Nastasya Parker

Toughness

This Week’s Bit of String: The power of pinching

“You know something I’m good at?” a Year 11 girl says, raising her eyebrows at me over her Jacqueline Wilson book. “Pinching.”

She proceeds to list all the boys she pinched good and hard in Year 7 to keep them in line. She’s often the only girl in the lowest-set class, and maybe her talent for pinching has been key to her thriving in potential chaos. I don’t condone it, but I understand where it comes from.

In first and second grade, I was good at getting pinched. I thought it proved my mettle, and built my tolerance. A couple of boys in my class obliged me by pinching the back of my hand, the tiniest amount of skin to cause the sharpest pain.

“This hurt?” they’d ask, and I’d shake my head, lips pressed together. I was quietly proud of my fingernail-shaped scabs.

As a small human, I was terrified of doing wrong and earning punishment. Because of abuse in my extended family, I knew what kinds of pain were out there and I knew that loved ones could inflict it. When aware of struggles in my immediate family or in the wider world (I was pretty self-absorbed, as kids often are), I internalised and worried about that, too.

Inviting pain, consenting to it, made me feel more powerful. It made me feel tough rather than sensitive.

I look back on this because I’m still prone to concern and deep feeling. Many of us creative types are. Now, my sensitivity is spread across a broader field; I’m aware of so many more problems and wrongs and agonies, many that are worse than my own.

Perhaps just as a pinch is less painful when gripping a wider section of skin, empathy cripples us less when cast over a greater area.

Reinvestigating Empathy

I’ve just finished reading Octavia E. Butler’s dystopia/ sci-fi classic The Parable of the Sower. The narrator of the story is a teen girl called Lauren, a hyperempathic ‘sharer.’ If she sees anyone injured, she will feel their pain, genuinely, sometimes to an incapacitating degree. (This is revealed in the beginning of the story—I’m avoiding spoilers.)

Because it can give her the appearance of weakness among a desperate population, Lauren tries to hide her ‘sharing.’ When she has to fight, she strikes to kill because then she won’t feel her enemy’s pain. Her empathy could make her a target, but it also forces her to be tough, and that’s quite a fascinating juxtaposition.

And our heroine’s empathy makes her wary. Tuned into, and rightly frightened of, the world’s suffering, Lauren educates herself and prepares for disaster. I love how Butler uses Lauren’s empathy as a catalyst for wisdom, combining heart and head, so to speak.

How often do we see our empathy as kind of a drag, as something exhausting? It’s a bit like writing. We actually have a tremendous gift, and when not in its throes we can consider how to let it steel and prepare us.

Resilience

We can only take so much, and when we hear stories, we have limits to how much we can stand to feel them. Or maybe it’s not limits. Maybe it’s more of an inoculation.

My most heart-breaking moment as a teaching assistant (and there is some competition here) was a Monday morning exchange with a Year 7 boy. He’d been allowed to see his mum at the weekend and then returned to his foster home. He said to me in a wavering voice:

*Can a good heart still be tough as rocks?*

“Miss, you know how usually, when you cry yourself to sleep, it stops by the morning? Well… this time it didn’t.”

He was refusing to go into the classroom because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of the group and looking weak. But his feelings were big enough to slay me where I stood. He wielded a power without knowing it.

This happened a decade ago and I carry it as a reminder that no matter how much aggravation my students cause, their inner turmoil is so much worse. When they don’t want to work, it’s often because they’re anxious about failure. If they’re disrespectful, it’s often because they want to impress their peers. They are frightened and often in pain.

Awareness of their angst inoculates me against taking things personally and becoming overwhelmingly discouraged. Likewise, empathy for those who suffer bereavement or chronic illness makes us appreciate those around us and our own ability to keep functioning (such as it may be). Like Lauren in Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we can combine empathy with awareness to make us stronger.

How does your empathy serve as a strength?

The Excitement of Uncertainty

This Week’s Bit of String: Old, fat, furry cat-puss

There’s an old British children’s show called Bagpuss, starring a pink and white floppy toy cat who comes to life, along with his other toy friends. It’s stop-motion puppetry, with calming background chimes and little animated stories thrown in along with strummed songs and whatever fits with the toys’ imaginings.

