Blog:

My mother, like most parents, thinks her children are miracles. Everything that I do is not an achievement on my part, but just a manifestation of that in-born miraculous nature. When I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I was just doing exactly what she knew I would do. When I graduated with distinction with my Masters degree, she was unsurprised. When I won the New Writers Award or the Gillian Purvis Award or blah blah blah, she would have expected nothing less. Every time I get a story published – well, she birthed talent, didn’t she?

This bothers me. I may appear to be an adult, but really I’m just a small child jumping up and down to get a pat on the head from my mum. Just once, I’d like her to dance around and shriek MY DAUGHTER IS BRILLIANT and then go and tell all the neighbours. But she’s not much of a shrieker.

My girlfriend Susie’s mum, in contrast, is utterly floored by everything that Susie does. When she graduated from graphic design school, her mum was amazed. When she got a job as a graphic designer, her mum was astounded. When she got a better job with a better graphic design company, her mum just couldn’t believe it was possible. When she plays the guitar or paints a picture or programmes a website, her mum gapes open-mouthed in wonder that a child of hers could do such things. Susie does not like this. She thinks it suggests that her mum thinks she’s an idiot, and anything she achieves is laudable because holy crap this fool did something good.

I’m jealous of the way Susie’s mum is so impressed by all of her achievements.

Susie is jealous of the way my mum thinks I can achieve anything.

Whoever we’re trying to impress – and don’t lie, there’s always someone – they’re never quite as impressed as we’d like them to be. But really, what do we want them to say? If my mum fainted in amazement every time I got a Facebook friend request, I would be annoyed. If Susie’s mum just shrugged and made a cup of tea every time she got a freelance job, Susie would be annoyed. Whatever the level of enthusiasm, it’s not quite right. Jumping and screaming seems insincere, and anything less is underwhelming.

So I am trying to appreciate what I get from my mum. I am a big girl, after all, and she can’t be patting me on the head forever. Sometimes when I meet someone new or meet up with family I haven’t seen for a while, they know all about what I’ve been doing. My mum does think I’m worth bragging about. And if I ever get shortlisted for the Orange Prize I know she’ll be in the audience clapping until her hands go numb, so I’ll just wait until then. Any day now…

I’ve tried desks. They don’t work for me. I resist sitting down at the desk. I resist going to the desk. Sometimes I resist even going into the room where the desk is kept.

But I have a little white MacBook and the battery lasts for hours and so I carry it around the house with me. Portability means no excuses.

Say I spend the morning working at the kitchen table. By coffee-time (which, as you know, is around 11am) I’ll decide that this cushion isn’t soft enough and my bumcheeks hurt, or that the edge of the table is too sharp and my elbows hurt, or that the light is too dark and my eyes hurt. It would be very easy to stop at that point. To go and watch some daytime TV or vacuum the carpet or rearrange books for no apparent reason.

But the laptop can be in any room I am in, so I take it with me. I take it into the front room and write on the comfy library chair for an hour, then I take it into the bedroom and sit up in bed for an hour, and then I take it into my girlfriend Susie’s studio and plug it into her giant graphic designer’s computer screen and work on that for an hour.

When I’m writing I’m like a bratty toddler – the only way anything gets done is bribery, threats, and a desperate avoidance of boredom. By changing my surroundings and moving around my (rather small) flat, I manage to alter the scenery often enough that I don’t get bored.

Picture #1 is the kitchen table. I usually start my day here because it’s quiet and the table is big and I can make tea often. The right side (with the notebooks and paperbacks and empty cup) is my side and the left (the neat one with the fruit bowl) is Susie’s. I feel that the neatness of our sides of the table serve as metaphors for our respective brains: hers is tidy and healthy, and mine is just a chaos of loose papers.

Picture #2 is the bed. I only work here during the day because Susie and I have a strict no-laptops-in-bed rule. It’s nicest in the afternoon when the sun slants in and warms my feet. The obvious problem is nap temptation.

Picture #3 is the library area in the front room. It’s good to work here in the evening because the lamp gives a soft glow and being surrounded by books always inspires me. I can also use them as bribery: “Edit another 500 words and you can read something!”

Writers and creative people, do you work all over the place like me? Or do you have a dedicated workspace? Show me!

As of Thursday the 21st of July, I will be on a writing retreat for a week. I’ll be trying out an email/phone/Facebook/Twitter silence (which, for me, will be a big change), so if I don’t respond to any messages you send, that is why.

See you next week!

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘Peach Cigarettes in Tokyo’, published in Pear Noir! #4.

An extract:

“The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb. My friend had a dinosaur suit because he’d gone to a fancy dress party the week before, and I was wearing it because I was cold and it was made of fleece. I’d never been much of a smoker, but the vending machine sold dozens of different flavours and what was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I wasn’t going to try new things?”

The Inspiration:

 

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’, published at Wigleaf.

The Inspiration:

I spent two years on an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. About 90% of what I learned appeared to be a complete waste of time. One class was about OuLiPo, a French movement that seeks to constrain writing in order to be more creative. OuLiPo practitioners use exercises like prose sestinas (using the word repetition of the sestina form in a prose piece), writing a story without using the letter E, or the “snowball” technique (the first line is one word long, the second line has two words, etc.)

In class, we all produced ‘opposite’ stories – write a story, then for each word write the opposite. ‘Some people are grumpy’ would become ‘none ghosts aren’t cheerful’. The interest in the exercise was that most words don’t have a clear opposite. What is the opposite of ‘people’? I chose ghosts but it could be angels, or corpses, or monsters. It was a fun exercise, but I really couldn’t see the point. The things we produced were nonsensical, pointless; who’d ever want to read these?

It’s only now, a year after I graduated, that I see the point of these things. They force you to not be yourself for a while, to not fall into the same themes and tropes and word-patterns that you always do. When I first started the MLitt there was nothing that I ‘always did’, because I hadn’t written much. Now that I’ve cranked out some more words, I often need to stop and think: have I said this before? And that is where OuLiPo comes in.

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’ is a prose sestina (if you want to figure out the word pattern, please feel free!). I love writing prose sestinas. I love that I start out trying to write one story, and then realise that the words won’t allow me to, and so it has to turn into a different story. I like that I’m guided by the words. I like the sense of losing control, of being forced to make unexpected decisions. When I’m finished, I sometimes don’t recognise the story I’ve written. It seems so un-me. But sometimes it’s good for us to wear a mask for a while.

(Note: I really did go to a Halloween party dressed as Betty Boop.)