The Ardalanish Tweed

When I found out that my friend Antonia had only months to live, I scrawled Jack Kornfield’s words on scrap paper with a fat marker—The trouble is, we think we have time— and stuck it to my kitchen cupboard.

Antonia had lived in the States since leaving Oxford in 1995, and although we’d seen each other every year, I hadn’t visited her home in Indiana until that final week in 2018. I reorganised my lectures, arranged for the kids to stay an extra week with their dad, and left room in my suitcase, as instructed.

Besides her students and her cats, Antonia had devoted her life to her intense passions: her friendships, her family, her rose garden, her music, her sewing. I met the cats, then the West Lafayette friends who’d organised a support network as soon as she’d received her diagnosis. Her music was a form of pain relief, she said, alongside the opioids, and I listened from my bed in the darkest part of the night as she stepped into its stream. We planned her funeral, we talked—or wrote notes to each other, when talking hurt her chest—and on an unseasonably warm February afternoon, Antonia got out of bed and led me round her garden in her silk kimono and soft wool cap, introducing me to her roses, one by one. She showed me her sewing room—windows on two sides, rainbows of cotton reels. She’d taught herself to make her own clothes—properly tailored garments with tucks, hidden seams, lining, buttons—on Sunday afternoons while listening to Radio 4, cutting patterns on the huge oval table.

Antonia had asked visiting friends and family if we’d like to choose an object from her house to take away with us, and if we found it too difficult or upsetting, she instructed us to imagine she “was moving to a smaller house,” not dying. I chose a red enamel teapot, and because I’d told Antonia that I wanted to learn to sew, she also gave me what she considered to be beginners’ sewing patterns, and fabrics from her stash: small floral scraps for dolls’ clothes for my stepdaughter, an untouched length of cotton printed with perky owls in mint and chocolate, and ‘a very special’ soft, light, sea-green tweed. Antonia loved the Hebrides and usually folded a trip to Mull into her visits to the UK. The tweed came from Ardalanish; in the words of Antonia’s mother, Lucy, ‘a wonderful place in the south of the island, where they not only had sheep of different beautiful colours, but also some old-fashioned weaving looms, set on a remote farm right by a beautiful little cove.’

Four years after that week in Indiana, the tweed was still untouched on my shelf. I’d used some of the smaller pieces of fabric as a makeshift curtain in our shabby camper van, a Zoom backdrop to hide the mess, but nothing that required actual sewing. During lockdown I’d practised my visible mending and learned to darn functionally enough to revive holey socks. But the tweed was different. The tweed was Very Special. To do it justice, I needed to learn to sew properly: straight hems, no bunching, no accidentally sewing the inside to the outside. It would take a lot of effort, probably a course at night school, but I would do it. One day.

But when I turned fifty this March, something shifted. I’d been dreading the impending five-oh, measuring myself against conventional markers of success I don’t even believe in, and finding myself woefully deficient. I told myself that aging was better than being dead, but when your brain is locked in rebuke mode, you can turn any thought against yourself. (“Oh my god, you’re lucky to be alive and you’re still wasting it!”) My friend Karen, compassionate, pragmatic, and utterly bullshit-free, told me that your fifties are the decade of letting go. I listen to Karen. She was my teacher on a mindfulness course years ago, and I’d relay her teaching to Antonia on our transatlantic phone calls. In my final days with Antonia in West Lafayette, I drew on what I’d learned from Karen about paying attention to the sensory experience in the moment, and noticed my breath as I made myself look directly at the cancer that was killing my friend, and noticed the feel of my friend’s skin as I held her hand and drew patterns on her palm.

This past month, I’ve let go of the idea that one day, my sewing skills will be worthy of Antonia’s Very Special tweed. This ‘one day’ is seductively but insidiously anti-life. It has no substance, no weight, neither warp nor weft, but it seduces me into forgetting that I am going to die and that I only have this moment. There’s a great poem by Jo Bell, ‘We All Believe That One Day We’ll Keep Chickens.’ We do, in fact, have chickens in our little suburban garden, but only because my partner called the rescue charity and bought the run. If it were down to me, I’d still be reading about chicken-keeping, or more likely, procrastinating about reading about chicken-keeping. But I no longer believe that one day I will have a walled kitchen garden or a small flock of sheep in the Welsh borders, or that one day I will rehab my knee so I can run a half-marathon. I am sad about this, but clearly not sad enough to do squats. There is no magic that will transform me from bodger to confident dressmaker, when I’m still baffled by reloading a bobbin.

