Blog | The Writing Coach

Leaf Writers’ Magazine

April 2, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Markets for your work, Resources Leave a Comment

One question I’m frequently asked by my clients is “where can I publish my shorter work?” In response to this question, in future weeks and months, I’m going to write a few features that highlight potential markets for your work.

I’d like to begin with a publication I’ve only recently become aware of: Leaf Writers’ Magazine. The magazine was first published in print and online by Leaf Books in Spring 2010 and the fourth edition is about to appear this month. Leaf Books was already established as a leading publisher of micro-fiction and they have put over 250 authors and poets into print, many for the first time, sourcing their material via their regular competitions.

Each issue of the magazine focuses on a couple of writing practices, genres or themes, and sets well-known authors alongside those just starting out. In Leaf’s own words:

“Seamlessly blending the heart and soul of a literary quarterly with the guidance and advice of a creative writing course, Leaf aims to bridge the gap between the beginners and the professionals of the writing world. The magazine also serves as a directory for the latest literary courses, reading groups, festivals, events and publishing opportunities for writers.”

To give you an idea of the magazine’s content, the edition I read included an interview with author of Chocolat, Joanne Harris and an interview with the poet Gillian Clarke. The interview with Joanne Harris reveals that she didn’t find things easy at the beginning of her writing career:

“My first full-length attempt at a novel was never submitted, but my next try, The Evil Seed, was published three years after its completion. It wasn’t an easy process; I spent most of that time looking for an agent, after realizing that unsolicited manuscripts are seldom read.”

It’s another example of persistence being key for writers and is a reminder that most well-known authors have an unpublished manuscript sitting under their bed somewhere…

The Gillian Clarke interview included a comment on her writing habits:

“Like most poets I spend more time thinking than writing, and the poem comes or it doesn’t, like a spell out of the air.”

This reminded me of a comment made by the playwright David Hare at the Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival which I attended last year. Hare also talked about spending more time thinking than writing, an insight that gave me much food for thought in relation to my next book, as it made me really focus on the quality of thought that must go into one’s work if it is to excel.

In addition to the interviews, the edition of Leaf Writers’ Magazine that I read had a comprehensive ‘Writers’ groups guide’, and articles on topics including how to get the most of writers’ workshops and point of view in writing fiction. It also included an inspiring piece about writers’ favourite locations for writing.

For me however, the most impressive thing was jut how much of the magazine was reader focused. A lot of the material in the magazine was generated by Leaf authors, including extracts from Leaf books and the winners of a memoir writing competition. One of the reasons I chose to feature Leaf is that they are so author-friendly in this respect, genuinely encouraging new writers. Indeed they are actively looking for submissions, including articles, as outlined on their website here.

Like many independents, Leaf are not yet in a position to pay contributors but they do offer valuable experience of publication and exposure for new authors. Every commended story in their competitions gets published in an anthology. (The last memoir competition included around 35 commended authors, all to be published.)

When I work with writers who are seeking a literary agent, I always advise on including relevant experience of publication in the covering letter (it sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed how many people forget to put it in). That’s just one reason I recommend aiming to publish your work with magazines such as Leaf. As well as being fantastic for your writer’s CV, publication in small magazines can offer a real confidence-boost too. In my view, when we’re feeling confident, we’re more likely to do our best work and also to push ourselves to submit further work – or, as Seth Godin would say, to Poke the Box.

Issue Four of the magazine is about to be published and will focus on creative collaboration and writing techniques. It will include an interview with Phillip Gross and Simon Denison about their award-winning book of poems and photography I Spy Pinhole Eye, Cinnamon, 2009. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl will discuss the process of writing their novel Beautiful Darkness, Puffin, 2010 together, while tutor and author Myra Schneider will examine the concept of beginnings in poetry. Issue 4’s essential guide will be dedicated to Writing Handbooks, profiling the top titles to use as your creative writing bibles. They have also accepted a very short piece I wrote called “Overcoming writer’s doubt”. I confess I found it quite a challenge to squeeze my thoughts on that subject into just over 300 words, but if you do read the magazine, I hope you will find it useful.

If you’re interested in Leaf Writers’ Magazine, you can order a hard copy or buy an instant PDF download here. They also send out a newsletter which you can sign up for here. If you do choose to buy the magazine, I’d love to hear your views on it. If you have had success in publishing your shorter work lately, do please share in the comments; the more we share our resources, the better for all writers who use this site.

Creating Convincing Characters (The Archive Series)

March 31, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Character, Inspiration, Technique, Writing Exercises 1 Comment

As I launch the new Writing Coach website, I thought it would be a good idea to also celebrate the history of The Writing Coach by beginning this series of blog posts and articles from my own archive. In coming weeks I’ll be sharing some of my favourite archive articles.

