on impulse

There’s no writing class today.  No notes to take, no notebook to exercise.  I scan my bookshelves instead, for inspirational reads.  Muriel Spark jumps out.  This wonderful Scottish author from Edinburgh, of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fame, picked up her pen every day, spinning colourful threads in her notebook, a canvas of intrigue developing.  Her notebooks teemed with scribblings on how she arrived at her conclusion.  She had the gift of telling stories, of making her characters come alive, even when they were dead, as in The Girl I Left Behind Me.  Teedle-um-tum-tum.  

This is a story about a young woman secretary, worried about something she’s left behind at the office.  Turns out she’s a ghost, killed by her boss.  Muriel Spark leaked this slowly, mysteriously, with sinister intent, into the mind of the reader, hooking them from the start.  She writes of an ordinary woman and ordinary life, but something isn’t right.  What?  Keep reading. 

How much of her own life is in these tales?

Sir Walter Scott, another Scottish writer, from Edinburgh, wrote in notebooks made in Valleyfield Papermill, in Penicuik.  It may not be incomprehensible to imagine they were given to him by an Auchendinny lassie in the name of Margaret Thomson, who entered humble employment as kitchen maid at Abbotsford, his home in the borders.  

Robert Louis Stevenson was another who used notebooks supplied from the mill.  His tale Treasure Island, I imagine drafted and written in them, the tale said to have developed from a visit to the Pirate’s Graveyard at Glencorse House.  A more wonderful secret graveyard I am yet to see.       

When I gave up working – not as a typist, and not because I feared being killed by my boss, however much the thorn in his side stung – I had more time to concentrate on my writing, amongst helping my elderly mum.  I had the freedom to indulge in workshops, library exhibitions, to read, and research, all in the hope of improving my writing.  Write what you know about I was told by my teacher, in school, as a keen English student.  I know my life, so I began writing a memoir, from my schooldays.  It still lies in the desk drawer.  Not forgotten, just waiting it’s time to be aired.  

‘Why don’t you write short stories,’ my mum said after reading some vague chapters of my said memoir.  ‘Here’s my Woman’s Weekly.  See what they do,’ she said, the role of helper reversed.  Regularly.  I took her advice, eventually, after some time editing and editing my childhood memoir, and I began writing short stories.  Poetry too.  My life flooded out, my thoughts, my dreams, my nightmares all flourished within fiction, while trying the drawn-out process of intrigue used by Muriel Spark.  

Only not in my notebook.  No drafts were written down.  I typed, still type on my laptop, where I can delete a word with the flick of the keypad, swap paragraphs around by cutting and pasting, save it, read it on enlarged print, for ease on the eyes, where I can suffer the many digital enhancements gone mad.  

I do have notebooks.  Many of them.  My notebooks are saved for noting.  I note things I’ve read, ideas which pop into my head on wakening, and in my writing class.  Here in my writing class, we are given an excerpt from a book to read.  We reveal our thoughts on it and then we’re given a couple of exercises to do.  These exercises are written in my notebook.  Impulsive on the spot writing doesn’t work for me, I repeat, time after time.  I’m a reflector, I say.  I need time to edit, edit, edit.  I need time to delete a word, look up a word, try out a word.  I need time to think, reflect on what I shall write.  There is no time in class.  I must just write.  

The exercises I complete are rubbish, but even so, what they consist of are my immediate thoughts, unhindered, the raw emotions I’m feeling in that moment.  They may not be presented coherently, or prettily, but the gut reaction thought is there, scribbled down.  Is your writing affected differently when pen is put to paper, when thought runs from brain, down spinal column, into arm, and fingers, and words thrive, come alive by escaping via pen, I wonder?  Ah, at last paper, a notebook, the mind squeals.  A permanent imprint, no cloud or auto correction in sight.  

Lesson learned.  Where’s that notebook.  I select it from beside The Collected Stories of Muriel Spark and begin to scribble.  Sorry, got to go, impulse has gripped me.  See you next time.