I’m still working out the difference between letting go and chucking stuff away. In difficult times, I don’t turn to G&Ts, but to Before & After videos on YouTube: minimalism, Marie Kondo, Swedish Death Cleaning. If I could, I’d go through everything I own and stamp it with a date by which I need to pass it on. This is how I tell what’s decluttering and what’s letting go: if you can pass it on with no pain and no sadness and no sense of loss, you’re just having a clear out.

I have let go of my social media accounts. They were, for me, a factory pumping out bespoke, intoxicating One Days, and I’ve wasted too much time longing to be different, to be better, to be anything-but-me, so I deleted them. I am trying to let go of anything that dislocates me from the here and now, from drawing vines on a friend’s palm, from smelling the roses.

Since I was five, I wanted to be a writer, but I could barely write a sentence before the inner critic crossed it out. I first finished something in my mid-thirties. For a while, I was an author: my name—my old name, before I let go of my marriage—is on the spine of a book. (I have let go of the fantasy that LAIKA will buy the rights to my novel, rescuing it from obscurity and turning it into a Boxtrolls-in-the-Black-Country stop motion masterpiece. Even after years of encouraging students to write what Anne Lamott calls ‘shitty first drafts,’ to play on the page, to get past the deadening pressures of performance and perfection, the stories I was planning to tell are like the bolt of Very Special tweed; material I don’t feel skilled enough to use, in reserve for when I’m good enough.

Since I turned fifty, I have deleted hundreds of thousands of words—ten years’ work on an abandoned novel, scenes from a lukewarm memoir, a mean-spirited draft of a radio play, scraps stored up for quilting into something warm and cosy. I have recycled several reams of work-in-progress. (Paper is heavier than I thought). What’s left is a slim file marked USE OR CHUCK. I’m tempted to shred it for chicken bedding and see what happens next.

I am no longer a writer. But I am still here.

Letting go can feel like freefall. I could blame plummeting oestrogen levels, lockdown, my older son leaving for university, losing my sense of usefulness when I chose to leave my job and turn freelance. When you step out of the roles you’ve always occupied, everything shifts. But it’s more than that: if I let go of not just phantom future Better Me, but who I’ve always been—the people-pleaser, the good girl, the smoother-over, the fixer, the rusher-in, the rescuer, the perpetual-tidy-upper—then who am I? What am I for? This can render you unravelled, unrecognisable. It’s uncomfortable and baffling for other people when you let go of being who they thought you were. It’s more than disconcerting from the inside. Letting go can, I suppose, be like releasing a rope so that the burning boat can float off across a mist-shrouded lake. More often, it’s like stepping off the edge when you can’t see the bottom. I’m not surprised it’s taken till I’m fifty to get started.

But if you don’t let go of what’s already lost and will never be, how can you make space for what’s here now? How can you greet whatever life brings to your threshold, knowing that you are one day closer to your death?

I told Karen about the Ardalanish tweed, and how I didn’t want to hoard it, and how I wanted to find a good home for it. She told me about her love of textiles—she’d even taken a textiles degree on a career break from nursing, so knowing she’d make good use of it, I posted the tweed to her. It arrived, coincidentally, on the fourth anniversary of Antonia’s death.

And now that I am learning to let go of what I’ve held on to, piece by piece, there is room to write new words, and let them go, too.

On Victoria Wood

As Finals approached, this time 22 years ago, I was worried that I’d wake up in the night before an exam and not be able to sleep, so I bought Victoria Wood’s AS SEEN ON TV on cassette tape: I’d watched her whenever she was on the telly, and knew that if I couldn’t sleep, at least I’d laugh, so I’d be exhausted but relaxed. Victoria Wood saw me safely through Finals, and, when it was all over, I bought more tapes in celebration, and listened on through my twenties till they warped and no amount of careful pencil-twiddling could make them play.

