The Writual of the First Kiss

In a previous post I mentioned going to a talk about being a poet, given by the Royal Society of Literature. It was a fascinating evening -- I always feel breathless with excitement when I'm in the company of other writers -- perhaps it is the collective unconscious crowding in, or the glinting danger of our shared obsession -- whatever; it always leaves me feeling high.

One of the speakers quoted D. H. Lawrence: "The cost of a first kiss is more than you have to give." It's a phrase which has been resonating with me ever since.  That what am I letting myself in for? tremor turning into the quivering intoxication of what the hell, it'll be worth it.

The reason that Lawrence's remark has been quietly stewing in my head is because I think it applies to writing as well as kissing. Both of them are compulsive, addictive activities, so there's no point in telling you not to write if the spell is already cast, but perhaps it is worth pointing out that there is a cost: the satisfaction of writing itself is intense, but it requires an enormous input of time, thought and energy.  You need to have faith in yourself, because recognition from the outside world is hard to come by. And don't imagine that it will earn you much  - the finished work is often its own reward.

Don't misinterpret this for pessimism -- it's intended to give you a realistic steer.  And after all, first kisses...first kisses...whoever could resist?

When the Words Won't Come...

I am writing this sitting at my desk in my house-shaped shed, complete with roof tiles made from recycled plastic bottles. 

Blossom is sparking in the tangle of gardens which spills down the hill.  I can hear birdsong (and builders, shouting).  It should be perfect, and in a way it is, but because it's my first day properly back at work it feels freighted with expectation.

In every sense it's like sitting in front of a blank page -- my little shed a literal Writer's Block: I'm already conscious of the pressure to deserve it.

So, how to cope with writer's block of the literary kind?

• Give yourself permission not to write anything at all -- go for a walk, hoover the house, have a cup of coffee.
• Do some kind of desk work that is not writing, to break yourself in gently -- pay bills, respond to e-mails, that sort of thing.
• Gaze out of the window, and gaze, and gaze, until something comes to you.
• Write down the first thought that enters your head and then pursue it, writing and writing  - it doesn't matter what -- until the flow comes.
• Write about how it feels not to be able to write.  Write about why you can't write, and see what it reveals to you.
• Outstare the blank page; sit in front of it, obstinately; face it down.  Make yourself write, even if it is rubbish, even if it feels like punishment; persist.
• Blog...

PS Books arranged - it took me hours

Silence is....Any Number of Things

Am conscious of deafening silence on blog front this week -- put it down to me still being deskless, although that is all about to change as this weekend I'll be moving fully and completely into my beautiful house-shaped shed.

Silence is a rich seam to mine when you are writing. It's not just the interesting spaces which are filled with all that is not said  - although what people keep to themselves, and why, is a source of endless fascination. It's also the different qualities with which silence can be loaded.  There's companionable silence and the gritty quietness which is its polar opposite. There's the silence of surmise (the coolly assessing stare) and the silence of shyness.  There's the silence of pure terror, when even to breathe will betray you.  Silence can be contemplative, resentful, aggressive, tender, or bemused. When you think that speech is said to make up only seven percent of all the communication which takes place between people, silence can be any number of things.

If you want a creative exercise for the weekend, try writing a scene in which two people inhabit the same silence, but in completely different ways.

I'll shut up now, because the sunlight is pouring pure spring through my window and the only response is to gaze out in quiet wonder...

Deviating into Deprevate

Ludicrously over excited about release today of my son Jack's first EP - check out his awesome, massively talented band Deprevate and have a listen to some soaring, pounding rock
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/deprevate-ep/id510524553

Shameless plug over .

Moving into shed later this week, when regular blogging service will resume

Top Ten Writers (Today)

Until my lovely shed is finished I'm hot-desking with my husband -- nightmare -- I'm tidy and he's NOT! So for today's blog, rather than something profound and thought-provoking, I'm having to resort to a list.

Here are the ten writers I most admire (at the moment, because any time I read a good book the author automatically becomes my new best favourite).

• Hilary Mantel - for her humane, tender, all encompassing characterisation.
• Tim Winton -- for prose to plunge into; rounded, salty characters and a sprinkling of magic realism that wrong-foots and amazes me.
• Helen Dunmore - for blurring the boundaries between poetry and fiction.
• Geoff Dyer - for never, ever being obvious about anything; an oblique, bone dry, stylist.
• Hugo Williams - for making the art of understatement all his own; for never succumbing to any kind of literary compromise.
• Pat Barker - for her first world war trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road  perfectly capture the pity of war; no one else can hold a candle to her.
• Miriam Toews-- for being sparky, witty and original.
• Lorrie Moore - for her unflinching, funny chronicles of the shortcomings of the human heart.
• Sarah Waters - for being a plotting supremo, her books are masterpieces of construction: smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, prestidigitation!
• Georgette Heyer - because flu wouldn't be survivable without her. These Old Shades?  Bring it on...

N.B. Writing list for blog not soft option after all.  Makes you think what you value in other writers.  Makes you realise what you aspire to yourself.  Who would be in your top ten ?

