As performed at the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe, Church House, Oct 6th 2019.
Gill Osborne: Paperback Writer
In 1969 I entered a children’s writing competition in the Liverpool Echo. The Red Gnomes was a short story about a football team of miniature men with pointy red and white hats in my grandad’s garden. They were fighting off The Blues: a marauding army of snails. The Reds won, and so did I, bagging one pound in prize money.
Riding high with success and in no doubt about my future career as a bestselling author, I wrote many more stories. Grandad was convinced the one about the escaped bat from Chester Zoo who set up home in my bedroom curtains would win the next year. It didn’t, but they sent me an encouraging rejection letter, telling me to keep writing, keep submitting.
As a teenager, short stories gave way to copious diaries and rambling love letters to David Cassidy. Fortunately, I kept those under lock and key. Then I met Tony, my first real-life love. I was a barmaid at the Everyman Theatre. He was an actor and comedy scriptwriter. He’d worked with Carla Lane and Alan Bleasdale. We shared the same ambition: to write books and make a fortune from it.
Tony was twelve years older than me and my grandad was worried about the age gap.
“Is he Red or Blue?” he asked.
“Red, of course.”
“Thank God. We can’t be having a mixed marriage.”
“Don’t be daft, Grandad. I’m only eighteen.”
My sights were set on going away to university. I broke up with Tony, tearily, in the snow outside Lime Street station, and went on to make more mistakes. I won’t bore you with the details. The fact was, I never made it as a bestselling author. Neither did Tony.
Two years ago, he found me on Facebook.
“You dancing?” he messaged. His old chat-up line, cribbed from The Liver Birds.
“You asking?” I replied.
We arranged to meet, but he died before I got there. It was cancer. At his funeral, Tony’s favourite Beatle’s song, Paperback Writer, jangled around the Crematorium Chapel. That refrain reverberated: “I need a job and a wanna be a paperback writer”. A sign I’d have been a fool to ignore.
And so, on a wing and a prayer, I left the stressful job I’d come to loathe. Retiring early felt scary at first, but I needn’t have worried. I’ve got a new job and I love it. Every morning I settle down in my home-office and write for at least three hours. Sometimes I carry on all day. At the weekends, I get itchy fingers. I’ve become a writaholic.
Last May, 49 years after The Red Gnomes, The People’s Friend accepted a short story. And they paid me for it. £80! Then they bought another. Thrilling, but I wanna be a paperback writer… I’ve slogged my way through three drafts of a novel – set in Liverpool in the seventies, of course. I don’t have any expectations for it; it’s only the first. And it’s not about the money.
Pat Belford: Breakfast in the Orchard
Grantchester, 1913.
“We’ll have breakfast in the orchard tomorrow,” Sophie, our hostess, announced when dinner was over.
“What if it rains?” Amelia asked.
“It won’t rain.” Sophie said.
She was right. We woke to a soft morning with warm sunshine. The smallest of breezes stirred the edges of the white tablecloth which Dilly, the maid, had spread over the long table. Bill dragged the shabby wooden chairs from under the apple trees at the far end of the garden and placed them round the table. Amelia cut giant poppies from the herbaceous border and stuck them, all scarlet and blowsy, in a green jug. Sophie brought a bowl of peaches to the table and one silken poppy petal dropped onto the golden fruit. There were raspberries, too, gathered earlier by the gardener, heaped like jewels in a glass dish.
Having decided that the occasion was going to be worthy of a photograph, I set up my tripod and camera at a suitable distance from the table. As I finished, the baker’s boy arrived on his bicycle with a basket of rolls freshly out of the oven. He was red faced and breathless so I gave him sixpence and a luscious peach as a reward.
Rupert appeared with his hands full, having been ordered to carry the cutlery. He scattered it haphazardly along the table then sank into a chair, yawning. Amelia followed with dishes of butter, strawberry jam and jars of marmalade and honey.
Sophie dumped the huge coffee pot on the table.
The first few gulps of coffee revived Rupert. He buttered a roll, heaped it with honey and announced that during the night he had written a poem.
“Do read it to us!” Sophie said.
