Tag: Work

Keeping the Daydream Alive

This Week’s Bit of String: Tiny pencil people

When I began writing my first ever novel at the age of eleven, I enacted it with an entire town’s worth of pencils.

Tall ones were adults, and smaller ones were kids. Yellow ones were men; coloured ones were women. You can see the sense in this, right?

I’d divided every shelf in my bedroom, one third of my drawers and the floor of my closet into little cubbies representing each building in the town, decorated with unique postage stamp pictures on the walls. The pencils had furniture—stub pencil babies slept in milkweed-pod cradles—and in some cases, even scraps of clothing sellotaped on.

An array of pencils
Who doesn’t love a bouquet of pencils?

For years pencils had been speaking their personalities to me. The chewed, battle-scarred ones and the prissy, fine-tipped ones and the fluorescent, too-trendy ones. Some of the citizens in my story-ville were carefully nursed survivors of first grade, when my little rural town sent us to a tottering two-room schoolhouse. We sat at ancient desks with ink pot holes in them, and the boy in front of me used to twist round and drop my beloved pencils through the hole. I sometimes wonder what happened to that boy. With the surname Dyke, he must have had an awful time in his later school years.

Even as adults, when we get swept up in a story idea, everything around us reflects aspects of it back at our infatuated brains. Have you ever noticed that? But I’ve been so busy lately, it’s been a while since I succumbed to such flights of fancy. I miss it. How do we ensure kid-high levels of imaginative activity when we’re getting a tonne of adulting done, too?

Twitter-pated

I turned to Twitter (which I’ve also been neglecting due to time constraints) for suggestions on maintaining good creative habits and keeping the dreams alive.

Some of these ideas overlap with the tips I gave back when I was adjusting to full-time work. Adjusting implies a process with an end, but I’m not sure I’ve completely figured out the balance. Does anybody? So reminders are all good.

Firstly, don’t stop writing. Even if we are taking a break between projects, we should keep scribbling observations and thoughts (bits of string…). Writer and editor Emma Cummins reminded me to make a habit of writing little and often. Because we all know what happens when we have a cool  idea, and try to stash it in a corner of our ever-churning minds while we rush off to do the next thing.

You can find Emma’s website here–she particularly focuses on reviews of art and cinema, which is perfect because taking in aspects of culture outside our own creations helps us develop new ideas, too.

Gravestone reading: 1859 M.A.N. 1831.
Another intriguing gravestone, from Painswick. Who was MAN? And was he (or she), in fact, born more than twenty years after dying?

Where else can we find things to write down? Creative writing teacher Stephen Tuffin suggests hanging out in graveyards, or accompanying someone to the shops without shopping yourself. (For some of his other, uniquely flavourful thoughts on writing, check out his blog here.) I remember seeing a 19th century gravestone for a child, with the verse ‘God’s will be done’ carved on it. And I wondered, did the parents agree on that resigned sentiment? Was it someone else’s idea entirely? Did they argue over what their faith meant in the face of such terrible loss? Given that I encountered that ‘bit of string’ over a decade ago, I guess cemeteries can make quite a lasting impression on the imagination.

Or follow Stephanie Hutton’s lead and snap up some vintage postcards from eBay or even a charity shop. Not only do you have the pictures to prompt you with story ideas, but each postcard message opens worlds of possibilities, in what’s said and perhaps what’s not said. Stephanie is part of The Writing Kiln, which aims to inspire confidence in budding writers. Have a look at their website here.

Vlada Poladyan advises putting sleep to use, to mesmerise and spur the imagination. She cites Stephen King’s nonfiction book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft for teaching her a routine for creative sleep. It’s been several years since I read On Writing, and it’s clearly time to check it out again.

Finally, Shannon Ferretti points out, ‘Daydreaming is important and a good use of time, [so] I bury my worries way down and play in make-believe lands instead.’ Part of getting back our imaginations is giving ourselves permission to daydream. We must remember that as writers it’s kind of our job to fantasise and create.

But we also must avoid feeling that every daydream should serve a marketable storyline. That’s been my problem. Being short on time, I get to thinking every idea has to count toward some ultimate writerly goal. I need to remember that every bit of string has value, even if it doesn’t lead to a beginning, middle, and end.

