Writing Character Goals, Objectives, Flaws and Fears

By Kristina Adams

If someone were to write about my goals, ambitions, and motivations, they’d probably put something like this: ‘She’s obsessed with writing. The first story she wrote outside of school was about a stolen china teacup. She was seven. Since then, she’s experimented with many different genres and mediums. No matter what gets in her way, she’ll always find a way to write. Her chronic pain sometimes makes it difficult to write, but when this happens, she finds ways around it. The thing that motivates her the most to write is her strong desire to help people.’

That paragraph tells you a lot about me, doesn’t it? It’s fair to say that I have a pretty one-track mind – most of my life revolves around writing. I really can be quite boring in that regard.

When that comes to goals and ambitions for characters, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Your character needs to have one main goal they’re working towards. Any more and it makes it confusing for you to write and confusing for the reader to follow.

The only exception to the one-goal rule is in a series, where you could have a goal per book and also one per series. For example, a detective in a crime novel could be motivated to find the murderer. But her goal in the series could be to find the person that murdered her mother ten years ago. The early seasons of Castle slowly explore this backstory for Beckett, teasing out bits of information about it from her as she learns to trust the titular character. Some of the show’s most powerful episodes are tied to Beckett’s search for answers about what happened to her mum because the victim of the crime is someone the viewer knows so well.

Think about TV shows from fifteen or twenty years ago. Often, episodes would have two layers: the demon / murderer / conundrum of the week, then on top of that a serial arc. The episodic theme could lead them to figure out elements of the serial arc, too. At the end of the series, either that arc is wrapped up, or a new layer / question is added to it to lead into the next series.

Goals and motivations
Motivations are tied to goals. If someone’s goal is to publish a book, their motivation could come from other people suggesting they do it, or from their deep desire to share a particular story. The thing that holds them back will always be their fear or their flaw.

Quite often, their flaw will come in the form of a fear, but not always. But let’s run with fears for a moment. In the case of a writer, it’s often the fear of being judged or rejected by agents, publishers, critics, and/or readers.

Fear is what holds people back in their goals more than anything else. For someone to achieve their goal, their motivation to do it must be stronger than their fear.

Fear tends to run deeper than claustrophobia or arachnophobia, although they can be useful if you want to torture your characters in a particular scene. It would be hard to carry a whole story – or series of stories – on something like that. A scene that focuses on it – or someone avoiding particular situations because of it – could work.

Everyday fears are the ones that hold people back more without them even realising it. Often because they don’t know they even have those fears. These include the fears of judgment, embarrassment, rejection, loneliness, or physical or mental health problems. These fears are tied to other people and our needs as a social species. We’ll do anything to not feel ostracised from those around us, both the people we love, people we don’t know, and sometimes even the people we hate. We want to feel like a part of something. Your characters are no different.

Many people fear public speaking because they fear standing up in front of so many people. Why? Because those people can judge them. Nobody likes to be judged, so many people avoid public speaking so they can’t be.

But you could flip that on its head. What if your main character needs to speak at a charity event to raise money for a friend to get a new cancer drug that their healthcare won’t cover? Their goal, then, is to help their friend. It motivates them to overcome their fear because they’re more afraid of losing their friend than of getting up on stage.

As I’ve said, fears are one of the bigger flaws, but there are plenty of others you can play with. There are the seven deadly sins: anger, greed, gluttony, lust, pride, sloth, and envy. Depending on what you’re writing about, these could give you considerable ways to put your character’s primary goal at odds with how they’re used to behaving. Someone who’s surrounded by material wealth having to give it all up and discover they don’t need it after all is a common one. Or someone very slothful discovering their motivation because they’ve finally found a real cause to get behind. Or maybe someone whose default reaction to not getting what they want being anger finally having to confront how unhealthy their angry behaviour is.

To come up with your character’s flaw or fear, think of something that’s directly at odds with what they want to achieve. That could be a musician with stage fright, a would-be politician who’s afraid of judgment, or a lust-filled nun.

About Kristina's book and course
How to Write Believable Characters: Character Development Tips for Novelists, Poets, and Scriptwriters, by Kristina Adams, is available now in ebook and print here and here. 

Discover how to create realistic, believable, and three-dimensional characters that readers remember long after they've turned the final page. Preorder Kristina’s Character Creation Crash Course today here. 

About the author
Kristina Adams is an author, blogger, and reformed caffeine addict. She’s written nine novels about our fascination with celebrity culture, three nonfiction books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She shares advice for writers over on her blog, The Writer’s Cookbook.

