Adrian White on Method Writing

People harm themselves in many different ways and it's never easy for others to understand why.

A few years ago, a colleague of mine - let's call him Jack - told me about a friend of his from college whose self-harm had become her whole life. This woman's story had a profound effect upon me, even though we had never met, and what I learnt about her was ultimately the prompt for my second novel, Where the Rain Gets In.

I met Jack again recently out of the blue and, when the topic of my writing came up, he told me he'd visited his friend just last week in hospital and that she wasn't doing at all well. What Jack told me hit home a second time and I thought of the years in between Jack first mentioning his friend and what those years have meant to this girl, this woman, this human being living through her own private hell.

I was very conscious when I sat down to write Where the Rain Gets In that what I was doing could be seen as exploiting another person's suffering. I told myself then, as I'm telling myself now, that I was writing from the heart, that this was a genuine attempt to put myself into the mind of a woman who could harm herself in this way.

I've come to call this technique 'method writing' - casting myself in the role of another person, trying to adopt their mindset as my own, and writing the words almost as a by-product of where I am taken. I was being honest and I stand by my intentions. What I wrote was a genuine response to a very upsetting life story - a life story that has continued long after its path crossed mine - and I hope this truthfulness is reflected in the writing and what is left on the page.

Of course, I had to create a whole character beyond this initial prompt and I had to remain true to the woman I wanted her to be. I had to create a past for Katie and a present and I had to ask what her future might hold. I had to create a driving narrative, a story - I may be proud of my writing but I'm no Terrence Malick to do without a narrative - and again, this story had to ring true. I think now that I succeeded with her present but relied too heavily on Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House for Katie's past.

I had read Mezrich's book and was unaware how heavily I was borrowing from it. At the time, I referenced Andrew Davies' novel B Monkey - just about my favourite ever book - and had received written permission from him to lift certain aspects and use them as my own. Also, this book was a very deliberate attempt to write in the third person and for that person to be a woman. My first novel, An Accident Waiting to Happen, was written in the first person with a voice distinctly my own and I wanted to put it up to myself, to see if I could do the whole third person narrator thing. But the over-riding requirement - what I wanted to achieve - was an accurate portrayal of a woman living her life as a self-harmer and to show that, without most of us knowing it, such a life is the lot of a great many people.

The responsibility of attempting such a thing weighed heavily at times but my need to do it - my compulsion, if you like - helped me see it through. Did I succeed? In many ways, yes; there are many things in Where the Rain Gets In of which I'm very proud. There are certain passages that are some of the best writing I've ever done - every writer knows the good and the bad in their own work - and most of these passages feature Katie self-harming. Writing now about meeting Jack again and of where this story began for me,

I can honestly say I went to some very dark places in the hope of understanding Katie and of letting my readers see her and know her, love her and care for her. And whether I succeeded or not, I'm glad I tried. Some people demand our attention, if only for a little while, and not everybody has a friend like Jack to look after them.

(c) Adrian White, September 2011

Adrian White is an English writer who has lived in Ireland for over twenty years. His first novel, An Accident Waiting to Happen, was published in print by Penguin Books - as was his second, Where the Rain Gets In. His third novel, Dancing to the End of Love, is published exclusively as an ebook.  He is an occasional blogger on his website lynskeybooks