A Tortoise and a Girl

Writing Creative Memoir - and Short Stories

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about a tortoise I once knew. I think he might have been called Timmy. He appeared unbidden in a short piece of writing I completed a few weeks ago, when I was working on memoir ideas, and has stayed with me ever since. I remember how exotic I thought he was and how ancient. An image of the tortoise and an image of a child, a young girl on the outside looking in, keeps returning.

Below is the piece that initially sparked these images. It was part of a creative memoir exercise where a memory is combined with extracts of non-fictional text. If you’d like to try it for yourself, you simply choose a memory and write about it - a few paragraphs, half a page is probably enough. You then select a seemingly unconnected non-fictional piece of writing. In this case I took a newspaper report, as well as an observational paragraph I'd written about the natural world. (I kind of cheated by using two different texts, but why not?) You can if you wish simply look up information on a subject and take the text from a source such as Wikipedia. This is your raw material and it’s a question of interspersing lines from one of the texts, with lines from another, and while doing so, looking for the connections that might occur, that you might begin to play with and may involve further writing.

Her Mother's Lover

He invited her in. It was as if he knew she would be the one to remember. She would be their witness. It was nothing like her father’s shed, though both were made of brick as were all the sheds on the estate. It smelled of acrylic paint and turpentine. On the workbench was a painting balanced on a small easel: two figures on a canvas of sky, sea, and a long stretch of white sand. Under the workbench he kept a tortoise in a box full of straw.

In the coastal town of Hobyo, Somalia, Hussein Karshe’s house is swallowed by the desert. A few sticks buried below the sand are the only visible signs of the home where his children were born. His second house is succumbing. He tries to keep the sand at bay by scooping it out with his hands and a small shovel.

 In the summer he put the tortoise out on the lawn. It was nothing like the cats that she feared, that invaded her dreams, that she could never be rid of, crowding her bedroom, populating every surface, lurking in every nook and cranny, until she emptied them out only to find them appearing again, as if from nowhere, to colonise the space. 

Sand accumulates, creeping up the external walls, flowing into rooms. The winds are stronger now than ever, schools, mosques, hospitals are all engulfed.

In the garden, the apple tree is out at sea, bending and swaying in the northerlies. The grass is uneven, patchy and burnt where the dog has been. Small birds cluster near the trunk on the protected side, seeking out the sheltered spots, the eaves of the house, an old nest in the privet hedge.

He grew coleuses in the shed, as exotic to her, as the tortoise. He grew them in terracotta pots. Their common name was Painted Nettle. They were velvety to the touch, tender and would not survive winter temperatures. She hadn’t known their names then: Mardi Gras, Freckles, Fishnet Stockings, Dark Star, Black Magic. Black Magic were her mother’s favourite chocolates.

Leaves turn their backs, defending themselves against the wind.

Once when the families were out walking, she fell among the nettles, and he fetched a dock leaf for her. Nettle seeds are carried on the wind and eaten by the siskins and bullfinches. We cannot walk through easily, they say, we are all at the mercy of the sand.

Thus the tortoise arrived, and with it the impression of a child overwhelmed. It was one I recognised. An unexpected truth had emerged from my choice of texts and the prompting of further memories, particularly my recurring childhood nightmares involving cats.

The image stays with me and refuses to go away. I begin to think there might be a short story in the making and decide to explore my way in.

I’m pretty impatient when it comes to most things, but I’m making a conscious effort to be more of a tortoise and less of a hare. I'm being helped in this by re-reading, The Art of Slow Writing, Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity, by Louise de Salvo, which reminds me, in this era of e-books, when writers can be pushed into brutal schedules of two books a year and 2000 words a day, how fortunate I am not to be in their position. I have the time I need to properly explore an idea.

Her first chapter is full of sound thoughts and advice:

First you imagine the work, think about it, take notes long before you begin writing. Second, you start work provisionally, knowing you'll have many opportunities to get it right.

…it takes many drafts to create a work of art...we cannot tackle all our challenges at once

…random, hazy unclear attempts at meaning, often characterise the earliest stages of the creative process. We work in the dark, not yet knowing the direction or work will take.

For me, beginning a novel or a short story, sometimes even a poem, is often a question of taking a run at an idea, so that I may try over and over with the same elements to find the place where my story begins. In this instance of the girl and the tortoise if, as is my intention, I'm moving away from memoir, I'm also looking for the place, where I can take that leap into fiction.

As a consequence, I end up with a number of notebook pages where I've tried out similar beginnings. I try over and over. It’s as if my pen runs out and I have to start again. And between these hesitant and varied beginnings, the thinking starts to take place and I see how my story could go in very different directions. But as yet I make no decisions, I wait for the direction to come from the writing itself, from the pen on the page in the notebook, working in the dark.

I'm still at the stage of thinking about what kind of story this might be. I think of Claire Keegan's novella, Foster, perhaps the best thing I’ve read in ages from a child’s perspective. You may have read Keegan's, Small Things Like These, but maybe not Foster, as it seems to me to be less well-known. Of the two I prefer it. Or at least it made most impact on me. Now seems like a good time to return to it, reading like a writer, reminding myself of what I liked about it and why it worked. With this in mind I have also downloaded Walk the Blue Fields, her series of short stories.

Of all things, I did not think I would be talking here, now, about short stories, but it seems I am. So it's probably a good time also to return to the master George Saunders, and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, the best book I know about writing short stories and which I've written about here on my website.

For those of you who prefer online, George, has a short story club on Substack, parts of which are free, but to be really useful you would probably need to subscribe - well worth any writer's money

Thanks for reading - Avril x