Author website: www.kristinaadamsauthor.com

Blog: www.writerscookbook.com 

You can read another article by Kristina Adams, "How Creative Writing Skills Can Make You A Better Copywriter," on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Elizabeth Baines, "Astral Travel"

Elizabeth Baines is the author of two short story collections, Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be, and two previous novels, The Birth Machine and Too Many Magpies, all published by and available from Salt. Her new, metafictive novel, Astral Travel, explores the effects that secrets forged in the cultural, religious and sexual prejudices of the past can have on subsequent generations, and the power and potential tyranny of storytelling, and the difficulty sometimes of getting at the truth. Her website is here. She blogs here. 

About Astral Travel

There were always two versions of Jo Jackson’s Irish father Patrick: the charming, talkative man he was in the outside world and in the tales Jo’s mother would tell her of their early life together, and the man Jo and her siblings experienced: bad-tempered, broody and uncommunicative, and given to violence towards them – an experience that has affected them into their adult life.

As the most rebellious of the siblings, and therefore the one he most had it in for, Jo long ago distanced herself from him, but, now a writer, after his death she finds herself drawn to write about him. Yet the more she thinks about him, the more she trawls her own memories and quizzes her mother, and the more she tries to investigate his past in Ireland, of which he hardly ever spoke, the more the mysteries deepen …

Astral Travel is available here. 

Below, you can read an extract from the beginning of Astral Travel. 

From Astral Travel

AFTER AND BEFORE

It was the winter I discovered I had a cyst in my belly, grown all without my knowing, and my sister’s heart started banging as if it wanted the hell out of there now. 

I went over on the train to the hospital she’d been taken to and rushed down the corridor and into the ward. She was sitting up, dark curls on end, still hooked to the monitor, but they’d given her a shot and her heart rate was back to normal. She was scowling, reminding me of our father, because they wouldn’t let her out of bed and she badly needed to pee.

There was a bed pan on the cover near the bottom of the bed. I said, ‘Use it, I’ll draw the curtains.’ She said, ‘You’re joking! Here?’ and looked around in horror at the drugged or sleeping patients each side and the curtains drawn on the bed opposite.

It’s a small town, of course, the one she still lives in, where our parents settled at long last when we were in our teens, and where she’s been a librarian all her adult life. She has her mystique to keep up.

The nurse came along and said my sister was OK now, her heartbeat had been normal for four hours, she could ring her husband to come back from his work to fetch her. As she took off the last plug my sister jumped from the leash and fled to the lavatory near the nurses’ station, slamming the door with a sound that rang round the ward.

I didn’t tell her about the cyst. And of course, the heart-thumping matter of the novel I had written, the novel about our family, wasn’t mentioned. By then the subject was completely avoided.

*

When I was six and my sister was four, she came down with scarlet fever, the one other time she was ever in hospital, carted off to an isolation hospital in the north Welsh hills.

We had only just moved from south Wales, the first of what would be several moves.

I sat outside the hospital in the car with my father, our baby brother asleep in the back in the carrycot, while our mother went in to visit her. Someone held her up at a hospital window for me to see her, but what I saw didn’t look like my sister, like Cathy: we were too far away and the window seemed to be frosted; all I could see was a pink thing that made me think of a shrimp. I guess we must have gone at bath time and they were in the bathroom.

For years afterwards Cathy would recount the horror of that time, considering it one of her major childhood traumas: the enforced baths in Dettol; the compulsory drink of sickly Ovaltine at bedtime; being made to march beforehand down the central aisle with the other children, with their various strange accents, singing a song she didn’t know in which you claimed to be something called an Ovalteenie, although she had no idea what that was.

Knowing nothing of this, cut off from my sister for the first time since I crawled across my mother’s exhausted body to look at her newborn face and exclaim in wonder, ‘Is she ours?’, I felt a new bleakness and sense of loss. The hills outside the car window were alien and bare, and my father was broody and silent beside me, which was how he had been since we’d moved here.

And there was something that had recently come to me, a disappointing realisation. I wanted to ask my father about it.

He’d seen fairies, he’d said, in Ireland where he was born, and even here in north Wales. He insisted upon it. I’d looked and looked, desperate to see them myself, but never had. And now I had read that they didn’t exist.

‘Daddy?’

He didn’t respond in the way he would have done once, with a languid, crooked-toothed, teasing grin. He didn’t turn to me. His eagle-nosed profile was a stony sculpture against the car window. He was smoking, of course.

