Tag Archives: writing techniques

Three things I have learned about writing crime fiction

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I wrote my first crime novel when I was 19, thirty-six years ago. I got a sniff of an interest from an agent who liked my writing but not what I had written and asked for something else. By the time I had produced another novel, she had lost interest.

I re-visited the crime genre with my Scarborough Mysteries series. The Art of the Imperfect was published in 2014. I have written four more crime novels since then; two (The Art of Survival and The Art of Breathing) have been published, the other two await next steps.

Writers learn to write through reading, through study, through supportive critical feedback, but most of all writers learn to write by writing. This blog details three things I have learned since re-dipping my toe into the crime genre.

(1) Jeopardy
An agent has recently told me my crime novels lack jeopardy. She said readers today want real page-turners, they want to be kept on the edge of their seats through the whole novel. Whether this is true or not (perhaps some readers, like me, want an intriguing puzzle or a social critique or complex characters) this idea has an effect on what crime books appear on shelves.

I ask myself, therefore, how to increase jeopardy? The main way is to put someone in danger. If a writer wants to stay close to reality, this causes a problem: most murderers kill once, for a very specific reason. A writer, therefore, has to work out a reason why a murderer might be thinking about acting again.

Then there’s the question of who is going to be in danger. It has to be someone who the reader cares about. A woman, especially a young one, or a child, generally automatically garners a reader’s concern. But if a writer is not going down that route, then there is another character the reader should be getting involved with: the detective. I have noticed that more and more, it is the detective who is being put in peril in order to increase the jeopardy of the story. Obviously this causes an issue in a series, just how many times is a detective stupid enough to risk their lives in the line of duty?

(2) The lone wolf detective
Gone are the days when novels with casts of thousands – à la Dickens or Tolstoy – are acceptable, especially in crime fiction. Once a writer has a victim, the victim’s entourage, a few suspects and a team of police officers, there’s not much room for any other characters. It seems to me this might be one reason why detectives with no friends or family are becoming more the norm.

(3) Naming
I often struggle to find names which stick for my characters. Names denote all sorts of things, including age, social class, nationality, culture, race, gender. The way a character feels about their name and whether they alter it can speak volumes about them. I have a habit of having characters change their names for various reasons and sometimes I have to curb the temptation to use this trope.

It’s not a good idea to have characters with names which start with the same letter or sound similar, unless there is a particular reason for doing so. This can cut down the choice. Dickens sometimes gave his characters names which reflected in some way something about them. I am drawn to this method, though it has to be done with a light hand.

 

What have you learnt about writing in a particular genre?

Poetry Workshop – 23rd November, Scarborough

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Very excited to have Nick Makoha come to Scarborough to run a poetry workshop and take part in Rotunda Night on the 23rd November. I was happy to host a post by Nick about his poetry on this blog in 2018: https://scarboroughmysteries.com/2018/04/16/reading-writing-poetry-nick-makoha/

Nick will be facilitating a workshop entitled ‘Writing as a stranger’. It will focus on the ‘metic’ experience and how it influences a writer’s work. The experience is most marked for black writers in the UK and the USA, but do we all have a unique metic experience and perspective that we can use to kickstart creativity and to forge original work? This will be an engaging and provoking poetry masterclass exploring issues of identity and race, migration, exile and ‘foreignness’.

Venue for the workshops is Woodend, Scarborough, North Yorkshire. It will take place on 23rd November, 2-4pm. Places on the workshop are strictly limited and cost £10 each. If you are interested, please contact Felix Hodcroft at feljen@feljen.plus.com.

Nick Makoha is a dynamic young poet and dramatist, born in Uganda, now living in London. His debut poetry collection ‘Kingdom of gravity’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis prize for best first collection and nominated in the Guardian as one of the best books of that year. His poetry has been published in the New York Times and the Poetry Review and he is a trustee for the Arvon Foundation. His poems explore themes of injustice, migration and ‘otherness’, peeling back the layers which constitute our humanity. His particular concerns as a poet include the experience of ‘metics’ – people born in one country, living in another and the challenges and opportunities that experience brings.