This image of the author John Fowles inspired the character Harold Bliss in my novel Bluethroat Morning

This one “Creating Convincing Characters” is more a series of notes than an article. I prepared the notes for a talk I gave at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2005. I hope you find them useful.

Creating Convincing Characters

When we write fiction in an organic way, we do not need to begin with a plot. We can begin by creating our characters. The plot grows from the characters and not vice-versa. For example, my novel Bluethroat Morning grew from a fragment of a rejected novel; from a single image of a Victorian woman in a bustle dress walking along a Norfolk beach, side by side with her elderly uncle who was wheezing for breath.

Characterisation includes aspects of character we may consider when first building characters, including:

Physical appearance
Dialogue & narrative voice
Self-perception of character and the perceptions of others
The character’s history
The character’s conflicts and desires
The thoughts and actions of the character

Yet character emerges through the difficult choices a person makes. In other words, if you are an organic writer, it is discovered only in the process of writing.

So we can begin with a visual image, we can do writing exercises to begin filling in the gaps (for example using lists like those in the list below – a common method). But real character goes deeper. It emerges when you put characters in situations and conflict with other characters, when you begin to dream about them and build on the characterisation. Characters develop and grow.

They may at first emerge from a fragment

A phrase that intrigues you
Visual images – paintings, photographs (I’m a huge John Fowles fan and his picture inspired my character Harold Bliss in Bluethroat Morning)
Composites of people we know
A face on a bus or a fragment of conversation

We then build these characters – by journaling, writing or dreaming about them. Maybe we’ll pin pictures above our desks: the novelist Deborah Moggach (author of Tulip Fever and more recently In the Dark) once told me she likes to use Michael Gambon’s face as an inspiration because she feels it is so open to interpretation.

We may set ourselves an exercise – for example – ‘write your character’s obituary’. Or we may write a scene about a central childhood experience, to begin to understand the character’s past. I did this for Harold Bliss, when I felt I didn’t know him well enough and the scene I wrote became a vital passage in the novel.

As we write our characters, so they begin to build in our imagination. Only through regular writing do they begin to live and act in unexpected ways…

If we keep notebooks, where we scribble ideas about our characters, we are giving them room to grow. They must never be static.

Character is about more than a set piece description. It is dynamic: a vital life force within a work of fiction.

And characters develop through conflict.

Where do your characters experience conflict?And how do our characters develop?

My experience is: it comes partly through writing partly through dreaming. It’s like getting to know a person. First you simply see them, then you see them in a certain situation, then they start to tell you their life-history, you notice their habits, you begin understanding their habits, their turn of phrase becomes familiar and you start to be able to anticipate how they will behave. You may wish to experiment: utilise different narrative methods to explore them such as playing with a first person voice, writing their dialogue, an internal monologue or a third person view of their life.

I suggest you be playful in your approach.

Try putting a character in a situation that is likely to cause some distress or difficulty, and write the scene using close observation. Think about what that person wants. What spurs them on? Desire and conflict are vital.

I once heard Iris Murdoch speak in a lecture at UEA. She said that we must like our characters – even those who appear on the surface to be abhorrent. If we do not ‘like’ them (for which you can substitute ‘understand’) then your reader is unlikely to want to be drawn into their story. Every character has their own justification for acting as they do.

Aim not merely to describe, but rather to illustrate character through action and dialogue. Don’t tell rather show. Let that character be revealed to us. Showing involves putting your character in a situation and seeing how he/she reacts. Describing the action in some detail, using dialogue. Taking it slowly.

Your own curiosity is vital too. If you have a genuine desire to understand how a particular character works, you are half way there.

Use this list of questions to inspire a journal entry about your character:

Write down two random facts about this person
What is their most important life event to date?
If they could change one thing about their life so far, what would it be?
Who do they love?
Who do they hate?
What is their favourite item of clothing?
What is their greatest desire?
Is it a secret or a public desire?
How do they envisage their life ten years from now?
What was their first sexual experience?
What makes them angry?
What is their earliest childhood memory?
What frightens them?
What does their voice sound like?
What is the texture of their skin?

I look forward to hearing what emerges from these questions and ideas for you.

An Interview with Voula Grand, Author of Honor’s Shadow

March 28, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Interviews, The writing life 1 Comment

Voula Grand, Author of Honor's Shadow

Voula Grand has been a client of The Writing Coach since September 2010. Her first novel Honor’s Shadow is about to be published by Karnac books in July 2011. This is the first in our series of author interviews.

