Tag Archives: story writing

Cautious Creativity

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A continuing discussion between writers, would-be writers and non-writers is whether you wait for inspiration to strike before picking up a pen or sitting down at a keyboard.

My approach has always been to think of creativity as a muscle and that it grows stronger with use. Just as preparing for a marathon starts with walking for five minutes on a treadmill, writing a novel, a story, a poem, starts with putting a word on a page and then several more and so on. I develop my creativity by ‘flexing’ it again and again. I mainly do this through various means:

I was, therefore, chuffed to hear the poet, the late Mary Oliver, say much the same but in a very different way. I was directed by a friend to the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett when she interviews Mary Oliver (https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/). In it Oliver talks about creativity being cautious and that a writer has to regularly turn up to meet their own until they gain creativity’s trust. It is only then that our creativity will blossom.

I have often written about giving permission, giving time, for creativity.

Even if you have no desire to write for an audience, there is a myriad of evidence which suggests creativity is good for us, for our well being (Lapidus). So there are many reasons for turning up regularly and gaining the trust of our creativity. Why not start with pledging an hour a week? Take a 20 minute walk, preferably somewhere in nature. On returning sit down with a large piece of plain paper and play with words, colours and putting marks on the paper for 30 minutes.

See where it takes you!

*** Those of a sensitive disposition may want to stop reading here ***

On a personal note, I have recently had a long awaited hysterectomy, necessary because of years of heavy bleeding, fibroids and anaemia in the run up to my menopause. My husband, who loves a fact, told me over 56,000 hysterectomies are carried out in the UK every year. I was wondering aloud to a friend, Ruth (ceramicist and artist: http://ruthcollett.co.uk/), what happens to all these wombs and (in my case) ovaries? She suggested they ended up in catawombs. Which got us laughing and me thinking. Below is the resultant collage of my very own catawomb. The stapling is significant. Farewell my womb.

One small step….

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What with the anniversary of the first moon landing, we have all been reminded of the oft-quoted ‘One small step… one giant leap…’ It fits with the idea of the slightly cliched: every journey starts with the first step.

And every piece of writing starts with writing the first word (even if later that first word will be discarded or become the 10th or the 100th or the last). In recent weeks I have been in conversation with several people who are struggling with the next steps in their writing. When drilling into what is going on for them, it appears to boil down to two issues:

  • What will people think?
  • Being too fixated on the product and not enjoying the process.

These may be dressed up in any numbers of ways including thoughts such as: I’m not good enough; what’s the point of this; I haven’t enough time; I’m not a writer; I should be doing the cleaning (or any other soul-destroying job you can think of). Or perhaps actions which means that any writing/thinking time gets squeezed out by trying to meet the (supposed?) needs of others.

Once some literacy skills have been gained, writing isn’t hard. I mean it’s not hard in the way going down a mine is hard or trying to eek food from an unforgiving soil or climate. What more often than not gets in the way of our writing hand is our heads. I am not immune. I can get mired in fears of being found wanting or in trying to find a point to spending time writing (beyond the simple fact that I enjoy it).

And there are parts to writing which I enjoy less. Such as currently I am re-reading Drowning Not Waving, in preparation for getting ready for (self) publishing. This novel, the fourth in my Scarborough Mysteries series, has not had an easy gestation. Picked up and then unceremoniously dropped by an agent, there are parts of it which I feel I wrote to please her and do not entirely please me. However, I have a strong urge to get it finished and out there, so I can move on. Plus, I am very aware that I see every sinew in magnified detail while the majority of readers will barely skim the skin.

So my challenge is not to take the first step, but to keep going though the terrain may be getting uncomfortable. My method (should you choose to adopt it) is to break things down into palatable chunks, write them on a list and tick them off as I do them. I am half way through my ‘re-read and take notes on Drowning Not Waving.’ I am doing it an hour at a time with breaks in between for walking, swimming, eating, reading, seeing friends, yoga, playing tennis….

It is perhaps a harsh reality that most of what most of us write – most of what we tear from the cavities of our hearts and commit to paper – will not be read in any great detail (if at all) nor appreciated much. Shed a tear for this and then think, wow what freedom this gives me. I can write to please myself! How joyous is that?