In my late twenties as an immigrant parent, I found the episodes quite soothing to watch with our little Bear.

*A pond of time. What might lie beneath?*

One summer, back in New England visiting my family, I showed them a YouTube video of the show’s opening. As my dad watched the slow introduction and brief flashes of black and white photos, he asked in stunned panic,

“What’s going to happen?”

The change of pace was vaguely terrifying, I think. Sometimes, when things are a bit chaotic, I hear that question in my head, repeated the same, confused way. And it becomes a little bit funny, as I found it so at the time.

Happenstance

Not a lot happens in Bagpuss. The lovely characters resume their usual places at the end, going back to sleep until next time. Sometimes my story ideas do exactly that. I think my characters are going to amount to something but they sort of peter off instead.

*Taking on this challenge probably means I will do a bit of waffling.*

On Monday, I decided to join in with the 100 Days of Writing challenge on Twitter. There were 100 days left of 2024, and the idea is simply that you write every day.

I already do write daily—my scribbles that I’m ridiculously addicted to. My notebooks are adding up to take over an entire table. Then of course there are blog posts, and critiques and such. But I haven’t felt very attached to a fiction project in a long time, and my novel about Eve is still out on submission.

So I’m writing 500 words of fiction per day, and make things up pretty much on the fly.

On Monday I was lucky, because I did that many words mainly before work and at my lunch break. For the rest of the weekdays, my work breaks were busy and I had so many chores at home (plus scribbles reflecting on the day’s events), I wasn’t settling down for fiction until at least 9 pm.

I’ve previously ruled out late evening writing, because I don’t have much brainpower or energy left by then. But each day, 6 in a row now, I’ve done my 500 words at least, across 4 different ideas.

Finding a Thing

The premise of the Bagpuss show is that Emily, the little girl who owns the toys including Bagpuss, finds an object when she’s out and about, leaves it with her toys, and they imagine what its story and purpose might be. Every episode begins: “One day, Emily found a thing. So she took it home to show Bagpuss.”

Writing is just finding a thing, and investigating it. So I began by writing about a couple meeting in a waffle house, and getting to know each other. This story is only for me; it doesn’t need an exciting plot. I wanted to introduce an invented character to a version of someone I know in real life. This way, I could chart a possible route to a happy ending, while safely exploring the emotions rooted around a sad situation. I made it just to suit myself.

*Oil refineries near Houston. I found them fascinating.*

Then I started writing a little place-centred piece, inspired by a funny malapropism from one of my sister’s students: “Once a pond of time.” What would the pond of time be like, I wondered? And I played with that idea. For a couple nights, I worked on both small projects at once.

When I’d written what I wanted to (for now) on those, I forayed into a new novel, having a protagonist carry a rucksack through the woods at three in the morning, making her way to an old mansion she believes will be empty. I have in no way plotted this novel. I have lengthy character and setting sketches. But it was exciting to just plunge in. I need to see if I love the idea enough to commit to a plot and many thousands of words. For now, I get to just see what happens, no strings attached.

And Saturday, I put my 500 words and then some toward finishing a story I started in summer, set in mid-20th century Southeast Texas. I lost the thread of it a little, so I needed a day when I have time in order to work on this. How fun, though, to say I’ve worked on four different fiction projects in just one week! Incredibly, despite the late nights, this fills me with delight rather than dread.

Do you sometimes relish not knowing what will come next, or does it throw you into a panic?

Preserving

This Week’s Bit of String: Jam from the hedgerows

The acers behind the school were already blushing scarlet when our new term started on Monday the 2nd of September. It felt too early, as if I’d missed out on something. Shouldn’t we already have got to know our new students and settled them into routine by the time the leaves turn?

There’s no time like autumn to remind us of… time. School starts, orienting students (and those of us working with them) toward exams. The garden outdoes itself and nature accelerates toward harvest. There’s my little Bear’s birthday–they just turned 23 this week. I’ve definitely missed out.

