Little Stories

My blog turns seven next month. (Seven!) Which means my first born will celebrate his seventh birthday before the year is out, for I posted those initial, self-conscious and naive blog posts while awaiting his arrival. What started out as a way to write and encourage myself to be creative each day, also became a way to document the early days of mother hood, my creative aspirations, and eventually the beginning of my business. 

How my blog and boy have grown and changed over that time, and just as certainly, myself also. When I was pregnant and first started blogging I couldn't cast my mind forward this far and try to picture it. I couldn't even picture what my baby would look like, the scans showed grainy ghosts of images that I could never truly reconcile with an actual baby. I spent my time imaging the birth and those first few years, where we were both new and awkward in our roles, and I learnt to mother him as he learnt everything he knows up until this point. What a gift that has been. To watch him, guide him, love him and learn all there is to know about him. Then slowly let him drift off in to the world of school where he will experience things I'm not there to share, and that he will have forgotten about by the time I walk him home and ask about his day. But oh, all the little stories he does share. His favourite Pokemon character. A game they played at lunch. The boy that took his hat. The girl he is in love with. A new wish list of party attendees for his seventh birthday. The largest animal in the world. So many little stories and room for so many more. Each one perhaps inconsequential, but making up a tiny part of a greater whole.

I feel my blog is so much the same. Full of little stories that I've captured with words and images over these past seven years, with room for more. More moments captured. More musings detailed. More inspiration shared. And so I continue to write.

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I found this lovely article called 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog. It is just the thing to those who may be thinking about starting a blog, those who are feeling that they are in a bit of a blogging rut and even those that ask themselves - why do I blog?

Writing Down the Bones

I've just finished reading 'Writing Down the Bones - Freeing the Writer Within' by Natalie Goldberg. The lovely Sophie highly recommended it on her Instagram feed and I am so pleased that she did. There are a few paragraphs that really stood out to me and I wanted to share them with you. We may not be aspiring novelists, but we can all be writers and improve our writing - even if we only wish to write facebook updates and Christmas letters to relatives. What do you think?

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. p56

Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. For instance, out tongues, elbows, water coming out of a water faucet, the kind of garbage trucks New York City has, the colour purple of a faded sign in a small town. I always tell my elementary school students, "Please, no more Michael Jackson, Atari games, TV characters in your poems." They get all the attention they need, plus millions of dollars spent in advertising to ensure their popularity. A writer's job if to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness off simply being. p123

Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Promise yourself, before you leave the earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article. p130

What to read next? Any suggestions? Favourite book of late? All time favourtie?