Creative Writing
Writing Workshop – A Second Chapter
For my writing workshop this week, I set the prompt ‘second’, and I thought that today I would share with you an except of the second chapter of a story that I’ve started working on again, after putting it down for a while. There seems to be a fair bit of interest in my writing at the moment which I need to make the most of, so I’m hoping to get this good enough for submission this year, if I can.
I’m not going to tell you as single thing about what it’s about, what came before or what might come after and it’s just a first draft, but I hope you enjoy it.
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“I slept then, deep. No memory, even, of finding a seat, only the repetitive lull of the train bending its way through the miles as I was pulled under.
I did not dream. I slept the sleep of something dead with no capacity left to rearrange fractured thoughts into pictures, if that is what dreaming is, I have never been sure. Although, actually, no, I did not feel dead, numb as I was. Perhaps, the sleep I slept was more like that of something brand-new, without yet sensory impressions to give shape to those fleeting cognitive flashes. Yes, it was more like that.
I woke to the feeling of being shaken, and wondered, briefly, confused, if perhaps I had passed out on the station platform after all, and whether everything that had come after it had been the dream, that perhaps I would come round to find myself still sitting there, still with that choice to make. But no: my nose working quicker than my brain, and the smell of upholstery and coffee and the stale, air conditioned air that comes with many shared hours in a train carriage with a few dozen strangers, quickly convinced me otherwise, and I looked up into the oval, white-downed face of the ticket officer as he roused me to state we had reached my destination, and that the train service was terminating here.
Here. I was here. Christ, had a slept that long?
Read MoreWriting Workshop – The girl and the jam jars
She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.
With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.
Read MoreWriting Workshop: Collected Glances
I am a natural collector, a hoarder of treasures. Not things that usually cost much, thankfully, but buttons and old keys and things I find on the pavement. I can’t walk past conkers without picking them up, or especially vibrant leaves, or pebbles or snail shells – my pockets are always full, the top of my piano always a shrine to my wanderings about. Mostly I love things that look like they have a story.
With my space to myself I’m becoming a braver collector. I dream of shelves of mis-matched tea cups, walls full of old frames with nothing in them, glass jars filled to the top with whatever I’ve thought to put in them. I want to fill my house with stories.
But if I could collect anything, if such things were possible, I would collect glances.
You know, those brief looks that people throw when they think no-one is looking. Each one a whole story in itself. And in a way, I do collect them. I watch for them and my little internal camera goes click. Some are slow and dawdling, others move so fast you would miss them to blink. You see them in the eyes of people gazing out their car windows in long queues of traffic, some vacant, lost somewhere else far away, fingers idly tapping on the steering wheels, others riddled with frowns and frustration with clenched grips at lateness and deadlines and don’t get so close, will you? You catch one in the sudden confused pause of a woman in the supermarket as she tries to remember what on earth she came in for. Another caught as a girl walks along the pavement with her arms folded around her thin chest, eyes to the floor, earphones plugged in when suddenly her eyes lift to the sky, in sudden response to the surge of a song or the line of a lyric as she flashes a smile, her whole face changing.
Read MoreWriting Workshop: Fast and Slow
For as long as I can remember, my life has been about too fast or too slow. On the way to nursery this morning, my boy sped along the lines in the pavement, dragging me by my hand. Fast, fast! he’d shout. And I laughed and we raced and declared ourselves winners. And that’s me, that is. Fast. I am most definitely the pretend horse galloping under cold sunshine, and the runaway train that’s going to catch us, mama! FASTER! I have always been a million miles an hour girl. It makes me skip and trip over my own feet. My head moves faster than I can keep up with sometimes. Mental energy is something that runs out of my ears like too-small hands trying to carry sand. It keeps me awake, it gives me this endless, relentless drive for more and more and more, each tiny cranial space stuffed to the ceiling with bits of paper marked IDEAS! and TOMORROW! and, I could this THIS! And I love it, I do. It makes me feel plugged into something huge. I love jumping into its current and letting it speed me away. I want to go fast. I love fast.
But I have a body that doesn’t like it, and I always have. From so tiny I learnt that my times of running and skipping and FLYING, which is what it would feel like, would mean getting right to the top, fingers outstretched, before something in the mechanics would give and I’d have to brace myself for the crash. And it always comes. Like night follows day, if I fly I have to pay for it, screaming angrily and frustratingly all the way down. And I pay for it with tiredness, and pain, and limbs like lead dragged through treacle. I pay for it with slow. That’s the illness, that’s my wiring, and like it or not, it’s just how things are.
As part of my treatment, for years and years, I was taught that my secret was pacing. I must learn to temper slow and fast with even, steady. Not too much, not too little. And when I was very, very ill, when the slow had won for a long, long time and fast was defined more as having the energy to get up and get myself dressed, than about spending the weekend speeding about on trains having adventures, when I was that ill, even was the only thing for it. I had to give up fast. I had to. I missed it. And I resented it hugely, and it would make me angry, the energy I wished to be pouring into life trapped somewhere I couldn’t get it. But I was patient and after very many hard lessons learnt I got well again. I got very well. I got my fast back and oh god it was wonderful.
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