CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

Writer's Notebook

What’s at the Heart of my Psychological Suspense Fiction?

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Ever since I was a small child, I have been a reader and a writer in equal measure (most of the time). Without even realising it for a long time, I would delve the depths of a book I enjoyed for whatever I felt was at its core: the reasons behind whatever was its central theme or moment. It has always been that I have wanted to get under the skin of a story, right to its very heart. The same has always applied to my writing. To make me interested, then obsessed by, a story enough to pursue it to its ending (however dark, tragic, twisty or heartfelt) there needs to be this same kind of heart, one which makes me love to be at my desk with the story, the characters, and the very words themselves. The elements of this beating heart are rarely the same for two stories running, yet they make up all the parts of writing my books that I absolutely adore. In this post, I’ll give you a run-down of several of my psychological suspense books, to show you what I mean when I say that each of my stories has a heart. And, for me at least, this heart often beats on well after typing the last sentence.

I’m going to begin with Show Me Dead, as it holds a very special place in my emotions. There was so much I fell in love with, the deeper I went into this novel. This was the first book in a brand new series linked by theme – and I had the opportunity to write as if no one was watching (which they weren’t)! I wanted a book full of Gothic-inspired atmosphere, which is why I set it almost exclusively in the catacombs of a dilapidated theatre. As I was writing, I had in mind a visual image of the entire book, scene by scene, almost as if I was watching an entire theatre performance myself (although, thankfully, I’ve never sat through performances that this one had to offer!). I imagined lights flickering, the dust in the air, the old and battered seats – and the terror on the stage. This book has been described as “claustrophobic”, and that’s exactly the atmosphere I was aiming for. Who wouldn’t want to escape from there – especially when the actors, themselves already captive, begin to go missing…?

I’ll refer to setting again later. But, as all readers know, characters are an endless source of fascination, and there are always some characters you love writing most as an author. As much as the tension and almost living dread in the walls of the setting of the catacombs of the theatre, I loved creating the characters. They felt very close, very special, to me, especially Angel, my main character, and the young girl, Pierette, who has also been held captive and terrified by the Puppet Master, for as long as she can remember. It was the vulnerability I found within them that made me care so much (and I genuinely, at times, cried for them; I can be a very emotional writer). And, ultimately, this drove me to dig deep and find what was at the heart of the strength they never knew they had. The journey from disempowerment to their own very particular kind of emancipation captivated me, and the characters of Show Me Dead continue to live on in my writer’s brain. I may even write more in their strange, terrifying world. If I do, then their emotions will play a huge part in finding the heart of the reason for the story, both theirs and mine.

Something similar happened with regard to character when I began writing That Killer Image, I knew almost instantly that I was going to love writing about Anthony, the completely obsessive photographer with only one objective: to capture what, to him, is the perfect image. Maybe, in a writerly way, I wanted to capture my own ‘perfect’ image of him as a dangerous man – more dangerous, as we discover, than anyone had realised before. But, as with all villains, he has his own motivations which, to him, make complete and logical sense, which is always what makes villains and antagonist characters so fascinating. His backstory is of immense importance here, as his present is haunted by his past, driven by the events which took place in his young life, and most importantly, how he felt and reacted emotionally and viscerally to them. There are times when he makes me feel incredibly emotional and sorry for him, yet these same incidents leave me completely terrified of this man. No surprise there – he’s a serial killer! And, the more I wrote his chapters, the more I realised he was an even darker character than even I expected him to be. That’s one of the challenges and the fun parts: the more you write about a character, the more you find out about them (even when you’re the one who invented them in the first place!).

Sometimes it is a theme combined with a sense of atmosphere which pulls me to a story, and it was the Gothic-inspired nature of everything about No Deadlier Time which held me captivated with this story from start to finish. At the heart of the book, it questions where reality ends and where fantasy born of a destructive mental state begins. It also questions something which is fundamental for me in my suspense literature: who or what is truly guilty and morally, as well as physically, culpable?

The book actually began life as a short horror story, which I weave into the book in monologue conversations my main character, Harry, has with his father. Harry blames his father for the dark past lurking in the house (and for something which happens there when he returns with his pregnant wife) which pull him into a terrible and deadly chain of events. I said I would return to setting, and in this book the house itself is at the very centre, and acts as a character in its own right, which I found fascinating. All the way through, I could picture the ancient, crumbling family home which sits on the edge of a cliff, isolated from the village full of deviants and criminals. Ravens live there and become integral to Harry’s declining mental state, infiltrating the landscape, his dreams – and the curse which the family, the house, and its grounds will not let die. There is a feeling of dark foreboding felt by the guilty and the innocent in this house – right to the terribly dark conclusion. I wonder who (or what) you would feel is the most guilty if you read this novel?