There are new writing deadlines and many special needs care plans to learn. I must jumpstart my diet and catch up on reading while my energy’s still depleted from the summer. Then family crisis strikes, and I’m glad that while I was home I stayed up till midnight scribbling the memories and got up at 5… Preserving things takes a real time commitment.

And yet, or perhaps therefore, I blew off the writing and reading progress I’d scheduled after school and went foraging for berries instead. For one sunny afternoon, I berried for 2 hours, and the following day I collected for over an hour, ending up soaked in a rain shower. The stormwater pooled in the seed-dimples of the blackberries.

Conserving Strength

I’d done this already. In the brief interval between visiting my family and restarting school, I spent hours picking blackberries and elderberries, then making jam. This was all on my to-do list, a great big planned chunk of time: to gather berries, cook it all down, and brutally sieve it smooth. This gave me 4 medium-small jars.

For a fair bit of money, you can get an elderberry concoction at the chemist’s to combat sore throats and infections. I made blackberry-elderberry jam last year, and I swear my horrible, 19-century-consumptive coughs didn’t stick around very long. This could be sheer coincidence, but in case tasty jam can help curtail illness, I’m not taking my chances without it.

This week’s batch of jam came to only half a single big jar. Not very good, is it? After a fair bit of effort. It uncomfortably mirrors certain writing projects once I’ve read through critically and realise the piece isn’t getting anywhere.

But having spent afternoons outside, I felt better than I had since school started. Sometimes the act of choosing what to preserve is as useful as the result. Foraging, alone in a back lane or field, my mind streamlines to one purpose and the many other commitments feel lighter for a while.

And I enjoyed rustling through the hedgerows again. I have great respect for these ecosystems, towering above me at this point in the year. Bright red rosehips like beacons along the top, bindweed buds like kisses and the sun glowing through their flowers’ white petals, the jumbled jewels of blackberry bunches mixing black with still-scarlet. Elderberries are particularly beautiful in my opinion, the delicate network of stems connecting shining berries: black, silvery-red, or pink-flecked green.

Preserving Memories

I realised too why I feel particularly myself when I’m caught in the rain. It’s an unmistakable impression that I’m seizing the day, regardless of the weather. Maybe I’m conflating vitality with inner self, but it’s something worthwhile, either way.

When we’re confronted with the changing of seasons, it can feel as if time picks up tempo exponentially. Every ball we juggle is flying faster, and which one should we chase first? I’m going to work and keeping my house just about clean, and checking in with my family and cooking meals and entering writing competitions and sending out critiques for other writers.

But those hours outside might stick with me most. I scribble daily to recount how I’m building relationships with my students, and my dreams in broken-up nights. Spending quieter moments in the fresh air, focused on hedgerow microcosms or the fine vistas beyond, keeps me in a mindset that livens other descriptions, such as of my walking commute to work. Becoming more aware, I have more to preserve.

I’m probably not the only one who rushes at tasks, clamouring to tick a good variety of them off my list, assuming that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. But making jam this week, I realised this isn’t always the case, nor should we wish it to be. Sometimes the act of gathering is more important than the fruit.

This can be true of writing. Staying open to ideas may benefit us more than toiling to write every single one down. It’s definitely true of families–preserving memories is important, but making them will always be the most precious time. And maybe slowing down briefly can be the key to keeping on.

What do you like to preserve, and how do you find the best ways to do it?

Learning Abroad

This Week’s Bit of String: On the way to somewhere else

I’d never have got into this whole immigrant fix, splitting myself between two countries, if I hadn’t done a term abroad while in college. My major was English/ Education in New Hampshire, where contributing to class discussion was key.

In the UK, on the other hand, professors seemed flummoxed when people turned up. They didn’t even expect us to read the assigned literature: “If you didn’t do the reading for this week, I hope you do at some point in your life. It’s a great book…”

*Twin American spires: church steeple and rocket*

I had read each book, as it happened, and was unimpressed having it summarised in a murmur for 3 hours. Screw it, I decided. I’ll do the reading while on the train to somewhere more interesting.