“When I said ‘written’ it’s not actually on paper yet. I just wrote it in my head.” He waved his roll, oblivious of the honey dripping onto the tablecloth. “I’ll read it to you tonight, when it’s finished.”
The sun filtering through the silver birches netted the table with a veil of delicate shadow-leaves. The peaches had a rosy glow and the marmalade in its jar shone like amber.
It was only just after nine, at least an hour earlier than our usual breakfast time when we spent a weekend here. The fresh air made us hungry and Dilly brought racks of toast.
As always when Rupert was of our party the talk was lively and laced with laughter. No one noticed as I rose quietly from the table and crouched behind my camera.
Snap! The moment was captured.
The previous evening there had been talk of war. Where would we all be a year from now?
Su Ryder: Why Do I write?
Why Do I write? Because writing hurts so much less than talking. Really. Always has. Ever since I first discovered that there was a choice between pencil and vocal-chords, pencil wins every time. You don’t have to look people in the eye to write, you don’t have to first decide if the words are intelligent, appropriate, or if it’s going to sound tedious or stupid. You just pick up your implement of choice and away you go, charging across the paper.
You see, with writing, you can edit. Oh, imagine if I could do that with speech, before vomiting it out. Speech is dull, imperfect and unrehearsed, my real, colloquial, unimpressive, broad Yorkshire self. My voice has no proof-reader. You can’t use an eraser with speech, you can’t hit the ‘delete’ key.
How I would love that …
Writing takes me away, away inside myself, into a cocoon of solitude, where there is no one else to judge. Colours are brighter, tastes are sweeter, life smells of coffee, vanilla, new-mown grass, and the back streets of Barcelona. Life sounds like purring, panting, thunder and the ocean. And no one looks puzzled or horrified. No one glazes over. No one asks me to speak up or to repeat myself. Everything there is possible, and no one is going to tell me that I can’t.
How do I write? First, ask me where. Everywhere and anywhere. Scribbling with a biro or a fine-honed pencil, at work, on the bus, in the coffee shop of M&S, Briggate. Sudden feverish outpourings of inspiration on blotters, jotters, spiral-bound notebooks or my smartphone. Or the nagging snippets of rhyme and rhythm that ear-worm around my brain for hours before spilling out into scrawling script on the backs of envelopes. Then there are those all-consuming bouts of typing, that start between putting the carrots on to steam and taking out the bin, and end at obscure times of night. Or those frustrated scraps and snatches of early-morning Kindle-tapping, interrupted by repeated pleas from my family for attention, coffee, and matching socks.
Best of all are the dreams that wake me at five a.m. as a ready-made piece of short fiction, needing only my help to translate them onto a page.
I do give up. I give up forever, every time I submit for publication, every time I receive another rejection, every time I attend an adjudication evening, every time I hear another poet perform. I admit defeat, rip everything up, shred it, launch it burning towards Valhalla and give it a Christian burial.
And I shout, “good riddance!” to the writing monkey that crouches grinning and whooping on my back.
But I can’t, any more than I can issue a petulant demand for my heartbeat to stop.
I write. I have to write. I am going to die with a pencil behind my ear, and a pen in my hand.
Emma Storr: How and why I write
How I write depends on what is available. I can compose straight onto a computer, like now, but I often scribble in a notebook or use receipts, envelopes, tickets if paper is short. I write almost anywhere – on the bus or train, sitting on a bench or at my desk.
I like the physical process of writing. First time round, I try to let the words spill out without editing. I need to get ideas down quickly before they float away. Often unexpected concepts and images appear. And that is a big part of why I write. I’m exploring my imagination as well as my attitudes. I don’t know what I think until I see it on the page, adjust it, play with it and let it settle for some weeks before I return to it with a more objective eye.
Sometimes I regret this in-between position. It seems a place of weakness not to be sure of my views. However, ambiguity allows creativity and I want to remain open to not suppressing those parts of my personality that I find difficult to admit. I can be cruel. I can be selfish. I can be deceptive. I’m not proud of these traits but allowing them to surface in my poetry has probably led to some of my better writing. I’m not talking about poems that are full of self-obsessed angst. I mean work that offers a glimpse of the complex emotions we experience as human beings trying to make sense of the world. Often this is best done tangentially, through metaphor or simile.
