The Writing Process – Nastasya Parker

Big Picture Thinking

This Week’s Bit of String: A hasty clearout

My family moved house only once. I was 8 years old, basically prepubescent and pretty melodramatic about it. I initially vowed that if our new house didn’t have a backyard brook like our old one, I would run away.

We got a backyard swamp instead. Home ownership is hard. But the New House never fully sank into it, and my parents remained there for 37 years. I first raised my kiddo in one of the bedrooms and we’ve returned there every summer.

My sister was in first grade when we moved, and since we all have a storytelling streak, she had moments of drama too. Before the move, she arrived home from school ahead of me one day and later recounted to me that she found our Mom on her knees in front of a closet, grabbing everything and then throwing it behind her like a cartoon puppy digging under a fence. That created image has stayed in my mind all these years when I think about moving: chaos combined with hard, focused work.

*The New House. Taken about 26 years ago.*

At the time, we kids were 8, 7, 4, and barely 3, so on the rare moments when Mom could tackle a sorting or packing project, she undoubtedly did so at a frantic pace.

It was then, too, that Mom started using a certain expression which has stuck with me as well. We’d ask what about this, is that coming with us, or how is such-and-such going to work, and Mom would say, “It’s in the plan.”

We came to dread that phrase and Mom ended up alluding to it more as a kiss of death. Anything “in the plan” was like any garment consigned to her Mending Pile. It wasn’t about to emerge for a very long while, if ever (through no fault of her own, I hasten to add).

Now, my parents plus my youngest sister and my cousin, who both live with them, need to move again, and somehow pack and clear everything my family owns from the last 37 years plus some of my late aunt’s things at my cousin’s house.

Zooming Out

When 2026 began, I knew my parents’ move was on the horizon, plus this summer our kiddo’s wedding. This meant a fair bit of extra transatlantic travel, while balancing my job, growing my little garden crops, drafting at least half a novel, keeping up with two different critique groups and various other deadlines…

My planner had spaces for monthly goals, which proved highly useful. Before returning to work after Christmas, I’d organised 2026 through July, listing where I need to be each month to ensure every aspect of the year runs smoothly.

*Also important to make the most of each season. I spotted my first opened bluebell while foraging for wild garlic.*

In January, we’d decide if my husband would join me on my Easter trip, so he too can see the family house for the last time. We’d book airport parking and meanwhile support kiddos with choosing a wedding venue and setting a summer wedding date. I’d also begin decluttering my own house, and plant seeds.

By February, I was looking into housesitters to stay with Obie during our April trip to the US, my dining room table was covered with seedlings, I was finishing a whole new section of my novel, and buying my plane ticket for the summer.

This past week, as March and school Term 4 draw to a close and my flight is coming right up, I’m cleaning the house as deeply as I can manage for the housesitter, while arranging for the summer’s sitter. It’s a constant organisational cycle. And funnily, making space for someone else to stay involves me frantically stuffing things into closets rather than pawing it all out.

Plot Twist

In a way, I’ve applied story-plotting technique to life. In order for this to happen, that must come first. While engrossed from afar in the travails of my family’s house-hunting—and keeping a wary eye on chaotic current events—I’ve kept up with my novel-drafting.

Depending on how many other writing commitments I have in a week, I write either 2000-3000 words. This is made easier by the plotting I did before I started writing. With a rough idea of events needed in each section, I can keep myself going, even when life is distracting.

*Welcome distraction: the cherry tree beside the church in town*

Of course, the planning is a means, not an end. My characters have to be real and rounded enough so the story doesn’t feel like paint-by-numbers. The fact that I enjoy writing about them might mean I’m on the right track. There’s still delight as I see them in action, as they show me why they do what they do.

In real life, similarly, a plan is never ironclad. Having fewer people depending on me than my parents do gives me more control as I organise, but with our little Obie cat, we do depend on house sitters. And just this morning, at 5 a.m., our April sitter messaged that she’s been injured and can’t drive or walk. Or housesit.

So, less than 24 hours before I have to be at the airport, I’m reviewing the situation. Was it a mistake to put something “in the plan?”

How far ahead do you manage to plan things, and does it ever fully work out?

Rounding Out Characters

This Week’s Bit of String: A sunset softening

When they were in infant school and then through most of junior school, my little Bear had a rather questionable friend. I’ll call the friend Jack. Jack would steal from Bear, and if bigger bullies came round, Jack would either abandon our Bear, or join in the bullying.

I had been mistrustful of Jack since Bear’s first session before infant school. Jack was a tester. I watched him wriggle to sit next to Bear and start poking them, to see what they’d do about it.

Yet when they became friends, they had fun playing together. Once I walked to the playground with the boys, who must have been around 6 or 7 at the time. It was evening, and tough little “Jack” couldn’t help crying out, “Look at that beautiful sunset!”

*Juxtaposition… I took this while helping with a GCSE mirror photo shoot.*

So despite the confusing torments to which he sometimes subjected my Bear, I was mindful that Jack had some reverence for beauty within him.

