Being True to Toddler You

Slimy pants!

I was looking after my favourite three-year-old this week. We made Slime – the blend of PVA glue, bicarb and contact lens solution that miraculously forms a blob of viscous, squeezable joy. Flobbery, bouncy and endlessly stretchy, it is surely the best stress-buster since Valium.

Charlie threw the Slime into the washing basket. ‘Ughh!’ I said. ‘Slimy socks!’

This led inevitably to more ‘accidental’ throws and to slimy pyjamas, slimy pants, slimy knickers, a slimy bra… Soon, Charlie was laughing so hard that he could hardly breathe.

Teddy Bunkles watching TV

Now Charlie is nearly four, his sense of humour and mine are very much on a level. He delights in word-play and nonsense rhymes, slapstick, cheekiness and the world’s funniest thing: farting. All jokes I have never grown out of.

If you are bringing up a toddler (or can borrow one, like me), you will know that at three a child’s personality shines out. Three-year-olds have got over the two-year-old’s struggle for self-assertion and world domination. They are beginning to know – and to show – what makes them tick.

My son, Ben, aged 3

My Mum has photographs of her three grandchildren at the age of three, and I can see why she preserves them at this golden age: though baby-cute and still malleable, they are already fully-formed versions of themselves.

In later life, we lose sight of this. I recently found myself a married, church-going, middle-class woman with two children, a mortgage and a very settled career. Life yawned ahead of me, a well-worn path through child-rearing to moderate career advancement to pension.

Was this the real me, living this life – contemplating this future?

No. As a toddler, I was a thrill-seeker. I’d be coming down the biggest slide in the play park while mum was still explaining that I was too small for it. I loved puddles, getting dirty and going for walks in storms. I would go exploring on the beach and bring tar back to the picnic rug. I made funny faces if people peered into my pushchair.

I was fiercely determined: I wanted to skip like my older sister before I had even mastered jumping. I stayed out in the garden with the skipping rope until I was red-faced and exhausted.

I had a vivid imagination and wild dreams I still recall. I made up gods and loved stories.

At fifty, in mid-life torpor, toddler Sophie re-emerged. I left my full-time employment to write, freelance and volunteer, and finally achieved my life-long ambition, publishing my psychological thriller Unspeakable Things this year. I am loving writing my second novel.

Photograph by Craig Matthews

Do you feel like a stranger in the life that has formed around you? Does time trudge by, weighed down by things you must do, but don’t care about? Are there too few moments in the flow of deep, fulfilling enjoyment, when the real you is out there, doing what he or she does best?

If you’re dancing to someone else’s tune, the music you could be making is silenced.

What did you dream of as a child? What excited you? You might have fallen into a life that doesn’t reveal that little person. It seems safe, particularly in later years, to stick with the status quo. But oh, the sad toddler inside, stifled, unexpressed – the real essential you that you were created to be.

Courtesy of JustMommies

I have reconnected with my imagination, my need for new challenges, my love of adventure, learning and discovery. The red-faced determination of three-year-old Sophie got me through the anxiety of starting a freelance career and the stress of self-publishing.

I’m at peace now with toddler me. And I love my mornings with Charlie.

What do people really think of your work? Meeting the critics face to face

Disaster and a consolation

Feedback about my psychological thriller novel Unspeakable Things has been wonderful. This was a great consolation after the disaster of my blog tour – Facebook blocked me for spamming.  I was in fact sharing unique content in groups with which I had built up relationships over months and years, but try explaining that to a broken algorithm! 

Feeling that I had failed to reach out to a readership I don’t know personally, it has been lovely to receive the encouragement of people I do know, and to share their excitement and kindness.

I just need to know more people…

Into the reader's den

I was delighted to get my first invitation to speak to a book group.

All did not go entirely to plan. I waited in the wrong place (they had moved to a different bar) and when I found them and went to buy a drink, I found that I had lost my purse. A lovely group member bought me a drink, but as I launched into my talk about how I came to write the novel, I was picturing thieves running amok with my bank account. I may well have been talking rubbish.

