Making the Rules: Physics and Fell

A guest post by novelist Jenn Ashworth

In the last month I’ve suggested to four mentees that they read this guest post by Jenn Ashworth, which she kindly wrote for This Itch of Writing some years ago. Jenn is not only an acclaimed, prize-nominated writer but a notable teacher, currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Although their projects are very different from each other and from Jenn’s, every single writer has found this post super-helpful, so I thought I’d repost it here.

The thing is, one of the questions I suggest asking your novel is ‘Who is telling this story?’ And the next is, ‘Where are they standing, relative to the events they’re telling?’. So I was excited when I discovered that Jenn was building her new novel, Fell, on one of the most interesting - and fruitful - answers to that question that I’ve yet come across. I was lucky enough to have a tiny role in her working-out of the considerable writerly challenges it posed, and when I read the book I just loved it, and also admired it enormously: a lovely review in the Guardian gives you the flavour. So over to Jenn: