The story to be told may come in tantalizing flashes, a glimpse here and an inkling there. Sometimes you have to come back again and again to corral the vaguest notions into a holding pen, chasing down the fleetest to where you can grab at them and cling fast. Images come; the dancer pirouettes away, the prisoner of conscience slumps against the wall of his cell, or the frumpy middle aged woman turns herself into a person of consequence, rising to the unlooked for occasion. The kaleidascope of ideas and pictures spinning round slow down to jab the imagination with an insistent poke, this one, this one worms into you, its threads burrowing away into endless possibilities. Now the words flower in front of you, metaphors jostle with similies, verbs spring, adjectives wrap around your nouns, they fall in like soldiers on parade, immaculate and beautifully in step. You lean forward, tap tap or scratch scratch…the stream is running again, a tide even, whooshing you along. Then, like the wind in the trees, whose rustling energy dies away, you sit back, rub your forehead, those tender places behind your eyebrows and wait. You fling yourself about, you need this or that. It seems so difficult but sit down and read the last entry once more: the soldier words wheel and turn, shoulder arms and you’re off again.
Veronica Handover 