Writing

POST-TURBULENCE

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I’m writing this as I sit in my empty new house. It’s been a busy few months.

I haven’t updated the site in a while for a few reasons. The first and most important reason is that I’ve been channeling my writing efforts into actual fictional writing. I’ve found with this site it’s easy to sate the writing appetite by publishing a new post. One click of the mouse and you’ve dispensed words to a potentially enormous audience. So in an effort to be more productive I’ve been working on some writing that someone else might want to publish.

Secondly, and as hinted at in the opening line, I’ve bought a house. It turns out the process of acquiring a home can take up a lot of your time. The search, the open houses, the negotiations, the meetings with brokers, realtors and solicitors. I was shocked at the cloud of stress that descended once the search began. But the good news is the house is bought (although still far from paid for), and the cloud is breaking apart, and as I sit in my empty house writing this it feels good to be a home owner.

Right now my house is like a blank page, waiting for words and stories to fill it. Empty rooms always feel so strange and incomplete, but right now it just feels anticipatory. Like the heaviness in the air before a storm breaks. I can’t wait to find out what stories unfold to fill these walls.

The final reason for the lack of writing is that I’ve been doing the artwork for a children’s book. I’m not the writer on this project, just the illustrator. Whilst I’ve always enjoying making art, I’ve never been commissioned for any project. When the opportunity came up I thought it would be brilliant. As with purchasing a house, I was unprepared for the effort required to create the artwork for a children’s book. I have sunk hours into sketches, drafts, and learning illustrator software. It resulted in a new found respect for anyone working in the graphic art industry.

The book should come out before christmas, all things going well. I’ll post more as it develops.

So, now that my few months of turbulence is winding down, I thought it only fair to post something on the site. In an effort to entice readers back I’ve posted a new piece of short writing which can be found in the writing page, or simply by clicking here.

In complete honesty, it’s a bribe. Take it. You know you want it.

DEALING IN DEATH

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I’ve been reflecting recently that a lot of my writing contains death. This is not a conscious decision. Death seems to worm its way into my stories like a recurring character in want of a cameo. And I’ve been trying to decide why I’m drawn to exploring this phenomenon. And I think I know.

The first reason is a rather simple one: I think about death a lot. This is not for any morbid reason. I don’t run fingertips over blades or stand on the edges of buildings rolling a foot over the corner. I’m a nurse. Death refuses to be ignored in my profession. Every time I interact with a patient who is wasting away I’m aware of death waiting in the background. Patients want to talk about it. Family members need to be consoled. Co-workers joke about it. This results in reflection on the nature of death, which in turn works its way into my writing.

The second reason is also rather simple: Death is dramatic. It’s an organic occurrence that shakes things up. It’s a way to test characters, to see their world view when confronted with loss. Death is a catalyst.

The reason I’m writing about death today is that I saw a patient recently who was thick in the absolute and utter realisation of her own mortality. This patient, let’s call her Pat, is a sixty-one year old woman with chronic leg ulcers. She has been in and out of hospitals for the past ten years of her life. She had been ill, recovered, and fallen ill again. And yet none of this was what triggered her sudden confrontation with the idea of death. It was seeing it in someone else that forced the truth of it into her mind.

Pat attended a doctor’s clinic for a regular review and saw another patient whom she had seen in the waiting room during previous appointments. At first she didn’t recognise the man. She though the woman with him was his daughter rather than his wife. It was when she went into the doctor’s room and found the doctor wiping away tears in an effort to compose herself that the connection clicked, and Pat realised that the healthy man from months ago had shrunk into the sickly old man she now saw in the waiting room.

Pat went home shocked. She sat in her empty house over the weekend chewing on the image of the man’s rapid decline. And when I arrived the following Monday she was scared, and desperate to talk to me about death.

So we talked. We discussed the obvious things first; the fate awaiting us all, the loss to ourselves and our families, and the misery of such a loss. And eventually we got to what really was bothering her: What was the point of it all? What surprised me most wasn’t the question, but that a woman almost thirty years my senior was looking to me for answers. And that I had something to say on the matter.

I told Pat that being aware of mortality isn’t a bad thing. It invigorates. It’s not a pleasurable notion to consider, but it forces you to acknowledge that you are alive now, and that that time is limited. It pushes you to make more of your time, and to appreciate the joys you get. I told Pat that I didn’t know what the point of it all was, or whether, in the face of death, our lives held a particular meaning at all. I told her what I knew: that in the face of no meaning, all you can work towards is contentment. That if you spend what time you have happy then you come away on top.

