Today, I have a guest post from Nelle Davy, author of The Legacy of Eden. Here, Nelle talks about writing on taboo topics.

Writing on Taboo Topics

 

Because the novel (The Legacy of Eden)  was inspired by I Claudius,  in which all these things occur it wasn’t difficult to write because it was the natural course for the story to take. The hardest scene to write was the rape scene and the end confrontation between Meredith and Ava. Everything else was a walk in the park compared to that which was very draining. I think it would be interesting to know that the bloodletting which actually is now a pivotal moment in the novel did not come in until the final draft. Everything that happens in the novel is in context with the characters, their build up, and their downfall, so writing them felt very natural and as I said because the book was a modern reworking of another, it already had a sort of natural path that it was going to take with these things along the way, so I was always prepared for what was going to happen within the novel and the journey it was going to take. What interested me as a writer was not the incidents themselves but the characters reactions to them. That was what kept me gripped when writing it – how the characters behaved and why and what was draining or difficult was trying to understand that and conveying it in such a way that the reader could to while also drawing their own conclusions. After all, books are symbiotic – the writer sets down the story but really it does not come into its own until someone reads it and puts their own interpretation onto it. That’s what gives stories life.