I’m completing a short story collection set in Cuba.
I recently returned to the island after an absence of five years. Here is an extract from my notebook, where the stories start.

Part of what I wrote in my notebook that day

La Habana, Friday 2pm.

We walked through Vedado, down Calle 8 to 23 where the bank was. I sat down in a green office chair outside. There were a few people there clustering under the shade. L— asked who was last in line. It was a middle-aged woman with bleached hair not done very well – a bit orange and patchy. I can’t remember what she was wearing except that it was orangey-red – trousers, I think, and a top pulled down to cover her belly. She was nothing like the lithe stalk girls – younger ones, before children came, perhaps before they stopped caring.

But I know that she said a nice thing to me, and I wanted to touch her arm – I did touch her arm. I jumped because a man had dropped ash on my toes in my white sandals, which already left my feet raw and chewed.

Chewed feet from sandals and walking and walking last night, along the Malecon por el dia, then hours in Centro Habana after dark, where smelly pools of water encircled by cats made me jump, as if they might have been rats, not half-starved domestic beasts.

Street in Centro Habana

And we walked to Giolvis in Cohimar and I remembered how it was here – the feeling of being cut off – the voices voices, everywhere human voices sobre todo – people just there, in the street, on the sides, on walls, talking, wandering… Loud music pounding from open houses; rock n roll; an old woman in a pink housecoat rocks, staring fixedly at her past as she listens to the Righteous Brothers: Oh – my love – my darling – I’ve hungered for your touch – a long, lonely time … but the music’s not from her house, but it doesn’t matter, it just plays…

And we walked down roads full of puddles and smashed paving stones and shacks that ate the street, and no one knew what the numbers were. Every house was 26. People were tired and broken and unhealthy – misshapen, protruding bellies, little stick legs and shriveled skin – a lot of raggaton. Loud loud. Who are these people? What do they do?

I remembered how it was to be so far from home – and not know who to be – how to be. Speaking Spanish like a clipped dinner party guest as we sat at Giolvis’ table eating rice and frankfurters, all chopped up – it might have been pork but I ate it anyway – it was all there was in a big pot, and salty beans with a side dish of platano, and Eric, an angel, Giolvis’ new boyfriend whose eyes and mine spoke.

Eric at Giolvis' house in Cohimar

I wanted to be here – this far away and strange, where people kept water in drums because sometimes it just stopped coming – you never knew when, like the light. The street lights stopped two weeks ago and no one knew why – anyway, nobody would come to mend them until who knew when.

The Cuban economy was fucked, said Giolvis. No one wanted to work in el campo any more – the work was hard and boring, without protection of conditions. Everyone was educated – they all wanted to go to university  – but there was no one to grow the coffee, or the sugar now. Cuba was fucked – even God did not know what was going to happen to Cuba now.

Vivan Fidel y Raúl — 'Long live Fidel and Raúl' (Pinar del Río street)

Outside the bank I jumped and the hot ash burnt me and I said in English, ‘Ow – that hurt, he dropped his cigarette on my foot!’ No one knew what I was saying but they all understood, and the orangey woman rolled her eyes, annoyed for me, and a few of the crowd moved at me sympathetically.

An old woman with one crutch came over. She loped from side to side, and had a boy with her of about four. He was eating something.

Her face was craggy and sweating. I let her sit down and the boy crouched into her, holding the top of the white plastic crutch. He had had enough of the crumbly thing
– cake or bread – that he was eating. He pushed it at her. ‘Finished?’ she asked.

‘Sí’

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded.

She bit out a part, I think with jam in, and threw the rest into the flower bed, then screwed up the paper it was in and tossed it behind her.

The boy, in a white vest and checked cotton shorts, lolled in the seat next to me.

The woman’s face was bluish, or reddish, and she kept looking into the distance, not paying attention to the boy. I looked at him. He was a hard little boy and I did not feel especially sympathetic. He looked back at me in an expressionless way. I thought of L— as a boy – a hard little boy who got beaten with a belt, whose father beat his beautiful kind mother whom everyone loved, and who died at 40 from an aneurism.

But then the boy smiled just a tiny bit; I gazed and was kind. He was, after all, just a boy. He looked at his grandmother, then back at me, and she said: ‘There – you see!’ and her face filled up with light.

Venceremos! - We will overcome! (Cuban revolutionary slogan on The Malecon, walkway along the Havana coast)

I was in Cuba again to gather material for my stories, face to face with her contradictions, five years on.

