Notes on Stories

Sometimes I stumble upon stories buried in old files or scrawled in forgotten notebooks, and I know instantly that they are mine. Not from the handwriting – though for me that’s a dead giveaway; a chicken-scratch scrawl that has been the bane of every educator’s existence from the day I stepped foot in a school until I completed my undergraduate degree – or from particular recognition of the notebook cover. Often I don’t even recognise the subject matter. Most of the time, the story doesn’t end. An idea, pounced upon and discarded. 

But the voice of it. 

That’s mine. 

I have had the same writing voice since I started seriously trying to write books. My first attempts when I was ten or so – ideas I’ve clung onto, because child-me wasn’t bad at concepts – were filled with the sort of humour that today, I can’t write without. Puns, banter, terrible jokes. The things that make my work feel complete. My first proper book I wrote – age fourteen, buried now in the bottom of a drawer and too embarrassing, even still, to read in its entirety – has my cadence. My preferred paragraph structures. My love of starting sentences in odd places, ending them wherever. Fragments. Beats I feel my way through, rather than write with any sort of intentionality. It is all intentional, and yet it isn’t. These are words that leave me, unconnected ribbons, that I smooth and piece together line by line, writing, rewriting. 

I think this is what they mean by craft. My hands are glue on construction paper, brush on canvas, chisel on stone, moulding and shaping something that is meant to be finished by me. Handmade. Filled with love. 

I’ve been a writer for more of my life than I haven’t been. It takes up space in every part of my day – as a reader, I am deconstructing, examining, being surprised on the daily by choices that writers far more capable than me, far more experienced than me, make. I’m learning every day how to be better. I watch episodes of TV and try to predict the arcs that will come based on the information that I’ve been given. And it’s fun – all of this is fun. Every day I am writing, even when there’s no keyboard beneath my fingers. 

And every day I have ideas. Ideas I babble at my agent with all the poise of that one scene in Elf (premise: asparagus children, self-conscious. Plot: vibes). Ideas that I will excitedly tell my partner in stumbling fits and starts right before I go to sleep when the brain worms turn their attention to something new, or when I rush out of the shower, hair dripping down my shoulders because the urgency of the idea, of what the story will be as I see it in my head, is more important than anything else. 

I want to tell the story. 

The story starts with an idea. 

I’ve only been doing this professionally for a handful of years. But I’ve learned in those years that the idea is the beginning; the telling is the bit where I come in. Where I sit down at my desk and type, or stare out the bus window, or ask myself ‘would my character like this’ when I’m trying a new drink or eating a new meal. The telling is in the jokes I think up while standing at the kettle, or in the precipitous slip between wake and sleep, where the choice is between searing my retinas with my phone screen or risk losing the joke. 

(Usually the phone wins; usually I’ve typed something like ahdht tsauys jugglig?? and I risk losing the joke anyway. Perhaps there wasn’t one to begin with, but it becomes a joke in itself.) 

Sometimes it is painful. Sometimes I want to lie on the forest floor and scream because what I want to do is bigger than what I am able to do in the moment (being chronically ill is part of that; my limitations are more than what I believe they could or should be, and it is a constant balancing act in accepting this over and over again). But often it is magic. Often I have really, really good writing days. They get better the more I practise telling stories. The more confident I get in my ability to stumble through the pictures I’m seeing in my head. To take the feeling I get when I think of a concept, a premise, and trust my ability to turn that into plot. 

All stories have a beginning, a middle, an end. Some will tell you there are only a certain number of plots – probably true, I bet it’s been researched – and that there are only a certain number of story structures. This is the bit anyone can learn. When I hear someone say ‘everyone has a book in them’, I think it’s true twofold: I think anyone could learn the basics of craft, and I believe everyone has enough of a rich inner world, enough of a life lived, that they have a story or stories they could tell that would fill an entire book. 

But in fiction, those experiences shape your stories. Those experiences make it so the story you are writing is yours. And because it’s you, the more you practise, the more your voice comes through. Some writers use a different voice for different works, but you still know it's theirs at the end of the day – and not because their name is on the cover. 

Your ideas come through you. Your plotting and crafting can be learned (and some writers never do; they feel their way through each and every story without ever structuring it, but that is a skill that has to be honed through trial and error and effort, again, again, again). There are millions of stories in the world, and millions of unique voices. There are millions of ways to tell a story, to write people, to dream up places, to use a real place to create something new. There are objectively good books and objectively bad books and books not to your personal taste and books you will tell everyone and anyone about, and what they all have in common is all of the above. 

