I have been reading so much lately – gulping books down on my Kindle, sometimes one or two a week. I read constantly during lockdown, and now continue to do so during this new period, no longer a burning inferno but a bleak plateau stretching on to a blurry trackless infinity (can you tell I’m feeling optimistic today).

At the start of the pandemic, when I was in a constant state of panic and stress, I could only cope with the most comfort-y of comfort reading, and I reread old favourites like My Friend Flicka and Westwood by Stella Gibbons (and honestly, also Anastasia’s Chosen Career). But in the summer, I wanted slightly more serious fare. More than anything, books have helped me learn and helped me escape. I don’t know what I would do without them.

Here are the best ten books I’ve read in this period – so far: 

Ordinary People by Diana Evans

This was the last book I took out of the library before lockdown; I loved it so much that I’ve ordered my own copy. Ordinary People is about a couple living in south London and their rocky marriage after their second child is born, over the period of about a year. So far so ordinary, but she turns it into gold: marriage, friendship, children, soul music, ghosts, the history of Crystal Palace – you name it. There was also a scene set in a soft play centre that made me feel SEEN and almost made me nostalgic for those hellish places. She is a truly wonderful writer.

I Give It to You by Valerie Martin

I was contemplating reading the Elena Ferrante novels but felt it might need a greater time/brain investment than I have at the moment – however this gave me the similar feeling I wanted, with a twisty female relationship and the history of a Tuscan family during fascism and the Second World War. Ownership is obviously a theme of Valerie Martin’s work as she won the Orange prize for Property. I loved this and will be reading more of her books. She is 72, which I have to confess surprised me and was also heartening.

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

‘You’re awfully opinionated for a girl.’ In this alternative history novel, Hillary meets Bill but doesn’t marry him, choosing instead to forge her own path. Her Rosebud is this thoughtless comment, above, from a friend’s father when she is about eight. I felt conflicted about reading this – it felt like a low blow to someone who, whatever your politics, has been through a lot. However, I loved it. I also heard a talk by Sittenfeld in which she explained why she couldn’t just change the name, as she did in American Wife. Having changed one variable, she couldn’t then change the name or she would be writing a pointless book about how Harriet met Bob at law school and didn’t marry him. Fair enough.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

I was sceptical about this having worked on celebrity autobiographies in the past, but this is great. I loved her reminder that life is becoming: we don’t reach a point at which we’re done, completed, and have every box ticked. Reassuring.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

I have always enjoyed Zadie Smith’s essays and especially this, written and published during the pandemic. I loved ‘Suffering Like Mel Gibson’ which made me feel better about having a terrible time while being safe at home, drawing as it does a distinction between privilege and suffering … ‘Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual – it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege’.’

Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy

I loved this novel about a young woman, Faith, and her efforts to navigate her path between her London life of flatshares and TV work, and the world of her Jamaican family. I knew Andrea Levy was a great writer, who of course won the Booker for Small Island, but I wasn’t expecting her writing to be so funny. Her descriptions of what it’s like to try and prise family history out of elderly relatives are so truthful, and hilarious too. I’m now looking forward to Small Island and all her other books. (Incidentally, what a dumb review on the Waterstones website – ‘it doesn’t hang together as well as it could’ as though it’s a wardrobe or a clothes horse).

Over the Top by Jonathan van Ness

I loved this. Life hasn’t always been gorgeous for JVN and this was very real and raw. I love Queer Eye and will also be reading Tan France’s book.

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

This is about a young Irish EFL teacher in Hong Kong who’s involved in a love triangle between an English guy called Julian, and Edith who is from Hong Kong (via Singapore). The writing style here is very similar to Sally Rooney’s,  but I liked this even more because of the wider range of ideas, about homophobia, race and nationalism, as well as class and gender. I found the narrator’s version of Irish nationalism (or anti-Englishness) quite confronting, shall we say, but I think that was part of the intended effect. Lest that sound forbidding, it’s also very funny.

Negative Capability by Michele Roberts

Also raw and honest. Michele Roberts is an acclaimed writer, but very few writers stay equally acclaimed all through their career. Here she writes of the year in which her Xth novel was rejected by her publisher, and in which she finds consolation in food, friendships and travel. This was a very reassuring book for a writer to read.

