Anorexia, Self Harm, Janet Ellis and Stephen King

      My daughter, whom I thought would be home soon, has just had a relapse, as far as her anorexia is concerned. She’s back on `the tube’ and the prospect of home is receding fast, along with her ability to sit her `A’ levels.

     My son is becoming an ever more difficult question mark and definitely won’t be home any time soon. Social Services have begun nosing around, uttering phrases like `the importance of keeping him safe’ and `this is no reflection on your parenting’, `court order’, which make me want to stamp my foot and scream down the phone, the very antithesis of the reasonable therapist persona I usually manage to cultivate.

     Another daughter (there are 6 adopted siblings) appears to have suffered a psychotic break and her 6 month old son has been taken into temporary foster care. She’s taken to ringing me at all hours to ask about dates and holidays, the timing of events and celebrations, the same tearful questions over and over, as if I had an aging parent on the phone. I try to cultivate patience and calm, very challenging in a dry January.

      As for writing, Janet Ellis, who was on the same Curtis Brown Creative course as me was picked by the Observer in its `Meet the New Faces of Fiction for 2016’ list. I’m not usually subject to envy, conscious that I’ve had my fair share of privilege and luck in life, but I did feel a sharp pang on opening the paper. Janet’s book, `The Butcher’s Hook’, is wonderfully written, it didn’t seem to need the endless drafts mine has, and she well deserves this launch next month. But I would so like to be in her (beautiful) shoes.

But as my personal reality has become ever bleaker this past week, my resolve seems only to have stiffened. I’ve switched off my phone, shut down my laptop and returned to Stephen King for more gems:

·       `When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure’. (And when you’re not so young? I wonder)

·       `One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, `Not for us.’ (Just need to get that little success...)

·       Gould, the editor of a local newpaper King worked on as a teen told him, `When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.’ The best advice, ever.

·       Gould also told him: `Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.’

·       `I don’t want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to come at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn’t just stand around with your hammer in your hand.’ (`I didn’t cop to much of this attitude’, he adds, neatly puncturing the conceit.)

 

New Year's Resolutions and Stephen King

So here it is, January 4^th, time to start putting my New Year’s Resolutions into practice. Like many people, I have eaten and drunk far too much over the Christmas period, so it’s going to be a dry January. I will cut out all cakes and biscuits, chocolate etc until my profile in the bathroom mirror of a morning no longer disgusts me.

2015 was a horrible year, probably the worst of my life. My mother died in early February and my brother was an arse during her last weeks and thereafter, as the sole executor. Two of my kids ended up in hospital for prolonged stays, which involved travelling the length of the country and spending a small fortune on train and cab fares, but I worked my way through a stack of postcards and wrote them uplifting anecdotes through bleary eyes. (One will be home soon, the other remains a difficult question mark.)

As far as my other writing is concerned, much was promised by several agents, but then either silence descended and emails remained unanswered or an assistant was deputised to say that X absolutely loved the rest of the manuscript, which was so clever and powerfully written, but in the end it didn’t quite fit with their list.

My resolution this year- apart from the no-longer-disgusting- myself part- is to find an agent and a publisher. To this end I have begun to read the much recommended Stephen King book `On Writing- A memoir of the Craft’. It's brilliant.

The choicest nuggets so far:

·       `We (his rock and roll band of fellow writers) never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

·       He recommends `The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White, particularly rule 17: `Omit needless words.’

·       `In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.’

·       I was pleased to note that I am akin to what King refers to as a `fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.’ My mum didn’t get a telly till I was 11.

·       Finally, he says (again) that `good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.’

I’ve had an idea for a new thriller which I shall begin writing in the spring. It arrived as an image: a woman sitting in a long corridor, watching another woman coming slowly towards her, as she mops the stone floor. The woman is in pain, puts a hand to her stomach and realises she is bleeding...