His dad was a veteran and a magistrate, a firm and strict man who appeared uninterested in children. Jack’s older half-brother had behavioural issues so severe, he boarded at a special school. Jack must have suffered from a lack of empathy around him.

Knowing some of a person’s challenging backstory, combined with a glimpse into a softer moment, helps me summon sympathy and patience for them. Semi-consciously, I use this to triangulate characters too: one point flaw, one point misfortune, one point unexpected kindness.

I wonder, though: does this become a bit formulaic, a bit facile? What fully qualifies a character, and indeed a real human being, as well-rounded?

Basic Binaries

It seems the instinct when creating characters is to allow for juxtaposition. If it’s a really nasty character, make sure there’s a streak of goodness. Any nice character needs a flaw. But binary opposites don’t draw a complete circle.

Then there’s the element of surprise. Let’s endow each character with something a little unexpected. Preternaturally mature thoughts from a young character; impressively trendy observations from an elderly one. Again, these examples fall into binaries, which are simply opposite points on a single line.

This makes characters entertaining and makes plots interesting. But when I look deeply at it, I’m not sure how enriched these methods are. The main character in Me Before You by JoJo Moyes, for example, is quite charming and we’re rooting for her, but I never felt convinced she was fully rounded. She was given a quirky dress sense and a shockingly sad episode in her background, plus a chatty demeanor. From that assemblage of characteristics, I didn’t feel I understood who she was, if that makes sense.

I come up against this a lot if I think deeply about characters, whether created by successful writers or by myself; whether it’s classic writing from centuries ago, or current. It’s like if you try to remember someone’s face in its entirety, but can only summon eyes and maybe the smile. Or if you look at a word too long and the way the letters fit together ceases to cohere, and you question how they could possibly belong in that absurd order and what business do we have assigning them any meaning in the first place.

I’m not sure we can ever fully round a character, because how can we ever grasp a human being in their fullness, when we are forever developing our understanding of ourselves?

Bursting Bubbles

The best way to fill out our own personalities is to take in diverse perspectives through various forms of media, and then reflect on them. In some ways this is made easy for us because more voices are amplified and represented now. On the other hand, this can feel like an intimidating cacophony, and we retreat into our own corners with people who share our opinions and backgrounds. We risk shallowness.

After a GCSE English lesson this week, my colleague approached me with concerns about a special needs student. ‘It’s…thinking,’ my fellow TA explained. “She avoids any thinking.”

That’s true of a lot of students. True of a lot of people. Watching particularly our year 10 boys, who don’t take anything seriously and won’t accept any responsibility, I suspect they’ve learned this not just online but from their parents.

We hear the phrase “living in a bubble” especially pertaining to social media. However, bubble is an unrealistically soft word for this. Sure, it feels soft and cushioning to us. But we’re actually sharpening our edges when we rub against the same opinions and beliefs again and again. Repeated agreement flattens our character.

One of my projects last month was a short story about Issy, whose teen brother became radicalised online by right-wing misogynists, so she runs away and hides out in the Charles Dickens Museum. She reads his classics and observes tourists and sometimes reflects on how one-dimensional everyone seems “these days.”

While creating Issy’s story, I explored with her the idea of flat versus rounded characters. Throughout human history, most have been forced to focus almost exclusively on survival. Even in the ever-so-civilised British Empire when Dickens wrote, thousands were starving and neglected; disease and dismal sanitation conditions were rampant. How many had the privilege of being well-rounded?

So it’s important we use our relative privilege to expand our horizons, and I guess sometimes that means not judging so harshly when people seem narrow-minded or flat. In fiction, though, I will continue to ponder what really makes a well-rounded character. How would you define it?

Writing Showcase

This week Lou Wilford, a fellow writer I know through reviewing and critiquing groups, has featured me on her blog as November’s Showcased Writer. Lou writes with wit and humour, so her own monthly blog posts are terrifically entertaining.

*Dickens Museum, Doughty Street, London*

Follow this link for my interview and a couple of stories. I enjoyed reflecting on Lou’s questions. We cover my influences and processes as a writer; what it means to be “cultured,” and the unfortunately valid question: “Are writers selfish?”

I selected my story “Centuries, in Burnt Sienna” as a sample to include in the showcase. I wrote it in 2020 and it was published in 2021, but I find myself going back to it when the world seems particularly tumultuous. Two sisters come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, and while they experience the terrorist attacks of September 2001 very differently, it ends their rivalry and brings them closer than ever before.

It’s a total classic, rich in taste and colour imagery. Also featuring pioneer Barbies at risk of dysentery, and a puppy named Periwinkle.

So anyway, that’s all I’m publishing for this fortnight. It’s handy timing. I worked hard on the interview questions and such during my flights at the end of October, and the work pays off a month later as I’m busy making Thanksgiving pies. I’m also fresh off a madcap romp through London, walking 13 miles in 8.5 hours to take in as many festive sights as possible. I expect I’ll be writing about that a bit in my Seven Wanders of 2025 coming up in another month!

