On Writing

Novelist Laura McVeigh describes her writing journey from student to journalism, motherhood, charity work and finally to full-time author.

My writing journey started early on – as a child filling notebooks with imagined stories and illustrations in the margins, creating plays at home, charging tickets for entry. For a while I channelled that creativity into art and painting, but the love of story remained.

At Cambridge I studied languages and literature – film and art too. I was a member of theatre and filmmaking societies, took work placements with TV production companies and in journalism, learning about storytelling and how to structure a story, how to create tension in your writing, how to develop characters, motivations, themes, emotion.

And I was always reading – to write you have to read. I read widely (a habit developed in early childhood), following whatever I was interested in. I read at first in French, Spanish, English, and soon began learning other languages – aware that each one opened up new worlds of literature and story. In London I was offered a place on the Royal Court Theatre Young Writers’ Programme – I loved the camaraderie and the space and time to create theatre. It was a practical kind of immersion in writing and the creative process, working with passionate storytellers and a motivated group of peers.

WORK/LIFE BALANCE

However, the world of work beckoned – journalism, publishing, new media at first.

Still very much in the world of words. I continued writing: short stories, plays. I kept learning new languages, reading and travelling. Interested in the wider world, I began studying global politics, human rights, international issues, and became involved in politics through the Fabian Society (once home to G.B. Shaw and George Orwell). I returned to the Royal Court ­ Theatre, this time to the Writers Programme, and that love of writing remained.

Yet for a number of years my career (now in the charity sector) consumed my energy and time – working with children and youth charities, with human rights organisations. I was travelling widely, often working internationally on projects I cared about deeply, even working with many writers – but I wasn’t writing. When my daughter was born I had a moment – a recognition that now was the time to write. Still I hesitated. Life was too busy and there was ‘never time’ to write.

WRITING AGAIN

Then eventually I chose. I gave up the job I cared about deeply. But it didn’t matter. I had been missing out on my daughter’s early years, working and travelling too much. I needed to take time for my family life, for myself, and I knew that I needed to write. I worked on two novel ideas – setting myself a deadline of the Mslexia First Novel Competition to submit one novel. I submitted the early draft manuscript, and it was shortlisted. ­ The other novel I was working on caught the eye of an agent.

I applied to several agents, had several offers, and the first manuscript found its way to publication, selling in ten territories, even making some international bestseller lists.

I kept writing, working on a new story, on screenplays, on playwriting. We decided to give our daughter, now a little older, the opportunity to grow up trilingual in the Balearics – a Mediterranean childhood spent in nature rather than the city life we’d lived up until then. While she goes to school I write – usually for four or five hours a day, then I take some time to edit, or work on a different writing project. Towards the end of working on a story, the timeline and work patterns shift. Sometimes I will write through the night if I’m close to finishing a story.

­There’s just that compulsion to capture the ideas on the page as best I can. I use the same technique of a deadline for any project I work on – both ­ The Plantation House (a story I’m currently editing) and Lenny (my new novel) were submitted to various Hollywood screenwriting contests. As I write in a visual way, I often imagine the story as film in the writing process. When the stories are shortlisted in the competitions then I know I’m writing along the right lines – that’s to say, there’s a story there with heart and emotion, a story that a reader will connect to. ­ That might even one day translate from book to film.

Some writers work on one project at a time. I can’t do that. I need the variety and contrast of working on diff rent ideas and in different genres and mediums. At the moment I’m working on a collection of travel writing, finishing a children’s novel for my daughter, writing a screenplay, working on a new novel, editing another manuscript.

With writing, it’s always the journey, not the end destination. Each writer’s creative process differs. Personally, I take quite a long time (perhaps even years) just letting ideas come together.

Novels are created from so many sparks, ideas, images. Sometimes I’ll see something – an old photograph, a newspaper headline, or hear a piece of music, and my memory will fi le it away, not knowing why in the moment, just feeling that it will be important at some future point in writing. With Lenny, I knew I wanted to write ‘in conversation’ with the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, famous both for the classic parable, ­The Little Prince, and his wonderful writing, but also as an aviator. ­ That then led me to Libya (where years before he had crashed a plane in the Libyan desert, and was saved by a Bedouin on a camel). ­ That image in turn became a spark for the way into telling Lenny – the story of a young boy who has lost his home and his family and is seeking to save his hometown Roseville from destruction, helped by the kindness of strangers and The Little Prince.

One of the other things I do as part of writing any story is to put together a visual board of images that somehow resonate for me with the imagined world of the story. From time to time, I look back over it, and that too can help forge unexpected connections in the storytelling.

Lenny by Laura McVeigh is available now

I usually know where a story will start and where it will fi nish. I don’t like to know how it will get there, usually preferring to discover that in the writing. And of course, sometimes the beginning and the end will change after all. I like to be surprised in writing a story. It needs to feel ‘alive’, to move me in the writing. If that doesn’t happen then I know it wouldn’t work for a reader. But the book is really always many books – there is the story I write and then later there is the book the reader reads - and every reader is different and brings a different interpretation to the story.

When the new manuscript, Lenny, was finished I wanted this time to work with an Irish publisher, seeking that closer connection to home, and early on discovered New Island Books. I appreciate the care and love they give to the books they publish. Fortunately they loved my writing too.

Lenny by Laura McVeigh is available now.

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