Today I am very happy to welcome Lucy Lawrie to the blog talking about the origins of the book and writing – this is one I’m looking forward to reading having loved her first novel, Tiny Acts of Love, very much. Thanks Lucy!
The Last Day I Saw Her came from a little seed of an idea that dates back to when I was 7 years old.
The story centres around two childhood friends, Janey and Hattie, and much of the activity happens at Hattie’s house, a dark and imposing Georgian town house in New Town Edinburgh.
And I had a school friend who lived in just such a house. One day she told me that sometimes, when she was down in the basement kitchen, she’d heard the piano on the top floor playing by itself. We decided that I would go for a sleepover to help her investigate – ghost-hunting style. We didn’t hear any piano playing, but I was so terrified that I stayed awake all night. At 4.30am when the sky was just starting to lighten, I looked out of the window and saw that the clouds had formed themselves into the shape of a skull. I decided then that I wanted to write a story about a house like that, and that idea surfaced again nearly thirty years later and came to life in The Last Day I Saw Her (phantom piano playing and all!).
When you’re writing, characters can be a bit like ghosts themselves. At first they’re shadowy figures, hovering at the edge of your vision, disappearing when you try to look at them directly. They need to be coaxed out of their hiding places.
When I wrote The Last Day I Saw Her, the first character who felt real to me was Hattie. I wanted to set part of the story in the 1980s when Hattie and Janey were twelve years old and I mentioned this to my sister, who very kindly let me read her diaries from when she’d been that age herself. I immersed myself in them over a few days, while playing 80s music on repeat!
I let my sister’s pre-teen and early-teen voice go round and round in my head until somehow, Hattie’s emerged quite easily and naturally when I went to try and write her. She was quite different from my sister in personality – I have no idea where she actually came from! But something about that process – the immersion in that era, perhaps, or just getting out of my own memories of being a 12 year old girl – had really helped.
Janey came about in another way entirely. My mum was training to be a counsellor at the time and she had become interested in a therapeutic technique where the client is asked to try writing or drawing with her non-dominant hand. The theory is that this accesses the right hemisphere of the brain, the areas that deal with feeling, intuition and creativity, and that are associated with the idea of the ‘inner child’ as a therapeutic concept.
I read some of the literature on this and I found the case studies fascinating and sometimes unnerving – it seemed that different aspects of a person could come through during the process, to the extent that they could often behave (in their writing or drawing) like another person entirely. It was as though they contained different versions of themselves, ‘inner children’ who were sad, or angry, or playful, and who were often calling the shots, despite their adult selves ‘keeping a lid on them’. I kept thinking of the Emily Dickinson poem, ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted.’
By way of experiment I tried non-dominant handwriting for myself. It didn’t happen naturally for me – my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of any words to write. But I drew a figure.
I’ll use my words from Chapter One of the book to describe what happened: ‘I drew a figure with stick arms and legs, a lollipop head, curly hair…. three dark moles… I added a big smile. But somehow, I couldn’t get the curve right – it remained crooked and tight, however much I went over it. The eyes looked startled, black holes in that sea of white, so I added eyebrows, which only made the curly-headed figure look anxious.’
I stared at the page, at this figure looking back at me. She looked like she had a story to tell. And just like that, Janey was born – and the idea for the first scene in the book.
Writers often talk about characters as though they’re real – the way they appear from nowhere and develop, the way they ‘do their own thing’, and talk back to you, saying things you didn’t expect them to. It can sound a bit uncanny, and in some ways it is.
Rather like in a séance, or a vigil, you need to stand in the doorway between two worlds, the ‘real’ world, and the world of your story.
So much of writing is about crossing thresholds; thresholds inside yourself, from not-knowing to knowing, from keeping back to letting go, from silence into words. You need to take a deep breath, step off the blank page, and into the unknown.
About the book:
When lonely single mum Janey stumbles into an art workshop, she can’t believe her eyes when her left hand mysteriously scribbles a picture of two little girls and a strange message from someone called ‘Hattie’: Janey’s childhood best friend. But they lost touch after Hattie’s family suddenly moved away in mysterious circumstances.
Janey’s instincts tell her that she must finally find out what happened to Hattie, but life is already complicated enough: she’s struggling with motherhood, a custody battle over her toddler son Pip is looming, and she finds herself falling for intense art tutor Steve. And when writing appears on the walls of her flat and Pip starts playing with an invisible friend, Janey fears she’s losing her mind. Is it really a good idea to go digging up the past? As dark secrets come to light, she can’t be sure what’s real any more – or who to trust…
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Happy Reading!
