Finding the write way

BY present-day standards my childhood after the age of nine was poverty-stricken and involved bitter interludes that took some living through. Even as we endured all this, my mother had two sayings: "It's no good being poor and looking poor", (although we did). And "You are judged by the company you keep" (which left you with very few friends).

The great joy of growing out of those difficult times was to leave them behind. For me the bad times have remained deep under the surface, to be mined from time to time and rendered as fiction in my novels. I can certainly write "poor and destitute" when I need to. No problem.

But it strikes me now that if I wanted to make my fortune I should have been more upfront about those experiences, should have written about them directly and in gory detail, presented them as unassailable fact.

In doing so I would have joined in the great (and lucrative) trend in misery memoirs. Some, like David Pelzer's, A Child Called It edge into the pornographic. Others, like Frank McCourt's lyrical Angela's Ashes are wise and humane.

Such work is consumed in millions by readers, arguably gloating over the fact that they themselves did not have to endure such childhoods. The same kind of gloating virtue is enjoyed by the millions watching TV programmes based on other people's filthy houses, or bizarre family lifestyles.

Of course, it can be argued that such writers find this memoir writing therapeutic. Therapeutic all the way to the bank, the cynic in me says. These misery volumes have certainly transformed the day-to-day lives of the writers in terms of creature comforts.

However, in my experience writing does not need to be lucrative to be truly therapeutic. In my work helping prisoners in the North-East, I saw writing transform the inmates' lives without making their fortune

It certainly transformed Kara's life. She, like many of the woman in prison, lived life in a perpetual state of low-level anger that could explode on a hair-trigger. A bad look or a disrespectful word or late medications and Boom! She would be yelling, swearing, sometimes kicking.

Kara was very tall, intimidating, and used foul language like a weapon. She had charm but was large and loud. Her childhood would have sat neatly alongside that of the David Pelzers of this world. Put in care by her own mother when she was nine, she spent the next 12 years in increasingly punitive institutions. At 20, her anger had become not just what she did, but who she was.

One morning she came into my room and peeled a scrap of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans, announcing, "Me. I wrote this. D'ya wanna see it?" It was as much a challenge as an offer.

The poem was well organised and full of feeling. I told her I liked it and she told me she had always written scraps like that right back to when she used to take refuge in a tree in the grounds of her secure children's home.

We came to an agreement when she joined my group that she wouldn't shout or swear or intimidate anyone inside the room. She would get her head down and write.

The writing streamed out of her: poems and prose obliquely reflecting her wide and often illegal destructive experiences of life; well-rounded stories of children - often boys - enduring bad, often abusive childhood episodes, frequently cocking a snook at authority. Kara's ability to contain her own experiences in these fictional flights was sophisticated. And chilling.

In writing her stories Kara gained power over, and distance from, her own difficult childhood. What's more, her work made me recognise the way I myself had made use of my own childhood experiences in my novels, at a safe, healing distance.

Kara wrote poems "on commission" for other prisoners. (One poem was worth two cigarettes or Crunchie Bar). Some of the women passed her work off as their own in letters home to their boyfriends. She wrote poems for officers for their children's or mother's birthdays.

We made leaflets and booklets of Kara's work that were distributed in and outside prison and gained her considerable respect. She sent them to her family and got a positive response.

Kara calmed down a lot. Her status in prison rose. When she went out of prison, she used her writings and her anthologies to get her a place on an access course and with one lapse, was able to keep herself out of prison. She did not make millions selling her memoirs but her writing gave her power and self-respect and changed her life.

Kara's experience was reflected - to one degree or another - in many other women with whom I worked while I was in prison. But I am now struck by the fact that her experience is also reflected very widely in the many writing workshops I give now, out in the community. New writers relish the act of writing as private, reflective, empowering, and surprising in its outcomes. They see that it allows them critical distance from the press of emotional experiences, the dramas of everyday life.

One writer said to me: "At last, I know what I feel now that I can see what I've said".

To work this magic the writing does not have to be directly revealing or painful. It can be memoirs, but also poetry, stories and novels. It doesn't have to be published. It doesn't have to make the writer a million.

For me this magical effect is not "writing as therapy" but the act of writing inevitably bringing about a therapeutic side-effect. And nowadays, significantly, people are finding their own way to that side-effect through the Internet. Blogs - personal diaries published freely through the Internet - are used by individuals who say: "This is my writing. This is who I am. Read me."

Of course, this is what I say about my novels: "This is my writing. This is who I am. Read me." I don't have to spill out my guts about a difficult childhood for writing to keep me balanced and sane.

All I have to do is write.