Last week I reviewed Lilith, a great debut book by Victoria Limbert. I asked her where her inspiration came from, and she kindly agreed to talk about how and why she started writing. Read her powerful and insightful story:
There are many reasons I began writing, and it all started when I was a young child in school. I have always been a little strange, preferring my own company when other children were hanging around on the street laughing and getting up to mischief. I liked to read constantly, and often stared off in to the distance thinking about the fantasy worlds I enjoyed. Even my own sisters and brothers didn’t fully understand me. I possessed an odd humour and a strange gift for tolerance and patience. I also had a strong sense of right and wrong, even if it put me in awkward situations, and I find it extremely hard to lie. Guilt is written across my face.
Ok, my scene is set: Quirky little girl who lives in a world of her own and sees the world with rose tinted glasses. So imagine how this inevitably led to years and years of bullying. I was the kind of child that spent her breaks talking to teachers and dinner ladies because other children didn’t share my love of words and books, and I thought that chasing boys around and trying to kiss them was just yucky and insane. I didn’t want to play hopscotch; why would I want to throw a rock just to find a ridiculous path to pick it back up? And I definitely wasn’t making daisy chains. As a loner I was laughed at, but it was in my later years at secondary school that the bullying really came to life. Teenagers can be very cruel.
Admittedly I was ‘slightly’ heavier than the average girl who was careful about what she ate, so I was called fat, chunky and other hurtful things. Stupidly, if the same people started talking to me nicely the next day, I was friendly and kind back, hoping to show that I was not such a bad person. This only made their bullying more forceful. I was pushed and name-called every single day. Some girls thought it funny to kick me while I was trying to read out my work in class, knowing the teacher was completely oblivious. Before and after school, groups of girls would follow me, call me names and threaten to ‘beat me up’. I had begged my mum for days off school, had tried to find new routes to walk, had tried talking to the few friends I DID have, but nothing worked.
All this fed my strong need for escapism. One day I watched my dad read a Stephen King novel, and saw how completely engrossed he was, saw how he barely registered my mum’s voice, and I wanted that. I wanted to write the kind of book where people like me had a chance to escape, where children bullied and ridiculed in school could pretend they were courageous, fighting alongside the book’s heroes and heroines. I put pen to paper and wrote a 70-page story about a woman who battled monstrous demons. She was strong and fearsome, and fell in love with a beautiful man who cared for nothing but her. Reading and writing kept me going through those horrible times.
For many years, I put away my dream of becoming a writer. I knew it was a hard profession to get in to, impossible even. I had done some research and discovered it was rare for a manuscript to be read, let alone published. And so I entered adult life. I breathed a sigh of relief on my last day of school, had met a great man who loved me, got engaged, moved out of the family home and finally felt like I could be myself. The quirky girl with a strange humour, who bought hundreds of books, stacked up on writing pads and got lost for hours in ideas and thoughts was finally accepted for who she was. I was happy. That was until we decided to try for a baby. A year later… nothing. The doctor told me I was young and shouldn’t rush or worry. Two years passed, then three, and I was told that due to an operation I had undergone at the age of fifteen, one of my ovaries had collapsed and was useless, and my fertility had taken a knock because of it. I was put on tablets and subjected to a barrage of treatments and tests, some of them very painful and intrusive. Nothing worked.
I did not cope well at first. I had failed to be the one thing I WAS: a woman. The one function I should be able to perform should have been bringing a child in to this world. It almost broke my partner and I apart, and I spent days crying. I wanted him to find another woman he could be happy and have babies with, but he stuck by me. I needed to escape once more. Finding my old story and reading it, I laughed at how awful it was: the grammar, the spelling, and the terrible descriptions. I spent years fixing it, pouring my life experience in to it, and so I created my debut Lilith, first book in the Twin Soul Novels series.
Unconsciously, I had created a main character that was a little odd, separated from the normal world, with acute problems she had to face every single day. I gave her a troubled childhood where no one around her understood what she was going through, or why she was different. I put her through hell as she grew up, gave her a deep depression and the love of a man she can’t have. Quite frankly, I am cruel to my characters, but I love to see how they develop, how they deal with each situation as it arises. In writing these difficulties, these strong characters, I am able to escape from my everyday life and I hope my stories can bring the same escapism to others who deal with challenging lives. It has worked for me. I can be strong like my protagonist, I can hold my chin high and face my problems like my protagonist, and I can say to myself that somewhere in this world someone has far worse problems than I have and faces far worse fears.
They say a writer’s personality comes alive in the books they write. Well, I hope this is true and I hope people see that I am just a woman who makes the best of every challenge thrown her way. I hope people see that I am strong, caring and compassionate, and have the patience of a saint that only life experience can give.
So meet Lilith and Annette, a demon and a human with huge problems they must deal with every day. Escape the real world for a few hours and close the book knowing that you too are strong, and capable of facing anything life throws at you. Annette and Lilith must believe this to survive, and so do I.