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain was twenty-one when the First World War broke out. She lost her brother, her fiancé and her two close male friends, all killed in the fighting. She lived through two world wars and a pandemic, survived hellish conditions while working as a nurse on the Western Front, and later became a writer and campaigner for pacifism. This was an unbearably sad book to read, but supplied a certain sense of perspective which is much needed right now.

More book reviews as I have them and I’d love to hear any recommendations via the handy box below.

Look, I’ve said it myself. And I’m still saying it (have you SEEN how long it’s been since I even blogged?)

The funny thing about ‘I don’t have time’ is that it’s more about the thing than the time. Rarely do we say ‘I don’t have time to scroll mindlessly through my former colleague’s holiday photos’ or ‘I don’t have time to browse eBay’ or ‘I don’t have time to press the snooze button six times’. In these cases we can make the time, because the thing is easy.  Mostly, it’s not a lack of time; it’s a lack of other things that prevents us doing the things we want to. Here are some I’ve experienced:

I don’t have energy: Honestly, this one is fair enough. Writing does take a lot of energy, especially in the early stages. I am, and remain, in awe of people who can come in from a full day’s work, put their kids to bed, load the dishwasher and then open their computer to write. I have never, and probably will never, be able to do this. To write my first book, I needed free time during the day – and not just a lunch break but a whole morning a week, just to get started. Not everyone is able to work part time (as I did) of course. You may have to give something up, like shopping or Netflix (I would be very interested to see a graph of productivity generally since the introduction of Netflix to our lives).

I don’t have headspace: again, fair enough. Some people are able to take refuge in writing while their lives are chaotic. That only happens for me when I’m 20,000 words into something which I find to be the threshold into the magic world where you’re really on a roll and obsessed. But prior to that, when I’m just trying to get into something, it’s like trying to scramble up onto a tall wall and thinking you’re going to fall back and get shin splints. To do that while the rest of my life felt chaotic, which has been the case for the past few years, was just too hard for me. Sometimes you just don’t have the bandwidth and writing has to wait.

I don’t have a dedicated time or place: this is really crucial. I think it helps to dedicate a time every week, ideally in the same place, where you can just try. Even if it’s just sitting at the keyboard writing a diary or notes or nothing at all. The key thing is not to open Net a Porter.

I don’t have a place to go: Some people swear by libraries but I don’t like writing in libraries – it’s too quiet, and every small isolated sound is an aggravation. Last time I worked in a library (the Dun Laoghaire lexicon, possibly the world’s most beautiful library or am I biased?) a man at a desk nearby made a long phone call about car insurance and I almost had to commit murder.  I like to write in cafes and always have – I like the background noise and chatter, and being surrounded by people which takes the edge off what can otherwise be a pretty lonely pursuit. There’s also the possibility that I am kidding myself that by being in the presence of people working hard that I am also working hard. It does get expensive of course, so if you can stay home and just shut the door and get on with it, good for you. I have to leave the house otherwise bad things happen (while stuck on an early draft once I found myself making granola).

I don’t know what to write: same tbh. Right now I feel guilty because I have SO much time (3 mornings a week ) but it gets eaten up by admin and housework, both avoidance activities because I don’t know what to write. In the past three years I’ve lost two parents to dementia, gained a daughter, moved from London to Dublin and back again, and been sent into a spin by political upheavals that are keeping us all awake. I don’t know where to start writing about these things or how. But there’s only one way to find out … Inspiration doesn’t come before sitting down to write; in my experience you sit down first, then get inspired.

I don’t have the confidence: This is a really good book on this – Elizabeth Gilbert says that fear is an invariable passenger on the creative journey; you just have to make sure it doesn’t take the driving seat. But there’s also the feeling we sometimes have of needing permission to write something. All I can say is everyone feels a fraud so you may as well just go for it.

I hope that’s been helpful! Do you have time to write?

*News: I am teaching a one-weekend course at London’s City Lit on 16 and 17 November 2019 for the bargain price of £99. I’d love to see you there! https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/writing-romance

Curtis Sittenfeld has a new book of short stories out. This is good news for me as she is the only author whose books I will buy in hardback, on publication; she is a brilliant writer and she never writes the same book twice, which is rarer than you might think. I loved all the stories but one has stayed with me, because it does something quite rare; it features a baby who is a fully rounded character, rather than just a plot point or object. This might sound bizarre but it just works beautifully on the page.