I’ll leave my Darker Minds novels now, and move onto a couple of standalone psychological suspense/thrillers. It may not come as a surprise, given what you’ve read so far, that I’ve always loved books with twists, and particularly with characters who have emotional-driven, dark and deep-rooted motivations. When I began writing Hers or Mine and delved further into the characters of paranoid and desperate wife, Lucy, and the enigmatic Charlotte, owner of a creative retreat where Lucy decides to spend time, I realised this was the kind of book I was going to write. It was clear immediately that there was so much more to these two women than met the eye. And there really is! This psychological suspense is a slow-burn by necessity. We have to get to know these characters (or at least think we know them), because each twist revolves around the characters themselves – their pasts which won’t stay buried, their actions, and in particular the deep-rooted, agonising and obsessively dark emotions which live within them and drive them to do… ah, no spoilers here!

Hers or Mine is also very much about relationships. Broken ones, betrayed ones, and ones that grow from a love tied to loyalty, gratitude and something much deeper than we could expect. So love in its many forms features heavily in this book, although there’s nothing straightforward about that, either. At its most pure, it brought tears to my eyes as the writer; at its worst it’s love which destroys people from the inside. Everything that happens to the characters in this story stems from their individual personal experiences, circumstances and feelings for someone else. It makes it as much of a psychological drama as it does a psychological suspense novel, and I truly loved writing it.

Indeed, during the two decades since my very first short story was published, I’ve been exploring the theme of love in my novels and short stories. What interests me most is the way different types of love are formed, and changed based on experience. And how sometimes it doesn’t change but becomes deeper, even darker, more obsessive and – potentially – dangerous. This danger could be to the one who holds such love in their heart, or to the object of this love. So I find it intriguing to explore the grey areas between innocence and guilt, and between heartfelt love and something that morphs into the (self-) destructive kind. I took this to the limits in my psychological suspense thriller, You Know You Shouldn’t.

Love with the darkest heart pervades this entire book from start to finish. A passionate (and, unknown to my protagonist, Eva, at the time, manipulative) relationship from the past leaves a shared history with a dark secret between her and the villain which affects the entire story. Obsessive love plays its part, too: it’s this obsession which is lethal, and which dictates the villain’s behaviour, leading Eva down a path which she realises too late that is affecting everyone she loves. Her emotions drive her, consume her, and undermine her, until she has no choice but to make (or struggle to make) some impossible decisions to try and keep her loved ones alive. Different forms of love become entangled, from the romantic to the co-dependent, to the familial, to the need to love oneself. Only this can stop a love that has gone so bad, so dangerous, that no one is safe. Such an intense, unpredictable and terrifying love was quite an experience to write.

What I hope is evident, then, is that the very heart of my psychological suspense, even the darkest ones, have at the very core feelings. My characters are very much driven by their emotions, whether, for example, because of a romantic relationship gone bad, or obsessions, desperation to get out of a situation, or loyalty and pure love. Feelings are by their very human nature, complex, and this complexity is what creates the twists and turns in the plots, as the characters themselves drive various actions due to how they feel. In a similar way, a reader’s feelings are extremely powerful, and for their own feelings to run amok as they become invested in the characters’ emotions, and in the psychological and emotional pull of settings which breathe life and darkness into a story is everything I sincerely hope for in a reading experience of one of my books. Reading itself is a feeling: one of being transported to the world of someone else and experiencing the events with them at a deep level (even if, in the case of my books, these events can get pretty dark, dangerous, and deadly). This is what I love about reading. And it’s what I ultimately love about writing,

You can find all the books listed above, and the stores where they are available for purchase, using the links below:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

No Deadlier Time

Hers or Mine

You Know You Shouldn’t

What a writer needs (according to Agatha Christie – and me!)

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I gave my new Agatha Christie bag a bit of an outing yesterday. As it was its first trip out, officially (I don’t really count the trip home from Waterstones Piccadilly on the train because it was stuffed in a suitcase), I wanted to make it a bit special. So the bag and I went to Lidl to do my weekly shopping. In case you didn’t know, the author life is exceedingly glamorous. Mine is especially so, as I don’t own a car and therefore the bag and I had the glorious task of lugging all the shopping home on foot. My feet, not the bag’s feet, unfortunately. I did discover that my new friend, ‘Christie bag’, was particularly good as a conveyor of rice cakes and crisps, though.

When I first saw said bag, hanging there near the till in Waterstones Piccadilly, I was struck by two things: one, that it’s got exactly the same design on it as the mug my kids bought me for Christmas, and two, that Agatha Christie had the needs of writers the world over written there in a nutshell. The quote on the bag reads, ‘All you need is a chair and a table and a typewriter and a bit of peace’.

For me, that’s a quote which requires some serious thinking about, because it’s that easy and that hard. Some decent story ideas certainly don’t go amiss, neither does a brain that absorbs people and bits of the world like a sponge, puts them through the literary meat grinder and spits them out as hero(in)es and villains, and little gems of history or conversation and the like. In essence, however, the Queen of Crime has it in the bag (so to speak – or on the bag, anyway). All those things are true. I think that, if you then want to go on and publish your work, there are a whole other set of necessities that the world of writing entails, but without the important part – the writing – those things become completely unnecessary. You can’t publish something that’s not written. You can’t even read it as a bedtime story to your kids, grandkids, snoring partner or to yourself. You can’t even leave it festering on your hard drive for a decade or more. Which I’ve done. Several times.

