Stories that make sense
Whenever thunder grumbles overhead, I think of where I am. Am I indoors, outdoors? Am I standing in a safe place? Can we get to the car? Is everything switched off at the plug?
Then I find an appropriate window to watch from.
Then I think about how it works. How does the lightning know what to strike? Is it striking everywhere, all through the storm, but only completes the circuit when it finds something that will take it all the way down to earth?
Then the lightning strikes.
Then I think, wow.
One of my greatest sources of inspiration has always been books.
A conventional answer, but none the less true. I’ve always had more books than I could ever possibly read, and I like it that way. When I was a child, I was blessed with a superabundance of books. A school in the area closed down when I was four, and my parents, looking ahead, bought up half the library. Fiction, history, geography, biology – I learned as much out of books marked ‘Westdowns – DISCARDED’ as I did at school. I remember with particular fondness one called ‘Blood’, which talked about black pudding and blood brothers, and had a family tree illustrating the progress of haemophilia through the royal families of Europe. There was one about weightlessness and gravity populated by zany cartoon characters ahead of their time. And a whole swarm of Ladybirds.
Then there were the Blue Peter annuals. My first one came from a church fete at Elton. Book Fifteen, with a blue, trapezey cover. My mother bought it for me: ‘You’ll like these: they have things to make in them.’ Didn’t they just. I’m not sure I ever made very many of them – I remember covering a spice pot in halved clothes pegs to make a pencil holder – but the idea was there. Books contained things to make, and I liked making things.
The funny thing about the Blue Peters was that we never had a television. Or perhaps that wasn’t so funny. I never joined the Brownies, either, and yet I had a dozen Brownie annuals at one point. And again, when things got a bit much in the house, I went round to our traveller friends’ bus and read their copy of Mary Berry’s Step by Step Desserts.
The thing about all these books was that I read them and thought ‘I could do that’. Sometimes I went on and did it. Sometimes I didn’t. It didn’t matter.
Fiction, too, suggested that anything was possible. I have been thinking a lot of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes recently. That was a book about determined women earning a living by doing something that they thought was worth doing, and it has modelled, consciously or otherwise, my ideal of an integrated artistic life. It talked sense about the importance of hard work and luck as well as that of talent.
Poetry, most of all, drew me in, dancing on the page, persuading me that I could do that, too. (I couldn’t – not at first. But books also tell you to keep going, to keep trying, that not everything is perfect first time round.)
Books, whether they be fiction or not, contain stories. The best ones invite you in to join them, and then send you out equipped with new tools, new ideas, to try it for yourself.
The last time I felt completely relaxed was one and a half years ago. Due to a complicated chain of events that I can’t now be bothered to go into, I was staying with a university friend and his parents. I was being fed, housed, amused. I slept in a comfortable white-sheeted bed. I walked twenty minutes to work and five minutes to church. Regarding future plans, I’d fallen into the exact job I needed. After a summer of horrible, grinding insecurity, it was bliss. For two weeks I was comprehensively, deliciously, looked after, and I let myself enjoy it.
Have I really not felt relaxed since then? Apparently not. I was moving house, and then I was unpacking, and then I was ill. I’ve been feeling very well over the past week or so, but it’s been the sort of bubbling glowiness that I get when I’m coming out of depression. Wonderful, but not at all relaxing.
I am not very good at looking after myself. When other people look after me it’s lovely (depending, of course, on the people), and I am learning how to accept it graciously (again, depending on the people), but – well. It is all very well for me to collapse on the sofa, but first I have to take all the books off it. And the fact that the books got there in the first place, and have remained there, is probably a sign that I should have been looking after myself better. There. It is so very easy for it to become another ‘should’.
My great-grandmother, having introduced her former beau to a suitable young lady, was wont to say of the resulting offspring, ‘I feel I brought those children into the world’.
History does not record what the suitable young lady said about that.
Which is to say that birth as a metaphor for anything that is not birth has never worked very well for me. It somehow manages to diminish both birth and work, and I am really uncomfortable with using it of my own projects.
