I can’t separate place from people.
In Birmingham, certain street corners and trees and bus stops and doorsteps and attics are all tagged with faces that populate the moments that made me – first kisses, epic fights, bad choices, romantic risks.
Since I started writing stuff that I wanted to share with other people, everything I’ve written has not only been inspired by, but literally set in those places. Spoken word pieces set in Lightwoods Park, stories set in the house I grew up in (184 Park Road), school playground memories from St Gregory’s and Perryfields that became scenes in plays, all of it nodding my cap to where I’m from.
That being said, as if I have been building up to it through all my work until now, my latest novel It’s About Love has turned out to be me taking my cap, scribbling hearts all over it and posting it to Birmingham.
I didn’t consciously set out for that to happen. When I started the story, I knew I wanted to set it in Birmingham. I knew I wanted to write about a boy who has discovered a passion for something that he feels like those around him don’t fully understand. That’s where I started. I was on a train that had just left Coventry station, heading to New Street and a line popped into my head that started the whole story: My life is my scrapbook.
I grew up around a lot of people who spoke like fortune cookies. Older family members who brought these little nuggets of passed-down wisdom from other countries and would readily speak them to me, my sister and cousins. I don’t remember ever getting “a lecture” at home. If I got in trouble for something, whatever punishment got dished out, by whichever adult, was never accompanied by some long rambling angry monologue about the consequences of my actions or why my behaviour was unacceptable. It simply went: Trouble = Clear Punishment + Fortune Cookie one-liner.
As I developed my main character, Luke, and gave him a home life very similar to my own, places and moments from my own life became even more important. As a result, It’s About Love is peppered with those one-liners I was constantly told, and the situations they spring from. Without intentionally setting out to do so, I was building a story that celebrated my upbringing.
I love film. My relationship with movies and the screen started in earnest when my parents split up when I was11. Me and my sister moved with my mum to a new area and didn’t really know anybody close by. I started watching videos from the corner shop and pretty soon had worked my way through every film they had. Any pocket money I got went on either CDs or more videos. Films became my own kind of escape. By giving Luke the same passion for film, I also wanted the form of the story to pay homage to it.
The use of film shots and descriptions became a tool to paint concise pictures throughout the story that hopefully give a sense of the mood of a moment and, again, particularly the place in which things happen. That short “straight to the point” style sentiment that I grew up with, seemed to fit the language of film perfectly and added to the sense that where the story happened was as important as the events themselves.
As I began to build the relationships in the book, I was thinking about each scene as though through a camera. Drawing on specific locations from Birmingham became even more relevant, to ensure that I had complete pictures of each place – down to describing the minute details – to hopefully give scenes the realism and life that my favourite writing has.
A certain table in a certain cafe. The specific texture of the specific canopy of a specific tree in the woods. The texture of a particular bus stop metal. All these things are drawn from definite experiences of the places I grew up in, which hopefully gives the story a genuine feeling of richness and layers without feeling manufactured.
I have said a few times, when asked, that It’s About Love is my own love letter to home. That feels true in terms of what the book ended up as, but the story is definitely not some kind of rose-tinted picture of an idyllic setting where everything is perfect, or even happy. It’s hopefully more a celebration of the mess and mistakes that were mixed in with the love I grew up around. The novel is me committing to ink and paper, for anyone who’s willing to read it, just how strongly I love who and where I come from. Hence the title.
I can’t separate place from people, and I don’t want to.
