Women Writing Women

Like most of us, I began writing with the hope of creating the kind of novels I most wanted to read. While I tried to figure out what that was, I was lucky to land a minor ghostwriting job, which led to more.

Writing as someone else came easily. I could submerge in another person’s life and adopt their voice.

I loved the exacting process of working with top editorial teams – and soon I had international bestsellers. But I was busting to write as myself, with my own characters, my own style, my own vision of the wrongs and rights I was driven to explore.

Agents took me on but couldn’t sell me. I was too fond of the unexpected story direction, the atypical protagonist. In 2011, after years of rejection, I self-published my first novel. It was like awakening in a brand-new world – one that accepted the genuine me.

On my wanderings through the internet, I’ve encountered other women writers who have come into their own by self-publishing. Seven of us decided we’d get together to issue some of our novels as a limited-edition set, available for just 90 days.

We wanted to show that self-publishing has come of age. That authors are making good creative decisions, and producing work of integrity and significance.

We also hope to also make life a little better for the traditionally published author, by showing the writer corps deserves to be included in business and promotion decisions, treated as partners and offered fair deals.

But most of all, it’s about the books. This set is about independence – our books, our protagonists, our way. Here’s who we are – and why.

Carol Cooper – One Night At The Jacaranda: finding the self-belief

I’ve always written. As a child it was stories about witches burning to death from smoking in bed, perhaps presaging the medical opinion pieces I now write for The Sun newspaper. At university I wrote music reviews which got me into the best gigs, but writing was just a hobby till I began making money from magazine columns.

I then had a run of non-fiction books and several attempts at a novel. In late 2013 I published my novel One Night at the Jacaranda, when I’d finally found the self-belief to create the kind of story I’d most like to read myself.

Jane Davis – An Unchoreographed Life: following the fact that eludes you

In 2008, a prostitute was ruled to have been living off the immoral earnings of one of her clients. I was gripped by this case, as well as the perceptions of who was likely to be a prostitute – she might be the ordinary middle-aged woman with the husband and two teenage children who lives next door. While I was writing the novel, I sourced personal accounts, diaries, blogs and newspaper reports.

How did sex workers come to the attention of the police and social services? What were the main reasons they ended up in court? How did sex workers see themselves? How did they view their clients? How did this perception change if they stopped? And then I began to imagine what life was like for the child of a prostitute. There was nowhere I could research that hidden subject. And it is always the thing that eludes you that becomes the story.

Joni Rodgers – Crazy For Trying: writing to build a new life

Crazy for Trying was my first novel. I started writing it when I was living on a fire tower in the Northern California wilderness with my husband and finished it ten years later while undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In between, there was a lot of life going on, but not much writing. I had no publishing expectations, no idea if I was doing it right. I just loved the act of creating this story, so it felt decadent to take time from “real life” to work on it. The crucible of chemo forced me into the quiet space I needed to finish the book and find my creative voice. I finally understood that if I wanted to keep living, my real life had to be built around writing.

Kathleen Jones – The Centauress: a story that wouldn’t let go

I was inspired by a meeting with an extraordinary Italian sculptor who was officially female, but was very open about the fact that she was a hermaphrodite. She appeared to revel in her dual sexuality, although there was an underlying note of tragedy in the stories she told about her life. I began to wonder what it must be like to be born without any specific gender identity and what it might mean for relationships.

Almost by accident, I was present when she was being interviewed for her biography and there were a lot of discussions about the ethical questions her life story raised; how much the biographer should tell and how to protect the people she’d shared her life with. When she died, her story wouldn’t let me go.

Meeting her had changed my life – as she had changed many people’s lives, not always for the better. Fictional episodes started writing themselves in my head, often centred around one of her reminiscences. I kept thinking ‘what if?’ and gradually the novel began to take shape.

Orna Ross – Blue Mercy: the mother-daughter enigma

The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most fascinating, complex and under-explored relationships in fiction. There are, it is true, a lot of novels about daughters rebelling against a strict, difficult and sex-averse mother — but that is only one side of what is, always, a double-barrelled story.

The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien once said: “If you want to know what I regard as the principle crux of female despair, it is this: in the Greek myth of Oedipus and in Freud’s exploration of it, the son’s desire for his mother is admitted. The infant daughter also desires her mother but it is unthinkable, either in myth, in fantasy, or in fact, that that desire can be consummated.” Star would think that a lot of tosh, motherless Mercy would be puzzled, but I agree.

What comes between Mercy and Star is a man. Actually, two men. The women are so focussed on Martin, the father, and Zach, the lover, that they fail to see each other. It was my hope, in writing their story, that it might help us all to look more closely at our own mothers and daughters.

Jessica Bell – White Lady: we are in the weather

Some writers have very specific triggers that lead them towards writing about certain topics. I am not one of those writers. I just write what feels right, and then figure out the “how, what, where, and when”. I have noticed though, (now that I’m writing my fifth novel!) that I’m often motivated by monotonous everyday occurrences. I always challenge myself to make them interesting.

Sounds very strange, I know, but let me give you an example. In White Lady, I got a little creative with the weather. The tricky thing with describing the weather is, it’s been written about to death, and there is always good, bad, and mediocre weather. We are in the weather, every second of every single day. It’s a little like trying to describe the fact that we breathe. We can’t not breathe as much as we can’t not experience weather. Here’s one way I described the rain in White Lady:
‘The rain stops and starts like God’s got prostate cancer.’

Here I’ve (hopefully) made the reader chuckle. I’ve insinuated that the narrator has a sense of humour, and I’ve let on that the weather leaves a lot to be desired. I think that says something about how inspirational triggers translate to my page, too. It’s sentence by sentence, not the book as a whole.

And finally, there’s me

Roz Morris – My Memories of a Future Life: fighting to live

I was always fascinated by tales of regression to past lives. I thought, what if instead of going to the past, someone went to a future life? Who would do that? Why? What would they find? The first root of the book was my own experience with repetitive strain injury, the condition that cripples my narrator. I had it myself when I was first working in publishing. I was lucky that I could find other ways to do my work, but what if that wasn’t possible? Carol in my novel, has no other way. It’s piano or nothing, and the pain of that is worse than anything physical.

Another longtime interest was the world of the classical musician. Musical scores are exacting and dictatorial – you play a note for perhaps a sixth of a second and not only that, there are instructions for how to feel – expressivo, amoroso. It’s as if you don’t play a piece of classical music; you channel the spirit of the composer. I became fascinated by a character who routinely opened her entire soul to the most emotional communications of classical composers. And I thought, as she can’t do it any more, what if I threw her together with someone who could trap the part of her that responded so completely to music? One small idea about seeing reincarnation the other way around became a journey about a character fighting to find a way to live.

Outside the Box: Women Writing Women, is a limited edition box set published in eBook format, available for just 90 days from February 20. Find the website here www.womenwritewomen.com

Just $9.99 (£7.99) for 7 full-length novels
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@Roz_Morris @OrnaRoss @MsBessieBell @DrCarolCooper @JaneDavisAuthor @KathyFerber @JoniRodgers

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Publishing, On Writing