My Mum Natalie
Without Prejudice
We went through her bag after she died. A mustard yellow looped bag with a leather brown petalled flower on the outside. Inside was the detritus of any normal woman's life. A worn out stub of a lipstick, an eyebrow pencil, a hankie, never used, some breath mints and a letter to The Prime Minister about a hair cut she had just had. Of course all women write letters to the Prime Minister about their haircuts, don't they ??? She said it looked like it had been cut with a knife and fork. it was not a copy, it was an original, never sent. Written in green pen.
In a notebook was a long forgotten half finished story about a young girl called Lucy and that was my Grandma Wishers name and my middle name. She never finished it, My Mum. It began with a girl running to a park, a girl called Lucy and seeing boys there at the park, "laking" as that is what Yorkshire lassies like my Mum called "playing". We found it unfinished in her journal and I never knew until then how much she wanted to write.
My brother Jamie a Writer, my daughter Lauren a writer and myself. Mum had struggled with the "elusive truth" just as I had, and when I read about Steven King one day sitting at his typewriter and only typing one word for the day I knew what he was banging on about. One word in six hours, imagine that. And yet he is the most published writer of all time.
I know that struggle with the search for the elusive truth or trying to find "your voice", so that you don't sound stilted or odd or boring or too fanciful. To cut through the bullshit in other words and getting to the "meat" in the writing sandwich, without waffling or padding. Hard, harder than you think. The first thing you have to overcome is your conscious self. Your critical self, self conscious self, that threatens to upstage you at every turn. To try and come across as authentic, and real without condescension or pretension. To realise without fully realising
We went through her bag after she died. A mustard yellow looped bag with a leather brown petalled flower on the outside. Inside was the detritus of any normal woman's life. A worn out stub of a lipstick, an eyebrow pencil, a hankie, never used, some breath mints and a letter to The Prime Minister about a hair cut she had just had. Of course all women write letters to the Prime Minister about their haircuts, don't they ??? She said it looked like it had been cut with a knife and fork. it was not a copy, it was an original, never sent. Written in green pen.
In a notebook was a long forgotten half finished story about a young girl called Lucy and that was my Grandma Wishers name and my middle name. She never finished it, My Mum. It began with a girl running to a park, a girl called Lucy and seeing boys there at the park, "laking" as that is what Yorkshire lassies like my Mum called "playing". We found it unfinished in her journal and I never knew until then how much she wanted to write.
My brother Jamie a Writer, my daughter Lauren a writer and myself. Mum had struggled with the "elusive truth" just as I had, and when I read about Steven King one day sitting at his typewriter and only typing one word for the day I knew what he was banging on about. One word in six hours, imagine that. And yet he is the most published writer of all time.
I know that struggle with the search for the elusive truth or trying to find "your voice", so that you don't sound stilted or odd or boring or too fanciful. To cut through the bullshit in other words and getting to the "meat" in the writing sandwich, without waffling or padding. Hard, harder than you think. The first thing you have to overcome is your conscious self. Your critical self, self conscious self, that threatens to upstage you at every turn. To try and come across as authentic, and real without condescension or pretension. To realise without fully realising
