I’ve just finished reading Helen Dunmore’s Exposure. She is among my favourite writers. I love her clear, deceptively simple prose – this was no exception. It lingers still, a poignant grown up Railway Children. Here is Dunmore on reading with our hearts
Firewords Competition with Bloomsbury and Writers and Artists –
The challenge is to write a short story (under 1000 words) that’s inspired by an illustration by Maggie Clancy.
The deadline for entries is 31st October and the prizes include publication in Firewords ‘Escape’ themed Issue 8, back issue bundles, and copies of the brand new 2017 Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. It’s a completely free competition, so head over to the Writers & Artists website for more details and how to enter.
To read an extract from my book on Writing – From Writing With Love – (99p on Kindle) about how I learned to write from the heart
You Can’t Fall in Love if You Don’t Open Your Heart
Risking Sentiment in Writing
If you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self ~ William Kitteredge
For a long time in my writing I was very afraid of being sentimental. I thought I was writing about feeling, often about loss and pain but I was keeping it at arm’s length. I was afraid of sentimentality. The problem with this fear for a writer is that in avoiding the sentimental we risk avoiding real sentiment or feeling. If we avoid our strongest experiences and feelings then our work has less chance of ringing true with our readers and if what we write doesn’t touch us we cannot hope for it to touch them.
In a letter to a student F Scott Fitzgerald said, You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner…
I’m not advocating spilling our lives unadulterated onto the page. I don’t consider good writing is about re-living trauma and misery – unless of course you are using writing in a wholly therapeutic context or you can write memoir with humour and panache – say like Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes. My point is not really about memoir but it’s about allowing ourselves to open up to our strongest feelings.
I believe I did this in my Costa story Mille and Bird. I was taking part in a poetry workshop run by the poet Gillian Allnut when she presented us with a copy of the painting: Katherine and Millie, by the artist Barbara Skingle. We wrote from the painting, in various voices, suddenly I seemed to recognise something in the young, vulnerable girl in the picture. I saw myself at twelve. Nothing had ever penetrated that far with me before, nothing had gone straight to the heart of my experience as a child as this image did. I wasn’t wholly aware of this at first. I just wrote, but it wasn’t long before I knew that this was very different from anything I’d written before.
I know because readers tell me, that this story has connected with them. It has also been the springboard for a whole stream of stories and a novel. It happened by accident but it was like hitting a vein. It taught me that as writer I have to put my heart on the page.
