THE PROCESS
I wish I could tell you that when I arrived in Roujan, I sat down and immediately began to write. Jonnie and I had achieved so much together in that month, I had fully expected to just hit the ground running.
I was paralyzed again. The temperatures were lower. The Gite had no central heating. High ceilings and tiled floors, I shivered in multiple layers, day after day, expending all my spare energy on staying awake. I was terrified to go back in time. I had come so far forward and part of me wanted to forget everything and move on as quickly as possible. I reasoned that had been part of the problem. Leaving such immense attachments and unhealthy experiences unprocessed had caused me to place myself in harms way, time and time again. The last time needed to be the final time.
Ten days passed and not a word had been written. Then two miraculous gifts came my way. One of my oldest friends called. We don’t speak often. She is the kind of friend where decades pass and we communicate almost telepathically as if we already have a sense of how each other are.
Over three and a half decades, our friendship is a bond and not an attachment to our shared history. I mistook the connection to my ex as a bond, formed over the same timeframe, when it was in fact, a sick attachment formed in a methodical way by someone with a destructively disordered personality.
As I outlined the premise of the book, I could almost hear her smiling. She said how like the movie Slumdog Millionaire it was. A lifetime of accumulated joy and tragedy. Experience so multifaceted that when circumstances conspired, he was quite possibly the only human on the planet who could fit the key into that one particular lock. She was right. No one else could write this book. Does it need to be written? Does it need to be written by me? Does it need to be written now? A resounding yes.
As the world finally awakens to the danger of our causes and conditions and how the patterns repeat, unchecked and untreated, it needs to be shared. Not only for preventative measures but to show that experience, strength and hope is universal.
I was invited to a non-denomination ‘church’ service by my Gite hosts. I do not consider myself religious and follow my spiritual program in sobriety but I like community. I needed to sing. To feel uplifted somehow. The sermon was truly a gift that was delivered just for me. The words struck me in that moment as the call to action I needed to hear. (I talk about it in more detail in the book so don’t want to give it all away)
I had been fearful of the strength of the emotions I had processed, returning as I wrote. The sermon showed me that while I had felt so alone and so unsafe, somehow, I had still been protected. My spiritual armour had kept me safe from more harm. My friend had shown me I was never alone either. She became a character in my novel.
I wrote as if I was a bystander in my story. The strong women that I call friends became characters that kept my central character safe and supported even when she felt most alone. Each morning I would jump up, after meditation and walk Jonnie. During our walk, my thoughts would organize themselves neatly. The overriding theme that emerged was the one that was developed on the walk and that was the chapter I would set about writing for that day.
I did attend a Reedsy seminar entitled “How to structure your Memoir like a Novel”. It was helpful. At that point I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a Memoir. I wanted to tell the story truthfully. I wasn’t sure it was safe to do so. I have underestimated people’s malignant intentions before. The previous six months had shown me that the abuse does not stop when we leave. The book is not about him though. It is about the patterns and chaos of untreated minds and there are lots of interestingly disturbing characters that show up. Just as there are beacons of kindness and hope.
I grew up with Tolkein and Stephen King. The battles between good and evil being the consistent themes. Good always winning but the battles are dark and the losses are heavy. I wrote a novel because it created some distance between myself and reality. I didn’t have to be afraid of a character on a page. In my story, I get to decide the ending. Not them.
I wrote the Prologue first and many iterations of an introduction. I played with a third person perspective to book end a first person narrative. I didn’t like how it read. It is written in third person narrative for my own comfort. It allowed me to write difficult and painful chapters in safety. That does not mean there weren’t tears and a great deal of discomfort. I walked, talked and dreamed of my future. Each day, I would return to my laptop and write until the chapter was finished.
I had two champions reading for me and feeding back. One a bright woman from London, an avid reader and someone I mentor. Working a program of rigorous honesty, I trusted her to tell me the truth. The other a charming chap from my old industry. Recently sober and checking in regularly. He had turned up in an AA presentation I delivered online the day after my mother died. An amazing coincidence!
I established a reasonable length to be between seventy and a hundred thousand words. Giving me twenty chapters or so of between three and five thousand words. The finished manuscript comes in at just over eighty-five thousand. A Prologue, Epilogue and 22 chapters.
Prologue written, which offers context for the main character but is a standalone story which takes place 8 years prior to the annus horribilis, I then wrote what I thought would be the final chapter next. It actually ended up being the penultimate chapter. With the cliffhanger taken care of, the actual final chapter is a sweet salute to the process and contains a much more powerful message than my first attempt. But it was not wasted effort. Everything got used.
I wrote chapter ten next. The middle of the book. The climax, the crescendo. Where the first half had been leading. That was hard to write. But WOW, I didn’t think I had that in me. I had been led to believe I had a memory issue. Turns out this brain is functioning just fine, thank you very much! Decades of research, tidbits of wisdom and truth flooded that chapter. Building my confidence in my writing style and my ability to tell the story authentically.
It really is true what they say. What we are looking for is already within us.
To take the reader to the midpoint and captivate their interest and maintain the momentum, I had to create context. I felt the reader needed to know how the character got to this point. They didn’t need to like her. They needed to see her motivations and what was in her heart. They needed to care about where all this context was leading if they were to keep investing their time.
I continued the story loosely in chronological order, knowing that the dark subject matter of the main content would take the main character back to various points in her life, memories and discoveries. Some important characters needed to be presented, even though they played no further part in the narrative, serving to offer the protagonist misdirection and misunderstanding.
I continued writing in my haphazard way. Writing the chapter that came through most strongly. Gifted by my Higher Self. Filling in the gaps between the beginning and middle and the ones from the end to the middle.
Four chapters were particularly harrowing and yet incredibly enlightening. If I got a phone call, I took it. I trusted that those calls were giving me the gentle breaks that I needed. I ploughed on regardless of the pain, avoiding self-pity and reminding myself that the process was putting everything back where it belonged.
Sunset in Rodes, Pyrenees Orientales, France. February, 2024.
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