Voula, you describe yourself as a novelist and psychologist. Are the two related?

I believe they are. I’ve practiced as a business psychologist for the last twenty five years; and I’ve been reading novels since I was three. These are two different ways of doing the same thing: reflecting on life, ourselves, others, relationships, emotions and thoughts. The two subjects come at this from different angles: psychology is a science that observes, studies, analyses, and concludes. Fiction, an art form, presents the lives of others in stories, and leaves it to the reader to take what they want from it. Both provoke us into thinking more deeply and that commonly results in the development of new insights and ideas: then we have more choices.

Honor’s Shadow is your first novel, about to be published by Karnac in July this year. For so many of my clients, finding a publisher is the ultimate goal. How did you find yours?

Happenstance. My publisher is Karnac books, and they had asked me to write a book on Executive Coaching, something I spend a great deal of my professional time doing. I agreed initially, though I was also writing a novel at the time. Eventually I realised I couldn’t do both, and when I explained to Karnac that I couldn’t write their book because I was writing a novel, they asked to see it, and that’s how I got my contract.

When did you first think you might want to become a writer?

When I was around 8 years old I moved schools and the headmaster there loved my compositions. He told my mother what a good writer I was, and she, a great reader herself, was very excited and encouraged me to read and to write.

I used to buy exercise books from the newsagent and write on the front, A Book by Voula Tsoflias, and then write stories in it. When I went to university, as a mature student aged 28, I planned to study English literature, but got diverted by my interest in psychology. During my long career in psychology, and my child rearing years, writing became an ambition for my retirement and later years. Once I turned fifty, I thought I’d better get on with it if I was to have any chance of realizing this ambition.

You did an MA in Creative Writing. Was that a key turning point for you and would you recommend it to others? What did you learn from your MA course?

Yes it was a turning point, because it gave me confidence to formally study my craft to the highest level currently available. I had attended writing courses for many years, keen to learn. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could. Completing an MA seemed the ultimate: a hallmark of excellence, of quality. I learned a lot, definitely: how difficult it is to write really well; how my professional work had got me into habits of business writing, not creative writing. Most importantly, I learned that whilst theory is important, until you practice, practice, practice, nothing will change. I would recommend an MA to others, provided you are clear what you want to get from it – it’s demanding, time consuming and costly, but I’m glad I did it.

Tell me briefly about your novel – and what attracted you to the themes that you write about?

Honor’s Shadow explores themes of secrets, revenge and betrayal, through the lives of two women who, as young women, were love rivals for Thomas. Honor moves away from her home town and she and Madalena lose touch, until twenty years later, when Madalena’s daughter appears in a national newspaper, reminding Honor of the past and re-awakening painful memories and old grief. How Honor, now a psychiatrist, deals with this old injury is the subject of her story, along with her struggle to contain the vengeful impulses of Tisi, a strange new client.

Madalena, living a life of luxury with her wealthy partner, has everything she ever thought she wanted in life. An anonymous letter jolts her: somebody thinks they know something about her past that could destroy the life she loves. She is desperate to find out who wrote the letter: she must stop them from taking further action.

The stories of Honor and Madalena weave together: how do they both resolve their difficulties?

The themes of revenge and betrayal are primitive and universal, causing suffering and distress for many people. The betrayal of infidelity in marriage, the betrayal of friends, of children, the way we betray ourselves: these experiences can be character shaping and life changing, depending on their resolution. So for me, these themes are fundamental aspects of psychological development: what do you learn from suffering? About yourself? Other people? Relationships? Life?

Totally fascinating!

Which writers do you most admire?

My all time favourite writer is Doris Lessing. She writes about profound themes in accessible ways. The Fifth Child and The Cleft are two of my favourites of hers. Other writers that I hugely admire are Margaret Atwood, Margaret Forster, Toni Morison, all older writers who have demonstrated their commitment and talent repeatedly.

In recent years, some of my favourite books have been “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver; “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, “The Secret River” by Kate Greville and “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

What advice would you give to fellow authors who have finished novels and are currently seeking publication?

I think you need to pay attention to two things: your manuscript and yourself.

The manuscript is the easy bit: edit and edit and edit, get others to edit, perfect, perfect. Do not make a submission till you are completely and utterly happy, particularly with the early chapters you are submitting.

Now the hard part: yourself. As my soldier son would say, you need to MAN UP! Whilst you may hit the jackpot and get an agent and publisher straight away, if you don’t you will have to get used to being turned down repeatedly. In other words, rejection. Tough one, and the temptation to give up after repeated rejection must be resisted at all costs.