I write also because it amuses and delights me. It is a form of play. I love searching for the right vocabulary, trying to avoid clichés (which is surprisingly difficult) and making connections that express something in a new way. I enjoy experimenting and learning about the craft, and myself, along the way.
Mainly I write because the fun of it greatly outweighs the frustration and despair. I write because I can’t help it. It’s the best way I know to express myself and be true to something deep inside that wants to be heard. Of course this is egotistical and narcissistic. But I hope it’s more than that. It’s also a desire to communicate and share, to fill a blank sheet with black marks that others can read and recognise, bringing their own interpretation to what I have written. I write because I want to know what happens next.
Bob Hamilton: Butterflies
I write to give butterflies their freedom. I’m trying to give one its freedom right now. You’re witness here to its maiden flight. Normally, they take to the wing from the page, in private, and I’m oblivious to their fate. Not so here this afternoon. Forgive me if I appear a little anxious.
It’s hard to say where they come from, these butterflies. One will arrive out of nowhere, most often when I’m off guard, not fully attending to the world. I might catch a brief flash of colour or a glimpse of a pattern. They keep their distance in the beginning, shy and sleepy, offering me just the occasional sighting, hard to spot in the deep undergrowth of my mind. The vegetation is dense down there. I’ve never been one for tending to my weeds, perhaps because I understand that butterflies like it a little on the wild side.
They’d probably be better off where they are, left fluttering around in my head, safe from criticism, but it’s never enough for me to just sit and watch and let them be. How I wish it was. No, it’s like we share the same restlessness. But there’s a problem. These butterflies are not immediately equipped for survival in the wider world.
They’re delicate, diaphanous creatures. They need substance in order to survive away from the haven of my mind. And that means language. I have to flesh them out with words, sentence by sentence, to give them shape and form. Only the right words will allow them a life of their own.
But writing is hard. It’s often the case that the wings get broken—the wrong choice of words—or that the poor thing is too heavy—overwritten and bloated with too many words. My biggest failing. Sometimes, though, just sometimes, I can find a form of words that fits one for flight. I read back my writing and recognise that I’ve managed to transport a butterfly from one realm to another. I see it sitting on the page, undamaged.
And then I want to see it fly away. I want it to take off on a journey, to lead an existence beyond me. If one were to flourish it would make all the hard work worthwhile. That’s why I write.
If you see a butterfly struggling on the floor as you go out, please try not to step on it.
Linda Fulton: The Form
In this extract set in the 1960s, schoolboy Peter reads over his mother’s shoulder as she fills in an application form for free school meals. Next to ‘Father’s Occupation’, he spots an unfamiliar word, spells it out in his head and stores it:
D … E … C … E … A … S … E … D
Just imagining himself in the free dinner line fills Peter with dread. Anthony Crabtree is a ‘free boy’ who once wrote school dinners stink with his finger on the window outside the dining hall and his mother was sent for. Anthony Crabtree has no father. When Peter asked his mother if she knew what happened to Anthony’s dad, she said as far as she remembered Anthony had never had one.
The free dinners stand to the left of the children who pay and who don’t have an F next to their name in the register. The F children queue by the windows—which is how Anthony Crabtree came to write in the steam about the stink. There’s a hole in the elbow of Anthony’s jumper and he smells like the toilets at lunchtime. A girl called Elaine from the Infants stands at the front and cries a lot. And there’s a boy with three thumbs who waits at the back and the children in paid-dinners never tire of shouting, ‘Hey. Give us a butcher’s’. They call the boy Tommy-Thumbs-Up or Three Thumbs, though really his name is Wayne. Wayne doesn’t mind the gawping. He seems quite proud of an extra thumb, even though Anthony Crabtree calls him Freak Boy.
Peter wonders if he should lose the brown envelope with the form in. Along the way to school are plenty of drain grates where he could ‘post’ it accidentally on purpose, but his mother said he must take it to the headmaster. Everyone is afraid of Mr Morris. Peter can’t help but stare at the yellowish-blue dint in the front of the headmaster’s balding head; it’s like a bruise that never fades. Peter’s mother says it’s a war wound from his days in the RAF and that there are ‘things the poor man’s seen he may never want to talk about’.