Happy beginning of the holidays, everyone. Do let me know what you think of the interview. What makes a person cultured? And should we allow creative types a bit of selfishness?

All Over the Place

This Week’s Bit of String: Expanding brackets

Back in school for the Christmas term, I spent 40 minutes working with a student on algebraic practice expanding brackets. Guiding him to multiply each bracketed term by each term in the other brackets, explaining why we’re multiplying here.

He was making progress, starting to remember a couple more steps as we moved on to the third problem of his online homework—and then he was sick of it. He insisted on guessing, repeatedly and incorrectly, stabbing the keyboard, for the fourth problem.

I sputtered reminders that he could work out the right answer if he tried.

*Autumn leaves at Mascoma Lake, New Hampshire*

He stabbed another wrong guess. “Miss, I just saw, like, three stages of grief pass over your face in one second.”

He may well have seen anger and bargaining and depression, but his comment then immediately made me laugh. It’s fitting, I suppose. It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.

Across the Ocean and Back

Just a week ago, as the half-term break ended, I arrived back from the USA. I published my previous blog post from Heathrow Departures on my way out, and spent the entire flight westward on writing tasks. Caught up on the latest Mslexia issue, scribbled about the journey, and wrote answers to interview questions for a Writers Showcase I’ll be participating in at the end of the month.

I made the trip for three reasons: to be with my family as we cope with bereavement, to start finding some private closure for myself, and to help out in any way possible. My parents are now in charge of my aunt’s house as well as their own, and my autistic cousin is now a wonderful part of our family. There’s a lot going on.

For example, on my first full day there I woke up at 4:15 a.m. and started scribbling about the previous evening’s reunion with my family. At the vaguest sign of daylight, around 6:45, I embarked on a 5-mile hike. I started in awe of the New England autumn colours which I haven’t seen much in 22 years and eventually made my way to the cemetery where I had a good cry at 8 a.m. over the family graves. I thanked our lost loves for giving us such good examples of how to look after each other.

After helping my mom with weeding, organising the pantry, and then hoovering up cobwebs from the basement ceiling, we left my aunt’s house for my parents’ and met up with my brother and his kids, plus my kiddo and their fiancé, for raucous family times. This included, among other random moments, me bouncing my niece on my lap while singing a sped-up version of a Sunday school song about Daniel in the lion’s den, in honour of my cousin’s middle name Daniel. Junie demanded it twice more.

And that was just one day! It was a wonderful week, I managed to squeeze a fair bit in, although it feels surreally separate from my back-to-term life. Despite the lack of sleep on the overnight flight home plus hints of jet lag, I made it through this past week at school while also cleaning my own house this time, running the BlueSky channel for Women Writers Network, critiquing 3 different pieces for other writers, editing the opening section of my new novel to submit that for feedback, starting my Thanksgiving cooking, and writing this masterful piece.

Ups and Downs

My day job itself is a microcosmic whirlwind of emotion. I’ll spend an excruciating hour with a student who refuses to go to classes so it’s down to TAs to educate her 1:1. An hour despairing of my career choice while she refuses to do anything while she glowers at her phone under a fur-lines parka hood. Try to make conversation and half the time I’m met with a sneering, “You WHAT?” The next hour, I might be fortunate enough to attend a Photography class, prompting and scribing a student’s self-evaluation of his work while a couple other boys in the class exchange corny jokes.

“Miss, what do you think of this one: What did the first hat say to the second hat? —You stay here, I’ll go on a head.”

I told my husband’s favourite joke which involves an elephant impersonation so I could never do it justice here. This surprised the boys so much, they cracked up. Meanwhile, my student tried his best to bite his smile back and I could claim my revenge:

“Pretty sure I just saw all five stages of grief pass over your face when I told that joke,” I quipped.

While acknowledging, and celebrating really, that our lives are made up of such emotional tempests, and that progress is often two steps forward and one (or two or three) back, I don’t necessarily like that portrayed too realistically in a book. I like a story to have a fairly orderly trajectory.

Yes, the protagonist, having been made suddenly aware of a problem during the inciting incident, will over-compensate and mess it all up. Yes, all will seem lost at the midpoint and they’ll have to rally again. But it irks me when a writer reconciles characters just to fall out over something else, for example, or gives them a crucial self-realisation only to forget it in the next chapter and have to learn it again. This seems common in stories of middle-class angst.

Maybe my intolerance makes me a selfish reader, but I don’t need fiction to resemble real life that much. I can read about real, sometimes harrowing issues, but give me some kind of actual trajectory through it. The ups and downs of real life are tiring enough.

Does that bother you in a book? How firmly do you like stories plotted, or are you happy enough to spend each moment with a character?