In ‘Off the Record’, journalist Nina flies to Los Angeles from Indianapolis with her six-month-old Zoe, to do a  celebrity interview. (Another writer would have let us wonder why on earth Nina, a single parent, didn’t arrange childcare. Sittenfeld supplies the mundane but realistic answer: Zoe won’t take a bottle.)

Nina botches the interview partly because she is distracted by the babysitter texting her to tell her that Zoe is crying non-stop. The texts are great; just reading the one that said I have tried everything (in response to Nina’s hopeful Have you tried jar of pears?) made me shiver. But my favourite part was the ending. Nina arrives back at her hotel having irretrievably messed up her assignment, and there’s a swift flash-forward (a Sittenfeld specialty) revealing that this is the end of her career as a journalist, that she will go on to write grants for non-profits happily enough, but that she will, in the future, for various reasons, kick herself for the way she handled this job. However, there’s a consolation:

But cranky, suspicious, eczema-ridden Zoe – Nina loves her so much! She’s so happy to see her! Outside the hotel, perched on the sitter’s hip, wearing her undignified clothes, Zoe is very familiar and dear, and it occurs to Nina that this is the first time she’s had a chance to miss her daughter.

I love this passage for its serious, affectionate portrait of the baby as a real character, and how it shows Nina’s feelings for her and the turning point in their relationship. It also captures that feeling of extra love for a child even when – especially when – they’re being cranky or grubby or otherwise unappealing to the rest of the world. And the feeling of home being a refuge and a haven when work goes wrong. I’ve never seen that written about before, especially not by a female writer  – maybe because it’s unfashionable or unfeminist or just not something women can afford to admit to? – but as the title puts it: You think it, I’ll say it. I await the next Curtis Sittenfeld hardback.

 

Have you been watching Mum? It is the most wonderful sitcom the BBC has done in ages. As well as being achingly funny it’s a really moving love story, as Cathy comes to terms with the death of her husband and her feelings for her old friend Michael. While battling their own shyness and fears they have to contend with constant toe-curling embarrassment in front of friends and family, such as the nightmarish Pauline who is a character that Jane Austen would have been proud of.  She’s played by Dorothy Atkinson who brings a really sublime megalomania to lines like ‘That was Vodafone … they’re desperate to keep me’.

There’s nothing sublime or aspirational about Michael and Cathy’s relationship – it revolves around trips to the dump or the purchase of new garden chairs. But the stakes feel sky-high, partly because this is an older couple, who have been through so much already. Bby the end you’re watching through your fingers, desperate to know that they will get together. Stefan Golasewski, who wrote Mum, is also responsible for the brilliant Him and Her, which is also about an ordinary couple, in a tiny flat. He is a master at one of the harder things to do: making gold from the ordinary and everyday. Another lesson from Jane Austen …

It’s all too easy, in any relationship, to see everything from your own point of view. It’s only human to put your own needs and desires first and overlook what the other person might be thinking or feeling. Guess what? the same can happen when writing romance. It’s easy to identify with your hero/heroine to the extent that you start to treat the love interest like a cipher – just there to turn up at the appropriate moment bearing flowers or a grovelling apology.

So we overlook the fact that the love interest is a person in his/her own right, with his own agency, past, agenda, hangups. Surprise; this does not make for gripping stories. So now, once I’m stuck into the story I try writing it out, start to finish, from the hero/love interest’s point of view. It’s one of those blindingly obvious things that it’s really easy to overlook, and amazingly effective in showing me things I’ve overlooked, giving me new ideas or revealing possible plot holes.

I imagine this would work in other genres – no doubt crime writers write synopses from their villain’s point of view too. Simple, but very helpful once it occurred to me. And works quite well in real life also.

If anyone else has a blindingly obvious tip I would love to hear it!

Also: if you are interested in the art of writing a synopsis, check out my day-long course on just that at City Lit, on Saturday June 24th. 