Mr Morris knows a lot about maths that he does want to talk about, and sometimes bursts into the room with wild eyes and sets the class a problem. Questions such as ‘how long will it take four men to dig ten holes?’ Peter finds difficult to answer, so instead he watches the veins beating in Mr Morris’s head.
On Monday when Peter delivers the envelope, he stands by the door in the headmaster’s study, stepping forward only when asked to. Mr Morris unfolds the form and casts a slow eye over it, resting his elbows on the desk, his spikey fingers bent like open claws on his battered head. Peter watches the skull throb, the bones either side of the dint shifting. He rests his weight on one leg then the other: he needs the toilet.
The headmaster mumbles at each question but at ‘Father’s Occupation?’ he looks up. Anxious to leave, Peter has crossed his legs but now here is a question he can answer, so to speed things up a bit, he cries, ‘DECEASED’. Mr Morris blushes, finger and thumb squeezing the corners of his mouth, until he lets go and says, ‘Thank you, Peter.’ He smiles, which is unusual. ‘Tell your mother it should take about a week.’
By the time Peter reaches the toilet, he can hold on no longer and sprays the wall. If he could, he would write a swear word but there isn’t enough pee left for bugger and he’s not very good at joined-up. He knows next Monday he’ll have to stand behind Elaine-Who-Cries-A-Lot, or squash in front of Three Thumbs Wayne, smelling school potato steam and Anthony’s stink. A letter F will be added to his name in the register and the teachers are bound to hear of his answer to the question. Perhaps they too will snigger over their playtime tea, sipped from flowery china cups.
Sarah Dodd: Lizard
This is why I write. Because the lizard is on the ceiling again.
The lizard doesn’t belong here. It is a dark shape on the white walls, an anti-lizard, the space where a lizard should be. It arrived a long time ago; I think it crawled out of a book somewhere, when I was very young. It crawled out of a book and it never went back. Its tongue is black with ink and its skin is dry as paper. Its scales change colour depending on its mood, or maybe my mood, it’s hard to tell, sometimes.
The lizard knows it was here in the beginning. It remembers primordial swamps. It wants me to remember them too. It whispers the names of forgotten birds into my ears at night. It breathes out the wet smell of the forest. It traces maps of lost kingdoms in the dust outside my door.
Some days, it looks down at me and exhibits, in every twitch of its limbs and every blink of its smooth black eyes, the most profound disappointment. Some days I could swear it gives a conspiratorial grin. Like all lizards, it is patient.
I try to outrun it, of course I do, but nothing ever works. I move a continent away and wake to find it on my pillow, looking smug. I try to stun it with reality, with facts, and common sense, but only succeed in making it stronger. It peers out of paintings wherever I go; it crouches like a gargoyle on every church; it weaves itself into the pattern of my days, whispering stories, always wanting more.
I decide it is time to take up a knife.
Afterwards, the tail keeps writhing. I throw it in the bin but can’t sleep for thinking of it, twitching with remembered life.
The next day, the lizard is whole again, but more than this, it is multiplying. More lizards appear. Two fall from the ceiling, post-coital, into the salad bowl, when I invite friends for dinner. I do not invite any more. I don’t really want to see them, anyway. I stop answering emails. I keep the curtains closed and lie in bed. My computer has started turning itself on in the middle of the night. My skin is hardening and there are scales on the pillow each morning. I find pieces of shed skin on the kitchen tiles, I find footprints I don’t remember making.
I write.
The lizard licks its lips. It basks in the glow of my laptop screen. It flicks its tongue and catches words to eat them like fat black flies. It closes its eyes and when it dreams it walks through imaginary landscapes where it is still king of all the creatures, where all stories are true, where all possibilities are endlessly, invitingly, open.
This is why I write.
Mark Pennington: Where do you get your ideas from?
In 1967, Brian Cant read the following script:
“Here is the clock, The Trumpton Clock. Telling the time,
steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly.
Telling the time… for Trumpton!”
