The Hole In The Wall

When we write we set up a world in which the reader views our story through a series of frames.

Writing is an on-going process of choosing what places, people, objects, and information to withhold or reveal, and in what detail. We need to make these choices according to the effect we hope to achieve. Do we want to build tension, raise drama, or release laughter?

It’s not unlike a series of film shots. In one frame a man walks down a dark street alone. In the next the mugger is there, arm round his neck, tugging at the bag. Surprised, shocked? I hope so. The effect is created by bringing something from outside the frame, in, unexpectedly.

Thinking about frames reminded me that one of the principles of Japanese garden design, is called ‘shakkei’ which literally means ‘borrowed scenery’.  

Here, a frame of trees or fencing, or perhaps a hole made in a wall, is used to capture an element from outside the garden that is poignant, or emotive, and make it part of the composition.

When I think of this idea, I always think of the maze that is the South Devon lanes. The hedges on either side of the small roads are six feet high. I drive along, seeing nothing except the road, until, quite suddenly, there’s a gate. The view opens up and I’m both flying free and finding my feet simultaneously. Open fields stretching to the sea, and endless sky. Breath-taking.

In the spirit of shakkei, I went for a walk yesterday.  

Going up the hill, and round the corner I was immediately aware of what was hidden and then gradually revealed. The first frame was a square of green wire in a fence. Inside it, the far mountains. The wood of a child’s swing created a moving frame, the view ever-altering. There were also caravan windows, the scratched Perspex distorting the sunlight and abstracting the view.  And then finally, and most wonderfully, in an upstanding slab of concrete, a small round hole revealed the pink glow of the sky, so ethereal in contrast with the hard material that enabled it.

I see now there’s a reason that galleries frame paintings. Things just look better through a frame.

The Weekly Prompt

This week, borrow some scenery, and create your own shakkei. Go for a walk outside and look for natural frames. Alternatively, construct a simple frame and take it outside with you.

When you notice a natural frame, or actively frame something- what does it bring to your experience of the environment? What effect does it have on the reader to describe that view in words? Choose different frames, and notice how your choices about what you emphasise, and what you leave out, change the story you tell.

First published June 7th 2013

Inspired By Nature: Sue Johnson

My work and the natural world are closely linked. I am fortunate to have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia where I interpret some words and names as a specific taste.

For instance, ‘world’ tastes of pink blancmange, ‘feather’ tastes of whipped cream and ‘thunder’ tastes of thick porridge. These sensations never change and can’t be switched off!

Since 1st January 2013, I’ve written a poem a day every day. I discovered that, even on days when time was a problem, I could always find a few minutes to scribble the draft of a poem in my notebook – usually sitting in a car park and watching the clouds or focusing on a bird or a tree. Some of these poems have gone on to be published in small press magazines – often with minimal alteration. Others have been developed into longer poems or they’ve formed the nucleus of a short story or a scene from a novel.

A friend of mine keeps a nature journal which includes photographs, pressed flowers, sketches, feathers, leaves and short poems. It occurs to me that this would be a brilliant idea for developing a series of story boards for a short story collection.

Obviously, not all my poems ‘work.’ This doesn’t matter. I have great fun recycling them.

If you fancy trying this, it involves scissors and glue and you can create more than one version. Print off a copy of a poem that hasn’t worked. Cut it up. Add six new words, a colour and a sound. Reposition the words. Play around with them until you’ve got something you’re happy with then glue them in place.

At the end of his life, the artist Picasso said he regretted not playing more. I’m determined not to let this happen to me.

If I do get stuck with a writing project I find that a walk amongst trees or by water helps me to sort the problem.  I’m also lucky to have a summerhouse in the garden where I hear blackbirds on the roof and the scent of lavender and honeysuckle drifts in through the open door.

Nature is playful. Look at the way the clouds move. Look at the common names for wild flowers – what could you do with ‘enchanter’s nightshade’, ‘fox and cubs’ and lady’s smocks?

Listen to the sound of the wind and the different birdsongs.

For a long time now, I’ve looked on the words I create as being like a seed bank. They will yield a harvest when the time is right.  

www.writers-toolkit.co.uk

Movement and Rhythm

In ‘The Poetic Principle’, Edgar Allen Poe says,

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

Poets out there will probably feel comfortable with that definition. Prose writers perhaps less so. But the line between poetry and prose is a blurred one, and those of us who write prose would also do well to embrace it.