I have just spent a week in Swanage. One of the things I most enjoyed was swimming in the bay, especially in the morning in the flat sun-rimed water, in sight of the Isle of Wight and Old Harry’s Rocks. It wasn’t easy to get in. The sea was chilly, there were sharp pebbles to be negotiated, but once I stopped hyperventilating and just let myself go, relaxing into the waves, it was glorious. Another metaphor, if you want one, for my writing method.

 

 

Midsummer Magic

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It is the Summer Solstice. Yes it is! I always feel midsummer comes too early at these latitudes. I have barely got my shorts on. However, midsummer it is.

Why not give yourself permission to give your creative spirit some time to play and let the midsummer magic sink in.

Scarborough lighthouse at dawn. Mark Vesey 2019

If you haven’t read it already, take a moment to jump back to a previous post: https://bit.ly/2RqqBKn

Now look at these amazing photos – or maybe you have one of your own – and do some free writing.

Scarborough beach huts at dawn. Mark Vesey 2019

Write freely for about ten minutes. Perhaps leave it for a while (take a walk or do some breathing/stretching) then scan through and pick out five or six words, sentences or phrases which seem interesting. Spend 30 minutes playing around with these. Perhaps you will put them down the page like a poem, adding in other words/phrases as necessary. Perhaps you will see if they will lead you into a 100 word narrative which goes across the page.

It doesn’t matter what you end up with. The main thing is to play and enjoy.

If anyone does this and feels like doing so, feel free to put what you’ve done in a comment so it can appear below this post.

Thank you!

 

A Writer’s Toolkit: Reading

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We read to escape, for pleasure, to learn something, to divert, but sometimes we read to meet ourselves. We read to have something in ourselves, in our experience, confirmed as acceptable. Or, at least, not so far beyond the possible as to be beyond the pale.

Many of us take up a writing journey to resolve things that, in the end, are un-resolvable. Possibly once we have realised they are un-resolvable, we will find acceptance. Reading another’s perspective or story can also bring us to view what is going with us in a different, perhaps more compassionate, way. Reading can be all encompassing.

Patricia Leavy, author of Handbook of Arts-Based Research (Guildford Press, 2019) suggests:
‘Research shows that reading fiction engages our entire brain, including some unexpected areas, such as those involved with movement and touch. We literally place ourselves in the stories we read, becoming immersed. There are activations in our brains for days after reading a novel, which is not the case with nonfiction prose.’

However, as writers we also read to develop ourselves and our craft. Read widely. Read actively. Don’t just think I enjoyed that (or not), ask what makes it appealing (or not) to me. Look for techniques which we may want to bring into our own writing. I’m not advocating plagiarism here. As with walking, we may all take the same path, but we will all experience it and talk about it in different ways. With writing, if we allow the means and the subject matter to be mediated through our self, then using similar methods to other writers will still result in a unique piece.

So essential items in a writer’s toolbox are: a library card, a shelf full of books and a community within which books can be leant and borrowed.

 

Update


My own writing projects continue to progress. I have pulled together my thoughts on writing, walking and memoir into a non-fiction piece and am waiting to see how I might develop that into something I could share with an audience. The short stories I discovered in embryonic state in my writing journals are drafted and are out with readers for comments.

 

 

 

 

I have completed Drowning Not Waving, the fourth in my Scarborough Mysteries series. It has been with a literary agent since the beginning of 2018. Initially she said she loved it and she enthusiastically talked to me over the phone, asking me to do some re-writes which I did before re-submitting it to her. On October 31st 2018 she said she would definitely get back to me with a definitive answer within the week. That is the last I have heard from her.

While all this has been going on, I have completed the fifth in the series, No Justice. I am currently at the re-writing/editing stage and hope to be able to indie publish both as one volume by the end of this year.


 

Guest Post: Delighting in Notebooks by Glynis Charlton

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How many notebooks do you have? Not the irresistible ones you’ve stroked in arty places and found yourself buying, only to leave them untouched because they were ‘too nice.’ No, I’m talking about the partially filled, slightly dog-eared variety, with random notes tucked inside, the ones you’ve promised yourself you’ll go back to?

 

I can’t tell you how many I have. Not because I’m being super-secretive, but because I stopped counting a long time ago. The answer would be embarrassing.