Has the process of being published been what you expected thus far?

I’m not really sure what I expected… I was focused for so long on finishing the novel, I hadn’t really thought about the next stage. The most engaging and exciting part so far has been selecting the cover image!

We’ve been working closely together on the marketing of your novel. It’s early days, of course, but what do you think is working for you – and what strategies would you recommend to others?

The most helpful thing to me, as a novice, was to understand the three key areas around marketing: 1. All the stuff you can expect your publisher to do 2. Developing a following using a technology platform and 3. Personal publicity – visiting book clubs and book shops.

I was pretty ignorant of the technology platform stuff, but you quickly downloaded to me all the key things I needed to do and provided advice and guidance that must have saved me months of painstaking research and learning.

My advice to is, don’t be precious about marketing. It’s part of your job as a writer. Promote yourself, shamelessly, in every way you can!

Like many writers, you continue to juggle a demanding professional life with being a novelist. What do you think are the real keys to doing that successfully?

I’m sure this will be different for everyone.

Much of the received wisdom around writing is to discipline yourself to write every single day, even if only for a very short time. That doesn’t work for me. I find my professional work all consuming, so if I’m having a working day, which is most days, it is not possible for me to switch my mind from work to writing.

I have dedicated writing days, whole days when work can’t intrude. When I’m writing intensively, I have one writing day a week, Mondays, so I can spend the weekend forgetting about work, and tuning in to what I’m going to be writing next, and maybe do some preparation for that, so I can be ready for a good day of writing on Monday. That doesn’t mean writing non-stop all day… I usually get up in a leisurely way, and then take a couple of hours to orient myself to where I am in my writing and what I’m trying to do. Then I go to the gym for an hour to let my thinking stew a bit. Then I have a light lunch, and write all afternoon, aiming to draft out whichever chapter I’m working on, and if time allows, do some first editing of it. I consider 3000 words a good writing day. For me the key to success in this area is to become very conscious of my own process, what works for me. I make friends with my process, I don’t struggle against it. I take the advice of other writers lightly, as ideas that I might want to experiment with – but I focus on finding my own writing rhythm.

What do you consider the greatest challenge in your writing life at present?

Making sure I do everything possible to promote Honor’s Shadow, make it successful to ensure I can publish a second novel. I read an alarming piece recently – as a debut novelist, you can find a publisher who will take a risk on you. As a second novel writer, you are now a known quantity – and if your first novel didn’t sell enough you are unlikely to get a second chance.

Finding more time to write continues to be a huge challenge.

You are a psychologist and coach yourself. Why did you choose to work with a writing coach and was it what you expected?

I am very committed to the usefulness of coaching, because I am a coach, and I know how constructive and positive it can be. However smart you are, you can only get so far on your own – you need someone else to provoke your thinking, to ask you questions you wouldn’t think of yourself. And to point things out to you that are in your blind spot (good and bad things).

The process of coaching is, in general, what I expected. The outcomes, the usefulness of it has far exceeded my expectations, both in terms of the practical outputs, and of the personal experience of it. Writing is essentially a lonely pursuit, so coaching is a great source of support. The feeling that I have a partner in it frees me to be bolder, and more experimental: I know you will steer me away from ideas that are unlikely to work, or encourage me to develop the ideas which have potential.

What is your next writing project?

A sequel novel to Honor’s Shadow, called Honor’s Ghost. This novel is going to be a major re-structure and rewrite of an existing manuscript that I worked on over a ten year period, before writing Honor’s Shadow. I am so looking forward to starting it, but I won’t begin until I have done the final proofs on Honor’s Shadow in a few weeks time.

Thanks Voula, I’m looking forward to reading…

Welcome to the Writing Coach Blog

March 28, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: African Revival, The writing coach 11 Comments

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the new Writing Coach website and blog. I’m Jacqui Lofthouse, founder of The Writing Coach and in future weeks and months I’m looking forward to sharing regular updates with you. Those of you who have followed The Writing Coach since the early days (we began in 2005) will know that we are unique in our approach. From the beginning we have had a strong coaching focus, with an emphasis on confidence, productivity and career success for writers. So whilst we do offer literary consultancy, our emphasis is on the whole person, not just the writing work.

The Writing Coach is now an international mentoring and development organisation for writers, with clients on four continents. As a novelist and a coach, my aim, when I set up this business, was to work with writers on a one-to-one basis, sharing my own insights into the writing life – but also, importantly, listening to the needs of the individual writer.

There is no “one size fits all” philosophy here. I like to see myself as an innovator and you’ll find me both responsive and interested in your views.

