Hello, My Name is Anna and I'm a Nostalgia Addict

But could my guilty pleasure help my writing?

I don’t read enough books. I don’t. I also don’t write enough books. I don’t. Why? Because I spend too much time doom-scrolling on my phone, that is, looking through reels on Instagram, scanning my timeline on Facebook, sending memes to my friends.

Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve got me, you have achieved your goal, you have made me less productive than I was before you came along almost two decades ago. You have got rich on my procrastination. I wonder what I might have been if you and your friends hadn’t created social media? Could I have been your boss by now? We shall never know.

My current addiction – and hence the headline – are those nostalgia pages on Facebook. Have you seen them? 70s 80s Kids UK, 80s Memory Lane, Back to the Eighties etc etc. I can lose whole evenings to them.

“Ooh, I had that Care Bears wallpaper!”

“Oh, I can still smell those crumbly, foil-wrapped bath cubes that came in my Sindy vanity case…”

“Ooh deeley boppers/tinsel wigs/lametta on the Christmas tree/soap-on-a-rope/penny sweets/halfpenny sweets I had those!”

The hours I waste, and yet…

As it is February 1st today, I can tell you the theme for this month: Desire. And not just the sexy kind, but desire in terms of our wants – as a writer, as a character, as a reader, as a human because you should know by now that I tend to blend writing craft and real life. But, yes, we are also going to talk about the sexy kind, in fact, I’m just putting together a short segment (don’t worry, not too scary) of erotic writing instruction for our Write With Me Club on Monday. Don’t forget if you would like to join us on Monday evening at 7pm GMT, you will need to upgrade to receive the zoom link, and you can do that here:

A few years ago, I attended an erotic writing workshop with Costa Prize winning author Monique Roffey, the reason being that I had always felt really …. well, embarrassed to write sex scenes, I mean, aren’t you just describing how you have sex on the page? But chances are if you want to write about relationships, you’re probably going to need to write about sex, and I like to do things that scare me, so I took a deep breath and attended an all-day course in London.

I was going through my notes the other day from this workshop for inspiration of what I might impart to you about writing sex next week, and I found this that I had written down:

“Remember that memories are compressed and you have to rub them a little, awaken them with friction to bring them to life.”

I assume this wisdom came from Monique herself, and because I spend so much time scrolling in those 70s 80s Kids UK groups, it put me in mind of those scratch and sniff stickers from the eighties. Do you remember them? It’s as if our brains are like that, that memories that we think we have long buried just need a little scratch, a little agitation, some ‘friction’ as Monique suggested to bring them floating back up to the surface.

When I see my Care Bears wallpaper from the mid-eighties, I am there again in my bedroom on our council estate that I loved.

I can see the layout of my furniture, the cream laquer and pale wood veneer of my MFI chest of drawers, how they were modular so you could change them all round and they snaked the whole length of two walls, and under the window which opened not vertically but horizontally (how did more kids not fall out of those windows in the eighties?).

I can remember the brass bedframe that my dad made for me, and the tiny airing cupboard in my bedroom which became my darkroom as a teenager where I squeezed myself in to open black and white film cartridges and push them onto the spool in the pitch black so I could develop them.

All that from just picturing that Care Bears wallpaper. I haven’t thought about that in years. I think there is a safety in nostalgia, it takes us back to a time when it felt as if life were more simple, that we didn’t have the same responsibilities, or rather we had none.

I heard recently that in Russia, adults are dressing up and recreating their pioneer clubs famous in communist times – grown adults donning the red neckerchiefs they had when they were eight, nine, ten years old, and marching around like boy and girl scouts again.

Covid times stripped us of responsibilities, the state told us when to do, when to go out, when not to go out, who we could see. Could it be that we got used to opting out of decision making? Did we regress somehow in those years? But look at how nostalgic the British public is - we want our sovereignty back, those who voted Brexit said. Donald Trump promised to make America great again.

Politicians know the emotional pull nostalgia has on us, but let’s not allow them to manipulate us for their ill-gotten gains, we should tune into that too in our writing, we just need to agitate those memories a little and up they’ll come, to the surface.

So here’s an exercise why don’t you give it a go. See if any of these images bring back memories for you, or have a look at some old photographs.

Or, close your eyes and walk yourself around the footprint of your childhood family home, or start with one detail of your childhood bedroom and see just what comes to the surface and how much you remember. Do some automatic writing if you can, just for that five or ten minutes, write down everything you remember, don’t let your pen nib leave the page for the time you’ve set yourself on your phone, or on a clock. I think you might surprise yourself at what memories are there if you just agitate them a little.

I’d love to read what memories come up for you in the comments.