Finding poetry with my sisters

Sarah 1987

I was lucky enough to have a sister, in fact, I nearly had two, but my parents' first daughter was premature and died after a day. When I started to have my own children, I really wanted a girl, so my children would have what I had, a sister. When I was on the MA I wrote a sequence of poems about my sister Sarah, who died thirteen years ago, not just about her death although that was a seismic shock for the whole family, but our relationship, the times we played together as children, that enabled us to play as adults. One of my great memories of Sarah is one hot day, when the wind was up and the waves mad, we left our two babies in the care of a friend and nipped to the beach for a quick swim. It was exhilarating, and for an hour, we left responsibility and exhaustion behind and played in the waves as we had as children.

For the poetry collection, I imagined what life would be like in our fifties and sixties, if we were all alive, by contriving an imaginary reunion. This is a very early draft:

Reunion

Coat brush each other as we overflow spindly chairs.

Jo rests her bag (leather, neat) in her lap as if someone would steal it,

Sarah puts hers (hand sewn, gaudy) on the floor for all to admire,

my rucksack (patchwork, overflowing) hangs behind me.

We laugh, compare children, order drinks.

One coffee, milk foamed into fluff, a shot of hazelnut,
one hot chocolate oozing with cream and chocolate curls,
one Earl Grey with fat slices of lemon and no sugar.

We are between lovers, husbands, jobs.

Jo’s rings clink against her cup, she wears her history
like her vintage blouse, with elegance
and a touch of theatre.

Cakes arrive, fragrant and ornamented, on bone china

barely chipped. I nibble an éclair, lick chocolate like a cat.
Jo spreads jam and cream on a scone, closes her eyes as she bites.

Sarah almost touches each cake, weighs up tastiness
then delicately extracts a doughnut, dissects it with a knife,
and eats each morsel, dipping it in fallen sugar.

We hide our scars. Caesarean, appendix, hip replacement.

Wrists scarified in a tide of relief.
A chicken pox scar, centred white in a tanned forehead
like a bindi, like an assassin’s mark.  

We don’t talk about the past, let memory

sharpen our tongues with childhood rage.
Or remember the vortex of depressions.
We can’t talk about the future.
Two of us are dead. 


Oh, and just a reminder that Kissing Frankenstein and other stories is available here, on National Flash Fiction day, and I have two stories in it!

I have a plan!

To my amazement, I have bitten the bullet and created a plan for my novel with the help of my son, Carey. I think I was having a panic attack through the first few chapters so I will have to work on those, but it got easier. The magic ingredient turned out to be someone to talk ideas over with who would usefully (and sometimes contentiously) ask questions and point out inconsistencies. Now I have to work each chapter out into its own little plan, and I'm hoping to get a fellow student to help with that. But for the first time I do feel like the ending, conceived fifteen months ago, now connects to the rest of the story, and the pace works better. I bumped into a fellow student who said they were working on the story arc in their module,

and I was given the Christopher Vogler Mythic Structure overview and from those two I think I have met all the basic requirements of the novel. I noticed that I was introducing characters along the way that didn't add to the action and then needed stories of their own, so I've cut those right back. The action comes in waves now building up to a big, tense uber-battle at the end, and I've introduced enough moral ambiguity to make the antagonists better rounded. I've dropped some of the softer elements that lose tension and kept the story moving better. I can imagine, once I've loosely plotted the scenes and chapters out, being able to write bits. Marcus Sedgwick suggested he can write 'stepping stones' of a story once he's plotted out where they are all going to go, then he can stitch the novel together. I'm beginning to see how that would work. 

Apart from that, I have my toolkit assignment back and it got a good mark though not enough for a distinction overall. I don't know why I got so hung up on a distinction, really, I came to Winchester to finish a book to reasonable standard and I think I can probably manage that in the time. I always knew I wasn't going to write literary fiction but I really enjoyed writing the poetry and will continue that for myself. Somehow having it there is a bit like moving to the foot of a mountain, you start to wonder if you can get to the top! If I want to go onto a PhD (undecided) I really need a distinction but I'm actually finding writing so enjoyable that that is enough at the moment. 

I have my poetry to focus on for light relief and my plan to work on, now. It's all coming together, and the boys are doing well at college so that part of the project worked.

Back on my horse with the aid of Paul Muldoon

Well, after the doubts of the week and the doldrums that followed, I'm going to get on with the beep beep poetry for the Open University assignment. (This is quite likely headed out for critique, sorry Carole.) Then I'm going to start a week of planning for Borrowed Time. We were handed a version of Christopher Vogler's Mythic Structure. I started glancing down it and I immediately realised how much of my novel fitted into it. So I thought I could use that as a starting point to replot my novel, starting further back in time to explain how Sadie came to be in the position she was in. I thought if I could plot Borrowed Time then I could start plotting an alternative novel if needed for the dissertation. I realised how little time I spend thinking and how quick I am to sit down and write.

