Creativity – Nastasya Parker

My Life in Libraries

This Week’s Bit of String: 14 million books

We finished a half-term weekend in London with the realisation of a dream for me, walking up from Lambeth to Camden so I could visit the British Library. I browsed their Treasures collection, a variety of artefacts displayed to the public with no admission price.

There’s one of the original Magna Carta sheepskin documents, a Gutenberg Bible, and a couple of the earliest Greek translations. Each of Shakespeare’s folios, a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’ve curated manuscripts of writers ranging from George Eliot to Oscar Wilde to Andrea Levy to Siegfried Sassoon, and musical notations from Mozart and from the Beatles, plus gorgeous ancient texts from every religion. Fantastic examples of moveable type in Asia (a century or two before Europe managed it), and 2000-year-old homework of an Egyptian student.

The library also has a philatelic collection, vertical tabs so you can pull a sheet out with examples of money or stamps from all around the world. There are the reading rooms, which I’m sure I can find an excuse to utilise one day, and on every, open storey, there are seats all along the walls and overlooks. Each one was occupied by someone studying or working, mainly young people.

There’s a central, multi-storey cube just beyond the foyer. It’s massive, and full of the old, vellum and leather-bound volumes that were King George III’s collection. We’re talking at least 5 floors of this, 4 walls facing out, each many metres long. I wonder if a librarian there knows every book in that collection and where they’re located. I wonder if I could fill my brain with something like that instead of obsessing over how the election will go.

Library History

Yup, I’m still stressed about the state of the world! However, I’m on half-term break so at least I’m not stressing about work and the state of our students. I am carrying on in the vein of last week’s post, by writing about something quite happy. Books!

As I looked at the enormous hoard of books the ‘mad’ King George had amassed, I was intrigued by his motivations. Did he enjoy actually reading the books? Were they merely a status symbol? I felt, for once, a bit smug about my native country because I remembered hearing that Benjamin Franklin started one of the first American libraries and I thought, How perfect that a Revolutionary would counter the tyrant King’s greed by sharing books.

Only, wouldn’t you know it, Franklin’s library wasn’t free. It was a subscription library in Philadelphia, so you had to pay dues to check out books. On the other hand, Britain established its first free public library in Manchester in 1653, thanks to a bequest from a textile merchant, Humphrey Chetham. He even requested that librarians overseeing the collection “require nothing of any man that cometh into the library.”

Isn’t that a lovely thought? Welcome to the library. Nothing’s required of you here.

Libraries I’ve Known

Libraries are so much more than book lenders. They often serve as community centres. Our little library in Lyme, New Hampshire was across from the school, and would welcome us for an autumn celebration every year, serving us donuts and cider as we listened to stories like The Enormous Crocodile, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or The Funny Little Woman who followed her lost dumpling into the underworld to get it back.

*Another phenomenal library I ticked off my bucket list previously: Trinity Library in Dublin*

By the time we moved away when I was 8 years old, I had a boyfriend and we’d kiss hidden by bookshelves from the rest of our class. I also had my favourite little chapter books from the library. One was about a puritan settlement in early America, including a dispute over a pewter spoon resulting in public punishment. Another had a young heroine, Elizabeth, uncover and foil a plot to blow up President Lincoln’s inaugural train. I don’t know the books’ titles, their authors, how old they were, or how I chose them. Perhaps I just bumbled into meeting them, as I did with my then-boyfriend.

The great thing about libraries is they allow you to be reckless. You can choose whatever you want—for free. If you don’t like it, just put it back, no charge. When I was first settling in the UK, I was so lonely I went to the fiction shelves in our orange-carpeted library and worked my way alphabetically, grabbing almost anything. One book had, as its climax, a heroine confronted by two marriage proposals from great guys and the stress of this caused her to fall into a deep sleep for days and wake up with clarity. Why couldn’t that happen to me? I thought.

