music – Nastasya Parker

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.

New Pleasures Prove

This Week’s Bit of String: Tale of two benches

Last Saturday night we went on a date. We got dinner from the chippy and sat in the rare clear evening on a bench above the car park.

“Like two yoofs,” my husband said as we popped open our cans of Rio tropical drink. “But without the cheeky ciggy.”

After our chips, we did a cultural about-face at the town cinema watching a broadcast of the National Theatre’s excellent The Motive and the Cue. Based on diaries from when John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in Hamlet, it made us want to see the actual 1964 production. It was my kind of nerdiness and luckily, my husband was all for it.

I remembered when we first moved to the town, new to the area (in my case, new to the whole nation) and unsure how to entertain our 3-year-old. We wandered up to a school playground on a typical cloudy afternoon. A plain, plasticky bench had a slightly rusting plaque: “In memory…” and a person’s name.

“Not the most flattering tribute,” said my husband.

“Well, it doesn’t say ‘In loving memory’ or anything,” I pointed out.

That made him laugh, and I felt smart and seen for a minute. That didn’t often happen in the first months as an immigrant and wife.

This week is our 20th anniversary. We’d used a John Donne quote from “The Bait” on our wedding invitations.

“Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove…”

I didn’t really have an idea what those pleasures would look like (does anybody?), and it took us a while to find the confidence and freedom–and economic stability–to come up with the successful melding of tastes like we had last week.

If That’s All We Have

It took time. Two decades ago, our wedding song was Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World,” from the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That is my husband’s type of nerdiness: gadgetry and fast cars and also outer space.

When we met and I was nearly 20, I was keen to lose myself. The movies we watched were ones he thought I should see, and I was thrilled to be trusted with them. We had 20 days together—weird how this number keeps popping up today—between meeting and my return from Old England to New. At some point in that mad rush, he played “We Have All the Time in the World” for me, and I was moved to the point of no return.

I’ve written about time before, though. It can be more romantic when you don’t have much of it, in the same way we sometimes use it better when we know it’s scarce.

When we said our wedding vows and I eventually sorted the paperwork for our kiddo and me to emigrate, the dream of being together became a promise. One of those takes more work than the other!

*Poses like these! New Orleans, New Years 2024*

The effort has been amply rewarded. My husband is a musician, so in addition to being immersed in James Bond and Star Trek, I get to be a jazz band groupie. I would never have imagined that my cautious British physicist would turn out to be a star poser for photos, or that he’d come along to Shakespeare performances.

Sticking with it for the amount of time that change requires is a small miracle. Other times, we swoop to each other’s rescue in an instant. That’s another miracle: when one vulnerable person reveals their desperation and their partner responds with care, no matter how lost and alone they too may feel.

Suddenly You Flare in My Sight

If a story equals character plus event plus time, there are infinite combinations. I come up with fiction ideas by asking “What if…?” sometimes about real-life situations, but not usually about my personal ones. Lately, though, I imagine alternative realities which would have unspooled had I made different choices.

We often liked to tell people, if they asked how we met, that we never would have if he’d been a moment later heading back to his uni, and had missed the train. But what if we’d met seven years ago, or ten, instead of twenty-three? If we met the same way, as students with no assets swiftly adding a child to the mix—we’d never have been able to live together as a family. The immigration laws are so tight now, they keep increasing the amount a British citizen must have in the bank to earn the right to bring an international spouse home. I ache for the people kept apart because of this, because of meeting each other a decade too late.

This helps me appreciate what we have, and I track our moments of delight in my daily scribbles. As favours we gave all our wedding guests copies of Wendell Berry’s poem “The Wild Rose.” He compares his longtime partner to a wild rose blooming… “where yesterday there was only shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before.”

There are so many twists in life which we can’t control, and always a fair few choices to regret. It’s nice to remember the ones we’re more than satisfied with, even—dare I say it—proud of. What surprising choices would you make all over again?

Antici…PAtion!

This Week’s Bit of String: Silent night

One of my earliest memories takes place at Christmas. My small New England town put on a Christmas pageant at the church, one of those crowned white ones on a pristine green.

