Writing Exercise #2: Write as much as you can on a random topic for five minutes...

Three attempts:

Garden furniture

Garden furniture comes in all shapes and sizes, like people. Some of it is very permanent, made of heavy wood and unmoving, screwed deep into the ground. Other items are light and temporary, like deckchairs which threaten to buckle under your weight. It can be fun to bring the inside of home into the new space of the garden, to get ants onto a nice rug, drop an ice-cream on a dining room chair that has been liberated onto the patio for an afternoon.

Does garden furniture secretly wish to be inside at night, once the sun has gone down and the family are safely ensconced into duvets and bedrooms where large wardrobes watch over them? Does garden furniture look around in the silent midnight hum of the garden and see insects and rodents and next-doors cat on the prowl and secretly wish it were a faithful chest of draws made of mahogany and holding a collection of miss-matched socks and baby photo’s?

Does the smell of soil and feline defecation get too much? Or is it happy to just be there for us on the four sunny days of the year when the rain holds off for just long enough so the family come together in the open air and stretch out on those trusty, slightly rusty, red deckchairs?

Eagles

Eagles frighten me. These aren’t sweet little birds that pop into the back garden for a bite of a worm basking itself in the sunshine, they are predatory, large and magnificent. The wing span of an eagle is truly terrifying – larger than a paraglider I’d imagine. Eagles soar in the air with a freedom that captures the imagination – especially that of the American people who supplant it into their national consciousness to represent strength and individualism. Eagles peer down from cliff-top roosts watching us tiny mortals; the size of ants. I wonder if they judge us, mock us with a dismissive flutter of feathers, if they playact ‘human’ to each other, smiling beaky disdain for Hank in his black SUV on a boiling day in the Canyons, listening to soft rock on his radio and wearing a baseball cap to cover his ever expanding bald patch – with a large eagle symbol emblazoned proudly upon it.

Fireworks

Fireworks remind me of the autumn – the smell of gunpowder and bonfires and the old ‘remember, remember’ rhyme. Do I remember my first firework show? There was a festival once where everyone stood around, freezing in the crisp early evening, waiting with a tired anticipation. The crowd was hushed, occasionally giving over into excited bursts of hysteria from children. The music looped to the greatest hits of Queen, everyone drinking a beer and buzzing with the celebratory feel to the air.

The moment the first one fizzes into the sky you are struck by several conflicting emotions: anticipation of the ‘big one’ the moment when a ten tonne firework will wreck the sky with its flaming aura; fear of the din of noise that is about to assault your senses; the sense of preserving your cool (you won’t ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with the masses, it takes more than a firework to make you smile!). But, then before you know it you are swept away with the music and the spectacle before you, all of that beauty and terror merge into a feeling of elation. You experience a feeling of lifting up, of letting go, of your body exploding into the sky.

© CT, 2012.

Flex, stretch, write!

So, in my quest to improve as a writer I am currently reading and working through The Creative Writing Coursebook (Edited by Julia Bell & Paul Magrs, Macmillan, 2001)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Creative-Writing-Coursebook-Exercises/dp/0333782259/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347547223&sr=8-1

The great thing about this book - designed to instruct and inspire your creative writing - is that it is a collection of anecdotes and essays by forty bona fide authors, so you really get into the mind-set of how other writers approach their own writing.

I’m finding the writing exercises really helpful, not only because they allow you to ‘start’ something but also they present a challenge. Here’s an example; Look around the room and settle upon an object, it can be anything, I chose my coffee cup. Then you have to describe the item in detail letting your mind wander and keep pulling it back to the item, creating two pages of free prose. You are not to edit it as you write so it should be a little rough and ready with a few glimmers of 'voice' appearing in the mix. Raw material to revisit and reshape. My attempt:

‘A Starbucks coffee mug bought as a gift from my mother who knows next to nothing about me other that I like coffee. I like the way coffee revives me, like now in the early hours of Saturday morning, the taste coating my tongue and the smell of it beginning to fill the living room. Coffee for me goes hand-in-hand with waking. Drinking it is as simple as breathing although sometimes my eagerness to drink it leaves a burn upon the roof of my mouth that stings like the sharp intake of air after crying.

The mug is long, as in tall. It is white with red inside - like innards or guts. The mug is bleeding inwardly but outside it is a perfect white marred only by the coffee dribble imprint on the rim that my gulping mouth has made.

The handle is stripped white and red like candy cane and now that I came to think of it there is a festive feel to the design, it may have come into my life at Christmas. The mug may have expected to be filled with spiced coffees full of nutmeg and cinnamon instead of the instant jars of coffee that I buy. I’m not sure that I would buy such tacky synthetic coffee’s to drink – I prefer my branded instant caffeine drunk in a cheap faux festive cup branded with the insignia of the corporate giant that harvests beans in some far off place and makes them into addictive beverages marked-up and held aloft on the way to work as a status symbol.

These days the disposable Starbucks clutched in the hand of a twenty-something sends a message: 

1. I am caffeine deprived 
2. I can afford to buy luxuries such as a three pound cup of coffee 
3. I am: tall, skinny latte, extra foam, with a shot of caramel syrup - Nice to meet you. 

No doubt the girl with the Starbucks, her hand silently sweating against its incredible heat, will be trying hard to cover the miss-spelt version of the name she was allocated at birth. Something like ‘Stefni’ or ‘Leeeyah’.

The coffee mug carries as image on it – a mermaid, white on green. Her hair falls in stripes and waves down her front, covering her bland nudity; she wears a crown with a star at its centre. I can’t see her arms or hands only two tails or fins on either side encasing her in scales. Miss Starbucks has a passive smile, her eyes appear half closed perhaps in the pleasurable state of one who is awaking with a morning coffee and has just taken her first sip. Do mermaids secretly like coffee then? Do they wait for the Starbucks shipment to run aground and purge its load into the salty world they inhabit? Starbucks is an even more irresponsible company than I thought! Getting mermaids hooked on java.’ 