For the poetry TMA I am working on an unrhymed (well, a slant rhymed anyway) sonnet. It's hard to know whether by removing the rhyme you make it not a sonnet. The Big Blue Book suggests you have to give it more of something else if you're going to lose the rhyme. So, the volta as line eight, maybe a basic iambic pentameter structure even if it gets played about with a bit. I'm relying on Paul Muldoon's Quoof for how far I can stretch the form. It doesn't stick to the iambic pentameter, it doesn't formally rhyme but the slant rhymes are there and the volta definitely. Breaking it at line 8 into a slightly differently focused sestet works too.

In The Old Country Muldoon wrote Horse Latitudes, changing the beat at line 4, 8 and 11 to form a different shape, 4, 4, 3, 3:

Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon 
Every resort was a last resort
with a harbor that harbored an old grudge.
Every sale was a selling short.
there were those who simply wouldn't budge

from the Dandy to the Rover.
That shouting was the shouting
but for which it was all over -
the weekend, I mean, we set off for an outing 

The rhyming is there but less obvious in the last six lines:

with the weekday train timetable.
Every tower was a tower of Babel
that graced each corner of a bawn

Where every lookout was a poor lookout.
Every rill had its unflashy trout.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.

I'm working on the notes I got from the session with Myra Schneider. Like Elizabeth Bishop said of structured poetry forms, 'They seem to start the machinery going'.

I have been the cause of poetry in others

While I am presently inspired to write poetry, and make my family sit down and read/listen to successive drafts, I hadn't noticed my eldest son, quietly scribbling himself. I come home from class each week, waffling about what I've learned and Kez soaks it up like a sponge. He started showing me his poems, and I've been astonished. They are good. They are really good. No wonder he's my first choice of editor when I want to present fiction for workshopping. I took most of his comments on my fantastic fiction piece to heart, but disagreed with two of them. My tutor picked both up as problematic. Now I'm more consciously sharing some of the ideas I'm still absorbing, and he's listening to my ideas on editing. 

The MA has been a terrifically steep learning curve for me, I haven't got an education in literature to fall back on, and I come away from each class with my head buzzing. I have found the cost - being away from a husband and the rest of my children - has been high but the benefits have been spectacular. Not just for my writing, but for the two boys I have down in Winchester. I will miss the ideas that float around the class, sometimes too many to grab and scribble in my notebook. Consequently, I'm trying to get everything in, the reading, the classes, talks. I'm also hoping to go to the Winchester Poetry Weekend (11-13 March) to see Neil Astley and Francesca Beard on their sessions. I think I might drag Kez along.   

Inspired by Philip Gross

Last night we met Philip Gross, the poet/novelist. He read from his books, all of which were wonderful poems in their own right, but I mostly enjoyed his comments on how he came to write them, what context they came out of. Having been moved to tears by his sequence 'The Wasting Game' (I really recommend the book they are reprinted in, Change of Address) I was then amazed by his poems from a collaboration with a photographer called I Spy Pinhole Eye.

Philip's poems started out more solid, with less white space on the page, less indentations and much longer stanzas. Now, his poems are more spaced out, more considered, and he uses punctuation like musical notation for the spacing in time of the words. His book The Water Table won the T.S.Eliot prize for 2009, an honour he described as a year long distraction from actually writing.

One of the provocative questions he posed was taken up by a fellow student on our course blog, Writers Ink. What, at the core of us, makes us write? That was the question that seemed to keep a fellow student and I standing in the gloom on a street corner discussing big questions like: 'why write' and 'why do an MA?' That's a hard one. I'm not desperate to have a book published, I primarily wanted to do an MA because I love teaching and would love to move into teaching creative writing - not especially for people with masses of talent but people who want to explore 'self' through writing. I suppose I'm still thinking in terms of mental health and therapy. What I do know is, I would still write even if I had no interest in publication, but I do want to get published, I just don't have a burning need to do so. Philip Gross struck me as a man who writes what he wants, what he loves, and ignores the savvy, business side of writing. He's found a lifestyle that suits him, is paid to write and talk about writing, and has an expressive outlet. That sounds perfect.

A363 also had an assignment, an outline of the EMA we have to write for May (which is going to be a very busy month). I sent in my ideas for the first chapters of a book, and one question my tutor asked was - what is the big idea at the heart of the book? What question are you trying to answer? That flummoxed me (fabulous word, flummoxed) as I really couldn't tell you. Having thought about it overnight, I've decided it's a book about second chances. Now I have to concentrate on poetry and get that out of the way before I can go back to novelling, as the two parts of my brain don't work well together.

Productive weekend

I've been busy. Another chapter for the book and more poems. I've always been a bit baffled by sequences of poems, but I love Douglas Dunn's elegy. It was written around the time that his wife died and in the year afterwards. Quite apart from having had a similar experience when Steve died, the poems talk about a loss as a human experience. It was also interesting comparing the way a man - one particular man - dealt with his loss. It was strange, because I dreamed about Steve last night, and he's been dead for twenty years this year.

