balance – Nastasya Parker

Following Through

This Week’s Bit of String: Setting out the pots and pans

On busy days, I put out the cooking dishes I’ll need for dinner before I even leave for work. I’m convinced it helps me later on.

It’s a mystery to my husband, the difference it makes to have a saucepan out ready for pasta, or a baking sheet for roast veg, maybe even the olive oil standing to attention beside the stove. I realise it doesn’t actually save me time. But it’s a springboard, a little jump in momentum.

If I feel a task is already started, it’s less daunting to carry on with the whole thing. Not that I have much choice regarding cooking dinner! But if it’s a really awful chore, like dusting or scrubbing the shower, having the space cleared and the cloth or scrub brush out convinces me to get on with it when I get up in the morning or come home from the schoolday.

Writing is similar. Just amending Pages’s silly default settings, titling a document, and putting page numbers at the bottom (to be really optimistic), makes me feel I’ve got going. No turning back. And when a piece is properly in progress, I sometimes utilise the trick of stopping midsentence so I know how to crack on when I return to it.

Finding the Way Through

To write a novel, I plan to a fair degree. After all, it’s so much work; I need to be sure something tangibly happens, that my protagonist is transformed in some way. Then I can write with a sense of what needs to occur in the beginning, middle, and end, stepping stones to guide me through the big project.

Short stories are often more vibey for me. I might have a character idea or an event idea, but almost never both. So I won’t necessarily know what happens, or who it’s happening to. Still, a short story feels less unwieldy, and it’s exciting to dive in without a plan. But the amount of options can be daunting.

In lieu of plot points to get me through, for a short story I like to coalesce around a certain language motif, or imagery theme. In “Pie a la Mode,” I followed the schoolyear’s changing weather and linked it to relationships. In “The Albatross of Albany High School,” I had Coleridge’s poem weaving throughout, a thread to follow. My current short story is about a fairground accident so I have all the carnival imagery to focus on.

The Finish Line

I’ve only just finished the fairground story, which I started writing during half-term. It’s been a long time since I did a first draft, and this is a really rough one. Just write it, I had to remind myself. Keep slamming whatever down; shape it later. And holy guacamole, I’ve got plenty here to chisel.

Winging it with writing a story feels similar to the fasting and dieting I’ve been doing. Fasting removes the usual structure of meals, the timings of a day dependent on treats. What are the markers here, am I even nearing my goal?

In an essay for LitHub, short story writer Yukiko Tominga talks about how she knows when to end a story. It’s “when I feel kindness.” Writing is her process toward loving a character despite their flaws. If she still feels “meanness” toward anyone, the story isn’t done.

This seems a beautiful way to view any process, really. We are journeying toward kindness. Any glimmer of sympathy is a stepping stone toward this, any hint of another’s motives is a thread we can follow toward sympathy or even empathy.

Planning ahead with my chores, placing equipment ready, I’m doing myself little favours, getting the initiation of the tasks out of the way. My diet makes me feel kinder to myself, and gives me more focus in the meantime. My current story draft, slapped down with random idea spatters and sprawling tendrils, has material I can work with to feel kindness to the characters and hopefully point readers in that direction.

What kindnesses are you striving for?

Feed and Flow

This Week’s Bit of String: Starving feet and empty legs

When they were little, my kiddo would sometimes pause their playing and say, “I’ve got my starving foot on!”

I assumed this was Bear’s way of telling me they were hungry right down to their toes, similarly to how my aunt described adolescents as “reaching the empty leg stage.” So I’d scramble to provide a snack.

Years later, I found out Bear was actually telling me their foot had fallen asleep. That pins and needles sensation in their extremities felt similar to the queasy emptiness of hunger in the belly, I suppose.

*Then there’s this little guy, who slept 8 hours straight one day last week after bringing a live bird inside, chasing it around, and then eating most of it.*

“Yeah,” mused Bear, “I always wondered why you gave me food every time my foot went dead.”

It’s an interesting feeling, hunger. Sometimes weirdly similar to feeling overfull, the ache and stretch of a stomach panicking, desperate to adapt its shape to the circumstances. While our minds seek refuge from pain, they are to an extent sharpened by hunger, since surplus can dull us.

Coming Clean

Over the half-term week off I began a change, cutting down my food intake and waiting 18 hours between one day’s evening meal and the next day’s late lunch. It’s a decision based partly on aesthetics, as I would catch sight of myself looking puddly, a bit of a soft mound. I’m proud of being a busy and vibrant person, and although the tiredness of life has accumulated somewhat, I still sort of picture myself as that trim mum chasing a little kid around.