For a time, they lived in a big blue plastic box, then they began to nudge the lid open, so the others got piled up on top, until the pile was so precarious I was in danger of needing to invest in box number two. But would that be an investment? Surely it would be akin to procrastination and, as I know only too well, I don’t need to hone my skills in that department.

What needed to be done, I decided, was to attack each notebook in turn. Type stuff up, put it into orderly digital categories, use some kind of code or sticker in the notebook to show what had been dealt with. This would then allow me – ooh, two or three months down the line – to select various drafts from the orderly files on my laptop, refine pieces that particularly called to me, and submit them to appropriate places from an impeccable spreadsheet based on focussed research. That was three years ago.

Don’t get me wrong – I did make a start (thanks to a boring tale involving medication that gives me a bonus half hour before breakfast). But it was just taking too long. I was, as my mother always loved to tell me, ‘at the back of the queue when they were handing out patience.’ I grew dispirited, annoyed with myself. At this rate, it could take me years to type everything up before I even began to develop or edit any of it. There was an amalgamation of pieces drafted in cafés, on trains, planes, at Lapidus days, workshops, masterclasses, and yes – for goodness’ sake – even during residential weeks at Arvon. All just sitting there.

I don’t help myself by being fickle. Poetry? Ooh yes, I’ll take that piece I started at Simon Armitage’s masterclass, craft it until it’s as good as I can get. Or maybe I could try my hand at a radio script? I did go on that workshop run by Rachel Joyce, two or three years ago, I wrote that thing about someone in an accident … or maybe it was a hospital?

Inevitably, I reached the point, over porridge one morning, where I decided this bonus half hour would probably be much better spent working on The Novel (two, to be exact, but the first one makes me cringe). So, the notebooks were shelved for a while – literally – and out came the novel again. But that took so long to get my head back into it that I ended up doing neither. Instead, I reassured myself, oh so easily, that half an hour’s reading before breakfast would ‘inform’ my own writing, which of course was true up to a point. But actually, the real informing to be done was from Procrastinating Me to Writer Me. Now here’s a radical idea, I told myself, have you noticed there are actually another 23.5 hours in each day? I know, I know, said the other one, but take Leonardo da Vinci … I mean, he had treatise after treatise he never got round to writing up, all those fountains and statues never built. But he was Leonardo, Glynis: look what he did do. OK, fair point.

Plan B – or C or D or whatever it is by now – is to go through each notebook as originally planned, but this time just type up the pieces that really pull me. The ones where I’ve put a big tick by the side or scrawled ‘do something with this.’

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered Tim Clare’s online Couch to 80K Bootcamp, so I make sure I do at least one of his short exercises every day. Why do we find it so much easier when it’s someone other than ourselves urging us to spend just ten minutes to do something that, let’s be honest, we actually enjoy doing once we get down to it?

I find setting a timer works. So too does shutting the rest of the notebooks out of site and being systematic. OK, so you’re not a great Renaissance genius, but you might just find a tiny nugget in that wobbling pile of notebooks that’s worth sharing.

 

Glynis Charlton [www.glynischarlton.com] is a poet and fiction writer whose work has been published in several anthologies. Her poetry was Highly Commended for the Bridport Prize 2016 and she is currently working on two novels. Glynis has also scripted a film short, screened at Leeds International Film Festival, and another screened on BBC1. She works freelance and has been running workshops in Yorkshire for many years and also runs an autumn writing retreat on a tiny Italian island [www.italianwritingretreat.org]

 

 

Guest Post: On not finishing things by Hilary Jenkins

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Photo from H Jenkins

On New Year’s Day I wrote in my diary that I was thinking about endings, and in particular how to finish my novel. It’s something I’ve put on my list of resolutions for at least ten years now. To begin with I blamed lack of will power, time, a quiet place to work, a view, the right frame of mind . . . but I found that even when I did have all these things, I still didn’t finish it. What happened was that I would re-read, re-write, change my mind, add sections, delete sections, and as a consequence, the ending grew ever more elusive.

Over the years I’ve discovered I have a problem with finishing things. I used to blame my lack of persistence but now I think that it’s because finishing things is hard. Finishing means loss, and loss means grieving. Society urges us to move on, come to terms, learn from our mistakes, seek closure, but the process is never finished  – until we are. As we grow older the whole idea of finishing becomes more real, and therefore, perhaps, more terrifying.