I'm hoping to write a group of poems about my sister and her death. I already have several randomly written over the last couple of years, and a few bits of fiction that reflect her. I'm playing with them, seeing if they make a poem. One is a description I wrote of cooking a curry, and it reminded me of Sarah when I wrote it, because she bought me the book (by Madhur Jaffrey) and we both used it a lot. We used to swap recipes, and ingredients. I often got packets of herbs and spices through the post, with aromatic letters full of jokes and laments and ideas, peppered with recipe ideas.

For light relief I have the book to work on and after the fantastic fiction session I had a revelation about the world in which Sadie and Jack live. So I'm writing with the anti-magic Nazis coming for Sadie...All very exciting to write. Also, how do you get a very large dog down a narrow tunnel? We managed it in the end...inspired by memories of my retriever wedging herself under the kids' beds when a bath was mentioned, or considered.

Starting the Publishing Project.

A quiet start to the MA proper, just 6 of us sat around looking at the publishing project module. In addition to the actual assignment, there is a class anthology to create, with work submitted from everyone to be edited and squeezed into the booklet. It's not that difficult, but I think editing an anthology will be a lot of work just at the time when we need to be working on assignments. Which means some people will have to be editors etc. of other students work. The other option is to look after the course blog instead. I'm happy to have a go at that, it's in blogger which makes it even easier. Then all I have to do is submit something for the anthology, which is, after all, a showcase of our work. Seems straightforward, but because the group is in two parts, I have to wait around to see what the other half decides, and they might all want to take on the blog... They can't make me edit the anthology. Can they?

Meanwhile I have to do something creative (OK) and then write a rationale about it (Ah). I'm assuming this is a bit like the commentaries I've been writing, and I've got a fair amount of helpful suggestions from the BA poetry module handbook. But words like 'write a critical essay on your creative blahdy blah' trickle into my head like lumpy soup and just sit there, indigestible.

If I'm going to write an essay I need a big question and a load of research papers and books. 'Can traumatic labour produce PTSD?' (The actual question was a lot longer) was a pushover for my MSc. 4000 words summarising the relationship between the triggering trauma and the effect it had later, coming up. References, sure, pages of them. Case studies? Check. Clinical experience? Loads of it. Easy peasy. I even got a distinction and it only took a weekend in the hospital library and two days to write. (I'm showing off at this point). But 1500 words of Rationale (see, it mysteriously has a capital letter) is terrifying. I would hate to write something really creative and then fail on this thing I can't even identify!

People assume I will be doing fiction but I really want to do poetry. The thing is, I probably won't ever get another chance to take a poetry course and while I am learning loads in fiction, that's much easier to keep pushing forwards. Oodles of books, I even live near an Arvon centre. I'll be putting in a big chunk of the book for the dissertation and so I want to capitalise on all the help the course has given me on my poetry. The poetry module is pushing towards publication, so it will be good research for the publishing project too. I'll learn all about selling a book in class and about selling poetry in the other class. I think it's an opportunity I don't want to miss. I'm rambling, that's how insecure I am at the moment. Everything seems a bit like it's slipped its moorings and the tide's going out... 

    

New poetry module

I turned up for my poetry class (the one I am very unofficially in - no paper trail exists) with my brand new notebook and pencils sharp and ready. Wow! I had so much fun. The class is only 2 hours which helps because it is really dense. The other students (just 5 of them) are highly motivated and one of them is doing a poetry final year project (FYP, must learn the lingo). The first thing the tutor gave us is a handout of current poetry magazines - BA students get this kind of assistance, MA students have to find it out for themselves - as suggested we get on and submit poems. Now. Get on with it. Then they will have something to report on in their rationale, the commentary they have to write about their assignment. I, on the other hand, realised I have a publishing project coming up and could just do the same. So I sent set of poems to two magazines, Brittle Star and Iota. The process of submitting can be useful for the rationale, and any response I get can be reported on. There is a list of current poetry journals and mags at the Poetry Library website. It turns out, poetry magazines have lovely names like Monkey Kettle and Obsessed with Pipework. They must be creative sorts.


We also worked off two prompts, Climbing Everest which I and two other people translated into old age, and Eurostar which I found turned into a fictionalised plan to go to Paris. The theme of the module is 'confessional' poetry, like Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, personal accounts which as he said, don't mean they are actually biographical. We can use our real lives to pull out themes that we then use to explore a fictional character or someone we know about. Having just read buckets of Erica Jong (recommended) and some of the books on the reading list, I can see the appeal but it does leave you very exposed. I've had some emotional hollows in my life, I'm not sure I want to splat them on the page like Olds does with such art.


We also talked about the relationship between creativity and mental illness, (useful link via Rosie's blog) especially depression. As someone who has been depressed I can say personally, that looking back on the dark days might provide food for thought, but productivity falls off completely when I'm depressed. My intellect is fine, I can write non-fiction but creative stuff just makes me feel worse. On the other hand, research suggests drugs like Prozac actually kill creativity too, as they appear to suppress imagination. I can't take the stuff, so I'm not in a position to judge, but the old tricyclics didn't do that for me, they enabled me to write, just dark, dark stuff. I'm looking forward to next week. Oh, and Myra Schneider, whose books I love, is coming to do a workshop and read in week 4. Can't wait.   