Breaking rules isn’t something we normally associate with Jane Austen. In her stories, characters who stray from the unwritten rules of society – like Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – do not come out of things well. But one of the things I’ve noticed is how many so-called ‘rules’ of creative writing she breaks. Here are just a few:

1. Show, don’t tell. A very good rule, generally speaking. Don’t tell the reader what your characters are like: show them in action. But here is Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, in full telling mode:

‘Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.’

2. Don’t over-use back-story. Back-story is used to denote events that happened before the story proper begins; they’re relevant to the current action but not a part of it. Generally, the advice is to keep back-story to an absolute minimum, and especially not to overload the reader with it in early chapters. Yet, the beginning of Sense and Sensibility is nothing but backstory, as we hear about the death of Eleanor and Marianne’s father, and their subsequent treatment at the hands of his second wife. Similarly, Emma’s opening chapters delve into Emma’s childhood, the loss of her mother and the remarriage of her beloved guardian.

         3. Have a likeable heroine. In Emma, Jane Austen wrote ‘I am going to take a heroine whom nobody but myself will much like.’ Emma’s opening lines show why she thought this: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence’ To present a character, a female character, who is doing very well and perfectly happy with herself, thank you very much – this is bold. Even the adjectives have a hard, almost masculine edge to them – ‘handsome, clever and rich’ strike a very different tone to ‘beautiful’ or ‘wise’. Few novelists today would use a female character like this as the protagonist of a romance: but Austen does.

How, and why, does she do it? In the first example, the reason it works is because the telling is expertly balanced with showing. The passage about the Bennett parents comes at the end of the first chapter, which is mainly dialogue, in which we see or rather hear exactly what these two people are like. The ‘telling’ rounds off the impression, and leaves us in no doubt as to the impression Austen wishes to give. More than that though, the narrative voice, with its crisp, merciless judgments, provides a relentless moral centre to the book, that is quite astonishing in its confidence. Austen is not just showing, but telling it like it is.

Regarding back-story: the first thing to note is that Austen doesn’t over-use it, and she lets us know why we’re reading about it. A common mistake new writers often make is that they launch into back-story without making it clear why it’s relevant to the matter at hand. In Austen, our interest is first piqued by these characters in their current situations which means we’re seduced into reading about how they got there. It’s also important to note that Austen is writing in a more leisurely age, when readers expected to take more time to settle in to a story. Nevertheless, she shows how, used effectively, backstory can be every bit as absorbing as, well, story.

As for the unlikeable heroine: what Emma shows is that you can certainly have a character who’s somewhat unlikeable, provided that they hold our interest, and to an extent our sympathy. And it’s important that female characters, in particular, are not forced to be ‘likeable’. I wrote more about this here.

Taken together all these examples show something that I think is often slightly misunderstood when people talk about creative writing. The craft of writing is not about hard and fast rules that are either followed or broken. It’s just a series of tools that can either be useful to you or not so useful, used well or not so well. The important thing is to understand when you are using them, and if they are working to your advantage or not.

If you’d like to know more … check out my forthcoming course on romantic fiction, ‘Beyond Elizabeth Bennet: writing the modern-day romance’ starting 23 May at City Lit.

I always forget that March is colder than November. Every year this takes me by surprise and makes me feel, well, indignant. Because cold is all very well in November when there’s fireworks and bonfires and we’re heading towards Christmas, but March? That’s meant to be Spring. Not this year! It’s been horrible. I realise this makes me sound like the Oldest Inhabitant but this winter is honestly the longest I can remember. It’s been a Game of Thrones extended-style extra-long one, and I’ve spent almost all of it sick (since January anyway).

However. There are signs of spring now and I’m so excited to be teaching some courses at City Lit in the very near future. The first one will be on May 19th, and it’s called ‘Edit like an Expert’

https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/edit-like-an-expert

I was an editor before I was a writer, and I’m still an editor – repetition and meandering sentences drive me mad and sometimes I even find myself mentally editing books as I read them. In this course we’ll talk about how to make sure your manuscript is ‘clean’ in the industry phrase, whether you’re self-editing or working with a professional editor, and how to improve your work and your writing in general, by getting rid of dead wood. I hope we’ll also have time to discuss how to deal with criticism and whether or not you really should ‘kill your darlings’.