Candles glow in frosty windows as Mary and Joseph journey to the manger and kneel respectfully. Junior high angels dance down the aisles, bare feet thumping over cast iron grates, and the kings stride in their colourful robes.

At the end, the choir sings “Silent Night” as everyone files off the darkened stage. Kings, shepherds, angels and kindergarten cherubs. Joseph, penultimately, exits down the centre aisle and finally Mary, sombre and alone, disappears into a side door. The lights come up and everyone bursts into “Joy to the World.”

*Some of my favourite ornaments, carrying lots of memories*

Can you spot what they forgot? My just-turned-three-year-old self was keenly aware that everyone left the infant Messiah behind. The wooden box-manger only held a doll, but I was inconsolable; to me dolls were as real as anything. I was outraged at the abandonment, sobbing amongst the heavily coated crowd.

My parents found the girl who played Mary, but I wanted nothing to do with that traitorous mother. Then I was introduced to the person who owned the Baby Jesus doll, and that alone calmed me down.

I still wonder at the order of that pageant, unchanged in decades. Through the ensuing years, I loved the pageant, thought it beautiful–but also tenderly sad. That’s Christmas for you, I guess; moments of quiet, of loss, of sudden delight. I was taught that when setting up a collection of short stories, you showcase the best ones first. Maybe it’s our instinct to start strong, but this can result in an anticlimax.

Maintaining Order

Four decades and an ocean now separate me from that distraught doll-defending girl at her first nativity play. I’ve been around long enough to know my ideal festive sequence of events, even if I can’t always control it.

The key is to avoid letdown. You have to hit your checklist in the right moments, before the season over-ripens to wistfulness. Most Christmas films have an element of nostalgia and wish fulfillment that’s too sad the day after Christmas. The build-up is the best part of Christmas, really. Putting ornaments on the tree is a lot more special than taking them down.

*There can be a lot of stress at Christmas, but Obie the Bosscat is keeping on top of things.*

The word anticipate shares a root with capture. It means to grasp something beforehand. That’s quite exciting, isn’t it? Not like the tedium of just waiting, because at least we know that December 25th will, in fact, arrive (unlike a lucrative writing contract, for example).

I get Christmas tunes playing in my earbuds during hikes around mid-November, and the lights and decorations go up at the very start of December, so I can enjoy them for longer. Everything must be in place for the cosy moments between all the running around. At some point, I will be reminded that it matters more to me than to others, and each sparkle will disappear from centre stage.

Heightened Sensations

Christmas forms strong memories because it engages all our senses. We associate smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and feelings with the holiday. When a moment incorporates all senses, I think our memories cohere around it more firmly.

We’ve got Christmas songs, both jolly or deeply moving, we’ve got sparkly lights and shiny ornaments and the contrasts of crimson berries against sharp green holly. We’ve got smells of cinnamon and pine, and tastes of citrus and chocolate. We’ve got the sensations of warm hearths and fuzzy jumpers and the bracing chill from anaemic skies.

Great storytelling engages all the senses as well, which is why Christmas stories and films and songs can be particularly moving. Listening, viewing, reading them, and even creating our own helps us to seize those moments because otherwise, we might forget the bits that turned out how we wanted, when some events inevitably proceed less smoothly.

I wonder if our relentless preparations are partly an attempt to find exactly the right combination of sensory stimuli that make us feel young, make us feel loved and valued as we believe we once did. We are desperate to capture something, maybe that outpouring that George Bailey finds at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, or the kindness and mutual appreciation of a goose dinner at the Cratchit family table.

What are your favourite moments to capture in the holidays? How do you manage to seize them, and do they fall before December 25th or after?

Make ‘Em Laugh

This Week’s Bit of String: Personification of ants

Our neediest Year 9s have been treated to a poet-in-residence course. The poet wears bright-patterned shirts and hipster glasses and leads the troop outside to find objects for personification practice. My dynamic duo choose an ant, and assign it a “he” pronoun.

“A male ant,” I say. “That would be an uncle!”

It’s the last lesson of the day, and very hot. We are all tired. I start to chuckle at my own joke.

My student, who takes stairs three at a time and is so bouncy you could easily interchange him with Tigger (although the constant involuntary shouts and bird chirps might give him away), stills suddenly and gives me a stern look. “No.”

