A Different Consistency by Lesley Hargreaves
Some of last Saturday, as per usual, was spent perusing the papers, and I came across one of those “What I’ve learned” columns. (It may have been called that, I wasn’t paying that much attention, but you get the idea.) Anyway, in these columns, random celebrities pretend that they are desperate to give you various details about their lives just to be sociable, and then, at the end, they always have a name of whoever has sponsored their writing, which is in no way connected to the interview they have just given the newspaper. (I am certainly not criticising - there are certainly worse ways to make a living.) Anyway, the interviewee was talking about her weight loss diary and how she had eschewed the use of weight loss drugs (forever known in this house as Kilimanjaro since seeing someone on the telly call them that). This lady had instead preferred to do it the old-fashioned way, gradually, bit by bit and with consistency. This is great, I thought. Then I read that it had taken her five years. Oh.
So maybe not that consistent then. Or maybe “consistency” isn’t always what I thought it was. There is a school of thought (Ok, it’s possibly just my school of thought.) that says that consistency, particularly in writing, is sitting down in the same place at the same time and making yourself keep going until you hit the word count. That is probably the Gold Standard in Consistency, but I’m afraid that I don’t hit that standard very often. Even though my other half has gone out and bought me a desk (moving heaven and earth to fit it into our tiny bedroom, see above). Sometimes I sit and write there, sometimes I sit and watch YouTube videos about women who live jet-set lifestyles in New York and London. Sometimes I just don’t have time to do either.
Are we downhearted? Yes! Well, I was. Until I discovered the power of a scabby notebook and a nice pen. Because I am learning to write in the margins. Not the literal margins obviously - it’s quite a small book but in the bits and pieces here and there. I can be quite dismissive of myself and this approach, but I saw an Instagram post by Lucy Rycroft this week. She’s a busy author and a busy mum, and a busy teacher, and she was talking about how she has learned to write in the margins - 20 minutes here and there that life gives her. She is a proper author, and I will take what she has to say as validation if you don’t mind.
I’m thinking that it is a bit like my day-to-day faith. One of the many reasons that I am not John Wesley is that I don’t study and pray for hours on end very often; well, hardly ever, actually, but I do a lot of Christian flitting - a prayer here, a thought there, a hoover-up of someone else's wisdom, and it adds up to a relationship and I grow. (I'm not ignoring the amount of grace on God’s side involved in this).
Maybe this kind of writing is another way to produce the things that we want to say.
So all hail the power of a notebook and pen, where an idea for a blog can be scribbled down while munching on a tuna sandwich, an idea that can be developed on the quiet while the husband is watching something dark and Danish on BBC4. But whatever the notebook is like, it does really need to be quite a nice pen.
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