Writing the actual words is something that has thrilled me from the day I was first able to string a sentence together on paper with a stubby pencil. It continues to enthral me, and I hope it does so until I take my last breath. But the actual practicalities of writing have not always been so easy for me. Since I began taking my writing seriously in 2007, I truly can’t say it’s been because I had to try and carve out time in between going to work and getting my ‘workplace’ job done, and only writing in my spare time, because that hasn’t been the case. I have been (and still am) a stay-at-home mum, in as much as everything I have done, job-wise and family-wise, has involved me working from home. I have, in my time, sold children’s books, made and sold handmade cards, been an editor, written online teaching resources, been a reviews editor, freelance writer, and pestered magazines until they probably just got so sick of me submitting stories that they gave in and published them, to name but a few. (Note: this is not advice to novice short story writers on story submission! In truth, I had a better plan!).

But being someone who works at home and has also taken the predominant role in cooking, cleaning, washing, looking after and fetching and carrying kids (or making them walk to their various clubs and school and the like, having not driven a car since the late 1990s – long story), and so on, this has often meant my writing needs have been pushed aside, squeezed in between other domestic jobs, or abandoned. Finding that sweet spot between knowing the hidey-hole of every once missing but now sparklingly clean sock and not knowing whether anyone in the home has eaten for a week hasn’t always been easy. There have been many times I would have loved a train commute to work, or even a bus ride, so I could get out my laptop, phone, notepad – anything – and write, but walking the kids to school didn’t quite have the same writerly effect! I tried writing in the playground while waiting for the end of school, but I got some very strange looks and I felt too guilty at ignoring the other parents that I gave that up as a bad job.

In my time, I’ve written in all sorts of places – sitting in front of the telly, kneeling at the side of the bed, in the garden, in the bathroom, in the garage. I’ve taken trips to the park and written in the passenger seat of the car. I have a pretty big desk because I thought a number of years ago that it wold be amazing to have such a luxury, but I more often than not have found myself writing at the kitchen worktop because I’ve really struggled to enjoy said desk, and because, more often than not, it has been in a different room (and even on a different floor level) to the one I have needed to be in. I have developed some kind of uneasy mastery over cooking dinner and writing at the same time! In my current home, my desk is only about ten feet from the cooker, and the washing machine – and thankfully, the kettle and the chocolate biscuits – so I am forcing myself more and more to actually sit at the gigantic thing and type there, because it means I can then use the big monitor. But I do change it up a bit. I doubt I’ll ever be truly comfortable with a ‘designated’ place to write.

That ‘bit of peace’, too, has spent the best part of two decades eluding this writer. I wrote really well during the snatched hours I had when my kids were very small and went to playgroup a couple of times a week. In fact, that was the time I was most productive with short stories, and managed to write and get certain unsuspecting magazines to publish quite a decent number of them, both in the UK and much further afield. But, as things do with families, that all changed as they got older. I had longer on my own, so you’d think my productivity would have gone through the roof. Well… no. I did lots of work, yes, but none of it was the crime, mystery and suspense writing I am currently doing, and which I’ve always wanted to do. (I’m a wannabe Agatha Christie!)

So, all I needed, of course (I told myself), was to change things up and find a better way of working. After all, any surface would do as a table, and anywhere I could park my bum would do as a seat. I had my laptop. I was just seeking that elusive last part. Several years ago, I tried a routine of going to the library and sitting at the table in there for a few hours, but my library is like Piccadilly Circus and I longed for a librarian to say ‘sh’ – and that was just to the other librarians! I had another brilliant idea of going to a cafe. I chose an amazing one. It was run by a woman who baked the most incredible scones and, when I arrived, they were always just coming out of the oven. This lovely lady became curious about what I was doing there two or three times a week, and she asked me outright – ‘Are you a writer?’ She was thrilled when I told her I was, and I sensed her watching me as I worked, which quite amused me. It was a great arrangement, except for two things: one, that she closed down, and two, that I’m surprised I didn’t roll out of the door, considering the number of jam and cream scones I ate in my time there.

I still love working in cafes. I would very much like to live near a cafe that has writer subscriptions – a favourite table booked in advance, as much tea/coffee as I can drink for one set ‘just for writers’ price, and every piece of their advertising promo stating, ‘Claire Ladds – you know, the world famous writer – writes her books here’. Okay, that last one is pushing it a bit (as is the rest, probably), but I’d love it! I get loads of work done when I’m sitting in the vicinity of people whose conversation I only hear in murmurs and who actually don’t want me to talk to them while I’m writing! That makes me sound like a really miserable so-and-so, but I’m not. I doubt there are many writers who can actually get words down while being talked to (or at!), and being expected to answer.

