(Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash)
Writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. Mostly that’s a difficult question to answer, but this story had a very definite moment of inspiration. It was conceived while doing a Joe Wicks workout in lockdown, which I think is the first time I’ve ever got anything truly satisfying out of exercise. Writing really is 90 per cent perspiration.
I love stories in which the structure complements, comments on and expands the theme and plot. With the HIIT workouts, I quickly realised that the different exercises could provide a workable structure. The ‘Warm Up’ and ‘Cool Down’ provided an obvious beginning and ending, and it was a short step from there to the idea that this could be about the course of a relationship.
Then it was a case of selecting the exercises that could be used as stepping stones in that relationship arc. Some lent themselves very quickly: I saw how I could use ‘Mountain Climbers’ and ‘Plank’ and ‘Butt Kicks’, but I knew I needed something more. That’s where the ‘Russian Twist’ came in.
My dad has never been keen to discuss his childhood and indeed appears to have forgotten almost every detail of his past. I’d picked up bits of information here and there. In particular, I believed that his grandparents were Russian Jews, who came over to England to escape the early twentieth-century pogroms in Russia. I asked him once if he knew anything about this and he said no, though he called his grandmother ‘Bushka’. It may be a stretch to definitively link this to the Russian word babushka, meaning ‘grandmother’, and I may never find out the truth, but it planted a seed that eventually provided a key theme in the story and made it about something deeper than merely keeping fit.
I knew the story worked, but was hesitant to send it out. It takes me so long to write a story that it often feels out of date by the time it’s finished. I didn’t know if anybody would want to read a story about lockdown workouts so long after the lockdowns were over. I was therefore stunned and delighted when the story won the Hammond House International Literary Prize.
You can read the story here (click on the down arrow on the right-hand side of that page to expand the text).
Ian Critchley 