But then there’s this idea of what we leave behind. Who wants to leave an unfinished novel? No one would read it. Of course they probably wouldn’t read a finished one either, but surely you’d feel better on your death bed, knowing the loose ends were all tied up, and the proof reading done?

When I started writing this particular novel, finishing it seemed straightforward. In those days I had not lost a marriage, a career, a partner, a parent. I didn’t know what grief was, or failure. I thought the problem was the beginning. I remember asking my MA tutor how and where to start. She gave me some excellent advice: decide where you think the story starts, and have the confidence to stick with your plan and get to the end.  Why didn’t I listen to her? I set off not knowing where I was going. I’d heard all those stories about writers who don’t want to know where their characters are going, that sounded more fun. And I forgot about my reader, and readers really like staying up all night to find out what happens in the end, don’t they?

The idea of the reader. Perhaps this is the crux of the problem. After all, if you finish your novel there will be readers (if you’re lucky) and you will be judged. However much you tell yourself it’s not you, it’s the book, you will feel it is you. The longer you’ve spent writing it, the more invested you will be, because the chances are you’ve poured in more and more of your life, and if you’re told it’s rubbish, that would mean you’re rubbish, and that’s hard. Why put yourself in this situation? Far easier to keep on tweaking. Forever.

There are of course, other reasons – like ignorance. I’ve had to learn about how to write a novel. Just because you can read one doesn’t mean you can write one, unless you are very lucky indeed. I even  made it more difficult for myself, by including three story lines, tight plotting, complex time schemes, multiple voices, all the things I warn students about.

On the other hand it has become part of me, like those barnacles that grow on whales. I’ve poured into it my difficult times, my Jungian shadows, and zombie childhood issues. It’s helped me survive. My inner therapist says you can give up on it, but I ignore her, because I am also afraid of failing, of change, and of having to start something new. Sometimes it is easier to cling on to what you know even if it is driving you mad.

Last night I dreamed I was swimming across a green weedy pool, unsure if I’d be able to reach the other side. I wasn’t in a panic this time, I accepted that I might not get there, but I knew I’d carry on swimming. In the dream there was the memory of that Vermont pond I swam across the day after my son’s wedding, and an echo of a Japanese Zen garden I’d seen on tv, covered in moss. So I’m going to finish this blog (yes!) not by saying  I will finish the novel, but with that image of swimming on a summer’s day not worrying about getting to the other side. It is the swimming I enjoy, the journey not the destination. I’m going to try to enjoy this experience of not quite getting to the end, and see what happens next.

Hilary Jenkins is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Teesside University. Her particular areas of interest include writing and wellbeing, creative writing and distance learning, and why people write novels. She also writes poetry which she finds easier to finish. She lives in the middle of the North York Moors where she likes to walk and think about the next novel.

Why Write? – by Sue Spencer

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In June 2015 I found myself unexpectedly un-busy – after 36 years of uninterrupted employment I found myself sent on gardening leave. Instead of being responsible for the running of a clinical facility I was asked to resign and not come back – it was horrible. It wasn’t an unexpected event (I had verbally resigned the week before) but the abruptness of the termination of working for the organisation was traumatic. I was sent packing – accompanied from the premises and told to come back at the end of the week when they had packed up my office. At the time I knew it was the best thing for me and would preserve my mental health but it has also been one of the most significant events in my life.

So why am I telling you this? Well it is because the day after this happened I was talking to a wise friend on the phone and she asked me about my life raft. What was going to keep me afloat over the next few months whilst I made sense of what had happened. Well I didn’t hesitate in my reply – I said it was poetry. Poetry had been a constant in my life for 10 years and it felt like it would keep me going during this unexpected and somewhat perplexing time. There is no doubt that I have found this to be true – poetry has proven to be the foundation I needed to rebuild my career and find myself a space that feels more authentic and stable.

Cultivating regular writing habits have been part of my recovery and also reading and writing poetry. Through regular writing practice I have become more attentive to the difference between sources of energy and activities that deplete my energy. Meditation has also helped me cultivate more attention to the present and calms my riotous brain and the overthinking that is my default setting. But it is the poetry and writing that has helped me more than anything else  – writing first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it is now an activity I can’t live without.