I am not entirely sure why that might be. It’s not as if I am particularly squicked by the concept of birth – I spent my teenage years as unofficial chief proofreader for Midwifery Matters, and as a result I probably know as much as anyone who hasn’t actually been there and done it about the physiological, practical and political aspects of birth. I can tell you what ‘O. P.’ stands for both in the Latin and the vulgar. I can explain why a common party balloon makes a reasonable model for the uterus. I can talk about the importance of continuous one-to-one midwifery care. What I absolutely cannot do is apply this to my own work.
Possibly I’m too much of a literalist. Take my long-going novel, for example. I resist applying the birth metaphor to that, because I am irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that the pregnancy has lasted seven years but nobody actually knows whether the conception was successful. I end up wandering through the animal kingdom (‘Well, horses and deer and things are born and then stand up within a few hours, while human infants need intensive nurturing for years before one can safely leave them to their own devices. Birds lay eggs – which is the nearest thing to birth – but then have to incubate them for weeks…’) and end up concluding that the current project is actually a marsupial.
And, jumping back behind the metaphor to what I think is the intention behind the prompt, my most recent project, into which I put a huge amount of work and of which I am extremely proud, has the unedifying title ‘Private Contractors Database’. One can’t talk about ‘birthing’ a ‘private contractors database’ without falling about laughing. At least, I can’t. The metaphors that do spring to mind are building (largely, of recent weeks, in the context of Rudyard Kipling’s If: ‘If you can see the things you gave your life to, broken/And stoop and build them up with Sharepoint 2013…’) and transformation.
The Private Contractors Database wasn’t my idea. It already existed, in an embryo (ha!) form. My role in bringing it to where it is now was more like this:
My manager: Well, we have six white mice and a pumpkin. We need a coach. I want you to look into coach-building possibilities.
Me: No problem; let me think about it.
Six months later, after a lot of hard work (important point! ‘hard work’ is often a translation of ‘magic’) we have a coach.
This is all very interesting, because I had thought that the part of me that was a fairy godmother had packed up and flown off when I stopped temping. I’d been looking after other people too much; it was time for me to look after myself. (I have a feeling I’ll be writing more about this soon…) But I look at the projects that I’m working on at the moment, and I see: one is a quilt for a baby. One is a necklace to surprise a friend.
Even the novel is a coming-of-age present for some imaginary godchild, to tell them that, whoever they are, they are turning out exactly as they should be.
Ten years ago, I was almost exactly at the mid-point of university, half-way through my second year. I lived in the House of Weird (12 Mowbray Avenue, Exeter) with people who are still my best friends. I was, by and large, having a whale of a time. Ten-years-ago me was bright, cheerful, had a social life that current-me remembers with affection and mild envy. She spent her time reading, walking, planning extravagant fancy-dress parties. Ten-years-ago me was having a fantastic time, and, more to the point, knew it. I’m not sure that there’s a huge amount that I could teach her.
Knowing what I know now, I would tell my ten-years-ago self,
just these few things that might have made her life a bit easier:
– bisexuality is an identity that exists, and you are perfectly entitled to adopt it at this point in your life. Even though you are not sure that anything with ‘sexual’ in it applies to you. Even though you are thinking seriously about permanent celibacy.
– that thing from last year? Not your fault. Not your fault at all. He was taking advantage of your being socialised to be nice. You don’t need to feel guilty about it any longer.
– you are allowed to say ‘yes’ the first time. People don’t ask you to do things unless they want you to.
– you are allowed to spend money on yourself, to buy yourself nice things. It isn’t your job to mitigate the shortcomings of the entire world by depriving yourself.
– don’t set your heart on the Church (not that she’d have listened to me on that one. She didn’t listen to anyone else!)
And (the one thing that might have changed things):
Don’t forget this. Don’t forget who you are now. This is a high, and I think you know it. Just see if you can’t find a way to carry some of this momentum forwards into what comes next.
And:
No matter, because you did well. Good job. Keep it up.
‘Well, you’ve all got it.’
Half the office, it seemed, had hung around to see whether we would get it. Four of us, employed on temporary contracts for going on for two years in some cases. I was the youngest, and the newest, having been there only since mid-January. Now it was August, interviews had taken place over the past two days, and I was beginning to dare to hope.
