Philippa East

Oh my lord @raine this is magnificent. Heartfelt and raw but with real beauty too (I don’t think you can help your writing being beautiful, frankly). That images of the monsters under the sea and the line about undoing her smile as if it had never been, the line about her joys being taken away – joy in his kindness, moments of softness. So vivid,…[Read more]

ooh, very interesting angle @sandradavies.I like using a secondary character to shed light on the story and this is a very vivid reveal – of both the son and father. The impression I got of the father was a sadistic bully who asserts power and enjoys it. The lines about the Duncans implies a family of note of some kind – or maybe notoriety? these…[Read more]

So very interesting @bellam, especially as your explanations show just how much you have buried below the surface of the letters. Very well done, both of them.

I too got a sense of a unreliable narrator in the first letter – do we believe her? I doubted her – and in the second one you have nailed the young, inexperienced voice and that line…[Read more]

thank you all! It was a surprise for me how it took off.

Nope, Raine, it does not 🙂

I’m trying (struggling) to write a man who, the more I get to know him, the more I realise he has psychopathic tendencies, from the hiding in plain sight/joy of transgression PoV. Born into (8th generation) family business but wants to forge his own path (while holding on to respectability) so secretly deals in…[Read more]

Thanks @sandradavies and @bellam both. It’s interesting – as I was writing this, I was thinking that it didn’t really tell me anything about the ‘inner lives’ of either Abigail or John. But in hindsight, perhaps it does. More about John though than Abigail, I think?

And yes, I think she needed to get out fast, and I think she did. She felt quite…[Read more]

This does give me a good sense of the father though, I think. A shouty, philandering, ‘man’s man’. Working class. I get the impression he’s one of those people who puts others down a lot but always in the form of jokes so any hurt feelings can be laughed of with a ‘can’t you take a joke?’. Does that come close?

Aaaah, that makes so much sense now – re the lie! Very clever!

“the miscarriage story is a lie” – aha! I did think there was something over- … stilted? about the letter. A bit too well-composed for the trauma undergone.