A date with Coco Mellors
As you probably say on the gram we went on a cute little galentine’s day date to hear Coco Mellors chat to journalist Olivia Petter to mark the launch of Cleopatra and Frankenstein in paperback (woo we love a paperback!). We had the CUTEST evening. Coco Mellors was so engaging and absolutely lovely and if you know Waterstones on TCR they have a bar in the basement (which has an excellent happy hour) which was a really nice venue for the event.
Throughout the evening, Coco Mellors spoke a lot about her writing process and what inspired her and we found it really engaging and inspiring. There was a lot to takeaway from the event and we wanted to share it a little with you.
We are yet to actually read Cleopatra and Frankenstein (because you all know how much we hate a hardback) but it’s next on the list so we’ll definitely be doing an episode on it, watch this space.
Not having read the book almost made the evening more special because we went with such an open mind and both frantically wrote a lot down throughout.
One of the first things that jumped out at both of us was when Coco detailed a writing exercise she did that actually started the novel (we love an insight like this). She was told to ‘write a scene in which the emotional response is completely difference to what you’d expect from the scene’ i.e. a funeral where people are happy or a honeymoon where people are sad. Which, as we’re soon to discover when we read Cleo & Frank, appears in the novel as it stands today…
The theme of characterisation came up a lot and we both enjoyed the discussion around foil characters - are the characters on the peripheries which are often used as a tool to make the main characters shine brighter. They can, therefore, be pretty flat. Coco Mellors talked about how much she loves these characters and is interested in the foils as well as the gems. We actually found out that the term came from the foil used to make gems in jewelry shine brighter - love a little etymology gem, Susie Dent would be proud.
It’s really nice to hear authors talk in depth about some of the tools they used and why. We think it adds such a nice level to the book when it comes to reading it and gives us things to think about and look out for.
When asked about the fact that she’s often asked if the character of Cleo is based on her at all, she was passionate about the fact that female authors are often asked whether their fiction is autobiographical which actually suggests a lack of trust in the female imagination, classic. We’d not really thought about this before and it really gave us food for thought. Especially given that we’d just read Monica Heisey’s ‘Really Good, Actually’ which IS actually biographical fiction and therefore does have many elements of the author in the book, on purpose. But I’d argue that ‘Really Good, Actually’ straddles the genre of fiction and memoir yet something like Cleo & Frank firmly sits in the ‘literary fiction’ category and therefore shouldn’t be discussed with the author’s experiences in the same way.
Of course people say that writers ‘write what they know’ but, as David Nicholls points out in his ‘Inside Story’ course with Curtis Brown Creative (worth signing up for if you can), people don’t mean this ~literally~ contrary to popular belief. Fiction writers are not expected to write an autobiography but rather they often write about an element of something they are passionate about. For Coco Mellors this was living a fast paced New York lifestyle (amongst many other themes in the book which are yet to have the pleasure of discovering)… not her own life story.
Actually, another theme we know she touches on in the novel is that young women have the capital power of being young, beautiful and desirable but it’s not real power, and she enjoys playing with what it looks like when the illusion falls (eek we’re so excited to get into this novel).
Finally, Coco Mellors explored the notion that fiction explores the discrepancy between how people FEEL and how they PRESENT themselves, which means that point of view is your strongest tool as a writer. Mellors herself said she loves close third because it gives you the opportunity to both give the thoughts and feelings of the character and the way they present themselves. We know that those who feel the worst about themselves often do the most to present themselves outwardly, beneath the surface of a glittering facade often lies loneliness and fear. Deep.
Basically we’re huge Coco Mellors fans now and thoroughly enjoyed the whole evening, if you get a chance to hear her speak we definitely recommend. For now though, we’ll leave you with a few of the tips & tricks we wrote down from the evening, if you yourself are an aspiring writer:
> Trick yourself and write a single scene, then write another scene, then write another one
> What you’re talking about with friends is often a good indication of what would be good to write about (does that mean we should write about books and our latest Netflix obsessions?)
> ‘If you’re having a hard time writing, you’re not doing enough thinking’ go for an ‘inspiration walk’
> So much of writing is getting past the discomfort. Turn your phone off for 3 hours+ to get through this discomfort and actually get some words down