Then on 24 June, I’ll be teaching a class on how to write a synopsis: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/how-to-write-a-novel-synopsis

I know that lots of people struggle with synopses – unfortunately, they are just one of those tools that are indispensable as most agents won’t look at your work without them. The good news is that they can also be a really good way of giving you a birds’-eye view of your work and can even illuminate plot problems that you might still have lurking (hopefully not, after you’ve edited like an expert!) We will also talk about the one crucial thing that people usually leave out of a synopsis …

Finally, I am teaching a 6-week course on romantic fiction starting 23 May. I COULD NOT be more excited about this. I have so many ideas about this and really can’t wait to share them with fellow authors and hear their ideas too:

https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/beyond-elizabeth-bennet-writing-the-modern-day-romance

See you there!

 

 

Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been ten months (oh God) since my last blog post.

The trouble isn’t no news. It’s that this year has contained too much news and I have let it all accumulate until, much like laundry or washing up or tax returns, I don’t know where to start. My new book? New course that I am teaching at City Lit? Or even (gulp) new baby?

The baby can be blamed for most of it, of course. I have only had one for 3 and a half months but I have already discovered that babies make the most marvellous excuse for just about anything. I need never go out again. She began as she meant to go on during my pregnancy when I was so exhausted from about 3 months that I could hardly lift my eyes off Netflix and the John Lewis website. I had grand plans of being one of those women who buzzes around doing Pilates, painting flats and climbing mountains at eight months pregnant, but most days I went no further than my local shop for Jaffa Cakes.

In any event, the new book came out in August and like many a younger sibling it’s been a tad neglected. But I have had nice feedback for it so that’s all good.  And so far they play well together.

Most exciting now is that I am teaching a course on writing romantic fiction, starting 9 November in City Lit, central London. I COULD NOT be more excited about this. I have so many ideas about romantic fiction and now I get to talk about them with anyone who cares to join me for two hours a week, every Thursday from 2.45 pm, for 6 weeks. There are still places available for the ridiculously bargainous price of £109 (£44 concession). Sign up now!

More news soon I promise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TLDR: I had chronic back pain (piriformis syndrome) for nearly two years, caused by writing hunched up in an armchair. I got rid of it through doing at least 20 minutes of Pilates every day for eight months, with particular reference to the suggestions in this article.

This month, though it’s not so great in global terms, is a bit of a miracle for me. January 2017 marks the two-year anniversary of when I first started experiencing chronic, excruciating, can’t-do-anything-except-lie-on-the-floor-with-a-hot-water-bottle back pain. And … drum roll … I’ve now been pain free for about nine months. It’s hard to describe how that feels but it’s a little like this:

If you are, as I once did, googling ‘how to get rid of back pain’ in the middle of the night, you probably don’t want to hear all about how I got it or all the things that didn’t work. So feel free to scroll down to the section on What did work. But if not, sit down, settle in, get a cup of tea and let me tell you ALL about my back pain.

How I got it

Before 2015, my only real experience of back pain was hearing other people talk about it. Whenever I heard anyone mention it, I said sympathetic things but I privately thought it was surely not such a big deal, and would probably go away if they did ten minutes’ stretching every day. I also thought it was something that only affected really old, unfit people, and would never happen to me. Ha, ha.

I first noticed some twinges over the summer of 2012, when I was writing my second book. I did this on my laptop, curled up for hours on end in an armchair that had as much support as a giant marshmallow. (When I later described to a physiotherapist this method of working, she put her face in her hands).

I stepped up my yoga and the problem seemed to resolve itself, although I did have a couple of quite bad episodes in the summer of 2014 – I remember being at a friend’s wedding and having to go and stretch halfway through the reception. But, again, I went for a swim the next morning and it went away. No big deal.

It was very important to me that it should remain no big deal. I was young and healthy and NOT the kind of person who would ever get back pain, and even if I did, it was nothing that a bit more yoga wouldn’t sort out. There was quite a lot of denial involved at this point, which it turns out is not the best way of dealing with back pain.

