My creative life (or something like that) and a list

It’s my belief that our brains don’t deteriorate as we age: they change. We move away from the factual towards the imaginative – towards stories, shapes and colours rather than words and ideas. We forget things like the days of the week or people’s names not because we’ve become forgetful but because they’re not important to us any more. Well, that’s my excuse.

And here’s the story of my brain’s development.

I went to a girls’ grammar school where the focus was firmly on the academic and passing exams. Then, after university and a lot of travelling and wrong turnings, I settled in Devon with Frog and started work as a book copy-editor and proofreader, occupations firmly rooted in the left brain*.

In my late thirties I branched into writing non-fiction books and articles. As a result of working in the publishing industry, I knew the gaps in the market, and as a result of migraines (vomiting and acute right-headed pain) that had begun in my twenties and my attempts to find a cure for them, I had become something of an expert on complementary health. These two factors combined to get me published.

In my fifties, with our financial situation easier, I didn’t have to work quite so hard at the editing and proofreading and I became interested in creative writing. It’s what I’d always wanted to do, but universities didn’t cover anything like that when I was a student so I’d not given the ambition any credence. I attended an evening class and started a novel. The process took me over however and I sat up writing for nights on end, eventually becoming ill and having to stop halfway through.

A few years later, I discovered the wonderful Roselle Angwin and followed one of her courses, meeting monthly for six months with her and a group of other would-be novel-writers. The result was a children’s novel. Or at least it was intended to be a children’s novel. It was in fact probably an adult novel with an eleven-year-old heroine. To date, it’s not found a publisher and actually I don’t think it’s very good. (It’s also hampered by the heroine and a ten-year-old friend running away on a canal-boat with two adults not related to them, which would probably not be allowed in a book these days.)

I didn’t find my editing work conducive to creativity. In fact it stifled it. So I took a part-time job in a local bookshop and at the same time signed up for another novel-writing course with Roselle, online this time. She kick-started the process by getting me to list all the mantras of my childhood, whether spoken or unspoken, and then choose one to write about. The one I chose (to disprove) was ‘Happiness is selfish’.

A few years later and a few drafts in, I sent the proto-novel to a literary consultancy** (Cornerstones) who loved it and made lots of helpful suggestions for ways it could be improved.

I then made a detour and edited a local villages magazine as I thought it was time I did something for the community. I had fun developing the magazine but after three years realised that to go any further would mean it becoming a full-time occupation and I didn’t want that. So I returned to the novel and, with the suggestions from Cornerstones in mind, started to redraft it yet again. The result was The Banker’s Niece, serialised on this blog as I rewrote it (see right).

At the beginning of this year I sent The Banker's Niece to another literary consultancy, The Literary Consultancy, whose Reader didn’t like it at all and – dare I say it – didn’t even appear to have read it properly. I slumped. I lost all belief in myself as a writer. I became depressed. Six weeks later, with the bad feelings not going away, I contacted TLC and explained what had happened, and they bless them (thank you, Joe) diagnosed a mismatch between Reader and novel and offered a second report free of charge.

I haven’t yet had that report back and I’ve no idea what it will say and I don’t even know if I want to carry on with the novel and rewrite it yet again, but my spirits have lifted. TLC’s first report is no longer the last word. There is hope. I’ve unlocked. My creative journey continues.

With the unlocking, a list of what I’ve learnt so far about creative writing, and novels in particular, has been forming in my mind. I thought I’d share it with you, not least because that way I’ll have to stick to it.

And, by the way, the migraines are getting better.

The list

If you want to start a new novel, state your intention to the universe and your subconscious and then step back and let them get on with it. Stressing and straining are counter-productive, and willpower is not what’s needed at this stage. Instead listen to the whispers in the corners of your mind and catch the images that flash across your mind’s eye. Soon they will gather momentum.

Remember to rest. Time spent not writing is as important as time spent writing. A wander round the garden, or in my case ten minutes flat on my back on the bed with my eyes closed, can be more productive than hours staring at a computer screen. Take days off, of course.

Have a routine for writing but don’t be too rigid about it. If you wake in the middle of the night flooded with ideas, write them in a notebook and then go back to sleep. Don’t get up and start working at the computer. If in the day the writing comes to a halt, stop. Either it’s finished, or you need time to refill the word-tank.