Virginia Woolf describes how,

A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it ... 

Our job then is to transfer that life, movement, and rhythm into words on a page, that others may know it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his journal, presents us with a fine example of how it reads when you do it well. This is his description of the movement and rhythm of a wave.

Aug. 13 — Heavy seas: we walked along the sea wall to the Kennaway Tunnel to watch them. The wave breaks in this order — the crest of the barrel 'doubling' (that, a boatman said, is the word in use) is broken into a bush of foam, which, if you search it, is a lace and tangle of jumping sprays; then breaking down these grow to a sort of shaggy quilt tumbling up the beach; thirdly this unfolds into a sheet of clear foam and running forward it leaves and laps the wave reaches its greatest height upon the shore and at the same time its greatest clearness and simplicity; after that, raking on the shingle and so on, it is forked and torn and, as it commonly has a pitch or lurch to one side besides its backdraught, these rents widen; they spread and mix and the water clears and escapes to the sea transparent and keeping in the end nothing of its white except in long dribble-bubble strings which trace its set and flow.

Wild words indeed.

Wild words have a broad range of expression, and vocabulary. The verbs are strong, and varied. They mostly stand alone.

When describing a person’s passage down a street, that person doesn’t just run, they canter, charge, and gallop. When describing their conversation, they don’t just talk, they squeak, they howl, and they rant. Strong verbs rarely need an adjective. Adjectives are used with great prudence.

As living, breathing creatures, Wild words are flexible and malleable. The wild storyteller plays with rhythm for strongest effect. A rhythm can be said to be a ‘regular recurrence or pattern in time’.

Wild words have rhythms, as varied as the gaits of the numerous wild creatures.

Rhythm can be achieved in many ways: including by choice of sentence length, by use of white space, by assonance, resonance and rhyme.

The basis of their rhythm is iambic, the di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM that spoken English has always moved to. The wild storyteller knows that when these rules of internal rhythm are broken without good reason, the result can be clotted prose, writing that does not flow.

Wild words play skilfully with listener and reader expectations, noting the effect that a change of rhythm has on those receiving the story. 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

Write about water: the sea, a lake, river, pond, or rain storm. Describe it, in poetry or prose, with precision. Look closely, and be curious. Can you reflect and heighten all its varying moods  through the use of rhythm in your words? 
 

A Writer's Process: Michael Loveday

I’d like to explore here how we, as writers, might recover when faced with a creative trough.

It involves a confession – about three years ago writing and I had fallen out of love.  

What had begun as an adventure, one that easily seduced me, had now dissipated into a series of irritable, familiar and tiresome habits. I was disenchanted with a writing process that I didn’t relish, and disenchanted with my end-product. In short, I was thinking of giving up. The challenges and highs of completing an MA and my first poetry pamphlet in the same summer had left me, afterwards, wandering in something like a desert sprawling with tumbleweed. I could almost hear the wind blowing past my ears. Is that it? What do I do now? Where the hell is everybody?

What follows is an outline of the remedies I sought. They may not all work for others; but perhaps some ideas will connect if you’re ever going through an uncreative time.

(1)   I loathed the results when I put pen to paper. A voice kept telling me I wasn’t creative enough. The writing I admired most, I realised, was associated with a quality of playfulness – one that I now seemed to lack. Michael Atavar has said: “We have this idea that creativity must be a product – a book, a performance, an event. I believe that creativity is a process. It might result in some of these external things, but its main purpose is to develop an attitude within ourselves.” I decided I wanted to make my process as slow, meandering, playful, fertile as possible – as if I were fermenting some fine wine to sip in the future.  (Later, I encountered the poet Liz Berry’s description of her writing process. I drew huge inspiration from this rich, leisurely experimentation).  https://poetryschool.com/poems/sow/.

(2)   I realised that I associated pure creativity most strongly with the visual arts. Look at kids! – they’re painting before they write. I admire artists for doodling away in notebooks, making preparatory sketches. So I bought an A4 artist’s sketchbook for my drafting – cream paper, unlined. I turned the page to landscape, starting in the centre (forgetting about order and position), and filled the page outwards with my pen. I felt much closer to my creative self. 