When Eve goes through her first pregnancy in my novel–the first ever human pregnancy, according to the Creation myth–she describes how “hunger and revulsion vied in my belly.” When our appetites have such complex manifestations, it’s easy to convince ourselves that our bodies and minds want things they don’t actually need.

*Saving myself the time it takes to bake goodies like this lemon meringue cake, and saving myself money on peanut butter.*

Over the last decade, I got in the habit of having “a little something,” a la Winnie the Pooh, to get me through whenever I had to do something hard. The problem, as you may swiftly detect, is that there are a lot of things we have to do that we don’t want to. Some days are an absolute litany of them! And my definition of a difficult task broadened to pretty much any job I wasn’t keen on. Even parts of the writing process fall into that category.

That’s why during half-term, when I had some time to do things I wanted to do, I stopped indulging in that way. Weirdly, it hasn’t been super difficult, even this week back at school. I feel a lot calmer not relying on sugar to get by, and probably in no small part because I stopped telling myself I deserved a “treat” at the slightest jostle to my plans.

Treating Myself

I’m still not getting a lot of sleep, but I’m finally accepting that sweets (and peanut butter by the spoonful) don’t cure tiredness. If they did, I wouldn’t have to keep dosing up on them.

It’s a conundrum in busy, tiring lives, keeping ourselves going in the short-term without sacrificing the long-term. I am not angry at myself for waiting this long to return to better habits. I don’t judge anyone else for doing the same, so why be nasty to myself? There are periods in our lives when it’s just not within our strength to make the best long-term decisions.

Instead, we treat ourselves to little immediacies, a pleasant taste on the tongue, a gravity to our middle while everything rushes around us. Now, I think I’m ready to go beyond “treating myself.” I’m going to treat myself… as the person I want to be.

Treating myself to a few extra minutes of sunshine taking the long way home on a nice day, instead of rushing over shortcuts to get chores done after work. Treating my stomach to a long rest. Treating my brain to concentrated periods of writing work instead of little bits here and there.

When thinking through this issue, I looked up the etymology of related terms. Words like food and hunger are so tied to basic physical needs, their roots have no surprises. The etymology of nourishment, though, reminded me of its Latin ties to nursing, as in feeding a baby, and before that, it shared the prefix nau: to swim, to flow. I do feel as if I’m getting into a more natural flow.

When my kiddo was a baby and I nursed them, they caught on quickly to the fact that milk hormones put them to sleep. Bear never wanted to sleep, even as a newborn. So they’d hum, kick, even bite to keep themselves awake while eating. It was not a tranquil experience. But it’s interesting, that link appearing again between a sated appetite and sleepiness, between hunger and staying awake. Exercising discipline physically, I feel, helps my discipline mentally.

How do hunger and satisfaction affect your mental and creative states?

Enjoy It

This Week’s Bit of String: Underrated qualifications

I’ve been helping one of our special needs students with her personal statement for university. She wants to study Photography and after writing about what she’s already achieved in the field and what specific techniques she wants to learn, she concluded with something like this: “I want to study Photography because it’s something that makes my life more enjoyable.”

This is not a conventional admission in an essay. I feel like we’re encouraged to sell our skills and our work ethic when applying for positions. We’re not supposed to bring up what, well, pleases us. Is it related to some old puritan idea that pleasure is bad? Is it a byproduct of our busy culture: our value increases as the work gets harder and less enjoyable?

*Without enjoyment, we could get dragged under. Why is it so hard to admit?*

It’s a bit backwards, though. In education, we’ll have an easier ride if a student actually likes our subject. Surely it would be nice for employers and for universities to hear that new recruits might enjoy what they’re expected to do.

Resilience

Maybe there’s the fear that if someone chooses a path because they like it, they’ll quit when the going is rough. But a passion is deeper than an interest, and that’s why we keep going in creative endeavours.

In our writing, we can’t cope with hard work, administrative tasks, and the inevitable rejection, unless we enjoy aspects of it. Just as it’s important to remember what we like about writing and why, it’s essential to then allow ourselves to enjoy writing.

I get caught up in the busy-boasting of social media sometimes, which results in me thinking of writing more as a quite mentally demanding second job. After all, we can’t just shut off the stories. I’m constantly tinkering with things in my head. And when I get to school on Monday morning for another week of supporting very needy students, I feel as if those 2 critiques passed to fellow writers and the 3 novel chapters edited over the weekend have sapped a substantial portion of my energy.

