A Day In the Creative Life
I always think that no-one wants to read my writing about writing. I tend to think of it as quite self-indulgent, so I try to keep it to a minimum. However, there are those who say that they are interested and I am willing to indulge them a little. Earlier today, someone messaged me about my comment that I had had an interesting dream last Sunday and then wanted to know more about how things progressed from there ... so, for those who are interested and use strange words like ‘inspirational’ ...
I woke up at 7.59 a.m. on Sunday morning with a very clear vision in my head of a dream that I had had. I am not one for remembering dreams unless my sleep is disturbed but oddly on this occassion my alarm was not set to sound until 8 a.m. so I was pre-empting it. In the dream, I was visiting a small voluntary sector organisation that was trying to move into tiny office space. They were attempting to lift the carpet but they were all over the place with their ‘to do’ list to have the place ready to run. One of the staff told me that they needed Charlotte, their Administrator, to come into work and sort things out. Then I woke up.
I am not sure why I was thinking about administrators. Perhaps it was because of the course that I had been on the previous Friday. On my table had been an administrator from the county youth service and he was very dismissive about his role - ‘I’m just an administrator’ and all that. I had tried to convince him that administrators actually run organisations but he was having none of it.
I am not sure why the name Charlotte either, but it seemed to fit. I knew even before the alarm clock sounded that there was a short story to be written in which the hero was an administrator. Notice that I say ‘hero’ for Charlotte, I think that women should reclaim the word ‘hero’ for themselves but we can talk about language another time. At 8 a.m. on Sunday I had to grab some breakfast and get ready to try to catch a bus from Cowbridge (due to engineering works on the rails, I was attempting to take a bus into Cardiff).
While having my breakfast, I watched Channel 5’s football highlights show. Once again I reflected that Channel 5 thought that I could only understand football if it was shown to me by a blonde woman who wears leather trousers. I decided that this was the ideal mid-section for the story as Charlotte’s knowledge of sport lands her a job with Channel 5, so long as she is prepared to dye her hair blonde, wear leather trousers and pretend not to understand the off-side rule. Ah, I do like my heroes battling against the sexism of society.
All the time, my mind was ticking over with what Charlotte the Administrator’s journey should be. I liked the idea of making it more than helping out someone with their filing, I wanted Charlotte to be a hero to all of the European nations - I imagined a picture of her on a pedestal holding a laptop and a spreadsheet (that is the book cover and I even know the person to take the photo and the person to pose for the shot, even though neither of them know it yet). I saw her celebrated as Charlotte the Liberator, although in her lifetime she had been known as Charlotte the Administrator. You may have noticed that I like stylistic quirks such as no-one having a surname. Maybe it is the Welsh tradition of nicknames, maybe it is working in a sector where everyone is on first name terms, maybe it is a deeper point that I have yet to create with hindsight, but no-one in this story would have a surname.
I had worked out that the story started in a dystopian future featuring a semi-rural Welsh town and that it had to take Charlotte to the point of walking into a voluntary sector organisation who are completely disorganised as they try to take up the carpet in their office. I have always thought that there was something rather radical about working in any occupation which is based on caring for other people (and hence why so much hatred is directed at teachers, social workers, nurses, voluntary sector workers and so on) and so I easily saw the voluntary sector as the underground in this future world.
I had to wait a long time for the bus in Cowbridge. I had, however, thought to grab my netbook before leaving the house. I had not charged it fully for a long time so it was a bit hit and miss whether it would work. As it happened, there was no chance to write on my journey into Cardiff and I hurried over to the morning’s Quaker Meeting without much other chance to remember things from the story.
I had worried that I would not be able to clear my mind for the Meeting but I managed surprisingly well and even contributed to a fascinating discussion about when it is right to break the law. I talked a little about my experience of ‘radicalisation’ training but the governmental strategy of defining dissent as potentially dangerous is a worry. I was intrigued to find that religious charities have been told that their senior staff must now be trained in how not to be radical. Given that Quakers are regularly arrested for protesting at arms fairs, breaking into Faslane, opposing government policy noisily and annoyingly and many other dissenting actions, it is a topic of much debate as to how the government is choosing to define ‘radical’.
I had planned to leave after the Meeting because the bus times back to Cowbridge were not in my favour. However, before I could leave, a woman who used to work for Careers Wales wanted my views on ‘young people today’. This is a temptation that I cannot resist. I was going to leave after that but the lovely Z. came over to tell me that she had made soup for everyone and I had to stay for soup (the soup was lovely to be fair). Finally, well-fed and thoughtful, I headed back to the bus stop with the thought of sitting down somewhere and starting some writing on the netbook.
The timing was such that after a fruitless search for somewhere to sit in the shopping centre, I thought that I ought to just head to the bus stop, where I spent far too long leaning on a lamp post looking at a building site. It is not all glamour.
Once the bus came, I found a seat near the back and unpacked my netbook. With slow traffic, I had about forty minutes to write. This was shortened to about thirty minutes by a wasp that followed me from seat to seat for the last ten minutes of the journey but by the time that we were in Cowbridge, Charlotte had made her journey from failure at the McDonald’s Comprehensive School through a brief career in admin to presenting football highlights. 1,500 words written.
I arrived home with about an hour before I was next due to go out. I had been planning to do some ‘homework’ from a course on mentoring that I had attended a couple of weeks before and for which I had to complete some work out of class by the next week. That was of secondary importance now though.
The sports presenter years were done by 3.50 p.m. It was hard to tear myself away but that is my time for swimming on a Sunday. The pool shuts at 5 p.m. and so it is about the latest you can get in there. I had to pause and go and swim 25 lengths. Then it was back to the story ...
It was finished in the early evening, to be honest. It came in at around 3,500 words and only had one alteration. I love the phrase “the revolution will not be televised, but it will need an efficient filing system” and I decided to move it from the middle of the story to the end. Short stories are very efficient as a story-telling mechanism, you really do not have many words to play with and so it is a case of set up the story, show the action and then leave the reader either with a conclusion or forever wondering what would have happened next.
When I re-read it ... no, it is not re-read and will not be re-edited. I never go back and read as I go along (I once saw someone writing like that and it was painful to watch). It may take another year or more to have enough stories for the next compilation and I will not re-read it until that compilation is ready. It is deliberate, I want the second reading to be after I have forgotten how it was written, what it is about and even the funniest lines. It brings a fresh eye to it in a way that constant re-writing does not.
And of course then I had to get on with the other thing called reality ...
... although if I was writing more, I would have ended by sitting at the piano and playing ‘Sound & Vision’ by David Bowie. It has always been my song for ending a creative burst.
Now you know ... obviously I am creative and brilliant and this happens to me all the time. Like hell, it happens rarely but I love it when it happens :)
So now and go buy your copy of the first compilation -
And if you have already bought your copy, why have you not written your review on Amazon yet? :)
For those who asked then, that is a Sunday in the Life. They are not always quite so exciting and it is a lot easier when the trains are running properly as I can just set the netbook up on a table and get my head down until we arrive at Central Station. I would love to tell you that I am a man who is constantly full of creative ideas. In my dreams, eh?