I’ve been blogging this week about how I wrote my novels, to celebrate my book How to Write a Novel and Get It Published being 99p for a few days. Here’s part four.
Another really important aspect of this search for the meaning of ‘story’ and a way into narrative structure was to do with finding my own voice, and having the confidence to write in that voice. Weirdly, when I do this, and let myself off the hook, the sound of the prose is pretty similar to The Water’s Edge – so I must have been doing that all along anyway.
It was grasping that I didn’t fit into other people’s boxes that gave me more confidence with my voice. I am middle-class but I’m not quite middle-class enough (I’m half my Dad!), I’m queer, I’m white, but have brown skin, I’ve got a PhD but I’m neurodiverse, I’m a fiction writer, but I didn’t do a literature degree, I did Drama – all of these things seemed to contradict the notion of a cohesive self, but only when I tried to get into those boxes.
This is why the character of Almost Brown was so important in my second novel, and her being nearly, not quite. It was central to the box for me. I was writing about the boxes. There’s power in understanding the stuff that’s important to you and that translates into more confident writing.
Finally receiving my dyslexia diagnosis, aged 41, meant I finally started to understand why I found sequencing hard – and how I was compensating for it with other ‘tricks’ or (according to the Educational Psychologist) ‘coping strategies’. I also got a diagnosis of dyspraxia at the same time. I had been working with various people from the neurodivergent community and started to see my way of thinking about things as valuable rather than ‘odd’ or ‘lacking’. Known by some as ‘dyslexia positivity’, it gave me a fresh understanding and empowered me to look into some of the difficulties I had had and the coping strategies I had developed.
Get your copy of How to Write a Novel and Get It Published myBook.to/writeanovel