An ‘exorcising of demons’
Former O-R reporter pulls from personal struggles to create fictional character
Many people think writing a book is driven by lightning bolts of inspiration that propel an author forward.
Katherine Mansfield isn’t one of them.
“There are definitely points when something comes out of the ether and rests on your brain … but I think true creativity is just getting up and doing it every single day,” she said.
That’s how she wrote her first novel.
With enough money set aside to pay for a writing coach for two months, she got up in the morning and wrote, spent her day writing as a reporter for the Observer-Reporter, and then wrote more when she got home. She wrote on weekends, too.
The result was “Original Works by Katharine Hughes,” a fictional novel that explores the pandemic’s toll on those in addiction recovery through the struggles of its title character.
Writing the book was a rigorous process, Mansfield said. To get it finished in two months, she had to write 2,500 words a day for 60 straight days.
“The first 10 or 15 chapters were hard because while I was writing the novel, I was also learning how to write a novel,” she said, laughing. “There’s a lot that goes into it.”
There were also rigors associated with the subject matter.
Katharine “Kate” Hughes, the book’s main character, struggles with substance addiction; Mansfield has struggled with alcohol abuse.
Sober for seven years, she stopped drinking when her now-husband, Josh, told her he’d break up with her if she didn’t.
The book pulls loosely from some of her experiences while abusing alcohol. Some of the darker parts were triggering.
“I was like, ‘I can’t write this. I need a drink to write this,'” Mansfield said.
Instead, she lit up, chain smoking when she penned the most emotionally and mentally draining chapters. She had never smoked before, and said she quit as soon as she was done with the book.
“I needed to feel gritty and needed to take the edge off,” she said. “It was like method writing instead of method acting.”
There are uplifting parts to the book, Mansfield is quick to say. (“I don’t want people to think they’re going to have to go to therapy,” she joked.) She’s also hopeful the story will help people realize they aren’t alone in their grief and experiences.
When the Carnegie woman finished the last keystroke of Kate’s journey, Mansfield said she was “dumbfounded.”
She shopped the book to major publishing houses without success, so a friend suggested she self-publish the novel. Mansfield used the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise the money for that as well as the book’s design and copyright. She reached her funding goal in one month.
That led to another hurdle.
“If learning how to write a novel while you’re writing it wasn’t enough, I had to learn how to publish it as I was publishing it. With a 1 ½-year-old. While pregnant,” she said.
The experience has made Mansfield more confident in her writing. She’s already 25-plus pages into a second novel.
It is nothing like this one, she said, keeping its subject matter a secret.
“There was definitely a very therapeutic quality with this book, and exorcising of demons,” she said. “Now, as a mother, I’m so far removed from the person Kate is. I don’t really want to deal with her again.”
“Original Works by Katharine Hughes” can be purchased on bykatherinemansfield.com.