There are as many reasons to write a book as there are to read one, but imagine, if you will, the process of creation: the idea that sparks it all. The trying, again and again. The learning, the shaping. The experience. The heart that goes in it. The hope that someone wants you to tell them a story, and will pick it up. Releasing it into the world for scrutiny, for enjoyment, with all that effort behind it. The triumph of it finding the ideal reader – the person who laughs and cries and likes your obscure references or the real places or that one line you couldn’t stop thinking about. And that hope blossoms each time you do it. You hope that that reader will pick up the next one and the next one and the next one. That of all the books in all the world, yours spoke to that reader.

They want your stories.

They want it to be yours. 

To offer up something that isn’t throws yours into contrast. To write is not just to write; the alternative is stories about people written by machines who can only copy what came before. Who can only tell you a story borrowed from other parts of stories. It might have a beginning, a middle, and end. It might have an idea – but it doesn’t have a heart. 

As a writer you offer up your heart. You offer up your jokes, your lines, your sentiments, your perceptions. Your characters drawn from experience who say things you’d want them to say in scenes you wrote for them. You offer time clocked and progress made and the highs and lows and all the parts of it, good and bad. And at the end of it, you have something you’ve made. Something you love, that someone else will love too. 

Without that, finding a story in a drawer – one with a beginning, a soggy middle, an almost-ending – will be a story without a voice. An unclaimed thing. An absence of the key component of being a writer: writing. 

2023: Post-Mortem

I thought I might try out writing long-form posts again sometimes. Not many; some sprinkled snapshots, or if I have some particularly good thoughts I want to share. This is just a little retrospective (a post-mortem, if you will) on my debut year, some work and personal life stuff, and a few of my favourite reads. 

Debuting

2023 was the year of The Undetectables. It’s a year I’ve been waiting for since I was 10, and been trying to make happen since I was 14, but it still feels absolutely bonkers to think that it’s actually happened? A really real thing. 

Whenever people ask what it’s like to have a book published, I don’t know what to say, because I still don’t think I know. It’s at once both the most incredible thing in the world, and the thing that makes the most sense. A life-long goal realised with a book I’m immensely proud of in a world I absolutely adore being in, with a publisher that has been a dream to work with.

Getting to publish a book with a chronically ill main character is everything – I would love to go back to 2018 to tell the version of me who finally got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia (among other things) that it was all going to work out pretty okay, actually. I would love to tell 2018 me that they’d get emails and DMs and tweets and comments from other people with fibro who could relate to Mallory. I’d love to go back even further and tell kid me that a lifelong obsession with forensic science would be useful for a fantasy world and that readers would be just as enthusiastic. And I’d love to go back to the tiny version of me that was scared to assert their queer identity and tell them they’d get BE GAY written on the front cover.

Because I’d had no expectations other than ‘I hope this goes well’, there’s virtually nothing I’d change about my debut year. Maybe a bit less airborne virus adding a layer of difficulty to everything, but I did so many events, met readers and booksellers, signed books (and bookplates), got into a book box and just generally had a blast with a genre that doesn’t tend to sell well in my country. 

 To absolutely every single person who was involved in making this the year of The Undetectables, THANK YOU! 

Writing 

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get a whole load of writing done this year besides what I was contracted to do. I started out 2023 working on The Undetectables edits while simultaneously working on an outline, and then a draft and another and another of what is now officially titled The Undead Complex. I started trying to untangle a first draft of a middle grade book I was writing in between rounds of edits and drafts, but didn’t get very far. I’d been practising writing drafts on a tight turnaround in the years leading up to getting a book deal, knowing it wasn’t a skill I’d want to have to develop from scratch, but actually juggling edits and drafts was a really interesting experience and one I think I can improve on next year. (It seems planning is a good 80% of it, the rest is down to my energy levels!) 

For some absolutely unknown reason I thought it would be a great goal to aim to write 12 short stories across the year, but that’s an absolutely laughable aspiration in hindsight. I wrote one and a half stories and a few paragraphs of others, but the ideas are sketched out for when I next get a chance to get them down on paper.

I also blurbed a nice handful of brilliant books and worked on some sensitivity/authenticity reads which is always so rewarding (and I’m open to doing one or two next year, authors/publishers don’t be afraid to hit me up!). Otherwise, I’ve got a handful of book ideas and documents where I’ve sketched out bits of plot, and they’ll be waiting for me when I’m ready to work on something new. Maybe in 2024, maybe later on. We’ll have to see what the future holds… 

Personally Speaking

I’m not really one for sharing private life online much anymore – I used to be a lot more frank and honest, but when I became chronically ill I found it harder and harder to share what used to come naturally, my desire to be private (and maybe not having much energy to put thoughts into words) outweighing any benefit it might’ve brought me and anyone reading about it. But this is important, I think. 

