From first chapters to published novel

Maria Allen writes about her debut novel Before the Earthquake, its roots in her italian heritage and the progress from early chapters to published novel.

My first novel, ‘Before the Earthquake’, is a historical mystery set in southern Italy at the turn of the last century. Concetta, a fifteen-year-old peasant girl, gets seriously injured in an earthquake and once she has slowly recovered from her physical injuries she realises that she has lost her memory of the weeks leading up to the earthquake. Remembering these weeks becomes even more critical when, some months later, it is discovered that she is pregnant. As her family deal with the practicalities of having an unmarried pregnant daughter, Concetta’s personal quest is to solve the riddle of what happened in the weeks before the earthquake struck.

My mother grew up in an area of Italy historically called Irpinia which is a mountainous area inland from Naples. Up until at least the 1950s, the area remained backward and remote, still marked by its feudal past. The life that my mother led in her girlhood would not have been so very different from the life that Concetta lived around fifty years earlier or even what another woman from this place would have lived a hundred years before that. She worked the land every day of the year except religious feast days or to mark marriage or funeral rites and so she, and the other villagers, were intimately connected to the land and what affected it: the weather patterns, the seasons, the cycles of the moon. Their powers and their fears were not only of the physical, what they could touch and see, but of the invisible too, what they could sense or feel and so the supernatural, witches, werewolves, spirits, the physical manifestation of good and bad intention, were as much a part of their belief system as the church and the priest and Sunday mass.

‘Before the Earthquake’ came out of this way of looking at the world, sought to reflect it accurately and authentically. As a writer, the material was plentiful, lots of anecdotes and personal histories and memories, and I felt fortunate to have such privileged access to this world through my mother and other close relatives, people at only one remove from me.

I started writing the novel as part of an MA in Writing at Nottingham Trent University. I did the course full time and the opening section of the novel, equating to the first three chapters came easily to me, almost complete and without much need of editing on the page. Then, with the MA finished, I started working full time and for three years I dried up. I tried to write at weekends, in evenings, even early mornings but nothing worked. Completing the novel would take a greater force of will on my part so I gave up my job in London, moved back to the East Midlands (where I had grown up) and finally started writing again.

There were many difficulties to come of course, of finding an agent and then a willing publisher, but setting that time aside, committing to the book, making it my priority, that was how I got it done. That was how I was able to get my first novel published.

Maria Allen is half Italian, half English and has lived in different parts of Italy and the USA. She has worked as a journalist, in TV research, publishing and most recently in teaching. She lives in Loughborough.