I always put a dedication at the front of my novels, and Flipside is dedicated to my friends, colleagues and people I taught in Oldham, where the novel is set. Unusually I also added a small preface declaring that the whole novel, characters, and plot were a complete fiction created entirely from my imagination and not based on any real people or incidents. The whole thing is a complete fabrication, although set in Oldham, in the town of Lees, it is completely made-up. Yes, there are real places mentioned, Tommyfield Market, the Lyceum Theatre, The Navigation Inn, but everything else is a fantasy.
I tried to emphasize that any similarities to real people, events, pubs or schools was merely coincidental… And as I wrote it I was thinking of a coincidence which had happened to me involving one of my books Farholm. I was on a story-telling course, partly training, partly to get out of school for an afternoon (sssh,don’t tell anyone!) One of the exercises we had to do was to get into pairs with someone we didn’t know, and each was to tell the other a lie about themselves, after which the other would question them and thus the lie would be elaborated. I couldn’t think of anything, so pretended I was the heroine from my story Farholm, and told this other woman, a complete stranger to me, Deke’s story. I was very sad, I told her, because my young husband had just been killed in an awful motorway pile-up and the friend who came to tell me dreadful news, also told me something else about my beloved husband, a devastating lie he had told me. His lie wrecked my world and destroyed my faith and trust in anything, and I was just on my way to Farholm Island where he had lived to see if I could find out why he had lied to me.
My partner asked me several very penetrating and interesting questions, and then it was her turn to lie to me. The end of the exercise was for us to tell the rest of the group what our partner had just told us, retelling the tale so to speak. Then it was coffee time; as we were wandering around drinking coffee, eating biscuits and chatting, my partner came up to me. She told me that the story I had told her about Deke was exactly what had happened to her!! her husband had died (although not in a crash) and on his death she discovered that he had told her the same lie that my fictitious character Nico had told my heroine Deke!
I was shocked, astounded,, embarrassed… guilty even! I felt as if I had stolen her story, but I had never met her before! She realised that, of course, but it made me very uncomfortable… even though I was totally innocent, and my story had just been a coincidence.
Lois Elsden 