The confrontation with memory forced a jarred leap across the gap of years and understanding. What was a memory? What was real? Could I see without memory shadowing every step? Time sped up as if none had intervened – every friendship here preserved in stone. They began again with me as if I’d left only days before.

In contrast to the flat planes of my London life, Cuba jumped at me upon my return. Writing became more vivid through a long absence; maturity; other lenses I have ground and now see through. For the last year I had worked with notebooks from my original trips to the island, which began almost a decade ago, and now I wrote with a better understanding of what raw material was useful – and with greater awareness of my methods. Distance had shown me why I was drawn to Cuba – the emotional resonance of this place. Now I could concentrate on developing work about that.

I wrote as much as I could from first impressions, visual and visceral, without thought. Emotional, uninhibited. This was the kind of work I most liked in the original notebooks, which I now knew would be the most valuable for making the stories.

The second part of this post will be a notebook extract, with which I hope to share how I gather material for stories in which I am emotionally present. As to the why of writing – it is for survival, and this trip, a difficult one, showed me that more than ever before. I write from what I know, have felt and lived – watching its meaning unfold as I put words down on the page.

Mostly, I don’t photograph. I find that photographing gets in the way of observation – the inner recording of an event, a kind of dialogue with things as they happen around you – how is this situation making me feel? What do I think? But sometimes if I’m tired or distracted and don’t have peace of mind enough to be present and observe, using a camera allows me to connect to my experience again.

Other times, especially with friends, when I want to participate in an experience rather than be at the writer’s one remove, I photograph as I go along – my personal connection and interaction recorded in these images, which allow me to return later to events I’ve participated in rather than witnessed, and to think of them again in terms of my writing.

This time in Cuba, I knew better how to be present in the work. I have gained confidence in my voice over the intervening years. Reading the original notebooks, I realised that it was the writing with a strong, uninhibited voice that made the stories interesting. As a younger writer, I had shied away from the ‘I’ – edited the ‘I’ out – but now I knew that viewpoint – mine – was interesting and essential in the creation of this, a collection of work about being outside.

Now I understood that I could never write about Cuba in any other way; I would always write across a culture gap – could see only from its far side. This was painful. Naïveté had led me to believe that what separated me from life in Cuba was superficial. I saw now that it was not. It was embedded and I could love only from the island of my difference.

I decide to hand-write the new draft.

I’m getting quite distracted these days – can’t sit still too long, and my mind seems to jump around. But maybe I always was this way – as a child I used to write constantly to give those thoughts some room. The first job I had that stuck was as news sub-editor at
The Times. You had to focus or fail. Distraction did not enter my mind.

As I begin hand-writing the new draft, my thoughts slow to meet the pace. I realise that in making the first version of The Party from my notebook, I was a sub-editor: every unnecessary word sliced. I drafted for meaning. Order. Logic. But this is a story, not that kind of writing, and it won’t give up its meaning in that way.

I remember the child who sat alone listening in the silence, who wrote.

Self-portrait writing in my diary (Nan Goldin)

On the paper, I like shaping each word. It suits me. I can be emotional. If I am sad, I can write slowly, as with paint. Shaping each letter like a child who is learning to write. There is time to cry while you put the letters down. This page demands nothing, lets me be.

I use an HB pencil, which changes as you go on.

I can hear the melody and rhythm of each phrase. When
I finish I am peaceful and feel that despite the pace a lot got done.

Writing by hand connects me to the original experience as I recorded it in my notebook in Alamar. I am writing the same words, the same way I did back then.

This way I can breathe; I can move as I work. Writing is a visceral act, not an intellectual one. It is presence on the page. Nothing should come between us, no intermediary machine.

I write early in the morning, in a fluid, half-conscious state. I don’t think much about what I’m doing and the work seems to make itself. It’s like being that child again.

I’m feeling today like I might disappear. Silent and remote. An image comes into my head – I look for it before I start. It’s a photograph of the actress Cookie Mueller, lying sick on her bed, being nursed through her final illness by ex-lover Sharon. On the wall is a picture of Cookie gettting married – to the man she left Sharon for, and who pre-deceased her of Aids.

Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed (Nan Goldin)

I look at this for a while. It gives me the right feeling, one I can not yet give words.

I start by hand-writing out chunks of text from my notebook: bits that leap off the page. These give me the emotional key to the story: ‘I sleep on the street if I have to … There were too many drunk people shouting, and Spanish exhausted me … At 3am I woke up and he was putting on his shoes saying: “We’re going. We’re leaving, going back to Havana” … I am not hungry. I want to go. I don’t want to eat anything else; no more meat. I just can’t eat any more. I won’t.’

