Writing The Last Days

on rejection, obsession, embodiment and disembodiment

I was asked on Twitter earlier in the week about the process of writing The Last Days. This is something I’ve been asked about a lot over the last few months, so I thought I’d put it all down here. Although no doubt I’ll probably miss something out. I’ll go through the process of thinking about writing it, the physical and mental effects of writing it, editing and refining, submission, rejection and refining.

EARLY LAST DAYS

I never wanted to write a memoir. Everything that happens to you has an air of normalcy even if it’s extraordinary because it’s your every day. I didn’t think my life as Jehovah’s Witness was interesting. Ashamed of it, I tried to write anything but the story. As a Jehovah’s Witness any arts based education was discouraged. I loved literature and reading but it was barely an interest I was allowed to pursue, books after all contained all sorts of sinful things - swearing, sex, ideas. When I left the Witnesses I wasn’t well for a while. Reading was a way of staying alive as much as it was of seeing other worlds. As I read, I began to write, using writing as a way of thinking myself away from the damaging thought patterns I’d been trapped by. I didn’t know if I was any use at writing, so I did an evening class at the local university, expecting the tutor to tell me I wasn’t. She didn’t. After that, I applied to the Creative Writing faculty at Edinburgh Napier. I was surprised when I got in.

It was a great MA. We didn’t workshop, instead we were mentored by tutors. I think this is a good thing, I wouldn’t want a student doctor to teach me surgery skills. The course taught a combination of technical skills - plot, structure, pace - and literary theory - Derrida, Baudrillard, Barthes. When I started I was very naive, I remember the other students talking about an arc, I wondered why they were talking about Noah. The most valuable things I learnt on the course were to think critically, to interrogate my work, and to apply rigour to it. Fancy prose does not good writing make.

I also learnt it’s a bad idea to get pregnant half way through your course. I graduated on my due date, with a distinction and the class medal. Over the course of the next five years I had three babies. That’s bad maths in anyone’s book, but exceptionally so when you want to write. We also moved to a farm, and the isolation coupled with ptsd following the loss of my mother took its toll. I kept writing strange fiction manuscripts that in retrospect weren’t right for a debut, and kept getting rejected. The important thing is, I didn’t stop.

FIRST DRAFTS

In 2019 when my youngest was 1, I decided to give myself one last chance. I wasn’t content any more to fit writing around my life, and got a bit ruthless as I shaped my life around it. I stopped socialising, didn’t keep the house as clean as I had, cut right back on other work, stopped trying to do everything, and most importantly, stopped writing around the elephant in the room, which was my past.

I started to write The Last Days in late January. I’d spend evenings, weekends, and the one day a week I had free writing. Most of the first draft was written as I waited for my sons to fall asleep. I’ve never written anything so quickly, three weeks later, and the first draft was complete. I’ve never read it since.

I filed in on the laptop and spent the following fews months trying to run away from what I’d done. I also began to plot the second draft. The first draft was a way of thinking the story out, the second of making sure it was plotted, and that the shifts in voice worked. Throughout the book I go from being 3 to nearly 30 - this meant voice had to work really hard.

The second draft took a couple of months to write. This was the draft that made me the most ill. I used music to take me back into the past and then would walk around a scene, writing down what was happening in it. Some scenes were very hard to write. I would shake while writing, cry, have panic attacks before and often be sick after. A lot of time I wasn’t sure why I was doing what I was doing. I didn’t have an agent, there was no guarantee I’d get one with this book. It wasn’t cathartic in any way.

I also wrote in second person. This fulfilled two functions. Firstly, I helped create a distance between myself as the ‘you’ on the page, and myself as the author. At that stage, the distance was essential. I also wanted to show on the page how far away from myself I was as a witness.

SIGNING AND SELLING

As I neared the end of the first draft, I contacted my now agent, Matthew Marland at RCW, who enthusiastically embraced the manuscript. We worked on it together for a few months before it went on submission to about 18 publishers. This is another thing you don’t often hear about, a manuscript usually goes to a lot of editors, and a lot of them will say no. Some of them will take it to an acquisitions meeting, which is where a team usually consisting of publicity, marketing and editorial will consider the manuscript from a commercial perspective before making a decision. So, while an editor might like it, the whole team might not see its commercial viability, which is where previous rejection really comes in useful!

My editor as Penguin really liked the manuscript from early on, but didn’t think 2nd person had commercial appeal. She was right. I rewrote sections for her, and in September 2020 was offered a deal with PRH. We then worked together on the manuscript for the next year.

At this later stage, rhythm and tone became really important, especially in relation to the voice. I described it in an interview as a bit like a mixing desk, and I needed to get the levels right. I’d tap the rhythm out on my desk, I’d read sections aloud and record as I did so, listening back to the recordings. The rule I had was if I stopped listening, the reader would stop paying attention, this meant I wrote a lot of short, sharp sentences, mixing them with longer ones.

I wanted the memoir to be in many ways a work of reportage. This influenced the narrative position adopted in the book. It’s first person present tense, I wanted the reader to be right inside experiences they hadn’t encountered which I why I made that choice. Narrative position and structure are really the two important tools in a book, and need nailed early on. Structure is the bones you hang the story on, without it, you’ll have a limp book. I also made sure I found the story - a life doesn’t automatically conform to the rules of plot - so my editor and I were conscious of making sure there was a clear plot, with conflict, tension and drama - all the great mechanics of story.

LEGAL READS

At some point I lost track of how many drafts we did. I know it was a lot. After the drafts were done came the legal read. This is the part I nearly came unstuck at. Defamation law is tricky at the best of times, but especially so when a global, litigious organisation is involved along with a lot of unsubstantiated events. The first legal report basically advised cutting the second half of the book. This was’t feasible so we had to find other ways of framing what had happened. I still didn’t legal nail it after the first legal report, two more reports later and lawyers were happy I wasn’t going to get horribly sued. This was probably the hardest part of the process. I wanted to tell a different story and wasn’t able to, but at the same time, it made me a better writer.

THE FEAR

I did have many sleepless nights. It’s hard writing about people you love if you’re not writing about them favourably. It’s hard looking back on your life and making sense of it, re-narrating it. I didn’t want to make myself a likeable narrator. There’s not much worse than a memoir narrator trying to ingratiate themselves with the reader. I wanted to be complicit in my downfall. If you’re being harsh about other people, you have to do the same to yourself. I also didn’t want a reflective voice, while they sometimes work in memoir, they can sometimes be artificially knowing and this sort of sickly pseudo-wisdom gets grating after the first chapter (page). Some people believe a reflective voice is a prerequisite in memoir. I don’t.

After I finished, I said I’d never write another memoir. But we all say things we don’t mean. The thing I love about having written The Last Days is that I started my career by putting my head above the parapet. Now when I write, I find there’s not much that I’m afraid to say, which is funny since I spent my life threatened with the pain of eternal damnation for saying anything at all.