The library in my parents’ town, where my mom worked when I was a teen, has a theatre hall/ voting place upstairs and a mysterious cabinet of porcelain dolls at the back. While waiting for Mom to finish shifts, I entertained myself reading through weekly news magazines in the 1990s and learned quite a lot about world events. I also spent many of my high school lunch periods in the school library. Compared to the lunchroom with my peers, I truly felt less was required of me there.

What libraries have comprised your history, and what do they mean to you?

Giving Voice

This Week’s Bit of String: Group karaoke in the school hall

Last weekend, we sang. There was an event called The Big Sing, hosted by a community organisation and linked to World Singing Day. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the roar of the election in my native country and the brutality in the Middle East, plus the tiring school term have stressed me out. It was time to step out and do something different.

I thought we might be carefully learning different harmony parts, line after diligent line. It turned out to be a playlist of fun hits from ABBA to Grease to Taylor Swift to Frozen, via a karaoke website projected onto the big screen of the main hall at my work. All we had to do was open our mouths and follow along, just right for my mental speed.

In front of us, a posse of little girls coloured with crayons through the songs they didn’t know. Their parents, in running kit, knew lots of the dance moves and were having a blast. There were various mums and grannies, including an older woman with heavy leg bandages on. A couple of boys in football kneepads and Ninjago t-shirts were singing too, and behind our plastic chairs, a short row of our Sixth Form chaps did the can-can. The newly-elected local MP even stopped in, and I could see him singing along to Disney’s “Let It Go” with the rest of us.

The idea was to come together and have fun, and it certainly hit the spot for me. It was lovely to witness and to be part of.

Borrowed Words

I’ve always loved singing, but in recent years I haven’t done much about it. As an adolescent I dreamed of hitting a Broadway stage at least as much as I did of becoming a published author. This was the 90s so my desperately-loved favourites ranged from “I Dreamed a Dream” to “Crucify” by Tori Amos.

*This is just a picture I took that I like, to go along with writing about something I like.*

Both singing and writing give us a chance to express ourselves. Singing is a slightly more instantly gratifying option. Mostly, we’re singing someone else’s words, but somehow that doesn’t lessen the release. There’s a feeling of something powerful flowing through us, and imagining a rapt audience is an enticing fantasy.

My fantasies were quickly dispelled in the first apartment we bought here in the UK. Our downstairs neighbour struggled with mental illness and addiction and would scream obscenities at us and slam his dumbbells into his ceiling/ our floor if we made any noise. We lived life on tiptoe, literally, and couldn’t let our child play in the so-called living room. It wasn’t safe to sing, and even though we moved out of there 13 years ago, perhaps the stifling lingered. It was nice to re-experience the escape on Saturday.

Listening

To sing shares an etymological root with to enchant. It is, maybe, a bit of magic. I remember church services as a little kid, in a congregation of 300 or so. I’d lean my ear against the pew and feel it vibrating with the might of voices raised together. It scared me a little, but also stirred a longing.

*Saw the touring production of this show and it was excellent.*

Now that I’m older, I kind of want to sing for me. I don’t need an audience, I just want to feel I’m stretching my voice as best I can. It’s more like my daily scribbled pages than a story I try to get published.

And I probably appreciate more than ever other people’s performances and words. When not so desperate to be heard, I can listen to others. I appreciate equally song lyrics that are raw or artful.
Stressed and tired lately, I’ve played the same songs on repeat. Here are two recent favourites which also happen to be great examples of storytelling.

Jenn Colella singing “Me and the Sky” from Come From Away: Classic musical theatre anthem with some dazzling, uplifting moments that takes the audience masterfully from “Hell yes” to “Oh hell” in 3 seconds. I love when music (and books) share a new perspective while being utterly relatable.

Carol Ades “Late Start:” It’s a catchy tune and the video is adorable as she portrays herself trying to fit a Successful Artist mould. Again, sadly relatable, but there’s a heartwarming twist as she makes an unexpected friend.