When we were newly married – C miserable and avoiding his PhD, me temping for a bullying accountant and too self-critical to get anything written – we’d start the week with a food budget of seven quid – mainly lentils, with apples for a treat – but by Friday, we’d say ‘sod it’ and write a cheque for a take-away, praying that it wouldn’t bounce. We were playing at being poor, of course, because we had seven kinds of safety net strung out below us, but still, it was recklessly, giddily indulgent when we blew £50 – a wedding gift – on a pair of tickets to see Victoria Wood live at Oxford New Theatre that summer, 1996. I laughed until I thought I’d never catch my breath again, and that night was worth all the subsequent eight-mile, round-trip walks to work when I didn’t have the money for the bus.

We read our copy of Chunky till the spine split, and cried every time at that moment in Frank’s café where Pat stays his hand: ‘Our Margaret doesn’t like peas’. Tapes of Dinnerladies got us through the years when the kids worked the night shift in tight relays (one dropping off, the other waking).

Our marriage has changed shape and now we’re mates and parents and not a couple any more, but as for so many of us, Victoria Wood’s work is woven into our shared lives and still, more than anyone, makes us laugh and cry together. Thank you, Victoria, for the deranged Sacherelle saleswoman, for Mrs Overall, for Kitty. Thank you for disarming us with Kimberley, then breaking us open with Chrissie the channel swimmer who’s never seen again; for Margaret Mottershead, Motorway Waitress, lost in the Granada canteen. Till now, I’ve never cried about the death of someone I didn’t know. But I think we all had you pegged as our mate; a mate who made it safe to feel very sad and very happy and not worried about being wakeful in the dark. We are, and always will be, so very, very grateful.

‘There we have been’ and ‘Without Stars’: James Cousins Company at the Dance XChange, Birmingham

I’ve learned that when Jonathan Davidson (Writing West Midlands, Birmingham Literary Festival) asks you to do something, it’s best to say yes quickly and not think too much about it, because it’s probably (a) something you haven’t done before and (b) terrifying.

I know nothing about contemporary dance, but, because I said yes, I was on the stage of the Patrick Centre at the Birmingham Hippodrome talking about Murakami’s Norwegian Wood with the dancers and choreographer of ‘There we have been’ and ‘Without Stars’.

Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is a novel about love and loss and death-in-life; it’s also about the limits of storytelling. At the outset, Toru, on an aeroplane, hears his dead girlfriend Naoko’s favourite song, and is flung up against a memory that doesn’t hurt, but ‘delivers a kick to some part of [his] mind’. He explains why he’s writing about the events of nineteen years ago – ‘I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them’ – and invites us to a place that in other circumstances might feel fairy-tale: the meadow, the field well, the ‘three wishes’.

No sooner than we’ve got used to ‘the frightful silence of a pine forest’, we’re evicted, and thrust into a land where the maps lie, where words don’t work and where stories and their tellers aren’t to be trusted. Toru and Naoko are brought together after the death of his Kizuki – his best friend; her boyfriend – and Toru describes a life in which stories can’t make sense of the world: the twice-bereaved and broken Naoko has a ‘word-searching sickness’ and can ‘never say what I want to say’; the warm, exuberant Midori lives above the wrong kind of bookshop, where you can buy women’s glossies and How-tos, but “No War and Peace… No Catcher in the Rye”, and she tells Toru that her father’s “in Uruguay”, rather than dying of a brain tumour in the local hospital; Toru goes on ‘supplying everyone with new stories’ about the knickers of the girl he hasn’t slept with, and cruel, humiliating lies about his room mate; a manipulative mythomaniac frames (the albeit complicit) Reiko. They’re all, in their own wounded, heavily defended ways, telling tales to keep the truth at bay, and trying to bring shape to chaos.

Behind all the static buzz of untruths, there’s one story that remains untold and untellable: the story that explains why Kizuki, Toru’s best friend and Naoko’s boyfriend, killed himself. It’s not solely the lack of Kizuki, but perhaps the lack of any explanation, any narrative, that creates the ‘vague knot of air’ inside Toru; for him, for Naoko, this lack is the hole in the centre of the wheel: “in the midst of life, everything revolved around death.”