Looking back
Take certainty down a peg or two,
listen for veiled heartbeats.

Tangible traces – illusive.

Take nothing for granted
instead caress tree bark, lichen, moss.
Measuring progress – a fool’s errand

This language thing is tricky,

we miss many moments rushing on.
Sudden insights – falter.
False visions – erased memories.

 

This poem is about being burnt out and how by reading about signs and symptoms of burn out I realised that my career change in 2014 was destined to be difficult – I had never worked out why I was disillusioned with my “successful” career in Academia – going back to clinical practice was a mistake and only one I have begun to understand as I excavate my experience as a student nurse. Hints of the activities that have helped me are indicated here – walking in nature and developing a more secure sense of self through values rather than status.

The poems shared here are from workshops and post-counselling sessions where I have found myself excavating the experiences I have had in the last four years and have begun to shed light on why things happened and also increase my self-awareness. I have been getting things wrong for quite a while and the mistakes I have made are better understood when I am kind and contain them in poetry.

I have been thinking about this approach to sharing my story over the last couple of years and then I was listening to radio 4 and heard a programme where the narrator shared his story weaving his poems into the narrative. It was a light bulb moment and I felt that I had heard something significant.

Ward Report
First there are

rules.

Instead of asking you
seek kindred spirits.

Isolated
not gaining kith or kin

You wander through the colleges on Sunday
Downing, Trinity, St Johns,
Magdalene, Christs
Pembroke, Peterhouse.

Back in your room – nothing fits.

 

I trained as a nurse in Cambridge – I hated nursing and being a student nurse but I loved the city. By the end of my first year (1980) ALL my friends were undergraduates NOT nurses. I didn’t realise this until I was in a writing workshop with William Fiennes. The exercise was about drawing a map of a significant place from our life. My map of the nurses home and hospital in Cambridge was uninhabited – I had labelled places and spaces BUT had not peopled the place. William’s sensitive questioning of this has stayed with me for the last 3 years and found itself in the poem. Reading this poem to a kind and attentive audience has enabled me to be more forgiving and kind to the lonely 19 year old who didn’t leave nursing and spent many years feeling unfulfilled and frustrated.

I went on a writing retreat with the magnificent Kate Fox at the beginning of December. As part of the weekend we were invited to perform some of our writing and share it with the other writers on the retreat. Well I decided this was my chance to try out the interweaving of my poems and story about my career hiccup and the theory I have begun to understand that provides some explanation to the things that have happened. I have been fascinated with the “why” word for a while and staying kind and curious about my recent job-related challenges has helped me learn so much about myself and how others perceive me. It hasn’t been easy, but the writing has helped hugely – morning pages have helped me start the day, writing during tricky times has helped me keep things in perspective and also it has given me confidence in a process that can really help contribute to understanding self and others.

Writing poems that crystallise an experience and help sense making is one thing but sharing them with others in a supportive and energising environment has also been healing. Having people listen to my story and honour my subjective experience has made all the difference.

My reflection on all of this is about how the process of writing that works towards making sense of ourselves and the world around us can make all the difference in relation to how we develop knowledge and I have learnt so much. The books that have inspired me about writing and healing over the years are now beginning to be part of what I do – rather than talking the talk I am also walking the walk. Regular habits of writing have significantly contributed to my sense of wellbeing and I am also more confident in encouraging others to do the same – encouraging regular practice and increasing well-being by doing so.

I believe that I am more confident in calling myself a writer and less hesitant in explain myself to colleagues at the University. Writing this blog and trusting the process of telling my story has really helped as well.

Further reading
Julia Cameron – The Artist’s Way https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artists-Way-Discovering-Recovering-Creative/dp/0330343580
Lousie De Salvo- The Art of Slow Writing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Slow-Writing-LOUISE-DESALVO/dp/1250051037
Jo Bell and Jane Commane – How to be a poet http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/how%20to%20be%20a%20poet.html
Sage Cohen – Writing the life poetic https://sagecohen.com/books/writing-the-life-poetic/

 

Sue Spencer is a former senior nurse and nursing academic. She has an interest in creative approaches to facilitation and working with person-centred learning and linking this to reflection and increased self-awareness.

