Laura Pashby on being not too busy to write
The author and substacker on writing and life
Today’s guest post is written by author, storyteller and substacker
. Laura is a fog-loving writer and photographer. She lives in the Cotswolds countryside with her husband and three sons, where she walks the woods and hills with her camera. Her first book, Little Stories of Your Life, was published in 2021. Her upcoming book, Chasing Fog, is now available to pre-order. Laura’s Substack ‘Small Stories’—a search for magic and meaning in the form of letters from her writing desk—was a Substack Featured Publication 2023Sometimes, when I am teetering close to overwhelm and the panic rises in my chest, I feel too busy even to breathe.’Stop’, I remind myself. ‘Slow down and exhale.’ But even on the most frenzied and fractured of days—mornings when I am too busy to glance at the mirror or to eat anything more than a snatched slice of toast—I am never too busy to write.
I sit down at a desk strewn with papers and teetering stacks of books, in my tiny writing room at the top of the house. My hair is unbrushed, my face without makeup, I wear slippers and a old cardigan. On my way upstairs I ignored strewn pyjamas, dirty socks and a stray hairbrush dropped on the landing. My house is a vortex of mess but I choose writing over tidying every time.
I am hoping I will neither see nor speak to another soul until the end of the school day comes around, at which point I will hurry down the road, forgetting my bedraggled state. Once, I read a piece of writing advice that said you should allow yourself fifteen minutes of quiet even after you finish writing, because your brain will still be processing, and further ideas will come. Some authors, I imagine, spend those fifteen minutes—or possibly just entire days—engaged in peaceful contemplation. Probably in an isolated woodland cabin or, at the very least an elegantly decorated writing shed. But I am someone who must write around the edges of my life and so for me, those fifteen minutes are the school run.
If the rhythm of my feet on the path is steady, my mind can become still. Sometimes, as I walk, the key to the piece I am working on appears clearly in my head. Layers of thoughts shake down into place, teased out into a narrative thread. I stand at the school gates, hastily typing notes into my phone so I don’t forget the sentences that suddenly came to me as I turned the street corner by the pub.
In my days, and in my thoughts, mothering and writing are entwined. I protect fiercely the hours that I spend at my desk — hours so easily eroded by coffee dates, medical appointments or grocery shops — but in my mind, even when I am hunting for lost school shoes or hanging rugby kit on the washing line, I am still writing. ‘A writer’ (as Shirley Jackson puts it in her brilliant essay Memory and Delusion )‘is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words’. She described how she told herself stories whilst making beds and doing dishes — stories about missing socks, kitchen appliances, and ‘a whopper of a story about the laundry basket’.
The more busy my life becomes, the stronger my need to write; writing is the calm place in my whirling world. Through writing, I find my centre and remember myself. I breathe in air, I breathe out words.
I am not too busy to write.
Chasing Fog is the story of a search for an elusive weather condition that makes the ordinary seem strange. A blend of nature-writing and memoir, it's a love song to weather and nature’s power to transform. | 'eerie and evocative' - Cal Flyn | 'haunting and beautiful' - Rebecca Schiller | 'a clear-sighted and loving ode to fog' - Alice Vincent
Chasing Fog will be published by Simon & Schuster on 29th August 2024 and is now available to pre-order.
pre-order link:
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Chasing-Fog/Laura-Pashby/9781398526990
Laura Pashby is a fog-loving writer and photographer. She lives in the Cotswolds countryside with her husband and three sons, where she walks the woods and hills with her camera. Her first book, Little Stories of Your Life, was published in 2021. Her upcoming book, Chasing Fog, is now available to pre-order. Laura’s Substack ‘Small Stories’—a search for magic and meaning in the form of letters from her writing desk—was a Substack Featured Publication 2023.
@circleofpines on social media
Portraits by Jules Williams:
https://www.juleswilliamsphotography.com/
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Laura your words are a beautiful balm and words are medicine to me as I move into post menopause. I too go up to the attic to write, but often stop by my bedroom on the way upstairs and write in my dressing gown on my bed, a throwback to my teenage self. My own mothering is still demanding but has shapeshifted as theyve grown and become young men, leaving an urgent space for me to write in…at last.
Thank you for sharing your writerly ways, writing around the edges of your life.
Gorgeously written, and for what it’s worth, you may work a bedraggled state on the school run, but you look fab in the shirt dress above!!