Category: Bravery

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Pandemic Pause (Part 3)

Facing a worldwide pandemic was scary, facing the ridiculous stock-piling crisis that followed it was scary but, when Boris Johnson told us cafes had to close and I was able to stop worrying about being a huge infection risk to my family, the relief was immense. I write this post very conscious of the awful time some people had in lockdown but, I think for a lot of people (including me), it was like someone had pressed pause on everything that had previously crammed into our days and we finally had space to breathe.

It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t smooth-sailing. Two weeks in and I had to move out of the place I was living. It wasn’t allowed, but I didn’t have a choice. I packed up my car and my dog and sneaked to my sister’s house in the night.

I then had to find a way to live harmoniously with the sister I’d not lived with since she was fifteen and her husband and their 5 month old son. I am so, so grateful they let me stay, and I’m eternally gifted with being there for my nephew’s first crawl, first steps, first hug and kiss, first words. And there were beautiful days of barbecues and baby cuddles and standing bare-footed in the kitchen preparing salads and marinades and me washing up while my sister dried. And then there were days when the baby had woken us all at 4am and no-one could get along and I felt like sisters just maybe shouldn’t live together.

I was sleeping in my brother-in-law’s study and, like so many others, he was now working from home so I had to make myself scarce in working hours. I put my notebooks and pens in a box and spent my days writing in the conservatory, sporadically interrupted by my sticky nephew bringing me toys and wanting to type on my laptop and my dog who panicked the baby would get all the attention and needed some reassuring fusses and my sister who needed some actual conversation.

In some ways, I’m very well designed for lockdown: an introvert with a time-consuming creative hobby that involves staying in the same place all day. But, like everyone, I struggled with the massive change my life had undergone.

I was saved by the aspects of my routine that couldn’t change. My nephew woke us up bright and early and my dog needed a walk morning and evening, I need coffee at 11am (fact) and my brother-in-law worked Monday to Friday which gave us all a residual sense of working time and weekend-relaxing time.

And my writing. My writing saved me even when I had neglected it for all this time. I suddenly had the time to write. Loads of it. More than I could even use. But I didn’t just jump out of bed every day, full of beans, and skip into the conservatory to type merrily all day.

Obviously.

But, with little else to fill my time, I tried to write every day and, with that level of perseverance, I did learn two essential lessons that I have carried with me as “normality” returns.

The first is my need for external accountability. The magical Caroline Donahue (check her out on Instagram @carodonahue because she’s great and her podcast is amazing) did something incredible during lockdown and reached out to anyone who needed it. She started running an Instagram live every weekday called the Quarantine Writers’ Retreat. Every day, by 3, I had to have words on the page. We’d set ourselves targets and share them with the group and, every day, we’d check in. I asked Caroline to hold me accountable and she really did, calling me out by name. We’d confess we’d actually spent the morning making cakes instead, or proudly show off our thousands of words, or sympathise when someone couldn’t find the headspace to create that day.

Because, with few demands on my time, I was realising I will always naturally prioritise the things other people expect of me. All this time at home and at work I had been cramming my days with everything I could do to help others at the expense of what I wanted to do and then feeling guilty when I hadn’t got my writing done again. I kept thinking if I changed jobs, if I worked fewer hours, if only I could protect my time from the demanding employer, then I’d get more writing done, only to find I filled it with cooking more elaborate dinners for whoever I lived with, taking my dog for longer walks, agreeing to meet more friends, for longer. In lockdown, I learned to harness this weakness and make it a strength. All I needed was someone who would expect me to write every day. If someone else expects it of me, I will do it.

The second thing I learned is how valuable it is to surround yourself with other writers. If you don’t have any writer friends in real life (and I didn’t really then), you can connect with people online (Instagram has a beautiful and supportive writing community) or take writing classes, or listen to writing podcasts or read books on writing. This is something I really invested my time in during lockdown and the effect of it is amazing. It makes you feel like you are working on writing like it’s your job, good old-fashioned career development. It’s also a powerful motivational tool. When you hear from other writers about what they’re doing, what works and doesn’t work for them, the goals they’ve hit and their achievements, the inspiration is strong.