I wasn’t sure how a story about stories would translate into dance. I wasn’t even sure how to watch: I know nothing about dance and I was worried that I wouldn’t know how to ‘read’ it. How would I know what was happening? (It’s telling that I can only talk about this in terms of reading story). But if there is a point to Toru’s narrative, it’s this: when we try to ‘make sense’, to forcibly shape a story, we end up locked in ‘the dead centre of this place that was no place’.

In ‘There we have been’ and ‘Without Stars’, James Cousins and his company haven’t tried to sketch out Murakami’s novel on the stage; they’ve distilled the relationships, exploring texture and dynamic rather than narrative arc; Naoko and Toru glance off each others’ bodies, with only the briefest of touches that can seem at times more like collision than embrace. (This brought to mind the pool game Toru and Kizuki play only hours before Kizuki kills himself). There is a brittleness and shared emptiness that defines how Toru and Naoko are with each other; fearful, tentative, compulsive, as if the terrifyingly unseen field well is between them, ‘deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density.’

Toru and Midori (male, here) have an altogether more robust, warm and substantial dynamic; their relationship is joyful and organic and fully embodied. But Toru is pulled away from Midori and back towards Naoko, and Naoko is pulled away from Toru, towards the shadow and the memory of Kizuki, and the dance ricochets between these triangles. (In life, Toru says, ‘we were like a talk-show, with me the guest, Kizuki the talented host and Naoko his assistant. He was good at occupying that central position.’) Even though her lover is no more, Naoko is pulled towards Kizuki (and, therefore, death): she leans towards him with a supple strength that we never see in her interactions with the living, and despite Toru’s frantic attempts to claw her back, we never see Naoko stronger and more alive than when she has chosen to die. In her astonishing duet, when her feet don’t touch the ground for the full seventeen minutes, we’re never quite sure whether she’s dancing with Kizuki or Toru. It doesn’t matter: in both her relationship with the living Toru and with the dead Kizuki, Naoko is ungrounded and never really in her body, suspended between heaven and earth, between death and life, as if this is takes place in the ‘knot of air’, in her final breath, her last moments of consciousness. But she is held, and there is, for Naoko, peace.

Find out where you can see ‘There we have been’ and ‘Without Stars’ here.

After the election: a call to creative subversion

When a Tory ‘friend’ posted on Facebook about her relief at the General Election result on Friday, I wanted to grab her by the hair and pull her through a Ghost-of-Christmas-Present ride through the city and watch her eyes widen in horror at what she’d done. The trouble is – aside from the violence behind the impulse – if you force someone’s eyes open, they’ll shut tighter than ever when you let go.

Cameron, Gove and friends don’t understand difference. They have a deficit of public kindness. They have no imagination. If they did, they couldn’t legislate the way they do. They can’t read across ideas and situations. If they could, the hideous inflexibility of Benefit Sanctions would be mirrored in a blanket criminalisation of high-end tax avoiders. (Maybe they don’t read. A local teacher told me on Friday that ‘Hard Times’ feels like contemporary comment).

This is what I mean by ‘no imagination’: they grab the unconfident, depressed or barely functioning person who missed his appointment at the Job Centre and shake the last pound coin from his pocket, shouting, “Be better! Be different! Be born in a different family! Don’t be abused! Have more opportunities! Have money! Be cleverer!” Ultimately, they’re shouting, “Be more like me!”, which is precisely what I wanted to shout at the Tory voter. Which makes me like this government. Which is eye-opening.

I want to resist, to be part of a ground-up, lasting change that spreads from person to person. Marching and spray-painting aren’t my thing, but between us, we have a big, juicy surplus of imagination and expertise. Grass-roots campaigners, anti-poverty lobbyists, writers, counsellors, trainers, expert listeners, makers and thinkers and doers…

How might we learn from each other? What beautifully subversive, unrelentingly compassionate action can we take?

Ultimately, the Tory voter is just as much a victim of this regime that prizes individual net worth above the intrinsic value of any human life.

So how do we engage kindly and imaginatively with the comfortably-off true-blue voter, and not in the manner of the evangelist or the Victorian White Man going into the “Dark” Continent?