I’m not generally sadistic, but the poor reception of my pun makes me laugh even more. The kids are disgruntled, and that’s hilarious. I try to apologise, but I’m not very sorry.

A couple weeks ago I attended my first in-person workshop or course since before covid. It was about writing with humour, hosted for Evesham’s Festival of Words by Fran Hill, whose memoirs including Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? are brilliant examples of warm humour and efficient prose. We went over different kinds of funny scenarios and set-ups, including wordplay like my awful hot-afternoon pun, and read and created lots of fun examples.

Because we don’t do this often enough, I thought I’d dedicate this post to comedy. So, in case you’re a bit tired and world-weary, here’s a little compendium of things I find really funny. Don’t worry, they’re higher quality than my ant joke.

Early Years

In my family we watched a lot of vintage comedy. My father passed his own father’s love of the Marx Brothers and Spike Jones down to us. The humour that often stays in my memory is musical. Here’s Chico Marx’s piano routine in Animal Crackers–and Groucho’s annoyance with it. “I can’t thinka the finish!” – “That’s strange, and I can’t think of anything else.”

Often what makes us laugh is an element of surprise. It’s characters who we expect to be straight-laced suddenly subverting stereotypes and doing something outrageous. Growing up (and this is still true for me), my siblings and I loved musicals and Disney animated films. I’ve got examples from both showing characters doing something hilariously unexpected: Fagin’s entrance in “I’d Do Anything for You” from Oliver!, and Kronk, the beefcake boytoy, creating his own theme music in The Emperor’s New Groove.

As we got older, we became fans of irony and understatement. We loved the Anguished English books, collecting the most egregious and uproarious written mistakes often from professional settings. We liked the absurd. Here’s a scene from the Beatles’ film Help, because Ringo’s flat-toned reaction to nearly having his finger bitten off in a vending machine tickled us: “I thought… y’know, I thought she was a sandwich.”

The Music Plays On

Given that the family I’ve raised is also quite musically inclined, I continue to enjoy that type of humour. Comedy increases its impact when it uses cultural references that people can further relate to. Bill Bailey is great at this. My husband and son and I love his Belgian jazz version of the Doctor Who (Docteur… Qui) theme song. Or, if you prefer, he also does a terrific reggae rendition of Downton Abbey.

*Bath Carnival last weekend… get happy!*

Talking of unlikely combinations, here’s a fabulous mashup my son created, of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, and the Tetris theme. How awesome is it when your own kids make you laugh?

I also love an ensemble piece. For me, that’s what makes shows from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Office to Stranger Things to The Good Place so fantastic. You adore and rely on every cast member. Here are prime examples of ensemble comedy from each side of the pond, that have me laughing more with each character adding to the piece: The Muppets covering “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and several incredible British actors and actresses attempting Hamlet’s soliloquy together. You’ll love both of these from the beginning… but the endings blow them out of the water.

In literature, Dickens’s descriptions of people make me laugh, and Louisa May Alcott’s quick action tags like saying a boy exited “with the graceful gait of a young giraffe.” An especially memorable (partly because I was on a bus full of dour commuters at the time) laugh-out-loud passage is from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

“Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limits of the bed…”

Most of all in my reading and writing, I like to celebrate surprising alliances, to build little bands of misfits, so maybe that’s why I enjoy odd pairings in comedy too. My humorous short story “From Newcastle, With Love” appears in the Stroud Short Stories anthology, and you can hear me read it (and hear the audience laughing at just the right places, too).

What are some of your favourite funnies?

What Moves Us

This Week’s Bit of String: Possible planetary shift

“Miss, is it true that moving the earth even a centimetre out of orbit would basically destroy everything?”

I’m not certain, Year 11 child who’s supposed to be completing a textbook-based cover lesson on greenhouse gases in the last period of the schoolday.

If I’d thought critically about what an orbit is, and the way it represents the equilibrium of attraction between two planetary bodies, I would probably have confirmed the student’s query. A change in orbit could trigger sudden prolonged extreme temperatures or just cause the earth to plummet into the sun which, come to that, would be a particularly prolonged temperature change.

