Healing by Writing

Debut author Fran McDonnell describes how writing her first novel helped her recovery from serious illness.

It is hard to explain what fifteen months of treatment for breast cancer can do. Two months after the end of my treatment I said to my consultant, “I have nothing left”. And I hadn’t. I was so tired physically, emotionally, mentally. Finishing treatment for some people creates anxiety as they move away from the safety of the hospital. For me I just wanted to curl up in a ball.

At the beginning of cancer treatment, the doctors and nurses warn that everyone’s journey is different. It is. I had finished my treatment but I was too fatigued to go back to work. I needed to recuperate. That meant taking care of the basics, eating well, sleeping and resting and gently doing some exercise. But there were other effects that also needed attention.

I had a sense of disconnection from myself. I could never be carefree about my health again or blithely confident about living to old age. The future held more question marks. Not only that, but for fifteen months nearly every conversation I had was about how I was feeling, my symptoms, my side-effects, my energy, my body. And that wasn’t just medical personnel, it was family and friends too.

Planning any social events meant thinking about whether I had enough energy, and if I would need to be at the hospital. I remember the first time being somewhere where nobody knew I had cancer. It was strange, re-experiencing life as just me, not me and cancer.

After treatment, I described my emotional world to a friend as a landscape – it was post-apocalyptic. There were no plants, no trees, no animals, no people, nothing as far as the eye could see, just dust. To help myself I needed to do more than eat, sleep and gently exercise. I needed to rejuvenate.

CREATIVITY

When I was first diagnosed, a friend suggested I should do something creative.

At the time, struggling to get through chemo, it made me angry. But now her words came back to me. Five years before, I had an idea for a crime novel. I had actually written two thousand words but life was busy and the idea languished. Now I resurrected it. Agatha Christie said, “There is nothing like boredom to make you write”. It seemed I had nothing but time, nothing to do and all day to do it.

I decided that I would go on a writing course. It was called The Inspiration Project, organised and run by three successful Irish writers. I left their weekend workshop believing that I had an idea for a book and, more importantly, believing that they had once been where I was.

And so I started to write.

I set my computer up at my kitchen table and it stayed there. When I got up in the morning, I turned on my computer before the kettle. After breakfast I sat down to write. One of the writers on the programme had said that she wrote three thousand words a day, so that was my aim too.

The beginning was shaky. Despite being an avid reader I wasn’t sure how a book was written. I reread two of my favourite crime novels to figure out what I liked about them.

When reading I particularly enjoyed seeing things from the perspective of the main investigator. And that is how I wrote my book and, just like when I was reading, that perspective drew me into the story. As I was writing, it was as if I was experiencing the investigation. I was immersed in the story, as if it was happening to me. It made every day sitting down to write exciting.

Early in the novel, there’s a scene where Isobel, the main character, is escorted to a solicitor’s office by the secretary, Patricia. As they exchanged words in the corridor I could feel the character Patricia wanting to have a bigger part in the story. Right then I experienced what I consider the wonder of writing. Suddenly, this character I had created was going beyond the remit I had envisaged for her and taking on a life of her own. From that day writing was different.

It was as if magic was involved. My imagination added characters and as they spoke in the story, the characters took on a life of their own. That alchemy is the part of writing I love the most. It creates tension, for me and the reader. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

While there is magic, writing is also a discipline, and it is work. Some days it was a hard slog, but writing gave me a reason to get up. The demands of plot and characters, while initially hard on my chemo-addled brain, gradually got easier. As the story unfolded, I could feel myself changing inside. I was excited to get up, to write. I was engaged. I felt productive and most importantly, I was doing something new, something I had never done before, and it was exhilarating.

HEALING

Initially, to reduce my doubt about my ability and my anxiety, I told myself that no one would see what I had written. ‑ at worked for a while. But the more I wrote, the more my family and friends became interested. Instead of my health they chatted to me about my writing. The book became a symbol of hope, not just for me but for those close to me. Perhaps they could feel me changing and revitalizing.

And of course they wanted to read it. One of the working titles for the book was Listening ­ rough the Silence. It comes from the song Only You by Sinead O’Connor, in particular the lines: “Only you know how I feel and can hear me through the silence”. Those lines summed up the emotion of the book for me but also I think they reflected some of the feelings I had through my treatment. Some things are too diffcult to verbalise and yet when someone seems to understand, it means so much.

What Lies Hidden (Poolbeg Press) by Fran McDonnell, €9.99, visit poolbeg.com

Another of my working titles was The Restoration of Isobel. Writing the book was the restoration of myself. Somehow, somewhere along the way, writing brought light into my life again, a belief in the future, a sense that there were still possibilities, that I had something more to give.

Isobel’s world became very real to me. On many occasions when I was writing a scene, I cried. I remember waking up in the morning when I had the last big scene to write. I was nervous, tense. I sat and wrote five thousand words that day. I remember finishing that long chapter and knowing that essentially I was finished. It was a moment of peace and stillness, of emerging, as a phoenix from the ashes. My internal landscape was no longer one of dust and desolation but instead was fecund and verdant and blooming.

I turned 50 a few months previously and my sister had bought me a bottle of Archangel Gin. I cut some lavender from my garden, threaded it through a slice of orange and toasted my book. Somehow writing had brought about an alchemical process within me, a healing process. As I breathed life into characters and a story, I breathed new life into me.

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