I had some form of an answer for Pat because I had thought about death. My profession meant that I couldn’t ignore the inevitable reality of it like most of us do, and I certainly did before nursing. We, as a race, are too skilled at pushing the knowledge that one day we won’t be on the earth anymore to the back of our minds. We cram it down into the crevasses of our brain and pile trivialities and day-to-day details on top until we can’t see it anymore. And we smile and think we’ve beaten it. But it doesn’t do any good down there. And for Pat, when the truth wiggled its way free and sprung to the forefront of her mind, she had no way to accept it.

Pat listened to my answers like an eager student. She smiled at my closing statement and seemed mollified. The haunted look wasn’t gone from her eyes, but she appeared to be in more control. She was contemplative rather than scared. And I felt shocked and proud that I had been the one to comfort her.

Thinking about death, and writing about it, had given me an answer. I don’t know if it was the right one, but it is better than staring into the void without a form of comprehension.

And reflecting on this, I think I’ll continue to write about death.

FRAMING REALITY

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Once when I was having a short story of mine work-shopped my lecturer stated that I had written an anecdote, not a story. This irked me at the time; I felt he was being pedantic and finding fault to complete his role as educator. This was perhaps a bit arrogant because after giving it some space, I looked back on this particular story and saw that he was absolutely correct. I had written an anecdote.

The difference between an anecdote and a short story is one of framing. An anecdote, as my lecturer explained, is a situation, an occurrence that lacks the correct framing of a story. This framing is a familiar one we’re all taught from primary school: beginning, middle, and end.

My anecdote had characterisation, dialogue, imagery. It had things happening. What it didn’t have was a point.

After realising the truth behind my lecturer’s advice, I gave the problem a lot of thought. I attempted to create a story that had correct framing. Unfortunately, being not yet twenty at the time and having spent a lot of my childhood in front of the television left me reaching for clichés to structure my stories. I used episodic formats and overused ideas. In other words, my stories weren’t very good. I became frustrated.

After months of frustration I pinpointed the cause of my irritation; life is messy.

I wanted to capture reality in my writing. I wanted to take the chaos of my experiences and display them in my text as they had felt. Even if what I was writing was fantasy, I wanted in to feel real. And life is messy. It lacks format, and at times it even lacks a point. I was frustrated because I felt my anecdotes more accurately represented reality than a neatly framed story. Granted, they were basically a description of events, but then so is life.

I didn’t write for a while after that realisation. I decided I’d wait until I thought of a story that had the correct framing, but at the same time allowed me to express my version of reality. And for a long time I didn’t think I could do it. I thought that any attempt to reshape ideas and events into a neat package was sacrificing my representation of a messy reality.

It took me a while to realise that I was looking at it from the wrong side. I had a story line and was trying to squeeze reality into that shape. But that’s not a writer’s job. What I actually had was reality, and what I should have been doing was looking for the story within it. Because even though life is messy, it’s a writer’s job to take that mess and search for a meaning. To find the point.

A well written story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has motifs, and loaded dialogue. It has subtext. It has a point. It’s a writer’s job to scroll through the mess of reality and find these elements in life. By writing an anecdote I was simply being lazy. I was failing to cut away the excess to find the structure buried inside.

By writing a story you’re finding the point amongst the mess. You’re pulling out the meaning from the chaos of events and structuring it so that meaning is more evident for the reader. An anecdote may capture a messy reality, but then so too does a diary entry. Or, god forbid, a blog. And while these types of writing have their purpose, they aren’t a story.

A story isn’t simply about photocopying reality; it’s about finding the meaning in the mess.

Thanks to my lecturer for pointing this out to me by criticising my work. It was the best thing he could have done.

 

TOWARDS THE MOUNTAIN

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Most aspiring writers are people who work a full-time job and use their precious free time to practice their hobby of writing. They dig caves into their blankets, settle in with their laptops, and become hermits from the world. I know this because I am one such hermit. This voluntary isolation is the only way I get writing done. And even then, it’s still a challenge. A here’s the reason:

Working full-time is hard.

Most days after nursing in the community I come home, lay on my bed, and tell myself I’ll watch half an hour of television before turning the rest of the afternoon into a whirlwind of productivity. It’s when I realise the sun has set, that I’ve been napping for the last hour, and should probably do something about dinner that I realise my productive whirlwind has wound down to more of a laboured huff.

The balance of working and writing is a hard one to maintain. Ideally, writing is where I’d like to pour most of my energy. But to perform my job, and more importantly, to perform it well, requires energy. Who would have thought?

This results in me soldiering through the working day and deflating in the evening. You know motivation is flagging when even the idea of going down to the shops is a herculean effort worthy of three hours of rest, followed by a bowl of ice-cream which leads naturally into a sugar-crash sleep. And that’s not a pretty image.