Often we find songs that function as somewhat unexpected friends. What are yours? What links have you noticed between singing and other forms of creativity?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Writing to Remember

This Week’s Bit of String: Memory manager

My mother always said you can tell a storm’s coming when the leaves blow upside down. It doesn’t sound logical, but she’s right. Once you’ve seen enough storms, you recognise a particular silvery toss.

When I was a kid, we lived across from a lake and spent whole summer days there, sometimes cut short by thunderstorms. As black clouds massed over the water, the maple tree beside the landlord’s boathouse would thrash and moan.

And we’d run for it, holding hands across the road, towels streaming behind us. Once indoors, we watched lightning jitter over the lake’s teased-up waves, and sometimes the power went out.

One such evening, we played on the scratchy carpet illuminated only by my dad’s battery-powered reading lamp. Perched on the edge of the sofa in his shorts, Dad flipped through a computer magazine and sang about the glossy adverts inside. I still recall the words:

“Super T-R-S control. Memory manager! Memory manager! Free inside this bo-oook!” As with many of his ditties, the first line copies the opening of “Good King Wenceslas.” Then he finished with a high-pitched flourish.

At the time, we were probably bored with being inside in the dark, hot in the humidity, and hungry for a dinner my mom wouldn’t have been able to prepare without electricity, but all I remember is Dad’s goofy crooning, and it makes me smile.

35 years later, I have no clue what a super TRS control memory manager does in a computer, or if it is in fact something a computer still relies upon. I do know that at every stage of my writing life, memory has been an essential motivator.

A Justification for Stealing

As writers we are somewhat notorious for snatching versions of people from our lives and wriggling them into stories. Sometimes a whole person might get caught up with the bits of string we collect.

Preserving one-time theatre buddies, exchange students, or other lost friends in my writing helped get me through high school and college. I could huddle in my work when metaphorical storms came.

*A local wall. Layers and fragments and wear and tear… it’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?*

Remembering is more than piecing together fragments. It is a profession of faith: You’re not here, but I believe in you, and the closeness we shared.

I’ve always loved Lionel Shriver’s line from We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a good-bye kiss the protagonist clings to: “I have relived that moment so many times now that the memory cells must be pale and broken down, like the denim of much-loved jeans.”

I’d done the same thing. Curled into a college half-desk in my Contemporary Poetry class, hunkered against a tempest of morning sickness, I would zone out from discussing TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and recall saying goodbye to my now-husband in Victoria Station. He’d cried and said, “You’re not the sort of person one forgets.”

I’d worried for the integrity of my memories, whether they’d buckle under the strain of my reliance. Is a remembered instant like a favourite song, and if you rewind too many times the cassette ribbon gets tangled and won’t play?

Nostalgia vs Declinism

Our memories aren’t saved into hard drives. They can get corrupted retroactively, or embellished. This is why I do my daily scribbles. My memory has a back-up. I’ve conserved in my pencil scrawl what ordinary felt like when my kiddo still lived here with us in the UK. I’ve described countless morning walks, in case the trees all get chopped down or my legs stop working. I’ve put down the frustrations and small wins and many laughs and a few tears over two years of getting to know SEN students who are now about to take exams and leave.

Studies show that the older we get, the more we prefer to reexamine the past than imagine the future. This is the tricky boundary between nostalgia and declinism, believing the best is all behind us and nothing good lies ahead.

Crossing that border is dangerous not just to ourselves, causing anxiety and pessimism, but potentially to society. The nagging feeling that things must have been better before, surely the nation was greater once—it can lead to people making some selfish political decisions.

I get the anxiety, of course. When the future flashes into my mind, it’s often like the maple tree by the boathouse at our childhood lake. A menacing, pale toss. The present could so easily blow away; storms of some kind are inevitable.

So we run for it, into our memories, and I’m thankful for how writing has reinforced mine. If the alternative is oblivion, I am unrepentant about my pilfering. Besides, memory needs imagination to keep going.

While a remembered person or location can inspire me to start a story, it’s the moment when they alchemise with other elements of fiction, when they become something truly new, that motivates me to keep going. That’s when I know I’m on to something.