And off I went, to friends in Glasgow, Bangor, Wolverhampton, and especially London. I read, and listened to new-to-me British music (Texas, Robbie Williams, Steps), survived on Kingsmill rolls and Edam cheese and Smirnoff Ice, and fell for three different guys in quick succession, the final one being my now-husband.

I also wrote a wacky but fantastic story about a girl whose heart, in the form of a cookie, is eaten for breakfast. I got an A for that class, after only attending 1.3 lessons. I did the reading!

What I Wrote This Summer

*New England idyll: Billings Farm Museum, Vermont*

It’s always interesting to see other writers post about their vacations in the summer. Some catch up on reading, and many are busy with their children during the holidays anyway. For me, I spend 4 weeks out of the 6-week break going to see my family in New England. There are definite vacation aspects to this—the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the ice cream.

It’s also very busy as I condense a year’s worth of interactions into 1/12 of the time. Half my family are too busy to keep in touch when I’m not there, so I run around trying to help people out and make memories. They are all I have, and they are precarious without me recording them. When not Doing Things, I’m scribbling about them.

This leaves little reading time. I have writing commitments—promised critiques, etc, and also students I check in with even in the summer, so I squeeze those in. What I do find, though, is that the travel, the hiking and driving and swimming and reflecting, open me up to learning a lot of random things. Without the more rigid structure of work and long-term writing projects, my brain relaxes just enough to sponge up new information.

What I Learned This Summer

There were my discoveries while hiking, which I researched later:
The rather formidable Argiope aurantia (ok, yellow garden spider) keeping watch from her web in the lake bridge. It’s also known as a zigzag spider because of that uniquely thick central line. The purpose of this unique pattern is still unknown to us.

The Warren Rocket: My family got together in Warren, NH, near the White Mountains. While other towns have Civil War cannons on their greens or in front of their schools, Warren (population peaked in 1860 at 1100-something) has a great big Redstone missile rocket. (Pictured at the top.) It was funded and transported by a local veteran hoping to encourage interest in space travel.

Signs around the rocket tell visitors about SS Officer Wernher von Braun, who supervised concentration camp workers to manufacture missiles that killed 1400 Londoners. After the war, Americans smuggled von Braun out of Germany to design even deadlier rockets over here, but also realise his childhood dream of sending rockets to space. I wonder what the childhood dreams of his captive labourers were, or those civilians killed in airstrikes.

*You can see why the Morse Museum caught my eye…*

The Morse Museum: Another early morning Warren hike discovery, a building with granite plaques advertising Curios of India and China, and African Game Trophies. Now-vacant, it was dedicated in 1928 to house the collections of Ira H Morse, a local shoe store mogul and game hunter. There’s a colourful bio online of IH and others, written by affectionate family members. They include his adventures but also quirks like how he would “ream out” uncooperative salt shakers, at home or in public.

Speaking of museums, there are a couple in the area which I like to visit.
Billings Farm, a late 19th century agricultural reenactment site. It’s great for learning about cows and dairy, edible plants and farm life (see above). When we visited this year, they were making pasta in the farmhouse kitchen. I hadn’t realised how long pasta has been a staple in the US (it’s much more recent in the UK), but in fact Thomas Jefferson sampled and loved it in Europe, and by the time of the Civil War macaroni was very popular.

The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College: I always stand in awe before the incredible, ancient Assyrian tablets before moving on to the current exhibits. This summer, a diverse selection of art including Musasama’s elaborate arrangement of textiles and natural objects across the floor, part of the Maple Tree Series, made me aware of the maple tree abolitionist movement. Did you know that in the 1790s, free people of colour, white settlers, and native Americans advocated substituting maple syrup for cane sugar, to starve the economy propping up enslavers?

My family creates a good learning environment, with our eclectic interests. Dinner discussions might be about what’s the oldest continuously-used language in the world (Hebrew, Tamil, Sanskrit… Lithuanian and Icelandic appear in the top 10, too). My dad found an 1884 encyclopaedia in our AirBnB and read passages out loud to us. There was no entry for childbirth, but lots of details on “Brawling in Church” and the various statutes against it.

