The Heart of the Matter

The inability to sing seems to be a small obstacle for performers now with all the studio techniques available. Back in 'the olden days' as the six year old put it, when I was young and would have loved to be able to sing, a great and original voice was something of a prerequisite for a singer, and if you could write your own material so much the better. I can still read music, played piano, guitar, and love everything from jazz to classical to 80s power rock, 70s prog, 60s pop ... but I just can't sing to save my life, and really admire anyone who can. Think Cameron Diaz doing karaoke in 'My Best Friend's Wedding'. It's bad - so bad, I won't even sing in the shower. Driving solo in the car is about the only place safe to let rip, and I found a bunch of old cassette tapes in the cellar this weekend - Don Henley amongst them. I played that tape so much the summer I was seventeen, it's almost worn out, but today on the drive home from school I had something of an eighties moment.

As Don put it, 'Heart of the Matter' took '42 years to write, and four minutes to sing.' This distillation of emotion and experience is what will give your work real strength and feeling. We've talked before about how valuable the senses can be to throw you back into the past and allow you to tap into an emotion for your work. The moment this song started, I was there - brokenhearted, away from home for the first time, surviving on thin air and crackers. 'I'm learning to live without you now/but I miss you sometimes ...', 'The more I know, the less I understand/All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again ...' It was the summer I learnt for the first time that life sometimes throws you a curved ball - I started to grow up, and this song keyed into that confusion and loss perfectly. Maybe that's what being a teenager is about - it struck me the other day looking at a young friend's profile on Bebo and MySpace how obsessively teenagers photograph themselves and one another - maybe it's that search for yourself and what other people see in you. A group of us were really into photography - this weekend I found boxes of grainy old pictures we had taken of one another (shot with a 35mm and hand developed, badly ...) - looking at photos from that summer now I just look so heartbroken, and unlike myself. The six year old asked me the other day 'Can people die from a broken heart? Does it really break?' What do you think?

Even if you are now coming from a place of relative calm, being able to mentally place yourself in the emotions you are writing is key to getting authenticity in your work. As book three opens, my main character is just that - away from home, broken hearted, starting over again (though in her case it is her husband who has gone), and I had been having trouble getting the pitch right - getting her to speak from the heart. Remembering how I felt when the boy I was in love with left suddenly has given me the key. Like the situation my character finds herself in, the relationship didn't end - it wasn't that we fell out of love with one another, he had to leave. The last time I saw him, he flew over from Holland unexpectedly for my 18th ball, and we said goodbye, but it took a long time to get over him. He had a breakdown - was found driving the wrong way down a motorway somewhere in Europe. He stopped answering letters, cut off from all of us. Years later he rang out of the blue - he'd got my number in London from Mum. It was like hearing a ghost from the past. 'If I'm not careful you're going to marry this guy ..' was one of the last things he said. The pilot and I married a couple of weeks afterwards. I never heard from him again. Twenty years on, as a happily married old girl with two kids and a menagerie, as the song says - it's all about forgiveness, and that's something you only learn with time. The ability to turn the key and unlock your past heartbreaks from the safe distance of age and experience will bring a weight and depth to your work that will reach out and touch your reader's hearts. Take Mr Henley's advice: all the things you thought you knew, try learning them again.

TODAY'S PROMPT: If you are stuck with a piece you are working on - try putting yourself in your character's shoes. What emotion are they experiencing? Love? Hate? Forgiveness? Think back over your life - when have you felt that? What were the sensory details - what did you listen to then? what perfume did you wear? what season was it? Try provoking your imagination by stirring your senses - put on a piece of music you haven't listened to for years, dig out some old photos, feel what your character feels, and get it all down.