Creative writing has been and continues to be a conduit for me to explore the intersection of crime, social structures and systems, mental illness and the psychological reality of the people who sometimes navigate these domains. Writing, then, is my attempt to address these intersections, showing how my characters are shaped, motivated, and ultimately react to their changing worlds. These worlds are informed by lived experience, research and, of course, imagination.

My creative process for the first novel was informed by past experiences on the fringes of society, of a time before I was diagnosed with a serious mental illness. I had always wanted to write a novel and began drafting Crack Falling as a pantser, but as the manuscript progressed, I realised I needed structure and plot planning. My creative process changed to include my own version of mind mapping, which took some of my own raw past lived experience and melded this with imagination: creating scenes, characters and scenarios in the novel that – as the foreword suggests  – are both a reflection of real, even plausible events as much as they are a fiction. That said, the narrative of Crack Falling is shaped by familiar places and imagined characters interacting on the page.

Flint, the main protagonist, is Mad.  But, as the reader discovers, he doesn’t quite realise his disposition until late in the novel, reflecting the journey of a young Mad person in the 1990s. He simply fell through the cracks in systems that were not designed to, or even to talk about, mental illness openly. In many ways, Flint’s journey highlights how Madness was experienced in a world that simply denied its very existence.  Of course, until it became so obvious that intervention was needed. Flint’s first-person account of Madness aims to illustrate the byproduct of domestic violence, of systems that failed to address this. His choice to self-medicate to find relief from trauma shapes his trajectory, and how this folly manifests is open to interpretation. My lived experience informed this character; my imagination heightened his experience of Madness as a journey; the book’s settings reflect the nomadic wanderings of his mind as much as his attempt to understand himself. In writing the novel, I also changed, came to understand my own past differently, and gave myself room to grow, explore, and learn.