‘Hm?’ He sounded faraway, abstract.

‘Daddy, fairies don’t exist, do they, really?’

He didn’t answer.

I persisted. ‘Well, it’s like Father Christmas, isn’t it?’

He had gone completely still, and I knew what I’d done. I’d forgotten that he didn’t even know I knew about Father Christmas. My mother had said better not tell him, he’d be disappointed.

‘Daddy?’ He was still silent.

Finally he said, ‘No,’ with such frozen shock and, yes, such flat disappointment, that I was filled with guilt and dismay. And a sense that things between me and my father would never be the same again.

Well, that’s how I remember it. But what do I know? Things get lost, memory can be muddled. As I say, by then, by the time we sat outside the hospital in the hills, my father had already changed. He was no longer the father who took me with him on his insurance rounds, rattling in the little Austin Seven down the flickering country lanes of south Wales, zooming up to the hump-back bridges with a grin, fag in the one hand on the wheel or stuck behind his ear, laughing his head off as I left the leather seat and squealed with delight. By this time, probably, he’d starting hitting us.

And it wasn’t as if I went on not believing in fairies. I wanted to believe in them, or rather I didn’t want not to. After that day, on Sunday outings to those hills I’d take a bag of silver charms I’d cut from the tobacco-smelling silver paper from my father’s cigarette packets, hearts and flowers, bows and stars and sickle moons. I’d scatter them in the gorse, an offering and a plea for the fairies to appear and prove themselves.

As I begged for the silver paper and he handed it over, my father would snigger.

And a lot of what I remember is not the same as what the others remember, which was partly what caused the trouble when I tried to write a novel about it all. 

Carrie Etter, "The Shooting Gallery"

Carrie Etter grew up in Normal, Illinois, lived in southern California for thirteen years, and moved to England in 2001. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a pamphlet of flash fiction, Hometown (V. Press, 2016). Her latest pamphlet is The Shooting Gallery (Verve, 2020), which you can read about below. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her website is here.

 

About The Shooting Gallery

The Shooting Gallery juxtaposes two series of prose poems: one responding to Czech surrealist artist Toyen's The Shooting Gallery (1939-40), a series of line drawings bringing together imagery of childhood and war; and one responding to US school and university shootings since Columbine High School in 1999. Both series explore the surreality and starkness of this conjunction of youth and violence. You can read an extract from The Shooting Gallery below. You can read more about the pamphlet, and order it here. 

From The Shooting Gallery

Normal Community High School, Illinois, 2012

At first, what rattled / was the proximity, the intimacy— / gunfire only a mile from / my family home. For days I wore the knowledge / like chain mail, my torso / heavier, my shoulders / newly weighted. I Googled. I found in my town Darnall’s Gun Works & Ranges, C.I. Shooting Sports. I found photos of / the aftermath, the brawny teacher leading a column of students / away, away, / the huddled parents, waiting, the / reunions, the mother and son— / — / the son’s t-shirt: a drawing of a boy wearing his baseball cap backwards / his eye to the viewfinder / of a machine gun, its long belt of cartridges ready— / mother
and son and his t-shirt—this / is where I come from.

Caroline Hardaker, "Little Quakes Every Day"

Caroline Hardaker lives in the north east of England and writes quite a lot of things. She earned her BA (English Literature) and MA (Cultural and Heritage Studies) from Newcastle University, and writes poetry, fiction, libretto, and occasional scripts, too.

Caroline’s debut poetry collection, Bone Ovation, was published by Valley Press in 2017, and her first full length collection, Little Quakes Every Day, will be published by Valley Press on 9th November 2020. Her debut novel, Composite Creatures, will also be published by Angry Robot in April 2021.

Caroline’s poetry has been published worldwide, most recently in Magma, The Interpreter’s House, The Emma Press, Neon Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets, and Contemporary British Poetry from Platypus Press.

Caroline’s worked with various organisations and community groups to advocate the holistic benefits of writing and making. She currently works as the Content Manager for Newcastle University in the north east of England. In 2019, Caroline was the Writer in Residence for ‘Moving Parts’ Newcastle Puppetry Festival and a Theatre Reviewer for NARC Magazine. Throughout 2019 and 2020, she’s collaborating with the Royal Northern College of Music to produce a cycle of operatic art songs to be performed at festivals across the UK. In September 2020, Folk Tales premiered at the Tête à Tête Festival in London.