I have some ideas. I bet you do, too. Imagination never felt so subversive.

9 Things You Need To Write A Novel

tobylitt

The first thing you need to write a novel is… Time.

The second thing you need to write a novel is… More Time.

And the third thing you need to write a novel is… Even More Time.

This perhaps seems a bit obvious. But let me explain.

Time, More Time and Even More Time are all necessary.

I’ve divided Time up into three because you need Time for different things.

The first lot of Time is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Time to write. Time to sit at the desk with words coming out of you.

The second lot of time, More Time, is… Time not to write. Time to do stuff which doesn’t seem to be writing but which, in the end, turns out to have been writing all along. To the uninitiated, this may appear to be window shopping or people-watching, taking a nice long…

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Forward this in seven days…

My son recently received his first chain letter. It came by text, lurid with cartoonishly graphic horror tropes and promising painful death to loved ones if he didn’t forward the message to seven friends within the hour. He was shaken, and it was only when I told him about the chains I’ve broken – with no ill-effects – that he calmed down and deleted the message, fidgeting until the hour was up. What I didn’t tell him was that I didn’t forward my first chain letter, not because I was a fearless sceptic, but because, even aged 10, I was an accomplished procrastinator. I just never got round to writing it out. At thirty, I broke the send-a-friend-some-fancy-new-knickers chain. (I got as far as buying pants but kept them for myself). At forty, I threw away a Herman friendship cake mix after leaving it to grow spores on the worktop for a good month. I am not good with chains, even the benevolent ones.

So I was a bit nervous when super-writer William Gallagher, king of productivity, asked me to take part in the Blogging Tour. (His stop on the Blogging Tour is here). Writers, signposting other writers? Writers, answering four not-so-simple questions about their work? These are Good Things. There is no grisly caveat attached to the original Blogging Tour request – ‘forward this in seven days or a mid-list writer will get dropped by their publisher’ – but this is still a chain I don’t want to break.

1) What am I working on?.  

I’m working on a novel that’s evolved from my first book, Ruby’s Spoon. While the first book is set in and around a landlocked Black Country town, the next  (working title, The Silver House) is set in an abandoned house on the coast of North Devon and involves wolves, post-partum delusions and garden restoration.

For a further novel, I’m reading about anchorholds and medieval spirituality, prisons, rogue convents, cell biology and the psychology of architecture. I have an idea of the shape that novel might take, but I’m holding it lightly and won’t start writing it till The Silver House is finished.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not the best judge of this and I’m not even sure what ‘genre’ it fits into. My writing has been called ‘by turns modern and folkloric’, but broadly, it’s long-form prose fiction with a poetic bent. I love Thomas Teal’s translations of Tove Jansson’s prose and sometimes I wish my writing were similarly translucent. To read The Summer Book is to be immersed in cold Finnish waters and feel moss and stone under your toes. George Orwell said, ‘Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane’, but while I think he would have approved of Jansson, there’s plenty of good writing that isn’t transparent, writing that makes you aware of the texture of the language as you read. I suspect my writing is more woven cloth than glass.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I write what interests me. I’m always quoting R. D. Laing at my students: ‘We can see other people’s behaviour, but not their experience’. I like to engage with unattractive characters who behave badly and find out what made them the way they are. I’m interested in the rhythm of words on the page, and I’m interested in the collision of the mundane and the magical. I’m interested in how place can shape and mirror experience. I love a mystery, and the unresolvable stuff that’s left after the denouement. Sometimes I think I should challenge myself to write in a contemporary setting with no suggestion of magic, but writing like that doesn’t comes naturally to me at all.

4) How does my writing process work?

It’s really hard to articulate how my process works because it’s always changing. I don’t have a formula: it’s a combination of organic growth and structured development. There is no right way to write a novel and I’m very suspicious when writers are doctrinaire and insist that you should approach writing in a certain way. That said, I know what doesn’t work for me. I don’t plan a story before I begin: I uncover the story by writing. I usually start with a particular image or cluster of images: Ruby’s Spoon began with a little girl jumping up and down in a fish and chip shop, and a woman sorting buttons in a saucer. The Silver House started with an image of a pair of shoes outside a locked bedroom.