I’m particularly proud to launch today the Writing Coach’s support of the charity African Revival. I’ve decided to pledge 10% of all revenue (not just profits) from all product sales (that’s the ebooks) and 20% of all Membership fees (for The Completion Club) to a charity that I really believe in. African Revival is a UK based charity, who believe passionately in the power of education to change lives. By building schools, training and supporting teachers, and overcoming barriers to education, African Revival help break the cycle of poverty and offers inspiration and opportunity to Africa’s future generations. My aim is to raise at least £20,000 for African Revival and you can find out more about my aims here.

If you support The Writing Coach via our ebooks or by becoming a member, you are also contributing to African Revival’s mission to build schools and increase literacy in the developing world. I’ll be writing more about this new partnership in future posts, but for now I want to emphasise that what makes this partnership possible is that this charity is local to my home, so I’ll be building a personal relationship with the director as I continue to figure out how we, as writers, can support them – in the long term.

Of course, in future weeks, you can rely on this blog to provide you with regular inspiration and motivation to write. If you are new to The Writing Coach – welcome! And if you’re an old friend – welcome back! If you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog (the black button on the top right for non-techie types), you’ll get updates sent directly to your in-box. Our posts will include: sound advice on technique for fiction and non-fiction writers; interviews with authors, agents and publishers; advice on submissions; time management tips for writers; news and events in the publishing world; ideas to get you writing; book reviews; information on epublishing and gentle encouragement to pick up your pen each day.

Whilst you’re here, do sign up for our newsletter to be sure you don’t miss a single thing we have to offer. And whilst you’re waiting for this blog to build into a full library of information, why not check out our Articles page too, to find archive articles and articles written by our clients?

I’m looking forward to getting to know you. Why not leave a comment to introduce yourself today?

On Uncertainty (or the Van Gogh School of writing fiction)

May 17, 2010 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Uncategorized Leave a Comment

vincent-van-gogh-a-couple-walking-in-the-forest

Van Gogh’s ‘A couple walking in the forest’

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream” – Van Gogh

Recently, on a short holiday to Woodbridge, Suffolk, we took a walk in Rendlesham Forest. My husband, David, and children strode ahead of me, sure of the path. Of course, that kind of certainty is always easier when it’s a planned walk, complete with painted posts to guide the way. We barely met a soul that morning, but (after the initial townie fear of leaving our car alone in the middle of nowhere) we soon felt perfectly safe and certain of our route.

Yet I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like if one of those posts had been taken away. It was a two-hour walk and without doubt, we would have become hopelessly lost.

I was reminded on that walk of the words of the novelist John Fowles who compares writing fiction to a woodland walk. He extends the metaphor beautifully in his book The Tree.

“Behind every path and every form of expression one does finally choose,” he writes, “lie the ghosts of all those that one did not. I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry. I am quite sure this is not some kind of rationalization, or irrationalization, after the fact; that having discovered I write fiction in a disgracefully haphazard sort of way, I now hit on the passage through an unknown wood as an analogy.”

That passage, as many of my former students know, has always been influential in my work. I believe that fiction must grow organically – that too much pre-planning can get in the way of our best work. (There has to be a balance, in truth, but for me, the ‘being lost’ has to come first.) Yet if we’re to believe that writing fiction is like walking through an unknown woodland (or God forbid, forest!) then we also have to get comfortable about the idea of working without ‘posts’ to show us the way. We have to be at ease with ‘being lost’ and accept uncertainty as part of our experience.

That’s not always easy in practice, but I have found that over the course of a writing life it has become at least familiar – and interesting. Only last week, for example, I came away from a writing session full of uncertainty. I’m revising my fourth novel. It had been an enjoyable session, I’d felt engaged with the work and yet it struck me that the relationship between my protagonist and one of the secondary characters wasn’t dynamic enough. There wasn’t enough development in that relationship – and it worried me that I hadn’t noticed that before. How could I have come thus far and not seen it? Wasn’t it a bit too late in the process for me to realise the error?

Yet I reminded myself – as these thoughts coursed through my head – that this fear of having got it ‘wrong’ is perfectly normal. It’s a signal. If I were walking through a forest one afternoon for example (without posts) and I intended to head west, but suddenly realised that the sun was behind me, I’d feel that same slight dread in my gut. But in fact, if I looked at it logically, I’d simply have a piece of information that would help me adjust my direction and get back on track. It’s the same thing with writing fiction. If we can embrace uncertainty and see it as a signal – our unconscious mind telling us that something isn’t working and therefore that something needs to be changed – then we can see that ‘not knowing’ is a positive thing. It leads us to asking the right questions, to discovering answers.

