Allie Cresswell is our guest blogger!

A huge welcome to a fellow indie-author, Allie Cresswell, who writes contemporary and historical fiction. I wrote in the June newsletter that I read and really enjoyed her latest, The Standing Stone on the Moor. We're swapping blogs this month and I hope you enjoy hers, below.

On the Peach side of Apricot

Years ago I sat on a bus in front of two women who were discussing the colour of the mother-of-the-bride outfit one of them had bought the week before.

‘What colour is it?’

‘Hard to say. Orangey.’

‘Like a tangerine?’

‘Oh no! Not so vivid. When I say orangey, really it’s more orangey-pink.’

‘Orange blossom, then? That’ll be nice for a spring wedding.’

‘N ... no, not really. That’s really pale, isn’t it?’

‘More of an apricot?’

‘Mmm. But pinker.’

‘Shrimp?’

‘No! Not as pink as that.’

‘Coral?’

‘No. Not so bright.’

I was hooked; crucially invested in establishing the colour of the frock. ‘Peach?’ I muttered into the damp air of the bus.

‘Peach?’ they took my suggestion up.

The mother of the bride considered. ‘On the peach side of apricot,’ she agreed at last.

Moments in time

I relate this incident because it illustrates a lot about why I am a writer, and the writing process. Moments in time like the one on the bus are meat and drink to a writer. All of life is material to her ever-eager eye and attentive ear. I am a terrible eaves-dropper, as demonstrated above, and I am very nosey; I have a knack of turning a conversation until it’s all about the other person ‘What have you been up to?’ I ask. ‘Where have you been? Who have you met?’ and then, ‘Really? Tell me about it. How did you feel?’ I ferret story out of the least snippet of overheard chat. I embroider story from encounters briefly glimpsed in the supermarket aisle or in railway carriages. For me, they are laced around with narrative potential. What’s the back-story? Why is he looking at her like that? Where will this meeting lead? It loops and coils and draws me in, ensnaring me in its possibilities. Before I know it, I am inventing dialogue, defining character, conjuring a world of history from the peculiar slouch of a hat over an eye, or a stretched-out silence over a neighbouring restaurant table. The two women on the bus got invested with character. I invented back-story. But the catalyst was that moment on the bus.

Life is by its nature a sequence of fragments; we never see everything, we never know the whole story. I’ll never know where on the colour spectrum that lady’s outfit belonged, or how it looked when it was on, or whether—as I rather suspect she did—her neighbour turned up to the evening do in something very similar saying, ‘If you’d said yours was cantaloupe, I’d never have worn this old thing.’ But to a writer those fragments are full of possibility. Potential becomes actual; I conjure the beginning, the middle and end.

Glimpses of life

All of the short stories and excerpts in this collection originated as moments in time, many of which I witnessed myself. The briefly overheard conversation on the bus became On the Peach Side of Apricot, the first story in this collection.

The next story, The Book, developed from a momentary glimpse of a girl on a railway platform who held a curious book.

While writing Crossings, I was struggling to decide upon the whereabouts of a long-lost son whose mother I had deposited in a nursing home. The incident on the train described in The Last Passenger took place exactly as I describe, determining the old lady’s fate and giving me everything I needed to complete that part of the book. I was travelling with my daughter at the time, so she can vouch for the veracity of this claim. I am the person who observed, ‘This is a quiet carriage,’ and then instantly regretted it. I included an anecdote related to me by a friend—a moment in her time—as an end-point for Open Day, which is also an excerpt from Crossings.

Many Rooms was inspired by an itinerant gentleman I often saw in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who wore a hat such as the one I describe in that story. I lacked the courage to get close enough to read whatever legend was beautifully inscribed upon it.

Accidental Death is an abridged and reworked adaptation from The Hoarder’s Widow. This novel was inspired by a house I once visited with a view to purchase. The house was owned by a hoarder and his wife. It was almost impossible to see the rooms for all the junk that was stacked inn them. I felt so sorry for the lady and wanted an alternative for her.

Genesis is my attempt to describe the process of writing—creation—when the initial catalyst is simply an idea, although often such a tangible one that it feels like a moment somewhere in the ether that hangs like fruit, waiting to be picked.

Good therapy for the roads less travelled

I use my writing to test out and explore universal themes and cultural traditions, to question big ideas like family—in Relative Strangers—and consequences—Crossings. I use it to tread the roads I have not taken in real life as well as to anatomise in surgical detail every false step and foolhardy choice I ever made. They say that writing is good therapy, and it really is—you can probe the most delicate and profound of issues and often make more sense of them on the page than you can in real life. Of course you can control the outcome, too, unravelling fashion faux pas to knit back into a successful garment. Fiction is a sort of laboratory where you can place something real into an artificial vacuum, test it and stretch it and subject it to unimaginable stresses to see how it behaves. You can vivisect the living flesh or dissect the corpse of regret as long as you bring forth something new and fine—wisdom, understanding, empathy, forgiveness—that will hopefully be of more than simply private benefit. The personal exposure is painful and dangerous but essential; the veracity of real experience brings something vital, I think, to the writer and the reader both.

Connections

Writing is all about connection, not only connecting up the moments in time but also connecting one person with another. I felt connected to the women on the bus, a small cog in the machine of their relationship. Although I never saw either of them again, let alone the apparel in question, the little interaction stayed with me; I had played a part, my muttered suggestion had connected me to them. Our stories had over-lapped, even if only briefly. It is an essential aspect of our humanity, this desire and ability to communicate and connect with one another, to be part of something that is bigger and more important than just ‘me’. Much more mysterious than simple physical association, I mean the shared understanding of one person with another, and of the individual with the wider world. Don’t we, when we hear a piece of music, or see a beautiful painting, or stare out at night into the star-peppered sky, feel some inner part of us reaching out and becoming part of it? Aren’t there moments, with a dear friend or loved one, or sometimes even with a stranger, when we know a better peace than we can ever have alone?

I invite you to share my moments in time and to find in them if you can, something that you might not have discovered alone.

Get Allie's FREE short stories here!