be able to get away with murder…

BUY SWEETPEA HERE

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C.J. Skuse was born in 1980 in Weston-super-Mare, England. She has first class degrees in Creative Writing and Writing for Young People and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of five YA novels and her first adult crime thriller SWEETPEA was released in April 2017 by HQ/HarperCollins. She is currently working on the sequel.

Follow her on Twitter @CeejaytheAuthor

 

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips