My biggest problem is what to write in the first place. Given a free rein, told to ‘Write what I like’ and I’m lost, the page as blank as my mind.
I have tried the notebook / people watching/ eavesdropping ideas with varying results.
I travel fairly regularly by train and two incidents spring to mind.
My first encounter was, sitting across the aisle from me, a girl with long flaming red hair, she was so striking, I enjoyed conjuring up a character profile for her, and this developed into ‘The Girl Across the Aisle’
I once had the pleasure or misfortune; I’m not quite sure which, to be sitting opposite another girl on a train, on her mobile phone discussing who was going to donate their kidney to her, which she was in desperate need of. Believe me, I got every gory detail. She was either oblivious to me sitting there, or more than likely just didn’t care ( It seems to be the norm nowadays that people are happy to have what I would call private conversations in public, for all and sundry to hear). My story; ‘The Girl with the Kidney’ is still waiting to be written.
Fortunately in my local U3A Creative Writing group, at the end of each meeting we are given that month’s homework. Even with that much needed prompt; I struggle for ages before coming up with something half worth developing. While my fellow wordsmiths are posting their valiant efforts, the deadline getting nearer and nearer, still nothing.
And then finally ‘Eureka’; more often than not, at three in the morning when my brain has been unable to switch off.
The funny thing is once I’ve started, that’s it, I simply can’t stop, frantically scribbling, editing, re-editing, never quite one hundred per cent satisfied which what I’ve done.
But in the end I have to let it go. My finger hovers over the ‘Send’ key before making that final decision to let it go.
And then spend the next few hours worrying about what everybody’s going to think of it!
Valerie Fish
Whittlesey Wordsmiths 