Never Give Up

Diary of a London Writer

Never Give Up by Miranda Miller

Hello Everybody,

This is my first newsletter. I want to write about what I’m writing, reading, thinking and doing. I’ve published eight novels, a book of short stories and a book of interviews and I also have a website (www.mirandamiller.info). For years I’ve been intermittently keeping a writer’s diary. What I want to do in this new medium is something more fluid and spontaneous: I would like to open up a forum for writers and readers to talk to each other about books. I’ve been writing for fifty years and, for twenty of those new writers have been sending me their manuscripts to read. I’ve learnt a lot from this and I hope my comments have been helpful. I think of us all, sitting in our lonely rooms, struggling to escape from an increasingly frightening world into the imaginary one in our heads. I’m sending this first newsletter to friends in France, Italy, Israel, Germany, Japan, Portugal, the US and Canada and I love the idea of an international network of writers and readers engaged in a continuing conversation. On a bad day it might be comforting to know that there are other people out there battling to concentrate and make sense of their thoughts and dreams; on a good day I think it would be exciting to hear from someone else, miles away, who has also made some kind of breakthrough.

I’m basically an optimist – hence the title. I’ve carried on writing through rejections, depressions, marriage, childbirth, divorce, dead-end jobs, cancer and money worries. I’m so glad I did and I think novels – both writing and reading them – have saved me from at least one nervous breakdown. So this newsletter is for people who love books, particularly fiction, and want to talk about them.

I’m sitting at my desk, staring out of my window in north London at a windy drizzly morning. Mornings are when I write or fail to write. My husband Gordon and I have just returned from a week in Portugal where the sun was so good for his arthritis that he was able to walk for miles around this beautiful city.

This was my first trip to Portugal since a holiday with my parents, so long ago that Salazar was still in power. Then, it felt gloomy and fearful; last week it was heartening to be in a country that feels open and hopeful. Of course, I was only a tourist and part of the problem that tourism brings to cities, but in January there weren’t too many of us. Like us, they’re about to have a general election after years of socialist government. Everybody we talked to asked in amazement why we had voted for Brexit. Gordon and I didn’t, in fact, but we’re stuck with it anyway. Why people vote against their own best interests is one of the issues I hope to address in my next novel.

As always after a break I’m finding it hard to focus on writing my new novel which is about a group of adolescents in London in the late 1960s. I grew up in London, it’s partly autobiographical and I’m struggling to remember as well as invent. I’m reading and enjoying Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) an ambitious, witty, visionary, anarchic novel that deserves to be read more widely. As in the best Dickens novels, London herself (for me, great cities are feminine) is a major character. I never met Moorcock but to some extent our Londons overlapped in that period.