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's one of those people I knew more gossip about than poems she had written. A363 gave us You're to play with, and I've sat down and read Ariel now from cover to cover. I fell in love with Tulips. The poem is about the black and white scene of a 1960's hospital ward...

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in

...with the almost violent intrusion of the scarlet tulips:
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their swaddlings, like an awful baby. 

Plath talks about her husband and child as smiling, the smiles catching on her skin with little smiling hooks. The focus of the poem, like many of the poems written in the last months before her death, is about the relationship between rude life and the tranquillity of death. I have mainly avoided Plath - and Woolf for that matter - because the exploration of depression and suicide is something that I have experienced in my own family. But there's something powerful about Plath's poems that makes them so much more about her vivid experience of life than just about the lead up to her suicide.

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

Perhaps it is that too vivid experience of life that created an intolerable stress for her, but fed her poetry. I often feel with writing poetry, you could be lost in it, just fall into it. As you try and describe authentically feelings that don't have words, you are forced to re-experience it, even if the poem is about something else. Your poetic palette is your own experience of feelings, including anguish and agony. I found this with life writing, too, you have to delve into memories and complex feelings. I started a poem about the children's ward my daughter was on (for most of a year) surrounded by children with life shortening illnesses, which is a polite euphemism for circumstances where you feel flayed alive, more by hope than by bad news, which are braced for, but the loss of hope... and all around your personal disaster movie, are all these others. I think it has the makings of a good poem, but I sit and cry when I edit it. As a therapist, I can see the benefits of draining that agonising collection of pain. As a poet, I suspect it would be better to leave well alone.

Pantoums, villanelles and sestinas, oh my.

Have I said, recently, how brilliant the Open University courses are? A215, of course, can't really be beaten, even if people do weep over the poetry TMA. But A363 threw up some absolute gems in chapter 13, which I turned to with a complete creative blockage akin to a week without vegetables. The work was about metaphor, and set some lovely exercises and examples to play with. My favourite was Sylvia Plath's wonderful You're, which is a kind of riddle, as she piles on metaphor after metaphor.

'...Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
of July to All Fools' Day

O high riser, my little loaf...'

She also describes the baby as 'our well-travelled prawn', fantastic!
But, in poetry and certainly prose, less is more.

These are my 14.3 exercises:

• The telephone operator spidered to her desk by a web of calls, looping in copper silk.
• The basket weaver, thumbs reworking the tree into coracles for cats.
• The ploughman: Horses work the land, dragging the tools, surging forward in harness like waves against a boat, like sails dragging the furrows to the shore, dragging the man in their tidal wake.
• The blacksmith plays his ringing music, hammer spitting off sparks, the finale drowned in a veil of steam.

 Then, starting chapter 15 (again) I started looking at pantoums, having bodged a sestina over the weekend.

We sat on slated steps, to watch the light 1
fade into bat colours, grey 2
misting with midges in smoky flight 3
the swallows in their last pass stay 4

Then you use line 2 and 4 as the first and third line of the next stanza:

fade into bat colours, grey 2
the orange glow tints the limewashed walls 5
the swallows in their last pass stay 4
screaming their came-for-the-summery-calls  6 ... and so on

It forces you to come up with some really good lines and reuse them to mean different things, like sestinas. It's really easy to write a rubbish one, but I'm looking forward to putting something better together. On to sonnets. I have found Stephen Fry's An Ode Less Travelled invaluable,

especially in the examples and the explanation of the different styles of sonnet. I think it's a really funny read and really helped me find my way through metre especially. Bizarrely, I have to be careful not to 'publish' something that I might use in an assignment. I don't think of a blog as published, since it's only you and me reading it, and I'm not too sure about you!

In my blocked phase I sat down and wrote a scene by scene synopsis of chapters 1-9 of the novel, spotting big inconsistencies along the way. If I can't get on with clearing those up I hope to at least start chapter 10. Meantime, my tutor has thrown down the gauntlet about a comment I made on our tutor forums about almost marrying an invertebrate!   

One poem short but novel at 23 000 words

I'm a poem short for my assignment. I'm happier with my work now, and they sound good (the acid test, for poetry, and for fiction really). But they have shrunk as I cut out the predictable, the clever-for-its-own-sake stuff, and various cliches. Which leaves me about a poem short. My instinct is to bypass the 'good' stuff' that's been peer reviewed in the past and go for something a bit more personal. ('good' being a relative term here!). Meanwhile, I'm living on way to little sleep. The word starts to look strange and dangerous when you're tired. I did manage six hours last night but still had to get up to send no.3 son off on the bus because the previous night no.1 son headed off at 3 in the morning to go skiing. His clock didn't go off  but that was OK, I was already up. I wish I could say all that extra time was spent writing but sadly, I'm too tired to be able to concentrate most of the time. I'm going to try and catch up tonight and get back on with the novel.