It felt like a cheat at first. It felt like I was still not a real writer because I had to have someone else thinking of it for me, inspiring me, making me sit down and type, but then, when it worked, I thought, who cares if it’s a cheat?!

The challenge with both of these methods is being brave enough to go out to strangers and identify yourself as a writer, to tell people what you really want to achieve. That’s, I think, what prevented me from learning this sooner. The thought of saying it out-loud to someone, the thought of the potential for them to see me fail, was (and still is) utterly terrifying. But, the biggest thing lockdown did for me, was give me a taste of what it was to be a full-time writer. And I can’t forget that taste. I always knew I wanted it but now I know I can’t settle for anything else. And, having learned from the people who are living the life I want, I know what I need to do.

When I was struggling to protect my boundaries at work before lockdown, it was because I didn’t think I could justify prioritising my writing until I was a real writer. And what made a real writer? Why a publishing deal, a literary agent, book-signings and readings and festivals and book tours of course! All the things I couldn’t control. But the old adage applies: a real writer writes. And defends their writing time against everything else.

I can’t control whether an agent or a publisher will like my work or see a place for me on their books. All I can control is how I use my time. Do I want to use my time working extra shifts, or do I want to use it working on my writing career by writing?

So, when “normal” life began to return, and I went back to full-time employment and all the demands that go with it, it was with the understanding that, if I don’t honour my time to write, no-one will. (And a bag of sneaky writing tricks to help me along the way!)

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The Black Forest Adventure

So far, this blog has been about doing big scary things. I have abandoned my law career for six months of voluntary unemployment in order to actively pursuing my writing career. But, doing the big scary things made me wonder about the small ones too. I suddenly started thinking of all those things I had said I’d like to do, or to try, and chickened out, or made excuses about why I couldn’t do them even though I’d like to. I started exploring the option of actually just doing them. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? I signed up for evening classes, I took up running and ran a 10km mud run and I began to dream of even more challenging adventures. I had always wanted to travel but, growing up in a family where our annual holiday was always under canvas and always within the UK, it seemed a daunting prospect; too daunting until now.

In May, I booked a seat on a cheap flight and set off, alone, for the first time. I wasn’t brave enough to go totally solo yet so I met my sister in Germany and, together, we disappeared into the woods for a two day hike. 28 miles over the first, third and fourth highest peaks in the Black Forest.

The closest I had ever come to this was a three day hike with my Dad on the South Downs when I was in primary school and my sister had never even come that close. Between us we had two broken pairs of boots, one borrowed map, one cheap rucksack, and one no-longer-waterproof raincoat (my sister bought one on sale the morning we set off so we eventually had one each).

We knew we wanted to mostly stick to the WestWeg path and we had made a booking at a guest house on top of the Stübenwasen for that night and that was the sum total of our knowledge setting out.

So, inexperienced and ill-equipped, bellies full of creamy, cheesey käsespätzle, we set off, climbing up the slopes through the pines.

The first day, we had to cover 16 miles and climb the highest peak: Feldberg. Our trail wound past chocolatey-red squirrels and flat stones piled up in precarious stacks and lonely houses with the chalk markings of Epiphany scrawled above their doors. We walked fast because we had no idea how long the walk would take us and, the further we walked, the more dangerous nightfall in the forest felt.

Eventually we made it to Feldsee; a circular, glacial lake like a thumbprint pressed into the side of the mountain. On almost all sides the crystal water reflects layers of pines towering over it up the dazzlingly steep sides of the Feldberg. And, above the trees, rises the pointed, snowy peak of the mountain itself. Everything we had seen so far had been beautiful but it was worth the march through it to get to this point. It is everything you hope to discover on a Black Forest adventure.

