Even going up the lighthouse for research was an ordeal. I am physically very cautious and terrified of heights. And finally Jen was the complete opposite to me. Plus there seemed to be a great number of books at the time that portrayed women as victims and I was keen to write about someone with agency. I’ve always been interested in people who love taking risks and living life on the edge and Jen was my chance to explore them. But it was her fearlessness that initially fascinated me most. Jen had lots of areas for me to explore not the least her strange family and her attachment to Cornwall. However, I still have to work at discovering their stories using the full toolbox of writer techniques, so that I can put words to my instinctive sense of who they are. It is not the first nor last time a character has arrived in my head, fully alive. I don’t mean I knew all the details of her life – that was a more gradual process – but I knew how she thought and spoke and, on a very visceral level, how she felt. The lighthouse came first but Jen Shaw, the daredevil protagonist of the book, arrived straight afterwards, getting in the car with me as I drove away and telling me about herself. The opening scene of On The Edge – a lighthouse in a storm with an unconscious and dreaming young woman hanging from its top – came to me one night when I stopped to watch one of the lighthouses that litter the dangerous stretch of coast where I live.
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