Uncertainty is the human condition. Perhaps it’s time we got used to it! The social philosopher Erich Fromm wrote: “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.” As Van Gogh acknowledged, we can know nothing with any certainty, but dreaming is open to all of us.

1920px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_Under_Thunderclouds_-_VGM_F778

Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield under thunderclouds’

ANY CHARACTER HERE

I’ve been discussing this theme recently with clients and what has struck many of us is that it is so easy to confuse uncertainty with negative emotion – and thus to allow it to block the creative impulse. But if we can go beyond this, if we can look at uncertainty as I imagine Benjamin Zander (conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and co-author of The Art of Possibility) would – and say, in Zander’s words ‘How Fascinating!’ – then we’ve taken the first step towards embracing uncertainty. We do not need to overcome it but to allow it as part of our experience – to use it as a positive creative force.

This week’s action:

What are you feeling uncertain about in your life at the moment? What are you feeling uncertain about in your creative work?

What will happen if you accept this uncertainty? Or can you use the questions the uncertainty throws up to enrich the creative process?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions…

Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis – On Creativity and Despair

June 26, 2006 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Confidence, Inspiration, The writing life, Writers 2 Comments

On the Work of Sarah Kane.

4.48 Psychosis: it’s the title of playwright Sarah Kane’s final play, currently being staged at the Royal Court Theatre (note – this article written in May 2001) and it refers to the hour of day when mental derangement is at its most extreme. Kane completed the play only a week before she hanged herself in hospital with her shoelaces and the play is, as she described it, ‘highly personal’. Inspired by Goethe’s novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, the play culminates in the suicide of a young woman. Like Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane clearly mined her own despair when writing and, whether intentionally or not, by her suicide has contributed to the myth of the tortured genius.

Sarah Kane killed herself in February 1999, aged 28. She shot to notoriety at age 23, with the production of her play ‘Blasted’, also at the Royal Court, which caused an instant tabloid scandal, condemned by ‘The Daily Mail’ as “a systematic trawl through the deepest pits of human degradation”. The way in which her work was seized upon by the hacks clearly had a lasting effect on Kane, who retained her dignity throughout the ordeal that followed, when, in the words of ‘Blasted’ director James Macdonald, “every editor and their dog put a journalist on the case looking for the author”.

Sarah Kane: my personal response

When I first heard the news of Kane’s death, I was profoundly shocked. I had never met her, but I was aware of her work and we had lived oddly parallel lives. Kane was 4 years younger than me, but had we been the same age, our paths would surely have crossed. In our teens, we were both members of Basildon Youth Theatre, which she must have joined, just as I left for Bristol University to study Drama. As I left Bristol Drama Department, Sarah Kane joined it. And later, whilst I studied for an MA creative writing in East Anglia, Kane was cutting her teeth on the MA in playwriting in Birmingham. But the parallels do not end there. Whilst I have not suffered from any serious depressive illness, I was, at the time of Kane’s death, embroiled in the subject of suicide, writing a novel about a writer, hounded by the media, who eventually succumbs to depression and takes her own life, securing for herself, incidentally, a place in literary history.

The myth of the tortured genius

The ‘tortured genius’ myth preoccupied me at that time. I’d spent several years questionning its validity. It began with Sappho in Ancient Greece, who leapt from a rock into the sea. In the eighteenth century there was Chatterton. He swallowed arsenic and so became a symbol for a whole generation of Romantic poets who measured their despair against his. After the publication of Goethe’s ‘Werther’ novel, about a young man who kills himself for love, suicide became positively fashionable. As Sarah Kane was clearly aware, ‘Werther’ inspired a whole spate of self-annihilations across Europe. Romantics believed that real geniuses had to live their lives in an intense and dramatic way. Like Coleridge, who effectively did himself away with opium. A. Alvarez, in his study of suicide ‘The Savage God’ writes, “At the high point of Romanticism, life itself was lived as though it were fiction and suicide became a literary act”. Only in the nineteenth century, with the demise of Romanticism, did the ideal of death by one’s own hand begin to dim.

But in our own age, the suicides continued apace. There was Hemingway, who shot himself; Virginia Woolf who plunged into the River Ouse; and Plath, of course, who gassed herself. Germaine Greer, in ‘Slip-Shod Sibyls’ has documented the lives of the many other, less famous, female poets who did themselves to death, including Anne Sexton, Ingrid Jonker, Eva Royston, Marina Tsvetaeva. Today, the Plath hysteria has not abated and with the 1998 publication of Ted Hughes’ ‘Birthday Letters’, Hughes’ death in 1999, and Faber’s publication this year of Plath’s diaries, there are no signs of the public interest abating.