When I came in, I was as low as I ever had been. My previous temp placement had been three months at the local hospital, handing out hearing aid batteries and making appointments. The job I was covering came up, and I was interviewed, and I didn’t get it.
The annoying thing was, I would have liked temping, if I’d felt that I was allowed to. It appealed to my fairy-godmother persona: I was the person who flew in, swept up the mess, and flew off again. I had no particular desire to stay in any workplace long-term; most of them had been horrible. But one couldn’t admit to that. I’d bought in to other people’s ideas about stability and permanence and planning for the future.
And yes, I would quite have liked more of those things in my life as well, but I could have done without the corollary, that any job with an end date wasn’t worth having. I could have done without writing myself off as a failure even as I had a job, even as I was supporting myself, even as I was learning how to operate as an adult in the workplace.
Temping for temping’s sake would have been fun. Temping as a stepping stone to a permanent job was depressing. I was always wondering if this was the one, and feeling that if it were I’d have to be grateful. I was very lucky that the one turned out to be the one it was. I’m still there, five years, four job titles and two offices later.
When I think of the others – the hospital library (lovely people, but a boring job); the exam script-checking (awful – we were treated as if we were back at school); the hospital medical records library (eight months with no natural light, no wonder I got depressed that year) – I am very glad that this was the one that stuck.
I remember how we all clustered at the end of that day, knowing that the interviews were done, knowing that the decisions were being made. I remember the glinting silver blinds, the slight August stuffiness.
I remember the waiting.
Well, you’ve all got it.
That’s how I knew that this chapter of my life had ended.
And now I was free to…
get on with the job. Devise and put in place systems that would make things run far more efficiently than I’d dared before. Finish all these projects I had started. Ask to be moved to other tasks. Get more experience.
Finish other projects, outside the workplace.
There is, after all, something to be said for security. It quiets everything that tells you, ‘don’t rock the boat’, and some boats need rocking.
I’m never quite free, though; even five years on, I have those phantom chains around my ankles, and I have to consciously kick them off. ‘You can’t finish this,’ my past self whispers to me. ‘What if they decide they don’t need you any more?’ And I tell her things about redundancy law and experience, but she still isn’t quite convinced.
And of course, they might decide they don’t want me any more. Nothing is certain, and in a job that is as dependent as mine is upon the political climate, I can’t be sure that ‘they’ won’t decide they don’t need me any more. All the same, I know this:
– that I was a decent temp
– that I’m doing a better job now that I’m not constantly worrying about where the next month’s work is going to come from
– that my worth is not defined by how much someone is paying me
– that I would manage. Because I did before, and this time I know it.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -Colette, author (28 Jan 1873-1954)
I subscribe to A.Word.A.Day, which, as the name suggests, emails me an interesting word every day. I know a lot of these already; many more are completely unusable; a few have potential and I put them away for future use.
It also comes with a Thought For The Day. The above was one of them.
I’m rather flattered. I want to say, ‘no, no, that’s the easy part’. Or, ‘I’m not an author, I’m just a proof-reader’. You see, proof-reading has always been the easy part, for me. Or, rather, since I started bothering to do it to my own work, it’s been the easy part. I have been proof-reading since I was in my early teens. I’ve always had a good eye for spelling and grammar; I know without having to delve into the rules how a word should look and where a comma wants to be. I’m as happy with a red pen in my hand as with a black one, and crossing through a word of my own hurts no more than crossing through a word of someone else’s. ‘Purple and derivative – cut!’ is no different from ‘Check your deadline here – you say 5pm on p. 17!’
Writing is the hard part. Oh, ‘everything that comes into my head’ is all very well, but it tends to leave me with an archipelago of unrelated scenes, snippets of description, brief exchanges of dialogue. What comes next is raising the ocean floor to make two islands into one, building bridges and tunnels to join two or three others into a coherent route, adding piers so that one can see a little bit further.