You can read more and follow her adventures on her writers’ blog.

About Little Quakes Every Day

In Caroline Hardaker's first full-length collection of poetry, readers will find tales of human evolution and natural laws, of technology, of the world's problems and the twisted inventions we create. Each encounter takes a host of characters to the brink of epiphany – sometimes they’ll burn bright, and sometimes they’ll fall apart.

Through the poems in the collection, the book imagines a world of explorers, philosophers, automatons, wild things, and the ghosts that dwell deep in the heart of the earth itself.

Caroline says, “The poems in this collection have been developed over a three year period, in which I wanted to explore the nature of discoveries in history and mythology and how they impact our everyday lives. I’ve balanced these larger questions with everyday ‘kitchen sink’ encounters, to demonstrate that both have a huge impact on our lives.”

You can find out more about Little Quakes Every Day and pre-order the book here.

Below, you can read two poems from the book. 

From Little Quakes Every Day

On Polar Bears Brought Together by the Death of a Humpback Whale

The boulders approach, grown with hoary turf
and smudging rune-marks across the tundra;
a moving tide to mount the hunt that’s found.
Jaws meet meat in many places to break the hide.

In the belly, brothers do not know brothers;
skins smell of sleep, birth-blood lost, and the beasts
take turns to tear out the swim-bladder or fists
of blubber. The bears are tied together with ropes

of knotted gut, and each hollows out his grotto
from fat, oiling his coat as if preparing for battle in woad –
but white as snow. Drifts of broad backs reinvent genesis.
Slow stomachfuls last a day, a night, a day,

and pressing for the last, boulders roll in the colossal arch;
ribs hanging above like paths of comets. After the feast,
blood flecks the ice like constellations, and then,
stones in a round, each brother licks his sores and retreats alone.

The supernova shatters, and the whale shrinks.

Little Shoe

It shone – a world on a little satin thing
poking through the rose of wrinkled Tyvek;
a ruby to slip a lily into.

Lifting it from the case, I sit it on one cottoned palm,
fingers fanning beneath like a lark’s wing around an egg
or a teacup, stitched from sun-silk
and curving to a point slim enough to perch on
the thumb-loop of a girl
painting a sky she watched in childhood.
All her favourite garden sights;
bluebirds, tamed hoopoes, palm-swifts
in peach of blushing cheek and perching proudly
amongst trickling vines in lagoon blue.
Hosts of cloud-like lotus flowers – falling
in a white flush of doves,
swooping on the whistle-crack of wind
up from the stone floor. Scenes from before

this life of little stitches, shuffling steps on fists of flesh
in groups of golden lilies tipped with red
and held together by hands grasping sisters’ sleeves.
Tied in this amorphous knot of quiet,
each face meets another mouthing the name
inked in a bird’s nest of strokes
hidden inside her shoes.

Frances Evelyn, "The Traitor Within"

Frances Evelyn writes real-world fantasy set in Leicestershire and Rutland. The third instalment in the bestselling The Changeling Tree series, The Traitor Within, is due for release on the 31st of October.

Readers have described The Changeling Tree series as ‘intriguing,’ ‘mesmerising,’ ‘amusing,’ ‘scary,’ ‘wonderful’ and ‘sublime’: ‘high fantasy meeting Jane Austen.’ The first three books (of five) are available in paperback, as e-books, and free via KindleUnlimited. More details about her books, freebies and competitions are available on her website and via social media.

Frances was born in Coventry and studied English in Manchester and London. She worked in higher education before becoming a full-time author. She’s an experienced editor and proof-reader, and offers proof-reading services to other indie authors in exchange for their support in promoting her books.

Frances Evelyn is a pen name. 

About The Changeling Tree Series

Rose Watts travels in time. Her mum and gran do too. So why didn’t they warn her? And why did they lose touch?

In The Changeling Tree, Mike’s girlfriend, Tracy, has been missing for months without a word. He’s sure her mum knows more than she’s telling, but he can’t live in limbo forever. He’ll make one last attempt before trying to move on. 

It’s the night of the winter solstice. Tracy’s house is dark and deserted, but there’s a pram in the garden, and inside the pram is a baby. 

To protect her throne, Queen Annis (remembered as Black Annis in Leicester legend) must bring human misery to the court as an antidote to the tedium of endless joy. Neither she nor her challenger have any sympathy for the humans caught up in their game: Tracy, her daughter, Rose, and Rose’s gran, Peggy.