With The Silver House, I got to know the characters through freewriting and found out what their stories were. When I knew which story I wanted to tell, I decided whose point of view the reader would have access to, how much the narrator would know, and, in broad strokes, how I would structure the plot.

In the later drafts of Ruby’s Spoon, I started each scene with a checklist that I may have nicked from Philip Pullman, and I’ll probably use the same checklist with the current novel. The checklist: what’s just happened? What time of day is it? Who’s here? Where’s the light coming from? What has to happen by the end of this scene? I found this discipline very useful and it gave momentum to the writing, but I didn’t think more than a scene or two ahead. I still don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or how the action will unfold. On the best days, the writing takes on a life of its own, and it’s my job to get the words down, not to force them in a direction they don’t want to take.

***

For the next stop on the blogging tour, jump over to Kit de Waal‘s blog. Kit worked in criminal and family law for fifteen years and now writes flash fiction, short stories and longer form prose. She is published in various anthologies (Fish Prize 2011 & 2012; ‘The Sea in Birmingham’ 2013; ‘Final Chapters’ 2014’) and works as an editor of non-fiction.  She came second in the Costa Short Story Prize 2014 with ‘The Old Man & The Suit’.  She is currently working on a novel ‘The Scarlet Emperor’.

 

The grindylow in the garden centre

Last week the Writers’ Reading Group at mac asked me to come and talk about my writing and to set them a task inspired by my  novel, RUBY’S SPOON. I love the collision of the mundane and the magical, so this is the exercise I set. The results were disturbing, arresting and compelling. Have a go.

Pick two numbers between 1 and 5 without reading any further. Write them down to prevent yourself from cheating.

Done?

Find your first number on this list of supernatural characters (descriptions below all from Katharine Briggs’ DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES, Penguin 1976)

1. Grindylow

a Yorkshire water-demon who lurks in deep stagnant pools to drag down children who come too near to the water.

2. Fetch

A double or co-walker. When seen at night, it is said to be a death omen and is always ominous.

3. Red cap

One of the most malignant of old Border Goblins, Redcap lived in old ruined peel towers and castles where wicked deeds had been done, and delighted to re-dye his red cap in human blood[…] Human strength can avail little against him, but he can be routed by scripture or the sight of the cross.

4. Ogres

The word ‘ogres’ is used sometimes to describe man-eating giants, monstrous both in shape and habits, but it may also be taken to mean a race of creatures of mortal size who are anthropophagous [eaters of human flesh]. George Macdonald in Phantases used the word in this sense to describe the sinister woman with the pointed teeth who sits quietly reading and looks up from her book to advise the hero not to look in a certain cupboard, advice that has more the effect of a temptation than a warning.

5. Fairy godmother

The fairy godmothers of the sophisticated fairy tales of Perrault… are something of an anomaly. The wild fairies would be by their nature entirely out of place at a Christian service, but there is a deep-rooted foundation for their appearance at a heathen name-giving… [eg]  three fairy ladies, Arcile, Morgue and Maglore, are summoned to attend a banquet… and Maglore is angered at the inadequacy of the cutlery set out for her, and lays a curse of baldness on her host.

This template forms the basis for your character.

Your second number is where we find your character.

1. garden centre

2. swimming pool

3. corner shop

4. primary school

5. library

Task:

Write a piece which reveals your character’s true nature through their interaction with the people they encounter in this setting.

Then, if you have time, pick two different numbers. Develop a second character in his/her setting. Write a second piece which brings your two characters together.

Spring

You walk away because you think the story’s dead – there’s nothing growing here. Your writer-garden used to be abundant. Things grew. It was fertile and people liked to walk about in it, but now your writer-garden is bare branches, frozen earth and you can’t even hack the spade tip into it. You walk away. You write other things and read about psychology of place, watch ‘Man on Wire’ or listen back-to-back to every crime drama on Radio 4 Extra. You fold up pants and hunt odd socks and even scrub the grouting. And then your friend says, ‘Try this: give it up. Walk away. You don’t have to write this any more,’ and you go back to the writer-garden and lock the tools up in the shed, but before you go, you stand and look about because, after all, you have invested hours, months, years in this writer-garden and what is there to show for it?

