Painting Bridges
“A month into the Dialect mentoring programme and my writing practice has been turned upside down. No, really. It has. And in a good way.”
In her first blog for Dialect, Audrey Healey writes about being mentored by novelist Melanie Golding
Image credit: Esteban
A month into the Dialect mentoring programme and my writing practice has been turned upside down. No, really. It has. And in a good way.
A friend who works for Gloucestershire Libraries sent me a link to Dialect’s mentoring programme in late January. When it arrived, I was encased in a duvet, coughing, wheezing, shivering and eating vindaloo (couldn’t taste a damn thing: cheers Covid). I applied with no expectations nor the luxury of the time to talk myself out of it. And applying took my mind off how brutal I felt.
I started writing my psychological thriller about three years ago. Didn’t do the sensible thing like starting with flash fiction or short stories – no - just dived straight in. Why bother with a nice watercolour when you can just go and paint the Forth Bridge? May sound cliched, but hitting forty got me writing again. Writing stories used to be my favourite thing. On the last day of primary school my teacher handed me my story filled exercise book and instructed me never to throw it away or stop writing. I ignored her. I considered writing to be a niche and unobtainable pursuit like being an astronaut or a Hollywood actor. After that I settled with only consuming stories, never producing my own. It didn’t occur to me I might like doing it for its own sake.
I started writing in secret. Didn’t even tell my husband. Poor guy, god knows what he thought I was doing in our study, shut away for hours and minimising the screen when he popped his head round the door. Writing is lonely and it is a craft. I felt I needed some instruction and a community but couldn’t shoulder the cost of a creative writing MA. Having searched for local writing groups and not found any, in winter 2018 I did a six-week course run by the literary agency Curtis Brown. Called ‘Write to the end of your novel’, it provided tools, feedback and crucially, inspiration to continue. Energised, I told my husband (my secret well and truly out by then) I was going to apply for the agency’s six-month, selective course the following summer, which I did and was accepted. It was incredibly useful and I’m still in touch with some of my fellow students, whose encouragement and feedback have kept me writing through lockdown.
I finished the first draft last December and thought: what now? I created a spreadsheet detailing my re-write plan, started learning how to use Scrivener, printed the draft, got my red pen out and used it with abandon. But I was still floundering and couldn’t quite pinpoint why. So the timing of Dialect’s mentoring programme was perfect.
I’m being mentored by best-selling author of psychological thrillers Melanie Golding. Can’t really believe it. She asked me where I was struggling and reviewed my synopsis. By talking it through and doing a couple of exercises to get to the root of one of my problems (overplotting), we’ve identified a way forward and I’m approaching my rewrite in a way I’d never envisaged. Melanie explained how she overcame other issues that are slowing me down. Such is the power of a different perspective and experience from an author who has been there. So for now, it’s back to painting that proverbial bridge, but with a renewed sense of purpose.