Sometimes I find my thoughts echoing my husband after a recent trip to London. 3 days, 2 nights, at least 30 miles walked… “What a stupid thing to do,” he said afterwards, half-joking (I think…) “Let’s never do that again!”

The Trappings

I liked it though. Exploring half the city, seeing new people and buildings and discovering unexpected remnants of history… It’s the same with writing. I get tired, but when my brain is jogging ahead toward a new destination (or painstakingly polishing the path to an old one, as when I’m editing), I don’t want to miss out.

*Picadilly Circus, a photo I took while tromping around London and I’m quite proud of it, actually.*

Our identities are wrapped up in writing. Part of it is that addiction to finding out where it takes us. Another part is having fun with what accompanies it. If you can score a quiet house for even just an hour, with a hot drink and some pleasantly burning candles and encouraging tunes playing, then curling up to scribble ruthless notes on your own manuscript doesn’t feel so brutal, or laborious.

I wonder if a few of us, myself included, would rather tell people we write in a cold garret subsisting on just bread crusts and gruel than confess to cranking some tunes and munching chocolate while we go. Maybe we should normalise admitting that something we devote time to is actually rather nice.

Imagine daring to pitch a writing project with: “I loved writing this story almost as much as I love reading it, and other people will too.” How amazing to get away with that! Wouldn’t it be great if, just now and then, liking something was an acceptable reason to go and do it?

Fever

This Week’s Bit of String: Overheated eyeballs

I have this bad habit of getting coughs. These aren’t misguidedly romantic chest coughs that might have made it into an epic nineteenth century novel or opera, just ugly, scraping hacks. My throat spasms into wretched fits. It carries on for weeks, my ribs get bruised, it’s exhausting.

Often, I’ll briefly get a high temperature with it. The kind of fever that crawls up behind your eyeballs and tenderises your skull. It’s not great for productivity, but does inspire vivid descriptions, if I do say so myself.

It may be a sign that I’ve been doing too much. I feel I should be able to Do All The Things. After all, I eat plenty of fruits and veggies, and get up early for exercise and fresh air. However, I seem to get sick when I’ve been completing a big writing project while also, as always, working full-time and taking care of my family. It’s as if that extra creative endeavour pushes me over the edge.

*Hiking during our camping weekend–totally worth it.*

At the moment, I’ve just missed a couple days of work for flu-like symptoms, probably a back-to-school virus, so now I’m trying my best to be quiet and not start coughing. This followed a weekend camping trip to the Peaks and copious reading about story structure, plus overtime planning resources for small group interventions at work, doing critiques for other writers, trying to finish a short story and while I haven’t quite begun the next rewrite of my novel, I’m thinking REALLY hard about it, ok?

Health Warning

Can writing affect our health? Is it one thing too much? I definitely am less grouchy when I’ve been able to write, preferably in a quiet setting, unlikely though that last bit is. I think it helps my mental health—but maybe it’s just that I place high standards on myself and I feel better for Getting Things Done, whatever the things may be.

Writing is a passion—and the root of that word is bound up with suffering. It is ‘that which must be endured.’ Hard, necessary work. It is absolutely fun and exciting, too! But it takes a lot of effort and relentless, toiling THOUGHT to make it good. So yes, it probably does impact our health.

I always felt guilty missing work if I picked up a bug while traveling, or if I’d run myself down finishing a novel. Was it wrong of me to let my personal interests impede my contracted employment? I worried I was behaving as selfishly as I perceived people who always called in sick on Mondays because they were still hungover. I’m still not convinced I’m being completely fair to co-workers or to my family in how I expend my energies.

But there are other fevers that make our brains itch. Characters that pummel our skulls from within and ideas that sputter up from deep inside us. We’ve got to write.

Incandescence

Sometimes, I do great work when I’m sick. I wrote a play during an extended bout of flu. It was about a team monitoring a whole city’s worth of subconsciouses, spying on people’s dreams to solve crimes.

*I call this one: Still life of a working writer mid-term*

Weird, I know. But kinda cool? Anyway, it did get through a competition and we performed it. Someday I might develop it further than a single act, and make a series of it or something.

In the same way that extreme weather or stress sears certain things into our memories and forms indelible creative impressions, health events can crystallise ideas.

From the tuberculosis that ravaged the Bronte family to Stephen King’s childhood ear infections which he writes about in his memoir On Writing, it does seem as if cycles of illness and health sharpen our imaginations. Have you ever found this?

