Writing about what we've lost

Great newsletter from Mo Hayder this morning, in which she talks about moving home for the thirty-third time in forty-nine years. Funnily enough, her latest move takes Mo to the Cotswolds, which I left eighteen months ago. "Someone once said that people write better about something when they've lost it," Mo writes, and that resonated with me. The newsletter is all about distance, and altered perspectives, and how these things help us to see our writing in new and exciting ways.

Several of the themes in my current novel are things I've moved on from recently. I won't say 'lost', since they've become part of me, but I've only recently acquired the distance - emotionally - to be able to put them down on paper. As Mo says of her recent writing, it's liberating, but it's more than just that.

Stories that come from under our skin are the ones most likely to get under the skin of others.

I'm looking forward to Mo's new book, The Hanging Hill, set in the city she's just left: Bath. She's certainly picked an adventurous season in which to spend her first Christmas in the Cotswolds. I hope she has a wood-burning stove and a village store.