This is my November walk poem, written in one of those 'got to write this down!' frenzies after a lovely walk along the Tarka trail towards Woolacombe.

Life and Death in November

We walk, descend into valleys
creased onto glacial curves,
speckled with sheep.
Rams, indigo raddled,
scent the armchair ewes,
trying the nearly-in-season
and the just-out-of-season;
blueing their backs with attempted lambs.
We creep past the bull, massive
behind the squat fence of wire and posts,
buttressed by blackened thorns.
One horn scratches an armoured shoulder.
Crows swagger after beetles or mice,
wing feathers clattering like ash keys.
Magpies cackle in stereo.
Goldfinches arrive in serrated flight,
dropping and rising onto teazle heads.
The wind rolls over the cold-stalled grass,
strips trees and impregnates the sea
with jagged surf.
Walls of un-mortared slate
perch on banks, anchored
with shrub roots and skeletal nettles.
Berries incandesce in scarlet and purple,
shrivelling in the frost.
A sparrowhawk claps from an oak,
indifferent, amber-eyed,
looping into the next killing tree.
Mole hills erupt, earth swelling,
and wrecked shells band the footpath.
A blackbird turns splinters over
for writhing snails, bubbling in the air.
A spider hurries ahead, back to her killing tree,
mugwort, hung with seeds, belled with webs,
mazed with silk wrapped carcases.
A late butterfly loops from plant to plant,
a magpie follows, eyes on her egg filled belly.
A raven, big as a buzzard, gazes out to sea.

I have now finished chapter 8 and am slowly writing chapter 9. No. 1 son says he likes the pace and tension, and my last draft of the books died in the middle so I'm thinking about new dilemmas and dangers for the characters. I'm also doing lots of research on things like John Dee's books and ceremonial magick, which is fascinating, especially in the old English. 

e.g. ...and for as much as, many yeers, in many places, far & nere, in many bokes, & sundry languages, I have sowght, & studied; and with sundry men conferred, and with my owne reasonable discourse laboured, thereby to fynde or get some ynckling, glyms or beame of such the foresaid radicall truthes.   

Me too, Dr. Dee! I just wish I had more of an ynckling, glyms or beame of inspiration for another poem.

Must have done something right

Amongst all my efforts, my children stand as the work I am most proud of. Oh, I know it's not fashionable to celebrate our work as parents, but I think that's short sighted. So, today, I want to celebrate the latest child to make me proud, Sophie B, who is finishing her degree this year and has a lovely, lovely boyfriend and to cap it all, has a plan to go WWOOFing with him for the summer before getting a proper job/flat/debt/life or whatever the future has in store. This means they have applied to various smallholdings and farm to take them on for a week or two or a month to teach them about sustainability and being grownups in our deteriorating ecosystem. Hard to believe she was just a bouncy, noisy little scrap a few years ago. She's my inspiration...well, one of them, anyway!

Meanwhile, I have set myself a deadline to finish all my MA assignments - a bit of a long shot, admittedly, but if I get all my homework done, I will get my husband to come down from Devon for the second half of next week, and then take me home for a week! Could be nice, especially as no. 1 son is off skiing. So, back to poems. I seem to have ended up with a  lot of overblown nature poems, commonplace at best, because they aren't saying anything new. I like the jackdaws - but they are only 19 lines. I have created a little aide memoir to help me work out how many lines I have to write to go with my short story. 

That's 150 lines. I have a poem about Harvard referencing (but that's down to 25 lines after a bit of trimming), a buzzard poem that was fun to write but isn't very good and will end up at about 20 lines; a poem about a walk I took in November that is quite good and is 43 lines long (yay!), a cyberpunk cut up poem that no-one understands but I quite like but is only 16 lines. That's, um (adds up on fingers, gives up, uses calculator, gets 13240.88 as answer, laboriously counts of fingers again) 123 lines. Assuming they don't get edited further (which they will be) I'm short at least one poem. Which means I have to put the second wife one in which I like, it came out of the toolkit but how on earth is my tutor ever going to know that! 

While looking for my notes I did find a couple of short (very short) poems that I wrote along the way. 

Men are like string

Men are like string,
you spend ages untangling 
but they tangle back up in the drawer.
The string gets longer as they get older.
Some of the tangles have been there since childhood.
You can use your teeth on those. 

Some poems

Some poems are spaniels,
they attach themselves to you,
bound ahead, take landscape sticks
they roll and beg for hefty pats
and bark at passing cars.

Some poems are strays, spotted
in alleys, under cars, up trees,
part wolf, part mystery, part memory.
Sometimes a single paw print
left in melting snow.  

     

Back to work.