After lingering in the lustre of Feldsee for a while, we curved around the shore of the lake and into the forest once more, zigzagging up the side of the mountain. Trees had fallen across the way and rockfalls had made the route invisible in some places but we scrambled our narrow path up, trying to ignore the perpetual drop beside us down to the milky-blue water below.

At last, we came out into the snowy open and, weary now, approached the wooden veranda of the café on the way to the Feldberg’s summit. It was closed. Windows shuttered and door locked. We flopped down onto one of the wooden benches outside and anxiously stretched out the map to check our route.

There was a young man nearby chain-smoking and building a handrail out of thin silver birch trunks with their silvery skins still intact. After a moment he approached and asked if we would like something to eat. We said we would, but the café was closed. He held up a key and smiled, “what would you like?”

We sat with chips and hot chocolates and slices of apfelkuchen wrapped up for the journey and the sun came out from behind the clouds and gleamed off the snow and warmed our arms and faces. It was a glorious moment but we could see the sun was getting lower in the sky and we still had miles to go.

We now walked at the highest point of the forest and the views were stunning. We crunched through snow along the top of the world, looking across the valleys gilded with the light of golden hour and counting seven layers of blue mountains in the distance. The wonder of what we had seen so far filled us and we still had more to see: a golden statue of Jesus on the cross rising from the mountain-top, a capercaillie performing to his would-be mate at the edge of the tree-line and the sound of his cane-dropping call. Then, eventually, we rounded a corner and saw the welcoming wooden face of our guest house.

Not a moment too soon either. By the time we had deposited our rucksack in our room beneath the eaves and settled at the table in the bar with cups of hot black tea, night had fallen over the mountain and rain began to beat the earth outside and the roof above.

We fell asleep that night with the rain as our soundtrack, content with hot showers and clean sheets and tired legs.

The next morning, we enjoyed a classic German breakfast: boiled eggs, an array of bread rolls, cheese and cream cheese and jams and Nutella and apple puree and muesli. I love the simplicity and the variety in a German breakfast buffet and, for me, breakfast is an elastic feast – best stretched out for as long as possible. But, there was more of the world to see, so we packed our one bag and set off again.

It had rained all night and streams ran down the mountains and cut across our path. The mountains sat in cloud and, all day, we walked with only the ghosts of trees and the soft drips through leaves onto the scented pine needle floor for company.

It became eery. In some places, the pristine trees gave way to the venting ground for angry giants; trees split half way up, bark shreds hanging down like streamers, some fallen into others and some hanging two or three feet from the ground.

At one point were curving up a mountain on a logging track, a rockface rising up to our left and a severe drop through the trees on our right. Suddenly, a roaring sound like the wind rushed upon us from behind. We turned and the dazzling headlights of a logging truck burst through the mist as it tore, full speed towards us. We flattened ourselves against the rockface just in time and it blazed on up the track and out of sight, unaware we were ever there.

Our isolation continued all day. Even the café we planned to stop at for lunch was closed and, when we detoured a kilometre off the trail to another one we came up against more bolted doors and shuttered windows. We sat, a little demoralised, on a small bench and ate the heart-shaped shortbread biscuits we had in our rucksack instead.

Going on through the mist we sang songs to distract us from the ache in our feet and in our stomachs and dreamed of the strudel and the cable car that awaited us at the top of the Belchen – our final mountain to climb. And, as it turned out, our steepest climb yet.

The path criss-crossed tightly all the way up. Fallen trees and huge root networks, as well as the swollen streams and waterfalls that had developed overnight, meant we had to scramble our way up using our hands now as well as our feet.

Eventually, the path stopped rising and, instead, curved round what seemed to be a plateau.

“Are we at the top?” My sister asked but I didn’t know. Visibility had been limited to no more than two metres all day and I couldn’t tell if we were even on the right mountain, let alone at the top. We moved along the trail, the white blankness of our surroundings unnerving now we couldn’t even discern the trunks of trees or hear any streams crossing our path or trickling beside us. We were two lone explorers and we didn’t even know what we were exploring. It started to press in on us that we hadn’t seen a single other human being all day. (Unless you count the one driving the truck that nearly ran us down but neither of us really saw them.)

