A Writer's Process: Penny Walker

Penny Walker was a shortlisted runner-up in the Wild Words Spring Solstice 2015 Writing Competition with her entry Above Grasmere.

"Although I do a lot of writing for my work, I’m only an occasional creative writer.

This poem records a precious day, when I went on a school trip with my younger daughter.

There’s a secret double meaning in its title. We were ‘above Grasmere’ in the Lake District. But it was also her final year at Grasmere Primary School in Hackney, London. This school trip for families to a namesake beauty spot was a goodbye to primary school because she would soon be ‘above Grasmere’ and moving on to secondary school.

The whole trip was a rite of passage: fun, exciting, and also poignant.

I wanted to capture how I felt about her and about my own changing identity. The first few lines emerged pretty much fully formed, and I scribbled them down. I wasn’t sure that there was any point in trying to write any more, but I took the risk and a few more verses came. The hard work was trying to see whether phrases and ideas that were 100% meaningful and understandable to me, would make sense to a reader who wasn’t inside my head.

I didn’t fully manage to strip it of cliché, but I’m pleased with some of the images and compactness.

When I was happy enough with it, the first person I shared it with was my daughter. After all, it was her story too. She encouraged me to do a final polish and was OK with the idea of me trying to get it published in some way.

And I’m glad it has been. But its importance is very personal - it’s a love letter to my daughter and to the bittersweet aching pride in letting your child leave you behind, beyond your protection, as they have to."

My Creative Process by Charlotte Stevens

Charlotte Stevens was a shortlisted runner-up in the Wild Words Spring Solstice Writing Competition 2015 with her poem About Witches. You can read her work here.

She told me about her creative process...

"I have a preoccupation with form when writing.

I have felt in the past that my writing has to have some kind of established form to be 'valid', and so I have often struggled with trying to capture the ideas and images I want to explore in a formal and recognised structure.

'About Witches' represents a breakthrough for me.

I was working with these ideas relating to dissent and disorder but was trying to write them in an English sonnet form. I liked the contrast, but wrangling the words into the established form was difficult and somehow 'flattened' the work. So I broke it apart. I pulled out lines and messed them up and around, and I felt this freedom to do something different and create something that worked better.

The outcome, this poem, is by no means perfect, but it is different to the way in which I was writing before, and revisiting it influences how I write now.

Since then I have been exploring free verse - still rather obsessively with my syllable counting and metrical forensics! - but it has moved me forward and opened my writing up."

Our Impoverished Lives

Write a non-fiction piece prompted by these words by George Monbiot.

"The closest we get to nature is feeding the ducks in the park, and the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts."

Writing outdoors

At the slightest excuse I unchain myself from my desk, break out of the building, and write in nature. I love to write outdoors because, in the act of writing about it, in the words of American poet, E.E. Cummings, the world becomes ‘mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful’. There is no better feeling than when words canter on the broad savannah, dive deep in the dark ocean, and swoop in the vast blue sky. 

Why are you a writer-in-the wild?

Please write and tell me about it.

Prowling your territory

Go out into your garden, or into a public green space. What is the history of the land you stand on?  Using your knowledge of how the land has been used over time, the evidence of objects you find, and your imagination, write a 1000 word story about it.

The Wild Animal

A visualisation:

Close your eyes and imagine that the writing project you are currently engaged in is a wild animal.

• What animal is it?
• Can you see the whole of its shape and movement, or are you are currently just glimpsing a part of it?
• As you write, imagine following it into its natural territory.
• Where does that take the writing?

Wildness and craziness

Wildness and craziness are not the same thing at all. ‘Wild words’ are connected, contained, channelled, a healthy expression of our thoughts and feelings. ‘Crazy words’ are disconnected, rambling, unfocussed, out of control.

We want our characters and situations to ‘live’, and to ‘jump off the page’. They must, however, do it on our terms, not theirs. 

Look back at the written work you’ve produced over the past month/year/decade(s) (depending on how long you’ve been writing). How often when you’ve written, have you had a sense of being in control of the words, and how often have the words controlled you?

From block to flow

Think for a moment about the word ‘block’.

‘Block’ is a metaphor that has its origins, (like most metaphors) in our embodied physical experience.

• How do you experience writer’s block in your body- as constriction, or tension, or hardness perhaps?
• Where in your body (if anywhere) do you feel it?

Now, think about the word ‘flow’.

• Again, where do you experience flow in your body?
• How would you describe the qualities of it?

Move your attention precisely but gently between the place in your body where you feel block, and the one where you feel flow. By pendulating between the block and the flow in this way you should notice the block gradually start to unwind, or ease.

I’d be fascinated to hear your experiences of undertaking this exercise, if you’d like to put them down in writing and send them to me.