As a consumer of art, be it film or books or otherwise, I look for a work to make me feel. (I do all my best crying in the cinema!)

As a writer I’m just the same, in that I wanted Rocks in the Belly to feel emotionally real, authentic, moving. I’m proud that readers say that’s so.

Not every reader wants to feel. As the adult protagonist in Rocks in the Belly says at one point, ‘Each person has a differing capacity for intensity’. But too many books are written from the intellect only. Books you read with some interest, but set aside and you’re in the same place you were when you took up reading.

I want to set a reader down again in a different place to where they were when I picked them up. Otherwise what’s the point, exactly?

 

 

I struggle to remember it, to be honest. Friends tell me I struggled. I’m writing a novel now and am shocked at the two steps forward one step back sort of tango that a novel entails.

I can remember Rocks in the Belly making me ill. Making me happy. Afraid. I worked myself so hard. Mostly I’m deeply nourished by the writing process. Even if it isn’t all easy progress, it is all sustaining.

And I resist moaning about it. I avoid artists who grumble about what a trial it is. Yes it’s hard. Yes it’s lonely. Yes it’s uncertain. But it’s also a privilege to have the time and capacity to do it.

In the end, writing is just a face-to-face confrontation with yourself. How it feels to write a novel is simply another aspect of how it feels to be you. Those who bleat on about the struggle tend to moan anyway. If they were an accountant they’d be moaning. If they were a beer-tester in Hawaii, they’d be moaning.

How you feel about writing has very little to do with writing, and very much to do with you. Anyway. I love being confronted, so I love writing.

 

 

 

Everywhere. These characters are a casserole. The mother is a fictionalised amalgamation of my own parents. The father has some of my stupid sense of humour, but I like to think I have more spine than he does. (Everyone likes the father but he’s actually the baddie in the book, if you ask me.)

The child’s life is so far from my own childhood but his essential fears and trials are the same for every child, to a greater or lesser extent. He keenly feels a child’s reliance on his parents for safety, and thus a need to be loveable in order to sustain that security. And yet he isn’t ever sure he’s loveable.

 

The adult protagonist comes from everywhere too. He’s some of me; anecdotes from others; fiction. But I was surprised by the rage in the book and cannot avoid the fact that some of the genesis of it is from me. Exaggerated, distorted. But mine. All of the book is mine and yet none of it is me. That’s the beauty of fiction, it is bare without nakedness.

But the absolute genesis of the story was a picture I saw on a mantelpiece ten years ago. It was of a smiling child, but obviously a child that had an intellectual disability. The family told me about her, how they’d fostered her and she’d had this disability. And that later she’d died. It was such an obvious source of sadness for all of them. They’d really loved this foster child.

Eventually that image fell out of me years later as a first line: I used to tell people I was a foster child.

 

 

 

I can only answer that post-rationally because at the time it was instinctive and natural to me that both time periods needed their own narration. I’d written it originally as a short story and often the language of that one adult narrator would regress slightly. So you could say that the child’s voice was very subtly seeded in that original story.

Setting out, I was nervous as to whether I could pull the boy’s voice off, but in the end he was pretty easy to write. I just had to let go, remember the painful innocence of a boy, play with language and the connectedness of ideas, something my mind lends itself to naturally. The boy is just a master at egocentric but naive segue.

 

Using two voices and eras gave me so much agency to explore the abuse of power, to switch it in every chapter. The boy’s identity bleeds into the man, and the older innocent mother into the younger more culpable mother. So that I made four characters out of two, characters that are never fully separate. They’re the same person, of course. We are all simultaneously the child we were, the person we are, and the old person we’ll be. It’s incredible when you think about it, all these skins we’ve so entirely occupied and never fully shed.

 

It makes for complexity and ambiguity and ambivalence in the book. Not something every reader wants. Nor what many books do. I look for a novel to be made up of contradictory or complex human characters, rather than caricatured goodness or badness.

 

I believe that we are all, always, both good and bad.

 

 

The voice was easy, the emotional realities of it were hard. The childhood the boy has is totally the reverse of mine, but his sense of isolation and loneliness and insufficiency is true for me – true of all childhoods in some ways because, as I said, we all have to navigate our absolute emotional and physical dependence on our parents. Parents who in all cases will be, to varying degrees, capriciously human; liable to fluctuate. And so all children are always assessing how they are going. Are they safe? Are they loveable enough. The less a child does this perpetual calculation, the more safe he must feel.

 

I felt unsafe. Insufficient. So does the boy in the story. I just gave him his own reasons for that.

 

 

I think I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had really positive reviews. But every reading of a book is valid. If anything, I marvel at the range of interpretations. And realise that as a writer I can only carve out my path through a story and hope people can follow.

Most readers get what the book does. Most people like that it takes them on a compelling and sometimes difficult journey. I think a lot of readers crave that. Some don’t though. I wish everyone did, but it’s not going to happen.

 

 

It’s nice. It is. I’m especially glad when readers write to me with praise or gratitude. But what I’ve learnt, to my disappointment, is that having a book in the shops, or well-reviewed, is not something you can fully assimilate. Like any compliment, it warms you for a while but can never actually sustain you in any way.

 

The only real experience I can assimilate is the writing of the book and what it has done for me. I am different having written this book. The rest of the outcome is a privilege, a pleasure, but not something I can claim fully as my own, or even fully about me.

 

Absolutely and absolutely not.

 

No long and uncertain project or journey could be contemplated or completed without some expectation of arrival, success, satisfaction. I mean, think about it, people buy lottery tickets. How crazy is that, when you consider the odds. Ok, the investment is lower, but the equation is the same. You invest in something because you expect dividends.

I believed in this book when I was writing it, and I believe in it now. My needs and hopes for its chances of success are what I required to sustain me through so much uncertainty. Because as much as I believed in it, I also totally doubted myself too.

 

I’m guessing that in the end, both self-doubt and self-confidence are necessary for success, satisfaction and commitment.

 

 

I find it amazing that a scene can evoke such a strong response from readers who know it’s fiction, but many have struggled with the one, short, section of animal cruelty in the book. Even though it‘s a confused and hurt boy carrying it out, and the cruelty is not severe. Even though it is fiction, some readers are deterred by it. I suppose I would soften that scene a little if I had my time again, but actually when (if) the book is reprinted I will just put in the acknowledgements: No animal was harmed during the writing of this book.

 

I mean, it’s fiction!

 

I am right back in the saddle. Perhaps prematurely. I wrote a first draft of a book before Rocks in the Belly which I will return to, although it’s hard to start editing a first draft just after editing a last draft. The state of the two is jarringly different.

But I’m more possessed by the new book I’m generating, about a man quickly losing his sight.

Blindness is an incredible and humbling area to research. An amazing canvas to write on too. Full blindness is rare, and so colour and imagery and sound and attunement is the landscape of a vision-impaired person.

This is a landscape that I can’t wait to write because there is such permission to reinterpret the world through metaphorical and distorted means. It is permission to let my writing roam far.

It is also an opportunity for me to confront my own fear of my body. To confront my fear of vulnerability. Our bodies are what sustain us, but also what make us so vulnerable. They’re what can make us dependent on others… Our body is what slowly robs us. And then kills us.

 

It’s exciting to know that my attitudes to these issues absolutely will not be the same at the end of this process. And that I’m getting to meet inspirational, humbling and lovely people navigating (if not emancipating) the experience of living with a vision-impairment.

This is why writing is a privilege. And why you’ll never hear me moaning about it.