Suddenly, out of the wet white air, loomed a huge man-made structure: a smooth curved metal zephyr-thing hanging still, and silent, in the space in front of us. It was like coming across an abandoned building on an alien planet. The cable cars. And they weren’t running. The restaurant we found behind them also had its lights out and door locked.

Still, at least we knew we had made it to the right place. We had reached our final summit.

Now, we just had no choice but to walk down the other side.

As we walked it began to rain hard. We were both tired now. It had been an adventure for sure but, when we finally reached a road at the bottom of the mountain, we stopped the first bus that came and got gratefully aboard without even knowing where it was going.

We sank into the bus seats and looked through steamy windows at the views we had been walking over all day on our path in the clouds. They were beautiful. Wide valleys of sweeping grass slopes, white-walled buildings with pointed red-tiled roofs, sandy brown cows with doleful eyes and bells around their necks.

The bus reached a train station and we stumbled on seizing legs onto the platform and the first train we saw. We meandered our way home on three more trains and, eventually, supermarket pizzas in hand, walked the last road to our base camp.

We had done it. We had pushed ourselves physically and emotionally further than we imagined we could go and it had worked. My feet hurt, my brain hurt, my back hurt and my stomach clawed at itself in hunger but, honestly, I couldn’t stop grinning. Even at the top of the Belchen facing disappointment and isolation and uncertainty I couldn’t help but feel elated.

If I could rise to this challenge as ill-equipped and inexperienced as I was, maybe I could do anything.

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The Writing Experiment (Part 3/3)

September

It had all been gearing up to this. This was the moment that would decide my future: was I cut out to be a writer, or had I just wasted a decent law career, six months of work and thirty years of dreaming?

I know that sounds dramatic. But that is how it felt; packing up my car with all my most flamboyant clothes and earrings (because that’s how writers dress isn’t it?) and hundreds of notebooks and pens ready to learn everything I could from the real writers at the festival. I had my coffee and my playlist for the road and I set out to York.

The agents had my submissions, they would have read them by now, already formed their opinions, they were ready to tell me: success, or failure.

I walked into my meeting with Agent One undecided if I would be able to speak or if I would just vomit on the desk in front of her. I refrained from vomiting. She was nice. She loved my style and prose but wasn’t blown away. Ok. Well, she didn’t laugh at me or tell me to give it up, but she wasn’t that reassuring either.

Later that day another agent read my work and gave me feedback. This was a bonus chance – an opportunistic moment for unplanned feedback. After talking to Agent Two I went back to my room to have a secret cry. She was lovely but she really didn’t get my book. Said she didn’t see how my idea was unique. It was not for her.

I hyperventilated my way into meeting with Agent Three. She sat across from me and beamed. She loved, loved, loved my first three chapters and my soul swooped high above the room on the lake where we sat.

But, she said, she wouldn’t have got past my synopsis if I was submitting under normal circumstances because it didn’t show why my novel was unique. My soul hit the floor hard.

Then she said the dreaded words, the words that tipped me so easily into my worst nightmare, the thing everyone talks about at writing festivals but I never worried about because I would make sure it never happened to me,

“I didn’t really get any sense of a unique selling point from your synopsis but I feel like there is one judging by your first three chapters. I wondered if you could explain to me now what makes your story unique?

What’s your elevator pitch?”

The elevator pitch. Quite possibly the worst three words an introverted novelist can hear. The succinct and perfect one sentence hook for your 100,000 word novel. The thing I have never, never ever, managed to satisfactorily create.

And now my whole success depended on it.

I opened my mouth – as dry as my hands were wet – and words came out. Words that felt like silt at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I stuttered out my sludgey pitch and waited, heart forcing its way out of my throat, for her blank stare and disappointed judgement.

“Wow!” She said, “well, if that had been in your synopsis I would have requested your full manuscript today. Is the novel finished?”

