People

In my head, they are people in a room. My characters. The people that I have already written, they are definitely there and the people that I want to write about, complex people with lives and jobs and emotions. Some that are mine, of course, the way to work through an emotion, a feeling, is to superimpose it onto a fictional character and have them work it out.

There’s Emily, of course. She is my very favourite and always will be. If I could get it past J, then I’d give our baby Emily as a middle name. She is so important to me, she started this journey and may very well end it too. If I stop writing, and that seems to be a distinct possibility at this point, she will remain the very best person that I ever wrote. She stands there with her hair curled, slightly awkward, wondering if anyone is looking at her, wanting to talk to the others but wondering what she would say.

Charlie and Ryan are there, my men protagonists, the men that made Emily come alive. Ellie too, older now, entering her teenage years and baby Rosie as well.

Then there are the characters that are half written. There’s Maddie, she was the one I wrote first, I was probably sixteen or seventeen so we’re going back twenty years which is terrifying. I would love to tell her story but maybe she represents a time in my life that I don’t particularly want to revisit. I don’t know. We’ll see. There are others, there’s a mum whose husband leaves her for another woman then comes back with his tail between his legs, there’s a group of women who are in varying stages of having babies and lots more. There’s the characters that I haven’t written yet. The ones that I’d like to write. I’d really like to write a character who has lost a sibling. One who has tried and tried to have a baby and failed. Someone who has turned their life upside down and started something entirely new. There are so many.

But they are all standing still in the room. They are waiting for me to write them a story. And I’m entirely stuck. Entirely unable to write anything. There are four blog posts half written in my drafts folder, even here the words are struggling to come, even here I worry about the writing being crap, here where I wasn’t supposed to set myself any expectations. I just need to write. Need to write and write and not worry at all about who might be reading.

Maybe I need to write about the deep things, the things that scare me, the way that I feel when I am in a room with people I don’t know. The way that I feel when I compare myself to other people. Body image. The tough stuff.

Here’s to the people in my head.

I’ll make them move.

Self Esteem

Self esteem is a ridiculous thing. It shouldn’t matter, your abilities and talents should speak for themselves without the need for confidence or arrogance or even the ability to promote them. I’m sure for a few, this is absolutely the case, and to be honest, aren’t they the envy of all of us? You see them, the chosen few, beautiful and talented and with seemingly endless opportunities falling into their laps and I wonder breathlessly what it might feel like to be that way, have that life.

I have a lovely life, I have miserable moments, of course. Last night, I ended up in Tesco in tears buying butter after a stupid row about butter. Butter?! Stupid. But I am very good at looking on the bright side, my cup is rarely half empty, I genuinely need to just look at my sleeping girls and I am back to feeling incredibly lucky. But that is my family, it isn’t me.

For me, my self esteem is pretty low. When I left my job on maternity leave, nearly four years ago, I left on a high, fully expecting to go back, twins blissfully happy at nursery, me continuing my career onto heights that I had not even contemplated. I did not imagine, could not imagine, that I would only not go back, but remain a stay at home mum approaching their fourth birthday. I did not anticipate that I would not want to go back, that I would realise that raising my girls would be more important than anything else I’ve ever done and ever will do. I didn’t realise that leaving my girls in a nursery when they were eight months old for ten hours a day would be as mentally devastating as it was. I didn’t work out the financial implications, didn’t do the sums that, in the end, it was costing me money to work.

So I wrote. Wrote a book. A whole book with 115000 words in it. I have wanted to do that for twenty years. So I’ve done that. But does it matter if no one read it? Or reviewed it? And that countless agents rejected it. What does that do to a person’s self esteem? I can tell you what it has done to mine. I can feel utterly worthless as a person. I contribute nothing to my family financially. There is an interesting dichotomy to being a stay at home mum these days. My mum and J’s mum stayed at home to raise us and this was the eighties, it was the done thing, the financial world was different then, rent was not two thirds of an average salary, there wasn’t a dependence on tax credits then. But aside from that, socially it was the right thing to do. You could still raise independent strong girls who wanted to be doctors and lawyers and politicians despite their mum being at home, cooking meals and keeping a house. You could still raise boys who understood the changing role of men in our society, the fact that J took on as much as he did when the girls were tiny, on top of his full time job, is testament to his mum as much as anyone.

