I truly believe that if you write regularly, you exercise your brain to be on the lookout for little prompts and ideas! Here’s what happened with my story for May.
A memory popped into my head of a family caravan holiday we’d taken with the kids way back in the 90s. We did a road trip of the north coast of Scotland moving every few days to a new location, and that way we covered the whole area which is now called the NC 500 (North Coast 500)!
The north-east coast of Scotland was the first phase of the journey and Dornoch was well known at the time as the place where Madonna married Guy Ritchie (at Skibo Castle) and christened their son in Dornoch Cathedral. In more recent years, Dornoch also hosted the wedding of Elon Musk (let’s not talk about that).
It is a beautiful area with a golf course right alongside the coast, beautiful beaches, and historical buildings.
For me, Dornoch was famous for another reason.
I had read many years ago that an author who was big in the 70s and 80s had a property in Dornoch and lived “above the bank”.
That author was Rosamunde Pilcher and her books were all over the book charts in those years, some adapted for TV. I wandered around Dornoch imagining what it must be like to sit at that window and type up your stories. What a dream!
Back then, I had actually written a whole novel. I’d typed it up on a portable Brother typewriter, painstakingly redoing any pages with errors on them. That novel still lives in a red folder in the bottom drawer.
I had no idea what to do with it back then. It will likely never see the light of day. It did prove something to me though. Despite the demands on my time (I had a small baby at the time) and lack of space (we stayed in a flat above the shops in Kirkcaldy High Street opposite the cinema - not quite Rosamunde Pilcher but, half-way there!), I was able to come up with an idea large enough to encompass a novel length story - and I finished and edited it. I completed something! I can’t emphasis enough how important it is to stick with your story (however short or long - and complete the work on it).
The prompt for May’s short story was something unusual. Apart from the pipeband, who marched down Dornoch High Street on the Saturday, little highland dancers doing their fling for the tourists, it was a different kind of dancing I seemed to remember.
Where did this memory come from? The far, far recesses of my brain, that’s for sure.
I had a vague recollection of a car park where people gathered to do line-dancing! Had I imagined it? I quickly got myself onto social media and started asking questions of the local Dornoch community.
Yes, I was told - there was a line-dancing teacher in Dornoch at the time and they met up….not in the car park. Was I perhaps confused with the highland dancing?!
I had to explain that I’m Scottish through and through and wasn’t about to confuse highland dancing with bagpipe music, with line dancing and country music!
Someone else popped up on the thread - an older lady. Yes, they had, on occasion in the summer done their line-dancing outside and on several occasions at the playpark next to the beach.
Near a car park?
Yes, the flat car park at the playpark next to the beach.
Thank you, brain! And thank you, Dornoch Community Page! I hadn’t dreamt it up at all! But now, my brain was dreaming up a story!
This one was a lot of work because of course it wasn’t memoir, or in any way true - the characters were a figment of my imagination. However, I did want to ensure that I did Dornoch a good turn in describing the area and what happened to those characters when they did, indeed, meet up in a seaside car park to do some line dancing.
I had to modernise it and that’s where a granddaughter….and, Taylor Swift, came into it! I remembered the hype over Taylor Swift’s recent sell-out concerts at Murrayfield, the local railway station, Haymarket, Edinburgh, being the focal transport hub for fans in and out of the city; the girls in Swiftie outfits: fringed outfits, boots, hats, friendship bracelets, all sorts! I managed to bring some of that to the story via the grand-daughter! What fun!
What a joyful story it was to write but I’d obviously had some difficulty getting what was in my head onto the page when my editor came back and told me that the male character seemed a stranger in the story and that the readers may wonder about his motivations! I was horrified. I’d spent so much time on my main female character and the relationship with her grand-daughter, that I’d done my male character a dis-service! His character had not quite made it from my brain to the page! I went back and did some work. By adding only a little more detail, I was able to turn this around. As soon as my editor read the re-do, he agreed everything worked and sent it over for a decision.
That decision was a yes! Strictly Line Dancing will appear in the Summer Bookazine of the People’s Friend published during May and on shelves for a good few weeks of summer.
I love it when my brain gives me an inkling of a potential story. No bones about it - stories rarely present themselves fully formed. A writer often has to work with the material to mould it into shape. In this case, they formed orderly lines and started dancing!
Honestly, that holiday was around 30 years ago and my husband had no recollection of the line-dancing I was talking about! I’m glad I managed to bring dancing into a story in such a unique location. I believe that’s what made the story more unique.
Has this ever happened to you? An idea, a picture, forms in your brain - a dream, a memory, a loose vision of some sort?
Thanks for being with me on this journey. I’m about to start a longer piece of work and I’ll keep you up to date with how it’s going!
Meanwhile, this short story Strictly Line Dancing will appear in the Summer Bookazine by People’s Friend in May - available in supermarkets and newsagents.
Jackie, in the Little Writing Corner!
Links:
More about Dornoch here: Dornoch
More about the extraordinary life of author Rosamunde Pilcher: Rosamunde Pilcher
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