In The Time Before, Rose moves in with her gran, following Tracy’s death. Determined to travel back in time and save her mum, she finds herself instead in 1941, where she’s evacuated to the coast with Peggy. They discover an impossible door that doesn’t lead outside, and when they go through it, they’re torn apart.

The third book in the series, The Traitor Within, sees Peggy re-appearing a year after she left, when everyone has given her up for dead. Her mother’s delighted of course, but it would have been easier for everyone else if she’d never come back.

Meanwhile, Rose is in the eighteenth century and far from home. She needs to get back to Leicester and find her mum, but highwaymen aren’t the only dangers on the roads.

Below, you can read an extract from The Traitor Within. 

Fom The Traitor Within

... Rose has been walking all day and takes shelter for the night among some trees near the road. Her thoughts are interrupted by a conversation nearby:

The first voice was male: not quite a boy, but not yet a man.

“Is it coming?” he asked.

“I can hear it,” answered a man’s voice. “You know your part?” 

“Yes,” said the first. “I’ll not let you down.” 

Leaves rustled and twigs snapped as they moved away. 

“Your face, you fool,” hissed the man. “Cover yourself.”

Hooves pounded the road and wheels rattled over stones and ruts. As they came level with Rose’s hiding place, she heard horses whinnying and a man cursing. The carriage stopped a little way past her.

“Hold the bridle,” hissed the man and then, in a louder voice, “You sir. If you’d be so kind as to climb down.” 

With grumbles, wheezes and creaks, a heavy man came down from the driver’s seat. 

“On the floor, there’s a good chap,” said the highwayman. 

Rose craned her neck to peer through the undergrowth. The coachman lowered himself to the ground, groaning as he knelt then lay, face down. The highwayman, with a scarf over his nose and mouth, was holding a pistol loosely between his fingertips. Rose knew what to do in these situations. Run. If you can’t run, hide. If it’s safe to do so, call for help.

She was out of sight already, so the safest thing was to stay where she was, except they weren’t far away, and they’d easily see her if they looked closely. She might need to run if it came to it, so slowly, carefully, she untangled her legs from the cloak, rustling dry leaves with every movement. 

She could hear the coachman breathing, she was that close, but he was breathing heavily, she assured herself. He was scared and out of shape. He must be making more noise than she was. As she raised herself to a crouch, the highwayman turned towards her and Rose froze in a squat among the shadows of the trees. After a while, he shrugged and turned away, leading his horse to the door of the carriage, and Rose breathed out. 

“Open up,” he shouted, rapping with the butt of his pistol. “Forgive the cliché, but … your money or your life.”

The occupants whimpered and swore, but they opened the door and, one by one, their valuables clinked into the highwayman’s sack.

“And the rest,” he said, with a bored rattle of his bag. “Though I can assure you I wouldn’t object to undertaking a thorough search of these young ladies. Not so much you, madam, but your daughters really are lovely.”

The ladies twittered in delighted outrage. Rose couldn’t see him clearly, but the highwayman’s charisma was evident even from this distance.

A man’s voice said, “You’ll hang for this, you dog.”

“It seems pretty unlikely, to be honest,” said the highwayman. “But I’m certainly not willing to be hanged for half of your valuables. I may as well shoot you if I’m to hang anyway, don’t you think? Come on. I haven’t got all night.” 

The next time he spoke, his voice was petulant. 

“Do I look like I was born yesterday?” 

More treasures were surrendered, more threats made, until the thief was content. He fastened the booty to his saddle and doffed his feathered hat with a flourish.

“Thank you, ladies, gentlemen. A great pleasure doing business with you. Apologies for any inconvenience, and my very best for your onward journey.” 

Replacing his hat, he swung himself on to his horse. 

“It’s been special,” he said, with a hand to his heart.

Yvonne Battle-Felton, "Remembered"

Yvonne Battle-Felton, author of Remembered, is an American writer living in the UK. Her writing has been published in literary journals and anthologies. Remembered was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2020). She was commended for children’s writing in the Faber Andlyn BAME (FAB) Prize (2017) and has three titles in Penguin Random House’s Ladybird Tales of Superheroes and three in the forthcoming Ladybird Tales of Crowns and Thrones. Yvonne has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is Lecturer in Creative Writing and Creative Industries at Sheffield Hallam University.

Yvonne writes because she loves endings, secrets, and stories. She writes for children and adults, creates literary events, moms, and plans (in her spare time) to take over the world one story at a time. 

Yvonne's website is here.