What We Do It For

This Week’s Bit of String: The attention-seeking habits of adolescent male humans

Most Year 11s in our bottom-set class aren’t interested in the problems of the past. They’ve been taught about the workhouses and Thomas Malthus’s Poor Law of 1834, but our Trio of Fortitude just smirks over their A Christmas Carol essays when I prompt, “So why did Dickens write about Scrooge in that way? Why did he write this book?”

“Fame. Money,” they say.

And what surer way to earn those than write a book? I hear my fellow creatives laughing wryly at that.

*Centre of attention, or chance for reflection? Mirror spiral in London*

There’s probably an element of projection here, assuming every adult from every time period will share the adolescents’ lust for money and fame. These are, after all, the same boys who’ve ridiculed me assuming my job is low-paid.

“You’ll never own a Lamborghini, Miss, so what is the point?”

As for fame, I don’t think these students crave it, but they do like a certain quantity of attention. The Year 10 boys have taken attention-seeking to new depths. They like to watch each other accuse staff of misconduct.

We squeeze through the crowded corridors to hear a boy shout, “Miss, did you just assault a minor?” One of our longest-serving, high-level TAs walked into a classroom to have a boy ask, grinning, “Didn’t I just see you chuck a pen at a student?” It happens with such frequency, we wondered if it was a TikTok trend. This particular group of boys get such a kick out of joining in to make bizarre claims.

Fame and Money

Attention-seeking is no fault, to my thinking. We all need attention, and I aim to give it to those I love without them needing to seek it. Ideally, we would know the students in our classes, even the ones not technically on the special needs register, well enough to cater to their personal interests and goals. But in a low-set Science class of thirty, many of the students with high need and low focus, while we’re trying to teach the entire GCSE curriculum, we’re mostly running around shushing and confiscating hazards.

Attention-seeking tactics, performances for peers, sometimes choke out opportunities to gain deeper, more constructive attention.

Obviously, when I write I do hope that certain pieces will gain favourable attention. Sometimes, in conversation, I prize making a witty riposte above empathy. Then I regret it after, even if I won a few gratifying laughs. Attention is great, but it’s not my raison d’etre.

*I also put up the harvesty decorations. Here’s Obie looking perfectly autumnal.*

My writing jobs in the last fortnight have consisted of preparations to feature as a Showcased Writer on another writer’s blog, and maintaining writing group correspondences and completing critiques, while also adding more to the new novel I’ve been working on. There’s a mix of promoting myself, others, and creating for the fun of it (which will hopefully one day appeal to others too).

Our Women Writers Network on Bluesky also hosted one of our Skychats, inviting other creatives to join in on the hashtag #WomenWritersNet. This month’s topic was the Writing Mindset and it was inspiring to listen to people’s thoughts about what this entails, and hammer out my own idea of it.

For me, a writing mindset is open to ideas, no matter how mundane the source, and is flexible in switching from gathering mode to the hard work of expanding an idea. My writing mindset is fed by such discussions with other creatives, and by taking in art of all forms–reading, listening to music, walking city streets–and yes, by affirmation.

Time Well Spent

By far, the most writing I do is in my daily scribbles. For 5.5 years, I’ve written on and about every single day, chronicling interactions and noting ideas. I sometimes worry about the amount of time this takes me, usually at least an hour each day.

Is the time I spend trying to preserve memories and thoughts distracting from the now? Or do my reflections enhance my present?

*A bit of notebook-ogling while waiting at the airport*

This week, as I prepare to visit my family in the US the instant half-term break begins, I’ve looked back through my notebooks. There are dozens of them now. I found the ones from each summer visit, and flipped through specifically to find each time we saw my Aunt Laurel, who passed away just weeks ago.

Since I’ll be helping my family in the wake of her loss, it fortified me tremendously to read family stories she told me that I’d recorded in my journal, and little bits of conversation, the ways we made each other laugh, how she’d reach up at least a foot over her head to hug my husband and call him “Sweetie.”

My journal also reminded me of her words: “It takes a lot of disasters to make a grown-up, or even to feel fully human.” That puts all the attention-seeking antics of young people in perspective, doesn’t it?

So, my favourite reason to write is to preserve love. To lay down a thread guiding me back to the best kind of attention, from the people dearest to me. It often works out that those people are the ones who give me strength and inspiration to keep creating.

Do you have people like that to fortify your writing mindset? How do you balance preserving relationships with gaining attention?

My Writingversary

This Week’s Bit of String: Pencils, coughs, and cake

Thirty-three years ago Wednesday, I started properly writing my first book. I was eleven years old, in seventh grade. I hid behind my hair and refused to wear my ugly glasses. When I was forced to speak in front of the class, a classmate hooted, “Turn up your hearing aids, everybody.”

I may not have had much to say, but I had a story to write. I’d planned it for months; drawing up maps and a census, tracing pictures I thought resembled my characters, recording a soundtrack mixtape. I blocked out scenes with my little pencil-people that lived in cardboard tenement blocks, or in drawer compartments above my jeans and sweaters.