Keep notebooks everywhere – by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the car, in front of the television, in your bag. Ideas can strike at any time, any place.

Enjoy the journey. Don't be in too much of a hurry to finish a project. If a side-path presents itself, follow it. Who knows where you'll end up.

Don’t feel guilty about everything you’re not doing. (In my case this means cleaning the house, having a tidy garden, being sociable, seeing family, looking immaculate, doing things for the community.) Your writing is your gift to the world. Take it seriously. Put it first.

The East Devon coast two weeks ago

*You probably know all about right and left brain stuff but in case you don't - the left brain is the intellectual side and the right brain is the intuitive, sensory side. Women have more connections than men between the two sides which is why they see things more holistically.

**In the past publishers did everything for an author. Now you have to pay a literary consultancy for editorial advice and then an agent for selling your book to a publisher, and then you have to do all the publicity yourself.

Circle, Triangle, Square, Star, Splat

Like the previous post, this is written for a blog link-up party hosted by ‘I live, I love, I craft, I am me’. The theme this time is photographs of geometric shapes. Do have a look at the other entries.

Circle

Here's an almost perfect circle (spotted by Frog), formed by a bridge on the Grand Western Canal near where we live.

Along the Grand Western Canal a week or so ago. (Spot the dog.)

And here is a picture from the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal in Somerset which we were able to visit yesterday after a three-month absence. It was very busy, lots of people obviously having the same idea as us. The sun and planets are ranged along its length at correctly-scaled intervals and in their relative sizes, which is an inspired idea, and has almost (but not quite) got me remembering the order of the planets. The sun is an enormous orange ball about ten feet high (but we didn’t go that way this time so I don’t have a picture).

Saturn, on the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal

Triangle

Here at last is our shade-sail, temporarily installed. As explained in a previous post, sunshades, gazebos etc don’t stand a chance in our garden as it gets so much wind, and the shade-sail is our latest ruse. Thanks to Primrose.co.uk for getting it to us, in spite of the difficulties the lockdown has caused them. We did have to wait seven weeks, but we trusted them.

Spot the dog, slinking off. Because of the noise the shade-sail makes, she thinks it might be a new form of hot-air balloon, one of the few things she's really frightened of. Hopefully, she'll get used to it.

Square
It took a lot of digging to create the 2 ½ foot deep post-holes for the shade-sail, most of which was done by Frog. My job was to trundle away the earth in a wheelbarrow and tip it into my new raised vegetable bed, also made by Frog.

Star
The bees are loving this geranium in flower in our garden at the moment. I’m loving the flowers' colour and their delicate markings. I’m not a painter but I’d like to be and a few days ago I tried to paint one of the blooms. I found it impossible to re-create their loveliness.

And I can’t resist showing you this picture of elderflower blossom yesterday, shining like a constellation of stars from a dark hedgerow. Its scent was intoxicatingly lemony and for the first time I understood why people use it for making drinks.

Splat

I don’t know if this counts as a splat, but here is a mind-map I’m creating for a possible new novel. I haven’t as yet made connections between the items as all I’m doing at this stage is writing up things like dreams, memories and stray thoughts as they occur to me, as well as more conscious ideas (which are probably the least helpful). In true lockdown fashion, I'm using the back of large pieces of patterned paper I found lining the drawers of a chest I've inherited from my mother.

I’ve used mind-maps in a more structured way (with connections and sub-connections and pathways) for novel chapters and blog posts for a while but this random mind-map is a new idea.

I’ve also been formulating a list of dos and don’ts connected to creativity – more of this in due course perhaps.

Own choice

And here is my lockdown indoor project, the tunic of many colours (and many geometric shapes) made from leftover pieces of material, intended for those rainy days which we haven’t had. Consequently I haven’t got very far with it.

This is the top of the tunic. There's a handkerchief skirt to come, made up of a pink piece of material, a green piece, and three purple pieces. 

And that's more than enough about me. I intend in future to write in a much more general and informative way . . .

PS As I said in the previous post, if you've arrived here through the blog link-up party you may not be able to access the links. Tune instead to www.belinda-whitworth.blogspot.com

Five on Friday

I’m writing this post as part of a blog link-in hosted by ‘I live, I love, I craft,I am me’*. The subject is gratitude and here are five things I’m grateful for.

