From Tumblr: Ask Meme on A Bed of Thorns

[nym_wibbly]

8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of [A Bed of Thorns]?

I draw on my own experiences in thousands of tiny ways, I guess. It’s been particularly fun with ABoT because Belle’s view of the world is so different to my own. We might be observing the same little detail about something, but she gives it angles that would never have occurred to me. I couldn’t begin to count how many of those tiny details where Belle saw it differently to me made it in there, from the housework to the love scenes.

Wren is based in part on my great-aunt Ivy, the voice and attitude particularly, and in part on an older woman I see sometimes while I’m out and about. She’s a really big woman – not obese, but quite tall and very broad-shouldered. I don’t think she’s particularly elderly, but her hair is pure white and styled big to match her. She hunches so that her chin is almost in front of her shoulders sometimes, making her shoulders look rounded, and she often wears a cloak style coat that gives her a timeless look, slightly out of place. I don’t think she’s anything like as old as my aunt Ivy or Wren, which may be why her completely white hair is so eye-catching. I know nothing about her, and have only spoken to her to say ‘good morning’ or ‘whoops, excuse me’, but her appearance is so striking that she found her way into Wren a little bit.

While I hesitated to write the pregnancy loss plotline, and had a fairly lame alternative in mind in case I couldn’t bear to go that far, when I agonised over it I thought of the women I know who’ve lost their pregnancy, particularly those who suffered a very early loss like Belle. They all say that they felt that their grief was stifled by society’s refusal to talk about pregnancy loss, by feeling dismissed, and that they blamed themselves without having an outlet to work through that pain. I thought of Amanda Tapping, the actress, who so bravely spoke out about her own multiple losses and that sense of guilt, and about how we need to recognise this everyday tragedy as something that’s all around us, unspoken. A vast number of pregnancies end in an early loss, the stats are astonishing, yet we don’t talk about it and where fiction does address it, it tends to fall back on tropes that are little more than euphemisms for something unspeakable.

While Belle’s experience in my story didn’t directly reflect anyone’s personal story, I did try to make sure that it was ‘real’ and that what I was writing reflected what I’ve learned from listening to women (and their partners too) who’ve been there. For a long time now, I’ve sewn little tokens that hospitals can offer to parents who’ve suffered an early loss and are being sent home as walking wounded, no medical care required. Some people find it helpful to have a focus for the grief that would otherwise be undirected, and something physical to remember their child by later. Most of all, they’re tokens that someone, somewhere, recognises this experience they’re having and validates their emotions. That’s how I came to be involved with a number of women who’ve lost their pregnancy before it even seemed fully real to them, and in that sense, that experience Belle has was based on something very real.

15: What did you learn from writing [A Bed of Thorns]?

I’m not completely sure yet! I have learned a new way to write, much more organised and segmented, and how to get the most out of that without feeling too restricted on the page. I’ve learned (unfortunately) that I don’t think I can keep on doing this; the amount of energy required is increasingly beyond my level of health, as is coping with the renewed dread of someone (else) stealing my work and making a fuss when I tell them to stop it. I’ve pulled myself up by the bootstraps after dealing with that one too many times and I don’t think I can do it again. I’ve learned that I can cope (just about) with being jossed constantly over the course of several years without losing my original thread.

I’ve learned that there’s no way to budge some readers’ expectations of a story, up to and including flat out telling folks that a thing isn’t going to happen, and that failing to adhere to the more popular/common fandom tropes will get you both respected and dismissed. I’ve learned (though these weren’t news after decades of fanfic-writing) that an awful lot of people only come for the smut, skipping over the rest of the story, and that only a tiny minority of readers will ever leave a comment of any kind.

Lastly, I have learned how to talk about what I’m doing. I’ve never felt confident about that before, being more of a seat-of-the-pants writer than a big planner with a system. It’s surprised me no end that other writers and would-be writers find anything of value in seeing me ramble about how I did a thing in A Bed of Thorns, how I approach and handle being not just a writer, but a fanfic writer, treating that as a craft in its own right, with its own particular challenges and rewards. But some people do take something away from it that helps them in some way with their own craft, and I love that more than breathing.