Novel Ideas Damned if you do

Sometimes we all make wrong decisions, says Lynne Hackles

Have you heard the advice about there being no such thing as a wrong decision? I saw it online somewhere again the other day and wondered if it was true, especially when it came to writing. Writers are often their own harshest critics. They decide their work is no good and that can be a wrong decision. If you ever feel like this then please don’t delete what you’ve written. Leave it a while, then return and decide if deleting it is the right decision.

When it comes to my writing, there are two things I’ve done, which looking back on, I might have said no to.

The first was when I was a new writer and the group I belonged to were asked to contribute to an event in the town hall. What could a writing group offer that was different? I’d been reading about an American who sat in a bookshop window in his home town offering sixty-second novels. Customers would go in, give him a subject and he would type enough words to be read in one minute. He reckoned it was fun. It wasn’t. It was terrifying. I know. I volunteered to do it and the public took it as a challenge to come up with the weirdest subjects – maggots was one. I’d never do that again.

The second was when I wrote a piece for a mind, body and spirit magazine about my husband’s heart attack. Christopher

Kerr in his TED talk (see YouTube) talks about people in their final moments seeing relatives. As my husband, Colin, (the Long Suffering One) fought for his life he saw his father at the foot of the bed. I wrote up the story, sold it and was horrified when the magazine came out with, emblazoned on the cover – ‘Colin’s horror as dead dad comes to get him.’ It was enough to give him another heart attack.