“erm, not quite,” I said, wondering if she had heard something different to what I had said, “but nearly,”

“Well, when you do finish it, please send it over to me. And, the beauty is, you don’t need to pitch it to me again because you already have!”

When I regained the feeling in my legs I walked back to my room.

I walked into that room a different person to when I had left it that morning. I walked back into that room as a writer. A writer with a plan. A non-linear, completely insane plan. But now, I realised, I was totally on board with that. My insane, non-linear plan so far had been a wild ride and I’d take the lows for the highs any day.

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The Writing Experiment (Part 2/3)

I took six months out of work to focus on my writing career and I thought it would change my writing forever. Mostly though, it changed me. I kept a diary throughout the six month experiment and I’ve compiled the highlights (and lowlights) so you can see how it all panned out.

30th March (Day 1)

Today I wrote a list. A list of things I was 100% certain I wanted. That’s 100% certain. No room for doubt or outside influence or expectation. (Try it, it’s surprisingly hard.)

My list had two entries:

  1. I want to live with my dog.
  2. I want to write.

April

I had absolutely no routine this month. I went to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning, slept late into the day, wrote sporadically and, overall, had a prevalent sense of failure and anxiety. I started this experiment desperate to escape from the life that was making me miserable but it seemed the misery was still in me and the need for escape was still very much running through my veins.

May

Something had to change to make my take this more seriously. I started actively nurturing my creative side: joined two new writing groups, spent a whole day at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre watching the history plays and I began to explore poetry – a previously highly neglected form of creativity for me.

My writing became more routine. I began to average 1,000 words a day.

I sated my need for escape by planning an adventure: my biggest yet. My first flight on my own, followed by a two-day hike through the Black Forest. I will write a post about that adventure soon. It was utterly terrifying, intensely hard and absolutely amazing.

In the airport before my flight I wrote:

“I feel full like I’m truly satisfied. I feel pregnant with possibilities. I feel open; acutely observant and expansive. For the first time in years: years and years, I feel wild.”

June

Something about risk-taking had got me hooked and I spent a lot of time riding my motorbike this month – a relatively new and frightening activity!

One afternoon I rode to my sister’s house and the journey shook me up so much, I almost chickened out and asked for a lift home. I left her house when it was dark. I put on my gear and started my bike and set off into the night. As I pulled out of her drive, there was a rumble of thunder. Within minutes I was riding through the most dramatic lightning storm I’ve ever seen.

Jagged forks of light struck the ground and strange spirals and circles of lightning popped into the darkness above me. But, somehow, riding through the lightning, I reached the eye of the storm of my own fear. The situation had become so intense I no longer felt afraid. I rode through the darkness and light, hearing the crackle of raindrops on my visor as if they couldn’t touch me, feeling completely calm. I was filled, instead, with wonder at how amazing and beautiful it all was.

I felt a powerful desire to capture it: all of the madness and beauty and my writing began to reflect this new approach to fear and beauty and freedom.

This month changed me: I never wanted to go back to life how it had been before this. Not now I knew how it felt to live life in pursuit of what I truly loved.

July

This was perhaps the hardest month I have ever experienced. It came right out of nowhere and blind-sided me. I felt intense anxiety and extreme vulnerability. I kept writing, just the same, but I had never felt more inadequate. I was 30 years old, single, unemployed, living with my parents, and had no linear plan for any aspect of my life. What’s more, my adventuring had rinsed through my savings faster than I had anticipated and I was now officially in my overdraft.

One afternoon I found myself riding to the small white chapel on a hill – the place a lot of my family are buried. It was a blistering day, well above thirty degrees, and the crickets sang loud in the long sand-coloured grass as I climbed the hill.

I sat on a bench in the tree-shade and looked at the grave of my grandfather: he spent his whole life running a farm and his family of 10 and preaching at the local church – giving his time to what mattered to him. And, a few stones down, my great aunt, who ran a health-food shop before that was even a thing, and got into politics so she could give the voiceless a voice, and poured all her energy into charity and helping anyone she saw being overlooked. I had never felt so low and so worthless.