Understanding that helps keep me from getting lost in the past. The power of synthesising the old into something fresh and creative means we can make something from the future, whatever it brings. It’s like my dad making new songs from a Christmas carol and a computer ad, and I’m still singing it decades later.

How do you preserve your favourite memories?

Non-Stop

This Week’s Bit of String: Dreams about reading

A Year 13 student informed me somewhat randomly, “It’s impossible to dream about reading books because you read with the opposite half of your brain from where you dream.”

Given she mentioned this after insisting, during a GCSE Maths Resit lesson on multipliers, “It’s impossible to have anything higher than 100%,” I should have taken it with a grain of salt. But I was intrigued because I do dream quite a bit, and I couldn’t think of any dreams in which I’d been reading a book.

Maybe it was true, a never-the-twain-shall-meet sort of thing. I often dream about getting lost while travelling. Maybe the signs and maps have no words, and that’s why. Have you ever read in your dreams?

*Can one truly rest when words are present?*

My subconscious launched into gear to prove me utterly and completely wrong.

The first night, I dreamed about gathering reading material for a trip. There was a photocopied chapter about encouraging students to read, and I distinctly remember reading the title in my dream: “Reading is like getting a big hug!” As if that would persuade my actual students.

The second night, I was in a library with a dusty shelf containing all the stories I’d written, and I searched through for the right one to offer a friend.

Whether this proves which brain hemisphere is in charge of what activity, I would not presume to say. Maybe words have permeated every function of my mind. Or maybe my subconscious is a stubborn and contrary creature.

All the Words, All the Time

When working with students in lower-set classes, sometimes I turn around to help someone else, reading an extract to them upside down. These kids struggle to read rightside-up, through no fault of their own, so this amazes them.

I almost inhale words though. I’ve been reading since age three. If there are words anywhere in the vicinity, I will read them. I can barely help reading them.

The problem with reading somewhat involuntarily is that it goes beyond my control. Stories are bigger than we are, aren’t they? I think a lot of writers have difficulty shutting stories off. We rely on this, and it’s marvellous to get lost in a story. My problem is, I can’t stop the words in general.

*Might be nice to just look, not try to describe or capture…*

My brain is always writing, if not creatively. It might be planning an email to check in with a friend, or working out how to explain developments to a student’s parent, or considering how to promote my own material, or thinking up character quirks.

It could be going over what I’ll recount in my daily scribbles: Magnolia blooms like flocks of butterflies. Trying to pass the gauntlet of Key Stage 3 girls outside the toilets between lessons, their handbags pert like ship prows. These thoughts from a Year 10 special needs student: “This might be stereotypical of me, but if I went to Texas, do you think people there would be mean because I’m different? They might stereotypic me because of it. But everyone’s different in some way and can get stereotypicked for something…”

Waste Not, Want Not?

My brain has been programmed to optimise any free moment. It’s learned to write like I’m running out of time, except my body can’t keep up. The second I wake up, even when it’s still the middle of the night and it’s the third or fourth time that night… Words switch right on and I’m rocketing through lots of things to say or write.

*Oberon the baby-cat is responsible for many of these wake-ups.*

To an extent, this helps me later on. I can remember how I decided to word that message for work, and I’ll remember the order I wanted to put things in when reunited with my journal.

But it’s also tiring, the constant torrent of words in my head, because it’s difficult to rest when it flows. Then the fog of tiredness is somewhat counterproductive.

Is poor sleep an inevitable part of creative life? Have I unwittingly rewired myself in a harmful way? If we took a machine and rerouted some electrics to provide extra energy to a particular function, then the other functions would not run so well. I’m worried I might have done this to myself.

I now have two weeks off for the Easter holidays. I may commit to the massive to-do list I’ve made which includes sorting the garden out and cleaning the house and stocking the freezer, plus catching up on reading literary magazines and (she adds breezily…) proofreading the latest type-up of my 330-page novel. Or I could try to catch up on sleep, see if I can pause the words, and then when it’s term-time again, throw myself back into the merciless pace of trying to proofread the novel and grow lots of veggies while working a rather intense job and keeping the house clean and meals cooked every day.