Even though I didn’t do much writing work over the summer, the feeling of my mind loosening to hold more is not an unwriterly sensation. New stories could develop from here!

Do travel and family time inspire your writing?

Incorporating Wildness

This Week’s Bit of String: S-curves under Main Street

Like many former mill towns, my parents’ town in New Hampshire is built on a river. To be more precise, it is built between a series of riverbends. The Mascoma River threads beneath Main Street twice, and beneath another principal artery around the corner of an intersection.

We moved to this town when I was a somewhat irascible 8-year-old and its charms were lost on me for a decade or two. The town wasn’t really feeling itself for a while there, either. When I visit now, and walk early in the morning to avoid the worst heat, I know to look over both sides of each bridge for heron, deer, and bald eagles. And I’ve started wondering at the river itself.

The town buildings of Main Street, mainly originating in the late 1800s or early 1900s, are built right next to the river but a fair way up in elevation. The banks are unbreached walls of leaves. Boulders stand in the water as if swept there by glaciers, just a car park away from the former laundromat (future microbrewery). There’s a heavily wooded peninsula in the middle of the river section near the Lutheran church. I’ve never seen a person down there but have seen a pair of deer drinking.

I’ve started wondering about all this. What was the river like before the town was built? Was it a great deal wilder in its natural state? Did boats travel down it when the mill was functioning, somehow steering around the boulders?

Inner Wilds

While contemplating how closely we can live with wildness in nature, I began drawing parallels to inner life. We grow up civilising ourselves, so to speak: building various blocks we deem useful or desirable within our minds. As we develop our mental landscape and moderate our personalities, what torrents gush, untameable, between these blocks?

*This is actually right in the middle of town.*

An interesting analogy as I traipse through the grey-gold dawn in my childhood town, and reflect on different incarnations of myself. I wonder at which point I was the most wild, the most untamed. It’s the moments when I feel most unique that I feel most myself, like when I used to run outside alone into thunderstorms. But there are so many shared characteristics among us all, equating identity with individuality may just be another societal pressure.

As an oldest child of four, and in a religious family, I’m not sure how wild I’ve ever been, really. Who knows what my natural state would be, and whether my eagerness to conform affects my writing. Most likely, my writing is where I break free from it a little.

Defying Expectations

After all, the problem with trying to conform is that there are so many standards to meet from others, and often they are contradictory. It’s cool to be non-conformist, at such times when society expects it from us. It’s equally challenging with writing: be clear but don’t over-reveal. Ensure your characters are unique, but recognisable and likeable.

*Even the built-up bits won’t last forever. The mill upriver from town.*

Writing a happy ending is practically an act of rebellion these days. Allowing a villain to be truly villainous breaks the writing mould (and I don’t think I have it in me to do that, although I’m happy to read it). Similarly, opting for quiet, non-busy moments in real life may be the ultimate subversion. Am I at my wildest when I’m out hiking or when I’m curled up reading a book?

By linking the word wild to its root of natural (with connections to wold; woodlands), then it’s easier to accept these contradictions. After all, nature can be both calm and then fierce. Sometimes at the same time—tonight I tried to connect with my wild self by going out in rolling thunder and glimmers of lightning, but it barely even rained. Well, I was there even if the storm wasn’t quite.

What wildness have you built your life around, and how do you reconnect with it every now and then?

Pick and Mix

This Week’s Bit of String: Hyperspace snowstorm

One of my students, finishing up her penultimate year of school and diligently researching university options, is becoming almost paralysed with anxiety. She explains, “I don’t like thinking about the future, because then I think too far ahead. Like hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands of years.”

“And it all depends on which uni you go to?” I ask, imagining the alternative timelines which might be thus affected.

“No. So it makes me feel insignificant.”

