Something sensational to read on the train!

Oscar Wilde once said, "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” 

I have been thinking a lot about the art and artifice of diary writing recently, as I have found myself dusting off my own childhood diaries for a new novel I'm writing (A Quiet Sense of Something Lost.)

It's been a hilarious, sobering roller-coaster to revisit past me and catch a glimpse inside the mind of an angst-ridden teenager. With my oldest child hurtling towards teenagedom himself, it's also a deeply valuable reminder of just how serious it all is when you are 13, 15, 17 etc.

Much of it is a rather plodding description of every day life (endless accounts of meals and television shows, parties and first kisses), peppered with the monumental made small (The Dunblane shooting. My first foray onto the World Wide Web! Princess Diana's Funeral. Tony Blair is Prime Minister!).

I wrote them religiously from the ages 10 to 22, and what these diaries allow me to do is find an authentic childhood and young adult voice for my new novel, even if it means opening myself up to a certain level of cringe-worthy humiliation to do so. In the words of 15 year old me after a particularly ranty entry about a thwarted love affair and a falling out with friends "I am hardly Anne fucking Frank am I?"

However, lurking among the murky prose and petulant teenage witterings are moments of real beauty and heartbreaking honesty. In particular my first real tastes of grief, which sledgehammered my life at 15 when I lost a dear friend and my beloved Nana in the same two week period.

It is in these pages that I found the root of the writer I always wanted to be. Carefully and sensitively documenting some of the biggest moments in my life to that point with a grace that took me by surprise as a 37 year old woman.

Here is an excerpt from the entry I wrote after her funeral:

Well it’s exactly a week since granny died. If you were to ask me how I feel right now I would honesty say empty. 
Her funeral was today and the chapel was so small and only a few people came - it made me think what a waste of a life, to have lived to 86 an only have a few family members to come and say their goodbyes seems cruel almost.I suppose I should go back to last Tuesday when it all happened. We got a call saying Nana had been rushed to hospital so Mummy and I drove to hospital in a taxi, I sat in the back and I was really calm and then this thought popped into my head about the last time I saw her - she’d been in so much pain and it sounds stupid but it didn’t just show in her body, it showed in her eyes and I cried only for a second but those are the most real tears I shed. What I mean by that is all those other tears have been for me - selfish tears because I was losing a person I love.We got the hospital and frantically rushed around trying to find the ward and we got there just as she was being wheeled through - that’s the picture that has stuck with me and probably always will.She looked so scared.We were allowed to see her and her breathing was ragged and her eyes were searching but never finding anything.They put her in a private room and the single lamp was dimmed and just seemed to cast a warm, hazy glow over everything and they had given her some morphine which had cut off a lot of the pain. Her breathing was slower and quieter and her eyes half closed.For the first time in, I would say a year and a half she looked like my Nana - peaceful, happy, dignified.I just sat with her, holding her hand and said my goodbyes. We both knew it was the end and I’m not ashamed to say I was glad - I just wanted her and maybe even us - out of this pain.I said goodbye and made her a promise to carry on writing just as she always said I should. Then I gave her a kiss. My only hope is that she heard and that she knew how much I loved her.She died at 3 in the morning. Only Mummy was with her.The funeral was a funeral I honestly have no opinion of it. I went to pieces in the funeral and I just wanted someone to comfort me, to put their arms around me and to make all the sadness stop. Now I am trying to think of things that remind me of Nana and all I can think is milky tea and sweets from her tin and raspberry ripple ice cream in little brown glass dishes and ham sandwiches that always tasted better than anyone else's and playing cards and collecting eggs from the chickens.She was a wonderful woman, always full of love and good humour. I loved my Nana and I will miss her more than anything.
 

I wanted to share this with you because that is at the very core of why I write -the need to make sense of the senseless and a drive to show the joy and the darkness of the world. 

I think it is in this diary entry that I began my journey to becoming a writer, based on a promise I made to someone I loved dearly. Using these entries as inspiration for my latest novel has proved invaluable and I can't wait to post a few teasers from A Quiet Sense of Something Lost soon!

In the meantime, why not get in touch and tell me about the moment(s) you realised you wanted to become a writer, and what drives you to write.