And then I finally started writing it. It had taken time to realise I could do more than play-act it in miniature, I could write it. Preserve it. Do the grown-up thing.

On the very evening after I’d begun my writing, I received encouragement at the junior high school’s annual Open Evening. My new English teacher praised my classwork extensively to my parents. She was the first to focus on my writing. It felt like an endorsement on behalf of the universe, the timing of her conviction that I could go far. I remember being giddily pleased, while of course trying not to show it.

In the next two months, with pencils, stacks of double-sided lined paper, and my tiny printing (I’ve no idea why they say that’s a symptom of a control freak), I wrote 386 pages. Whilst maintaining my good grades, too. I have never been able to replicate that accomplishment in terms of volume produced.

Reaching Limits

That draft should have been more than 386 pages. I hadn’t reached the end, even though I knew exactly what should come next. I had thought about it, played reels of it in my mind often enough. I contracted bronchitis and was sick for 3 weeks, then got it again the following month and was sick for longer.

Not only had I entered my Author Era, I was pioneering what would become my Victorian street urchin-inspired cough. To this day, I’m susceptible to it, and it serves as a homing signal for my family to find me.

I was barely able to do schoolwork, and I stopped writing my story. Throughout the following decade, I simply restarted the same story, standing in new sidekicks as I met new friends, and I never got past 100 pages. The first novel I would ever complete, Artefacts, was a very different story although it had a similar protagonist modeled somewhat inadvertently on myself. But my self-perception had evolved over the years requiring a different plot, because my dream ending shifted from being rescued to self-acceptance.

I finished my first novel in 2015, almost 23 years after my original Writingversary. My first published story, in The Bristol Prize Anthology 2010, came 17.5 years after the Writingversary. 10.5 years after my Writingversary, I completed a degree in Writing and Literature while a single mother working full-time. I’ve had quite a few short stories published now. Not so with my novels yet, but I wonder if my 7th grade teacher, and the many supportive teachers and college instructors that followed, might still be impressed.

Marking Success

It’s a bit staggering to consider that I’ve been putting pencil to paper to write planned projects for more than three decades. Naturally, I wish I had more to show for it. Winning the 2017 Gloucestershire Prose Prize and reading at Cheltenham Literature Festival was a highlight, and my story “Pie a la Mode” won £250 in Amazon vouchers from the Funny Pearls humour website. Enough to fund equipment for a pet cat, and even a new hoover to clean up after our dark feline prince Oberon.

*This year’s Writingversary* *destination*

Writing has opened up social opportunities as I’ve made wonderful friends through writing groups, and it’s an integral part of my mental well-being. I don’t feel right if I don’t do it. By building my writing habit over the years, I’ve built resilience as well. I may not have a lucrative career, but I am constantly creating or fine-tuning pieces.

I still sometimes wonder if my bouts of poorliness tend to follow a particularly busy writing stretch. But now, because writing is part of my daily life, I tend to keep working on projects even when a cough strikes, or even flu.

Maybe that’s my best success. Thirty-three years provide many chances to give up, and I didn’t. For this year’s Writingversary, I walked up to the local Garden Centre after work and had a drink in the cafe and a slice of pumpkin cake with maple chai frosting. I scribbled in the golden autumn light. The timing of my Writingversary draws me to this season, and I’m so glad I found a bit of time to celebrate.

Do you remember when you first started writing? How do you celebrate this milestone?

Weighing Ideas

This Week’s Bit of String: Notre Dame towers and a dog called Unity

Last weekend, we were in Paris. It was a wild idea, the trip planned in less than a fortnight. From 3:00 Saturday morning, when we woke up to shower and catch a flight from Bristol to Paris CDG, until 10:15 Sunday night when we fell into bed back in our own home, we walked 54,000 steps. We stayed Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in the 14th Arondissement, but the bed was comfortable, we had climate control, and there was a full Parisian breakfast included.

We had a bittersweet reason for this enjoyable adventure. When my aunt Laurel died a couple weeks ago, one of my cousins already had a trip booked to Paris. Laurel and my cousin were great Francophiles, so the family was inspired to send some of her ashes over and scatter them in the Seine. I couldn’t be at the full funeral in Vermont–busy though the weekend in Paris was, it didn’t shatter me the way a whirlwind cross-Atlantic trip with a minimum of 16 hours travel each way would have done–I could be part of this goodbye without missing work.

My cousin chose a spot across from Notre Dame’s dome, where we could walk down a cobbled ramp to the river. We found as we approached that as well as a cathedral view, we would be leaving my aunt alongside a weathered wooden statue of a turtle bracketed onto the stone wall, quite fitting as she’d had a beloved pet turtle for decades.

She loved dogs too, and soon after we’d poured her ashes into the river, a dog came bounding in, bucking jubilantly, snapping at her own splashes. Her French owner told us the dog’s name was Unity, and we did feel a strange synthesis at the resting place.

