Too tranquil: struggling with creativity
In her second guest post, writer Keely O’Shaughnessy discusses creativity, how she generated stories for her flash fiction collection, and how idyllic surroundings can sometimes present unexpected challenges.
As a writer, I don’t follow a strict writing practice and I’d describe my writing routine as chaotic at best. I know this is all types of writer sacrilege but being honest I’m not a disciplined person and I find the act of writing challenging. For me words have always eked out rather than flooded, so I thought I would talk a little about how I un-stoppered my creative flow and allowed myself to craft the stories that my book Baby is a Thing Best Whispered called for.
When I was last here, I went from spinning wildly to finding a path for my debut collection: I was going to write about womanhood. I had direction and even a clutch of stories to use as a springboard. But knowing that to make headway, I had to dive deeper into my own notions of womanhood and family, progress was slow.
I could tell you about my walks beside the canal at Bowbridge or about the numerous trips out to Haresfield Beacon, balancing on the steep, sloping loam of the Cotswold scarp, staring out at the Severn Vale in hope of inspiration, but none of this worked for me. Growing up in Devon, I’m a child of the countryside, and fully appreciate the abundant natural beauty that Gloucestershire hosts, yet I have found that being amongst nature is almost too tranquil to tease words from me. Instead of calming my mind, walking tends to shake free my other anxieties, allowing them time to roam along with me.
View of the River Severn from Haresfield Beacon
Living in a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty such as the Cotswolds, I harbour an odd sense of guilt that my brain isn’t sparked by green spaces in the way I feel it should, but another method I use to jumpstart creativity, in times of drought, is art. Susan Vreeland said, “art begets art,” that “painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.”
This idea has always resonated with me, so when it came to crafting stories for the collection, my brain went to ekphrastic writing as a prompt for generating stories. Meaning “Description” in Greek, Ekphrasis in its simplest form is writing about or inspired by art.
There is something pleasing about the tactile nature of a painting, but photographs work just as well as stimulus. For me, it’s about removing the pressure of writing, the need to forge a narrative, by simply describing what you see.
A detailed description of this photocard lead to what would become “Some Girls are Trashy and No Good”
Looking at the postcard, describing the lattice work of the Ferris wheel, the blur of its rotation. The pinks and yellows of blinking lights, leads to the way that the photograph fades at its edges, how this could denote age and suggest a mood. And thus, from the postcard “Some Girls are Just Trashy and No Good” grew, a collective of teenage girls who celebrate summer with fairground rides and what they’ve learned from Grease. After a while the string of images take on their own momentum and the creative brain takes the reins again. That same creativity that balked and refused to yield when faced with rolling hills, started to offer up ideas.
And it seemed that writing the descriptions in “Some Girls are Just Trashy and No Good” unlocked snapshots of my own childhood. I remember the sights and sounds of the funfair so vividly that I found I was able to tap into other formative memories to generate stories.
Ekphrastic techniques had helped dislodge something in my creative brain. I didn’t want to jinx it or question it too much at this point; I was grateful I had stories on the page and the collection was becoming tangible and substantial.
Reviews of Baby is a Thing Best Whispered
‘raw and compelling’
‘This is a collection which gets to the heart of families and their complexities.’
‘Fans of Lydia Davis, Roxane Gay and Laura Lampton Scott will love the collection.’
YOU CAN BUY Baby Is A Thing Best Whispered ONLINE HERE
READ AN EXTRACT FROM KEELY’S STORY BELOW
From ‘Some Girls are Just Trashy and No Good’
The funfair is our slice of Americana spread across the far playing field behind Marcie’s house. Late August, we go the last night it’s in town. We’ve seen Grease and understand all good things end with a flying car and a fairground. We’re all about the lights, about toffee apples and green and blue candy floss. We’re all about the hot oil and fried doughnuts. Our lips coated with vanilla sugar, we call to the Year Nine boys who smoke weed in the dark gap between the carousel and the funhouse, and we giggle when they yell back, “Alright, babe.”
We play Hook-a-Duck and win reams of pink tickets, which we trail from the back pockets of our jean shorts or trade in for stuffed animals that we parade about with on our heads or draped around our shoulders like prized furs until we tire of carrying them and leave them where they fall.
We ride The Twister in pairs so that with each revolution we slide the length of the plastic seat. As the metal arms whirl us through space and time, our bony hips grind against the ride’s outer-most point, and we clasp the steel safety bar to save our bodies from slipping under and out completely.
KEELY O’SHAUGHNESSY is a writer with Cerebral Palsy, who lives in Gloucestershire. Her micro-chapbook, The Swell of Seafoam, was published as part of Ghost City Press’ Summer Series 2022 and her debut collection, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered is published with Alien Buddha Press (2022). Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions as well as the Wigleaf Top 50. She is Managing Editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. Find her at keelyoshaughnessy.com or Twitter: @KeelyO_writer