So, I do think Agatha Christie absolutely nailed it. A ‘bit of peace’ can come in many shapes and sizes. It might be sitting in a room in silence (even if that room turns out to be in the bathroom), or in a cafe, on a train or at a park bench surrounded by ambient noise, or whatever works. It doesn’t really matter, just as long as it does the job (preferably without turning you into a jam and cream scone). For me, my latest – and as of right now, my ‘bit of peace’ that gets the words down – is to write at my desk (or the kitchen worktop if I’m sick of sitting there) and writing to the sound of rain for 35 minutes, then having ten minutes off. It’s working better than anything I’ve ever tried before, so I’ll be sticking to it until it stops working. I love rain (which is a good job, living in England!) and so I’m hoping that all I need is my version of ‘a table and a chair and a typewriter and a bit of peace’. And that will do very nicely to get my books written. 😊

Backstory: plotting and planning vengeance

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Somewhere, hiding among the pages of every book, there is a backstory, a story that happened to the characters before the book you read actually begins on the page. It’s the characters’ personal histories, if you like: things that happened to them, memories they have, people they’ve met, events that shaped them into the person you see on the page.

I want to share with you a small piece of the backstory for The Secrets That Haunt Us. It occurs right at the beginning of the book, and takes the shape of five letters, sent to two different members of the same family – mother, Emmeline, and daughter, Julia. These letters, sent months before the book ‘proper’ begins, gives the reader an inkling that all is not only not well at home as the book gets started, but that clearly there have been events in the past which have led to the letter-writing of Alex, a man who is a most unpleasant man indeed. Vengeance has been plotted with malice and a great deal of forethought, and he intends to execute his plans for betrayals and secrets long since past.

But is he the only villain of the piece? The Secrets That Haunt Us blurs the lines between what we would automatically consider ‘good’ and ‘bad, or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. When I wrote it, I often wondered what courses of action I would have taken, had I been in the various characters’ shoes. And the question will probably haunt me for a very long time.

I hope these five letters intrigue you into wanting to know what could have prompted Alex to plot and plan his own very particular type of vengeance – and what happens once his plans have been set in motion!

[A note on this book: The Secrets That Haunt Us is not a thriller, in any kind of genre-specific sense. It is literary fiction set predominantly on one day in the 1970s, and also going back to the 1950s and late 1930s. But there is a definite thread of malice running through one particular strand of the novel, and this is what I am focusing on here.]

~ ~ ~

Tuesday 29th September, 1970

My Emmeline,

I have been watching. Waiting. I know your face like I know my own. I know your heart like I know mine. I know everything about you. Did you truly believe you could escape my soul? We are entwined, you and I. You live within me. And I live within you.

Anything you ever wanted I gave to you. A perfect life. Everything was perfection. But you spoiled it. You spoiled everything.

Did you really believe that I would remain dead? To you, of all people? You are my obsession. My every waking thought.

Do you remember our games of chess? How you moved your pieces around the board? You have moved many pieces in the last 30 years. It’s my turn, don’t you think?

You wanted to destroy all you should have loved. It will happen. The time is nearing. We always have to pay our debts to love, don’t we?

I am coming. You are forever my Cathy; I am forever your Heathcliff. You can never escape me. And I will not rest until our torment is over.

A.

~

Friday 6th November, 1970

My lovely, dearest, darling Julia,

I have agonised over how to begin this letter. I have no idea how to explain, except to say that you have been in my thoughts since the second I last saw you. I watched your tears as I went away, and I need you to know that I have never got over that sight of you.

I wish more than anything that you can forgive the way I left. There were reasons, and they are very complex. I was unable to tell you about them then. I want to tell you everything now. The whole truth. But not in a letter.

I have never left you. I have kept watch over your life. Your troubles, which made me ache for you, my wonderful, darling girl; your marriage; your unhappiness. You ARE unhappy, aren’t you, my beautiful Julia?

I need you to know that the love I had for you then remains exactly as it was. It has never changed within me, not even through all the years we have been apart. Do you feel it? In the way you always said you could? I know you do. Every day when I awake, I reach out, only to find you are not there. Do you reach for me, too? For years, I have wanted to take your hand and stroke your face with my thumb – do you remember that?

I am back in the house. I had to. I know how much you loved it. And I want you here, beside me, in it once more.

Say you will return to me. Please. Even if it is just for one day, so that we can say goodbye. I don’t want to say goodbye ever again. Do you?

Please reply to me. And please destroy this letter. It is very important that you do, my darling girl.

You are in my dreams, always.

With all the love I have always had for you,

Alex.

x – x – x

~

Saturday 6th November, 1970

My sweetest Julia,

I knew you would not fail me. I knew the moment I told you where I was that you would write. And write you did. Over and over!

You will never know what it means to me that you wrote just how much you still love me. Your forgiveness makes everything all right. I did not expect such a torrent of letters. Every one is held against my heart as I struggle with my daily life.

Please, do not cry. There were tears on your letters, darling girl. Please do not feel that your circumstances now mean that I would not want you back in my arms once more. I have always wanted a perfect baby. You can give me the chance. Please say you will.

There are reasons that I am unable to explain more clearly why I left as I did. If anyone found this letter with that explanation, then I would be in extreme danger of needing to vanish once more. I know you do not want that, do you, not now? Did you do as I asked? Did you burn the letter? Please say that you did. I don’t want to ever have to leave you, ever again. Every moment spent without you has been torture. You know how much I adore you. You belong to me. I need you with me. Without you here, my life is worth nothing.

