Sometimes, the story you intend to write isn’t necessarily the story you’re ready to write. For a while now, I’ve been working on Harrow House, a novel I’ve spoken about here before. It’s a rather different undertaking from some of my previous work, with an inherited manor house, an ancient family curse and a beast haunting the North Yorkshire Moors.
The story is all mapped out, the pieces are waiting to be assembled, and I know where I want it to go. But lately, I’ve found myself struggling to settle into it.
It’s not that I’ve lost interest in the story. I fully intend to return to it. I think, perhaps, I simply need to step away from the manor and the moors for a while. The beast isn’t going anywhere. It can wait.
Instead, I’ve found myself drawn towards something smaller. Something quieter and much closer to everyday life. A handful of characters, a more contained setting and a story that allows me to spend time exploring the people at its centre, without quite so much elaborate machinery.
And so, a new project has begun.
It’s called Close Enough.
At its heart are two sisters, Gina and Madeline, who find themselves living together again in later life. Their relationship is complicated, their recollections of the past don’t always align, and beneath the familiar rhythms of domestic life lies something neither has quite managed to put to rest.
There’s a house, a shared history and a few unsettling occurrences that might not be quite so easily explained. It’s a story about memory, guilt, family and the uncomfortable spaces between what happened and what we believe happened.
And as I’ve begun exploring the story, I’ve realised I’m returning to familiar territory. Earlier this year, I worked on a short project called Schema, which explored the way we construct our understanding of other people and how those perceptions can become distorted over time.
We tend to think we know the truth. We remember events, form opinions and build explanations that help us make sense of the world around us. But our understanding is never entirely separate from our own experiences. It’s shaped by the mental frameworks we’ve developed, the things we’ve been told and the assumptions we’ve come to accept.
What seems perfectly obvious to one person might be completely unrecognisable to another.
I’ve found myself returning to that idea while developing Close Enough. What happens when two people share a history but have constructed entirely different versions of it? And what happens when those versions can no longer comfortably coexist?
It’s also made me think about another of my novels, The Shadow of a Shadow, which explores some similar territory. Although the stories are very different, there’s a shared fascination with complex female characters, the histories they carry and the ways their pasts continue to shape their present.
Perhaps I’ve discovered a recurring preoccupation of my own.
I’m drawn to characters who have complicated histories, who remember things differently, who have made mistakes and who aren’t always entirely comfortable with the people they’ve become. I enjoy exploring what happens when those histories begin to surface, and what people do when they’re forced to confront the parts of themselves they’d rather leave undisturbed.
Close Enough feels like the right story for me to be writing just now. It’s still early days, and I’m still getting to know the characters, discovering the spaces they inhabit and allowing the story to find its shape – but I’m enjoying the quieter world of two sisters, one house and a past that refuses to stay neatly behind them.
We can spend a lifetime believing we know what happened. But what if the truth is simply the story we’ve learned to tell ourselves?
And what if someone else remembers it differently?