But it’s hard to properly consider an extra theory when you still have remnants of covid brain from less than two weeks ago, and you’re trying to prepare teenagers for exams while fielding queries from cover teacher and students alike, such as: “Did you find Jacob?” and “Miss, what’s your opinion about amputees?” (Kids are just weird, ok?)

Anyway, once I was home and the dust of my thoughts settled, I channeled them into a new wormhole. I researched what would happen if the earth’s orbit skewed, if its tilt altered, and also looked into the calculations being done to check the feasibility of moving the earth further from the sun.

All interesting and fairly unlikely, but what intrigued me was what, I suspect, intrigues a lot of us readers and writers. How a tiny change can make a big difference, how a slight tick of motion can catalyse vast movements.

Being Moved

My most recent (and utterly wonderful) read was Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, in which a character mentions being “moved” by a book. “It moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time one begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find impossible to describe, it changed me.”

I thought, couldn’t they have come up with a better verb for such a significant impact? “Move” is stretched wearily over many meanings. But as I reflected on our use of move, I warmed to the term. Sometimes having multiple uses is appropriate. It allows a word extra levels.

We talk about moving up or moving out. We move house and move away, dream of moving mountains and possibly moving the earth’s orbit. There are chess moves and symphonic movements and moves to proceed or to adjourn. Aristotle even came up with a theory referring to God as the Unmoved Mover.

A book (or other work of art) is an Unmoved Mover. It didn’t spring up out of nowhere, but by the time we hold it in our hands, it is standing on its own, detached from its maker. Its power is only what we can take from it, yet it gives so much.

Roots and Tongues

The oldest known version of the word move comes from the proto-Indo-European root meaning “to push away.” There are undoubtedly books that knock us slightly out of orbit. Our temperature heats up, and we proceed with a certain rawness. It’s often, as Krauss writes, impossible to point out a concrete change in our lives. Yet who can say what we notice, how we react, that comes down to our sensitivity being pricked by a book?

While thinking about our use of this word in English, I consulted the gloriously warm and talented poet Elizabeth M Castillo. She is fluent in several languages, and let me know about the word “ému” in French, which is deeper and longer-lasting than “moved.” I suppose it’s a bit like our word emote, but in English that sounds sort of… clinical.

“Affect” or “inspire” are a bit vague, whereas I’ve come to like the physical, visceral implications of “move.” A story can be touching, but to say a book “touches” me feels uneasy.

In Spanish, Castillo says, there’s “conmovido,” which is different from their word for physical movement. It “implies something or someone is doing it to you… bringing you along into a feeling.” A bit like an Unmoved Mover, again.

Stories on the Move

I feel as if the best reads can be Unmoved Mover books that give you a shove, or companion books that move along with you, or paper boat books which do the moving for you. Elizabeth M Castillo’s poetry book Cajoncito is one of the latter. Reading her poems, I feel relieved, as if someone’s unlocked sentiments I hadn’t managed to untangle yet, and set them afloat. It’s on sale through Amazon, and honestly the first poem alone is worth the price.

It’s not just books, of course. Would I have made it through my teen years without accompaniment from Tori Amos and the Les Miserables soundtrack? Have you ever had the lights go up from a live stage production and felt your life as you knew it is over; you’ve been elevated to a different plane and your trajectory has inevitably, if not definably, swerved? In the end, have you come up for a better word to describe the general experience than… “moving?”

An Eventful Week

Bit of String: The Relevance of Little Earthquakes

As a late sixteenth birthday present, I took my son to Tori Amos’ concert in the Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night. He appeared to be the youngest in the huge audience, but he loves Tori’s music, often fully recreating it on the piano by ear, and he recognised every song she played by its opening chord, turning to me to whisper excitedly.

On our way to the concert, he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve asked you this before. I mean, I know you have her music and that’s how I got to know it, but is she one of your favourites, too?’

The answer, of course, is yes. I told him about the Columbia and BMG cassette tape deals of the mid-90s, how you could join their ‘clubs’ and get tapes at cut prices. I used these, as an adolescent, to buy all kinds of music to experiment with what I best related to. I bought Under the Pink as part of my explorations, with Little Earthquakes quick to follow.

