This 7500-word short story (or Long Read in People’s Friend terms) has just been published in a bookazine Feel Good Fiction (see details below).
I’m thrilled the story found a home (and a great illustration) but almost more thrilled that I eventually managed to finish it …
Some stories go quite quickly from inspiration to thinking where to go with it; others take a little longer and one or two much looonger.
I had the initial idea, the ‘What if?’ thought, for Looking for Laurie twenty years ago.
We’d booked a short family holiday in Canada during the October school holidays but unfortunately had to cancel a couple of days before we travelled when one of the children took appendicitis.
After we’d all recovered from that I thought What if? … What if the appendix chose to get nasty after a family arrived in Toronto? And what if the child couldn’t fly home on the return date and the mother had to stay on? How would she spend those few days on her own in a strange city?
I could have stuck with Toronto for the setting but as I’ve never been (see above … ) I decided to turn the story around and have a young Canadian woman – the name Joanne popped into my head – arriving with her teenage son in London. She’d just got married and this was a business trip for her new husband combined with a honeymoon.
What if Laurie, the London-born father of her son, had left her in Toronto promising to return but he never did? Never knew he had a son, in fact?
Thoughts percolated and bubbled inconclusively for a while. I wrote other stories, magazine serials.
Wait! Could this be a serial rather than a story? I tried to make that work, cliff-hangers and all. It didn’t.
But now I knew what Joanne would do in London on her own while her husband David travelled north on business and Ben was still in hospital. She’d been thinking how little she actually knew about Laurie and became determined to find out more – and find out why he’d left her when they’d been so happy.
I realised I had to set the story back in the day so that her sleuthing would be more tricky than making internet searches. As I’d lived in London, moving there in the fiendishly hot summer of 1976, I placed Joanne there (with a flashback to 1962).
What took the
longest to work out was what would happen when/if she found him? Would she still love him? How would her son and husband react?
I pecked away at it, thinking and rejecting various solutions. When I had success in placing two 7500-word stories with The People's Friend that suddenly seemed the best length to tell the story. I never wanted to give up
on it – I wanted to find out myself what happened when Joanne went looking for
Laurie.
And if you want to know, the story is in this bookazine – available from larger supermarkets, T. G. Jones (where I got mine), online from DC Thomson, Amazon and elsewhere. Yes, it’s £8.99 but that’s only around 20p a story including (see above!) a Long Read.