And then you notice figures moving slowly. They stop at the far side of the lawn, their coats unbuttoned and their faces open to the sun. They don’t fall to their knees and plead with you, but they are dignified and stand there, close enough for you to see their faces: Isa, Tomas, Gatty, Edi, Flo. Edi says that they have things they want to say if I will listen and they walk off into the garden, through the door cut in yew tree hedge and then they walk in all directions – Edi to the seat curved round the oak tree, Tomas towards the cliffs. Gatty and Flo run off to the veg patch and Isa kneels down in the herb garden, and you don’t know who to follow first but as you walk you find that green shoots have broken earth that metal couldn’t and the story has been growing when you weren’t looking, despite – perhaps because of – your neglect.

I love it when a story keeps on growing.

A writer’s block

Louise Doughty was interviewed on BBC’s Today Programme this week about writer’s block. According to Doughty, writers who ‘claim to have writer’s block’ need to a) ‘raise a few more children b) ‘knuckle down’ and c) ‘stop moaning’. She dusted off Bernard Cornwell’s line about nurses and gave it her own twist: ‘a shop assistant doesn’t go to their boss and say I’ve got shop assistant’s block so I can’t serve today.’

I’ve been trying to write my second novel for a while now. Three and a half years, to be precise. My first novel officially took five and a half years from initial sketch to submission of manuscript, but unofficially I’d been trying to write for the previous ten years. After university, I’d tried to bully myself into writing and moved to a tiny 13th century cottage in a village outside Oxford with two-foot thick walls, no heating and mould on the ceiling. I got a part-time job as a receptionist at the housing benefit office and lived on a weekly food budget of less than a tenner, under the misguided apprehension that being cold and broke would smash through my writer’s block. It didn’t work.

Having failed to write in Oxford, I moved to London and signed up with a secretarial agency, hoping that temping jobs would leave me time and energy to write a novel. They didn’t, but I became a very fast typist and, in the loo, read books smuggled in the pockets of a baggy linen coat with huge pockets. I worked in Makro at the weekend’s, fitting security tags into cheap v necks, pairing shoes and facing down the clocks in Fancy Goods. One weekend they put me on a till. I couldn’t work the conveyor belt; the bar codes wouldn’t scan; I gave a customer  the cheque she’d written instead of a receipt. When it came to cashing up, my till was £25 down and nothing I could do would make it right. Next time I saw the supervisor hunting, I hid in the stock room.

So no, a shop assistant doesn’t tell her boss she can’t work today. She faces her fear and asks for more training, or, if she’s like me, she hides among the rails of winter coats, not because she’s work-shy and needs to knuckle down, but because for reasons beyond her, she is terrified of making more mistakes. Except this fear doesn’t walk up with a name badge on. It works from the inside and lives somewhere just below the gut. It’s quiet, eloquent, insistent and protective. You don’t know it’s fear because it knows you better than you know yourself and cites a dozen reasons why you’re not up to this. Leave it for someone who won’t mess it up like you. So yes, I think a shop assistant can get shop assistant’s block.

And money  – or the lack of it – doesn’t seem to make the difference. I have struggled to write in my own Age of Affluence, living off that once-in-a-lifetime advance on my novel. I have tried to write when not writing meant no food, but found I still couldn’t write, so I did other things, like answering telephones and photocopying and making PowerPoint presentations and picking books off my shelves to sell online.

Doughty says that all blocked writers need is a bit more external pressure. But that doesn’t seem to work for me. I’ve had a bit of that: these past four years, I’ve moved my family abroad and back again, grieved the loss of my lovely dad six weeks’ after his cancer diagnosis, moved my family to another new city, cared for a family member through three spinal operations. I’ve still had time to write, but found it hard to muscle through a scene or sometimes to stay awake. The knowledge that I have to fetch the kids in two hours doesn’t always make the writing flow. I have, scattered across notebooks and Word documents, something approaching ninety thousand words – false starts, wrong turns, dream-like wanderings – but, three years after starting, no coherent draft.

