Author’s Note
People frequently ask me where I get my ideas for short stories and books. It is a great question, and one to which there seems to be an endlessly expanding answer. I am a very visual person, so images often inspire ideas, as does music or, more accurately, the images I associate with it. Sometimes personal experience or memory seeds an idea, other times a deep emotion I have felt sparks a character who also needs to feel in the same way I did, in their own circumstances.
To generate new fiction I also very much enjoy using prompts and themes which appear in calls for submissions in magazines and anthologies, offered up by the publication staff to spark creative ideas. These can appear in various forms: anything from a single suggested word to a line of dialogue to a theme, tone or mood requested for the publication. Writing prompts proliferate social media, too, and I save the posts and collect these in ‘story inspiration’ files. I have also been known to open a dictionary or thesaurus and jab at it with the end of a spoon, using the impaled word as a theme. All of these story generation ideas create a starting point; no one says it has to remain present in the finished piece, and no one says that I cannot deviate from it if my mind goes off on a tangent. The point of using any of these stimuli is to begin creating, allow my thoughts to roam around an axis, even if they break free of it and find their own way into a story and it becomes something else entirely.
This is a story of the development of one such piece of fiction. I ask you to crave my own indulgence over my inclusion of ‘The reason for everything’ here. It is present for one very personal reason: I absolutely adore it; it’s probably the story I poured the most emotion into while writing (so far), and I want as many people as possible to experience it. The version below is the exact one I wrote years ago, and which won a beautiful glass trophy from the National Association of Writers’ Groups in the UK, as winner of a category of stories based on a single colour, and was subsequently published in NAWG’s Blue Sky Thinking paperback anthology. It may not be seasonal (if you are reading along as I am posting) but I offer it up to you anyway.
I wrote ‘The reason for everything’ in my local library, while my baby lay sleeping next to me in the pram, white shawl which I used as a blanket hanging slightly over the edge. Despite the sunny day, and as I gazed around the room in search of inspiration for a colour on which to hang a story, the blanket-shawl reminded me of undulating snow. There was something here: a sense of innocence but also a deeper consciousness of more. With excitement and trepidation in equal measure, I began making a list of all the associations with white that I could dream up. It may not, then, come as a revelation to you that I chose white as the colour theme for this snowy piece of work.
It may, however, surprise you to know that this story made the judge of the competition cry. I know this because she specifically took me to one side after the presentation ceremony to inform me. Learning this was, to a then embryonic writer, of at least as much importance as winning the trophy had been: it meant that I had managed to touch someone’s heart, someone’s soul, with my words. I had made the story, an intimate moment in time to my character, all at once relatable to strangers in a wider, real world. And all I ever wanted was to be, from that moment on, a writer capable of doing this, over and over.
‘The reason for everything’ appears in my collection of the same title. To this day, the shawl is still in existence in a baby box. This story, along with ‘Baby up the chimney’, remains a most treasured one. And it makes me cry, too, when I read it. Every single time.
The Reason for Everything
Content warning: death
What will I call you? She’s set the challenge for me and I have to find an answer. The names we’ve chosen blur together in a mish-mash of curled pages, stuck on the wardrobe door with rolled-up pieces of tape. All the names. I don’t know what to pick, but she’s left the final choice to me. I wish she would help me.
Through the glare, it startles me how the insidious sunlight leaps off the paper and smacks me in the eyes. Everything is set to thwart me. So, I look to you to make my job easier. It’s okay for you. You lay there, warm and beautiful in your new-white fluffy towel, with all the innocence of a yet untouched life in your gurgle. But I have to tell her today. I must be able to say that I’ve made a decision when we go to meet her.
The snow is falling, finally. It threatened to all yesterday while we were out together, dealing with our life and death business, and now it sugar-coats the ground with its grains of sparkle. Its layers form, deeper and deeper, until no one would ever know there was real life underneath; no one would guess that anger and pain run as undercurrents below, and that decisions have to be made. It just looks beautiful and unsullied, nature’s way of reminding me of you – as if I needed reminding. Right at this moment I wish I was like you. You have no idea how lucky you are to be able to lay there and have nothing to bother you; just to be able to lay still and examine the ceiling with your eyes, as the sunlight reflects off the snow and makes your room glow with stunning white innocence.