I see the bind she’s in. Berating herself for her insignificance won’t help her feel any less anxious and confused. I suddenly have an image of her exceptionally intelligent thoughts as a vehicle driving into a snowstorm, the blizzard flying almost horizontally at you as if you’re zooming past stars in hyperdrive.

*Sometimes, of course, it’s easier to just keep things frozen.*

I’ve been in an end-of-term rush myself. When I stop to reflect for a moment, as modelled by writer and life coach Liz Champion, I realise it’s been a hell of a term. In the last few weeks, students I’ve worked with for years have taken their exams and left. My kiddo just moved into their first apartment, while I try to support from across the ocean. At the same time, I sent queries and novel extracts to agents, after another careful edit. A friend died the day before the second anniversary of another friend’s death. I’m still dieting and not sleeping a tonne, packing and organising for my summer trip home while also cleaning the house and weeding the entire garden so it’s set for the catsitters.

I’m not even really reflecting here. I’m merely cataloguing. If I stopped and felt the loss, some part of me would counterbalance it by acknowledging the many greater crises in the world, and I too might get stuck between my own sharp pain and my global insignificance. In case you’re overwhelmed this time of year, let’s do a quick round-up of things that keep us going.

Goals of Fun

Before parting with my hyperspace-minded student for the summer, I made her a “Summer Pick and Mix” list. I used to do this with my kiddo when a problem loomed: we’d sit down and make two lists: Goals of Need, Goals of Fun. Not my catchiest or most articulate idea, but for the things we need to accomplish, it really helps to break them down into small steps.

And so we don’t get overwhelmed by what we have to do, there’s the fun. I’ve been known to write things on my to-do list like: Re-watch WALL-E (my favourite Pixar film–the detail! The storytelling!) or: Eat a bowl of cereal while reading a book.

*Hopefully I’ll have a few moments like this.*

For my student, apart from putting links on her list to research the courses she’s interested in, and breaking her homework assignments into weekly chunks, I added links to relaxing activities like chair yoga and mandala colouring, interior decorating, and Bob Ross’s happy little trees. I recommended writing a shape poem about her cat, and reading “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver—especially when she’s feeling inadequate. I haven’t worked out yet what I’m going to do to relax this summer, or if I’ll have time. But I might look at a few of those links.

Do you have any methods that really tick that de-stressing box?

Words of Power

I’ve gone entire school terms or more ensuring a certain anthem plays in my earbuds while I bustle through the school gates. Years ago it was “I Believe” from Book of Mormon, “One Foot” by Fun., and this year’s exam season was survived thanks to “Odds Are” by Barenaked Ladies. The video is hilarious. Maybe things aren’t going remotely ok. But you can put on a brave face and laugh about it.

Searching for memorial quotes to honour our late, great writing friend Sarah Tinsley, I was reminded of how she personally and tirelessly encouraged and inspired so many (she was the first person to read my novel that’s now, terrifyingly, out on submission), and also that we all have that potential.

Here’s an excerpt from “Let Me Tell You About the Moon” by multilingual poet Elizabeth M Costello in her gorgeous little volume Cajoncito: “Let me tell you that you and I are gardeners. I cultivate words, sowing them here and there, watering them, and teaching them how to worship the sun as they should… and to venerate the trees, not only for their height, but also for the honour and honesty that courses through their sweet sap, and that the bravest among them is not always the tallest.”

*Just look how many branches can work together from one trunk.*

Likewise, I’ve always been inspired by this wonderful quote from Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus: “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all.”

And what about these words from Sarah herself? Our fellow writer Rita Gould reminded us Sarah said on her Substack The Disorganised Creative: “There’s that strange connection between me sitting at this laptop and you being wherever you are reading this. Maybe you and I have just made the world a tiny bit better, across the space of words between us.”

When we are far from those we love, when the future we face seems to render us insignificant, it helps to remember that even a single connection, even online and not in person, can really give someone a boost. And then maybe that encouragement renews them enough to encourage others, and on it goes… Keep boosting the world in your little ways, friends.