In about 1984, a teenage Mark Pennington was chasing locomotives around West Yorkshire as a railway enthusiast. The participants in this activity divided according to their preference for different classes of engine. The groups didn’t like each other, and would shout specialist insults from train to platform and platform to train. Bucket basher! Ned! Insect! Poltroon!
By the late nineteen-eighties, I had moved on to the marginally more intelligent pursuit of railway photography. One weekend, the West Coast Main Line was closed for maintenance near Penrith, and all the expresses were being dragged by diesels over the Settle-Carlisle line. I used roads and footpaths to walk to various vantage points, eventually reaching one of the large viaducts. I photographed northbound and southbound trains and looked again at my map, to discover that further lineside progress was impossible without a detour of several miles.
Unless … I knew that the signalling sections on this line were large, and no further trains could come for quite a while. I looked around the remote landscape, hopped over the fence onto the track, and walked quickly and efficiently along the viaduct, using the sleepers as my path. And then off the other side, and back to normality. Nobody saw me.
Many years later, while developing my interest in writing, I read a book called Plot and Structure, which had a chapter on good opening lines. One line cited was by Dean Koontz. ‘Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.’ If you know the author, it will come as no surprise that Janice Capshaw is dead by the end of the first chapter. But it rang a bell, stuck in my mind.
And here are the first 68 words of my new novel, The Angel of Dent.
I am Poltroon, and I walk the rails at night. Sleeper to sleeper, my footsteps are even, their sound metronomic, dictating the time. A stride every second, leather on wood, striking out northbound, milepost to milepost, their numbers all rising as facing the country, I hammer away. Away from my life, away from my home and from him. I have no fixed abode, each second a different home.
So – we assemble ideas from the history of our lives. That is the genius of humanity. I commend it to you.
Pat Pickavance: My life as a writer
With apologies to absolutely everybody.
When I was just a little girl …
When I was just a VERY little girl
with horrid hair that wouldn’t curl –
in raglan knits and frilly frocks
with pigtails, bows and short white socks,
christened Patricia – eeeeuw, stuff that –
just call me by the name of Pat!
my arms and legs were beanpole thin,
my crooked teeth a ghastly grin:
with mucky hands and scabby knees
from riding trikes and climbing trees,
and when I got involved in games
I spat -* , and called my playmates names,
and when invited to play fair,
I shouted “bugger off, no share!”
I made rude signs, I tore my clothes
I bit my nails, I picked my nose.
I always scowled, I seldom smiled:
I was an unattractive child.
They tried to make me pay the price
for just not being very nice,
They dragged me up the usual way:
“Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”
They made my life a living hell –
You don’t believe me, I can tell.
This isn’t fiction – it’s the truth!
I swear I had a dreadful youth.
Because I knew they’d never budge,
I scribbled down each bitter grudge,
pretending I had seen the light –
I held my tongue. I learned to write.
I gave up fighting, hid away –
I planned to have revenge, one day.
I heard that nervous little cough!
I’ll bet you think I bumped them off.
No!!! I’m well brought up; and I’ve been taught
You can’t act out each violent thought.
Perhaps I should have broken out
and learned what life is all about…
I should have filled what followed next
with rock and roll, and drugs, and sex –
a writer should research these things.
If only I had spread my wings!
The book I meant to write, you see,
was “Fifty shades of being me.”
But – well…
we all grow up. Each of us forgets
The long, slow path to our regrets.
I’m older now, I’m better placed
For editing with style and taste.
I tidy up a text so well:
I’ve learned to show instead of tell!
I try to keep the structure tight:
No adverb ever sees the light!
I follow Rules, I Play The Game,
I’ve done my best to make my name.
It hasn’t worked, as you can see –
cos no-one’s ever heard of me!
D’you know, I’ve had to do as I’ve been told,
For all these years, and now I’m old!
I began my life a fighter.
why aren’t I a famous writer?
H’mm.
To seek revenge, or pick a fight,
is not why anyone should write.
The monster child, with folks from hell
It’s just a story that I tell.
Instead of pointless poems of woe,
I should be writing what I know:
I’ve brought up children, and I’ve seen
What little toerags they’ve all been.
No wonder that I lost the plot.
Murder my darlings?! Yes, why not?
Leeds Writers Circle 