About Remembered

It’s 1910 and Philadelphia is burning. The Union is threatening to strike. The Company is threatening. Tensions have boiled over and flow through the street like blood, shattering communities like glass. 

In the middle of this glass lies Edward. He was in the streetcar that barrelled down a lane into a shop window of a segregated store. Was. Pulled out of the wreckage by an angry mob, Edward is beaten by them and the police for a crime he may or may not have committed.

Set in 1910 Philadelphia and 1840-1864 Maryland, Remembered is a historical fiction, framed narrative that follows Spring and her sister before they were born, through slavery, and beyond, through stories of Spring’s life and Tempe’s death. Through vivid descriptions, complex characters, and haunting, the novel explores 24 years in America’s slaveholding past over 24 hours in its post-emancipation present. Remembered is the story of Spring, his mother, and her dead sister Tempe’s journey to lead Edward home.

Below, you can read an extract from Remembered.

From Remembered: 

‘Ready or not, here we come!’ Tempe shouts.

Watson, long brown legs and thin bony arms flailing, is already halfway to the porch. He’s panting and sweating. His chest pumps hard. I just watch it, glistening.

Run.

Tempe’s long, shapely legs carry her to within inches of Watson. It don’t look like she’s hardly breathing. She cuts through the yard with hardly no effort at all. It don’t seem fair. Tempe can catch him anytime she wants. She knows the land and made the rules.

‘Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.’ I tap each little head quickly, dashing from one to the next so I can turn back to the race. There are no tears this time. The little hearts race along with Watson’s.

Run.

Watson is just a few strides ahead of Tempe. If she leans forward just a little more she’ll have him. If not, he’ll reach the porch, Sanctuary, seconds before her. He slows, and even from the back of his head I know he’s grinning. He zags sharply. You’re running the wrong way! I can’t get the words out fast enough. But then I see. He isn’t running the wrong way at all.

The women must have heard the commotion. Armed with broomsticks they take to the porch in synchronized annoyance. They stand guard. Around back, the men have already stopped talking about the war, escape and freedom. They’re out front, gruff voices whispering: Run.

Tempe must have seen it then. We all do. Watson isn’t running for the porch. Tempe stops. She stands still whispering: Run, run, run, along with everybody else. Watson never stops running. I wish he had taken me with him.

Vic Pickup, "Lost & Found"

Vic Pickup is a previous winner of the Café Writers and Cupid’s Arrow Competitions, and she was shortlisted for the National Poetry Day #speakyourtruth prize on YouTube last year. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, magazines and online, recently published by Mslexia, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village and Reach Poetry. Lost & Found is Vic’s debut pamphlet, published by Hedgehog Poetry Press. She tweets @vicpickup and her website is www.vicpickup.com.

About Lost & Found

The lockdown of 2020 has presented, for many, a time to think - to consider the good, the bad, the haves and the have-nots, what’s lost and what’s been found. This short collection observes individual losses and gains through a lens, seeing what’s going, gone, and what unexpected treasures emerge as we walk this untrodden path. In a world of chaos, these poems help us reconnect over common ground, through the shared experiences brought about in these unreal times.  

Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

‘Beyond the Love of Women’ 

Harry Billinge MBE

You’re stuck there cold in a hole 
with bullets popping like corn in your head,
taking down brothers in sheets

and then, flung, sack heavy, 
a boy across your lap,
red berries leaking hot 
and sticky on your arms and fingers 

and he looks at you, not with anguish or fear
but bewilderment; 

as he tightens the hold, 
the whites of his eyes turn to porcelain.

 
And all you can feel, slumped and wet 
as the greying sludge curdles beneath you, is love. 
And the crushing loss of it. 

Lost and Found

You got up by yourself this morning,
put on your own knickers,
said you fancied eggs and bacon.

You went outside – first time in two years,
to breathe the dawn air and
survey the world since you left it.

In a few days, you remembered 
your name, the dog’s, who I was,
that the postman wasn’t your Dad.

You exchanged pleasantries
with the woman next door, no longer 
suspecting her of plotting your murder. 

The hairdresser turned your flat feathers 
into a helmet of curls in the mirror
igniting a glimmer of recognition.

We chucked the grab rails and Complan
drove the zimmer to the tip, turned 
your pill box into earring storage.

Weeks went by, you took the car out,
joined the library, had a stab at calligraphy,
tried your first chai latte. 

Then on Sunday we came home and there 
you were on hands and knees under the table, 
looking for something; you didn’t know what.