I dreamed of us last night, lying here, your head on my chest while I read you poetry and that passage of Jane Eyre you love so much. The one about the invisible cord that fastens two hearts. There is an invisible bond between us, Julia. You have always known it, haven’t you? It cannot be broken and it pulls us together again now.

Please, my angel, say you will come. I need to see you. To hold you. I want to feel your lips on mine.

Write to me. Say you’ll come. And please burn this letter. Do not fail me.

With every drop of love and passion I have within me for you,

Your very own,

Alex.

x – x – x

~

Sunday 28th February, 1971

Julia, my angel,

Such torrents of letters! You never need fear, I have not forgotten you, I have not changed my mind. I have been making preparations for your arrival, that is all.

It breaks my heart to know how much you have missed me. I am so, so sorry. I promise, I will tell you everything once we are together again. I think of you, and of that moment, endlessly.

Knowing you want to be with me is the greatest honour you could do me. You have no need to worry about money, my sweetest girl. The contents of the envelope inside this letter will cover all the costs of your travel. You will notice that the ticket is for next Saturday, and that it is one-way. Do not ever go back, my beautiful one. You will always be free to leave me, but I do not want you to. Oh, you have no idea how much I want you to end your days here.

My heart is ready to explode at the very thought of you on the train. Soon, my angel. Soon everything in our lives will fall into place. Only promise me you will be on the train. Promise me. If circumstances prevent me meeting you at the station, know that I am being very careful in case we are seen, and that I will not be far away. Ultimately, you know where to find me. I will be waiting. Tell no one you are coming. No one. Please. It is important.

Remember to destroy this letter.

I will see you on Saturday. I am counting the seconds until you are with me. Then I will truly show you what love means to me.

Until then, my darling girl,

Alex.

x – x – x

~

Monday 1st March, 1971

My Emmeline,

The time is almost upon us. Our final battle will soon commence. It will be checkmate. Our story will end the way it was always fated that it would.

You really believed you had escaped me, didn’t you? You should have made sure I was dead. It will be your biggest regret. I promise.

Forever yours, just as you have always been forever mine,

A.

~ ~ ~

If you’d like to know more about The Secrets That Haunt Us, you can visit my webpage for the book here.

Ready to buy? Get it on Amazon here, or on Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and many other good e-book stores here.

Finding a writing process: how I write my books

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When you read (or listen to) novels, novellas, short story collections and any other fiction or non-fiction, I wonder if you can possibly guess the processes the writer might have used to write the book you hold in your hand, or read, or listen to on your device?

I have been thinking a lot about my writing process, recently. I think this has been sparked by the realisation of just how many books I have on my computer that are in partial states of completion and that I’ve been saying I’m going to finish ‘this year’ or ‘next year’. For some of them, I’ve been saying it since 2014! I also have an absolute stack of story ideas and partial plots.

Some people have said to me that I should just write a non-fiction book for writers and put all these ideas in a ‘story prompts’ book, and actually, I would really like to write a series of books on this topic. I’m one of those people who find it extremely easy to begin projects, and I have fantastic starting energy. I also have extremely strong finishing energy. The issue comes once the first excitement of a new idea has passed and the ending is nowhere in sight. In talking to other writers, I know I’m not the only one who, left to my own devices, would have nothing but a string of story starters!

But I’m now a full-time author. ‘Oooh, I’ve got a great idea for a story,’ followed by eating a Twirl and making three cups of tea, and forgetting the book I’m meant to be working on because I want to play around with new places someone could find a corpse, or a whole new setting, or (and I’ve been known to do this numerous times) think that I can write a whole load of books in a completely different genre and play around with that for a while – none of this is going to get novels in any reader’s hands.

I heard someone say recently that if you have all the time in the world to write a book, then that book will take all the time in the world. For me, this couldn’t be more true. It took me ten years to put together The Reason for Everything, even though many of the stories in it had been written several years before I finally published it in 2019. Likewise, it took a similar length of time to write and publish the book that finally became The Secrets That Haunt Us. I put this down to all sorts of factors. I said that it was because I was nervous of the publishing process and I had to figure it out. Publishing is, in fact, very straightforward, so I had to rule this out as an excuse.

I also had to rule out the other ‘reason’ that I had been using to tell myself that any book I write is going to take me a decade. I write out of order, so that must mean that I have no idea what is happening in the book and it takes forever to try and piece the scenes and ideas together. Okay, this is true to a certain extent, but the main conclusion I came to was that I was just plain scared to get the books finished. Because being finished means it can be published, which means it can be judged. And this can be a very scary thing when you’ve poured your heart and soul into your book.

Being a full-time author doesn’t mean I’m not scared anymore. It doesn’t mean that the fear of judgement has miraculously gone away. I’m still the same person I was before, but I’ve experimented with lots and lots of different ways of working and I’ve finally found some processes that work for me. Some work for longer writing projects, some for short ones. But for me, they all start in the same place(s): character, and the ending.

