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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Closer, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Wearing two hats, by Maxine Linnell
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By: Maxine., on 2/28/2013
Blog: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  young adult fiction, psychotherapy, Closer, Maxine Linnell, wearing two hats., Add a tag




After my blog last month, Lynda Waterhouse asked me about what it’s like to be a psychotherapist and a novelist. Thanks Lynda, you made me think about it some more! 

I’ll start off with two people I’ve met who’ve been both a writer and a therapist. About 25 years ago I knew a  therapist who worked with people for a couple of years, then suddenly stopped for no obvious reason. A few months later her book of short stories was published. The linking theme of the collection was the relationship between a psychotherapist and her clients. I knew one of her clients, who was pretty sure one of the stories was about her.

A few years ago I met a well-known novelist, who was a psychotherapist for many years. As her books became well-known, she began to have problems in her therapy world. She worked hard not to use any of the people she had met in her consulting room. Her clients read her books. Some were convinced they were the basis of a character, and were angry. Some were hurt and angry that they were missing from her books! Eventually writing took over, and she no longer works  as a therapist. 

It’s a bit of a minefield, and clearly not just for me. I’ve never used the experience of someone I’ve worked with in my books, stories, plays or poems. I feel very strongly about the privilege of people sharing very private aspects of themselves with me, and would not knowingly betray their trust. So I’ve been very careful. But some of the themes and difficulties I write about have been issues for people I’ve worked with. It could be easy for someone to feel betrayed by reading my books, even if I think there’s nothing that comes from them in the stories. It feels very important not to cause harm. 

On the positive side, there’s so much I’ve learned from the people I’ve known, sometimes over years. I’ve learned to listen very deeply, to hear what people say, and what they might be saying under the surface. I wouldn’t presume to say I know, but in the job it’s important to ask, to check it out. So I’ve heard a great deal. I also know a little of how people get hurt, the strategies we find to cope, the best and the worst aspects of human beings. And how none of us is only one thing, and all of us change over time.

I think that’s helpful for writing - I like to think I trust my readers to look beneath the obvious, to be able to handle characters who aren’t just good or bad, heroes or monsters, who develop and change, often through meetings with important people in their lives. 

And there’s that tricky job for novelists, finding an authentic, consistent voice for our characters and ourselves. In Closer, Mel speaks of her experience, what she knows, what she guesses, and what she’d rather not know. Readers usually work it out long before Mel does, and have to go along with her as she discovers the truth, her reactions and feelings, and eventually finds a way through. Perhaps I’m inviting people who read my books to listen as accurately as I try to as a psychotherapist, to look beyond the words on the page.

The training and the work of a therapist also develop empathy. It’s essential to be able to imagine what other people think and feel, to walk in their shoes. There is some research to show that reading stories and novels develops empathy. Through identifying with characters in books who might have very different lives from our own, we can find compassion and understanding for real people. There have been so many times too, when as a reader I've felt a writer really 'got' something I've been feeling or experiencing - and it's helped me know what's going on. Deborah Moggach said recently ‘reading sensitises us as human beings’ - though perhaps that depends on what we read! We can recognise that people have different perspectives, different backgrounds and cultures, different needs and intentions. Writers also need empathy to be able to create believable characters whose lives readers will want to follow. The connections are clear.

Most of the time we look at people from the outside, and they seem all in one piece. I’ve learnt in my therapy work that so many people are walking miracles. They adapt, they learn, they recover, they love, even when they’ve experienced huge suffering and damage over many years. That’s something I want to pass on in my writing: the recognition of how each of us has come through something and managed the best way we can.

Maxine Linnell
www.maxinelinnell.com
Vintage and Closer, published by Five Leaves
Breaking the Rules, published by Bloomsbury
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles retold, published by Real Reads.
Mentoring and teaching.



4 Comments on Wearing two hats, by Maxine Linnell, last added: 2/28/2013
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2. What's it about?
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By: Maxine., on 1/28/2013
Blog: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  YA fiction, Thomas Hardy, Vintage, issues, Closer, Maxine Linnell, Breaking the Rules, Real Reads, Add a tag


‘What are your books about?’ That’s a question I often get asked when I say I’m  a novelist writing for, or about, young adults. My first book, Vintage, is easy to describe. Vintage is about a 17 year old girl living in 2010 who swaps places with a seventeen year old living in 1962. That seems to satisfy, and interest people, including adults who were around in 1962! 






The second book, Closer, is harder to describe. In the blurb on the back we chose to focus on Mel, the main character - on who she is, her gritty and quirky take on the world, and on her finding the courage to speak out. But I was a bit naive if I thought it would stop there. As soon as the book came out, the reviews on Amazon and in magazines spelt out the story - Closer is about a girl whose stepfather gets too close. It involves sexual abuse. 




Some parents have said that they don’t think their children are ready to read it, and I can understand that. Some young people have said they don’t want to read about incest or abuse (yukk!, as one graphically put it). But the feedback I’ve had from those who read it is that they find Closer inspiring, compelling and not remotely explicit. And some of the best feedback has been from teachers and social workers who have said that it’s realistic - better than reading a case study, one said. I have to admit I'm really proud of that.



There’s something about ‘issue’ books which puts me off too. If I feel I’m being asked to think in a particular way, if I feel lectured or taught, it’s a huge turnoff. I want to be told a story. I want to find a way of getting inside someone else’s world and knowing something I’d never otherwise have known. I want to be gripped, to have to read on, and to be satisfied by the ending even if it doesn’t give me all the answers. I want to be interested in the characters and where they’re going. I want to make my own mind up.

I've learned so much from reading novels about difficult times in their characters' lives. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar comes to mind, and Roddy Doyle's The Woman who walked into Doors. Most recently, Patrick Ness wrote so movingly about grief in A Monster Calls. When something new comes up in my life, whether it's working out how to knit socks or how to find a way through grief, I'll reach for a book, or the internet, or a friend - or all three.

It’s a conundrum, how to pose questions about an issue without giving easy answers - and then how to describe the book without giving away the story. I wrote Closer partly because I’d read the YA novels I could find at that time about sexual abuse, and the outcome in the stories was often disastrous. I knew from my work as a psychotherapist that this wasn't always the case, or it didn't have to be. 

I imagined a reader, possibly young, who read these books and had gone through something like Mel’s experience - or had a friend going through it. I wanted her, or him, to have a story where there are no monsters, and where there’s a way through. I feel passionately about that. And when sexual abuse has been so much around in the news in the last few months, we need ways of making sense of it, and stories about coming through.





So that's my first blog for ABBA - phew! 
But I still don’t know how to say what Closer is about...










Bloomsbury has published my story about Facebook in their series Wired Up for reluctant readers. It's called Breaking the Rules.





 I've retold three Thomas Hardy novels for Real Reads - The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. They're read by 9-13s, and by adults learning English as a foreign language.
















8 Comments on What's it about?, last added: 2/2/2013
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3. Closer by Shawn McDonald
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By: Shellie Neumeier, on 1/31/2011
Blog: Shellie Neumeier (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  music, Stuff, closer, shawn mcdonald, Add a tag

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