In January 2015, I was sitting in a café writing, when the pain in my lower back became so bad that I had to leave. On the way home, I googled chiropractors and made a panicked appointment. Then I texted a friend in caps saying, HOW DID YOU GET RID OF YOUR BACK PAIN? He was horrified that I was seeing a chiro and recommended a physiotherapist instead.  This is an area of big debate among back pain fans – a bit like Oasis versus Blur. My friend was adamant that chiros are quacks. My take, for what it’s worth, is that chiros can be good if you’ve done one dodgy thing to ‘throw’ your back out, but that if it’s a chronic problem that’s taken time to develop, you really should see a physiotherapist.

I cancelled my chiro appointment and instead I saw an excellent physiotherapist (Nicole at Physio Solutions in Angel). She swiftly diagnosed piriformis syndrome: a very common complaint, caused by too much sitting, also associated with running, more prevalent in women, and generally appearing in people in their thirties. Tick, tick, tick. The piriformis touches the sciatic nerve, which means that as well as being literally a pain in the butt it can also radiate down the leg and into the lower back and take over your entire life.

Nicole gave me some simple stretching exercises to do. They were very boring, but I did them. The pain lessened, until by April, it was completely gone.

So what did I do?

I stopped doing the exercises, of course!

Nicole had also strongly suggested I take up Pilates, but I couldn’t find a decent class, and anyway the pain was gone and I was young and healthy and not the kind of person who would ever really get back pain so …  You can guess what happened next.

The lowest point

In May 2015 I went on holiday to Japan. It involved miles of walking every day, which I assumed would be great for my back, so no need to do any stretches. Most of our hotels had hard floors, so stretching was out anyway. During the second week of our holiday, the pain reappeared, so bad that I couldn’t sit for longer than half an hour.

The above picture was taken while we were staying in a traditional onsen, an inn with traditional baths and a sunken bath in our room. We were meant to be having a six-course meal, but I could only stay at the table for three of them. That entire night I spent either in the bath or else curled up on the floor, until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. The next day, we made an unscheduled stop on our bullet train to find a pharmacy. There I scored a sweet, sweet drug called Loxoprofen, which is similar to ibuprofen except 1,000 times better. It was hands down the best drug I’ve ever taken. The catch is that it’s only available in Japan, Mexico and Brazil. I can’t tell you how many times, over the next year or so, I wished I had bought more of it. At my lowest point, I googled ways to buy it over the internet, but I stopped myself. I was happy to gulp down paracetamol, but I didn’t really want to be buying contraband prescription drugs over the internet.

As soon as we got home, I went back to the physio with my tail between my legs, and confessed that I had stopped doing the exercises and the pain was back.

‘Did you take up Pilates?’ she asked.

I shook my head. She sighed and gave me some basic Pilates exercises to do. We also looked again at the layout of my desk, and talked about everything from shoes to sleeping position. I was learning that when back pain takes over your life, everything becomes a possible culprit. Like someone who’s just been dumped, you mull endlessly over what you did wrong. As David Mitchell wrote, trying to get rid of back pain is like trying to solve a country house murder mystery, while being slowly murdered in a county house. Around this time, I bought David Mitchell’s book Back Story. I really enjoyed it but I am probably one of the few readers who would have appreciated a bit more detail on his back pain and how he got rid of it.

What didn’t work

As I continued to go to the physio the pain got slightly better, but it never went away completely. With an injury caused by running or tennis, you can eliminate that activity while you rehab. But piriformis pain is aggravated by sitting, and it’s impossible to eliminate sitting completely and live a normal life, especially when you’re a writer.  (I still can’t quite believe that I still managed to complete two books during this time.) I was also trying to find a good Pilates instructor which, first world problem alert, is surprisingly hard (that’s a whole other post). Essentially, I had ignored the pain for too long that now it had become, not just chronic but savage and seemingly untreatable.

It would be too sad to itemise all the ways in which my back pain affected me. I turned down invitations from friends because I knew that socialising while sitting would aggravate my pain. I had to stop running. I avoided the cinema – one of my favourite things in the world. I still don’t know how the Steve Jobs film ended, because I had to leave halfway through. It wasn’t that bad all the time, but I had at least ten days’ pain out of every month, and sometimes more, which is plenty. During those spells, I was on the maximum dose of paracetamol, and the pain would still wake me up at night and keep me awake for several hours. Back pain was quietly, if not ruling my life, then having a very strong say in it.