Nick will also be performing at Rotunda Night, that evening at the iconic Rotunda Museum in Scarborough. Information and tickets from Scarborough Museum Trust, https://www.scarboroughmuseumstrust.com/rotunda-museum/ 01723 353 665.

 

Writing Tips: Voice

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I have previously blogged on ‘voice’, so some of this may be a repeat for some of my readers. However, I am adding to my previous thoughts.

I think there are two aspects to voice for a writer. Firstly there is the writer’s voice. This might include (among other aspects) choices as to plot or point of view or language, structural quirks, an outlook on the world and/or future. In some ways this is like the voice of an actor. There are different types of actors. I watch a film with Michael Cain in and I know I am watching Michael Cain. On the other hand, one year I saw three films starring Daniel Day-Lewis and it could have been a completely different actor in each, so effectively did he morph into the characters. I think writers are the same. For me, Colm Tóibín is more of a Michael Cain, while Louise Doughty is more of a Daniel Day-Lewis.

Then, if a writer is creating fiction, there are the voices of the characters. Here I do believe a writer should strive for diversity, which must mean going beyond their own experiences.

One of the narrative characters in my Scarborough Mysteries novels is Theo Akande – young, black, gay, male. What is a fifty-five year old white woman doing writing in a young, black, gay, male voice? There has been some suggestion that this disjunction is one reason why it has not been picked up by literary agents. Perhaps it smacks of appropriation or colonisation. There is a good point here, there are not enough young, black, gay voices out there and publishers should be focusing on promoting them rather than a voice created by me. I do get that. And sometimes I do feel nervous that I’m not getting Theo ‘right’ in some way.

I was cheered slightly by an interview with Bonnie Greer which I heard on the excellent podcast: https://www.thelastbohemians.co.uk/. Greer said we are, after all, from the same species. She also said don’t be an artist if you want to be safe.

Theo evolved over several novels (unpublished & published). Initially he was the ‘sane’ counterweight to Hannah’s descent into depression. He has faced prejudiced and bullying and has many reasons to feel aggrieved, but he maintains his more balanced view of the world because of the ‘secure base’ (à la Bowlby) of his upbringing. I believe Theo is more unlike me because of this than because of his other attributes. I have a very bleak view on life. I also wanted him to be different from the many ‘cops with hang-ups’ which are out there in contemporary fiction, while also having his vulnerabilities. He is more a Peter Wimsey (DL Sayers) than a Rebus (Ian Rankin).

Whether readers will be content with my depiction of Theo is up to them. However, as writers, it is worth considering how we come to characters who are very different from ourselves. I have several suggestions. Firstly, writers need big ears for listening. We also need curiosity. When we meet someone, we need to be asking questions and listening to the answers. The ‘overheard’ is also a great source. Secondly, we research through reading, TV, radio, internet, social media, interviewing… Thirdly, I come back to what Greer said about us all being the same species. At a very basic level, we all have the same impulses to want to be loved and respected and have a sense of purpose. How we might try and gain love, respect and a sense of purpose will vary, more, I believe, by nurture than by nature, though genes must play its part. I only have to look at me and my siblings to understand that. Fourthly, characters develop if we writers allow them to. Planning is often useful, but not if it gets in the way of characters bouncing off each other and off what is happening to them. As with real life, characters behave differently, and are changed, because of what is going on around them.

Finally, as a writer, it is important to believe that all human behaviour is possible. For me, I want all my characters’ behaviours/feelings to stretch back to those fundamental needs of love, respect and sense of purpose. I suspect I would not be able to do great violence to another person, I am far too squeamish and fearful. But I wanted to write from the point of view of someone who could and created Max in my short story Adrift (still available on Amazon somewhere). I feel I managed to capture a mindset which could allow extreme violence and rationalise it. That’s not saying I believe what Max did was right, only that he thought it was right.

What is your experience of creating character and voice? Have you deliberately set out to write a character very different from you?

