“Pretend that this is where we’re meant to go but you think it’s not where we’re meant to go“
“Oh, this isn’t where we were meant to be. We went the wrong way!”
“No, it is the right place. We are meant to be right here!“
“Yes. Yes yes yes you’re right we are meant to be here.”
– An older brother, appeasing the imaginative wishes of his younger sister.
You can write beautiful poetry if you open your window out to a view of a craggy set of grassy cliffs, foamy sea crashing against hard black rock, and the ocean spreading out before you.
Your garden is sprawled along a hilltop, and hills rise and fall all around your humble abode, with its whitewashed walls and thatched roof.
You could sit on your doorstep everyday, watching the view, not a single human sound to clang in your ears for hours on end.
Your mind could wander to far off places, and the scene would change hourly, as the clouds and sunlight chase each other over the plains and lend jewels and paintbrush strokes to the sea.
You could write beautiful poetry if you opened your front door to a busy highway, which is never the same from minute to minute, let alone hour to hour.
Bright in the day, backdrop of engines and shoes pattering on pavements, clamour of conversations, snippets of lives, all trundling down the highway as though on a conveyor belt. Shops brimming with people and then empty, the hum and bang of various playlists drifting out into the street and intertwining with a variety of smells. Earthy tobacco, warm and sweet cinnamon, sharp pungent car exhaust, a woman’s expensive perfume, the stink of a turd, fried fish roaming its way down the road. Then at night the beat increases in pace. Vibrant lights and dancing shadows, glamour replacing busy bustle, and the subtle undertone of danger, menacing and yet ever so slightly exciting.
Your poetry would be full, bursting, fleeting, less contemplative, less slow, a stark contrast to the gentle nostalgia of a mountain and sea that have remained through time immemorial.
In an effort to get myself back into writing, and to oil my writing gears, I will be attempting the Author’s Publish Magazine’s 2018 book of writing prompts.
Every day I will attempt one of the prompts and publish it as a blogpost for accountability.
Here is prompt 1: Three Minute Warm Up (daily writing exercise). Write a title, set a timer for three minutes, and write! Write anything, doesn’t have to match up to the title. It’s a good warm up exercise!
Title: Summer Afternoons
There could be a great many things you can do with a stack of beads. You could polish them expertly using your hands or a machine. They have machines for those now, and you would have a brightly coloured pile of beads to use. Thread them together to make a pretty necklace or take them to the beach and sprinkle them among the stones and shells for curious little hands to pick up and curious little minds to wonder over.
Exuberance.
I wonder where there ever could be something wonderful to play with, at the beach or at home. I watch the sun setting over the ocean nearly everyday, when the clouds don’t join me to mar the experience. I marvel at the colours and the way the sky is different from one day to the next. Sunsets are like fingerprints. Never the same. Always telling a different story. Sometimes I am there with my loved ones and sometimes alone, nothing but a cup of coffee to keep me company. Sitting on a hidden bench watching the swimmers who brave the winter seas and then have the freedom …
That, folks, is as far as I got.
My writing gears really do need oiling. Lol!
I’m listening.
He said.
as the leaves rustled outside the window, and the distant clouds warned of an impending storm.
She could hear it, a slow rumble, like hills jostling each other over the earth. The smell of wet soil hung in the air, and there was a cool breeze wafting in through the small diamond panes.
Rustling the little curls she had hanging out of her cap.
But you’re not, really. You can’t hear my inner voice telling you the truth. You hear my words, don’t you. You hang onto my syllables, making meaning of the sentences I string together like glittering beads on a piece of stretchy string. Light dancing on the ceiling, in and out, back and forth, random, painful.
I am listening.
When she walked through the big wooden doors she felt it straight away. An absence of it.
Absence of what it was before.
“How do you know you’re listening?” she asked him.
The look he gave her was blank. Questioning.
“How don’t I know?”
He wasn’t listening.
I am supposed to be writing for myself this month but there are six days (about) left and I only have ten thousand words of the fifty thousand minimum limit. I shall give up without much of a fuss this month And hope for the best in the next month I set aside for some writing.
With cheer I say, I do believe I have once again stumbled upon the Writing Blues! Everything seems to come to a juddering halt before the brick wall of discouragement. None of my characters will adhere to my commands. They have wilful souls of their own, and oddly, all seem to be biased towards the defiant, sullen demeanor. This will not do at all, because they can’t all monopolise the brooding inclination. They can’t all have the same damn personality!
These aren’t blues, though, so much as purples. This is not the muffled thump of me falling into a pit of writing misery. This is the tremulous hanging in the airless space between inspiration and avolition. Between red and blue. In purple.
He stayed away for three years. Each term, when his fellow students would pack their trunks and shout their goodbyes, he stayed on. Always finding an excuse to stay. One summer he worked as an assistant for an old doctor who lived in a village not far from the Academy. Another, he found himself inundated with work that he had not managed to complete during term, and had a letter from Master Jeffman himself to say he required the services of one Thomas Norton, if his family would be so kind as to excuse his absence.
Each holiday when John stepped off the train alone, or arrived home alone, or exited a carriage alone, her eyes would lose some spark. Nobody noticed. She was still her energetic, cheerful self.
