This week’s question is another by Anabela (who gave me a wheelbarrow-load of really good ones!) Do you have subjects you think you could never write about?
Yes! Definitely! Is the short answer—I should think everyone does. And I should think everyone’s answer is very different and probably changes with time.
The first one that jumps to mind though is children. I’ve always been very disinclined to write about characters with children. Mine are in their early teens now and I was first published in 2017 when they were…thinks very hard…nine and ten. The absolutely last thing I wanted to do was revisit that in fiction. Likewise now, I can’t see myself writing in the parental romance genre any time soon. I had a rubbish time when they were tiny babies and it’s simply not something I want to explore, whether it would be a story that sells or not. I’m utterly baffled by epilogues in romance that show characters having children. I read them and they leave me cold, they’re not my thing at all. So I can’t ever envisage me writing one.
Having said that I do have a character in the Theatr Fach world who has a child; but that’s accidental—I wrote them as a side character in Out of Focus and threw in a kid they had to pick up from school as an excuse to leave Alex alone at the hospital; and I’d quite like to explore them further, so ta-da, they’re a parent. But generally speaking…writing about characters with children is a nix.
Also a nix is mpreg. Does that come under the ‘people with children’ caveat? It probably does, but it should also be a category on its own. I just…can’t. I think it might be my own dysphoria that makes me so revolted by it. Let me emphasise people should absolutely read and write what they want, this is my own personal reaction, not a judgment. I think, actually, giving it more thought whilst writing this, it’s not just mpreg, it’s an entire pregnancy thing. So let’s expand the nix to cover pregnancy. I cannot envisage ever writing a pregnant character. Even writing this paragraph has made me shudder. I did not enjoy being pregnant—I loathed it, every single minute of it. I had the two children very close together—sort of by design as I was nearly forty by the time the first one came along—but so close together that at one point I was pregnant and had post-natal depression. When Littlest was born, my lovely obstetrician wrote me a letter of congratulation expressing the wish never to see me in her clinic again. So a nix to pregnancy completely, please!
I don’t think there’s anything else I am conscious of definitely not wanting to write about. I’ve written about death and violence and assault, all sort of horrible things. I do find writing about sexytimes quite difficult sometimes. I don’t think that’s an inherent disinclination though, more that sex is inherently messy and funny and stupid and I find it hard to do right without slipping in to cliché. I’m always worried that readers will come across a sex-scene and it’ll throw them out of the story because I’ve done sexing in a way that no-one else will find acceptable/interesting/arousing/relevant to the narrative.
I’m sure there are other things and I don’t know it, simply because I haven’t come across them yet or I’ve buried them so deeply I don’t have a clue they’re there!
I’m really enjoying these posts…if you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.