After a really lovely solstice/Christmas/New year celebration I am finally installed, ahead of time, in Winchester. It's been a terrible wrench leaving home and I found myself wandering around, the day I packed, touching things I think of as completely home - the blue and white china I started collecting two decades ago, much of which is from charity shops, the bookshelves my husband built, the wooden box I bought when I moved to the Island in 1994. I have deliberately not brought favourite things from home, because home is Devon. This is my work place, so I'm supposed to be working. My commitment is to write 1000 words a day, because that's when I feel best about my writing, even if I'm also writing something else like an assignment. This counts, and so does my diary. So I very quickly rack up words anyway. With 4,000 words ready to go off for my fiction assignment (thanks to the very welcome help of a fellow student!) I am ready to start seriously editing the next thing, a collection of poems. The problem is, they all sound a bit similar in style, because I've been reading a lot of Erica Jong and Sharon Olds. I also want to write a sestina, but I've never tried. They seem so contrived when you look at them on the paper yet they sound so gorgeous. Since we're doing sestinas, villanelles and sonnets in A363 shortly, I thought I would work my way through that chapter and see if one of my long poems (which needs serious cutting) will work in a new format.

Otherwise, I'm quietly looking at the novel, not setting myself a huge workload, but pottering with new scenes rather than whole chapters. I need a new way of novelling, just taking a run up at it means the beginnings are full of ideas but I'm running out by the end. So my novels accelerate at the end and fall off into anticlimax. Although I had no fun at all writing the radio play for A363, I have found some of the screenplay writing stuff useful for writing cinematically, like a film. So I'm playing with that.

The assignment I have been most confident of, partly because I've got my head in the sand about it, is the 'creative toolkit' one. For this, I've put together a sequence of poems and a short story, but I've left these until last to work on. I'm going to print them off and stick them on the shelves so I can see them when I'm slacking relaxing after a hard days work. Meanwhile I'm putting a photo up of the silliest cat ever. She was sitting on the desk looking out at the birds and obviously got tired - and curled up like a snail.  Silly Saffy. Or as she is known in the family - (big breath) Teeny Tanley Fat Fluffly Saffy Doolins Bave. And when middle daughter was working at the vet's, she did try and get all that on the computer...I shall miss the cats too.

Packing and radio plays

What exactly do you need to go away for a year? But still leaving stuff at home because you have to come home for Christmas and Easter. If I pack all my favourite books I feel like I'm leaving for good. So I'm just packing all the literary masterpieces I have bought in the last six months but haven't really read. I also seemed to have accumulated dozens of books on writing. I must just write a list. I go around thinking 'Oh, I must remember that...' and the list is growing. It's easier to focus on what the kids need, to be honest. But if I'm going to feel at home there (very important) and be able to relax enough to work, I must remember the desk and the computer chair, and cutlery is OK but without plates... I swerve between 'It's going to be exciting' and 'Oh, help, what the hell am I doing?'.


I have started chapter seven of A363 which is about radio plays. Now, I can't stand radio. I can't even listen to story tapes. I don't mind music of course, but I read fast, and anything going slower than my normal reading speed loses my interest. Strangely, I think this might be the dramatic medium that suits me best of the three on the course.The exercises get you looking at two short stories: A Real Durwan and Violin lessons, and frankly, I can't stand either of them having looked at them so much. I'm cheating and using my own short stories to write plays etc. from. Besides, that helps with the whole TMA thing, as one at least has to be a radio/stage/screen play.  We had to look at Rose Tremain's play, Temporary Shelter, which seems pretty straightforward. The problem is, the radio plays I have recently read off the BBC website are nothing like this sensible, structured, 'here are all the characters in this setting and here's what happens next'. So I had a go at activity 7.2 (Write a scene or two which establishes a holiday destination known to you (up to 700 words) and before I knew what was happening, I was pushing one of my charcaters off a cliff. 

I'm meandering over the poetry chapter too - it's essentially a free standing unit. In fact, it would work quite well as a last chapter of the Big Red Book poetry section. I decided to have a go at a sestina - but have decided it is ridiculously difficult to keep interest in 6 words repeating over 36 lines. The poetry TMA is 80-100 lines, and most of my poems are well under 20 lines. they have to be in sonnets or in sestinas, villanelles or pantoums. (I love that the spellcheck reads these as 'villainies and phantoms').

I watched an interview with David Almond and how he wrote Skellig. He had one line, sat down and let the story write itself. He was astonished as the readers to find the tramp in the shed has wings... when I'm writing well, that's what I do, just follow the characters (not as successfully as Almond, clearly!). The problem is, planning and trying to write more 'literary' work stops that flow, makes me self conscious and question. I've set myself the task of reading all Almond's other books, see where that first book flow took him.   

A363 Chapter 2

I have taken exercise 2.2 from the new course and written a short story. It's about a woman cleaning a floor in an empty flat. Predictably, she's musing on the identity of the deceased, elderly owner when she discovers a tiny clue that might explain her unnatural demise. Immediately I wrote it, I applied chapter two and realised that her speculations could become more dramatic if the person she realises may have committed a crime actually walks in, if only to check whether the flat will be ready for the estate agents to begin viewings (he's very keen to get his inheritance). So I can move the story up a gear and this is the big, plot edit that I will get on with today. Then I can work on the language another time.