I was happy with this sendoff for Laurel, but my heart aches that all the life erupting around her in this location will never know her or her story. I wonder what other remnants of lives we step over all the time, and what unimaginable events will unfold later.

Interlocking Stories

Paris is particularly suited to such wonderings, with its many plaques honouring students and others who were killed in the Resistance against Nazi occupiers, and other signs memorialising Jewish families that were deported. Behind Notre Dame, there’s the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, which I researched for part of a story I wrote in January. The main character spent time in Paris and met his fiance, changing his life.

I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be visiting Paris later, and scattering my aunt’s ashes across the Seine from the same Memorial. Once again, there’s a strange unity of past and present, fiction and nonfiction. As Julia Ormond says in the 1990s remake of Sabrina, one of my aunt’s “Chicken Soup Movies” which she believed had restorative powers: “Paris is always a good idea.”

*Back to the writing work, here’s a picture of the incredible Our Lady of the Workers church in the 14th Arondissement*

I’d actually forgotten about the story I wrote in January, with its Paris turning point, until my cousin told me where we’d take our aunt’s ashes. The story needs a lot of work. I wrote it during my January short story binge, when I slapped whatever idea I had onto paper: new ones, old and previously rejected ones, half-dreamed ones.

Since then, I’ve had a couple short stories I’ve worked hard at polishing, and I’ve started a new novel while still working on the final edits to my book about Eve and Creation. These projects are still keeping me pretty busy alongside my day job and everything else, so the fictional Paris encounter will probably wait a long while.

Ideas to Remember

It’s not possible to remember every idea or story, good or bad. So just because one thing has to wait doesn’t mean it will never get its time. When it comes to assessing our creative choices–and our life choices, really–there are so many possibilities that it seems unfair to judge one as entirely bad or good.

While I’m making up a new novel, I haven’t decided yet whose voice to lead with out of my new characters, and I keep switching. Would 5 points-of-view be too many? Yes, I know. But I decided while making myself write just four days after Laurel’s death, my work-in-progress wasn’t fun enough. So I pried its bars loose, and went back to page 2 to introduce an entirely new character, outside the pages of development I’d explored and planned in the pre-drafting stages.

Have you ever felt the need to do such a thing? Did it work?

My middle-class protagonists who take themselves somewhat seriously needed a foil, or maybe that was just me. Either way, I’ll see what comes of having someone else in the mix. A story undergoes so much evolution and so many rewrites, most ideas turn out to contribute something worthwhile.

I wouldn’t usually slide in an extra character, but it’s earlyish still, and who’s to stop me? In real life, there are people who appear out of nowhere and brighten everything.

I wouldn’t usually spend a middle-of-the-term weekend gallivanting around Paris, either. I don’t know if Paris, is, in fact, always a good idea, but it worked for us this time. And there’s a lot more we’d like to see. Strange to think I now have a bit of my aunt on this side of the ocean, over the Channel. Wondrous to imagine the places and people we have yet to be part of.

All in Your Head

This Week’s Bit of String: A 160-year-old murder

Once on a Girl Scout visit to the local Shaker Museum, we learned about a murder which hastened the decline of this hard-working populace. The story stayed with me for decades, and only recently on a visit home did I confirm it.

Shakers, officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, fused work and worship to delight in tasks rather than view them as punishments. This resulted in some excellent craftsmanship for which they’re known. They’re also distinct for practising celibacy. Their numbers relied on recruits.

*One of the original Shaker tables, where the Wier girls may have eaten their meals*

Families struggling to provide for their children might sign a couple over to the Shakers, agreeing not to interfere with Shaker education. When the American Civil War started, a man named Thomas Wier entered two daughters into such an agreement. He was enlisting, and his wife was ill. It seemed the best way to look after them.

In 1863, Wier returned. He made various attempts to take his daughters back, valuing unification above the contract. His wife and older daughter tried to snatch them away during a visit, but the girls fought them. On another evening, Wier tried to visit them but the community trustee, Caleb Dyer, refused because it was so late in the day. Wier shot him.

Caleb Dyer died from his wounds three days later. As trustee, he’d been in charge of the finances pooled by the fellowship. They had invested in mills, bridges, and railways around town. However, his records of these transactions had mainly been mental and unwritten. Without him, creditors swarmed and a local mill even, apparently, fabricated debts and demanded them of the Shakers. The community lost a lot of money.

Hearing that story the first time, it fascinated me that a whole group’s fate hinged on a desperate man’s impulsive act against a seemingly, perhaps excessively, introspective one. I always wondered what happened to the children Wier was pursuing. Did they feel responsible? Where did they truly feel at home?

My recent visit did not illuminate anything on that front, so I’m still imagining the possibilities.

Life of the Mind

The tale had populated my mind for so long anyhow. In my last post, I considered how random objects can lodge in our memories, and this is even more true of stories. Their crest and ebb etch channels into our minds. For us creative types, it’s as if we’re standing on the shore wondering how to harness these tides.