Nobody thought it odd that Tom did not come back. Not even John. He would cheerfully remark on his friend’s ability to throw himself wholly, completely into his studies. He would detail how well Tom was doing, the praise Tom received from Master Jeffman, praise which any for other boy was hard to come by.
And she smiled when her brother spoke of him. Gracious smile, and then a change of track in conversation.
Nobody noticed.
Until one day, she could not take it any longer.
She sat down, picked up her pen.
Dear Tom,
I do not know but that I despise December. It is cold. It is grey. Darkness arrives not long after it lifts. When I see the dawn, I see no colour, save for the few days of sunshine we are so blessed to have. Perpetual GLOOM, Tom. Daises on a teacup. The only thing I look forward to in December is John’s much anticipated arrival. We all wait for him at the station, you see, since he writes which day he will be here. Mary waits, too, and your mother. She expects you, even if you have written to tell her you will not be on that train.
We get up early in December, before the dawn struggles its way up our side of the hill. The Lake has finally, finally frozen around the edges. Not enough to skate on – never enough for THAT, but we still dream, Mary and I. She is preparing to set off to new horizons. Come February, she too will be gone and then it will be just me left. She will be an Educated Woman, and I shall be the last remaining farm girl.
I could spend the rest of my life here, Tom. Everyday I love it more. I love the wind blowing over the hills and meadows. I love watching the sun set itself over our lake. I love the rustle in the forest. I love the smell of pine and rose when I fling my windows open in late summer. I love, yes, begrudgingly, I love the frosty mornings of December when every leaf, every twig, every branch, every blade of grass is iced most delicately, the most beautiful handiwork ever seen. I have no desire to take myself off into the world, or throw myself into studies, or teach, or marry a rich man and sail the seas with him. I want to stay here. With my roses. With my beast.
Daises on a teacup, Tom.
Our John tells us you are doing so well. So brilliantly well. He says you will be a doctor so renowned one day that none of us shall ever hear from you again, you shall be wanted all over the world. Is that true? I know my brother, he embellishes a lot. He flourishes one’s positive traits until one becomes faultless in his description. You are not faultless, and I know you are excelling, but I want some grisly detail. I want to hear of the fun things you get up to. I want to know what you do when you are not wearing the tip of your nose away on the grindstone.
With Affection,
Laura
P.S. Can we possibly be friends again?
It was a mundane life she chose to lead.
Her brother was off studying to be a doctor. Her younger sister had married a sailor, and was off traversing the oceans. They received a letter from Phyllis every six months, like clockwork, detailing one grand adventure after another. Small notes in the margins to outline the many illnesses she had managed to catch, but mostly tales of escapade after escapade.
Her dearest friend; they were joined at the hip from the tender age of four, had taken herself off to university.
‘What will you become,’ Laura remarked one day, a week before Mary was set to leave.
‘Nothing,’ Mary retorted, ‘I shall become knowledgable and learned, and then marry a rich man and raise some beautiful babies.’ Her eyes danced with laughter and light.
Everything was a possibility for Mary.
Everything was possible.
But for Laura, nothing beckoned to her from the distant, shimmering paths of the years ahead. She had no plans. Her sights were set on nothing.
When they all left, one by one, and she took up her pen at her desk by the window, looking over her rose garden, a deep desolation settled on her shoulders. It shrouded her like a cloak of misery. Her eyes scanned the roses, the trees of the gardens beyond, the acres of forest behind, all with her name on it. And beyond, the hills rolling away pale and blue in the distance.
They all wrote.
John from medical school. Mary from her dorms at university. Phyllis.. yes baby Phyllis still sending bi-annual letters. The days melted into weeks, into months. The letters became scarce.
She was busy enough, of course. She taught at the school on Tuesdays. She wrote for the paper, and soon her published pieces were so numerous that Aunt Martha, her mother and Mrs Norton no longer exclaimed over them with the same gusto.
‘Oh, Laura, another piece! Well done, dear,’
Their eyes did not match their words. They scanned her. Scanned her. Expected her to do things.
They invited young males over – parading her. She said as much in one of her letters to Tom, ink spattering indignantly on her face.
And Tom, TOM, they PARADE me. Can you believe the audacity? Your own mother invited Colonel Williams one evening and then decided she had a headache and could not possibly stay to keep him company, and ‘Laura dear’ would you please be so kind as to take the good colonel out to look at your beautiful roses. YOUR MOTHER, TOM?! Of course, my own mother is no better. She informed me we would be seeing Lady Betsy and to wear my best dress, you know, with the rosebuds. So I got all het up thinking the worst. It was all a wonderful conspiracy. Lady Betsy and Mama walked arm in arm ahead while a tall, gangly fellow whose name I cannot for the life of me recall regaled me with tall tales of life in the Navy. THE NAVY?! I informed him I much preferred the life a doctor leads – the only profession I know most about, since I have a bi-monthly summary from you and my brother.
And then Mary’s engagement. To John. Of all people.
She had a fat juicy letter brimming with the details from Mary. A short concise letter from her brother, the few words he had so clearly carefully selected not concealing the great joy leaping out at her from beneath. Leaping at her and stabbing her right in the heart.
