It's all about trust

Having spent 10 years trying to guess the needs of the publishing market, and fulfill its expectations rather than my own, I'm feeling over-inspired for perhaps the first time in my working life. Writing a creative dissertation requires you to be... well, creative! Not creative in that I'm-trying-to-fool-the-marketing-office way, but creative like a person (an artist?) who doesn’t need to sell her work to survive. Wooooo! How liberating (and ephemeral).

I decided to make the adaptation of my banned novel more interesting than a plain novella, because I didn’t like the idea of summarising the story just to fit it into the word-count. I wanted a new life for Aleksandra and the other characters, a life with fewer boundaries. I remembered what Noga, the marker on my Creative Writing course, said about my short story: you didn’t trust the reader enough. Trust is a word I’ve come across so many times during these two academic years at Roehampton. Trust the reader. Trust the author. It's so true. Trust is the secret.

Perhaps I didn’t trust my readers enough because I’m an Italian children’s writer. I don’t know about other countries, but in Italy the age group is often artificially raised. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness? In the UK it is marketed as +11, in Italy it’s a YA. The curious incident of the dog in the nightime? In the UK it’s a classic of children’s literature, in Italy (drum roll) it’s in the adult list. So maybe we get  accustomed to dumbing down stories for children. But this time, I decided, I will trust my readers. Who in this case are also my markers.

So I’m composing a fake dossier of both real and fictional material: pictures, videos, fake police investigative interviews, real articles, fake articles, letters, emails, a song in mp3, and much more. In this way the writer (me) becomes one of the characters, the one who’s collecting evidence for the fictional story (Aleksandra’s) using also non-fictional elements. Sound complicated? It’s not! It’s just exciting, and the characters feel much more alive. Because I blurred the boundaries between real and not real. Could this be defined as literary “docufiction”?

Today I also tried to jot down some poems. As if I were Aleksandra, after the trial, sharing my thoughts with Manuela the writer. Manuela had contacted Aleksandra suggesting she write something herself and here it is, a sixteen-year-old girl’s poems:

1

I am the ghost you never see,

I walk, I eat, I breathe,

one in a million girls like me.

  

 2

When the judge stared at me

What did she see?

A whore,

a moth, a wasted being?

I stared back at her, though.

What did I see?

An adult who’s never been naked

In front of a crowd

Who’s never been branded

Like a fucking cow.

 3

The first kiss was on my boob.

The second, on my butt.

The third, on my vag.

This is the fairy tale of sleeping beauties

Who’ll never wake up.