I waver over some bits: how far into the personal should I go? I’m mining for the emotional truth but it’s fiction, not a journal. I reject passages that seem intimate but trivial, or too reflective. What I want is interior, but story – filtered through my narrator’s heart.

In the current draft of The Party, my Cuban friend Charo cries when the guests leave without eating the meat his cousin has bought. But my notebook tells a different story. There was a whole tussle between us – and only then did he cry: ‘I said I wanted to go back to Nelida’s and Charo got annoyed. I tried to explain how tired I was but he said that here in Cuba when you got to a party it’s for all night. Then I heard him telling Sandra we needed a taxi to Vedado so I finally got up and went into the bedroom and told her we were staying. I said Charo had drunk too much and Sandra said he’d told them this place wasn’t comfortable enough for me. So I said this wasn’t true and she dragged Charo into the bedroom to speak to him. He denied he’d said it and started to cry.’

'Here in Cuba, when you go to a party, it's for all the night.' (Claire Elliot)

The party was a drunken chaos. This comes across clearly from the notebook, whereas the final draft has only a few discrete references to ‘drinking rum’. My original words betray my confusion: ‘Lazaro grabbed me and motioned to Charo with two fingers next to each other. A question: “I need a girlfriend”. He leered at me, his eyes red and bloodshot. Earlier, his grace while dancing was lovely. Now he made me sick.’ I want the language of The Party, the narrator’s fractured report of what is going on, to mirror her dismay.

I begin to hear my story’s voice. I think of Jane Bowles, of How to Breathe Under Water – first-person, intimate work where the narrator has the courage to show who she is. I can get that close – why not? You always worry how much the reader will think a first-person narrator is ‘you’. But this is what the story needs.

So now I have two parallel versions of The Party: my current draft, and the mined bits from the notebook of the time. I type both out, then cut them into scenes, which I lay out on the floor, slotting the versions together. I do this quickly. At this point it’s not words; it’s a shape.
I make a shape. It’s all in the right place now.

I realise that the feeling Nan Goldin’s picture evoked, the one that resonated within me, was of self-effacement. Humility and courage. This is how the Cubans lived.

I realise that what resonates within you is the story waiting to be born. Before the story, comes its feeling, which you can not distinguish from your own.

I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.

Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation

I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view – or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.

What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft

I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there – overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.

Just back from New York, I go upstairs to the spare room and retrieve a huge dusty rucksack that contains all the notebooks from my Cuban project*. Plus a fireproof box. Before going away, I got really scared my house might burn down and tried to scan them all. Realising it was a losing battle, with 48 hours to go before the flight, and 24 packed handwritten books, I did second best: stashed some in the rucksack, and crammed as many as possible into an Argos fireproof box.

So I take my notebook – the large A3 one that I’m charting the process of this collection in – and get back to the project, which has been on hold for a month since I submitted my Arts Council grant application and went away. This large one is the master-notebook. I have so much material from those six years to fashion into stories, half-made, or just dreamed, that I can no longer see their shapes. I need an overview.

And, time has passed. The original material is vivid – lived. The stories have percolated, though, and they come out better now. I’m distilling fiction from real life.

After I’ve written a bit, I sit here in my kitchen and think, which story is the next? How am I going to know?

Tomorrow, I will thread my way back – from 24 to one – and find out where it is.

* I am writing a collection of short stories set in Cuba, where I spent time between 1999 and 2006. Nii Parkes, of Flipped Eye, is my publisher and editor – we’re preparing the book for print later this year.

I went round to Leila Segal’s for afternoon tea to talk about her contribution as a guest booker.

Leila's tea pot has the air of a rare find on Antiques Road Show. I think it really might be worth a thousand pounds. She bought it for next to nothing in a charity shop. We drank black Earl Grey and looked through her notebooks.

Leila and I met a few years ago when she came to a workshop I was facilitating. She was writing these fascinating stories about living in Cuba and I was captivated by them. We worked together on them for a while and now she has a publishing deal and is writing some new stories and editing old ones.

Leila’s going to take us through the process of editing one story over two weeks in February. In the meantime she’ll be reading through all the notebooks from that period. She said that she now wants to go back to some of the original notes she had, as that’s where the freshest, most impactful writing resides. Five years down the line she feels she knows more about creating stories and has the perspective to structure the material.

Her guest blogging may look something like this.

I’m excited to see how the editing/recasting process pans out and am glad she’ll be examining it here. It has a sense of coming full circle but ending up in a slightly different spot.