The point of the exhausted picture I’m painting is that if you want to create something, it requires effort. Finding the balance of dispersing your effort can be a hard thing, and I wouldn’t blame anyone if their creative projects fell to the wayside under the pressure of simply getting through life. But if you want it, more often than not you’ll find putting energy into a creative project gives motivation. You feel like you’ve done something worthy of note, and that you’re getting to the place you want to be.

To steal a quote from Neil Gaiman, it takes you closer to the mountain.

And that’s the secret, I think. When you’re working on what you love, giving effort results in energy. Even as I’m writing this I’m feeling more awake that I have all afternoon because I’m creating. I’m engaging in an activity that is in itself self-rewarding. I’m walking towards my mountain.

Neil Gaiman said it better, so I’ll let his words do the explaining:

For me, it’s important to remind myself of where I want to be heading, and to realign myself now and then when I notice I’m slipping off the path. And it’s important to remember that motivation can be found simply by starting even when I’m feeling tired. Because every word I type gives me energy and gets me closer towards the mountain.

I hope your day included creativity, motivation, and steps towards your mountain.

BE NICE TO YOUR NURSE

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It was International Nurses Day a week ago so I thought I’d use that neat segue to describe a scenario I’ve experienced when working on the wards, one I’m sure all nurses have faced at one point or another.

I had an elderly patient who’d recently had a hip replacement. The woman, let’s call her Ethel, was a delight. Patient, pleasant, cooperative. She smiled a lot and consequently I smiled a lot. A smiling patient can be a rare thing. Ethel, unfortunately, had to have a catheter post her surgery. More unfortunately, she developed a urinary tract infection.

A UTI is rather common, especially when you’re inserting foreign objects into someone’s bladder, and is treated with antibiotics. For most people it means a little pain and irritation. However, with elderly and frail people it can bring on delirium. Delirium is essentially a fast acting, short-term dementia. In other words, it sends the patient loopy.

Ethel transformed from the perfect patient into a terror.

Sunken deep in her delirium, Ethel held the belief that the hospital staff were holding her there against her will. In her eyes, we were her jailers. She let us know this with a rather impressive and expressive collection of profanity, as well as physical threats. While this made doing even the simplest thing for Ethel a great struggle, a part of me couldn’t help but admire Ethel’s fight. In her head we were the enemy; rather than laying back and taking her imprisonment, she chose to fight. And I mean fight.

Fists swung, feet kicked, and if you weren’t staying alert and got to close to her head, you ran the risk of being head-butted. Ethel was a warrior.

Because of Ethel’s UTI she had to have an intravenous infusion of antibiotics. Luckily she viewed her infusion favourably. Any attempt to touch her cannula was met with, “This is mine! You can’t have it. If you try and have it, it will poison you and you’ll die!” This was a much better reaction than distrusting her infusion and yanking out the cannula, which was the usual course of events in these situations.

One night we had hung her latest infusion. Any interaction left Ethel unsettled so we gave her fifteen minutes to calm down before checking her vital signs. When we returned we found Ethel asleep in her bed. This was brilliant. Her BP cuff was still circling her arm and all it took to measure her blood pressure was the push of a button. Checking her temperature, however, was a bit trickier.

We had a thermometer that had to be inserted into the ear and a button pushed. This sounds simple, but when a person is violent thrashing their head it’s hard to get an accurate reading. A sleeping Ethel was a blessing.

I tiptoed beside Ethel, carefully lowered the thermometer probe, and pushed the button. It beeps as you press it. Ethel woke instantly.

I jerked my hand away just in time to avoid the clacking of her teeth as she tried to bite me. Her eyes darted between me and the thermometer in my hands and understanding spread across her face. Her response was instantaneous.

“You little bitch,” she hissed.

I had to bite my lip to stop from laughing.

After three days of antibiotics, Ethel was back to her charming and lovely self. She had no memories of her delirium, which was for the best.

Despite her reversion back to the grandmotherly old dear, I couldn’t help but remember the warrior that lurked beneath. I was warily impressed.

The point of this story is that this scenario is just one of millions that combine to make what is a rather average day in a nurse’s work life. Threats, physical assault, stress over a patient’s health, juggling ten tasks as once, and trying to decipher medical orders are the hurdles a nurse is facing at any given point, be it day or night.

As you’re reading this there are nurses tending to wounds, bathing patients, administering injections, and stopping sweet old ladies from biting down on their wrists. It’s a strange job, a stressful one, and a rewarding one. And one that leaves you with a lot of stories.

Next time you’re in hospital, be nice to your nurse.

Please don’t bite them.