A New Challenge

I needed to find a happier and more optimistic writing challenge and I found one in the shape of The Daily Telegraph's Short Story Club with its tempting monthly Short Story Competition and the wonderfully friendly and entertaining members. I had been part of the Telegraph's Novel In A Year, led by Louise Doughty and had been lucky enough to be short-listed, so I was very pleased to see the birth of her new column. I created my pseudonym, made an avatar and Bonnie Lass was born! 

Apart from the monthly 2500 word short story, we had fun writing weekly challenges; perhaps it would be to write a short story in 6 words, like the one Hemingway is alleged to have written ...

''For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn.''

... or maybe it would be to write a story in less than 200 words.  The brevity was appealing and some of us posted several in the course of a week. It became addictive! Friends were made, jokes were shared and the creative support was amazing. 

I found all of my stories on an old memory stick and will post a couple of my favourites next time. Meanwhile how many 6 word stories can you make up?

An Empty Space

I went very quiet for a spell. Horrible things happened in the family; having already lost my sister to breast cancer several years before, my dear brother died very suddenly after a short illness. He had been absolutely fine until one day he couldn't breathe. Turned out that he had cancer of the kidney which had spread to his lungs. What was really upsetting was that the scans showed he had been born with only one kidney, something that no-one knew about. He died three weeks after diagnosis, the week before Christmas.  On top of that, my sister-in-law had died of lung cancer a few weeks before and I lost the remnants of my already poor hearing. So there I was, with no siblings and no hearing and there was so much to do! 

The three of us 

Work became impossible because I couldn't use the telephone and despite attempts by Occupational Health to find something suitable, I decided to give up. Thankfully, this gave me the space and time I needed for the huge task of sorting out my brother's flat. He lived alone and had collected thousands of books. I had very little choice but to take them home. They sat piled up, three-deep, against the living-room wall for over a year until I felt able to deal with them. I gave most of them to Oxfam. 

Through all of this, I was still trying to write but everything was too soulful and morose. I needed a new and optimistic challenge and I was to find it in a very unusual place!

Back to Being a Poet

Being a little despondent about my novel writing attempts, I decided to go back to writing poetry. My work as a Health visitor gave me so much inspiration, the people I met, their joys and their sorrows. There was no shortage of subject matter and I eventually wrote over 200 poems. One Scottish publisher expressed an interest until his funding from The Arts Council dried up! 

Being a poet is not a very lucrative pastime. But some day, as with the short stories, I will sort them into bundles and pubish them to Kindle. A bit like sorting out all the old photographs - a task for my old age! 

The Digital Age Arrives

Very soon after the final rejection slip had been carefully filed away, Amazon self-publishing arrived! I asked my talented and creative daughter to design a front cover, I learned how to upload my file and voilá- my novel was out there! 

But ... it really wasn't so easy! Seeing my book in digital form, I found loads of typos and formatting issues. I must have corrected and uploaded the book about a million times. Even now, I still find mistakes but I can't be bothered with the hassle of going back into the file and changing things. 

After the first enthusiastic flurry of friends and family who said it was great (?) nobody looks at it now. It's rather painful for me to read because it's full of memories and dead people. It's the proverbial first novel that everyone has in them. It needed to be written and then it needed to be discarded. 

Like my first attempts at knitting, the few mis-shapen things that I made in the early days had to be unravelled and ripped out before I could pick up the used wool, start again and create something better the next time. 

Wishes and Dreams

The next thing was to approach publishers. This was still the day of snail mail and paper applications. I must have printed off about 20 copies of the required 'First Three Chapters' to send in large brown A4 envelopes, covering letters attached with shiny new paper clips and stamped addressed envelopes for replies.  

I remember the excitement and tummy nerves when I posted them into the red post box at the end of our street. 

Then came the wait.

Slowly, over the course of six to twelve months, little white envelopes addressed to myself in my hopeful handwriting, came plopping through my letterbox. Despite the fact that they were all contained rejection slips, I still felt very proud somehow. At least it showed that I had written a novel and that I had tried. All was not lost. I still held onto my wishes and dreams

Taking Things Seriously

I needed a stronger incentive to make me write and to stop me from procrastinating, so my next step was to sign up with The Open University's Course on Creative Writing. And it was terrific. It did everything that it said on the tin, and more! 

I found that my original love of writing poetry, gleaned from my time studying English Lit at University, had not been lost and it was a joy to find expression in all kinds of ways, through Haiku, poems, stories, flash fiction... I would often read my favourite poets for inspiration:

The feedback from my tutor and the group meetings was really supportive and by the end of the course I had gained a distinction, written loads of stuff and was well on the way to finishing my first novel. I also had a poem published in a prestigious Scottish magazine and The Scotsman newspaper chose it as their poem of the week. 

Success!! 

But how to get my novel published ... ?

I Kept on Going

What next? 

Having been given a confidence boost by winning the prize - £100!! I decided to write some more short stories based on the same character - my father as a small boy. My husband refused to read any of the new work until I had written ten stories - this gave me a huge incentive! I was working full time with four young children and finding the time and space wasn't easy, but it was being done as a homage to my father and this spurred me on!  So I had two men in my life encouraging me to write  - one very much alive and one dead! 

Only problem was the spellcheck - I was using Scots dialect and what a nuisance it was! 

I escaped back to the 1930's and tried to recreate the atmosphere of large families and the extreme poverty to be found in the heart of Scottish cities in those years between the wars. 

I managed to write the ten stories and I had a vague plan of publishing them as a booklet. A local magazine printed a few and I had the wonderful fun of seeing them being used as reminiscence therapy with dementia patients - how great is that??? An endless loop of stories being told and then forgotten and then told again - ha ha! 

I never did get round to publishing them but I really must do an upload to kindle one of these days. 

The Beginning of it All

How did it all begin, the desire to write?

I didn't even think about writing until my father died. 

And then I just wanted to write about him. I began to remember the stories he used to tell us when we were kids and I tried to write them down, using his voice. 

Storytelling : that's what it's all about. The basic human desire to listen to a tale. Whether it be round a camp fire or snuggled up in bed. 

For me, nothing can match the joy of a child sitting in my lap, snuggling into the warmth, listening to the sound of my voice and wondering ... what will happen next? 

So, the first proper story I wrote was about a little boy living in the 1930's, recovering from a bad bout of measles.  His large family are poor, with little in the way of luxuries but his mother loves him. And when all the other kids go off on a Sunday School picnic he's left at home to recover his strength and his mother shares with him a little treat of a fancy cake and it's the best thing ever, to have his mother all to himself, for a little while at least until the others come home. 

A Wee Treat

I was working as a community nurse at the time and our local NHS ran a short story competition for the staff. I entered my little tale and it won first prize!