While I was sick this week, my brain came to a screeching halt over work things like differentiating Science vocabulary on independent or dependent variables. But it did present me with a striking novel-related sequence, like a dream Eve or Cain might have. It unfolded before me as I trudged to work (and didn’t stay long). My elevated temperature practically distilled my story’s essence better than my healthy brain could.

What links do you see between your health and your creativity?

The Right Mix

This Week’s Bit of String: A seating plan reshuffle

You know it’s time to amend the classroom seating plan when sitting through an English exam practice question results in two students pelting empty drinks bottles at each other, clipping a staff member’s ear, and unabashedly informing the teacher they’ll f each other up as soon as the bell sounds.

In this case, the teacher begrudgingly typed up an incident report but tried to make me write the new seating chart in my unpaid after-school time.

“Make sure students a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, and i are nowhere near the windows,” she ordered. There are 3 window seats. There are 15 kids in the class.

She wanted at least 6 of them right in the front, but no one next to each other. Consign to some unreachable corner the special needs ones I’m there to support. “It’s a shame,” she said. “Most of them have been working well enough, but we’ll have to move everyone around in order to be fair.”

Rewriting a short story the following weekend felt like staring at the paper on which I was meant to draw up a new seating plan. Where to even start? So much I like, must I really chop and change the whole thing?

Outnumbered

For years since I first worked in the local secondary school, whenever I have to do something hard I have a recurring image in my mind. A dark-eyed little Year 8 slumped over basic arithmetic problems, throwing his head back and groaning, “This is so looooong!”

Long is a big insult from a student. Long is NEVER permissible to them.

*Rewriting can feel long. Long and not particularly well-illuminated.*

So it is with rewriting, in more ways than one. It takes a really long time, and I’d forgotten that because it’s been several months since I was free to sit down and fully overhaul a project. You think creating, yanking plot and character and language out of thin air, is the hardest bit. It should be quicker tidying things up, but it’s not.

It took hours of painstaking line-by-line work to shrink the word count by 40%, and that’s only the first go. Just as we make our Year 11s do more than one practice paper before exams, it’s going to take multiple versions before I get this story right.

The piece I’m working on is told by a mother of young kids. She has a terrible back injury and her husband’s disappeared. It’s funner than it sounds, because the kids are cute and the woman has a wry sense of humour. However, as with many tales, I have to balance out pain and hope, despair and wit.

Seating Plans Versus Story Drafts

There are a few similarities between helping run a classroom and pulling together a narrative.

No aimless gazing out the window: We want focus in the classroom (easier said than done) and definitely in a story. Every word and exchange should be trained toward the story’s purpose. No diddly passive verbs or excess prepositional phrases, no meandering side glances or navel-gazing either.

Long = Bad: This isn’t always true of course, but we don’t want anyone to feel something’s a slog. We give students various quick tasks to build different skills, and likewise with a story we can vary the tempo. Once I’ve made a major round of cuts, I look at the shape of the paragraphs on the page—are there too many rapid-fire dialogue lines, or excessively dense thickets of description? Where possible, I distribute these and alternate them.

Don’t forget the back row: The first page is like the classroom front row: curated with special care to set the tone. Because so much expectation rests on those initial words, I go over the beginning loads of times. But I also work backwards at some point, line-editing in reverse so my scalpel is sharp at the end for this round of cuts, rather than always sharpest at the beginning.

*A little cold round the edges can bring the general shape into sharper relief*

Maintaining balance: Move over Hamlet, the REAL question in life is do we lump the bad together so we get bigger swathes of good, or try to pace it out? In schools we often inflict a beastly child upon a lovely one in a seating plan. Otherwise the “bad” kids sit next to each other and form a whole beastly herd in Row 3. As a writer, I don’t want to present readers with unrelenting woe (I mean I’m not Thomas Hardy), so I emphasise warm relationships where possible and sprinkle humour throughout.

Make space for addition: When deep-diving into a rewrite, the immersion lasts beyond the hours of Post-It rearranging, pen slashing, and sitting at my laptop. I’ve reentered the world of my story and it takes a while to find the exit. In my dreams, on my walks, while I’m cooking dinner, I think of things I want to add. Parallels to be drawn more clearly perhaps, quick descriptors to enhance the mood.

Not ideal when trying to reduce word count to meet a competition’s maximum requirements. It’s like unleashing a kid fresh from the Internal Exclusion Room into a previously settled classroom. Will this knock everything off balance? But newcomers, whether people or words, deserve a chance.