She currently works at Newcastle University within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences developing creative pedagogies and activities for undergraduates studying the Combined Honours programme. The focus of her work is to encourage early help seeking behaviour in relation to self-care and well-being.

The Writer’s Toolbox (3)

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I’m not a cat person, but these ladies look pretty curious.

Curiosity may be fatal for felines but it is essential for writers.

If you’ve been following this series of blog posts up to now, you are hopefully writing regularly in a writing journal. At this stage, be curious not critical about what your work. Instead of judging your writing – this is good/bad – wonder what brought me to write this? If you choose to bring your writing to an audience at some point, there will be plenty of time to garner critiques, for now let curiosity and compassion for your words be your guide.

Writers also need a voracious curiosity about the world around them. What you see, hear, taste, smell, feel, experience, are all essential inspiration for a writer. In her seminal book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about taking artist’s dates. These are trips taken by creatives to feed the imagination. It could be as simple as going to a local museum or visiting a part of town you’ve never been to, perhaps a park, a graveyard, a church (or another place of worship). It could be going further afield. Everywhere is redolent with stories.

Go on these trips of discovery as a writer. Possibly alone or with another creative person, certainly not with others who will constantly need your attention. Then notice, notice, notice. Notice the external, but notice also what is going on for you, how the external is impacting on the internal. Stop frequently to write in your journal. Personally, I find stopping frequently for tea and cake also aids the creative process!

It may be that you have already decided on something you wish to pursue in your writing. Of course, these days, it is easy to sit at our desks and research with Mr Google etc. However, there is nothing like experience as research.

Go to places you want to write about. Find the little niche museum which covers the subject you are interested in, speak to the volunteers/staff about their passions. Visit the historical sites which are connected to what you are interested in. Put yourself in the environments which are inspiring you. It may not always be possible to do this in actuality, so see if there is a way of replicating it. Perhaps it is the rainforest which is stimulating your words and a ticket to Peru is beyond you, then a visit to Kew Gardens may not be.

I was listening to crime writer Ann Cleeves on the radio yesterday, she said, ‘People make a mistake when they separate setting from plot and character. People grow out of where they are born and live.’ (Desert Island Discs, Radio 4, 17th February 2019, Presenter: Lauren Laverne. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.)

Stories also grow out of place, out of environment, out of setting. Open your curiosity to the world around you and your internal landscapes and allow the words to tumble onto the page.

A Writer’s Toolbox: the self

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If you’ve read the first post in this series, https://bit.ly/2RqqBKn, then hopefully that has encouraged you to write regularly. You may have adapted the sprints to suit yourself, all well and good. The point is to be writing regularly without critiquing and without too much concern over what is the point, apart from enjoying yourself.

Now we come to the most important implement in the Writer’s Toolbox: the writer themselves. Everything that comes from the writer is mediated through the self. So let’s consider how the self might work for the writer.

We have five physical senses: touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing. We may favour one of these senses. If I say the word ‘tractor’, do you see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, feel the texture of it? This little exercise gives an idea of which sense you may lean towards. A writer encourages the development of all the senses. Try these explorations:

  •      walk (preferably through a bit of nature) with all your senses opened. Write for ten minutes, uncritically, letting the words drop onto the paper.
  •       Once you have worked out which sense you least favour, go for a walk and focus on that sense. Write for ten minutes, uncritically, letting the words drop onto the paper.
  •       Take an image (a photo or a postcard or a picture or a painting), imagine yourself within the picture, what would you be seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling? What textures could you touch? Write for ten minutes, uncritically, letting the words drop onto the paper.
  •       Imagine that one of your senses has gone. Take a short walk without that sense working. Write for ten minutes, uncritically, letting the words drop onto the paper.

You may discover your own ways of opening up your senses. Keep exploring what your five physical senses can tell you.

Writing is about imagination, inspiration, that’s what people commonly say, which all sounds very head-based. Poet William Blake likened the imagination and inspiration to a grinding millstone and a blacksmith’s forge. If we continue with his analogy, then we need the grain, we need the base metal, for the millstones or the fire in the forge to produce anything. We need the raw materials for the imagination and inspiration to feed on. These raw materials come through the senses, but also through the body as a whole. The body is the receptor by which we experience the world as we pass through it, then the mind puts language and interpretations to this experience. Working in concert, the two enrich our writing.