They were a great group – lively, interesting, intelligent and all really focused on discussing the novel (which has not always been my experience of book groups).

It was fascinating and enlightening hearing their thoughts. They had plenty of positive things to say – many had been gripped and read avidly to the end. 

One young man, usually a reader of Fantasy, said it was out of his comfort zone, but he really enjoyed it, particularly the character of David. His interest and insights into the character were very encouraging. As usual when receiving compliments, I tried desperately to erase them from memory to avoid embarrassment, but I did treasure up these gems of approval.

There were of course things they weren’t sure about – moments they felt stretched credibility or left them confused. Once one person is brave enough to bring up such points, others tend to wade in too. When something comes entirely from your own head, it is a revelation to hear how it reads to others. They all thought, for instance, that the injection John attacked Sarah with was the reason for her collapse. I had left this open, intending the reader  to fear this, but later realise it was her high blood pressure that led to the crisis.

Some questioned why Sarah would stay in the house after what happened there. I explained that she wanted to restore the past, making new memories over the terrible ones. But as with a joke, if you have to explain it…

What really struck me was how often the points brought up were ones already raised by my literary consultant, which I thought I had dealt with.

Top tip for expert feedback

When you have professional feedback, the advice is to leave the rewrite for a time, and ponder on it fully. Writers are all very excited at this stage, thinking, ‘If I just fix these things, it’s finished – I can publish it!’ The risk is that we rush in with quick fixes, following each suggestion. Perhaps it is better to wait for a solution to come from our own imagination. This might mean a fuller rewrite, but you will avoid the same issues being raised in future. In other words, don't do as I do, do as I say...

Dealing with  (ouch!) criticism

We all know that writers need rhino hide – if your work is published, it’s out there for the world to judge. But I’m not really a rhinoceros, and let’s be honest, any criticism of your creative baby is like a stab in your self-esteem.

Nevetheless, I was determined to keep a cool head, and learn from this. I made sure I discussed all the issues rather than becoming defensive, and the result was an open and interesting talk, with a lot of warmth and laughter.

The vexed issue of Codeine Linctus

The trick with criticism is to separate the useful from the … less useful. One woman, having heard that I am an editor, took issue with my capitalisation of Codeine Linctus. Having aired this grievance, she had other matters to get off her chest. But we are never going to please everyone.

It was a privilege meeting this book group. I am hugely grateful to every one of them for buying the book and reading it. Their feedback was invaluable, and so was the drink that they bought me when I was flapping.

I found my purse later in the car. And as for Codeine Linctus, look – I’m still giving it capitals!

If You’re Writing About Trauma, Read This Book

“ ‘Torture your protagonist’ urges novelist and creative writing tutor, Janet Fitch. The more sadistically you torture them ‘along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.’ “ So says Mslexia’s ’10 Commandments’ for writers (issue 57). If, like me, you are writing a psychological thriller, there is all the more need to put your characters through intense, believable trauma. I found a huge source of information and insight in Laurence Gonzales’ book: Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience.

 Gonzales recounts in a readable, novelistic style the survival stories of thirteen people who have been through extraordinary traumas, and have reacted and recovered in different ways. The stories themselves are jaw-dropping: Lisette was shot by her husband; Eileen was attacked by a crocodile; Aron (of 27 Hours fame) cut off his own arm to escape from a canyon; US Marine Chris lost a leg in an explosion in Iraq; Ann’s five-year-old daughter suddenly died; Kathy survived cancer; Patricia and Trevor were attacked by a bear; Don’s ship was torpedoed; Leon survived a Nazi concentration camp.

Gonzales dips into psychology and neuroscience to explain the effects of trauma and the ways in which the body and mind survive it, suffer from it, react to it in later life and recover from it. The science is accessible and highly illuminating for anyone fascinated by the variety of human experience, from the function of rage in survival, to the neural pathways created by loving and caring for a child; from the exhilarating effect of going on holiday, to the scientific reason for that ‘sixth sense’ that warns us of danger in a way we cannot rationally explain.

