Writing for the love of it
Published:
AUTHORS are far more likely to see their books in print if they have had an affair with a celebrity – or preferably several.
As author Linda Gillan talked to a writing group on the challenges of getting their books published, she said celebrity, or infamy, had become the big sell, the not-so-secret something agents and publishers were after.
Thankfully, it was only a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of publishing perils and traumas. Skye-based Linda, whose third novel, Star Gazing, is now in the shops, well remembers the rejection letters, but she didn’t let them stop her.
Linda writes because she loves writing. She writes because she gets cranky if she doesn’t. And she has caught the attention of publishers because she is genuinely original.
Star Gazing is set partly in Skye. As Linda looked out over the Cuillin Mountains from her home, she knew she wanted to write about her home but wondered what she could say about the island that had not already been said in reams of travelogues.
And so, after a huge amount of research, and adopting an entirely different approach to the world around her, she brought Marianne Fraser to life, congenitally blind and widowed by the Piper Alpha disaster.
Her heroine is taken to Skye by Keir Harvey, who is determined to “show” her his home. He turns the stars and the hills into pieces of music, trying to portray the landscape through other senses.
“Readers seem to have loved the landscape descriptions,” said 56-year-old Linda.
“I loved doing it that way. By trying to write about a blind person, it made me see differently.
“I think it has probably permanently changed the way I write now, and I use the other senses far more. I think far more about what something feels like or how it smells. It made me realise that other senses were as valid a way of seeing as seeing through my eyes.”
Almost 10 years on from when she first started writing, Linda has wholeheartedly reinvented herself as a novelist after a past which includes careers as an actress, a journalist and, most recently, a primary school teacher.
Struggling with depression, she gave up teaching when she had a breakdown and started to write while she was convalescing. She was 47.
Her first novel, Emotional Geology, features a woman who is manic depressive and bipolar. It is not autobiographical – for ages, she debated over whether to talk about her depression lest critics immediately rushed to say it was the story of her life.
However, she did set out to spread a very positive message and show that people who have bipolar disorder can be extremely high achievers and that it does not need to take over people’s lives if they have the right support and medication.
Her readers have been quick to say that it struck a chord.
Writing Emotional Geology was really a kind of therapy, she said. It was never intended for publication. Who would want to read about a woman in her 40s and 50s with depression?
Luckily, friends from her writing group persuaded her to try to find an agent. She says she got lucky. An agent took her on and Transita, which happened to be looking for books for older women, snapped her up.
Now Linda, who lives in Torvaig, just north of Portree, wonders why it took her so long to start writing. She treasures the fantasy world her characters inhabit and is head over heels in love with her heroes.
For her, writing is a drug.
“Writing is the thing I was born to do. It is what I should have been doing all along. I am totally hooked. It is an addiction. I would write even if I wasn’t being published.”
Linda Gillan recently led a workshop on writing and the challenges and pitfalls of getting books published for Banchory-based Deeside Writers.
Star Gazing (Piatkus, £6.99) was published in May 2008. www.lindagillard.co.uk
