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Sunday 19 April 2015

Working to write


My favourite writing place - home!

I am a writer because I write.  I don't call myself a professional writer, because I don't write for a living.  At least, I do, but within the context of the work that I am expected to do as a property manager - which does have it's occasional and welcome moments of creativity.  I have great admiration for those who have taken a decision to make writing their career, whether as jobbing journalists or copywriters for a publication, freelancers or novelists and so on.  Unhappily I do not have the courage nor the conviction that I can succeed that is necessary to give up the day job and dedicate myself to a career as a writer.  Perhaps that is partly due to self-confidence although a large measure is down to having no option but to earn a reliable living in order to raise the kids.  And there are many writers across the decades who have had to write in their spare time and yet have published successfully.

Work - uninspiring and constrained - or a route to inspiration and success?
Photo "Business Image" courtesy of Pong at www.freedigitalphotos.net
But having to work for a living and try to find time to write creatively is not necessarily a bad thing.  The world of work can bring its own inspiration and its own opportunities.  For some, this means taking advantage of perhaps a marketing campaign to develop advertising copy for their employing organisation - useful experience and a useful skill.  For others, it might be working on an employee handbook or developing instruction manuals for items that they manufacture.  A myriad of possibilities that can be added to the CV and perhaps used to find "writing jobs".

Or perhaps, as in my case, work provides the opportunity to observe people and situations, to use snatches of dialogue to inspire stories, or characteristics to blend together to build characters, or situations which can either inspire whole stories or poems or help unravel and episode in a novel.  It also disciplines me to use the little time I have to knuckle down and be productive.


Work places vary - as do characters and story lines.  Work can provide ideas for stories.
Photo courtesy of "Construction Building with support frame" by Keerati www.freedigitalphotos.net

As a property manager for many years, I have seen things and heard things that  curl the toes, bleach the hair and curdle the milk.  I have encountered odd and unusual people and have become a very firm believer - despite being a reader of fantasy novels - that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.  In fact, it is unlikely some of the situations I have encountered could be replicated in a novel because it would stretch reader believability just a bit too far.  But it is  possible to develop ideas: what if that person were like this?  What if the boiler had burst and flooded the apartment below - again?  What if no-one had answered the door and the police had to force entry and a decomposing body found?  What if that mild-mannered secretary turned out to be a lap dancer at the weekends?  

Workplace inspiration has struck and won me second place in a competition a couple of years ago with the story "Predictable Me", which I've set out below - hope you enjoy.

Perhaps the moral of this piece then, is not to let the frustrations of having to spend day in day out at work instead of creating a literary masterpiece slow you down:  use it to keep the ideas flowing and the literary masterpiece will come.



PREDICTABLE ME




     “You’re going to love not coming to work anymore,” says Emily.  She places my cup of coffee exactly in the centre of my coaster.  The coaster is old now, edges curling, a perfect circle marked in its centre from the countless cups of coffee placed there by a parade of assistants over the years.
     I try not to cringe.  Eight years of Emily’s gunpowder-strong concoction and I have never complained.  And I shan’t today, of all days.
     The telephone’s bleeping jars the peace of the morning and Emily scuttles.  What a ridiculous statement.  Half a century of crusty offices, whinging clients and cringing clerks; of course I’m delighted never to have to come in again.
      I sip at the coffee, shudder and leave the rest.  Emily has her back turned and is taking painstaking notes of her telephone conversation.  Whoever is talking to her must be desperate with frustration.
      I sigh and flick a switch.  Despite the early hour the heat is suffocating. The air-conditioning groans into action and then buzzes like bluebottles around carrion. Within hours the sounds that will come to my ears will be the sizzling of cicadas in the day and the grunt of marauding lions at night.
     “Here early as usual,” says Michael, his round, shining face appearing round the edge of the door.
     “And why wouldn’t I be?” I ask.  Michael is flushed and the pink of his cheeks contrast with the bland grey and magnolia of the office, a colourless place that drains life.  I ease myself into my chair.  My hips ache slightly and remind me that my aging body welcomes retirement.
     “I thought you might take it easy today,” he grins and enters the room, a slim file in his hand.  He’s my boss.  A clever lad really, half my age with appalling taste in ties and generally a bit of a fool. A sickly yellow number hangs from his collar this morning. Perhaps he thinks the girls will like it.
    “I’ll be answering emails and then tidying my things off my desk,” I reassure him.
     “Great, and please take a quick look at this file,” adds Michael, “we’re going to miss you.”
     The hell they are.  By tomorrow lunchtime they will have forgotten I exist.
     “Just leave it with me,” I say.  He breezes off, whistling.  I cannot help but shake my head.  In a place where the boss blows air through pursed lips in tuneless sounds there can be little hope for achieving professional success. 
     “So, have you booked your sessions at the golf course yet?  Wouldn’t want to risk getting bored, would you?” roars Mr Fernandez a little later.  Emily hovers, smoothing down her beige skirt, although it would be better if she made an attempt at smoothing down the beige skin of her face.
     I attempt to smile at Mr Fernandez’ jollity, aware I only manage to lift a corner of my lips, which must give the impression of a snarl to the man who lauds himself for introducing the arbitrary corporate performance reward scheme I hold in complete contempt.  I put down my pen.  I have finished with Michael’s file and have added a note which he will find later: ‘to an idiot from a fool’.  I ignore the gold issue; where I’m going, I won’t be playing.
      The day wears on and as I empty my desk of the insignificant symbols of years at work, I contemplate just how vacuous my professional life has been.  The shareholders grew immensely rich on the back of the drivel I typed and I managed to buy a flat.  Home ownership of a leaky apartment was all the rage for a while.
      At the end of the day there is a little speech and a gift: a pair of silver cuff links.  Also not needed where I’ll be going, but I am too decent, or dull, to say.
     There’s a ripple of half-hearted applause and the pop of a cork from a bottle of supermarket Cava.
     “So, come on, let’s know your plans,” urges Mr Fernandez, with a self-satisfied smile.
     “My plans….,” I pause. I glance out of the window to the street beyond and catch a glimpse of my car.
     “Don’t tell me,” giggled Michael, “you’re going straight on a cruise?  You’ve always been predictable.”
     Perhaps I have: predictable, dependable, reliable Francis.  But it’s not really me.
     “I’m going away, to Africa…” I begin.
     “An African cruise?” says poor Emily.
     Something about her featureless face, the clothes that would have better adorned a woman half her age, the inanity of her comment chaffs at my frustration.
     “Try not to spend your sorry life being ridiculous,” I say.  The sudden silence simmers.  My mouth dries and my throat tightens.  I look at the car again.  Kim, my woman, waits for me there, black skin smooth and oiled and glistening, her breasts pressing against her light dress.
     “I’m going to Africa with my lover.  Marta and I are divorced.  We wanted to keep it quiet,” I press.  Even the motes of dust that have circled the office for the past fifty years pause in their drifting.  “I’m spending a few years in Ghana helping set up small businesses with micro-finance.  Kim is a doctor and setting up a clinic. The idea is to help women take control of their sexual health, avoid AIDS, death in childbirth and so on.  We might even be able to reduce the trade in sex slavery.  Ambitious, maybe….and not very predictable.”
     They stare at me, mouths slightly agape, but they are no longer important.  They probably never were.
      “You see,” I carry on, compelled to explain myself, “no-one is too old to change, no-one can be dependable for ever.  We all need meaning.”
      I step out into a blaze of afternoon sun and breathe as if I had just been born, leaving the stagnation behind the office door.  From the car, Kim smiles and waves.  I hurry onwards.  There is much to do.