Once we’ve diverted our gathered stories into new forms, an even bigger question is: What’s good enough to share? Which are better off eddying in our minds and which can we release?

Last week, one of my stories dried up in the wild, you might say. It was my third story to flow all the way to a major competition’s longlist, but not make it past the dam. Longlisting is good for sure, but I want better for my stories. Now I have to work out how to give it an extra shove, when I thought it was great already.

It’s panic-inducing, the realisation that most of our work will advance no further than the borders of our minds. Our desires to reap tangible benefits from all our efforts, to gain recognition and to be remembered for it after we’re gone, are all real and human. If my novels and more of my stories never get published, will all my time be wasted?

Shifting Currents

When the Shaker community started to die down and sell off their buildings, a Catholic community bought up much of the premises. They built their own shrine and chapel, and fixed up the Shaker buildings with a view to running a boys’ school.

*From left: Shaker broom shop, Catholic chapel, Shaker Great Stone Dwelling*

For decades the shrine kept going partly by putting up a dazzling display of Christmas lights in the snow, and receiving donations. But the funds seem to have dried up, and as of a few years ago, they couldn’t maintain the site. By this time, the Shaker Museum was established enough to buy the site back.

So, anything can happen. A draft of a story in my head could evolve into something else entirely, or get swallowed into another project. Maybe that will have more of a chance outside my imagination’s borders. Who knows.

Like the Shakers, we can’t view our work as a punishment, or even exclusively as a means to an end. Engaging with creative pursuits is challenging, but it helps us make sense of and appreciate our surroundings and the people therein. It gives us an outlet in stressful times, whether someone else ever sees it or not.

Even if our creations don’t make it far out of our heads, is that really such a bad place to be?

Objects in the Rearview Mirror

This Week’s Bit of String: A library visit and hometown changes

On the first day of my summer visit from old England to New, I went to the library with my mother. It’s recently been refurbished in my hometown. The children’s area boasts a full play kitchen, and a teen reading room features a whiteboard table for doodling. On top of the bookshelves in the grown-up section, a community craft exhibit includes three-dimensional scrapbooked cards, patchwork quilts, carvings of birds, embroidered landscapes, and a whole felted ark full of animals.

What a lovely place. I did wonder, though, as Mom and I left, “What happened to that mysterious cabinet of dolls that used to be at the back of the library when I was a kid?”

She responded, “I keep wondering what happened to the collection of international creches at the Catholic shrine after it was bought out.”

Another good question. The lakeside Catholic retreat in town ran out of funds and was bought out by the Shaker Museum across the street, an ironic reversal of fortunes which I may revisit in a later post because there’s an intriguing story at the heart of it.

For our purposes this week, suffice to say that the Catholic site had a Christmas specialty. They ranged an immense collection of lights along their hillside. Coming home on a December night, we’d see them reflected in the lake from a couple miles away. They also took donations of nativity sets from all around the world, many of them beautifully crafted.

It’s funny how objects that may not have tangibly impacted us can anchor in our minds and resurface later. As writers, we’re often character-driven and particularly fascinated with people. But lately, I’ve noticed inanimate objects asserting importance in my short stories. What does it mean?

Living in a Material World

For me, writing a short story has generally included a central image, which may well be a natural or material object. Mudpies, a book of mazes, lipstick. Usually these are sort of thematic, whereas lately they’re practically plot points.

In the past year, I wrote a story about a fairground tragedy involving a ferris wheel, and the wheel additionally functions as a wider symbol. Another story currently on submission is about a family, each child represented by a colour from the gumballs in a vintage candy machine. Two decades of mid-twentieth century history are magnified through the machine’s glass sphere.

In real life, I’ve tended to wax sentimental over objects. After moving house when I was 8, I carried a little box of favourite things with me everywhere. A stone from the lake where we used to live, a broken necklace charm from a long-distance relative, I can’t even remember what else. When called upon to correct a sentence on the blackboard, I didn’t leave my seat without my box. I dropped it once and scrambled on the floor in front of my new classmates to gather my treasured crumbs.

Objects stand in for people in my mind. One of the many details I plan regarding my summer trip is coordinating my contact lenses. I wear monthly ones, and I always time the changing of them so that I put new ones in on the last day with my family. That way, I can linger for longer back in the UK with lenses that have “seen” my loved ones. It’s silly, but I’ve not been able to shake that symbolism.

Object Permanence

*Please look after this bear thank you.*

Maybe I am holding back a bit from attaching deeply to characters in a short story, placing a central object between us for distance. Will that impede the reader’s experience? We’ll have to see. It’s a new angle from which to look at characters—how they handle objects in their lives can tell us a lot.

It’s not as if this is wholly without literary precedent. Objects are important in children’s literature. A glass slipper, a golden ticket…A wardrobe becomes a new world, a boxcar becomes a home, dolls come to life. I remember a book in our church library about a penny. Each chapter focused on a new owner of that penny, from a child abducted by native Americans to an enslaved boy running toward freedom.