© CT, 2012.

Word Weaving

I'm a writer it seems. One of my earliest memories is of standing triumphantly before the brilliant bright white wall of my teacher's classroom, aged four or five, having just completed a masterpiece of image and text with a felt tip pen. When my teacher enquired why I had decided to express myself on the walls I calmly showed her the three allocated pieces of paper already used-up and explained that the wall was much like a large piece of white paper onto which I had 'expanded'. The fact that I didn't get into trouble - my thought process being so genuine- but instead was encouraged with more pens and paper felt like a turning point in my life, the moment I created and was rewarded, when I first became a writer.

But writing is tough. So many times I've sat before a blank page or my PC staring into space awaiting a visit from inspiration. Looking into the air for the words that would do justice to the colourful pictures in my head:

"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." Jules Renard

Finding 'it' is a tricky business. Finding the thing that triggers a memory, emotion, sensation or the single line that will prove to be the building block of a story or verse - a snippet of dialogue, a funny visual composition to spark the imagination.

They say: write what you know. But what if you haven't made up your mind about reality yet? What if you struggle to piece together the memories which evade you only to be hurriedly stitched together like mismatched carpet samples?

Perhaps it should instead be: write who you know, that might be easier. I can find myself hiding in the left elbow of many an invented character along with ex-boyfriends, disastrous crushes, co-workers and people I've met on the bus. But how do you corral the voices all together into something that makes sense to ensure that they don't all jump up and run riot - overpowering you? Therein lies the difficulty.

Still, I've never been a quitter. A procrastinator, maybe...

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

Adrenal Glands. Honestly, before I became ill I had next to no idea that these things even existed inside my body. I suppose I must have once wondered where adrenalin came from but, in that slightly arrogant manner of the healthy and well I put it down to 'these things just work like magic'. I remember what it felt like when I was 'well', that sense of having inexhaustible energy supplies, when I could run full-pelt and have a busy day, stay up late and then just sleep for a few hours before doing it all over again.

Those days are gone! Replaced with remembering to take medications on time and with food whilst managing food allergies I never had before, pacing myself so that I don't crash every evening at 6pm, being mindful of my stress levels and not 'overdoing it' too much to conserve my strength and popping painkillers to deal with the muscle aches. A good day for me now consists of: remembering to take my medication, taking it on time, not experiencing too many side effects of chronic fatigue and getting some decent sleep. Now perhaps a life of lounging on the sofa and early nights doesn't sound too bad - if you are of a certain age - but bearing in mind that I was diagnosed with Addison's Disease at 24 you can imagine the period of shock and readjustment. 

At 24 I was on the periphery of beginning a career having just graduated from University and living independently for the first time. At 24 I was in the process of deciding 'what next', whether to save some money and take time out to travel -having never had a Gap year- or to enter vocational training or to apply for a Masters course. In some ways these plans were put on hold by the sudden appearance of an illness I'd never heard of, in other ways I've managed to do more in spite of my circumstances. But it has been tough. Sure, I've worked hard, met some brilliant (and some less helpful) people, socialised until the early hours, travelled for work, been abseiling, survived surgery... but the fear of 'what if it all goes wrong and I end up in a coma' is always there and the cost to my body has been something that I really haven't considered enough.

Now I'm 30 and I think that it is only now that I am beginning to grasp what this change has meant and still means for my life as I navigate towards the future hurdles of having kids and avoiding additional health problems like diabetes.

One positive is that my body and I aren't at war any more. It may frustrate me when it refuses to be predictable or controlled, it may frighten me when the disease hits from nowhere but, it is the only one I have and despite its quirks I think the human body is a beautiful and marvellous thing. It is just a shame that it takes something so fundamental to stop working before we notice.

The first day of the rest of my life?

So what do you do when the 9 to 5 existence you have been so desperate to exit becomes a thing of the past? I guess I'm about to find out...

I finally decided that I had to make a change in my life and shake things up. Managing a chronic illness doesn't seem to be getting any easier over time and the afternoons are the worst for me. The high stress environment of a corporate 'for profit' office - open plan and full of vulgar chatter - and the pressure of an ever expanding workload in a struggling industry hasn't helped me and ultimately proved too much, so after seven years in publishing I just took a deep breath, steadied my nerves and walked away.

The decision wasn't a particularly easy one to make. I have given up a comfortable £30k full-time and full-on occupation and all the trappings that went with it: indulgently priced cocktails with friends, the daily commute, a work laptop, international travel and a career track... but the numerous attempts at drawing up a pros and cons list tell me that leaving this lifestyle is better for me in the long run.

After a relocation to a new city (where the cost of living is significantly lower) to be with my partner (who will be partly supporting me), I've taken a part-time job in an educational institution. I'll be going from 35 minimum to 18 hours a week and picking and choosing the working hours that make most sense to me and my body. This is going to take some definite adjustment!

But it seems I'm not alone. I've noticed that even despite really tough economic times in the UK a wave of my friends all aged in their late twenties and early thirties are similarly choosing to turn their backs on the stability of full time employment and the daily grind in favour of experimenting with flexible hours, working from home, returning to study and freelance work. It is their braveness that made me feel able to try something different myself.

And now? Well, today was day one of flexible working and I'm home before the fatigue hits to write this with a cup of tea on the sofa.

I think the challenge for me will be to recognise that my past self - all driven and ambitious to achieve - needs to relax into a different set of circumstances and an altered set of priorities now.

Ciou Rocks!

I also did an interview with the awesome artist Ciou, in the summer, which you can find here:

http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/snippets/issue15/the_art_of_ciou