She came out with lyrics we didn’t usually hear from singers. Before Alanis Morissette asked ‘Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ and Fiona Apple owned being a ‘Criminal’ and a ‘Sullen Girl,’ before Paula Cole got sarcastic about cowboys, there was Tori admitting she wanted to ‘smash the faces of those beautiful boys’ who took advantage of her as a child in ‘Precious Things.’ She reminded us, ‘You’re just an empty cage, Girl, if you kill the bird,’ and she knew we’d been ‘Silent All These Years.’ So I was thrilled to see her live, to enter the Royal Albert Hall, although it was an even bigger thrill to attend with my son and see his joy as he said, ‘I feel so light, I feel like I weigh nothing.’

The Royal Albert Hall stage set for Tori Amos. — The stage is set.

‘It’s the crowd’s reaction when she started playing “Silent All These Years,”’ he said as we wandered through London the next day, making a required stop at the American Embassy and then moving on to the sculpture exhibition in Regents Park and the London Zoo. ‘That’s what makes me so happy, that she’s still really relevant today, and she could see it for herself there.’

I’m intrigued that he takes that away from the event; as a musician he’s pondering relevance and as a teenager he’s already giving some consideration to generativity versus stagnation, Erikson’s late stage of psychological development.

But it also made me think about what makes music—or literature—relevant. In Tori’s case, I think there’s that revelatory quality, of communicating something true (at least for a lot of us) that hasn’t yet been voiced enough.

And as I’ve written before, it’s about creating beauty from pain.

Relevance at Cheltenham Literature Festival

Fast forward to Saturday. Cheltenham Literature Festival day! I love this festival, there’s so much on and the vibe is excellent. My husband came out for the evening with me and we saw comedian Robert Webb (of Mitchell and Webb, as in Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar) speak about his new book, How Not to Be a Boy. He spoke, wryly but warmly, about the difficulties of conforming to gender stereotypes.

Given that my son has such varied interests, you may see why the topic is relevant to me. Here, Mr. Webb has created a piece of work from his own sometimes painful childhood of feeling misfitted. He also put a particularly public voice to what may well be a private dilemma for a lot of people.

A Festival mural depicts travels against a backdrop of giant books. — Mural along one of the marquees at the Festival

Before that, I had been in the Sky Garden Tent with a few hundred others to see Sarah Waters receive the Times Award for Literary Excellence. Having read Fingersmith last year and considering it the most surprising twist I have ever read—and the most well-executed, she was the top of my must-see list for this year’s festival.

Sarah Waters managed to bring lesbian historical fiction into mainstream literature. I suspect that’s hugely relevant to a lot of people. For those of us not that way inclined, it’s still important to read that perspective. I also loved her answer when asked about planning one of her later novels. She said she’d just been through the hard break-up of a longterm relationship.

‘I thought, this has been really awful. So I might as well make some fucking money out of it!’

Fellow writers, I think we’ve all been there. Not making money out of it necessarily, but at least putting our tough times into artistic form, creating characters to carry those burdens for us.

Before the prize-giving, I’d watched a panel discussion on Being Other in Britain Today. Nikesh Shukla talked to June Sarpong and Reni Eddo-Lodge about their books. Check out Mr. Shukla’s campaign to start a quarterly journal of great writing from authors of colour, and the website for June Sarpong’s new book Diversify, which lists practical steps to tackle all our private prejudices.

It was a challenging decision which book to buy after this event. (I can’t buy every single one; I’d go broke.) I chose Ms. Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. It seemed the one I might need the most education on. When someone from another sphere of experience feels they’re not being heard, the logical step is undoubtedly for us to listen.

Ms. Eddo-Lodge’s book is based on a blog post she wrote a few years ago. She says she never imagined the piece would go viral; it was something she had to get out of her system. Once she had written her feelings of frustration at how her white friends seemed to ignore her concerns about race, she felt that was that, and didn’t assume dialogue would actually ensue.

Which goes to show, perhaps, that our writing can be relevant and impactful to us even when we don’t do it for a large audience. We can’t really predict how many others might need to read it, can we?

