Cath Staincliffe

Pessimist

The glass wasn’t even half-empty. It was smashed. And he’d trodden on it. And a bloody great shard had gone right through his foot.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

You Couldn’t Make It Up

(Spoiler alert – some stories from the Sal Kilkenny series revealed here.)

The truth is always stranger than fiction and one of the spookiest things in being a writer is when something you think you’ve dreamt up turns out to exist in real life. There are two particular times when this has really struck me. The first was with my debut novel Looking For Trouble. When I set out to write the book I didn’t know where it would take me and I was disturbed to find myself writing about organised child sexual abuse in children’s homes run by the local authority. News was just emerging back then (1992) of suspected cases of paedophile rings violating vulnerable children and young people but it was still very much under the radar. Some time later I met someone who had worked in social services in Manchester City Council and who had read the book at the same time as an undercover inquiry was going on into exactly this type of crime in the Manchester area. She almost sought me out, thinking I had some insider knowledge that they might draw on.

A second example was with Go Not Gently, the second Sal Kilkenny novel. In this a number of unexpected and unexplained deaths in old people’s homes leads to a discovery of horrendous malpractice by the local GP who ‘cares’ for the residents. Sometime after publication, news broke of the horrific crimes of GP Harold Shipman in nearby Ashton-under-Lyne.

In both cases it was complete coincidence that I had chosen these topics – or they had chosen me. The stories emerged through the writing. I hadn’t picked a topic, researched it and then given it to my PI as a case. Perhaps there is an element of a writer picking up on the fears and rumours and speculation in the air at the time, on the undercurrents of anxiety and whispers of wrongdoing. There’s also an element of writing about what you fear – and then real life showing you those fears are well founded. In much of my work I write about what I dread – about my nightmares writ large. And of course I sincerely hope none of them come true. But life continues to be ever stranger, darker and more harrowing than fiction.

Fly Me

She watched the plane climb, sexy lights, loud roar. Dreamed of beaches and someone else cooking tea and funny pillows. And pegged the next load of washing out.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

Research – A Story of Resentment

I hate research. I think, as a writer, that’s probably a minority position. Most writers seem to relish it, waxing lyrical about libraries and reference books, research trips and source material.

There are three reasons I hate it: it’s tedious, it takes me away from writing and it’s scary.

Tedium first. I find it very hard to connect to non-fiction, my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders off. It takes me a week to make it through Saturday’s Guardian – in small chunks at a time. Practical research is easier than reading – visiting a location to check it out or meeting someone to talk about their area of expertise – but even so it is something I would avoid if I could get away with it. Because…

… My second point – it takes me away from the writing. I want to tell a story, I invent the characters and a situation, I know roughly where I am going and that’s what sets my heart beating, that’s what gets me up in the morning. Not another two hours spent on Google and Wikipedia or at the library.

And scary? Because you can get it wrong! Fiction is never wrong, it’s only a point of view, an offering which you hope will mean something to other people. It might be badly written or unsatisfying but it can’t be objectively incorrect. However research is about facts and figures and dates and procedures that are objective. Mistakes are possible.

When I started writing I chose a private eye as my protagonist, I based her in Manchester and gave her the problem of juggling work and childcare. That immediately let me off huge swathes of research as there were no rules whatsoever to being a PI, I lived in Manchester so knew the city well and I was steeped in my own real-life attempts to find a balance between work and home life. But as I developed as a writer and broadened my horizons, I was drawn to tackling subjects that couldn’t be done without proper, careful research. So, for example, recently I’ve written fiction or drama about assisted dying and life in a women’s prison, about the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya, and the way dangerous driving offences are investigated. The writing couldn’t happen without the research (though I did persuade my partner, who is a history buff, to read some of the books about the Mau Mau for me and mark relevant sections). The meetings I’ve had with solicitors and women prisoners have been incredibly useful and illuminating and I’m glad that the work I’ve produced is as authentic as I can make it. But with each new project my heart sinks at the thought of yet more research.

DIY is one of my hobbies and I guess research is a bit like having to get all the gubbins out and prepare the space before you can actually get cracking. An inescapable, necessary and unrewarding part of the job.

Lost Dreams

It hit her one day: middle age. Watching a circus parade, she realised she would never fulfil her lifelong ambition of tumbling hands to feet to hands all along the street.

Wonderful words

Words are the writer’s medium, the raw material, the building blocks with which we construct our stories. A follow-on question to, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ might well be, ‘Where do you find the words?’ How do we translate that vision in our head, that image in our mind’s eye, that scene, the picture of a character into marks on the page or screen?

For myself it’s an organic process, the words come into my head, sometimes visit my mouth (I shape them as I’m writing, tasting them which must look bizarre and is one reason for not writing in front of an audience) and then they travel down my arm to my hand and through the pen to the page.

As I’ve said before I don’t like to analyse the process of writing too much (superstitious) but as I write I am often automatically seeking out better words to capture what I mean. My first draft has plenty of crossings out. A grey sky will become a blank or bleak sky. ‘How are you?’ will be replaced by, ‘You okay?’ or, ‘How you doing?’ There are dozens of choices as I write. And a sense of the rhythm of the words, the beat beneath them, figures in there somewhere.

Then there is the Thesaurus. I love the Thesaurus. I’m prone to repetition and finding alternative words helps keep that in check and introduces variety into my work.

Sometimes I collect words as I read other people’s books. If they strike me as particularly eloquent or visceral then I jot them down and when I am tidying up my prose I consider whether there is a good place for any of them. Often they don’t fit or they don’t suit my style so they languish on the list for the future.

You may have read lots of rules about writing: cut out your adverbs, avoid the passive voice, don’t split infinitives. None of these rules help me, I ignore them all. I prefer to rely on my instincts. And I constantly break a rule that I was taught at school – never start a sentence with ‘and’. (See what I did there?) I also have loads and loads of sentences that are not proper sentences even though they start with a capital letter and end with a full stop. I leave out the subject or the verb or both. Suffice to say the grammar and style function on my word processor is permanently disabled.

It works for me.

Don’t Fence Me In

Land south of the city was going for a million pounds an acre so the chances of a decent youth centre were a bit slim.

Where do you get your ideas from?

It’s the question writers get asked most. Sometimes I make a jokey reply: ‘Off a stall in Longsight Market.’ Truth is, I’m a little reluctant to examine too closely how ideas come, I don’t like to analyse my writing process. For me, writing is about letting go, freeing up my mind to play, create, invent and I fear that too much unpicking of that might make me self-conscious, hamper that flow. In a similar way, as a reader I don’t want to analyse the books I’m immersed in, I want to suspend disbelief and accept the world of the story and connect with the characters.

What is true for me is that stories come in different ways, some grow from a phrase that triggers a situation, and an idea of character in that situation. Some follow from seeing an image in my head: dust motes in sunbeams in a hallway, Victorian tiles, the house holds a secret. Particular books might start more cerebrally – thinking about a theme that seems ripe for exploration or a situation that would petrify me, or even an incident I experience that suggests a parallel in a fictional world. These are all seeds. In order to germinate them I need to have a sense that there’s potential in the ‘idea’, which I can only explain as a spark, an excitement; when I consider it my mind goes racing ahead. But I can’t make real progress until I discover the characters. I can’t go anywhere until I’ve worked out who the people are, what they’re like and named them. And then the story, the ideas develop and change as I write. Like mould or grass or fruits. What a job, eh? Love it.