The Joy of Lists

We are all writers at heart

I don’t know about you but I live by my lists. I am a serial list maker and I suspect I’m not alone. Who among us hasn’t written a list at sometime or another? My daughter often posts her ‘to do,’ list on Instagram against a carefully chosen backdrop of delicate flowers or foliage. My son compiles his on his computer. He showed me his ‘to do’ list at the weekend. It had 24 items on it. Time is short when you have twin babies and lists are a necessity.

When I worked in Low Newton Women’s prison, which for those who don’t know me, I did for 25 years, (chronicled here in my collection of poetry and short prose essays - Going in With Flowers) I did not leave work without writing my list for the next day. This was especially true when I was a senior manager. It helped me shed the worries and pressures of a very busy and stressful job, where there was too much to do and not enough time to do it in. With a list on my desk, I could at least leave some of my stress behind at the prison gate.

In another iteration of the list, I recall a time when I did what I christened my ‘five a day.’ This was a list I wrote every night before bed. A list of the five things I was grateful for that day. This kind of gratitude practice is common now. I believe in it. A list like this helps when the chips are down and it teaches you very, very, quickly what is important to you and what sustains you. And I’d be willing to bet that what’s important, for the most part, has little to do with material goods.

Our lists can be our: intentions, accounts, orders, goals, snapshots, evocations of time and place (and for the writer, character) aide-memoire, thought showers, daily practices… Writing lists is, I believe, the creative instinct at work in all of us. A gardener lists the bulbs she will be planting in the autumn, a dressmaker the measurements she needs, and the fabrics to order, likewise the painter with her list of materials and subjects, the poet with his words.

I began keeping lists many years ago when I was travelling. To begin with, most days I wrote a journal entry in a tiny blue notebook which weighed next to nothing and so was ideal for carrying in my rucksack. (I have to admit now that such a minuscule notebook would not be sufficient for me. I would be saying to hell with the extra weight and taking something much bigger.) After seven months I got tired of making daily entries. By now we’d reached Thailand and I’d filled the blue notebook and bought myself a new, red, spiral-bound exercise book. I didn’t want to keep a diary anymore. I’ve never been good at keeping a diary consistently, but I knew that day by day I was still experiencing so much that was new and different, such an assault on the senses, that I needed a way of capturing it. I needed something that would give me an instant record, and transport me back to a certain time and place. So I began to make lists. I began to name things which is really what writing is all about. Here is one of my random Bangkok lists:

death dodges on zebra crossings, diesel fog, polluted skies, steaming woks, street food, baskets of pink salted fish, gold watts and palaces, steep curling roofs, orange robed monks who smoke, fat cats, magazine fashions and painted ladies, neat men in American slacks and bomber jackets, basket weave hats, lemon sprite, floating kitchens, hair washing in the river, cottage cheese sandwiches…

Even now, after many years, this list brings back my very particular experience of Bangkok. Lists are the quickest, most immediate way of capturing time and place for the writer. They are the equivalent of the photograph, but the photograph, so easy to take now with mobile phone cameras, does not necessarily capture the senses that the list does. A list can deal in all five - sound, sight, touch, taste and smell.

Lists are easy and accessible, they can be little more than scribble, written without too much if any prior thought, always a good thing. There are no rights or wrongs as far as lists are concerned. If you’re keen to write but scared to begin, then there is no better place than the list. Lists are the skeletons, the bare bones of writing on which a world of meaning and substance may be hung.

In themselves they add richness and texture, lend detail, precision, rhythm, a poetic song-like quality, to any writing.

Here’s a great list from Tender is the Night ~ F Scott Fitzgerald:

She bought coloured beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarves, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house, and three yards of some new cloth the colour of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes…

Here is a list of gifts that the women of the asylum give to a departing patient, from my novel, A Little Madness in the Spring, pub Aug 2023.

they place their gifts on her bed: a blown robin’s egg, a fragment of sea glass, a postcard from Lyme Regis, two boiled sweets, a knot of dried moss, a pressed forget-me-not, a scrap of needle lace fashioned as a leaf, a watercolour painted by Phoebe. There are prayer cards and postage stamps, locks of hair, a brooch with the stones missing, a pocket almanac, and from Simone, a gold guinea.

Lists can act as a trigger to memory. I’ve been trying to list all the objects I remember from the house I lived in between the ages of 5 and 14. What has been unexpected and interesting about this, is the paucity of my list, the lack of books, magazines, pictures, decorative items, flowers - apart from the plastic roses that came free with Daz soap powder. Some of you may remember them!

If you like the idea of working in lists then you might want to keep a weather diary, or an ‘out of my window in the morning,’ diary in list form, perhaps a garden or nature diary in list only. I keep a writing journal which has a lot of lists in it. You may want to conjure familiar or newly visited places in your lists, a what’s in the cupboard under the stairs list, or what was in the cupboard under the stairs when you were growing up, or what you wish was in the cupboard under the stairs now, list…the possibilities are endless and I guarantee especially if you use the senses, your lists will spark ideas for phrases, poems or longer prose.

On the subject of lists - because this was all about lists - this week I watched, Every Brilliant Thing (on HBO- Sky - which we have because my OH is a sports fanatic) - an adaptation of Johnny Donahoe’s acclaimed one-man show in which a son creates a list of things worth living for in an attempt to raise the spirits of his chronically depressed mother. It is outstanding, if you ever get the chance do watch. It was a tough watch for me. He was seven when his mother attempted suicide. I was eight, when mine did the same. It brought back a lot. But it was brilliant and funny and in some ways repairing, I’m so glad I saw it.

Finally - if you’re interested in learning more about essay writing - this is a great sub stack and the Essay Writing Camp is free

Essay Camp Day 1

Thanks for reading - I’d love to hear about your lists…

Avril x