Book Of The Month August, 2006
Down Daisy StreetKatie Flynn
Liverpool, 1935. Kathy Kelling is coming home to Daisy Street from her first day at the High School, longing to tell her friend, Jane, all about it. Then her brother, Billy, has a serious accident and Kathy’s schooling is in jeopardy. The Kellings’ life becomes a struggle; Billy needs constant attention so Mrs Kelling takes in lodgers since she’s determined Kathy’s schooling must not suffer. Meanwhile, in Norfolk, young Alec Hewitt has problems of his own. A farmer’s son, living within yards of the North Sea, one terrible night will change his life forever. Then War comes and Alec and Kathy meet, but it’s blonde and bubbly Jane to whom Alec is attracted…
What We Think
Katie Flynn, author or Down Daisy Street on writing sagas:
I must tell you that starting a new book is always difficult. I know writers who will literally do anything in order not to write. They redecorate the house from attic to cellar, plough up the garden, move to Spain or start divorce proceedings… anything to put off the evil hour when they must knuckle down to sitting before the computer and actually writing the book.
So there are two sorts of writers. The ones, who follow the synopsis their publishers have approved, sit down at once and begin to write. And the others, of whom I was one of. After all, I had a whole six months to write this work of fiction… imagine it Six whole months! So no need to rush, I could perfectly well spare a month or two… Then, of course, one day I would wake up to the realisation that the deadline was only three weeks off – not three months, three weeks – and I would begin to write frantically, twenty hours a day, simply pouring out the story which though I wasn’t aware of it at the time had been writing itself inside my head or in my subconscious for the previous five months. And then one day I would fish out the synopsis – and my face would pale whilst my hair stood on end… Nothing I was writing bore the faintest resemblance to the synopsis in which the publishers had such touching faith… even the names had changed and the title no longer fitted.
And given their heads, my characters do awful things. They fall in love with the wrong people, get drowned on their way to their own weddings, die in the wrong bed at the wrong time… and I follow dumbly writing down the story which the characters now seem to be telling, and don’t forget that I was now writing twenty hours out of twenty four, because I have never missed a deadline yet and don’t intend to start now! But for the sort of book I write I believe this is a great advantage. The people in a synopsis are unreal, just names and descriptions, but once I begin writing these people become as real to me as my own family – and possibly better known. Their actions change because they know best how they would react in certain circumstances and I simply give them their heads.
Now I am a different sort of writer. I have had to learn discipline and how to pace myself – but my characters still rule the roost.