And then I simply go through and take out everything that doesn’t need to be there. Blow up a bridge or two. Bypass one of the original islands. ‘Simply’, I say. It’s a long, tedious, process – since I started writing ‘Speak Its Name’ I must have deleted at least as much as there is in the current almost-finished file – but it doesn’t hurt. ‘Murder your darlings’, they say. It doesn’t feel like murdering to me. It’s more (if we’re going to mix our metaphors) as if I’ve been building a cathedral, and I’ve had to do masonry and woodwork and everything from scratch, and until I’m quite a long way through the process I can’t see what’s scaffolding and what’s a flying buttress. I put in what needs to be there at the beginning, but when I approach the end I find that some of it doesn’t need to be there any more.
I suppose I don’t really murder my darlings. I take them out of class and put them to bed. Sometimes they reappear, adapted for a different character’s point of view or a flashback to somebody’s past. Sometimes they slumber in ‘might come in useful’ for ever. I don’t much mind either way. Resurrecting a paragraph or two isn’t so much like saving a life as picking a useful plank out of the skip, finding that it can fill a hole after all.
An author? How I’d love to accept Colette’s title. I can’t help feeling though, that I don’t really, or really don’t, deserve it; that it ought to be harder than that. Perhaps everything feels not-quite-hard-enough when you’ve already done it, when you know you can.
It started snowing at about nine o’clock on Monday evening. It started settling. I love watching snow. I like most forms of weather, really; I will peer out of the window like a dog or a small child watching whatever falls from the sky. But snow is particularly good: the way it tumbles so gracefully, and sparkles in the light from the window, and reflects the streetlights back to the sky and turns everything orange. I put my arm outside the French window to catch a flake on the sleeve of my dressing gown; it melted before I could get a proper look at it. I kept putting my head behind the curtain to see if it was still coming down.
And then I started feeling guilty about enjoying it. Because probably the snow was going to inconvenience some people. Possibly it was going to hurt some people.
And then I realised that my feelings about snow, whichever way I tried to push them, would make no difference whatsoever to the fact of the snow, and that my enjoying it doesn’t hurt anybody. I can’t melt it by disapproving of it. I can’t make it fall thicker by watching it. I’m allowed to enjoy it. I am.
Nobody asked – it didn’t come up in Reverb – and so I was going to do without a particular word-for-the-year this year. However, there is one particular word that has been jumping up and down screaming at me to notice it. I have come across it in all sorts of contexts, and every time I do it leaps off the page, or the screen, or whatever it is.
It’s kind.
This is terrifying me in much the same way as generosity did earlier in this series, on account of being knackered. Compassion fatigue. And yet I know it’s not actually about that at all. Kindness costs nothing, indeed, particularly if I make it important to be kind to myself as well. And I remember 2013, when my word was love, how it all came in, how I found that I had already been swimming in the stuff. If kindness works the same way… yes.
I note that they seem to appear as adjectives rather than the associated nouns. Last year it was free, not freedom; this year it’s kind, more than kindness.
This year, then, is to be kind in, to be kind to others and to be kind to myself, to let kindness happen to me. Bring it on.
In August, I signed up on a whim for a class at a local arts centre – 10 Wednesday evenings learning how to work with silver.
Annoyingly, I lost about five of those Wednesdays to work, illness or sheer bloody exhaustion. The autumn drew in and it got dark and I found it harder and harder to leave the house once I’d got home.
The other five were great fun. I got to: use a saw, use a blowtorch, hit bits of silver with a hammer, solder bits of silver to other bits of solder, use a polishing machine, use a pendant drill. The tutor was great: he showed us how to use things and then let us get on with them, and encouraged us strongly to come up with our own designs. This is pretty much exactly how I learn and work, so I thought it was great.
I made a ring, a bangle and a sort of torc (the last I need to polish up). I was reasonably pleased with all of them – largely on the level of ‘I made a thing!’; they were not perfect by any means, but still, making a thing is pleasing enough in itself. I would need quite a lot of practice to get good, that’s the trouble, and one evening a week – often an evening that doesn’t actually happen – isn’t enough. And of course one’s restricted in terms of tools: I have neither the money nor the space for my own workshop, and can do very little without one.
I enjoyed such of the course as I was able to get to, but I think that at the moment I need to stick to things I can do on the dining table. In the end, perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was how much I can reasonably expect of myself on a work evening.
Kathleen Jowitt 