I don’t know how to clothe you. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ll get better, quicker at it, over time, I promise. I’ll be a hands-on father. I suppose, well, the baby-grow is easy. Everyone else’s babies seem to wear them, so there’ll be nothing out of the ordinary in that, whatever else may be different in your life. I remember passers-by telling your mum and me that day, as we stood gawking naively at the rows of tiny trousers, puffball dresses and minuscule socks on the shelves, that white was the safest bet. It wouldn’t matter whether you were a boy or a girl then, just as long as you were ‘fine’, they all said. Oh, and you are fine – the tiny image of your mum, laid there staring up in your white cocoon. Yes, they said nothing could go wrong if we got white.
The snow is coming down harder, thicker. It would be so easy to fetch your car seat and take you to your mum like that. But the pram is there in the hallway. I just want to push it through the snow – be the first one to make my mark on it. Like starting a new life, right from the beginning. That’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it? Maybe the snow will clear my mind for a while. There will be something comforting about it, to feel surrounded by something so virginal and unblemished, as we go together to your mum.
I mustn’t forget her Friday flowers. You lay there, and your feet can take care of them for me under the rain cover. Do you know that I’ve bought flowers for your mum every week from the moment we married? Don’t ever tell her, but at first I think it was a novelty, holding the bunch behind my back as I met her in the foyer of her office block, and seeing her large eyes widen with feigned surprise, but also – always – with genuine happiness. Then, I suppose, it felt like a duty. She would look for them when I came in from work on a Friday while she lay on the sofa with her feet elevated on its arm, and her belly ballooning rounder with every week. And I couldn’t refuse her. I’ve never refused her anything. Now, because of you, my little one, I now know just how much I love her, and I want, really want, to take them to her.
The snow does its job well. It pulls its cotton-wool blanket over all the dirt and rubbish and, for as long as our journey lasts, we are surrounded by... What is it? Contentment? A feeling that nothing can intrude on the way we are, right now.
But then we reach our destination, and everything in the foyer breaks through my mood – from the heavy oak chair where I sit and wait, to the earth-coloured, swirly carpet. And I look at you, in your fleecy white blankets and your snowy baby-grow, and try so hard not to let the oppression of the room, of this moment, get to me. Because I have you, and you are the reason for everything.
The woman behind the desk has her eyes fixed on the pram. It’s the first time I’ve seen her eyes so clearly. Her face usually droops in full basset hound insipidness, and I’ve only ever seen the marine blue caked on her eyelids as she glides her folders surreptitiously from the right to the left of the reception desk. Never her eyes. They make me feel uncomfortable, those tiny, voracious, black dots. Can you feel them, too? I know what it is: they’re outraged at the soggy, white trail fallen from the pram wheels, and which give a glittering but temporary reprieve to slivers of the earthy carpet. But most of all, those eyes – they seem to be horrified by you. Am I not allowed to bring a baby here, then? No one told me. And still she stares, and she peers at you with an odd face I can’t quite describe when she tells me that we can go right in.
So, at last, you get to see your mum. I hold you in my arms, so you can see her clearly as we approach. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s still beautiful, even with her face ghostly pale, laid in crisp white satin and cocooned in her snow-white shroud. I want to take her hand – there – but it is icy cold. If I hold it long enough, will it warm to my touch, like it did once before? Your hot little fist brushes my cheek, as your mum’s hand slips through my fingers, still cold, and her shroud surrounds her stillness.
Please, please don’t cry. What can I do? She doesn’t move, although I’m sure she will, once she hears you, and I wait and wait for her. But she lays there like marble – beautiful, cold, unresponsive to the cracks in my emotion as I have no choice but to comfort you. For this isolated moment, while we are together in this tiny, pale room, a set of tiny daggers rip into my spine as I wish you weren’t here. Without you, she would have held my snow-chilled hand in her constant, warm one. And she would have looked at me with colour in her cheeks as I lay flowers in her arms; pale lilies every week for years, just like the ones in her wedding bouquet which she loved so much.
I told you I could refuse her nothing; that I would move heaven and earth to make her happy. All she ever wanted was to hold you in her arms. She spoke of nothing else for months. So, I slide the tiny photograph into the crook of her elbow, next to the flowers, for her to take on her journey. She will hold you forever, in her shroud and in her heart. Her darling. Her image.
And now I can complete my task. She will know, before I am never allowed to look upon her again, that I have made my decision. You are called Lily, my beautiful bundle of life, wrapped in your fluffy white cocoon and protected from the cold. And you will present an image to me every day of the woman I love, and who I have to leave, alone in her shroud of silence. We will return to the snow, and the contentment of its unreality, for now. And we must start a new life, now that you are the reason for everything.
If you are interested in finding out more about my collection, The Reason for Everything, you can find more information on my website here, or find all stores where it is available here.