The Border Between Memoir and Fiction

Emerging Insights

My friendship with literary archivist Dr. Donna Maynard has always been interesting and continues to be fruitful. She was excited when she saw the hundreds of notebooks on the shelves in my little writing room, which go back through my fifty years as a working novelist. As she read through them she realised that they mapped the 20 or so novels and the short stories and poetry which have been my professional preoccupation through that time.

Donna came to a personal conclusion that these notebooks and the books themselves formed a very interesting literary archive. Since then she has begun to map the relationships between the notebooks and the books, cross-referencing them in a way which somehow reflects the creative process of writing novels. In essence this relationship between the notebooks and the novels would be an essential part of any emerging archive.

So, part of this process has been our discussion about the individual novels and my own stories of the process whereby they came about. I have found myself telling her about the underlying story of each novel in the creation of each novel, each story and each poem - the stories as it were of the unique creative process.

It has now emerged that an essential part of this process has been my self-imposed task of writing here on my Substack an essay documenting the story of the creation of each of the novels and some of the short stories and poems. These essays will be eventually published week by week on my Substack and will eventually be collected together as part of the archive and published in book form which hopefully will make sense as a creative project,

This may take a year of so but it will be interesting and the collaboration with Donna is very inspiring.