I have a feeling my subconscious has already chosen for me. It’s a good thing I’m rather fond of words and writing.

Do you have tips for getting control of all the words in our heads… preferably without stifling creativity?

Waiting for Applause

This Week’s Bit of String: Ghosts and earwax

Last Wednesday I went back to summer camp to do story-making activities with 5- to 11-year-olds. “Do we have to write?” some asked as they came in with oversized tie dye shirts and baseball caps.

“We’re just going to have fun.”

I always start them off silly, with Mad Libs, so we can create wacky stories. I brought outrageous hats borrowed from my sister: a plaid fedora full of nouns, a cowboy sheriff hat full of verbs, a blue-haired pointy witch hat with adjectives. Kids carry on with Mad Libs, or sketch their own versions of video or board games, or make comics around the stickers I have on offer—some just plaster anything and everything with stickers. In each group, a few want to work with me to write a story together.

So we end up with adventures about pig princes, and about a cowboy fighting a banana. With one group we based our protagonists on some very cool stickers from my other sister—a red panda in a turquoise tux and an alligator in polka dot shorts. The kids embellished these even further; the alligator has a ghost named Shawn riding on his back, and they find a haunted castle where a ghost king is having a trampoline party.

While I wrote this out on a big scroll of rolling paper, I overheard a little boy to my right say to his neighbour, “I don’t want your earwax. Just keep your earwax.”

Right! Into the story with that line. The red panda and the alligator with Shawn offer their earwax as a birthday present to the ghost king but are rejected, because he wants a Pikachu instead.

Keeping It Fun

The small fellow who refused the earwax drew a red-curtained stage on his piece of paper, and wrote in the stage space: Once upon a time. The end. I am waiting for applause.

Then he came round to show it to us, his grin riddled with missing baby teeth. Considering how his story lacked plot, the applause demand was a surprise twist.

Not that I’m about to judge. I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare my workshops this year, once the busy school term was finally over. I ended up just pulling together the same resources and activities we did last year, and hoping these would still inspire.

I kind of got away with it because the kids remember what they like and I remember what works. I offered more specific suggestions to help get them started. Most people are unprepared to be told, “Sit down and write whatever you want.” Heck, even we writers struggle with that.

Hence the stickers, the Mad Libs, and the hats full of prompts. And why not celebrate the shortcuts, the tricks that make things slightly easier? Yes, even the fun things that aren’t proper stories. Let’s applaud ourselves for actually stopping to have fun and explore what we want to once in a while.

A Personal Pirate

In my final session, a tiny girl with a blond ponytail asked me to tape papers together so she had lots of pages. She used Disney princess stickers and drew a sad pirate on a ship in her book called The Love. The pirate gets to the princesses’ castle, and asks Sleeping Beauty if he can be her pirate.

“How do you spell yes?” the little girl asked. She put it in a speech balloon above the princess.

Who wouldn’t want their own pirate to go and fetch treasure? I believe actual royalty have had them before. This princess wasn’t pining for a prince; it was a pirate she wanted! It would be like having a personal shopper, but way cheaper.

*Personally, if I had a pirate I’d send them to search here for stories.*

When we’re writing, I think we have to remember not to hold out for princes. A single, heroic solution to our plot holes or character conundrums is probably not going to come charging to the rescue on a metaphorical white horse.

We have more need of pirates, I think. Writing requires a bit of plunder, at least sometimes to get us started or re-started. The nice thing about working with kids is that it reminds me of the basics. Keep things fun and don’t be ashamed of keeping them simple. There’s nothing wrong with raiding the classic tropes for inspiration, or even with being a bit shameless in our quest for positive feedback.

What have you learned in your writing journey this summer? Have you found pirate treasure, or that ever-elusive applause?