For activity 2.2 I also played around with the Uncle Fred blog entries and a theme immediately presented itself from the week I picked randomly - Fred waters his mother's grave, itself a very retrospective look, and there's the added dimension of the seventy year gap between the diary entries and the blog. And if course, Dunkirk rumbling in the background.

He waters Mother's grave
Plants geraniums and petunias
While Dunkirk guns echo through
The night-time air

He walks along the railway path
Rain softening his day
Buys Dinkey's food while desperate men
Crush into the grey sea

He washes the sashes round the back
As they rattle with the echoes
Of the Dunkirk guns,
An walk over dusky Cannon Hill

Warm sun on the new blue suit
The first rose blooms, startling
In cerise, scarlet, ochre and yellow
An explosion of colour.

OK this is just the raw material, but I'm amazed at the juxtaposition of the Dunkirk drama unfolding (which he, of course, wasn't as aware at the time as we are now) and the normal life that had to go on just the same. All from four diary entries! Go A363...

We've got a date for the boys college interviews - my attendance at Winchester is somewhat dependant on at least one of the boys getting in - otherwise I would have to go into halls or share a house (gulp) with someone else's teenagers. And we have to find a house - if not then, at least in July. It helps that the long list of requirements we had for this adventure are being ticked off - I have a car (tick), Carey has passed his driving test so can co-pilot (tick) I'm in at Winchester (tick). Now I just have the other hurdles of getting funding for the boys, them on courses, packing, renting, moving and saying goodbye to the bear for weeks at a time. I love my bear, I miss him if he goes away for one night. This is going to be tricky for both of us.

Moving smartly on to A363

Well, enough shaking and wittering about A215, as it's a done deal, in the past, over and out. Until the results come out, of course... OK, a small amount of wittering still to come! Anyway, A363 starts today (for me, anyway!)

So, I had a look at the very beginning of chapter 1, and it started looking at genre. Not just big genre like poetry or fiction or drama but sub-genres like crime or romantic fiction. So, we got a short passage and had to look at it as if it had one of five different titles, which each suggested a different genre. I must admit, the title does set up certain expectations! Then we had to write a follow up (in activity 1.2) from some of the titles. So in the crime drama/mystery beginning, the body lies across the church doorway and the figure glides away, the body that of someone who has majorly pissed someone off and the figure - maybe the killer - or someone who witnessed it? If the same words were part of a romantic mystery titled 'The Betrayal', my focus was on the person who found the body and the woman who glided away, the inference that the characters will be central. If I was to write 'My Problem with Peyote' the body in the doorway wouldn't even be dead! So, pages 1-3 sorted. On my way!

There are also some top poetry comps coming up:
National poetry comp 31 October
Bridport prize 30 June
Wells Festival of Literature 31 July
Mslexia poetry comp 26 July
Poetry London Comp 31 May (OK, this one is a bit close!)

As usual, Mslexia are full of ideas for editing. Here for inspirational approaches to editing.

I tried the babelfish thing too! Babelfish, if you don't know, translates English into other languages, just put 'babelfish' into your search engine. Then translate it back - and the words are different, pick out any interesting changes!

So:

She never lies, she never says ‘no’.
Her hands are smooth in memory,
Her body slender, unlined, pictured
Forever at twenty three or thirty two.
No demands of flesh, no meaty needs.
Her brain does not snip or snipe
As she rests, under a blanket of grass,
A silver birch, waving to the road.

becomes

Elle ne se trouve jamais, elle ne dit jamais le `no'. Elle des mains sont lisse dans la mémoire, Son corps mince, sans doublure, décrit pour toujours à vingt-trois ou à trente-deux. Aucunes demandes de chair, aucuns besoins de viande. Son cerveau ne coupe pas ou ne tire un coup de feu pas d'un coup de ciseaux Comme elle se repose, sous une couverture d'herbe, le bouleau argenté d'A, saluant la route.

and back again!

It is never, it never says the `no'. It with the hands smooth in the memory, Its body thin, without lining, are described for always with twenty-three or thirty-two. Aucunes requests for flesh, aucuns needs for meat. Its brain does not cross or does not draw a shot not d' a blow of scissors As it rests, under a cover d' bleaches on grass, the birch silver plated d' With, greeting the road.

I love greeting the road, for example, and hands smooth in the memory.

TMA03 off and 44,000 words!

What a busy, and productive week! Having spent literally seven months studying poetry and working towards the TMA, in the end one poem was written a week ago and another one reworked from months ago. I'm hugely enjoying writing poetry but it's so time consuming! In the time it would take to write 20 poems to reasonable standard I could have got the first draft and probably the first rewrite of a whole novel. Scary amounts of work. I only had to hand in 40 lines, I started out with over 90 and they edited down to exactly 40 - so much thrown away. The freewrites they came from were even more, thousands of words, and I ended up with hundreds. A fiction rewrite is a bit of a trim, maybe a new style, re-working and re-phrasing, maybe a few cuts and a few new scenes. Poetry rewrites are shaving down to the skin. Maybe a small tattoo, but you know you'll remove that at the end. Just bare skin, naked, revealed. Maybe a scratch or too. Ouch.

