The Surprise In The Dark

The other night I walked the fifteen minutes from the main road to our house, carrying a plastic shopping bag. It’s a steep, winding mountain track.

It had been a while since I’d trod that path in the pitch dark of a moonless night. As I walked, I remembered the extraordinary peace of being alone in the blackness, in a completely silent place, under a million stars. 

The next moment I realised that of course I wasn’t alone. There were rustlings in the undergrowth: hare, badgers, or deer perhaps. There were the creeping shadows of trees. There was also the wild boar. He snorted loud in my ears, a noise something like the exclamation of a surprised pig. Then he turned a panicked circle in the undergrowth close by. I knew the great size of him by the heavy cracking of the saplings. They are big, wild boar, and can attack when they feel threatened. Instinctively, I struck at the plastic bag as noisily as I could. He orientated to where I was, and racketed away into the bush.

I am pleased to have stepped a little outside my comfort zone that night. My daytimes these days are spent wrestling with updating the technology that runs the Wild Words ecourse. The whirring, the rattling, the turning cogs of my overloaded brain drown out every other sound.

There is so much movement inside my own head at the moment, that everything outside seems still and dead in comparison.  No wonder we human beings get lonely. We think we are the only creatures living, breathing, moving.

Last night, my brain stopped still in the presence of the boar, and I re-connected with something bigger. And somehow, when I met the boar’s presence with the striking of the bag, I turned a little to face my own fear, and my world expanded, just a bit.

This article was first published on January 17th 2013

A Writer's Process: Sebastian Lander

I don’t know whether I should call my writing a process – it’s more a linguistic version of throwing paint at a canvas when I have the time, and inspiration deigns to drop in.

I write sporadically, often at the kitchen table, even though we have a quiet studio at the end of the garden. Being in a space where there’s the opportunity for distraction somehow lends energy to my writing. And I can always put my fingers in my ears when I need to focus.

Sometimes I tap at my laptop in bed, reference books spread around me. It feels indulgent, an emotion I am ironically trying to indulge. My writing has the tendency to slip down the list, in favour of seemingly more productive priorities.

 

I have worked with words for a number of years. That question, ‘Have you got a book in you?’ has long been in the back of my head and, on occasion, on other people’s lips.

It’s only now that I am trying to get that book out, and I don’t even know if it will be any good.

Currently I am researching and writing about a character in Elizabethan England. The research part threatens to stretch endlessly into the future, unless I am careful. Meanwhile, fact and fiction are locked in a gladiatorial wrestling match in my head, fact holding itself up as truth and fiction championing freedom. I am learning to make room for both.

I try to visit as many places as I can which will enable me to resurrect the past. Lines pop into my head and I write them on my iPhone, puzzle pieces to be later worked up into a hopefully faithful 16th century picture. When I am writing, I light an incense stick. For me, the smell evokes everything Tudor, bringing with it the nostalgia of childhood visits to historic houses.

 

I find that I have lots of ideas and can really visualise how I want my writing to read in my head. When it comes to fingertips on keys, it doesn’t always match up.

And then I start labouring over the language, which can weigh it down.

I have fixed on finishing my book by the time I am 40. Just completing it will be an achievement in itself, let alone anything else. Hopefully, those splodges on canvas will eventually take some sort of meaningful form.

The 'New' Nature Writing

Wild Words at Swindon Festival of Literature 

It’s the beginning of the season of festivals of literature, and writers’ summer schools, in the UK.

 In the last two weeks I’ve presented my work in Chipping Campden and Swindon. At both festivals I felt warmed by the generosity of organisers, and the passion of my workshop participants.
 
In London, with a spare moment between commitments, I decided that what I wanted to do most in the world was to spend leisurely time in a gigantic bookshop with comfy chairs and a café. Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus was on my route, and fitted the bill very nicely.
 
Once upon a time, not that long ago, to find fiction, or non-fiction, that took connection with nature as a theme, I would have been crawling into the most obscure sections of the bookshop and dusting off cobwebs. No more.
 
Imagine my delight when centre-stage on the ground floor, and featured in the front window, were books collected under the shining title ‘New Nature Writing’.
 
But what exactly is ‘new nature writing’? In an article in The New Statesman, Robert Macfarlane (something of a king in this emerging literary genre), defines it well. Read here.
 
It has, as its core value, an appreciation that human beings are animals, that we are animals among other animals. It values community over commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, and the deep over the shallow.
 
It turns out that at Wild Words we’ve been trailblazing. The kind of writing many of us practice, is selling like hot cakes. We’ve become a trend. That makes me very happy. I’m happy that people who make a choice to cultivate an appreciation of the natural world around them, and to record it, are now considered amongst the coolest people you can meet (didn’t we always know it!)
 
I spent a glorious day in that bookshop, fuelled by carrot cake and Earl Grey, sifting through a pile of (as yet unbought, and untarnished) ‘new nature writing’ books.
 
What’s exciting is how broad, deep and wide the genre is. It takes in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. It fuses nature writing, travel writing, philosophy and psychology. (For specific examples, see Macfarlane’s article).  An interesting strand is that of the memoir writers, such as Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun. These writers have turned to nature in times of difficulty and disillusionment, and have found it has everything to offer.
 
There can be a perception that nature writing is a little ‘tame’. The pastoral poetry tradition, that can be traced back to the Greeks, and extended into and through Renaissance England, idealised rural life and landscapes. It is partly, if not mostly, responsible for that view. 
 
Central to what I communicate with Wild Words, is that writing inspired by contact with nature can be imbued with a force that goes way beyond that. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the beauty and majesty of nature. Recognition of its power to soothe us, and restore us to health is sorely needed. However, the new nature writing is much more than that. Rightly so, given we human beings dig ourselves ever deeper into a hole, in relationship to That Which Sustains Life.

It’s groundbreaking, thought-provoking, politically challenging, society changing. It’s awe inspiring stuff.  It connects people. It’s a route to re-find the animal in us. The wild.
 
Not everyone who comes to Wild Words is interested in the genre of ‘nature-writing’ and that’s fine. Every skill we hone here is applicable to all writing in all genres. But, maybe, with this new take on an ancient tradition in writing, those of us who are interested to try their hand at it, can come out the shadows.
 
We’re no longer regarded as something akin to train spotters, we’re cooler than Madonna.
 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

Those of us who choose to spend time in nature, consider it normal. It isn’t. Most people only read about it in books. There’s even a term for the wide range of problems that can result from the modern phenomenon of dislocation from our environment- Nature Deficit Disorder.
 
Have you had contact and experiences in nature that have formed or informed you, or which have echoed other themes in your life? If so, that gives you something unique to say. Write about it. For those who haven’t. 

 

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