The drafting process.

(3)   I reminded myself that other writers readily confessed to writing awful stuff. Ann Lamott labels it “the shitty first draft.” https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf

Raymond Carver talked about how his first drafts “are dreadful”; how he regularly went through between 10 and 30 drafts to get a piece of writing right. 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver

I became increasingly fascinated with the way it was possible, through patient drafting, to turn base metal into… if not gold, then at least something more interesting than base metal.

More than ever before, most of the words I wrote were “wasted” – edited out; revised to the point that they were no longer the same; or seemed so embarrassing that they were hidden in a drawer. I followed a new 80/20 rule: the last 20% of a piece of writing, I told myself, takes up 80% of the time.

These three seemed to offer a key. In addition -

(4)   I hunted back through several years’ worth of old, abandoned drafts and experiments from my first few years of writing – I’d been industrious when I first started, burning with enthusiasm, before I realised how awful I was, but I’d kept all my old drafts. I sifted for places where the writing had a touch of sparkle. I didn’t find as much as I’d hoped. But I did surprise myself to see this other person, buzzing with ideas, accumulating reams of material. Had I really, once, been producing so much stuff?

I remembered the deal Julia Cameron urges us to make – Universe, look after the quality; I’ll look after the quantity.

(5)   I started using my iPhone to jot down poem / story concepts the moment they sparked, whether memories of my own life, or fiction ideas. Barely a sentence, or a couple of words each time – without saying “oh, I’ll remember that later”. Gradually the list accumulated until I had a large resource of prompts I could go to when it was writing time – just pick the one I fancied most that day, and go.

(6)   In a topsy-turvy experiment, I started using a computer for editing, instead of my beloved pen. I found I was tougher when I typed things in presentable black and white, and this seemed to push my writing to its benefit (though with drafting, I still rely on pen and A4 sketchbook, where I want access to first thoughts, as free as possible from the inner critic).

(7)   I held my nerve more and shoved first drafts “in a drawer” for longer before tinkering. Maybe not quite the mythical month that some writers argue first drafts should be set aside for. But a couple of weeks, at least. Just to see things genuinely fresh.

(8)   And I started a writing journal. A third one, in fact – to my shame, I am a serial journaller, already possessing a traditional diary (where I wrote twice a week), and a reflective learning journal for teaching (once a week). I nattered in my writing journal whenever it suited me. I babbled about: process; how I felt about edits I’d made; potential new edits to try;  sequencing and structuring of material for fantasised poem / story collections; news of rejections (boo! hiss!) or acceptances (hooray!); books I’d been reading, plays and films I’d seen; creativity generally; quotes from books that I admired. Etc, etc. Anything that nourished and consoled the process.

That uncreative tumbleweed: it’ll haunt you if you let it.

There is a long list of other things one can try (and many I’ve stuck with) to escape from it – walking, jogging, meditating, eating better food, going to see films, spending more time with other writers, time with loved ones doing anything but writing, experimenting with a drastic new haircut, smashing your fists against rocks (er – hang on – maybe forget about those last two).

In the end I have, I think, settled in a better place in terms of process: I’ve decided that being a writer demands a mingling of doubt and faith that is disconcerting to experience, but one that I can live with for now.

If you don’t doubt your work, don’t interrogate your themes and narratives, worry about your sentences, you may never push your writing enough until it is ready to share publically (if that’s what you want to do – admittedly a big if).

If you don’t have long-term faith in what you are trying to achieve, you will falter at hurdles – when obstacles materialise in the writing, or when rejections appear, or when low confidence risks leading you into the desert.

Maybe, in fact, negotiating the intersection of these two opposing forces – doubt and faith – is the mission of the writer.

In other words, if you spend enough time thinking “it’s not good enough”, it has a chance of becoming “good enough”. It’s the kind of logical and existential paradox that will trigger cycles of crisis and recovery. (May all artists and writers be creatively fruitful in the land of their suffering! Ha!) But the reality is more mundane: one step at a time, what if I cut this word here, or change that one, or add this one? Would it read more strangely, more beautifully, more powerfully? Can I at least have some fun trying?

 www.michaelloveday.co.uk

Not Enough Time

The year-long mentoring scheme starts in October, and I’ve been talking to people about it: the commitment, the challenges, and the benefits.
 