Fated to Create

This Week’s Bit of String: Catalog of catastrophe

At the start of this unending term, I changed my contract to leave school 2 hours early on Tuesdays. Just a couple extra hours a week, I hoped to use these as a springboard to cope with all the writing work and the household chores.

Only it hasn’t quite worked out. Last Tuesday, I got some errands done but when stowing one of my purchases under my bed, I noticed a feather or two around my shoes. Then a few downy clumps further back. With growing unease, and knowing that Obie the Babycat in what is surely intense devotion sometimes brings his kills under my side of the bed, I emptied the entire space.

It seemed to be carnage left from a week ago, when he brought a blackbird upstairs–trailing blood spatters over the pale-carpeted stairs and hallway which took me over an hour to scrub out, one speckle at a time. And it took me quite a while again, to sort out my shoes and bags, and hoover up all the feathers that had gotten inside them.

Dinner was in the oven as I did this, the second night of a cauliflower cheese batch I’d prepared at the weekend. Super efficient, right? Except when I took it out of the oven, it was as cool as it could be on a 28-degree-Celsius day. The oven had died. I had to re-dish it, and microwave individual portions.

We all have times when nothing seems to go smoothly, and circumstances keep us from our writing, or wear us out before we can get to it. To our dramatic writerly brains, it feels like a personal attack from the fates themselves. It’s easier to notice things that stop us from writing, than things that go right.

Could that be because, to an extent, writing is hard work and when life wears us down, we’re almost looking for an excuse not to?

The One and Only

Like many people, I project a grand authorship over life sometimes. I consider the what ifs: What if my husband had missed his train and we never met? What if our kiddo got into a different uni, one that looked after the students through covid so they didn’t have complete breakdowns, ultimately starting life over in another country? I don’t actively credit fate with these things, though. Mostly it’s myself and other people around (and the cat!) that affect my daily goings-on and beyond.

*Maybe someone else could do the history-making?*

The problem with believing in fate or some sort of grand author means we might fall into thinking the full story’s written. This has been on my mind with the Presidential debate in my native USA. Political parties seem to think that just because a particular senior white guy won that one time, it absolutely must be him again. Note that the Republicans have done that with Trump–he won in 2016! (Popular vote, shmopular vote according to them)–He must have actually won in 2020 and will undoubtedly win in 2024.

But was Biden really the only person who could have managed the 2020 Democratic victory against him? Surely anyone with empathy and discernment could do it? Given how life carries on, and the many variables of national and international politics, the aging process, the changes to media consumption… I’m not sure it’s fair to say that only one person out of the whole population could do even this unique and intimidating job.

Desire vs Destiny

Believing only one person is meant to do only one thing subtracts choice from the equation. I’ve looked at that in my novel about Eve. She and Adam were essentially created for each other–but would they choose each other? We’re better at something when we’ve chosen it, when we know we want it.

And sometimes, we will convince ourselves that what we want is what we should have. The friction between wants and needs is crucial in a character’s trajectory. How many people have run for president insisting that God told them to? I wonder how they rationalised it to themselves after it didn’t work out.

Being accustomed to treating my wants with skepticism and refraining from boasts, I’ve lately been researching the querying process for The Gospel of Eve, to make sure I get it right. Apparently we’re supposed to convince agents not just that our book has a market and is super relevant today, but also that it is uniquely ours. I’m supposed to explain, very efficiently and pithily of course, why I alone could write Eve’s story and provide an alternate view of the Creation myth.

Yikes. It’s taken me some time, and late night thought, to come round to this. Anyone could offer a take on humanity’s origins. But I’ve created Eve with warmth and wry humour, and as I worked on my cover letter, it occurred to me that the major beats of my life have orchestrated the book I’ve written.

Growing up in an evangelical family in rural America, becoming a single mother and in a way, transferring my faith from religion to my new little family, then immigrating with my little Bear. I’m a combination of outsider and insider, able to balance questions with respect for those who love and depend on their God.

And I’ve also actually written the thing, and rewritten, and edited, and edited. I created a brand new version of an ancient epic–at just 340 pages, in fact–and plenty of times it felt as if the world were conspiring to exhaust me. Maybe it does take more than just wanting something, choosing it, to manage such a challenge.