Maybe I just don’t have enough children. Maybe I’m afraid to knuckle down.

Or maybe that’s not quite it.

This thing that stops me writing is a shape-shifter. Sometimes it’s a cold, paralysing fog. Mostly, it’s that clamour in my head that tells me to stop wasting everybody’s time. Put me in front of a blank piece of paper with a decent pen in a quiet room and my jaw tightens and my muscles lock and the chorus of disapproval in my head starts up. No matter what I’ve achieved, no matter how others view me, I find myself stalked by fear: the fear that this book will never be finished, that I can’t do it again, that this is pointless, that I am a fraud, I’m squandering my life.

Telling a blocked writer to ‘knuckle down’ is like telling someone with anorexia to shut up and eat the bloody sandwich. (That feels like a quote. I hope I didn’t steal it).

Name-calling and bullying and ‘pull yourself together’ didn’t work for me. It was only when I had a new baby and was exhausted beyond anything I had ever experienced, when I was stretched so thin I thought I would tear like a tissue, when I was desperate for a scrap of time to myself, that I began to play with words and my writer’s block dissolved.

For the first time I wrote without caring what words I was putting down, I wrote to see what might happen, I wrote with no sense of an audience and I wrote entirely to please myself. The critics in my head were so startled by the sudden shift in my behaviour that they stopped heckling, and when they did wake up enough to splutter, ‘This isn’t any good,’ I’d say, ‘I know, but I’m having fun.’ I wrote stories about girls who suddenly realised they could fly and about being bewitched and a strange, unsettling version of the Prodigal Son. I doodled with an idea for a novel that grew from a word game and before I knew it I was writing.

I thought that I had melted that nasty old block for good; that, like the Wicked Witch of the West, it was defeated and no more than a puddle on the floor. But it turns out that the fear is here to stay. It’s how I choose to live with it that means I’m writing, or I’m not.

The most difficult part of writing for me is not and never has been the technical challenge. It’s remembering that it’s not just ok to make mistakes, to draft and redraft, to write into the dark, it’s the only way. Writing is process. It’s play, it’s practice. And writing’s not performance.

Some days I am not blocked; I’m a writer. I connect with this story that makes my heart sing and my bones dance and I live in and with the text and I forget to have lunch and I have to set an alarm on my phone to make sure that I don’t forget the children.

I applaud those who can shout down their doubts, who can muscle through a scene or write to a plan or set a target and stick to it. That isn’t me.

I’m not asking for sympathy. I love being a writer and wouldn’t swap this life for any other. But I would ask writers who don’t get the cold fog, or manage to find their way through it quicker than the rest of us, not to crow.

I want to time-travel and tell the young woman with the baggy linen coat that it will be ok. I want to tell her to keep on with the false starts and wrong turns. I want to tell her that the block, the fear’s still here; it’s living just under the skin. But for all the days when you can’t write, there will be days when the words come and never stop.

All night at the Locksmith’s House

In the end there was no danger of nodding off. The place was, as Dylan Thomas put it, “fast, and slow, asleep”.

Andy heating, hammering, bending metal and cooling it in the bosh. (It’s called the bosh because that’s the sound hot metal makes when it’s plunged in cold water). A gas-lamp lighting with a soft-edged pop.

We stood on the cobbles between the house and the workshop under the harvest moon. (Rich asked me why I stood on tiptoe). We stole a line from Jung’s bird-girl – “Only in the first hour of the night can I become human,” and wrote about what we might become.

At 3, we toasted bread at the kitchen range. You have to slow down to make toast this way. You have to crouch and slowly turn the fork to gauge the heat; tilt it so the bread doesn’t slip off into the ash.

The incidental tales, added by our guide as afterthoughts: that safe in the corner? The back of it was blasted open when the museum took over. Inside, Edgar’s dancing shoes, locked up by his sisters to keep him safe and still at home. The sofa where Flora-the-hoarder died. Another sister, Ida, not in the family album: banished when she fell in love with a man below her station. A house heaped high with unworn dresses.

Diplomatic case-locks, time-locks, showy Exhibition locks, and tiny apprentice padlocks, smaller than a thumbnail.

The Locksmith’s House: there’s treasure there.