Hannah Brennan on writing what you know

I never set out to write a novel about my OCD. For me, the old adage “write what you know” referred more to my years of binging of crime dramas, police and forensic documentaries, Silent Witness…

The list goes on!

No Safe Place started out as a single scene. Stephen King talks about the “what if” – and I kept coming back to an idea for a blood-soaked, shocking crime scene that could maybe open a novel. It just so happened that a character in that scene would have OCD.

I treated that idea as a writing exercise, and wrote the most dramatic opener I could muster – before submitting it to my writing group. They loved the drama, but they struggled to understand how the character’s OCD was impacting his choices.

Over the next few months, I built out more of the story, and other characters with very different presentations of OCD – layering in more of my own experiences. I included characters who had recovered from OCD too, because too often fiction focuses only on the darkest mental health moments, and the grey areas and in-betweens aren’t represented.

In the end, I had to restructure the book entirely. My dramatic opening is now a third of the way in. The reader needed to meet that character in his day-to-day life, and see his “normal” – before I could cast him into chaos.

I didn’t want the novel to feel preachy, or like it was trying to teach you a lesson. As writers we’re always told: show, don’t tell.

When it came to writing OCD in a way that was accessible, my supportive, thoughtful writing group were invaluable. They were honest about what made sense to them and what didn’t – and I was ready to take on that feedback.

It meant I could refine the characters and the story, to make sure it landed with people who had no experience and little prior understanding of OCD.

That’s not to say it wasn’t tough. It felt really exposing, trying to distil some of my worst experiences into these characters – and then handing that over for literary critique.

OCD comes in many different guises – often referred to as “themes” – and there wasn’t space in the novel to represent them all. I don’t have a lot of the OCD themes I was writing about, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the experience of those people.

I’d shared extracts with my writing group, but it took a lot longer to share with my OCD support group that I was writing about – well, us. I was met with nothing but encouragement, and most amazingly – excitement.

Another fear I had was that I was somehow commodifying my OCD. That by folding some of my horrific teenage experiences into the book, I was devaluing them. Or worse, profiting from them.

As the book is published, these will all be feelings and fears I have to contend with.

On the other side of the coin, it was incredibly cathartic to write, too. I had more sympathy for my fictional characters, struggling in their day-to-day lives, than I often had for myself. We’re much harder on ourselves than we are on our friends – and it made me appreciate how far I’ve come.

I’m also bloody proud of it! I’ve been blown away by the responses and support from my fellow authors and early readers.

For anyone who is debating writing about their own experiences, I would say go for it.

Writing is a brilliant tool in our arsenal, for getting things out of our brains and into the world. Getting stuff on paper often helps us view it from a different angle.

You don’t have to offer your writing up for critique, or share it with anyone. You also don’t have to set out to write a whole novel – all I had when I started was a single scene.

If you do want to write a novel, particularly in crime or a commercial genre, my one piece of advice would be not to forget the story. My book is a police procedural and crime thriller, before it’s a book about OCD.

My only other bit of advice is take care. Look after yourself, and don’t be hard on yourself if things aren’t quite working on the page. Take breaks from it, when you need to. Indulge in chocolate often.

OCD is too vast a topic to contain into one crime story, but I hope that No Safe Place is a slice of life; that some people might find comfort in seeing OCD represented, and others might feel like they’ve learned something new about it.

No Safe Place by Hannah Brennan is published by Avon on 31st July