Sense of Place

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Recently the film and the sit com both called Scarborough have had their UK release. I have some issues with both movie and TV series, but the town I have chosen as home certainly comes out as visually stunning. At its UK premier, Barnaby Southcombe, the director of Scarborough the film, explained how the location had informed the final version. The plot contains two interweaving narratives and Southcombe said the two were filmed at separate times of year, aiding the feeling of a shifting time frame. Though in many ways both film and sit com are not really rooted in Scarborough, they could have been set in any (at times faded) seaside town.

In my series of crime novels Scarborough and especially the sea are more than mere backdrops. I want them to become almost like another character interacting with the stories being told. I am currently working on Scarborough Mysteries number 5, No Justice, and seas and oceans from various parts of the globe flow through the narrative.

* * *

Extracts from No Justice:

She lets her gaze travel across the sea to where it meets the sky. It had been a blue day, tolerably warm given such a late Spring. Now the darkness is sifting through the scrapes of cloud to reach down to the flat sea. It is like molten silver alloy. The sun is setting and tinting the hills behind Hannah. It is the brushwork of the moon which is painting the water. A misshapen orb is nudging above the castle which stands on its headland to Hannah’s left, above the harbour, between the two bays.

She continues down the cliff path, through the gardens to the beach. Below her is the meringue-white curve of the sun court attached to the Victorian Gothic spa buildings. At the base of the cliffs, she sits on the sea wall. The waves are easing themselves up the tawny sand, she can smell the salt on them and the Bladder Wrack which garlands the rocks. She’s taken this walk many, many times since moving to Scarborough, five years ago. Temporarily as she thought at the time, to finish her training as a counsellor, moving back in with her parents, into the house she now owns. It hadn’t really been her choice, she had felt she had to finish something, succeed at something, but now she relishes her life here. Especially her walks by the sea. Though more recently, Kelsey’s story has given Hannah pause for thought. She’s more likely to start at movements, which are usually a bird or squirrel rootling about in the bushes. She gives men more than a second look – though the vast majority are obviously dog walkers and many are elderly. She looks out across the water, she won’t give this up, she needs this breathing through her.

…

Where Blessing and Marianne live, all their windows are nailed shut and the watchers insist the curtains are kept drawn. Only the bathroom has a narrow louvred opening. Through it Blessing can smell the cool salty air. She’d caught the scent of it the early morning of their arrival and had a glimpse of the expanse of dark water, like a tank of oil, a fire lit at its rim. The ocean. Only here it is the sea.

She has memories of holidays by the ocean, with her family, when she was young. For several years they had owned an apartment on the beach. She and her husband had visited the ocean, during the early years, before things became difficult. She had swum in that ocean, strong, steady strokes. She had sailed along the coast of that ocean. She had thought a sea, an enclosed sea, where, in places, one shore is clearly visible from another, she had thought such a sea could hold little danger. How wrong she’d been.

* * *

I am also collecting together some short stories I have been writing over several years. In these the sense of place is more germane. As every writer knows, stories can start from anything – an idea, a person, an overheard conversation, a walk through the countryside, a visit to a museum….. I found that every time I went away somewhere new, a short story began to emerge and I would take down notes. Once back home, I would work on these stories which are very much rooted in a place. The place itself birthed the story.

Extract White Night

The white nights will send you crazy. I walk the hills between Fløyen and Ulriken. I keep to the route, mostly, and there are plenty of others out there being sent crazy by the daylight at midnight. The grey granite rises steeply. There’s rowan, beech and birch on the lower slopes. These soon give way to the spruce and red pine under which the soft fronds of the ferns unfurl and bilberries ripen. Blackbird and coal tit chitter in the branches. Terns swoop silently over the still waters of the Blåmansvannet. A crow caws abrasively. Soon after the trees peter out leaving the naked rock scarred with lichen and moss. I have found my own paths which are safe to stray down, leading to the sheer drops; down, down to the fjord, a black mirror rippled with silver wire. I know the spots they choose, those sent crazy by the white nights. I know where they saunter too close and I am there waiting.

