Workshop - Telling Your Story

'For some reason I had always thought that to write a novel I’d have to invent things. To make up a story. Here I had stories to write from my own life, and the time and space to do so. Stories of my discomfort, of finding this life strange, of being stuck with my own thoughts all day. I suspended the critical part of my brain and wrote them down, the true stories and the imagined ones. It was liberating to realise that I could write about things that had happened to me, and what I thought about them, and it was liberating to write things that could never happen. Things so dark I barely dared think them, but which made perfect sense on the page.'

from Discomfort and Boredom: How I Wrote My Debut Novel by Eva Aldea on Booksbywomen.org

Dr Eva Aldea is a writer, lecturer and editor. Born in Krakow and raised in Stockholm, Eva Aldea lives in Greenwich, London. She lectures in creative writing at De Montfort University, and teaches literature and theory on the University of London's online degrees. Her debut novel Singapore is reviewed below.

‘SINGAPORE is a compelling and disturbing story about privilege, intrusive thoughts, and greyhounds.’ Emily Austin, author of Oh Honey and Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead

Bored and lonely, with hounds for company, she starts thinking about how it would feel to kill…

When she finds herself a ‘trailing spouse’, a woman attempts to make sense of a world that is both familiar and utterly different. Cooking, shopping, yoga, and the beauty salon: a mundane routine that alienates her from who thought she was. Her only comforts are the dogs, but even they have lost their lust for the chase in the ever-oppressive heat. Discomfort turns into exciting fantasies of violence.

Singapore builds towards grotesque scenes, where the boundaries of a woman who always thought she had a conscience are blurred and broken, and the amorality of animals is increasingly her own.