Firstly, thanks to you for reading this blog. Writing (for me) is all about confidence and believing in what you’re doing, and every page view helps.

Thanks to The Literary Consultancy for arranging a second assessment of my novel (by a different person) free of charge because I’d found the first report so unhelpful. It brought my writing (apart from this blog) and hence my future to a juddering halt, but now things are opening up again.

Thanks to the police for taking seriously my complaint about the cage-trap on a neighbouring farmer’s land and thanks to a neighbour for being with me in this matter. (See my post 'Meltdown' on the subject.)

Thanks to the lockdown for simplifying my life and enabling me to see what really matters.

Which brings me to my final item. Thanks to Frog and Dog, my favourite companions, for being with me at this time.

The dog is there, honest. Can you spot her??

And I've just realised it's Saturday today, not Friday. Oh well.

*If you've accessed this blog through 'I live, I love, I craft, I am me' you may not be able to access the links. You'll need instead to visit my blog (www.belinda-whitworth.blogspot.com) directly. 

Horsetails and a walk 300 million years back in time

It all started on Wednesday when Frog, Dog and I went for a walk along a nearby canal. With the bird-scarer going off every fifteen minutes near home, Ellie was in a permanent tizz and it was becoming impossible to walk her around my usual routes. So we decided to go a little further afield.

    It was a glorious day and the air was full of what we would normally have called midges but decided to call mayflies as it seemed appropriate.

Swan and mayflies

Everywhere we saw baby water-birds.

I love the way these cygnets are copying their parent and preening themselves exactly as s/he is doing

Mallard pair and ducklings

A tiny black moorhen chick scooted across the canal into cover on the far bank, watched over by a noisy parent who continued screeching angrily long after the baby had disappeared into safety.

Along a shady stretch I saw my first orchids of the year, Early Purples with their leopard-print leaves

Early Purple Orchid (and Bluebells)

The leopard-print leaf of the Early Purple Orchid

and this exquisite plant which I’d never seen in Devon before but vaguely remembered seeing half a century ago on the chalky North Downs of Kent where I was brought up.

    ‘Woodruff’, I said to Frog, the name popping out of my inner directory without conscious intervention. What else could it have been called?

Woodruff

As we neared the end of the restored section of the canal, I saw this plant, with its feet firmly planted in the water.

The plant with its feet in the water 

‘Mare’s-tail,’ I said. Or was it Horsetail? I really wasn’t sure. I knew the names, but the plant I remembered lived on the land, in damp patches, like this one on the bank immediately behind the water-plant.

The plant on the bank

I also remembered Frog’s brother pointing out the land version to his young daughter and saying that it was one of the most ancient of plants, around at the time of the dinosaurs, and that intrigued me. The plants did look alike and they did both look strange - like bottlebrushes. Were they the same, with the names and habitats interchangeable? Or were they related? Or was something else entirely going on? I had to know. (I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to wild plants.)

Back home, I trawled through my reference books and the internet. And here’s what I discovered.

Mare's-tail and Horsetail

The two plants are completely unrelated, even though their appearance and their common names are similar. Even more confusingly, they have similar scientific names.

Mare's-tail
The water plant (the one with its feet in the canal) is indeed Mare’s-tail, as I thought. Its scientific name is Hippuris vulgaris, from the Greek ‘hippos’, meaning horse. In spite of its appearance, it’s a normal flowering plant, its tiny blooms appearing in June and July.

Mare's-tail, a flowering water plant

Horsetail
The land plant (the one on the bank) however is something extraordinary. It’s Horsetail, scientific name Equisetum from the Latin for horse-hair, and like Ferns it’s one of the oldest plants in existence with its origins 300 million years ago – way before the dinosaurs (who were around 230-65 mya).

    Once it was much much bigger and great forests of tree-like Horsetails covered the land. Scientists know this from fossils, and most coal is the fossilised remains of Ferns and Horsetails.
    The names, both common and scientific, of both plants (Mare's-tail and Horsetail) relate to the way their leaves grow which reminds those in the know of the way horse-hair grows.

    And even though Horsetails don't grow in water, they do like boggy ground - something else to add to the confusion.