The fjord has its moods. Its surface turns from charcoal, to ivy, to forget-me-not, concealing its glacier-torn depth with a pleasing cloth. An uncareful step, a slip, and a body is gone. A body turns to bone before it is discovered. I am little more than a skeleton now, since you left me here. No flesh. Unremembered, unspoken of, the flesh loses its corpulence.

Since it is unlikely you will return to save me, I have my existence and I follow those who have misplaced the path, envious, let it be understood, of their lustrous flesh. I am made crazy by these white nights.

* * *

I am now reworking the story drafts following comments from various first readers. During my recovery from my hysterectomy I have done a lot of listening to the radio especially to stories being read. It has made me wonder whether I should produce these stories as audios rather than in print. There is something magical, I find, in being read to and I think my collection would lend itself to this approach.

Has anyone else made a podcast of their stories? Any advice?

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: Some Thoughts on Form by Sue Wilson

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If I had the luxury of writing a PhD, I would like to research the idea of what drives artists in their particular direction. 

In my musings, often when I am looking at a blank page, I wonder why it is that I must write poetry. Which then leads me off into other realms. Why does one writer write plays and another short stories? What drives an artist to make ceramics, or do a screen print, a collage, a mural, or paint in oils on large canvasses? I have no answer to these questions, but I would love to see a research project that focussed on the psychology of the creative drive. 

Myself I write poetry. It is at the core of my being, I am unable to stop producing poetry, admittedly of variable quality. And yet at no time in my life have I been able to see my writing, my very essence, as a means to generate income. It sustains my soul, but I have never exploited it to sustain my body. And like the visual artist who specialises in a particular form of their craft, I don’t just write poems. I write poems that follow precise form. I have written haiku, sestinas, sonnets, ballads, and the glorious villanelle. 

My faith in my work has ebbed and flowed over the years. Many times I have listened to critics who do not like form. Critics who have no respect for a structured rhyming scheme. And I have felt belittled and unworthy. At these times I have written poetry that does not adhere to specific form, and I have felt unsatisfied. 

Currently I am feeling strong. At the wrong side of 65 I feel it is time to accept who I am and what I write. Form brings me joy. Form brings me satisfaction. Form brings me a sense of great admiration for the writer who has clung to the coat tails of their belief in their own art. And so now, without apology, I have launched myself into a new venture. I am writing a series of Villanelles. I aim to write fifty in a year. I have no plans for publication. This is a challenge and a goal I have set myself, simply because I need to, and because I can. 

So, here is a Villanelle I wrote last month, whilst walking in the cemetery with my dogs. We came upon a small, fragile bird’s skull, and it took me straight back to the days when my children were small, in particular my youngest, now 30, and about to join the naval medical corps

Skull

In the cemetery we found a skull,
Its beak still intact, we thought it must be
a seabird, maybe, or a herring gull.

Lifting it gently by the mandible
you kissed and caressed it tenderly.
In the cemetery we found a skull:

bone-white fragility a tangible
early encounter with mortality.
A seabird, maybe, or a herring gull

had come to grief. Its span ephemeral
in that long, hot summer when you were three,
and in the cemetery found a skull.

You took it with you in your carryall
the year you left for university.
Was it a seabird? Or a herring gull?

Boy and skull; you were inseparable.
With hindsight it was unmistakably
a seabird. Certainly a herring gull.
In the cemetery we found a skull.

Sue Wilson, February 2019

 

Sue Wilson lives in Scarborough having retired there after a long career in the caring professions. She was a Probation Officer and an Addictions Counsellor. When not writing poetry she can be found walking her two Trailhounds, Norah and Doris, by the sea, and thinking about the poetry she’s read, and the poetry she’s writing. When not walking she will be in the swimming pool, another great environment for thinking about metre and rhythm. Her body is sustained by copious amounts of vegan food. In 2017 she maintained a Facebook page “The Ginger Vegan Baker” where she published an original vegan recipe every day for a year. Each recipe was accompanied by step by step photography, and, of course, photos of her dogs.