The thing is, and this has got rambly and for that, I apologise. The thing is that I believe myself to be a good writer, better than average and absolutely good enough to be published. I am so glad that I have this blog. For so many reasons, but mostly because my love for writing fiction has left me for now. All of my characters seem contrived, their conversation clunky and unnatural, the scenarios I write them into are unrealistic and a little bit ridiculous. I have three books started and I don’t want to continue with any of them. My book was perfect to me, the characters were absolutely the ones I wanted to write, the story was the one that I wanted and needed to tell.

I need to raise my self esteem. I need to promote my writing. Others do, without fear or abject terror of being rejected. I need to learn. I need to write this bloody short story and enter it into this competition without being so stupidly frightened.

I am ten weeks away from having my third child (all being well) and I have two amazing daughters. I have a relationship with a wonderful, funny, frustrating man. I am incredibly lucky. That should be enough.

But it isn’t.

 

Fiction Friday

‘I can’t, Em.’

‘OK,’ she said and for a moment, I could sense the sadness, it emanated from her in waves. She turned and placed her bag on the passenger seat of her car and made a move to sit in the driver’s seat. I don’t know where it came from but I decided to tell her how I felt, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore or it suddenly mattered enough to lay every card I had on the table.

‘Em, you must know that I love you, that I’m in love with you. I wasn’t looking for you, my marriage failed and I was not looking to find anything serious, I needed to heal and then maybe find a couple of women to date for a while to feel good about myself. And then I saw your name on your door and that was that, I didn’t knock expecting to fall in love with you but that’s what happened. I think you’re spectacular,’ I grinned at her, overwhelmed by what I was saying and the intense feeling of relief in getting these words out of my head. ‘I think that you’re beautiful and I think that I will never feel like this about anyone else. I will find someone else, don’t get me wrong, but I’ll always be settling slightly, because they won’t be you.’

She opened her mouth to speak but I shook my head. This was happening now, the entire speech had to be completed today, right now and then I could walk away.

‘I will always be your friend, we will always be friends. I value that friendship so much, I need it in my life but you have Charlie and he excites you and  he’s young and handsome and,’ I laughed, picturing Charlie in my head. ‘He’s ripped and I’m well, I’m never going to be like that. So, however, you feel about me, I can’t be the safe option, the sounding board and the one that is a little bit second best. That isn’t fair.’

‘You’re not,’ she was out of the car now and reaching forward to touch me. I let her rest her hand on my chest and for a brief moment, felt completely calm looking down at her small hand tucked into my suit jacket. ‘But I didn’t know, I didn’t have any idea, I mean, I hoped but-‘

I sighed and took a step backwards, her hand falling away from my body and hanging there for a second in the space between us. She looked at her hand then at my face and just then I did believe that she might love me. But it disappeared as quickly as it came and an image of Charlie popped back into my head, I’d seen photos, found his Instagram profile, looked at the picture of the two of them on the train until it was imprinted on my brain. I knew when I was beaten, and I needed to walk away, to stand here and thrash it out to no conclusion would do neither of us any good.

‘Go and get Ellie,’ I said eventually, as she lowered her arm and sat back in her car, the resignation apparent in the slump of her shoulders. ‘She’ll be wondering where you are.’

I watched her eyes flicker to the digital display on the dashboard and she nodded, not looking at me.

‘Emily, we’re good,’ I said, moving forward and holding the car door. She had tucked her legs into the foot well now and her car keys were in her hand. I wanted to go home, I realised suddenly, but I had no idea where that was. I wondered briefly if Nic would mind me sitting in her living room until the kids went to bed, just so that I wouldn’t have to sit in that beige box I paid rent on. ‘We’re friends, and we’ll be fine. Give this a couple of days and we’ll be completely back to normal.’

‘Did you come today to tell me this?’ she asked, still not looking at me, her voice small as she stared out of the front windscreen.

‘No, god, no, I came to see how you were. To see you. I missed you. I came because wherever I am, I want it to be with you.’

‘Oh, Ryan,’ she said and I shut the car door.

Am I in it?

I wasn’t particularly vocal about writing a book. It certainly wasn’t a secret, it just wasn’t something that I volunteered. I’d moan if I’d stayed up late writing, there was a point where I wouldn’t sleep until I’d written 1000 words, but largely I didn’t mention it. I would say to the girls that I was working when I dropped them off at nursery because I was, the few hours that they spent there meant that I could edit or squeeze in an extra few hundred words. It’s funny, when the girls were small, it was somehow deemed valid that I didn’t work, they were work enough it seemed but as they approach four and school age, it is somehow now not. So I would mention it, in passing to my in-laws if they came over to take the girls out to the park or wherever.