She ought to have been happy. So happy. Leaping over the hills happy.
But she was not.
The most darling month of the year, she would like to argue.
Make a case.
Type it up.
Send it to court.
Not court. That would be too drastic.
Somebody must declare it for all to know. It would be a travesty if nobody were to be so absolutely certain of the superiority of October over all the other months.
In October, her roses still bloomed. Less enthusiastically, but they opened their soft delicate petals to the grim clouds above and strove towards life. Something she always took inspiration from.
Briskly tying her boots, brightly buttoning her coat, tucking the old brown umbrella that belonged to a certain someone that she would not name under her padded arm.
Every morning at ten o’clock she exited from the kitchen door to inspect her beauties. She had twenty varieties which she had cultivated lovingly over the last six years. She had climbing roses winding their way intricately around metal trellises and wooden archways. Shrub roses adorning every inch along the pathway which curved its way around the little rose garden, and in the middle an orchard of tree roses. Yellow, white, pink and lush peach. The scent in the summer was overpowering, wafting towards the kitchen on cool gusts of wind. In the winter it was a mess of thorns, with some roses struggling their way through the dreary storms of the season.
In October, however, there was still beauty.
The trees surrounding the rose garden were alight with colour. Fiery, furious, yet lovely and soft at the same time. Tame flames. And the rose bushes still nodded with blooms, even as the season’s change wrestled around them. In the morning they were bejewelled with droplets of glittering dew.
She would cup an ungloved hand under a deliciously fat rose, and bend her nose to it, closing her eyes.
October is the most darling month of the year.
Some people do their best writing while they are depressed. And others write beautifully when they are happy, their emotions lending wings to their minds and their fingers. It’s all down to emotion at the end of the day, and how one perceives feelings, and reacts to them.
I’ve learned that people react so differently to the same emotions and situations, which is why you can never win at situations no matter how hard you try. If you can’t get through to someone, you can’t get through to them.
In my previous life I have managed to write the best during my times of depression, but now that I am 25 and feeling a way I have never felt before in my life, I find that words somehow escape me.
I don’t know why this is. I thought that if I let my emotions out in stories they would somehow live a life on paper that they couldn’t live inside my mind. But it doesn’t work. On paper they seem mundane and mismatched. They teeter and totter on the edge of a cliff and fall off. They are the missing planks in a swaying wooden bridge, and you just fall right on through when you try to follow the track.
They just do not do the truth any justice, and it leaves me feeling frustrated and sad.
So I have come to the conclusion that my best writing happens when I am marginally sad, but not overwhelmingly so. When I see hope shining like a beacon at the end of a time period. Now time appears to stretch endlessly before me and hope is dragging her heels behind. Why, Hope, WHY? Well, she replies, I really don’t think that time has anything for me at the end of her path. I feel like time is shaving pieces off me as each of her seconds drip off her chain, like desolate, worthless diamonds.
Did you know that diamond rings are worthless if you want to resell them? Jewellers will only charge you for the price of the band, whatever metal it was made from. A fascinating piece of knowledge I got from my husband’s friend’s wife, who is a jeweller. I’d always wanted a diamond ring but now I am glad I don’t have one. But I digress.
You see my sadness cannot be fixed with time, or so the naive youth in me bemoans. It knows it will have to go through a harrowingly narrow tunnel before anything changes. Or it could get solemnly worse and I will just end up old and regretful and the vicious cycle continues.
So there. I am an in-between writer. I can’t write well when I am happy and I can’t write well when I am desolate, but there is a good in-between niche that hits the spot just fine.
Apparently L M Montgomery wrote her later Anne novels when she was in depression. Perhaps that is why the Anne voice we know and love recedes massively in her later novels.
Some people can write when they are both happy and depressed. Others can channel their particular emotions while writing and produce work that is representative of it, challenging themselves marvellously and being just ridiculously talented at making terrific use of their mental state, whatever it may be, to produce written work.
What kind of writer are you? Do you write best when you are happy, or sad? Or both? Or do your emotions not feature in your creativity at all?
Eggs. Where would we be without eggs, huh? There is something fine about eggs, for all their unsavoury texture when raw.
Eggs are the epitome of health, according to sumo wrestlers. The rumour went, when we were kids, that sumo wrestlers had raw eggs in a glass of milk for breakfast. Makes them strong, the children would nod wisely at each other, and mime disgusted faces, but I could NEVER do that!
Some people do, though. Like what is it about carbonara and eggs? I feel like the eggs are raw still, even though they supposedly ‘cook’ in the heat of the pasta. If the egg is still runny then to me it is raw. So for that reason I can’t bring myself to enjoy carbonara.
Same thing with eggnog. Gross.
Also, eggs Benedict. The hollandaise sauce contains raw eggs.
Personally I don’t like the yolk to be runny when I have fried eggs. Sometimes I like a soft boiled egg but oftentimes the smell just puts me off. There is something divine about fresh organic eggs from happy hens. They cost a lot of money but they taste wonderful.
What do you think about this whole raw eggs business?
Image Credit
Ocean Bream 