But, when I picked myself up off that bench, walked back down the hill and rode the winding back-lanes home, I had somehow come to know deep in the core of myself that, no matter how low I felt, I could and would finish this novel.

That sense of capability in my writing, that determination, is something I had never felt certain of before.

And that sense of determination meant that, when my sister wanted to come home from Germany at the end of the month, I drove out to get her. A road-trip that marked the end of my engine stalling, and the start of moving forward no matter what.

August

One morning I rolled out of bed, groggy as hell, threw on some not-that-clean-actually clothes and wandered out to walk my dog in the park. I walked around like a shell of a woman and thought about how sorry for myself I felt. And then it happened: a strange sense of bubbling emotion deep down in the pit of my stomach, building up and up until it covered my chest and rose to my throat making me want to laugh.

Somehow, I had reached an emotional rock bottom and I felt an undeniable, effervescent joy at everything life had to offer. Now I knew I was on the right path. I knew it with the same physicality and certainty that I knew my feet were on the ground.

But, my time on this writing experiment was nearly up. Next month was judgement time: would the agents tell me I had spent my time well, or would they laugh me out of the room and tell me to go back to lawyering?

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The Writing Experiment (Part 1/3)

Finding the Wild Path

I am upstairs in the café in Debenhams during my lunchbreak, desperately working on the novel I hope will save me from the life that is making me miserable.

I don’t always get to take my break, I don’t always have a free evening, I often work weekends but, when I do get fifteen or twenty minutes spare, I work on my novel like I never have before.

 Like my life depends on it.

I sit in the hard armchair in my counsellor’s office looking for someone to tell me how to live. I know that’s not what counsellors are for but I’m desperate. We have talked about writing, we have talked about my law career, and then he says,

“What do you think would happen if you were to write full time?”

He may as well have asked the armchair for all the answer I’ll give him. I stare at him blankly. If writing full time was an option, doesn’t he think I would have taken it?

So, he says into the silence, “what would happen if you just did it for a set period of time? Say, six months?”

And then the reasoning begins – the justifications for staying in the life I can’t bear: I couldn’t! Imagine telling Mum and Dad! I might live with my parents but I still pay rent, I still have a car to run and a phone bill to pay. I’m saving to get my own place too.

And I can’t give up my job, I’d never be able to justify it to a future employer – they’d think I was weird, unreliable, flakey. I would ruin my future and deplete my savings and I’d have to stay unemployed and living with my parents forever.

And what if I did? What if I gave up work for six months to write and realised I couldn’t do it? Couldn’t finish a novel, or my writing was terrible. And how would I know? How could there possibly be some kind of quality control in place to test if the six months had been wasted or a success?

But I’m driving home and I can’t get his questions out of my head. My mind is racing miles away from the roads, my muscles feel alive with potential. I feel like I’ve just been given access to a parallel world. And, for the first time in years, there’s a bubble of hope and excitement inflating in my chest.

By the time I’m home all I can think is, if I don’t do it now, when I have the most security and the least responsibility, when would I?

For weeks I make my secret plans. I sit in court taking notes, I draft letters to clients, I drive to and from the police station and, all the time, I’m wondering how I could make it work. The bubble of excitement in my chest is unpoppable and, the more I think of the life I could have, the bigger it grows.

I think I would be more insane not to take the risk. Writing has been the longest activity of my life, my constant source of absorption, my life-long companion. And I had savings, I could use those for rent and petrol and bills.

A six month window would put Mum and Dad’s minds at ease – it would just be an experiment that way – a small intermission from real life. And, if I started now, that gave me six months before The Festival of Writing in York. The Festival offers the chance to put your work in front of literary agents for feedback; that was that quality control I was looking for. It all came together perfectly.

I presented the idea to my parents (who were mercifully accepting and probably imagined this was the start of my breakdown) and used my last pay cheque to buy a ticket to the Festival. At the end of March I was officially unemployed and my six month writing experiment began.

I was taking the gamble at last.