Some writers have signed up without hesitation because it’s the opportunity they’ve been waiting for to birth that long dreamed-of book-child.
 
There have also been people who’ve sent an initial, enthusiastic YES, followed by another email hard on the heels of the first, qualifying that with an  umm… err… perhaps I responded too quickly…
 
Their reason for changing their mind is usually a variation on the theme of I just don’t think I’ll have the time. They often add, I’ll come back to you next year. I’ll have more time and energy when…
 
a) I give up my job
b) my children leave home
c) the divorce has gone through
d) I retire
e) my health is better
 
Now, if you’re one of those in-then-out-of-the-scheme people, just watch what’s happening to you now.  Are you beginning to sink in your seat, embarrassed, or shamed?
 
If so, is that because you feel you responded without thinking in that first email? Or because, in sending the second email, you fear you’re failing in your writerly quest to get that book finished, and out there?  Or is it just because you changed your mind?
 
To allay one concern, I’ll say, as the receiver of those two emails, that it’s no problem for me if you change your mind like that. I believe it’s a basic human right to re-think something.
 
I’ll also say, unequivocally, that if you responded to that first email without thinking, that’s brilliant. Do that more. Expose your instinctual animal self more.
 
On the subject of failing; the only person you make a contract with when you decide to write a book, is yourself. So, the only person you can fail, is yourself.  A feeling of failure is only useful for one thing, for making us examine at how we’ve set up our expectations, in order to renegotiate them with ourselves. 
 
The most important job for us as writers, arguable more important than the act of writing itself, is to raise our confidence, and then raise it some more. To keep remembering we are skilled in the art of sitting down in front of the blank page. That means hitting our own targets. It’s almost irrelevant whether that’s writing for four hours a day, or fifteen minutes a week.  If we keep doing it, one day we find it’s done.
 
When you’ve negotiated a realistic contract with yourself, start saying no to the I’m a failure line in your head. Life is tough enough, why make it harder by beating yourself up?
 
I’m very grateful indeed to the in-then-out-of-the-scheme-people because they point up an internal message that sabotages so many of us writers- I don’t have time.
 
I know very well that feeling of overwhelm when thinking about fitting writing into a busy schedule of work, childcare and domestic tasks. However, I’d say that the idea that we’ll have more time in the future is largely an illusion.
 
Reality check 1: there is enough time to write.
 
Reality check 2: you will never have more time than you do now.
 
We can invent all sorts of stories about it, but actually, none of us have any idea what the future will hold. Chances are it will also be busy. Ever noticed how human beings like to fill time in any way they can?
 
My general line is that we need to know how to deal with that feeling of overwhelm, of constriction, of too-much-ness, and write despite the busyness, rather than waiting for more space. Scary? Yes, I know.
 
Perhaps this message from Stephen King, via Neil Gaiman will help,

“I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time to write.”
 
So much more than we expect can be achieved, if we put down the procrastinating.

 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

Here’s a challenge for you:  if you have 15 minutes spare in a day, how about using that to write, rather than to think about when that next clear hour will come up? Do that every day for a month.  

Between The Lines

Saturday’s Vide Grenier (village jumble sale) turned up an exciting find. For one euro I bought a letter, unopened. It bore the stamp of the German authorities, a Polish place name, and the date 1942. 

Seventy years after its intended reading, I sliced into the envelope. Inside was a single folded sheet of notepaper, still crisp and white. The spidery writing was blobbed with the uneven ink of a fountain pen.  My mediocre grasp of French didn’t stand a chance.

In the three days before a friend came over and translated it, several war epics played out in my mind. Occupied territory… wartime secrets…code breaking…a letter stolen… the intended reader dead…

I was on the edge of my seat when it was eventually read out to me. The writer talked about the price of bread, and how far advanced the spring was. And then, well, that was it. Not one reference to the war, or the political climate. Not a mention of fear, hatred, or the thrill of lives lived close to death.

It said nothing, and yet it said everything- about the censorship, the restriction of free speech, and the monotony that are the marks of living under occupation. It made me think about how much is revealed by the absence of words on a page. Often absence is more telling than presence.

When we write, we carefully compose our ink marks. Perhaps we should also consider how to use the white spaces; the no man’s land of paragraph breaks, the pauses between words, the blank page at the end of a chapter.