Characters develop in my head long before I write about them. Eventually they have enough ‘life’ about them for me to start thinking about what might happen to them in a story. Whatever that turns out to be, I always know how I want the story to end. So I get paper and I scribble. A lot. I put the story title (a working one will do) in a circle in the centre, then I spider out from there. I put the ending in an adjoining circle and join them together. Then I look for the main plot points: the inciting incident that sets the story in motion, the high points, the twists and turns, the point of no return, and any others that I can see are important. This mind mapping is great if I’m writing a short story, but it gets pretty confusing on one sheet of paper when I want to add in all the extras that you get in a novel. So I use two things: Scrivener, which is a fabulous piece of writing software and allows you to move chapters about easily, and a pen, strips of paper and blu tac.

I love the tactile nature of pen and paper, so with a novel, I write each of my plot points on a strip of paper, and then I stick them on a board (or in my case, currently, my fridge door) and move them around until I’m happy with the order they are in. I also have markers to ensure I have the inciting incident, the point of no return, the highs, the lows, and the other points that make up a crime or suspense novel – discovery of clues, the aha moments, the showdown. That’s the point I turn them into chapters in my writing software.

So far, so good. But then what? I’ve got a story idea, yes, but no book. And I’ve got enough story ideas already, without another one falling by the wayside! Well, because I now know what each of my sections are about, I can start filling in with details. Some people will write a complete story outline, like a summary of the entire book, covering one or two sheets of paper. For some reason this doesn’t work very well for me, so I now do a ‘skinny draft’ to start off. This involves writing each section of the book if I can at this stage, and if not, then I write notes about what will happen.

Once I’ve got a complete skinny draft, I can begin the process I love best: the rewriting. This is where I can throw everything at the book that I want to include, and make it as detailed as I want. I have fun with the book, which keeps the middle part of the process alive for me – an important motivation trick for this author! I can still do this in any order I like, which suits my mentality, and because I edit the book into shape after this step anyway, filling in any plot holes and anachronisms – and hopefully eradicating plainly stupid mistakes.

So finally, this gets me to the point at which the book can have its final edit, picking up on word choices and grammatical errors, and then it gets a proofread, before I format it for e-book or paperback, or other formats. For me, too, the most important thing is that this whole process gets the book written in weeks, for the first full draft, and a few months from start to finish. That’s definitely better (for me) than a decade.

It’s taken me since 2007 to discover that this process works for me, every time. That’s a long time, and has involved a lot of trial and error, and a lot of giving up on one way or doing something and trying a new one. It may or may not work for you. Everyone has to find their own writing processes. There is an awful lot of help and advice for new writers and experienced ones alike, and some of the advice may be useful to you. And some may not. The thing is, you have no way of knowing what kind of processes work for you until you try them out. It may even be that the process you discover works for one kind of story or book but doesn’t work for another, especially if the story is in a different genre to the previous one, or it’s a novel instead of a short story, or a play instead of a novella.

All a writer can really do is take note of all the good advice out there and sift through it, trying out different ways of working until one, or a few, work for you. From personal experience, too, I would have to say listen to your instincts. If you know you’re the kind of writer who likes mind maps instead of lists, then use them. If you know you like being clear on the end of the story and then figuring out how the characters get to that point, do so. Everyone works differently, everyone has different demands on their time. Writing is a creative process; if you’re a writer, let yourself be creative in ways that you discover work best for you.

Writing what you know (Part 2)

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I can’t believe that the release of my novel, Baby up the Chimney, is only a week away! It’s taken ten years, since I first wrote a short story with the same name, to get this book onto the shelves of Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble and lots of other stores. I don’t mean that I’ve been writing the same book incessantly, squirrelled away like a little hermit (and I say ‘little’ because I just about scrape five feet tall on a good day!). No, the original version of this book was originally written a number of years ago, although it has changed a lot since that initial draft.

I almost couldn’t explain it, even to myself, but this book became immensely personal in many ways. I obsessed over it for years, nothing I wrote made me feel like it was good enough, and I put it down and restarted it half a dozen times before biting the bullet the year, ripping it apart and rebuilding it, chapter by chapter. And then it dawned on me what the problem had been: it had begun to incorporate all sorts of things that meant a great deal to me, or I had experienced in some way, big and small, even though I fictionalised each one and placed them in the hands of completely fictional characters. And if you read the book, you’ll probably be very glad that they are fictional.

One of the major themes of this book is motherhood – actual, impending, miscarriage and loss. My own relationship with my mum is absolutely amazing, open and honest, and so is the one I have with my kids, but I wanted to explore an alternative version of a mother-daughter relationship. So I twisted everything about my own relationships into a mother-daughter relationship with tensions, secrets, lies and trauma, the kind any person can only hope never to experience.

Within that tension, I found myself exorcising a few of my own ghosts, however. In late 2002 I had a miscarriage, and it is something I have never got over. I blamed myself, even though I did nothing wrong, and the guilt and the self-blame became something I lived with daily. Without giving too much away about the book, this kind of loss does feature very heavily in the female characters, although the essence of my own feelings has been heavily fictionalised and distilled into two characters and their very, very different lives to my own. But this became the thing I obsessed about, dreamt about, and why I struggled to complete the book, I think. I was finding it difficult to let go – of my memories, my guilt and self-blame, and ultimately the story itself.

