New Novel from CWP Tutor Bethan Roberts

Bethan Roberts has been teaching on the Creative Writing Programme for many years. She is the author of six novels including A Short Road to Longbrook which comes out this month. Here she talks about her new book and her writing life.

Congratulations on the launch of your new book A Short Road to Longbrook, which is out on 5th March – could you tell us what it is about? Thank you! The novel is about three generations of mothers and daughters whose lives are all impacted by the local psychiatric institution - Longbrook Hospital. The woman at the centre of it all is Lillian Wells, who me meet in the 1960s as a young girl with a daring pixie cut and an ambition to go to art school. But when she wins a place, secrets about her mother’s links to Longbrook come out and Lillian finds her road to independence doesn’t look quite as straightforward. It’s set in the small town of Abingdon, where I grew up, and takes place from the 1960s to the 2000s.

Patrick Gale is very complimentary about the book – he describes it as: ‘A tangled tale of maternal inheritance, the ties that bind and the queasy way psychiatry in the mid twentieth century seemed so much about crushing women's independence.’ Could you tell us about the inspiration behind the book and why you decided to write about these issues? I grew up up hearing terrifying stories of women - and it was always women - who had been ‘taken away’ to the local psychiatric hospital, or the loony bin as many people back then used to call it. When I was a little older, I realised my own grandmother had been referred there after an ‘attack of the nerves’ - but this was not talked about in the family. In my early twenties I struggled with anorexia. And my mother-in-law was also a lifelong anorexic who was hospitalised for the condition in the 1950s. So I suppose it just seemed that almost every woman I knew didn’t get through life without experiencing her own version of Longbrook.

A Short Road to Longbrook is your sixth book, has your writing process changed over the course of these books? Not a great deal! I’m still not a good planner. I begin with a person in a place with a problem and see where that takes me. I write the first draft by hand, in my notebook, which seems to free me up to write something, at least. It’s rare I have a plan for the middle and the end until I’ve written around a quarter of the book. This all means a lot of redrafting but it seems to work.

What are you working on now? I’m writing a drama for Radio 4 about the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. I’ve long loved Brian so writing about him is an absolute delight. And there’s a novel on the go, but God knows how long that will take.

You have taught on the Creative Writing Programme for a number or years, how does teaching Creative Writing impact your own writing process? I love teaching on the CWP. It’s such a pleasure to share my enthusiasm for the craft with people who are eager to learn.  In order to teach, I had to become much more aware of all the technical aspects of writing and reading. Trying to communicate what I’ve learned over the years helps me to hone my craft, I think.

Is there any advice you could give to the writers on the CWP course now, as they start their writing journeys? Try not to second-guess the market or the zeitgeist - write about what really matters to you, and try to be honest about it. Don’t worry if you can’t see how the story will develop. Just dive into a scene and write something. You can make it better later on. Also: keep going, but try to keep the joy of writing. You have to turn up at the page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be a daily slog. If you need a break, the page will be there waiting for you to come back.

You can buy a copy of A Short Road to Longbrook here.