Ire fire

What do you do when you are angry?

Many years ago, I wrote. Today, I still write, but as a life, not merely as a way to defuse my black mood. And where and when I could, I wrote for people who asked for it, starting with four words they gave me that somehow got linked in a tale that wandered through realms real, imagined and totally inconceivable. I now write more with words that are taken from real life and then stretched to their limits to weave new horizons and worlds that I explore as I create them.

Once upon a time I wrote for a little girl I knew, who believed in fairies and magic and chocolate chip muffins and lacy pink negligee sets and roller skates and Aunty, the transient being who brought her all of those things and more. I wrote her stories about a little elf with blonde hair and blue eyes who lived with her family, but only she could see her and talk to her and have fun with her, especially when everyone else was asleep or out. The little girl and the elf played house and made sugar drops and ran after the cat who was actually another fairy that no one except they could see, but the three of them were real to each other. And, in a way, to me, too, because they were all my doing – even the little girl who was my pet and playmate, the daughter of an adopted big sister. They told me, in different voices, what they wanted to do and I made sure that they could do it and did.

But the writer in me was not just about children and their dreams. I needed to have some of my own grown up fantasies expressed in words and I wrote for my then roommate, a close friend and soul sister. Karen got stories about a purple hippo called Charlotte who was longing to visit India and who had long blue eyelashes and more adventures than she could shake her hips at. The last time I met Charlie, she was trying to retrieve her make-up bag from a plane crash, because her left-top-last eyelash was losing its glue and without it, she would look like an absolute hag, darling! Charlotte was a femme fatale who had many of the felinely feminine characteristics both me and my friend longed for, but could never actually sustain, and had a wonderfully wicked time with it all.

And then there was the play I wrote while sitting in a bathtub in an unpretentious but luxurious hotel in Lyon, France. I sat there in four inches of rapidly cooling water, a dish of Vietnamese spring rolls close at hand, writing with my favourite ballpoint pen in a red-covered notebook that was, I think, printed for musical notation rather than my well-rounded, scrawly script. Having incorporated all the people I knew, liked and hated in the school I went to in Geneva, Switzerland, I had them go through the most trying of circumstances that my 17 year old mind could conceive of and then proceeded to get them either married, extremely happy (which is not necessarily mutually exclusive) or dead in a fabulously, satisfyingly gory manner.

When I was about 13, I wrote what would today amount to half a romance novel. I had only a very hazy idea of the mushy bits, had no clue about any kind of intimacy, over-characterised everyone, all of whom had utterly romantic names, looks and behaviour, and had so much fun that I wish I could find it today – it would probably be published as a farce on the lines of that marvellous soap opera spoof called Soap that I watched when I was a teenager. At regular intervals, and as my general knowledge base of all things adult expanded, I wrote various other romantic vignettes, always meaning to string them together to make a full-length book, but never quite managing to add the staying power to get it done in one fell swoop.

Having gone through the various genres, even writing a couple of fantasies and one rather juvenile but funny sci-fi story, I settled into a career that allows for – nay, mandates – writing. For some reason, that has not taken any of the fun out of playing with words, but it has taken away the time I would like for writing because I want to. For anger management, I now cook or I imagine stories in my head. Or I shop for shoes, which is a whole new story in itself!