Plath, like Kane, used her depression as subject matter for her writing. She mined her grief and gave it substance, penning lines that have continued to define the way we view the link between death and creativity. Plath wrote that dying is an art. In one of her final poems, ‘Edge’, she described a woman, perfected by death, wearing a smile of accomplishment. As if death itself, were some kind of achievement. Kane does not romanticise death, but she does reinforce, in her work, the link between death and the act of writing. A character in her play, ‘Crave’ says: “I write the truth and it kills me” and in interview, Kane said, in relation to ‘Blasted’, “There is an enormous amount of depression in the play because I felt an enormous amount of despair when writing it.” After Sarah Kane’s death, her agent and close friend Mel Kenyon commented, “I think she felt something … like existential despair which is what makes many artists tick.” This comment was immediately seized upon in a letter to the Guardian. Anthony Neilson wrote “Nobody in despair ‘ticks’ – and for Sarah Kane the clock has stopped. Truth didn’t kill her, lies did: the lies of worthlessness and futility whispered by an afflicted brain. They’re lies told to artists and check-out girls alike, but we canonise one and stigmatise the other.”

It is easy to understand Neilson’s frustration. If we repeat the idea that despair and art are intricately linked, are we not fuelling the Romantic oven? Are we not encouraging would-be artists to believe that only if we enter into the depths of our own misery will we produce an art that is real and worthy? Nobody wants to encourage suicide. It’s a horrific waste and a growing social problem. A recent survey revealed that one in eight young people has considered or attempted suicide. Suicide is the biggest killer of young men after road accidents: there has been a 71% increase in suicide by young men in the last 10 years. At Edinburgh University, five students (four of them women) have killed themselves in the last 2 years.

Contemporary views on creativity and despair

The question we must ask is, did Kenyon have a point? Are writers and artists more prone to depression and if so, are they drawn into depression by their work, or is it, conversely it is the work that causes the despair? Novelist Louise Doughty was theatre critic for the Mail on Sunday when ‘Blasted’ was performed at the Royal Court. She was the play’s only defender among the national theatre critics. “I also saw the opening of Phaedra at the Gate and Cleansed at the Royal Court,” she says, “and I pleaded publicly with everyone to give the kid a break and leave her alone for a bit.” Doughty, also, has suffered from depression. “I’ve found it very intimately connected to my creative writing but in a way which is much more subtle than people might think. When I’m depressed I can’t write – I can’t do anything other than get through the day. When I’m euphoric it’s not possible to write either, it’s like having ants in your pants. But my best work is often done in the transition phase between depression and euphoria.”

This is a view echoed by novelist Anna Davis. “I write at my best when I am feeling calm and level-headed. If I’m either depressed on the one hand or exuberant on the other, I can’t settle down, concentrate and focus properly. I think there’s something intrinsically unhealthy about the idea that creativity is in some sense fuelled by depression.” These writers’ views contradict the myth. Whilst both have experienced depression of some kind, neither has felt the need to purge themselves of that feeling at the time by writing. However, the more one talks to writers, the more one becomes aware that depression is something that most are very keen to talk about; as if it’s a common language.

Liz Jensen is a novelist who admires writers who tackle dark subject matter, but avoids this herself. She writes to “cheer myself up”. Yet she believes that writers are indeed prone to gloom, “because we’re doing something emotionally dangerous, which is to put our souls on the line. When you’re engaged in a feat of the imagination, you are dredging up something quite deep within yourself. Perhaps feeling things acutely is the price you pay for going that far into your subconscious. It’s the entry fee.” Yet Jensen, like the other novelists I spoke to, also spoke of the up-side of writing: “For every low, there’s an incredible high. When it’s going well, you’re soaring – and there’s nothing like it. There’s a definite payoff.” Davis, equally, seems to refute the myth of the tragic writer. “I know that for many people there is indeed a link between dissatisfaction, despair and the creative process – but not for me. I think you’d have to be pretty neurotic to really buy into that idea – I’d hate to think that you had to be a suicidal neurotic in order to be truly great.”

It’s a view that Germaine Greer and Anthony Neilson alike will doubtless be pleased to hear. Greer fears that female writers who “fail to flay themselves alive…will be called minor”, yet surely now, we are beginning to move beyond that idea. Surely we must see that whilst there may be some link between depression and creativity, it does not follow that greatness and self-destruction are inextricably linked. Doughty believes that it was not Sarah Kane’s work that made her commit suicide. “If her career contributed at all,” she says, “it was the success that tipped her over the edge, the sudden attention and the disgusting sensationalism of the tabloid press.”