This is one of those books that you can’t stop talking about, and when you have recommended it to someone, you can’t rest until they have read it. But how did it benefit my writing? Since I am writing a psychological thriller, Unspeakable Things, I need to put my heroine through extraordinary trauma, yet make both this and her reaction to it believable. There is nothing worse than reading an account of something that should be remarkable, and thinking, ‘Hm, that’s probably how I would describe that if I tried, not particularly hard, to think what it would be like.’ Experience is real, vivid and unexpected, and our writing about extraordinary events should be fresh and surprising, but have that ring of truth that sparks recognition in the reader. This is where Gonzales’ novelistic accounts of trauma come in. They gain from both his scientific studies of the brain’s reaction to trauma, and the first-hand accounts of the survivors. The accounts are very rarely what you would come up with if you sat down to write such a scene from a brief scan of your imagination, in the way that lazy writing is done.

 After Lisette’s husband shot her, she ran from the house. ‘She heard another shot but felt nothing,. Then, all at once, she knew what he had done. That last shot had been for him. She put it from her mind. She had a single purpose now. Survive.’

After escaping the crocodile’s jaws and diving down to the sea bed, Eileen ‘became sharply aware that she might die down there. All that she loved... snatched away from her in the single appalling act of a mindless creature... that thought made her angry.’

When Aron Ralston (of 27 Hours fame) found that his arm was crushed, trapping him in a canyon, having told no one where he was going, ‘He felt a rush of sadness and remorse for the thing he’d done.’

When Micki Glenn was attacked by a shark, which bit down to her spine, time appeared to slow down and she felt no pain, only pressure, ‘like I was in a vise.’ She could perceive the most minute details of what the shark was doing as it bit off chunks of her.

As doctors fought to save her five-year-old daughter, who had been perfectly healthy only hours before, Ann “looked up and saw that both her husband and Dr. Green were weeping. This made no sense. It made even less sense when the attending physican turned to Ann and said, ‘Your daughter is not going to make it’. It made so little sense that Ann laughed out loud.”

It is not the fact that these accounts are graphic that makes them excellent reading for writers of trauma, it is that they are surprising. It is the unexpected nature of the experiences described that convinces us that they are true. Even though the events we describe in fiction are not true, we can borrow from the vivid strangeness of these accounts and our writing can become shot through with the unexpected and elevated beyond a mundane imagining of what trauma might be like.

Writer's Reluctance

As the name of my blog suggests, my  lifelong tendency to be secretive about my writing brings to mind Jane Austen's creaky door, which she refused to have mended because she valued its warning that people were approaching so that she could hide her writing. She also published all her books anonymously as 'A Lady', because it was considered 'too forward' to put your name to a novel if you were not already famous. Nevertheless, times have changed and being 'too forward' is part of the writer's task these days, so in a most unladylike manner I am launching in with my first blog post. I feel sure Jane would have approved. I wonder how witty, pithy and entertaining her blog would been if she had had the technology - and society's blessing - in her day?

I am suffering not so much from writer's block, at the moment, but from a certain reluctance to get down to the task. I know why it is: for over a year, I have been making some fairly sweeping changes to my novel, Unspeakable Things, as suggested by a consultant. Realising the scale of the task, I dedicated myself to spending some time every evening and every weekend on writing. I even cancelled a week-long trip so that I could take the days off work throughout the year as writing days. Writing has been enjoyable and I have relished the time spent on it and resented anything that has kept me from it. This makes it all the more noticeable that I am shuffling and time-wasting and having a 'quick look' at Facebook before getting down to work now.

   The reason is this: I am coming to the end of a long 'pass' through the novel that has taken more than a year. The overall task of rewriting is nowhere near finished, but I think a part of me has taken fright as I have rewritten the later chapters, feeling that it is nearly over, and not wanting it to end. Because once I am finished with the writing bit, which I love; I have to face the getting it out there, offering it up for scrutiny, getting knocked back bit, which I'm sure all writers dread.

   I know what the remedy is. I need to get over my reluctance and rediscover my relish for the writing process. I'll just have a quick look at Facebook and I'll be there...