This week my emotions caught me out, as they often do. It was an ordinary day. I was doing bits of work in my front room because we had a plumber round doing some work in the bathroom. As I sat tapping away at my keyboard, a sound drifted down the stairs that transported me back to another time. He was whistling.
Both my Grandad’s were whistlers. They had both worked their way up in their chosen trades – one Clerk of Works at Yorkshire Water, the other a master joiner. This, combined with the fact our Dad is an electrician by trade, meant that I don’t ever remember having anyone work on our house apart from family until we had a large extension built. If ever something needed doing we knew which Grandad to call.
Listening to them working away with Dad, as they tackled whatever task needed sorting that day, is one of my earliest memories, and of course one of them was always whistling.
I sat on the sofa and tears rolled down my cheeks as I felt wrapped in this comforting memory, I felt my Grandads there helping our plumber. It reassured me in a way I couldn’t have predicted. Something as simple as a whistle had brought back memories and emotions that I hadn’t thought about for years.
That’s what we want to create for our readers. Those moments. The little moments that seem insignificant, but which are actually the most important things in life. The every day, mundane moments filled with love and care.
The Memory Ladder
I was reminded of an exercise I have used with people a few times called “the memory ladder”. The idea is that when you are writing about something in your life, whether it is an anecdote or a full memoir, instead of diving straight in you take time to write down five small things that you remember from about an hour before the event that you are about to write about.
You might write about:
- Something you remember hearing; a song on the radio, a bird singing, a car going past the house too quickly
- Perhaps you can remember who you were with
- It might be that you write about the clothes you chose to wear that day, were they significant in some way?
- You might have eaten something that day that you hadn’t tried before, or that had an impact on the rest of the day
- Maybe you took a journey
You get the idea. The idea is that the exercise helps you to create a more full and rounded image of the day itself, before you start layering the events onto that canvas.
Often we forget to mention the little things, because we think they aren’t important, but they give depth to the story you are telling and paint a more vivid picture for your reader.
Revisiting old emotions can be really challenging as we relive past experiences in order to share them on the page, but this is where the real gold often lives. If you need some support in processing these big emotions we wrote a blog a while ago with suggestions as to how you can work through this stage in your writing. You can take a look here.
Writer’s Notebook
Moments such as my experience with the plumber, are a reminder of why it is so important to keep your writer’s notebook with you at all times too. Often these moments of unexpected and untapped emotion land in our laps when we least expect them. We may be on a train and smell a stranger’s perfume, or be walking past a flower shop and see our Grandma’s favourite flowers, these moments can’t be predicted but they can cause a whole mountain of untapped emotions to resurface. It is so important to capture these feelings as soon as possible and in as much detail as we can, in order that we can recreate these gems in our writing.
Have you ever experienced anything similar to my plumbing moment? If you have why not take a moment to journal about it and the memories and emotions it brought back to you.
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