Putting Flesh on the Bones

This Week’s Bit of String: ‘The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle’

Sweden, 1628. The country is at war with Poland, so King Gustavus Adolphus orders a mighty ship built, with holes for thirty-two cannons on each side. When each cannon hatch is opened, a carved lion’s head, mid-roar, glares out from the inside of the lifted door. The Vasa is fierce and ornate, and I can just imagine the king promising ‘fire and fury like the world has never seen before.’

But as the Vasa sets off for the very first time, the top-heavy ship starts to list, then sinks after a kilometre, dragging at least thirty to their deaths.

Over three hundred years later, the ship is located and, incredibly, salvaged. Piecing together all the bits that fell off takes twenty-five years, including twelve during which some experts focus on restoring original colours to the statues. The whole Vasa is now a museum in Stockholm.

The Vasa's ornately carved stern castle. — The top portion of the Vasa’s 18-metre stern castle

As breathtaking as the ship is, I am also fascinated by the process of its discovery and restoration. The Vasamuseet exhibits skeletons found on the ship, and details what scientists and historians have learned from them. They’ve created digital, 3D portraits of the Vasa’s victims, based on their skulls. Turns out skulls don’t all look the same (although I got the impression they did when I visited the Catacombs in Paris). Small differences in eye socket and mouth shape and position indicate not just where those features were, but also how facial muscles connected to them, and from there offer clues to flesh out the faces.

This all made me think about story development. (Come on, any writer would.) How do we flesh ideas out into full stories?

The Idea (Skeleton)

We get ideas (when we’re lucky). Those are just the bones, washed up from the relentless tide of busy everyday life.

An idea can be a name, a phrase, an image, a what if, a combination of these. At work we’re planning a trip to a Halloween ‘frightmare,’ and it made me wonder what it’s like for those people who are paid to jump out and scare you all night long. Does that have some kind of effect on the psyche? I don’t know what the story would look like, but the what if is not migrating from my brain.

The Questions (Muscles)

We then ask questions about our idea. It’s not an interrogation, but an investigation. It’s exciting, not demanding. This forms the foundation of plotting.

Rows of bones in the Catacombs, Paris — Catacombs. Imagine if they hired scarers to work here! Or, nearly as terrifying, imagine having THIS many ideas to flesh out…

The questions tell us how it all works, so they are the muscles driving this thing. Does someone choose to take a job scaring people? Why would they make this choice? What is their everyday life like? How will this job affect it?

I had a little Twitter discussion about story development. Children’s writer Michael Mahin pointed me to his great post on planning a story around a central question. This is your ultimate What If, a little like your hook.

It’s worth noting that a muscle-bound face (if that’s a thing) would not be particularly pleasant. Don’t overthink the plotting of your story. Plot needs to be an unfolding, not a firing off of facts. Asking why is at least as important as asking what happened.

Also, questions are a great facilitator of ideas, of digging up the bones in the first place. If you’re stuck at the first stage, here are tips from Helen Taylor to generate your own writing prompts.

The Connections (Tissue)

Once we know more about our idea, we have to fit together the beginning, middle, and end of what we’re actually going to tell. Now the planning really takes off.

Among the responses I had on Twitter, quite a few people mention Post-Its or outlining to keep track of these different points. I take down various scribbles myself.

We might use music to inspire us. Julie Rea, a Scottish Book Trust winner, described almost the exact process I tend to use in her tweet: ‘Jot idea down in a pad. Listen to music with the ‘feel’ of the story, jot down more ideas. Weeks could pass. Sketch a rough outline-write!’ (I insert a few hikes, and more than enough sleepy, jolty, subconscious-jabbing bus commutes.)

Flashers’ Club and Writers HQ Cheltenham guru Alex Clark tweets about longer works like novels, ‘Plotting happens in a very ploddy, non-magical way.’ I love this phrase and have found it to be pretty accurate.

Of course, the process totally varies. As a couple of people pointed out, the original idea will often be two-fold: image plus phrase, for example. And with short stories, it often just cascades into place. Whatever you’ve read recently, whatever you’ve seen and heard, the idea acts as a magnet and pulls the most salient bits into its field.

