“If I hadn’t experienced loss, anxiety and – often – sheer despair, I might not have managed to draw on those emotions in my writing.”
Author Gill Thompson tells how she draws on her own difficult experiences to do justice to her heart-wrenching novels.
Fifteen years ago my life was in a complete mess: my beloved parents had just died and my husband had developed a mysterious medical condition that confined him to bed for months at a time. As a freelance I.T trainer he was unable to work and earn money, and I was on my knees trying to look after him whilst keeping up my day job as a teacher. We also had two teenage children going through exams…
Writing was certainly the last thing on my mind, but as my husband slowly recovered and our children progressed to the next stage in their lives, I finally started to claw back some time for myself. One day I was listening to the lunchtime news and heard Gordon Brown apologise to the ex child migrants to Australia who had been lied to by the British government, sold a dream life on the other side of the world on the basis that their parents were dead, then cruelly treated by so called Christian brothers. Some were never to see their parents again, and those parents often spent fruitless years trying to track their children down. I was appalled and distressed and started to read more about this tragic story. I eventually spoke to some of the ex child migrants who lamented the fact their experiences were still relatively unknown. With their permission, I started to write a novel based on their lives. But I realised if I was to do their stories justice I needed to be the best writer I could, so I enrolled on a Creative Writing M.A at the University of Chichester.
There my wise tutors and fellow students helped me to shape the novel that is now ‘The Oceans Between Us.’ It took nine years, eighty drafts and bucket loads of blood, sweat and tears, but I finally found an agent and then a publisher. The book is out in the world now, as is its successor ‘The Child on Platform One.’ Both are doing well.
I now look back on those awful times in my life with remembered horror. Yet if I hadn’t experienced loss, anxiety and – often – sheer despair, I might not have managed to draw on those emotions in my writing. I would never like to repeat my ordeal yet, with the luxury of time and space I am grateful to it for spurring me into a whole new career.
Gill Thompson began her working life as a teacher and has spent nearly forty years at the chalk face. More recently she has also become an author. Her debut novel The Oceans Between Us was published by Headline in March 2019 and her new novel, The Child on Platform One, came out in March 2020. She lives with her family in West Sussex and hosts a creative writing site at: www.wordkindling.co.u
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How to be Unstoppable: Gill Thompson on how personal pain can turn into poignant fiction