Love in all its many guises

The other night I went along to listen to Michael Arditti read from his most recent novel Jubilate. It tells the story of Vincent and Gillian, who begin a passionate affair in Lourdes where she has brought her brain-damaged husband. The sceptical Vincent is there making a TV documentary about the shrine's 150th anniversary. I liked the idea that these two people who have such differing beliefs could find each other in this most unlikely of places. Also, the way the story is structured appealed to me. It is told from both their points of view, but while one of them tells their story in chronological order, the other does so backwards. I've not come across this structure before so I'm intrigued to see how it works on the page.

Anyhow, despite telling myself I wouldn't buy any more books until I had read what I have by my bedside (11 books at the moment - eek), I came away from the talk with two: Jubilate and a book of Michael's short stories. Well, if you want to be a writer, you have to read lots. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

When talking about the unconventional structure of this novel, Michael said that in each book he has written so far he tries to do something different with it - to keep it interesting for his readers but also for himself. This made me sit up and take notice as I've been struggling with a few short stories I've written recently. Funny enough, one was a love story. I'd never written one before and thought I'd give it a go. But somehow I just couldn't find the main character's true voice and the tone of the story didn't seem right either. So I've shelved it for the time being and will come back to it another day.

It can be easy to get into a writing rut - perhaps your characters are often the same sort of person or you always write in the third person or you've never told a tale in a different order to the one the events happened in. We have to challenge ourselves as writers and also experiment and see what happens. Without doubt some experiments will be more successful than others but I thought to myself I should try and do something a bit different in each of my stories (different for me, that is.) Don't worry - I'm not going to start limiting myself to using words that only contain the first half of the alphabet or anything so radical. I just mean I should try and use more of the tools open to us as writers. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Oh before I forget, the other thing I picked up from Michael's talk the other night was when writing a love story you want the reader to truly engage with, at least one of the main characters has to have a lot to lose from the affair. Maybe that's where I've been going wrong with my story... Hmm back to the drawing board methinks.