I’ve written for years.
Thoughts, ideas, stories. Sometimes whole books that nobody else has ever read.
And I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved writing is that I don’t really know where I’m going when I start.
I might think I do.
I usually have an idea. A woman. A situation. Something that’s happened to her, or something she’s beginning to question. I know enough to start writing.
And then something happens.
The story starts to become hers instead of mine.
A reader recently asked me whether, when I was writing Kit, I always knew where her journey would take her, or whether she surprised me along the way.
I’ve thought about that question quite a lot.
Surprised isn’t quite the right word.
Kit evolved.
When I first started writing her, I had an idea of who she was and where I thought she was going. She was an older woman whose long marriage had ended because her husband had gone chasing something younger.
I thought I knew what happened next.
Except Kit didn’t seem particularly interested in doing what I’d planned for her.
At first, I tried to make her.
I’d written the story, after all. Surely I was in charge.
But it didn’t feel right.
So I stopped trying to force her down the path I’d chosen and started listening to her instead.
And that’s when she became real to me.
She developed opinions I hadn’t necessarily given her. She made choices I hadn’t planned. She had doubts and contradictions. Sometimes she made me rethink things myself.
I became very fond of her.
She started to feel less like somebody I’d invented and more like a good friend I’d spent an enormous amount of time with.
And I think that’s how most of my characters develop.
I start them.
Then they take over.
They confide in me. Their struggles, their doubts, the things they want and the things they’re frightened to admit they want. I get to know them as I’m writing them, probably in much the same way we get to know real people.
Slowly.
And occasionally they turn out not to be the person I thought they were at all.
Perhaps that’s why I struggle so much with endings.
And that’s the other thing I loved about that reader’s question.
She made me understand something about myself as a writer that I think I probably already knew, but had never really stopped to think about.
I love that exchange.
I give somebody a book. A story. Characters I’ve lived with and words I’ve spent hours putting onto a page.
And then occasionally a reader gives something back.
They ask a question, or tell me what they saw in a character, and suddenly I’m looking at my own writing differently. They’ve taken something from my words and, without even realising it, offered me something in return.
This time, it was an understanding of why I find endings so difficult.
I’d never really asked myself why before.
Because I don’t think I really believe in them.
Obviously, I know things end. Marriages end. Relationships end. Jobs end. People leave. People die. There are things in life that quite definitely have a final full stop.
But even then, life doesn’t stop with them.
Something comes afterwards.
Sometimes immediately. Sometimes after a long period when nothing much seems to happen at all.
But there is an afterwards.
And when I’ve spent months with a character, watched her change, listened to her, argued with her occasionally, and followed her into places I hadn’t expected to go, writing THE END feels strangely dishonest.
Because she isn’t finished.
I’ve just stopped writing about her.
And there is a difference.
Maybe that’s why you won’t often find a grand finale in one of my books.
I’m unlikely to gather everybody together, resolve every problem, answer every question and send my heroine off towards a perfectly arranged happily ever after.
Life has never looked like that to me.
Neither, though, do I feel the need to leave her standing dramatically amongst the ruins.
Usually I find a place where it feels right for me to leave.
A moment where something has changed.
Something has been understood.
A choice has been made.
A door has opened.
And that’s where I stop.
Perhaps sometimes a reader reaches that final page and thinks, But what happened next?
I rather like that.
Because I wonder too.
I wonder what Kit is doing.
I wonder about the women I’ve written before her.
I wonder whether they made different choices later. Whether they changed their minds. Whether something completely unexpected happened six months after I left them.
In my head, they’re still out there somewhere.
Still getting things wrong.
Still discovering things.
Still changing.
Still living.
I suppose that’s the strange thing about being the person who created them.
I’m the one who decides when the book ends.
But I’ve never quite believed that means their story does.