What I also noticed as I was rewriting, and especially when I was editing, was that snapshots of experiences I’ve had managed to filter their way into the book. For instance, I remember vividly what it was like to go into the shoe shop and get measured for new shoes, so the first draft contained a massive section all about my character, Julia, being fitted for a pair of shoes. Luckily for you, I trimmed that right down. When I say it was long, it went on for about six pages!

I think that, besides the memory and the emotions of my own miscarriage, one of the biggest things that fed into this book that was based on personal experience was a fear of spiders. I gave my character David a morbid fear of arachnids which was a useful plot device, but the first version of the book took this much further, as David recalls, in extreme and painful detail, an experience my ex-husband and I had shortly after we moved into our first rented house. This house was built in the late 1800s. It had a brick fireplace, a loft we daren’t ever venture into for fear of what might be up there, windows that were painted shut, an airing cupboard which contained a tank which flooded the cupboard every time the immersion heater was switched on, and a front door that the woodlice loved. Oh yes, and spiders. Lots of them. And there was one particular spider that was bigger than the rest…

The following is how this experience made it into the first draft of the book. While the characters themselves and the context to this scene are fictional, the spider part, the events after we spotted it, is completely true (and the feelings of the characters about the aforementioned arachnid are very much mine):

***

He honestly had never been truly arachnophobic, not even after Paul’s juvenile stunts – he told himself this regularly – until that day in the kitchen a week after they had moved in. Julia had been in the kitchen, making some sandwiches next to the cooker and he had been engrossed in the Vauxhall Viva manual which would hopefully explain where the oil on the road came from every time he moved the car. 

“Do you want a cup of tea with this?” Julia had said, nodding towards the sandwich. 

“Um, yeah, okay,” He had replied, glancing up and smiling at Julia’s underskirt showing about an inch below the rest of her dress. She would be so mad if she realised. As his eyes drew in a sweeping motion about the room to return to the confusion of the diagrammatic nonsense which was meant to represent the manual’s car engine, he spotted something large – about the size of one of Julia’s gloves, in the right angled crevice between the kick-board near the cooker and the one which veered to the left towards the sink. He was just about to mention it to Julia when the black glove grew tendrils. Their indiscriminate loops slowly began to morph into definite shapes, and the whole black mass of fur began to move itself slowly away from the corner and out onto the first printed tile on the black and white lino floor. 

“Julia,” he said, the calm in his voice wavering every time he swallowed. “Come over here a minute.”

“I will, when I’ve finished making your dinner,” she responded. “What’s so important.” She laughed momentarily at his still and grey face. “Do you want me to try and figure out what you’re supposed to do?” Her face stiffened as he stood up. “What’s the matter?”

He hadn’t been able to help himself. His eyes had not left the black crawling nightmare since he had realised it was moving. Very slowly – at the moment. Julia took one look at where his eyes seemed to be stuck to the floor.

“Bloody hell!” He could not remember ever seeing her move so fast, before or since. Making more noise than a cacophony of every sub-species of primate communicating simultaneously through the trees, she yanked a chair out from under the dining table and stood on its seat, her back to the creeping arachnid. “Get rid of it!” she screamed. “Where the hell did it come from?”

What could he do? He struggled out of his frozen state and shook all over. He had absolutely no idea that spiders in England could ever grow to be that big. How many decades had the thing been creeping around this house? Eating all the other spiders. Anything that moved. Oh, he felt sick. Edging around the kitchen, he grabbed a washed-up and stored plastic Christmas pudding basin from the nearest cupboard. He had no idea what he was going to do. He just knew he could not look at this thing while he made his mind up. It was as big as his outstretched hand. Throwing the pudding basin on the thick black body, he searched around for some way of scooping it up from underneath its current temporary prison. He found a thin tray and turned back to brave the scooping and removal episode which he knew was coming next. Julia was still standing on the chair, making awful noises and refusing to look.

When he had looked down at the floor, the spider’s legs were sticking out of the edge of the bowl and the whole thing – spider and bowl – were moving steadily across the floor. It had made its way into the middle of the room, and the legs were still bending, crawling, trying to give him a heart attack. It was lucky that Julia was not in a position to see: David’s shoes did their job. One lucky aim with the left shoe and the pudding bowl came off; before the gigantic arachnid could scuttle away to torment them from another hidey-hole, David’s other shoe came down hard – and again – and again.

It had taken Julia over half an hour to bring herself to look, and another half an hour to wash the mess from the lino.

***

You have no idea how terrified my ex-husband and I both were after that – but if you’re arachnophobic, you can probably guess!

So, for me, writing about what you know can mean internalising vividly remembered experiences and snapshots of other, less traumatic memories and turning them into the essence of something that my fictional characters have to deal with in their daily lives. I know that if I write with the integrity of the feeling the experience conjures up inside, then however fictionalised the character, the events or the places, the feelings expressed are authentic, because they come from a place unique to me: my heart.

