Writing from life (by Lynne Hackles)

(Amazon UK link)

When I’m interested in a topic, I tend to collect rather a lot of books on the topic; as soon as I’ve bought or acquired a couple, I get recommendations for others, and they all seem interesting in different ways. One of those topics is writing - I have an entire bookshelf devoted to this topic, and am trying hard not to want any more. Instead, I determined to re-read some of them this year, and work my way through the advice or exercises.

I don’t know how I came across ‘Writing from life’ by Lynne Hackles. A note at the front says that I have had it since 2011, but not whether I bought it or was given it, nor how I came across it. Perhaps I read a recommendation in a writing magazine, or perhaps Amazon suggested it. I can recall having dipped into it a couple of times, and found some interesting insights. But I had never read it from cover to cover, so I started doing so at the beginning of the year and have just finished.

The subtitle of the book is ‘How to turn your personal experience into profitable prose’. The author succeeds in explaining how to do this in a variety of ways. The first chapter is called ‘Writing and your life’, and contains exercises which seem quite simple: jotting down earliest memories, making lists of happy or sad occasions, looking through photo albums to trigger emotions and to bring to the surface some events we might have forgotten.

I did several of the exercises, hoping they would inspire me to do some writing, but that didn’t work too well. However these exercises, as I gradually realised, were meant more as a storehouse to pick from rather than triggers in themselves. At one point the book asks for a list of ten interesting people we know. Later in the book, the author explains how to take one of them, to change the name and other obvious characteristics, and to mix and match with other people - using incidents from our own past, perhaps - to begin a piece of fiction.

We’re encouraged to make notes of conversations we hear, odd incidents in the news, things we observe that others might not notice. The author tells us to ask, ‘What if?’ about events, even if they don’t seem all that interesting in themselves. For instance, the postman delivers a letter and it’s a note from a friend. But what if it was something else…? What if it was a blackmail letter, unearthing a deep secret? Or what if it was actually intended for a neighbour, and we opened it by mistake, and saw something private…? We can invent far-fetched ideas and choose one of them to move our story forwards.

I’m most interested in fiction, but the chapters about short stories and novels come towards the end of the book. Before that are ideas for letters and articles - advice I’ve seen before, and have taken up several times. So there wasn’t really anything that was new to me, and in places I had already written some of the things the author suggests. But I found the writing style encouraging - it’s nicely paced and lively, with a mixture of advice and anecdotes about the author or other folk who followed her advice.

I didn’t do all the exercises; I got the general idea, however, and think it could be very useful for someone who doesn’t really know where to start with writing. It’s probably more useful for non-fiction than fiction, but that’s a good place to start. I very much liked the idea that we all have stories that are of interest to others, even if they don’t seem all that exciting ourselves. And, indeed, my first ever published article (a very long time ago!) was about an experiment we tried, when my sons were young, of renting an allotment for a couple of years.

Despite not finding anything actively new, I enjoyed reading ‘Writing from Life’, and would recommend it to anyone starting out on writing. We often read advice to ‘write what we know’ - Lynne Hackles explains how we can do exactly that.

Review copyright 2020 Sue's Book Reviews