The Actual Writing (Skin)

Then we write, my friends. A fair number of us will write anyway, and structure afterwards, at least with short stories. This bit can feel like magic, actually. I’ve been working on a story this week from an idea that came to me at 4:30 Tuesday morning. I just started writing it, and the next bits continually feed themselves to the page.

These are the moments when I feel I must be doing something right. What comes out at the end will probably need a lot of contouring, cosmetics, maybe even plastic surgery. The resulting face may not be glamorous but hopefully there will be an authenticity and more than a spark of interest to it.

Writers with Day Jobs: Survival Tips

This Week’s Bit of String: Astringent in a contacts case

What’s the craziest thing tiredness made you do? Mine was filling my contact lens case with facial astringent when I worked twelve-hour shifts at a nursing home, and my son was younger. The job I’m starting next week shouldn’t be quite as taxing, but even while employed at the nursing home, I managed to write several stories, including my second Bristol Short Story Prize shortlister.

Last week I wrote about the advantages and disadvantages of writers having day jobs. I alluded to this Huffington Post piece about famous authors and their occupations, noting that these are mostly men.

Steps and stile — Another inspirational photo from the walking commute…

Boldly generalising, I’d say at least in the eras during which these male authors operated, men have been lucky. They would be free as soon as they clocked out of their day jobs for the evening, to shut themselves in their mysteriously cleaned home offices while meals appeared magically before them and their offspring were entertained elsewhere. Not necessarily the case for women.

It’s different in many households now, but in mine I am still principally responsible for housework and offspring management, for a variety of reasons (the time it would take to change that, for example). But this means I’m used to planning far ahead, and juggling various commitments. In a way, women have unique experience at making do.

From across the ocean, my mum worries over the phone as I prepare to reenter full-time work, ‘I’m afraid you won’t have time to write.’

I dismiss her kind concern. ‘No, no, it’s fine. I’ll figure it out.’

But how?

‘Why do you write like you’re running out of time?’

I brought up the subject on Twitter, and my main respondents about writers with day jobs were women. Freya Morris recommends lots of caffeine and offered tough but necessary talk. ‘Friends and family take the hit. But I chose my priorities. Writing first. Mostly.’ She also notes that full-time work makes it difficult to carry out the required ‘immersion’ for bigger projects like novels.

Ríona Judge McCormack just quit her job for a temporary writing break, since she felt split in two by her paid work and her need to create. She details her decision, a rather appealing strategy, on her blog.

It was lovely, too, to hear from Poppy O’Neill, who works part time in a job that is apparently stress-free! Having a flexible schedule and minimal work baggage helps her get writing done, not surprisingly.

Finally, some thoughts from Emily Royal, who also works full-time but utilises ‘snatched, focused writing bursts—’ I love that phrase—and of course, self-discipline.

‘You get nothing if you wait for it, wait for it, wait…’

My tips as I prepare myself for the transition from 20 weekly working hours to 37.5:

Writing nook — My writing corner, in the laundry room since I’m there so often anyway.

Notebooks: Always keep one handy. I have one on each floor of my house, plus one that travels. My TA planners from when I worked in a secondary school are crisscrossed with scribbled threads. This keeps those interesting observations, those bits of string, from blowing away in a busy whirlwind.

Tiredness: Use it. If I come home from work and my brain feels too fried to write, I do housework instead. It takes a lot less mental energy to clean, cook, and iron, than to create, and this way I’ve got those pesky chores done so I can sit and write early the next morning. If I’m too tired even to clean, I read. That counts as work for writers!

Music and Images: Use visual and musical aides representing your work-in-progress to switch on that elusive immersion. While walking home from work, I listen to songs echoing my characters’ feelings so I can dive into them once I’ve got the chance. I also have a writing corner stocked with images to keep me in the right mindset. Lately, the Hamilton soundtrack keeps me fired up, as evidenced in the sub-headings.

Routine: Obviously. We need to keep good habits. Just as our working hours are fairly inflexible, we need to brutally delineate writing times and stick to them. I’m not saying it’s easy. But often, neither are our jobs and we do them anyway. I’m hoping if I sit down in my self-assigned writing time having perhaps already jotted down thoughts and plans in my notebook while out of the house, completed household tasks the previous night, and maybe got my brain going with some carefully selected songs and pictures, I might be able to keep up.

