Tick, Tick, Boom

Thunderous, churning, sweeping the shore

In and then out, repeating

Dragging pebbles and thoughts

Eroding the shape of it all

In the Frame

What are your earliest memories?

I’m sitting in the bay window of my childhood bedroom following the path of raindrops as they make their way down the outside of the glass.

I’m fascinated with how the water catches and wells at the bottom of each V in the diamond shaped leaded panes.

There is no direct route.

Natures tears have to wait their turn to fall to earth.

Gran is washing me in the kitchen sink of a holiday park static caravan, on the Isle of Wight.

It’s my first day at Infant School.

I’m waiting outside the gates with Mummy.

I’m wearing a yellow dress, not school uniform.

Apparently, the last two didn’t happen quite like that.

I suspect memory, second hand story and photograph have been stirred into a generous helping of time to create a fiction-mess.

Are your memories always in colour?

I can see that yellow dress (and feel the scratchy polyester against my bare legs!).

The sink is stainless steel and the kitchen is white; maybe even colourless.

My bedroom walls are peachy-pink.

Floral patterned navy blue curtains are pinched back from the bay, their roses concertinaed in a fabric press.

Those images lead to other images in my mind, spilling out from each room or setting:

I can see the school playground… fragments of games, faces, noise.

Gran is singing to me, lulling me to sleep.

I’m walking out of my bedroom, into the hall.

Doors to the other rooms are open, waiting to be remembered and explored.

What can you remember?

Close your eyes and picture a place or time you know well. It might just start a story…

Put the Radio on

There are days I can't start a story, or can't continue.

What is it that stops me?

Fear.

You might think that sounds silly... How can she be afraid of a few words on a page?

Stop sitting there, staring out the window and just get on with it! Come on! Write!

It sounds simple. Simple and silly.

Open the laptop, tap the keys, form words and make sentences.

Nothing to be afraid of, surely?

It's not so much the action of typing, or a lack of ideas, images, plot, characters etc.

It's more what all that says to me when I read it back.

If I start to think about where those words come from and how they make me feel, then I am lost. Lost in thoughts, memories, photographs all jumbled up with my imagination, like ingredients in a Magimix; kneaded together, ready to roll into a story.

What's wrong with that? Isn't that the point - how and where stories start?

Well, yes. I just didn't know it could make me feel like this: like I'm turning myself inside out and spreading my jam-guts on toast. They're not really my guts - Bryn's story is about Bryn, not me. But, like most writers I guess I cannibalize my life and experiences and regurgitate them (apologies if you're having your lunch).

I stare at what I've written and it looks good (despite the resemblance to guts... sorry, I'll stop now!) but it's as though I don't remember writing it. The images in my head made words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters all by themselves. I have no idea how they escaped from that secret locked-away space between my ears and rearranged themselves in black and white on the screen.

Did I do it in my sleep? Sleep-writing... is that a thing?

Is that where the fear comes from - the not knowing where it comes from in the first place?

Ironically, I think it's the fear that makes me want to write. The more scared I am of how this ability to form mental scribbles into stories happens, the more curious I get about what else I'll find in there - so I keep going. Splutter-start-stop-splutter-start... like an old Volkswagen Beetle lost and kangerooing down a bumpy country lane.

I'll get from A to Z in the end, it might just take me a while to find the right gear.