A specific event many years ago caused me to develop agoraphobia (a story for another day, perhaps) and I’ve never been quite right since. While it waned a lot by 2019, it came back with a bang in 2020, and I couldn’t rationalise it because my fears of going outside were tied up in the very real fear of getting sick and losing some (or all) of the progress I’d made in managing my chronic illness. In 2022, I moved across the country and had no real need to go very far from home, so I was happily sitting in and writing and reading and rarely setting foot outside my little village without someone with me. It was a nice place to write and read books and convalesce near the sea like a sickly Victorian child. 

Fast forward to January 2023. My book had been announced. I’d seen a rough cover. I had edits to complete and it was going to be a real book. There were going to be events. I was maybe going to have to travel outside of Ireland, but certainly up to Dublin, on a train, on my own. There were going to be other people around. It was absolutely happening.

 And I still couldn’t go outside by myself. 

I look back on the start of the year and don’t recognise that person. The original agoraphobia, despite being a huge problem, went untreated until I took matters into my own hands (something I understand is not possible for lots of people, but worked for me in lieu of anyone helping me out) and designed a way for me to go outside and do things, again and again, until it became easier. This year I tried that same method, a slow creep of exposure to other people and to places on my own – which brings us to events!

Events 

So I’d expected to maybe do, like, a book launch? Maybe do an in-person event, maybe be invited to something in England, though that was never a given, and I never really expected it to happen. I honestly had no idea what to expect aside from the nebulous sense that I needed to be ready to go places on my own by the time September rolled around.

It was certainly not a given that I got chosen as an Irish Book Week Ambassador (thanks to Sans Press, who’ve published me twice in two of their anthologies and thought I’d be a good nominee!). It was not a given I’d do events for IBW (including an event at Chapters Dublin with the SYP, and an in-conversation with JF Murray), that I’d be asked to chair VE Schwab at the Dublin date of the Fragile Threads tour, or that I’d be asked to do a panel at MCM Comic Con with David Fenne and Juno Dawson (chaired by Alwyn Hamilton), but I was and I did all of these things and it was wild and wonderful and incredible. I chaired an event in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway with my impossibly talented friend Meg Grehan, which was my first time chairing and cemented the possibility that I could chair events – and even like doing it. 

Edit: so focused was on I events where I had to actually go outside, I forgot to mention the wonderful events I did where the eyes were on me through phones and tablets and laptops… and TVs! I did an excellent panel on writing disabled characters with Lillie Lainoff at CampYA, a Fantasy Fellowship panel with fellow Titan authors Trip Galey, KJ Dell’Antonia and Kell Woods, and appeared on VirginMedia’s What’s the Story? tv show and had a chat with Tom Dunne, where he let me ramble on about science a lot. (it was great)

I think how I see myself is not how others see me (I’ve been told this by those closest to me on multiple occasions), but January 2023 Courtney and December 2023 Courtney are worlds apart in terms of confidence in their ability to do things. It was challenging physically and mentally to get here, but while I was in the moment… god was it fun.  

Favourite Books

In spite of the wild year I had, I somehow read 133 books this year. (Lots were research books, or for the purpose of me studying craft, and this list does not include books I’ve blurbed for next year!) These were some stand-outs across adult, YA and non-fiction. 

Fiction (adult):

The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

In Memoriam – Alice Winn 

Floating Hotel (March 2024) – Grace Curtis 

My Hot Friend – Sophie White 

Vicious – VE Schwab

Penance – Eliza Clark

Masters of Death – Olivie Blake

The Nothing Man – Catherine Ryan Howard

Feed – Mira Grant

Orlando – Virgina Woolf 

YA: 

What Walks These Halls – Amy Clarkin 

Iron Widow – Xiran Jay Zhao 

Mindwalker – Kate Dylan 

One For All – Lillie Lainoff 

Sixteen Souls – Rosie Talbot 

Overemotional – David Fenne 

The Honeys – Ryan LaSala 

Wise Creatures – Deirdre Sullivan 

Heartstopper vol. 5 – Alice Oseman 

Nonfiction: 

Takeaway – Angela Hui

18 Tiny Deaths – Bruce Goldfarb  (a re-read) 

But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct – Ken Kwapis 

Murder: the Biography – Kate Morgan

Night Terrors – Alice Vernon