Next week, I will conclude this series on Working Writers (for now) with a farewell to the post office, featuring various bits of string I’ve gathered there and at previous jobs.

Art is All Around

This week’s bit of string: Thoughts and images from artists who’ve passed this way already

We’re approaching that time of year when Bill Nighy’s ‘Christ-MAS is all around us’ from Love Actually gets stuck in our heads. Come now, it isn’t just me. But I won’t bother you about Christmas yet, nor even, indeed, about love. Let’s talk about art instead. Art is all around us!

Bristol street art: Colourful twist ties in old city wall window — Bristol’s old city wall, brightened with hundreds of colourful twisty ties.

As someone who left the ability to drive when I emigrated twelve years ago, I do a lot of walking, and I don’t mind it. Even when I’m walking the same route to and from work every day, I enjoy taking pictures from my journey and reflecting on it later, scribbling details in one of my handy-dandy notebooks.

I’ve been motivated in this by a hashtag project my sister Nicole St. James started two years ago. #Everythingyoucanwalkto encourages us to get outside and take pictures. We use our phone lenses to frame what we see, and make it into art. Have a look, here.

What qualifies these photos as art? They just feature things found in nature, or random bits of graffiti like a sticker on a lamppost. How do we identify what art is?

Art Derives from Nature

On her Brainpickings website, Maria Popova posted a nice compilation of quotes defining art. She references Frank Lloyd Wright, who observed that art develops the ‘elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms’ for people to use.

Roses laced with frost — A rose is a rose, but it’s art too.

I agree that the relationship between nature and art is key. Being out in the fresh air, in the colour and grandeur of the landscape, opens our minds more to appreciate art and beauty. So when I’m walking along, provided I’m not stressing too much about something stupid, I am more liable to look around and interpret what I see as beautiful, and capable of use in art.

Art Creates the Unexpected

The other thing that opens my mind to art as I’m out walking is finding something unexpected. A painting on the side of a building, or a baby’s shoe hung in a tree. These give me pause, make me think, question: what’s the story here?

In remarks detailed by a New York Public Library article in the Huffington Post, Leon Botstein called art necessary to ‘discover the imagination.’ He also noted its ‘powerful protection against boredom.’ In order to do so, of course art has to surprise you a little. As for defining it, he said: ‘If it seems to evoke, even inadvertently… it can be a piece of art.’

Yes, those weird pieces of street art, even the most obscure or minimalistic modern art—if they cause emotion, even frustration or confusion, they are art! After all, it’s a frustrating and confusing world. We have to expect art to reflect that, at least occasionally. Look at Kafka, or Beckett, or Joyce. The bizarre, somewhat disjointed narratives they created qualify as literature partly because they awaken us to the same qualities in the real world.

The Unbearable Inconvenience of Feeling

My personal definition of art, plain and simple: It makes you think, and it makes you feel. That includes literature. As writers, we definitely have the power to do those things, if people let us.

Paris graffiti: 'Love me' sticker on a drainpipe — Encountered this ‘Love me’ sticker in Paris. Ceci une pipe? Or a poignant plea from a wayward artist?

Admittedly, thinking and feeling aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. In a passage from my novel Artefacts, a teacher confronts the rather challenging seventh grader, Luke, after Luke covers the toilet conveniences in paper mache and uses the excuse that he’s made art.
‘You can’t use art just to inconvenience people,’ Mr. Tamworth said. ‘Or even solely to shock people, I would argue.’
‘They say it’s supposed to make people feel,’ Luke snapped. ‘That’s pretty damn inconvenient.’

And it is, it is inconvenient, sometimes excruciating, especially when art or literature places another human being’s pain-stricken soul in front of us. Art is all around us, bursting before our eyes, blooming in our minds, and the beauty of it can ache. But we use it to create our own work.

So we cry at movies (including Love Actually. You know it isn’t just me!) as we are forced to contemplate what we might do in a similar situation. We feel as if we can fly when listening to music like Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ and new imagery and ideas seep through our veins. We look at an art installation in the street and start thinking about who put it there, and why. And eventually, these feelings and thoughts, these what ifs and bits of string, help us formulate new stories, and put new art into the world.