Every random exchange witnessed, every anecdote passed on, better informs our sense of the world and humanity. And every silly idea can lift us beyond that. So that’s worthwhile, isn’t it?

Writers with Day Jobs, Part 1: What I’m Doing Here

This Week’s Bit of String: Teeth in the mail

A nice lady from the dentist’s office up the street stops in at our post office almost daily, smiling in her spring-green scrubs. She requires certificates of posting for pre-paid parcels of dental samples. Am I sending people’s teeth? Gum tissue? I’ve posted a crocodile’s foot for someone before, but that’s another story.

Today we chatted and I mentioned that I’d had a couple stories published. Her eyes widened behind her glasses. ‘Fantastic! But what are you doing HERE?’

Have you encountered this misconception that writers belong in ivory towers where we do nothing but create? Lovely as it sounds, we writerly folk know it’s not feasible.

The primary answer to what I’m doing working in a post office at the back of an ailing convenience store is, of course: earning money. But there’s more to it.

For most of us writers, maintaining our finances entails more than ‘just’ wringing our hearts and brains out onto a page. (Seriously, isn’t that what it feels like sometimes?) I’ve worked in customer service, education, catering, and healthcare. Each has unleashed stampedes of What Ifs in my mind, but depending on the job, I’m sometimes too exhausted to corral them into anything useful.

Anti-urinating notice in post office window
In the window of my work. Couldn’t make this up.

Incorporating work experiences into fiction is essential, however, to create a range of meaningful pieces. There’s increasing concern about literary fiction’s underrepresentation of, and consequent lack of appeal to, working class people. Many established authors write what they know; often featuring academics or artists and writers. Those of us stuck in jobs further toward the bottom of society’s ladder have, in that case, a duty to represent it.

What am I doing here? Collecting ground intelligence that will ultimately infiltrate the upper echelons of literature.

We have other moral obligations as writers. Our talents involve empathy and eloquence, which, when paired together, hopefully add up to diplomacy: useful skills in any profession. An ability to assess others’ needs and to thoughtfully address them is as important whether assisting elderly patients to the toilet, supporting SEN students in lessons, or helping a man close his deceased parent’s pension account.

What am I doing here? Possibly doing you a favour by weighing my responses more carefully than others would.

Can you tell I’ve been toiling over job applications lately? I’m getting good at talking myself up. But as I wrote before about writers’ potential shortcomings as parents, I wonder too if there are drawbacks to having us on a payroll. Apart from the risk that I’ll savage versions of tricky clients and employers in my stories, I might be preoccupied now and then. It’s hard to shut down the characters and plot twists in our minds. Writers in day jobs have to compartmentalise. We want occupations we don’t have to take home with us.

View of sunburst and hills
A scenic walking commute is an ideal bridge between the day job and the writing life.

But I don’t always compartmentalise my writing. It seems silly to lock ideas in a mental box to be opened only during lunchtime, because I might scrawl a few lines between customers. This has been one of the only jobs in which I’ve managed to do so, and I am utterly unrepentant.

What am I doing here? Occasionally engaging in an activity outside the job description.

I’m not the first to write while I work. Here’s a fun round-up of famous writers and their jobs, in which we learn that James Joyce could sing, and Kafka worked at an ‘industrial injury institute—’does that sound Kafkaesque, or what? Maybe I should emulate Bram Stoker and kiss up to someone who can be my wealthy patron.

(Note: The above article mainly features men. I’ll definitely be revisiting the topic to explore potential added complications for women writers, so do share any thoughts in anticipation of that topic!)

Would these writers have had as much to write about without their day jobs? My work experience colours much of my writing. In The Wrong Ten Seconds, for example, one protagonist works in a supermarket on a zero-hours contract, while another works in a nursing home.

‘The corridor lights were dimmed as per management orders, to save on electricity. With its expectant hush and artificial-looking attempts to induce sleepiness, the nursing home at evening time reminded Lydia of an overnight flight. They were all barreling toward the same destination, a strangely relaxing thought.’

What am I doing here? Gathering string, weaving new story ideas, corralling the What Ifs, and plotting my next move.

Do your working and writing worlds sometimes collide? Have you found ways to make each complement the other?

Next week, Part 2: Work Balancing and Story Bribery