Summer Focus, and Punctuation

Dear Writers, carriers of story, crafters of words, metaphorical creatures, wild ones,

It doesn’t half focus one’s mind, to be sleeping and writing a novel in the woodland, with no water, electricity or wifi until you walk over the fields to the village.

Particularly when you only have only fifteen percent battery, and are watch it ticking down. Such was my summer… Thus no August newsletter, apologies …

There’s a steadiness that, for me, comes with living close to nature, and – relatively speaking – far from ‘civilised’ comforts. Every day needed a clear, step-by-step approach, so that I remembered to cover the basics: filling up water bottles, charging phone and computer, making sure there was food and clean clothes at the yurt.

Blissfully happy there often, but also sometimes close to overwhelm, the only thing to do was to let go of thinking, relax and allow strong feelings to rise, fulfill themselves and pass on. Not to react. Not to embed them. They’re insubstantial anyway. It was a matter of survival.

It was like that as well with the writing; in fact, that always is my creative process. Once we start to believe or invest in the voices that tell us one moment that our writing is the best thing ever, and the next that it’s the worst thing ever, once we do anything other than just engage with the physical process, once we stop trusting that our writer-human-storytelling-meaning-making writer know where it’s going – then we are lost.

Trust, trust, trust…

Take the writerly question of use of colons and semi-colons, not to mention em dashes, speech marks, and all those other small black inky things. My current, novel-related task relates to checking all of that. For me, this stage is like weeding a garden, giving a haircut, or focusing a camera lens.

We want to know the standard, traditional, technical advice around punctuation, of course. However, if we get too tight and effortful around trying to apply certain guidelines, we can lose touch with our gut instinct: our holistic, embodied connection with the rhythm and sound, the poetry and the story within the words.

Once we know the rules, it’s much better to relax – as if in the cosy space of reading, or being read to, in bed, for example – and feel into contact with the symbols on the page.

Those symbols have a natural rising and falling, an instinctual pace, connected to the breathing patterns of the spoken word.

We raise tension in a story via pace, repetition of motifs, and the addition of pauses at key moments. Just like in music. Just like in speech – think of the pause moment before the punch-line in a joke.

I have to drop into my body to know. Then the answer as to whether, for example, a semi-colon should go here, or there – aided by the bird-song, and the breeze in the trees – is clear.

I’m back from the woods now, and wishing you all an inspire and inspiring writing month. I hope that any restrictions on movement you’re experiencing in these unusual times, is giving rise to an increased appreciation of the natural world on your doorstep, an opportunity to train your observing eye, and time to explore the vast, untapped territory of the imagination.

This is the lead article from the September 2020 Newsletter. If you’d like to receive the writing prompt that accompanies this article, sign up on the website homepage, for the Monthly Newsletter.

I’d be delighted to hear about your experiences . You can comment below, write in the Facebook group, or contact me privately via bridgetholding@wildwords.org