Sunday 5 April 2015

Walking to write



Spring morning in Ocean Village, Gibraltar


Easter Sunday and here, in Gibraltar at least, it has been one of those perfect spring days: sunny skies, brilliant blue sea, a warm calm pervading the lushness of the upper rock, the lazy drone of a sleepy bee and the chirruping of young birds in the bushes and trees lining the road.  Not too hot, not at all cold.  Perfect for strapping the lead to the dog, shepherding reluctant teenagers out of the door and walking.  Just walking.  Not walking with a purpose except to fill lungs with reasonably fresh air and get away from electronic games and flickering monitors.  Not even walking for fitness or burning of calories, fat cells, cellulite or improving lung function.  Just plain walking, the kind of walking that lets you take in things you might see day to day, but somehow don't register - there's an old chap hobbles about with his equally ancient dog near where I live, I probably walk past him every morning, but wrapped up in daily worries, I rarely actually see him.  Today was for walking, and seeing, and breathing, and creating.


"Morning Walk" photo by Arvind Balaraman courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net

To write is to create. That walking helps the creative process is now well-established and there are many examples of writers who have worked out their plots or found their inspirations from walking: think of Wordsworth walking the Lakes, for example.  Henry Thoreau once said "the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow."  A Stanford University study, reported in 2014, found that there was a link to creative thinking and walking, although not necessarily to focused thinking - you might be able to develop a brainstorm of possible solutions to a problem (such as how to untangle parts of your plotting) but you might not be able to quite work out your son's GCSE practise trigonometry question that's had the both of you puzzling for hours.  

But for writers, walking is perfect.  An hour or so away from the mundane tasks that can so easily distract, the blood flowing, oxygen flooding into the brain to freshen it up and get it working that much better can do wonders to your plotting or character development.  Which means it's best to leave the mobile phone behind. There's also the chance to clear up all that clutter in your mind.  While you're walking, your mind drifts.  You may dwell on some of your domestic or professional problems, but the release of positive hormones that exercise brings means that you return ready to approach the rest of your day in a much more positive mood, and I'm not stepping onto the soap box of health benefits except to cite Hippocrates who put it thus:"walking is man's best medicine." Without a doubt, walking is good for you.

"Sunday Walk" photo by Simon Howden from www.freedigitalphotos.net

Walking also gives you a chance to observe and sharpen those powers of observations that are so essential to a writer.  You can focus on sounds, on smells, on what and on whom you see.  Walking is a time I can work out the next steps in a story.  It is the time of quiet that I can use to plan ahead, to straighten things out in my mind.  Sometimes I am struck by something I see to the extent that the words that spring to mind at the time might turn into the opening lines of a poem.  Other times, I walk like a child, with quiet and inquisitive mind, absorbing what is around me.

"Young Child Walking Alone in Forest" photo by chrisroll courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net
There are writers who never go out without a notebook, and I frequently have a notebook and a pen or two on me, but more recently I have just walked and avoided even the physical act of writing.  This is because I have been so busy with work and family that I have not had much time to think, so I think as I walk, and what I want is to see things and have my imagination sparked off, to hear things and let those sounds develop into ideas in my head.  There's a tramp who from time to time spends a night on a bench outside the hospital - he turned into a character in a short story I wrote some weeks ago.  The slurping of the sea against the revetement at Waterport in the dead of night became something black and sinister that slinks out of the ocean to consume every living thing it meets.  The stench of the fumes belched out by the bunkering in the harbour was written into a poem.  Walking imprinted those impressions without having to even think them through.  And it has meant I could allow myself that extra chocolate egg this weekend!

"Easter Eggs in a Basket" photo by Mister GC courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net