Wedding Rondeau: musing on a serious literary life

June 12, 2005 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Uncategorized Leave a Comment

This first entry from my earlier blog ‘This Stubborn World’ sees me returning from a trip to Barcelona, struggling with the tension between a serious literary life and the earnestness that I perceived in the coaching world, which I later went on to satirise in the person of James Loftus in my novel The Modigliani Girl. I will publish today’s blog both here and under the original date. After today, I will regularly post archive blogs under their original dates to form a full archive on this site.

Posing on the rooftop of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

It begins with a poem:

Wedding Rondeau

This stubborn world conforms not with my will
and, for the vast majority, goes ill,
or worse than ill, goes catastrophically –
but in your seldom case, the world and I
totally independently fulfil
our almost always warring wishes: he’ll
rejoice, and so will I, when you distil
love from involvement. Love will mollify
this stubborn world.
In tropic-dreams the orchid-birds do thrill
about the warlike head – thornbill, spoonbill –
perplexing song, dazzling frivolity:
bewildered by love’s prodigality,
see, sleeping, like the giant under the hill,
this stubborn world.

The novelist Toby Litt wrote this poem for my husband David and I to celebrate our wedding day. I hope he won’t mind me reproducing it here. It meant a lot to me at the time and still does. The opening line of the poem returned to me when I was thinking what I might entitle this blog (My first blog was entitled ‘The Stubborn World’). It seemed entirely fitting. Like Toby, I’m a novelist. Unlike Toby I’ve recently started coaching. I’ve felt a tension lately between my novelist self and my coaching self and I’m hoping I might unravel that tension in this blog. I guess I rebel against the earnestness of my coaching self and I need to reconcile myself to the fact that I don’t need to be earnest in order to coach. Here’s a place where I can rail against the stubborn world, but more than that, explore it, celebrate it (oh God, does that sound earnest?) Most of all, I want this to be a general arts blog. Though I write fiction, I find myself increasingly drawn towards other art forms and I don’t want to limit myself to writing about writing and literature (or coaching for that matter, though doubtless all three will appear on these pages).

I’ve recently returned from a short trip to Barcelona. Having left the children at home with David I was free to explore the city with a friend who has a wonderful flat at the heart of the Gothic quarter, a stone’s throw from the Picasso Museum (oh what friends…) I visited, for the first time, the Miro Museum, on a hill above the city, close to the Olympic village.

Never had an angle on Miro before now; just didn’t ‘get’ him. But something about seeing his development – how like Picasso he was an accomplished artist as an eight-year old – observing his progression through impressionism and surrealism, seeing how his development runs parallel to the nation’s, indeed to that of Catalonia, I began to gain a sense of who he was and why he was important. As his work became more minimalist, he formed an almost hieroglyphic system of images that I found intensely beautiful even as I failed to fully understand (though I will, I will). There was something hypnotic about the images, especially the huge triptychs. I gained a sense, not only from Miro, but also from Gaudi, of what a ‘body of work’ means. Have been thinking a lot about the word ‘vision’, maybe because we use it a lot in coaching, but again I really ‘got’ what true vision is. What greater vision could there be than the Sagrada Familia? Gaudi was a visionary in the purest sense of the word. To be able to conceive of something that would not be realised in one’s own lifetime; that the creation is greater than the man. If Miro’s museum was on the hill, Gaudi’s museum is the city itself. Is that an earnest thought? Possibly. But I think it’s also true.

Antoni Gaudi in 1878

I bought Gijs van Hensbergen’s biography of Gaudi whilst I was there, so hopefully I’ll find further enlightenment as I read. I first visited the Sagrada Familia 18 years ago and so much had changed. I was a drama student then, inter-railing my way through Europe. All work had stopped, it was doubtful the project would be completed. It was wonderful to see the work continuing. To see culture and architecture so much at the heart of a city was immensely inspiring. We also visited an exhibition entitled ‘Visons of Don Quixote’, a display of paintings by Hogarth, Dore, Daumier, Picasso, Dali, Ponc, Matta and Saura. Every artwork was a depiction of a scene from Cervantes’ novel. 123 artworks in all, inspired by a single novel. This time a writer who has come to represent a nation.

Great cathedrals inspire awe, make us feel small as human beings. The same could be said of great works of art. At the beginning of the Gaudi biography, van Hensbergen quotes George Bernard Shaw from ‘Man and Superman’.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

So, I will aim, perhaps, to adapt this stubborn world to myself. Who knows where that might lead me?

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My novel The Modigliani Girl is published by Blackbird Digital Books: “a deceptively light satire on the modern writing and publishing world”.