What could objects say about us, if they could speak? We did an assignment like that in our Journal As Literature college class. A friend wrote from the point of view of the socks she always wore to bed. I wrote about the teddy bear I’d bought my baby from London, to connect them to their then-estranged father. If I’m remembering correctly, I think the bear assessed me as guilty of some misplaced sentimentality, but he felt compassion for me too. Of course he was compassionate; he’s a teddy bear.

What would you write about? If your main character had to flee with a handful of possessions, what would they take?

Rules and Regulations

This Week’s Bit of String: A blossoming crop of exclamation points

My back garden has transitioned from Phase 1 to Phase 2. Especially in a warm, dry year like this, I work on growing vegetables almost all year-round, something not possible in the winters where I’m from.

Phase 1 involved harvesting the broad beans and onions I planted last October. It involved tulip worship, California poppy and cosmos bliss, and a long wait for raspberry-shaped alliums. A near-intoxicating glut of strawberries, plus the first courgettes.

And it was fairly bountiful. A dozen onions lie curing on a cooling rack on my dining room table. I have two bags of strawberries in the freezer, and I ate loads more as summer conquered the spring most mercilessly.

Despite platoons of ants marching up and down the beanstalks to farm saturated black colonies of aphids, I harvested a few mixing bowls of bean pods over the during Phase 1, enhancing a few stews and salads. I uprooted the stalks a couple weeks ago, leaving some foliage to nourish the soil.

Phase 2 is more courgettes, blueberries, tomatoes, and cauliflower. Deep purple petunias and gladioli; roses and rudbeckia. Phase 3 will be carrots, aubergines, more tomatoes and onions, plus possibly a few pears.

When the breeze blows and the neighbours’ various extension projects fall silent, the garden is blissful, a haven for bees (so long as they can spiral upward, away from Obie cat). But it’s also a wonder, a rebellion, a never-guaranteed reward for labour.

Sometimes I reflect that every unfolding petal is miraculous.

Shout-Outs

I adore the velvet of the petunia flowers, and I was thrilled to find the broad bean pods were fleecy inside, too. I never knew that.

I’ve seen two different kinds of bees on one allium. Every time I pass the cream-coloured roses in the front garden to water the hostas and calla lilies, I smell their gentle raspberry scent. A peony bush and two sheafs of wheat at opposite sides have appeared and grown out of nowhere. The wheat is a tight braid of kernels, its blue-green slowly drying.

Until three years ago, when our Bear moved back to the USA, I didn’t have time to grow plants. I’m still a bit shocked this is a thing I’m capable of, although clearly nature is doing much of the work. If given the chance, I will boast about my yields, just as I might about my word count cultivating a new novel. 3000 words per week isn’t amazing, except maybe it is because I’m doing it while the term stretches on and I spend my breaks and half my lessons in classrooms that are at least 30 degrees Celsius, with understandably obstreperous teens.

Thinning the Rows

Of course, that isn’t my only writing project. I’m still doing some editing work on my novel about Eve. Lately, this involves hitting the Ctrl + F to find all instances of very, or thing, or just. Most of these can be eliminated, or replaced with a stronger, more suitable word.

When gardening, I often disregard recommended distances between plants. For a British garden, we’re lucky with its size, but ours isn’t massive and I’m trying to squeeze a diverse group of crops in. So I will plant things closer together than recommended and I don’t always thin the seedlings out. What will be, will be, It usually works out.

Not so with writing, of course. There’s a lot of pruning involved, almost in perpetuity. And I follow the rules more faithfully here, trimming off excess modifiers and adverbs and honing language beyond “started to” or “tried to” or “like” or “things.”

But there’s one rule I’m questioning, and it’s exclamation points. Current thinking allows them little right to exist. I know what you’re thinking: “What?!” Just kidding. I hated when, for the last couple years or so, Elon changed the post-your-Tweet box to “What’s happening?!” feeding the sensation that the world is in chaos and each of us is urgently reporting on this minute by minute.

I understand that the words themselves should convey the urgency. But it looks limp and anti-climactic to write without an exclamation point sometimes: “‘No,’ she cried.”

Take the flashback scene when Eve remembers Cain killing Abel. In the Biblical account, it is the second of many instances in which God is disappointed by His underperforming Creation. To Eve, it is unending separation from both her sons because of a deity’s petty grievances. Perhaps she is entitled to a few exclamation points.

There are times when playing it cool doesn’t make sense. I am happy to sprinkle excited exclamation marks amidst the contentment I feel in my garden. Goodness knows there are many more alarming justifications for exclamations these days. I wonder if robbing a character or incident of an exclamation mark minimises their experience. But as with any other device, the mark’s potency does depend on it not being overused.

What do you think about this form of punctuation? Do you strive to use it less… Or should we be letting it back into our lives and our work?