I didn’t really tell many people – except my long-suffering husband – because it was boring, and also I was embarrassed. Back pain wasn’t something I wanted to have. Instead, like many people with chronic conditions, I fell down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos, miracle products, gurus and magical cures. I tried the Egoscue method, the Gokhale method, TENS machines, tennis ball massages, myofascial releases, traditional massages and trigger point releases. Most of them contained one helpful element or suggestion. But nothing was a complete cure, and the only thing that really helped was the TENS machine, hot water bottles and baths. Like a stalker or bad boyfriend, my back pain kept on coming back. Until November 2015, when the curve went upwards.

 
What did work

I stopped writing curled in an armchair, obviously. I did my physio exercises, daily. I found a brilliant Pilates instructor online and did at least 20 minutes every day by myself, starting with this video. Once I had the basics I took classes with Tony Watson at the Life Centre who I consider the best Pilates instructor out of the dozen or so that I’ve tried in London. And crucially, during one of my late-night google sessions, I stumbled on this key piece of advice from a physiotherapist based in the States. Her advice was to work the glute muscles harder, in order to decrease pressure on the piriformis. So I worked my buns off. Because I had let the pain get so bad, it took maybe six months of daily exercises before I saw results. But eventually, it worked. I’ve now been pain free since last spring.

If you have back pain, all I can say is: I feel you. I can’t promise that what worked for me will work for you. I would personally suggest seeing a physiotherapist who can show you the Pilates basics, and then seeing a proper Pilates instructor. Start with the video below, if you can’t do anything else – if your problems aren’t too severe, doing it daily might be all you need. You could try reading this post, also by a writer, for some suggestions.

And don’t give up hope. The worst thing about a chronic condition, in my very limited experience, is the fear that it will never go away. With some conditions, that is the case. With others – and I feel very lucky that this applies to me – it will, with patience and persistence, finally become a memory and a lesson to be more careful in future. Good luck!

A couple of years ago I was having a drink with a friend, and we were talking about how few novels there were about the suffragettes. She said she thought their story would make a really great film … and we got enthused about researching their stories and writing a screenplay together. It was one of those great ideas you have over a drink and then forget about, like inflatable gym equipment or an app that chooses your outfit for you.

Sadly, the acclaimed 2015 film Suffragette was not written by us. But, given the slow pace of film production, it’s very probable that someone else was having the exact same idea at the same time as us. Maybe even in the same area; almost certainly in the same city. Except they took their idea a bit further than we did.

A similar thing happened when my second book If I Could Turn Back Time came out in 2013. A few weeks after it came out, I heard about a new book by Ali McNamara called Step Back in Time. And then Richard Curtis’s film About Time came out. These stories are all totally different, and none of us could have known anything about each others’ ideas – yet there they were. You wait years for one time-travelling romantic comedy and three come along at once.

This is just one of the many examples I’ve come across of multiple discovery – people having the same ideas at the same time. The term comes from science but it definitely happens creatively as well. In her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert posits an intriguing idea about this. She imagines ideas as being animate – in other words, they’re around in the ether and are essentially looking for hosts. It sounds trippy, but it’s not dissimilar to Richard Dawkins’s theory of the cultural meme:

‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain’ The Selfish Gene

Of course Dawkins was talking about existing ideas which are out being shared in the world, whereas Gilbert is dealing with ideas that haven’t yet materialised but are looking for a way to do so. This does sound a little crazy – but how else do you explain the independent invention of calculus by Newton and Liebniz? Or the time-travelling rom-com pile-up of 2013?

The most persuasive part of Gilbert’s theory, I think – whether you take it literally or figuratively – is that ideas are looking for receptive hosts. If you just think, ‘that would make a great story’ and then forget about it, the idea will go and find someone else who will work with it. (Gilbert has a totally fascinating example of this in Big Magic, relating to State of Wonder by Ann Patchett which is one of my favourite books). Whichever way you want to explain it – whether you see it as downright telepathy, or just something in the cultural water – it definitely happens.

All of which is to say … If you’ve got an idea for a book, or a play or a film, which has caught your imagination, especially if it seems a little different or quirky: write it. Write it now. Don’t worry about making it perfect, or even good – that can come later. Just get it down on paper – because if you don’t somebody else will …