Horsetail, an ancient damp-loving land plant

Horsetails don’t have flowers, since flowering plants weren't yet invented that long ago. Instead they reproduce by spores, like fungi (and Ferns).

And now, from pictures I encountered while researching, I had the answer to another mystery – these extraordinary things which Frog and I encountered in a boggy field near the sea in March (a few days before lockdown). We’d never seen anything like them before and we wondered if they’d dropped from outer space like triffids.

What are these weird things that Frog and I saw in mid-March?

They - it turned out - were the spore-bearing cones of this extraordinary plant called Horsetail. These cones appear in spring, before the main stems and leaves which were what I'd seen on the canal bank.

Now I find all that absolutely fascinating and I hope you do too. And I wish I could find a picture of a primeval Horsetail forest to show you, but not even Google can produce one. We'll just have to use our imaginations.

Here instead - and just to remind you yet again which plant is which as I know it's confusing and it took me a long time to get things straight in my mind - is a picture I took yesterday of some Horsetail (the ancient non-flowering land plant) in a field near the house. Yes, it's everywhere, now I look.

Ancient Horsetail, still here after 300 million years

NB1 Horsetails are poisonous to horses, considered Pest Plants in New Zealand, and sometimes invasive in UK gardens - so not everyone loves them.

NB2  Even more confusingly, there's a plant called Horsetail Restio which is no relation (or at least not closely related - if I find out more, I'll let you know). Its scientific name is Elegia capensis and it's much younger (dating to only 145-100 mya) than the Horsetails I'm talking about above. They have it at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

What's going on?

I hadn't seen a song thrush in Devon since the arctic winter of 2010 but last week when I was in my secret wood I heard a gentle tap-tap-tap. I wonder if that’s a thrush I thought. I kept as quiet as I could so that the creatures of the wood got used to me but nothing emerged that I could see. Then a few days ago I thought I saw a thrush in our garden. Unfortunately I didn’t have binoculars to hand so couldn’t be sure. Yesterday evening however, I saw the thrush-like bird again and was able to grab binoculars and verify that, yes, it was a thrush. And not one but TWO, feeding busily on our unkempt lawn. I was thrilled.

    Here’s a (not very good) picture I managed to take of one of them through glass.

And here, just for fun, is another not-very-good picture (again through glass) which I took at the same time of one of our great spotted woodpeckers, the female I think. They eat us out of house and home, which is why we put the cage around the feeder. As you can see, it hasn’t deterred them. The pair has been around for years, and in the summer they bring their scruffy youngsters to show them the foodbank.

Their latest trick is to hammer at the base of the aerial on the roof just above the bedroom – usually at about five in the morning. (We know it's them because Frog's seen them at it.) The noise is quite extraordinary – loud and metallic and reverberating - and we think they must be signalling as there can’t be much nourishment in a metal pole. I’m trying to persuade Frog to record it so that I can include it on the blog.

Incidentally, we’ve also had a green woodpecker in the garden recently – something I've only seen in August up until now, when they peck the lawn (for ants, says my bird book).

And when I walked into the village yesterday with Ellie there were more anomalies, one bird I haven’t seen since I was a child and another I did see in the winter in the field behind the house but have never noticed over the village before.

    We have to go that way at the moment as there’s bird-scarer somewhere near home and Ellie refuses to leave the garden except in the car, so I drive a mile or so and park next to the road. Ellie then heads off at speed in a westerly direction away from the noise, up a footpath which takes us towards the village. It’s a very pretty walk, but a lot of people use the paths so normally I avoid them.
    Here's a view of the village I took yesterday as we walked.

    Anyway, as we walked around the edge of the village - which was utterly peaceful, more so than the countryside - I noticed flocks of unfamiliar birds in the air. They were shaped like crows but smaller, and fluttered like skylarks but were bigger. One of them landed on the roof of a cottage I was passing and ducked into a nest under the eaves. As I watched, a lovely old lady came out of the cottage.

    ‘I see you’m looking at my jackdaw nest,’ she said.

    ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s what it is. I was wondering what all those birds were.’
    I waved at the air.

    ‘Them’s starlings,’ she said. ‘I watches them more’n I watches the television.’

What is going on? Is it the lockdown, and if so what is it about the lockdown? Is it us, noticing more, or is it the wildlife? And whatever it is, can we hang on to it as the lockdown lifts?