I managed to put loads in the commentary because I learned loads. I actually understood why I did things, rather than fiction when you just sort of KNOW because you've read so much, written so many words. I must have written literally several millions of fiction words. And read many many times more.

However, things are changing. I have a pile of enjoyable but not-very-well-written books by the bed - and bad writing grates on my nerves. Poetry books also get read at night, although they are intense, you can't just run through them quickly, you have to savour them, read them out loud, maybe read them again. This course has changed me as a writer, and it certainly helped me kick off the shackles of doubt. If I spend an hour or two or three hours a day writing novel which NEVER get published, so be it. I'm enjoying it, and that's important. And writing more and reading better stuff is just improving my work.

At the 30,000 word mark and still no poetry

OK, now I'm really having fun. My characters are much clearer now - and the Emma I wrote in the first two chapters is going to have to be substantially rewritten at the editing stage but she's really unfurling now. I'm enjoying the genealogy bit as well, though I now have a huge family tree open on the desk and have to keep adding dates and names to it. I'm working to 1000 words a day first draft or 600 words rewrite, but in reality I'm nailing 2000 words of first draft a day. My husband has already commissioned the screenplay and cast the major roles. Colin Firth is my first choice for any role, of course, including Emma. If he wants to dive into a pond at any point that would also be possible.

Meanwhile, the poetry is coming in fits and starts. I'm frozen with indecision at the final editing phase. I don't have problems getting good initial material, nor now forming reasonable poems but pruning it is still a challenge. Who knows if I've cut out the only interesting bits? I'm drawn to Sharon Olds poetry, but my tutor wants very sparse stuff. I love Douglas Dunn's Elegy, Kathy France, loads of new people. My husband treated me to the anthology of women poets by Bloodaxe - wow! I feel a bit like a small child with a crayon at this point. I feel like a fraud, in fact. I've been studying this for six months now, which I realise is ludicrously too short a time to develop a whole new art form! I think I'm going to have to let go of any preconceptions, write three poems all a bit different, and hope for the best.

I'm a novelist, really, long fiction is my thing! Maybe the odd short story... People think you're being so pretentious when you write novels but haven't had any published. You know it's just you (and maybe the odd doting relative or lover or child), who has any faith in the protracted process. But the only way to get published is to write a finished, polished book, so I just have to keep them coming. On the plus side, they are getting better paced (always a problem, if I have a dull day the book suffers). I have a good solid beginning, reasonable ending and vague map of how to get from one to the other (at least for the principals). This is progress!

27,000 words plus and still poetry!

Well, it's still growing, and Emma is becoming clearer (she's the woman who runs the B&B). Emma's intense connection with her identical twin has left her aware of atmospheres, shadows, all the ghosts of her family home. In a way, the man who she is starting to see as a friend is fitting into her world of the past as she starts to go into his world.

On the poetry front, I have been playing around with the two freewrites I did on the day school, which I will put up once I have had them marked. One was so intensely personal, painful, the days and weeks we spent on a children's ward waiting for Leonie to be diagnosed/treated. I think the poetry is creeping into the fiction, which is very satisfying. It's starting to read better, even in its primitive first draft. What has become clear to me is the energy in Emma, what happens when she not in front of the guests, folded in on herself, just performing the basic tasks, the cooking etc. I'm liking her more and more!

While I'm playing with book 1 I'm plotting book 2. I don't plot - but this is a more complex book aimed at young adults so I need more research, especially into the minds of teenagers for the background. I don't want it to date too much, so I'm looking for the right language. I've been picking the brains of my 15 year old niece (thanks, Ash!) and will continue to do so. I must admit, she's kind of influenced the heroine a bit! Gradually, I'm picking up threads that will form the book.

Twenty thousand, five hundred words and counting

The book is flowing well and the odd character of Emma is being stretched like an elastic band. I have to go back and read chapters one and two, because Lily and Emma have developed and I need to make sure they are still consistent. But this is only first draft so it's still all about the pacing and the story.

I can't draft something from a plan, the characters kind of write the story and then I loop back to the beginning and rewrite from the end, as if I were looking back, to make sure I set up the later chapters with the right foundations. Poetry wise, I have started looking at a series of autobiographical poems about the impact of losing a child for TMA 04. Hopefully the feedback from TMA03 will help, but I'm not expecting high marks. Just thinking about Leonie is hard, it's easier to write poetry about her than prose. She died so long ago, but it stays with you, like a scar. It's that scar I want to write about, how your life grows around this grief until you make it into something else. The novel is about losing a child, too, and about coming back from that long winter, and I think that's probably therapeutic anyway. It's sparking ideas for the life writing, anyway.