How Do We Put Ourselves On The Page?

On when, and how to make it personal

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

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Hello Team CCC! Happy Monday! How are you? I’m abuzz - I’ve been working on something new and I’m feeling very cheerful about it, not least because I’ve hit a tight deadline, and made the magic Scrivener bar go green! Whoop whoop! It’s the sweetest feeling!

The You’re Booked podcast will be returning to your ears soon, and it’s an icon-fest. We’ll be bringing you some legendary authors, so if you want to hear about the books that have inspired Jodi Picoult, Bella Mackie, Dawn O’Porter, Paula Hawkins, Holly Williams and more, make sure you’re subscribed (and find our extremely bingeable archives here - we closed out our last series with

Catherine Newman

and she’s such a delight!)

I’m having a glorious time with my Write Like A Reader students - it’s my five part confidence building course for anyone who is curious about writing fiction. It’s designed to show you just how much you already know about storytelling, and make you feel excited about writing. Each 90 minute session is taught on Zoom, and available to watch on catch up. There will be a second Autumn session beginning on Sunday 27th October - finishing on Sunday 24th November. To get the syllabus, pricing information and full details email creativeconfidenceclinic@gmail.com. There’s a decent discount for paid subscribers, too.

Today’s newsletter was inspired by Write Like A Reader alumnus

David Arthur

- and by last night’s class, in which we talked about creating characters. Hope you enjoy it!

Putting ourselves on the page

A little while ago, the writer and Team CCC member

David Arthur

asked me a really great question. David had listened to my conversation with Abi Daré about first and third person narratives, and why Abi and I are both drawn to writing in the third person. How do we choose? David said ‘I’ve always avoided first person myself, it feels too much like acting!’

David’s question intrigued me. I love writing fiction in the first person, because I love reading fiction that has been written in the first person. I write, and read, because I crave the experience of being inside someone else’s head. But oh, to capture that omniscient third person, observing everything with just the right amount of intimacy and elegant distance!

I spent the weekend reading Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe – which is a glorious book about casting yourself as a character, the illusion of intimacy, stepping up and stepping back – and it uses both first and third person narration to illustrate these points. It reminded me of one of my favourite children’s stories, The Five Children And It (stay with me!) The narrator uses ‘I’ and ‘you’ – but once we’re a few chapters in, they own up to being ‘Cyril’ – having presented Cyril to us as another character, one of the five siblings, albeit the cleverest and bravest. Last night, I taught the ‘Character building’ part of my Write Like A Reader course, and I was interested to hear that all of my students had the same concern: When writing fiction, how do we prevent our main characters from simply becoming versions of ourselves? On the page, how can we convince our readers and ourselves of people that we have invented – without giving too much of ourselves away?

Over here on Substack, much of the writing is personal. Lots of us are working on memoirs and exploring that form. We might write about things that have happened to us, or we might be writing about how we think and feel, making the case for our opinions, and sometimes using our own experiences as evidence. This is what I love to read, a fact that brings me comfort when I worry about the impact of AI. I believe that most humans are insatiably curious. We’re so nosy. We want to know how people – people – live. AI cannot replicate this. Last night, during the session, I put forth the following theory: ‘I think every single one of us does something really weird in our regular or domestic life, and we have no idea that it isn’t normal. I read and write because I want to find out what everyone’s weird thing is.’ I have realised that when I started writing, I wanted to be known. Now, I want to know.