Stories

Jen and I stayed in a posh hotel for one night at a cut price rate. (Jen is so good at finding bargains.) It was a Georgian country house hotel set in parkland, like a house in a Jane Austen story. Do you know one of the things I love about staying in a posh hotel? Never mind the huge flagged hall with ancestral paintings, the sitting room with the trompe l’oeil paintings on the walls, the library with the comfy sofas and the library steps up to fusty volumes that no-one wants to read, the dining room with the white table linen, the attentive staff… it’s the white towelling bathrobe in the bedroom. This is how happy it makes me…

I am so easy to please, if you are in the know.

Jen asked me (perhaps when I asked her to take this photo) if I think of everything as fodder for writing. Sometimes I do. Some things are too weird or too funny not to be written about. And then there are things that are so momentous or moving that I need to write about them to fully assimilate them.

Natalie Goldberg says writers live twice – once when they live something, and the second time when they write about it.

And here’s that quote again from Nora Ephron that I had on here recently:

“Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why.
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”

And this is from the writer, Anais Nin:

"Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved."