Sometimes the story is all from the writer.
Sometimes the writer has an easier time of it and simply writes down the story as it occurs.
Sometimes it's a combination.
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This is the story, for The Sunday Post's My Week column -
MID-WINTER WARMTH
There’s an old tradition that your “first foot”, the first visitor to your house in the New Year, should bring a lump of coal with them. The coal symbolised warmth in the mid-winter. Adding your coal to the fire in the family heart and sharing the warmth was like being welcomed as part of the family.
Julie has a group of friends who have spent every New Year’s Day together for decades. But this year, she was the only one of them not isolating, shielding, or actually suffering from Covid. It looked like being a sad, lonely day. Until she packed the food she had prepared for the party and set out to visit her friends’ houses. She left a package of goodies on each doorstep and chatted with whoever was available from the end of the garden path.
There’s more than one way to bring warmth to a home.
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The part about Julie going around the doors with the party food is all true. I knew it was a nice thing and wanted to write about it, but I needed something to hang it on.
I knew she was taking more than food to her friends. The dot-joiner in my mind tagged that with "coal", "black bun", and "whiskey".
Before then I had never given much thought to the "coal" part of the story. I may have seen it done, and the coal might have been thrown into the coal bunker... I can't say for sure. But the idea of coal providing warmth, and joining in with the family's existing fire only really came out as I was writing.
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Sometimes you have to trust your instincts, know you have something good, and let the writing itself make what it will with it.
Photo by Juan Encalada on Unsplash
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