I’ve been trying to tidy up… shifting a pile of stuff from here to there and another pile of stuff from there to here and I came across lots of interesting things, including what looks like an essay about writing, written by me!
I have absolutely no idea when I may have written it, or why; it is in my adult hand writing, and it is titled ‘Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, sub-titled Creative Non-fiction, and at the beginning has sources including ‘Missing’ by Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Roots’ by Alex Haley, Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens and the biography of Peggy Ashcroft… and also the film ‘The Shining’. Of these I have only read Haley and O’Hagan, so it is curious I should mention the other books and the film.
The first part is about how I imagine the Elsdens might have come to East Anglia from Scandinavia; then there is a brief snapshot of my maternal grand-father as an old man, widowed and alone and reading Westerns. The next part is quotes from Philip Gerard’s book ‘Creative Non-fiction’ which I guess I must have read, and other sources, which I don’t remember and then, right at the end there are quotes from a book about fishing for pike??? Pike?
I must read the whole thing carefully to see if I can find out why I wrote it, but I think I must have been wanting to write the story of my family, and trying to find a way of doing it. I think it may have been at a time when I was working as a teacher and working very long hours and wanted to write; I think my mental battery must have been pretty low and I thought something like this might have been more do-able than writing creative fiction. I am slightly baffled by it, but at one point I list ‘my challenges’:
- to go where the story lies
- to find the right form
- to find a voice
- to write other people’s story
- to identify what ‘Englishness’ is
Yes, I’m totally baffled… but interested… maybe this could become my next novel!!
Lois Elsden 
Your version of tidying up sounds like mine! I am very good at moving piles of stuff around without actually getting rid of anything and, like you I find things of which I have no memory. I also feel I have achieved something after moving the piles, though an onlooker may beg to differ.
LikeLike
I also do emergency tidying – which is as dangerous as it is dramatic. Plastic bags filled with everything and hidden until the guests who occasioned the tidy-up have gone; dramatic because there is a splendid difference before and after, dangerous because the bags can be mistaken for rubbish, or get hidden under the stairs/bed/back of cupboard etc and only get discovered when you’re looking for something else which has mysteriously disappeared!
LikeLike