Above all, when I’m editing I just wish someone could give me the answers. Does this go here? Am I allowed to keep this? Is something more needed there? I lucked out with the seating plan at school, because the other teaching assistant and I convinced the teacher it wasn’t our job to do it, and that little was required anyway. “You can keep most of the students where they are. It’s not as if it’s a secret why we have to move two or three of them.”

What are your tips for rewriting? Do you enjoy the process or do you find it… long?

The Privilege of Being Busy

This Week’s Bit of String: Haunted by to-do lists

When I worked in a care home, we had a particularly restless but bedbound dementia patient. She constantly asked, ‘Where have we gotta go? What have we gotta get out and do?’ And sometimes she’d say, ‘Can I just stop here a bit?’

We were told she’d been a highly reputable nurse to newborn babies. No doubt she devoted countless long shifts to her calling. She had no family of her own apart from a sister wandering the nursing home halls, stealing biscuits to feed her stuffed toy cat.

No matter how many times we reassured our resident that she didn’t have to go anywhere, she repeated her questions. She was haunted by the ghosts of her busy working life.

Today we don’t need dementia to be haunted–we have social media. Facebook pings ‘Event’ reminders, other mums depict homemade concoctions on Pinterest, and other writers’ word counts race upward on Twitter.

None of this is inherently bad. I, too, indulge in public boasts after particularly hard work: Busy Brags. I’m also ready to ‘Like’ your Busy Brags. As a writer, I’m interested in the minutiae of daily life as well as the big events, so I enjoy hearing what people get up to in a day.

Busy = Lucky

What I have to make sure not to do, however, is act as though I’m busier than everyone else.

Some kids (and adults) work ridiculously long hours in sweatshops. Some people work multiple jobs to ensure they can pay medical bills. Yet most of the Busy Brags I see in my social media bubble are about the nightmarish turmoil of preparing birthday celebrations for small offspring, or rushing back to work after an adventurous holiday. And I totally get that. But we’ve chosen this. So brag away, but don’t complain.

Cooking homemade meals and going on active holidays are choices. Even going to the gym regularly is a choice, albeit a healthy one, and writing is a choice even though it feels like a necessary response to what ranges from a nagging voice to rampant hunger. We may be utter grouches when we don’t have time to write, or exercise, but those are still privileges and most of us have enough moments of leisure, however small, that we can choose to prioritise things differently if we really want to.

Busy = Important

Fun fact: guinea pigs don’t yawn just to get oxygen to their furry wee brains when they’re sleepy. They yawn to show their teeth and scare off rivals or predators. Similarly, our society has transformed tiredness into a badge of honour. Whoever’s the most tired must have done the most work, and is therefore the most indispensable.

Watch out: fierce! Our guinea pigs, George and Fred.

I think most of us love being busy, and not just because we can brag about it on social media. To occupy our time means to take possession of it, that middle syllable of occupy coming from the same Latin word for grasp or seize, as in Carpe Diem. By filling Time’s wearying, wily moments, we feel we’ve mastered it in some way.

And of course we like quantifiable achievements so we can list in no uncertain terms how we’ve occupied, invaded, placed a firm stake in a day. Steps or miles run. Loads of laundry completed, meals packed into the freezer. Words typed. For me, I like being able to tick these off on a list. My day job is similarly oriented around clear targets: accounts billed, calls taken, cases resolved. Hours of sleep foregone.

Busy = Easy

These achievements are exciting and addictive. But am I the only one who has developed a fear, almost an aversion, to the incredibly important things that aren’t quantifiable? Spending proper time with people, caring for struggling loved ones. More than anything in the world I want to be there every second for my family when they’re hurting. But when I’m juggling office targets and word counts and submission deadlines and fitness goals the rest of the time, it’s hard to shut off that achievement addiction when a genuine crisis, something you really have to pour time into, comes up.

The kind of Busy we brag about on social media is easy. It can even be a cop out. Writers will be familiar with the memes and jokes about how clean our houses get when we have writers block, because housework is straightforward and simpler than wrestling an unwieldy plot. But tricky as finding resolution for our characters can be, that’s still many times easier than getting friends and family through real-life drama. And entertaining readers sometimes comes more naturally than entertaining our own kids.

Looking back to our patient who had been a nurse, I wonder if on some level she was aware of how repetitive she was. Maybe her questions were her way of asserting her value in a somewhat demeaning situation; a reminder that she once had gone places and done things. Sadly, she never made a single reference to the babies and children she’d looked after, as if only the business remained and not the lives.

If the final stages of my life give me any choice in the matter, I’d like it the other way around. Is it possible to achieve relentlessly but not desperately?