When it was finished and out there in the world, J was my social media cheerleader. He tweeted the link out, put tons of photos on instagram, promoted it on his facebook and I just sat there that first weekend, not writing for the first time in about six months and I accepted the surprised compliments from friends and family. A handful downloaded it that first weekend and I had a lovely chat with one of J’s cousins in Australia who was very complimentary and it was generally a lovely few days.

But what was odd was the questions? The big one, is it me? Is Emily, the main character, me? This is, of course, a ridiculous question. Of course she is, to an extent at least. She’s the person I’d quite like to be, she’s a bit more put together than me, she is calmer than me, as lonely, but she isn’t me. Not really. Some of her experiences are mine, the way that her husband dumps her is almost exactly the break up I had with an ex, written slightly differently (but only slightly!) knowing full well that there is more chance of the world ending than him reading it. Another character is based entirely on someone I know. Others are completely made up. I’m sure this is true of all books, isn’t it?

The other question, asked slightly shyly, is ‘am I in it?’. This was asked a lot and the answer was mostly the same. No. It’s too much to try to hide a person, change their hair colour or their name or the amount of children they have just to shoehorn them into a story. You can hide yourself, that’s easy, you know yourself better than anyone but someone else, not worth it.

There is a draft on my computer of something much more autobiographical but I wrote three chapters of it and it felt too hard to carry on. It’s a story I’d like to tell one day but maybe it needs to be a little more fictionalised, a little less me and a bit more padded out. Who knows? The second book, if it’s ever finished, is a sequel to the first. I needed to see what happened next, if Emily ended up happy.

It will be finished. I’ll reopen it tomorrow, read what I last wrote and crack on.

Hold me to it, would you….

The Writing Process

My first book was written quite quickly in the end. As always with me, there were several first draft chapters sitting in my computer, all different ideas, some too personal, almost autobiographical, some half hearted, some a lot better than others. But none really ever got past that, there wasn’t time, it wasn’t good enough and some I had made the mistake of trying to edit as I went so they were then deemed too awful to ever see the light of day.

Then I was in Starbucks and there was a barista there at the time who was a little bit flirty. With everyone, certainly not just with a tired looking mum who always had her little ones with her, but it occurred to me that there was a story in it. What if a barista DID fancy the tired looking mum and something did actually happen?

So I wrote it down. And it was slow at first, the self doubt crept in and I was tempted to stop but this was the first genuine story idea, one that might be good, that I’d had in forever so I ploughed on. No idea what I was doing, just sitting and writing and the words added up. 115,000 of them in the end.

J sent them off, the first three chapters, and the rejections rolled in, very nice rejections, you definitely do not just get a no these days, there was loads of constructive criticism and one not quite a no, one email that requested some more of it. I sent it off, the optimism bubbling just a little then nothing, no follow up email.

I self published in the end. A laborious, ultimately anti-climactic experience. But it’s out there in the world. A book written by me with my name on it. Book Two is in the works, curtailed by early pregnancy and having no energy to speak of, but I’ll write that too and it’ll sit along side the first one. I’m immensely proud of that book, I re-read it recently, having not since I edited it and I forgot that I’d written it to be honest, I just read and enjoyed it. I adore the main character, she is bold and emotional and she makes good and bad choices and I just love her. I wish that I could shoehorn Emily into the new baby’s name somewhere in homage to her but I don’t think that J would go for it. Maybe I’ll get a strange Emily tattoo somewhere….

The writing process is unique, of that I am sure. Absolutely different for everyone, laborious and long and difficult but the only work that you ever want to do. I am a better person when I’m writing, less bogged down, happier, clearer. It is no coincidence that this blog has sprung up in January, in an effort to write more, write anything, write what means something to me without the pressure of 1000 words, of finishing this chapter or editing this scene.

There was a meme doing the rounds after Christmas, in the rounds of resolutions and anti-resolutions that take over social media at that time, and it said that if you had written a book, you were an author. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t sold in Waterstones, or hadn’t been read by a hundred thousand people, you were an author.

I am an author.