The self can be a tuning fork, resonating with the environment and finding the individual note for the individual writer. One of the things I have found which encourages the mining of the resources of the body is mindful walking. Mindfulness is a word which is used in many different contexts with a myriad of meanings. I like this definition from psychologytoday.com (accessed 5th October 2015): Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience. Try walking mindfully and then writing for ten minutes, uncritically, letting the words drop onto the paper.

Writing creatively means engaging emotion, both for the writer and for the reader. We don’t think emotions, we feel them. Philippot et al. (2004) suggest that emotions are primarily experienced though bodily sensation and then translated into feelings and brought into consciousness. Writers connecting with their bodies are more aware of emotion, more able to capture them and find ways of communicating them which will touch a reader. However, writers are in the business of engaging with a plethora of emotions, not just the ones which we might think are nice or respectable or allowed. This can be hard, can be painful, can be distressing. Be sure you have supports in place to help you through.

The self may also be the spanner in the works, which jams the creative wheels. Another part of a writer’s toolkit is a small but resilient core of self-belief. This is usually difficult to hone and maintain. Writers need to experience a full range of emotions to put them into their writing, some, such as shame and anger, are not conducive to self-belief. Writers might lay themselves open to criticism and rejection – generated by themselves or by others, or (even harder) imagined others.

It is worth remembering that both the creative practice and the construction of self-belief are iterative. There is a back-and-forth to the process. ‘Onwards and upwards’ is an oft repeated phrase, as if going forwards is always what’s best. Writers can feel they are going backwards or round in circles. Remembering that this is an important part of being creative may help this become less frustrating.

Take your time exploring your senses and mindful walking and see where it takes you. I’ll be exploring further tools in the writer’s toolbox in the next post in the series in the coming weeks.

 

Philippot P, Baeyens C, Douilliez C, & Francart B. (2004). Cognitive regulation of emotion: application to clinical disorders. In: Philippot P, Feldman RS (eds.). (2004) The regulation of emotion. New York: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Rosy Stewart

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Writing – especially writing a novel/novella – is often characterised as a solitary occupation. However, there are ‘authors’ who are, in reality, two writers collaborating, Nicci French for one. In my neighbourhood, there is Rosy Stewart, the nom de plume for writers Rosie and Stuart Larner (who also write separately).

In 2015, Rosy Stewart published Hope. The book is about a fictional women’s refuge. Each chapter tells a separate story involving the main characters with a different case. There is also an ongoing storyline threading through the chapters to the conclusion of the book. Rosie was a social worker and lecturer and Stuart was a clinical psychologist. In their professional careers they saw thousands of cases of marital discord. They have a wealth of experience of how distress can affect people and how, under the right conditions, it can be used as a springboard for personal growth. They say of Hope: ‘We want our writing to be realistic, gritty, but optimistic, giving solace to readers who might be seeking a solution to their own personal problems.’

Hope is available at: https://amzn.to/2CSG5dN

 

Rosy Stewart is currently working on a sequel, so I interviewed them about their writing process.

 

 

 

 

 

What was the inspiration for Hope? What motivated you to write it?
We wanted to write something which was accessible and popular. Abuse impacts most people in some way or other and we are very familiar with the topic through our work as health and social care professionals.

We know that domestic abuse takes many forms and is not just physical violence but it involves social, cultural and psychological factors. In Hope, and the sequel we are currently writing, we want to get across the idea that a person who has been abused need not continue to be defined as a victim, by themselves or others. Our stories aim to show that people from all backgrounds can make lasting positive changes with the help of friends, family and committed carers.

How do you write as a couple? What are the mechanics of the process?
Writing in collaboration is usually associated with comedy scriptwriting, a strategy, probably essential, to test out in practice what produces the laugh. I do not know of any detailed account of the process, but I imagine there is no set formula. Galton and Simpson, writers of Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son, report spending long periods of silence together when working on a script: https://binged.it/2HzFHIT

Stuart and I use an approach that has evolved from lessons learned writing our first novella, Hope. Then we spent a great deal of time talking and planning each chapter and writing our own versions before coming together to merge them. As you might guess this was not easy. We had to discard rafts of material and, because each chapter’s content and style might be very different, we risked long debates or uncritical acceptance of the other’s work.

