Mikela Bond has just finished her novel The Waters Edge. Here, she tells us how she wrote it.
I tell a different story every time that I try to explain how I wrote a novel, on top of a full-time teaching job and being Mum to two young children. It was something that I didn’t think was possible beforehand. Was it that I had a fully formed idea, a direction? No, not at all. All I had was a glimpse, an image of a woman washing up and then, later, running. No name, no voice yet, but a start. For me, it was enough.
It didn’t much matter at first whether it was any good, or whether anybody would rate it. Readers came later in the form of trusted friends and then the Unthank School Online Workshops. For me, it was more about well-being. A creative space in which none of the other day to day demands mattered. It’s easy to say, ‘I’d love to write a novel but I’m too busy.’ Everyone’s busy. Life’s cluttered and messy and full of chores. It’s about choice. Can you devote the time a good novel needs to grow and still do your job well? I think so. But it does mean compromise. I had to fit my writing into my evenings, around kids’ swimming lessons, Judo, Beavers. I’ve spent many a cold hour scribbling in a notebook on my knee in the car then typing everything up in a fever when the kids went to bed.
The writing process constantly surprises and delights me. I had that piece of the puzzle – the image of sunlight on soap suds, a character who was frightened but defiant for some reason. I didn’t know it then, but that woman would come to haunt me for months. I’d hear her talking to me constantly, keeping me awake, filling my head with her secrets. Her name was always just out of reach and so I called her H. She became Helena. Then Lena.
I knew that I wanted to use the coast as a setting, a sort of liminal space, a crumbling edge. I started reading stories: about the residents of Happisburgh in Norfolk waking in the night to see the water on their bedside tables rippling as more cliff fell away; the ghost stories of the lost city of Dunwich, a place rich with folklore. One tale, in particular, caught my attention – that of Eva, a medieval girl from Dunwich who fell in love and ended up cutting out her own heart. I wrote a short story in the third person about her. Then something strange happened – the strands started to intertwine. I was writing Eva in the third person and then this first-person, present-tense narrative started to push her aside. The folklore and the contemporary met as the sea handed over a wooden heart to a modern woman. And Lena took over. Her voice demanded the present tense because of the danger she put herself in and her desperation to escape it – so, I let her tell me her story.
I’m not an architect – the discovery draft was never plotted or planned – I’d sit down to write for an hour or two every evening, excited as I never knew what would happen next. She started giving me flashbacks. I’ve moved a few of them now and deleted lots, but mostly they sit naturally where she first revealed them to me. Once I had the first 10,000 words or so, I had a definite genre and some important characters who also needed fleshing out. So I stopped writing and began re-reading lots of crime novels and psychological thrillers. I made countless lists. I thought about how Lena’s story could twist, misdirect and betray. The hardest part for me was writing an ending that was satisfying, fit the rules of the genre and wasn’t melodramatic. It wasn’t until I started workshopping with Ashley and the Unthank Writers that I got a true and consistent voice for Lena, but also for the principle male characters, Sam and Matthew. That was when the ending clicked. It was as much about these men and their feelings for her as it was about plot. I finished the discovery draft in December and started workshopping in the January. I have really valued those sessions. Reading the work of other writers, getting their sensitive and honest feedback, helped me to reshape, rewrite and define this novel. Without those conversations, it would probably still be raw and unfinished. The different responses of so many readers and the faith that they showed in the work was what pushed me to sharpen the writing. Over lockdown and through the summer holidays, all of my energy went into the rewrite. It had to be sharper, better, more shocking.
Almost two years after the initial idea, I have a final draft that is very different to the original but which has remained true to the character and the story she had to tell. My first interactions with agents have been positive. I’ve overcome the first hurdle so something must be working now.
So, what next? I have a notebook full of scribbles, lots of fragments, fresh voices filling my head. I’ll start a new novel and I’ll workshop it. The process begins again.
Brief Biog
Mikela Bond is an English teacher at a Norfolk High School. She studied English Literature with Creative Writing at UEA.
Her first novel, The Water’s Edge, is a psychological thriller which was completed while taking part in the Unthank School of Writing Online Fiction Workshop with Ashley Stokes.