The Autobiography in your Book Shelves

There's only one Steve left now, doing the snagging - the ten thousand little jobs that need finishing off before the work is done.  It's a bit like copy editing your book: all your editor's notes have been minutely attended to and you think the whole thing's done and dusted, but then you have to trawl through it one more time (at least one more time) tidying up the punctuation, checking for consistency (eyes which started out as brown carry on that way and don't inadvertently become green or grey), checking your facts as well, in case something trips you up later.

So after all this slog, my house-shaped shed is looking less and less like a shed and more and more like a beautiful, writerly room in which to sit and work. I have a desk top...

....(I also appear to have a set of folding steps and a band saw, but not for long). Although the sight of it enthralls me and I yearn to be sitting there, gazing out of the window, thinking what to write next, I'm even more excited about the rows and rows of empty shelves waiting to be filled.

It's because the books I own are the intimate friends of my past life; we've been through things together, they're like travelling companions I haven't seen for ages and I'm longing to catch up with them.  Filling each shelf will be an exercise in autobiography -- I write the date in every book I buy so that I'll know what I was reading when (and by implication what I was doing and with whom). So it's not just a question of simply arranging them, it's a kind of navigation, charting memories and lost flights of imagination.

Books have siren voices, whispering pages; you turn one, and then you turn another, and before you know it, the whole day is done.

In Praise of Phrasing

We've been listening to Lambchop all weekend and it's not just Kurt Wagner's haunting voice, his haunting voice, which I can't get out of my head, it's his supple phrasing.  It doesn't just give texture to his music, it gives it drama, as well.

There's a lesson to be learned from such a maestro. To explore the importance of phrasing in your own work, here's an exercise you might want to experiment with.

Try writing a paragraph with sentences of a similar length.  I am using ten words in every one I write. I am not going to allow myself to use nine. God forbid that I should over run and use eleven. After a while my prose will become very dull indeed. It won't just be dull, it will be predictable too.

What if you shorten them, though? Truncate them? Alternatively you could allow them to drift from clause to clause, meandering like flowing water, until everything you want to say has been expressed. The effect is palpable. Immediately (and in a sense regardless of what you're talking about) they become easier to read.

When I'm working, I listen to the words inside my head before I write them down.  I listen to the music of them: the rhythm and the stresses; I listen to hear where the pauses fall. So remember that if you want to discover the musicality of your own voice, thinking about the phrasing may be the place to start.

Inspiration - It Must be the Sap Starting to Rise....

As time off for good behaviour went to see the inestimable Lambchop play The Fleece in Bristol yesterday. Kurt Wagner took three years off from making music to come to terms with the death of his close friend and collaborator James Vincent Chesnutt and the gig last night perfectly illustrated what I was noodling on about in my previous post: that in any form of creativity, beauty should always be the servant of truth. Lambchop's new songs chart the shell shock of bereavement, Wagner's  resonant voice articulating our own griefs for us. He sang from the heart about the ravages of waste and loss  - private emotions, profoundly expressed, in a public space, have a beauty that is almost incidental.  It was humbling and elating to listen to him.

Supplementary thought - it's really good for you, as a writer, to absorb the very best of the creative arts that are available to you - gigs in pubs, borrowed books, fine art in galleries for as long as there is free admission, sun streaming through stained glass - none of it need cost much, and it will feed your soul.

As the Spring starts to spring, allow yourself to be inspired....

Writing Poetry? Don't be Poetic

Here's a very brief thought for the day (I 've been too busy painting my house-shaped shed - lunar landscape blue, if you're interested).

I went to a talk given by the Royal Society of Literature a couple of weeks ago. Lavinia Greenlaw, David Harsent, Emma Jones and Ahren Warner were all trying to overcome their instinctive diffidence in order to talk about what it's like to be a poet.  One of them dryly quoted Douglas Dunn, "I spend most of my time protecting my gift," but Lavinia Greenlaw came up with a useful insight: she said that being poetic was the opposite of what makes a good poem.  There are several things to think about here, but what interested me most was the notion that being poetic somehow implies being self-conscious, being too aware of how you're writing, rather than concentrating on what you're trying to say.  It seems to me that being truthful -- speaking with emotional truth -- trumps trying to express yourself in an overtly beautiful way every single time

The other interesting thing is WHAT MAKES A GOOD POEM?
Answers on a postcard please...

Try Not to Fill the Creative Space

To the weary and unseeing eye (mine, I'll admit) my house-shaped shed looks almost exactly the same as it did when I was blogging on February 15...

If anything, the sense of chaos is even more pronounced than it was back then...

Add to this the fact that my agent is starting to send my novel The Dragonfly round to publishers - eliciting an eerie silence after the noise made by the Steves - and there is the definite sense that everything which matters is completely on hold.

My default position, both as a writer and as a woman trying to get her life back, is to slide into a decline, but somewhere inside me is the sense that it would be an opportunity missed.  It's in these rare, weightless, transitional moments that magic can sometimes occur:  When you feel precarious and unprotected perhaps you see things obliquely, or allow different and unexpected ideas to slip through your defences. Tectonic plates only need to shift a tiny bit to create an earthquake. It's a question of learning to accept that everything  will remain in suspension for the time being, however uncomfortable that might feel.

Try to think of these spaces in your life as creative ones.  Steel yourself to listen attentively to the cool acoustic, the unsettling silence, and perhaps you'll hear the rumble of the ground starting to move beneath your feet.