Debbie Bennett says Button It!
Buttons and fasteners. Connections. Things that hold things together. Or just an embellishment?
My daughter bought me a long fluffy cardigan for Christmas a couple of years ago. She’s very tuned into my dress style and knows what I like. It’s one of those cardis that thinks it might be a jacket, or even a dressing gown in the right circumstances and at this time of year, it’s rarely far from me. But it needed buttons. Not that I like to button it up fully, but it can get annoying when it constantly slips off your shoulders.
So what are buttons? Connectors, fasteners, embellishments? Sometimes I feel like I’m a button in my local community – connecting people together, volunteering and helping out. Our village started a monthly pensioners’ lunch, so I find myself in my Royal British Legion T shirt, hair tied back and serving lasagne and chips, clearing tables, washing up and getting on the other side of the bar!
No matter how good a writer you are - you can pen the world's greatest manuscript or the next Great American/British Novel - but if nobody ever gets to read it, you're only halfway there. Not that there are any issues with writing just for personal pleasure, but many of us at least hope for readers beyond our family & friends - to connect to other readers, strangers even. To bring them into our stories, our worlds and our minds.
No belt and no buttonholes. And it was machine-knitted. Handy as I am with a sewing machine, I’m not competent enough to make holes in a knit without the whole thing unravelling. So I bought some fasteners I could sew on to both sides and now it’s perfect!
Fast forward a year or so and I’m mooching around one of my favourite charity shops while killing time in town. And I find the most gorgeous deep red velour winter coat. In a charity shop but brand new still with tags and leaping off the rail screaming Buy me. So I did, obviously, got it home and then saw that the buttons were cheap brown plastic. Nothing that can’t be rectified by a trip to the sewing shop and the purchase of some snazzy red buttons instead. Doubtless it’ll be well into next winter before I think about actually sewing them on and by then, I will probably have lost them …
And what on earth does this have to do with writing? I think connections have everything to do with the writing industry, if not the actual writing. Although words connect to form sentences and sentences connect to form paragraphs. And so on. We need connections to sell our books - word of mouth, bookshops, talks and events and that's only the surface-level connections. The ones underneath - under the skin - are much harder to forge, but so much more rewarding.
And that's personal. Letting somebody into your head is giving them access to the secret part of you that creates stories. That's a connection on the deepest level. And that's what matters.
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