I Can't Read a Book the Same Way Anymore

I cannot read a book or watch a film or tv series the same again.

In more than thirty years of studying and teaching literature, there was something I did not see clearly. Not until I trained as a book coach. It was something which underpins nearly all stories, whatever form they come in.

And that was the wound. The thing which happens before the story begins. The thing which influences and shapes a character’s behaviour, beliefs, actions and reactions. The very thing orchestrating so much of why things happen the way they do.

My training as a book coach taught me to look for it. And once I saw it I could not unsee it.

I recently read ‘The Safekeep’, a beautiful book written by Yael van der Wouden, winner of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. It is set in 1960s Netherlands and follows Isabel, a guarded and rigid woman whose life is upended when her brother's girlfriend comes to stay for the summer. Isabel is fiercely protective of the house she lives in, of her mother’s room, of the cutlery and the crockery. She also won’t let anyone get close to her. Until Eva arrives and gradually dismantles all the walls Isabel had built around herself. We don’t see Isabel’s mother in the story, we don’t experience the immediate post war years in the Netherlands, but we certainly feel the heavy influence of both these things in everything Isabel does, how she reacts, how she behaves, how she feels. This, in essence, is the wound at work. Everything Isabel does in the present is shaped by what happened to her before the story begins.

I am constantly fascinated by how much of ourselves we write into our own characters. How much of our lived experience, our hurts and buried beliefs, finds its way onto the page, consciously or not. When I wrote my third novel draft (I had abandoned two before this), I hadn't realised just how much of my own beliefs, based on past wounds, had found their way onto the page until I did a read through. But they were clearly there. And it was strange and cathartic.

When I read back through my draft, I was struck by how true it felt. Not true in its facts, but true in its feeling. The wounds were mine, even if the story was not.

And I understood, for the first time, not as something I had read or been told, but as something I had actually felt, that writing can transform the writer, not just the reader.

This is what I find myself thinking about now, when I work with the women who bring me their manuscripts. I think about this when I am reading stories with characters who have stayed with me long after the last page. How much of the writer is in those pages? How much of their own experience, their own beliefs, their own quietly carried hurts, has found its way into their characters without them ever making a conscious decision to put it there?

It is one of the things that makes women's fiction so powerful. And it is one of the reasons why the story you are writing matters more than you might think.

I would love to know - what did you put into your pages without realising it? If you feel comfortable sharing, I would genuinely love to hear.

Photo by Katelyn G on Unsplash