Suzanne McCourt

A Moment With…Suzanne McCourt

McCourt_LostChild_rgb Suzanne McCourt photoSuzanne McCourt also joins us on day twenty-seven of National Novel Writing Month. Her debut novel, The Lost Child has been released today. She shares with us her writing process and route to publication.

It took me almost ten years to write The Lost Child, in part because I tried to control the process: I thought writing came from my head and it took some time to discover that it needed to come from my heart. Losing my mother and having four family deaths within eight months, taught me a lot about letting go of control. So did Barbara Turner-Vesselago’s freefall writing workshops. But it was only when I let myself trust the voice of a child who’d tried to take over a previous novel—only when I allowed Sylvie to tell her own story—that The Lost Child began to unfold without interference from me.

Nabokov suggests that a writer is part storyteller, teacher and enchanter, and that by far the most important of these is enchanter. One of the great joys of writing from Sylvie’s perspective was that I was able to enter a child’s world of innocence, spontaneity, vulnerability and humour and lose myself in the process.

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