Sometimes, it is hard to understand how a book idea comes around. When it is a nice, easy-flowing story, it is simply inspiration. But sometimes our darker side takes over and we have to write things that are not so nice. Am I weird, we may ask? We are fiction writers. We create stories. They come from us but they are not us. When bad things happen to our characters, it doesn’t mean that they have happened to us or that we wish them to happen. Stories come to us and we write them.
In 2017, I was compelled to write the book Waiting. It wasn’t a book back then, it was just a story meant to be made into a book. A character moved into my head and demanded to be written. At the time, I thought the character had nothing to do with me. But she worked in the hospitality sector. So did I, albeit a longer time ago and not anymore. She lived on the outskirts of Manchester. So did I. She moved in the same streets. She was a young woman, married, and wanted a child. So far, so similar, although not quite the same.
I wrote Waiting when I already had a child. I was dealing with multiple miscarriages and was facing the fact that I would most likely not have more children. I was going through a lot of pain and I didn’t even realise how down I had been back then. I was lonely, not well supported and quite isolated. Motherhood was my saviour on one hand, demanding role that couldn’t be paused on the other. These were no easy years.
And in the middle of this turmoil, I suddenly had the urge to create a character that was raped, got pregnant and had to deal with the fact that this may be her only chance for motherhood. She had to come to terms with her trauma, with the baby, with her family and her husband and their opinions and reactions. Why would a person who was hurting sit down and write an ugly story? I don’t know. I felt slightly ashamed at the time, describing things that were hard to imagine, researching procedures I wouldn’t wish to be needed even by my enemies, and creating situations that only added to my own struggles and dissatisfaction.
Besides the struggles of motherhood, my journey was also a journey of a partner and wife. I was living through my own struggles, arguments, and disillusion with my partner. I was often feeling trapped; unable to leave and move on as I would have done in my previous, single life.
I had written Waiting during NaNoWriMo, got it out of my system and let it sit back in the finished drawer. I didn’t think about it for a long time. I got the story out of my system. A few years later, I started working on my finished stories, slowly bringing them into the real world. They were edited, rewritten, reshaped, re-read, and then, finally, made real – into e-books and paperbacks. Waiting was always the last one in the line. But its time had come. It wouldn’t be fair to leave the story behind. So, this year, I dusted off the manuscript and got to work. And suddenly, I understood. My long frustration, pain, loss, sadness, disillusion and disappointment pushed me to create this story. Some writers go to horror, fantasy, or crime. Others write novels filled with cupcakes, fashion, and good old ‘will they/won’t they’. They need happy endings to heal. Well, I go to the hard-to-define fiction. I write stories. And sometimes they are more difficult than the average stories for women. That’s how I dealt with challenging times in my life.
Vivien is a young woman who has to overcome a bad thing to reach something good. She doesn’t have an easy life and her relationship is seemingly good, but has its own challenges. So far, so similar to me and many others. I can’t wait to put the finishing touches on the book and send it out into the world.