I feel like these posts should have been entitled, ‘Writing what I know’, as I’m describing lessons I’m learning along my writing journey, and things I’m noticing about my work. My next full novel is a crime story set in the 1700s and about a really horrible hangman, so I’ll be interested to see if I end up writing what I know into that one!

*

You can read ‘Write what you know, Part 1’ here.

[Post edit: Please note that this book has since been re-released as The Secrets That Haunt Us. You can read more about it here.]

Writing what you know (Part 1): Relatability and familiarity in The Reason for Everything

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Writing what you know part 1 by Claire Ladds

This is my first blog post on my shiny new website. It’s all very exciting for me, and it comes straight after the launch period of my first collection, The Reason for Everything. This is a book which focuses on the lives of ordinary people who, through circumstances or due to their own memories and emotions, often find themselves driven to feel, or do, the most extraordinary of things. It also explores the ways in which people react to what they know – their version of reality and the truth – which may be very different from someone else’s as an outsider looking in.

Relatability and familiarity

Given these themes, ‘writing what you know’ became something that hovered in the background throughout the creation of this collection. In writing terms, not for one minute do I believe that writers should meticulously stick to only writing what they know, or where would be the place of reading and research and the sheer love of discovering things to write about? But I did find that, in all of the stories, somewhere, there’s an essence of something that I know, or have felt, or have experienced (now, there are a few murderers among my cast of characters, and I can categorically state that that’s pure fiction!). Put simply, there’s an empathy with the characters and their circumstances at some level. They are all relatable to me in some way. And I came to understand that, somewhere, there was always a reason for everything that happened to them.

I’m struggling to think of even one story that doesn’t have a personal connection to me in some way. Some are tenuous – ‘Little star’, for instance, is the story of a mother with her small son on Christmas Eve (I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read it), and it came about because I was staring at our Christmas tree, all packed away in the box and in desperate need of being shoved back into the loft. ‘In two minds’ was written using three pictures cut from magazines that I found one Sunday. I was playing Scrabble with the kids and… bingo! A story about two men playing the ultimate game of Scrabble. Similarly, others contain pinpoint observations I’ve made over the years, one way or another. After all, that’s what writers do – soak up characters, costume, settings, snippets of conversations and anything else we can squirrel away for later, which becomes eventually another way of ‘writing what you know’.

However, there are others in which I really have written from a depth of personal experience which has infiltrated the fiction. This is, therefore, the first in a short series of posts about those particular stories and the experiences which shaped the stories in which they occur. Some are comical, some uncomfortable, some heartbreaking, but maybe, just maybe, you might relate to them.

Jeff the travelling fish

To the first experience, then, and this is one I intend to keep light. It tells the story of a fish and its bizarre journey one May weekend in 2015…

My main character in ‘Joy is a bubble’ wins a fish at the fair, and it becomes integral to the story. This fish is, or was, in reality, a goldfish called Jeff.

The fair has always come to my home town during May. I loved it as a child and I can picture every part of it vividly: the painted swirls of colour, the aromas of candyfloss and hot dogs, the bustle and the music. I haven’t lived in that town for almost thirty years, yet I still really miss it.

The other year, while I was visiting my parents with my daughter, we took a trip to the fair. Amid the excitement and the chaos, we found a hook-a-duck stall, where, to my astonishment, one of the prizes you could win was a goldfish. I thought that kind of thing had been outlawed years ago.

My daughter was desperate to have a go, so she did. And what else but promptly won a fish! Without thinking (and, to be honest, to rescue the fish), I said she could have it, and we carried it around the fair in its little plastic tub, went and bought a tank, and… only then did I remember we had come on the train and now we’d got to get a fish home on it, too.

My dad tried to persuade my daughter to put the fish in his pond. Well, she was having none of that. So Jeff was duly named and my mum put him in one of those large cereal tubs (those ones with a lid that opens so you can pour out your cereal), we hid him in a plastic bag, and took him on a train ride.

When we had to change stations, we went to get something to eat. I’ve never been thrown out of a cafe before, but this was a close call due to our extra passenger, until I pointed out that the fish was unlikely to be much of a health hazard at it was unlikely to jump out of the water and into the sandwiches. At which point, the waitress left us alone.

Jeff seemed not to mind the train ride, and was oblivious of the conductor giving us a strange look, although he didn’t question our oddball travelling arrangements. Jeff lived happily in his tank for three years before old age finally got the better of him last year. My daughter came into the room to find him floating one afternoon. She was distraught and insisted he was buried in the garden, deep enough for the cats not to find him.

So… you can see that ’Joy is a bubble’ is grounded in a bit of unexpected reality! The rest of the story just snowballed from the notion that something as small and benign as the sight of a fish can imbue someone with such strong feelings of possession and empathy.

Where can you find the collection?

Claire Ladds - The Reason for Everything and other short stories

If you would like to buy my collection, The Reason for Everything, you can find it as an ebook in many digital stores here. Paperback and other variants are also available.