What do you think? Are you particularly fated to create certain works?

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?

Making It Up

This Week’s Bit of String: Near-misses and resistant materials

“Miss, did you ever almost cause the death of a small child?” a year 10 boy asks casually as we sit on the high stools around a Design Technology table. Three boys with various tools and MDF fragments, me with my laptop and notebooks.

This is Resistant Materials. I know very little about CAD, woodwork or metalwork, but I’m supporting a student doing the GCSE. When I told my husband I’d be helping with Resistant Materials, he quipped, “Is that the course, or the students?”

Fair question. But I’ve clearly won some trust. The boy who’s asked this surprising question explains to me that he was once on a ferris wheel with a friend, and her shoe fell off and almost hit a toddler on the ground. Hence, he feels he was beside someone who almost accidentally caused the death of a small child.

Story ideas pivot on crucial moments like the one he mentioned. A slight change in breeze, an incremental rise or fall in the Big Wheel, and the shoe might have hit. I noted the exchange with the Year 10 boy and preliminary thoughts about the alternate scenarios in my daily scribbles, ready for half-term when I have a few free hours to sit, and wrestle out my first new story of the year. I’ll have my latest novel edits all typed up by then.

Exploring Options

Around the time the Resistant Materials boy mentioned his anecdote, I was reading through a literary magazine called Story. It’s based in the US, and I discovered it because I was looking for submission possibilities and Googled “short story magazine.” Sometimes we forget to keep things simple; we look through comprehensive listings of publications and deadlines and fret over word counts… This was more a case of “ask and you shall receive.”

There were some great stories in this issue. My favourite was about a group of boys and their scout leader who got trapped in a cave for several days. The dynamic among the boys before, during, and after was fascinatingly written. It made me realise–and again this sounds SO obvious but it’s another thing that I lose sight of now and then–we get to make stuff up.

I’m pretty sure the writer hadn’t been stuck in a cave or been close to someone who was. But they did a great job making up the scenario and tracking its impacts. I’m going to do that too, I thought. Make something up.

I tend to be a bit timid with my ideas, whether it’s from actual fear or more likely, lack of mental energy. Starting from scratch is EFFORT, to borrow the ultimate disparaging statement from my students. That’s why it can be useful to begin with a memory, with a favourite setting or even person, or with a retelling, a twist on something old.

What About the Future?

Lately, I’ve indulged in inventing future scenarios. If my imagination is slightly inhibited regarding stories, I severely limit it when considering how real life could turn out. I’ve done this from a young age, to avoid disappointment. I specifically remember preparing for my 8th birthday, to be celebrated at Chuck E Cheese’s, something I’d wanted for years. Rides! Games! Pizza! I’d wanted it, but wouldn’t allow myself to picture it, because that would risk building expectations.

If we’re tuned into the world, and we have an ounce of empathy, it can’t escape our notice that we’re clinging to some privilege. Whatever tough times we’ve had, billions in the world are substantially worse off. My husband and I remark to each other sometimes about the Event, an imaginary but tacitly half-expected reversal of world fortunes.

“This would be a strategic location in the Event,” he says when we take in hilltop views on a hike.

“For the Event,” I say when I add to the ranks of canned goods in the cupboard.

But it’s also possible that amazing things will happen in the future. You know, on occasion. Struggling to sleep with exam stress on behalf of my students recently, I started imagining what, for example, our 30th or 40th anniversary might look like, having just celebrated our 20th.

Maybe we will be surrounded by family next time, instead of on our own. There could be a new generation of children on the scene, and though another decade could see further health complications for my parents, I imagined my own kiddo helping to ensure they’re looked after, and this brought comfort.

We can’t get attached to any single projection of the future. But envisioning positives—perhaps especially in the form of small, everyday details—is a new bravery for me. Part of appreciating what I have means letting go of my expectation of disappointment. And if events look to go in a different direction, then I’ll just make up new hopes.

How do you keep sight of the freedom to make things up?