13th September 2023
I am in the final edits of my current adult novel, The Photograph Album, although I’m pretty sure I said this a few weeks ago too! The fact that I am still editing is thanks to my wonderful beta readers who have given me such incredible and helpful suggestions and feedback. As a result of this, I am striving to keep working until the story is as good as it possibly can be. It would be foolhardy to let it go out into the world before this point. The next stage will be looking for an agent. Although I’ve had books published in the past, I haven’t had an agent to represent me so this is something I am really looking forward to. Please keep everything crossed for me!
The whole journey with The Photograph Album started around seven years ago when I discovered a Victorian photograph album in an antique shop. Like Scarlett, in the novel, I couldn’t afford it. I nudged them down to a price I felt I could pay. One of the reasons I felt compelled to buy it was that the minute I discovered it and opened it, I began to formulate a story around it. Since then, the pages have been turned many times, the unknown people held inside becoming more and more real as time went on.
Last autumn, I began to plot. I don’t plot in the same way for each project and tend to do whatever feels natural depending on what I’m writing. For this novel, I plotted on index cards, then, as I began to write my first draft, I completed a chapter by chapter plot breakdown. This made it easy to see action points as they happened and assisted with later edits. As my chapters switch perspectives between the two central characters, this breakdown also made it easier to see at a glance whose perspective each chapter was written from.
I also kept an A4 notebook with printed photocopies of the photos from the album with hand-written notes that grew with the story. The Photograph Album falls into the genre of speculative fiction or magical realism. It’s about history, friendship, family and belonging. It’s also about grief and loneliness, about losing and then finding. It’s very grounded but also has a supernatural element. What made working on this novel even more poignant for me, is that alongside writing it I decided to trace my own ancestry. I had always known that I had Irish ancestors on my grandfather’s side, but was unsure of the details and where in Ireland these family members were from. So, as Scarlett makes discoveries about particular characters from the Victorian album, I was also making discoveries about my own relatives.
I booked a trip to Dublin for this June, arranging to stay in a hotel near Croke Park football stadium, intending to use this base as a starting point. A couple of weeks after booking, I made the fortuitous discovery that both of my great great grandparents were actually from Dublin. Not only that, they had both lived on the same road as teenagers, ten minutes walk from my hotel. I do wonder if they’d known each other as young children and if a friendship had later blossomed into romance. I can imagine them chatting over the garden fences and walking the same route to school, sharing a bag of boiled sweets and arguing over who would have the last one. I also found out the church that they were married in, St Michans, which was close to the River Liffey.
The road on which they lived, Dispensary Lane, no longer exists, but thanks to a conversation on a Google thread I managed to find where it had been and visited the area during my stay. I also managed to find the church, although was unable to go inside due to restrictions. There was a little confusion on the day of the search due to a discovery that there were, in fact, two St Michan’s churches near the river. One was protestant, the other catholic. Knowing a few details about my grandfather’s upbringing, I was able to work out which one they would have been married in.
It was an incredibly poignant trip, made even more so due to the parallel threads running through The Photograph Album. The meeting of these two things seemed fated and it feels as if this was exactly the right time to visit my ancestral home and exactly the right time for this story to be told.
I always love to receive comments, so please feel free to comment below, either on your experience as a beta reader, how you plot or about your ancestral journeys or family stories. Thanks for reading x
Leave a Reply