For Hope we compiled an essential outline of all central characters and their histories, and this has been an invaluable tool to refer to in writing our second book, set in the same women’s refuge. Those characters have evolved and new ones have emerged through our writing. We knew that our protagonist in both books, Sue the manager of the refuge, is strong, idealistic and determined to help individuals who have been abused. In some stories in Hope she was frustrated by the restrictions of her professional role. This has developed into an increasing tendency to take risks. So we expanded the role of her deputy, Cath, an ex-prison officer who speaks her mind and can sometimes be cynical about the motives and behaviour of residents in the refuge. She allows Sue a different perspective.

Our first step in writing our second book was to review the first book, and as a result of this we have published a revised edition of Hope. Following this, and ready to start afresh, we spent a morning brainstorming ideas for new stories that centred on individuals who might had suffered abuse. They could be any age or gender and from any social or cultural background. We came up with over twenty possibilities from which we chose twelve. Each story/chapter was to be around 4,000 words.

Once we identify a story we intend to work on, we meet and discuss ideas, getting an agreed shape. We make only very brief notes at this stage as we try not to fix the plot, and during the following week we just think individually about possible directions for the story. I think a good deal of the work is done at this stage, not always at a conscious level. We then have a further meeting where we firm up our ideas and list plot points in the chapter. As we are writing a series of potentially stand-alone stories, we can identify a beginning and work out how, with suitable shifts and complications, we will reach our intended end, bearing in mind the word limit. Having done this we choose the parts of the story we would most like to write. Generally we quickly agree to this, though sometimes we both want to write the show rather than tell sections. In writing our latest chapter, Stuart chose the beginning of a story that starts with a fire in the refuge, and a section near its end describing a fight between an abuser and his brother-in-law. In a previous chapter, I was keen to write an account of a conflict between a homeless man and woman who turn on Sue, when she tries to help the woman. It is set on Westminster Bridge in the early hours of the morning.

The following week we put the words on the page knowing it should be completed in a week. This is not difficult as we are pretty sure we will enjoy writing those 2,000 words. We chose them. At our next meeting we merge the sections we have written and read the story aloud, then produce a written copy that one of us will edit. We return this to the other who will again edit the work. It is in editing and re-editing where we aim to bring the writing to a unified style. I feel this process has also brought our initial writing style closer.

We now send the work to another writer for critique. This is a reciprocal process and Stuart meets face-to-face with them to give and receive feedback on chapters as we write them. This ensures that we all make every effort to meet deadlines. We make notes of their comments and take these into account when editing the whole book before publication.

The method we use is suitable for the kind of material we are writing, and it is an enjoyable process, however I believe it would be very challenging to try to write a longer, more complex work in this way. We are also in a position, as a married couple to write together, meeting frequently for quite short periods of time and able to quickly rearrange our other commitments if necessary. We are both very used to others critiquing our work and because of this we do not find it threatening but a useful source of ideas.

What does writing as a couple bring which is different from writing individually?
Writing as a team, we benefit from deadlines that we give each other because our work is dependent on the other completing theirs. As we have frequent, regular writing meetings, we bounce ideas off each other and consequently have no writer’s block. Our pieces are more developed along the editorial pathway because we edit and re-edit each other’s work before finally sending it to an external editor. Having accomplished a piece and having gone through all the processes, we are much more confident about it than we would be if we were writing alone.

 

Stuart Larner is a chartered psychologist, who worked in the UK Health Service, and was mental health expert in XL for Men magazine. He writes plays for performance in Scarborough and York, poems, and stories. His latest books are the cricket novel Guile and Spin, and The Car: a sequence of sonnets with illustrations. http://stuartlarner.blogspot.com/.

Rosie Larner is a retired social worker and lecturer in Health and Social Care. Rosie was co- leader of a West Yorkshire Drama Workshop that focused on festival performance and members achieving external LAMDA awards. She has directed and performed twice at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has a MA in Theatre Writing Directing & Performance from York University. Rosie writes prose, poetry and plays.