Technically speaking, white space gives the reader a moment to breathe, to process, to reflect. Paragraph breaks signal changes in location, or allow us to take leaps in time. But we can make use of the absence of words on a more subtle level also. 

We could, for example, have our character be asked a question, and reply only with silence. Or, our character could choose not to mention a huge subject in their life. The ‘elephant in the room’ has a powerful impact.

If we can just look past the proliferation of symbols we will see that there is wildness hiding in the shadows of our words.  

The Weekly Prompt:

Look at your page of writing. Instead of focusing on the black ink marks, be interested in the emptiness between the words. Notice how the white sky of the page wraps perfectly around your letters. How the ground of it supports them. What is being spoken by the absence of words?

When you next write a story or poem, have the intention to allow the white page to reveal. In this way the reader will discover the answers to their questions, rather than being a passive recipient. If they are spoon-fed the words, you deprive them of the excitement of the exploration.

This article was first published on May 4th 2013

Wild Words: What Are We Frightened Of?

The important thing to know is, that just because you think you want to free those wild words, doesn’t mean there won’t be whole raft of ways in which you will unconsciously try to avoid doing that very thing.

Cutting away just as tension, emotion or drama heightens is one example. And there’s a whole sub-category of ways in which you will try to sabotage your relationship with me in our group or individual sessions. Don’t worry, I won’t take it personally.

We think we want to live and write in a way that’s unfettered, spontaneous, more instinctual, but it’s an unfamiliar way of being. Human beings, in general, cling to what is familiar, even if it’s unpleasant.

We’re frightened of the unknown. Added to that there’s the terror we feel when getting in touch with those strong emotions is offered to us as a possibility.

Be reassured, I will never go storming in and strip away the strategies, the defence mechanisms that you’ve unconsciously spent years erecting. I will never force you to face what lies behind. Freeing the tiger that way, might mean the tiger turns around and eats you, or me, or us both. No, we must be much cleverer than that, like a good tracker. A good tracker understands and works with his environment; he doesn’t see it as an enemy.

It may be that some, or all of your strategies no longer serve you well, but it’s important to acknowledge that your body and mind are doing the best they can to keep you well and safe, within the range of possibilities open to them.

So our starting point is to respect our own creativity, strength and resilience in this respect. It’s easy to be clear about what we have to gain by freeing those wild words, but it’s what you have to gain by NOT freeing them that is keeping you stuck. That’s what we need to work to understand. What is it that you have to lose?

This blog was first published on October 31st 2012

The Fly

So, as everyday, I’m sitting in a room, inside my house, and my mind is inside that other box that is my computer.

There are three levels of separation between me and the world. The walls are white, textureless, the floor is equally flat.

The desk is polished wood. The books are ordered on the shelf. The extractor fan in the kitchen has been on, so nothing smells of anything anymore. The double-glazed window is closed. Outside, who knows what temperature it is. The front door of my house is locked. Nothing can get in, or out - not even noise.

This is my controlled environment, where I bring life to my characters and their world, where I CREATE. Except I don’t.

I stare at the flat white walls, drum my fingers on the smooth polished desk, scuff my feet on the varnished floorboards.

And then, the final straw. God only knows how, but a fly gets in, and flies around. Except, (in retrospect) it doesn’t just fly. It completes a slalom course across the room. The buzzing powers in and fades as it flashes and jerks its way towards me. It zigzags, sketching a circle around me, then it careers straight at me and whispers in my ear. It smells of dog shit and rancid oil.

It distracts me. I try to ignore it and get on with my work.

Now it steers a straight course for the window, and accelerates, a Kamikaze pilot on a mission. It hurls itself against the glass, and rebuffed, soars upward, arcing. Close to the ceiling it cuts its engine, and drops towards the light. The silence of the drone.

This time I am ready, hate-filled, with a rolled up copy of the previous draft of my novel. They make hollow contact. The fly spins, and slides inanimate down the windowpane.

What a relief. Now I can get back to being creative-not.

This sad story happened some time back. These days I’m beginning to learn that are many more original and impactful words for ‘fly’, but only if we can learn to see the fly, so to speak. I wonder how many thousands of times I’ve killed the teacher of vitality and creativity because I thought the answer lay somewhere else?

This article was first published on September 20th 2012