My Half-Formed Words

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As the Facebook followers among you may have seen, on November 1st, I made a public declaration to write or undertake a creative activity, for every seasonal festival of the year. 

Afterwards I realised, with horror, that there was no way that I would have time to craft those pieces until I considered them complete. I would have to put them out into the social media cosmos unfinished. My malformed children.

(That elicited in me something like the shame I experienced when my 2-year old son threw a tantrum on the floor of Tesco’s. Trying to manhandle him out, I glimpsed the queue of shoppers staring and tutting as they waited to get down the blocked aisle to their spaghetti.)

Following that moment of horror, the phrase practice what you preach sprung into my mind, and I took a deep breath, After all, I ask participants on both the real-world, and online Wild Words courses to share their work all the time, albeit in small groups rather than cosmos-wide.

In the Skype live check-in the other week, we had a spirited conversation about this very subject. One participant(speaking for most I suspect) said she didn’t have time to edit her work to her satisfaction, and was terrified of posting anything that wasn’t finished.

But the point is, (I remind myself as my finger hovers over the send button with regard to a piece about The Full Moon of November) that creative writing and stories are never finished. We could redraft even the same short poem for years - that’s the beauty, richness and magic of language.

In Herman Melville’s words,

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft- nay, but the draft of a draft.
                                                                        - Moby Dick (Chapter 32 Paragraph 44)

 That finish line is an illusion. It’s only ever that we make a choice to stop working on something, put it aside and do something else.   

The purpose of stories is to hear others, and be heard. Stories are gifts in the giving, and gifts in the receiving.  They are points of contact and meaning in a sea of meaningless life events. They are,

...but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

                           - Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

When we don't share them, we deprive them of their life-giving role. 

In my approach to teaching creative writing, each draft of a piece is a stepping stone, with a particular purpose. For example, the first draft stage is about connecting with your passion for your subject and writing from a place of instinct. That’s all. It’s not about making sure the point of view is the strongest it could be, or checking to make sure you’ve got the colour red somewhere in the piece, or anything else for that matter. 

The first draft doesn't have to do everything. It just has to give us solid ground under our feet, from which to step on up to somewhere else.  It doesn't need to be perfect. Just like we don't need to be perfect.  (As if we even knew what perfect was anyway!) 

So many of us writers beaver away in our solitary rooms, isolated and struggling. Let's not deprive ourselves of the possibility to receive and offer support, because we don't feel ourselves, or our work, is right. We progress as writers when we are part of a community.  It’s having other people around that gets us through times of block and hardship. And it's via human connections that people come to know about our work.

The way to be part of any community is to come to it just as you are. And to let your writing do the same. No-one will steal your ideas. The world is abundant in ideas and there are more than enough to go round. (It’s the willingness to do the work that not many people have). Anyway, no-one writes in exactly the way that you do. No one has your voice.

 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

It's not so much a prompt this month, as a challenge... 

Share a first draft piece of work, something you are not entirely happy with, something that feels unfinished.  Let it be the animal that it is. Absolutely unapologetically.

The Turning Year Prompt

If you'd like to join me in spinning some Wild Words around the seasonal festivals, here are the key dates this month:

-New Moon: Friday 11th November 

-Winter Solstice, the shortest day: 04:48 Tuesday 22nd December 

-Full Moon: Friday 25th December

 

Events News

There’s lots to announce this month! I’m beyond excited to unveil the new look Wild Words website, created by the talented Emma Wallace.  Take a browse.  Here's a summary of what you'll find. 

-The online courses will continue to be thriving, supportive communities.  However, in order to extend their reach, and to allow those on lower incomes to access the courses, for 2016I’ve lowered the prices to a bargain £95 per 7-week course.

For all the online courses (levels 1, 2, and 3), the start dates for 2016 are:  

-Monday 1st February 2016 

-Monday 2nd May 2016 

-Monday 3rd of October 2016  

I expect them to fill up quickly! Register here.

 

I’m delighted to announce the first Wild Words residential immersive weeks in Southern France, which will take place in 2016. 

-Spring retreat: Monday 18th- Saturday 23rd April  2016 

-Autumn retreat: Monday 3rd October - Saturday 8th October 2016

Register interest here. 

-As well as that we’re preparing a Wild Words UK tour of literary and arts festivals for summer 2016.  If you are involved in organising an arts or literary event, and would like me to attend, please get in touch via hello@wildwords.org

-There's still time to enter The Biannual Wild Words Writing Competition, which closes on December 21st. See here.

-This monthly newsletter will continue to go out as usual in 2016. However you will now receive it on the third (rather than the first) Monday of each month. This is in order to be able to prompt you before the beginning of each new lunar month.

-You are ongoingly invited to share writing about the seasonal festivals, lunar landmarks, and turning of the year on the Wild Words Facebook page (please don’t let me post alone!)

-I'm enjoying publishing writer's stories about their creative processes, on the Wild Words Facebook page. Whatever kind of writer you are, if you would like to share yours, please send me up to 400 words on the subject. I'll also need a photograph of you looking directly to camera, and preferably holding the tools of  the writer's trade.  

I look forward to sharing the continued journey into freedom through creative expression with you all. Have a very happy December. 
Thank you for being part of Wild Words.
Bridget
Founder, Wild Words

What’s Happening Now At Wild Words…

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At Wild Words we’re having adventures.

We’re going ever deeper into what it means to speak with an authentic voice, and to tell the story you need to tell - from the hopeful beginning to the satisfying end. 
 
The online courses are thriving, supportive communities. And we’re gearing up to announce the first Wild Words residential immersive weeks in Southern France, which will take place in 2016. We’re also preparing a Wild Words tour of literary and arts festivals for next summer. 
 
Via Facebook and other social media, I’m loving sharing writer’s experiences of block and flow in the creative process. And I’m carving out a space to share my words around the seasonal festivals of the year, as well as my personal journey to track the wild animal and the wild words.

And now a new website too. :-)

A Writer's Process: Penny Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Creative Process by Charlotte Stevens

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

She told me about her creative process...

"I have a preoccupation with form when writing.

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

'About Witches' represents a breakthrough for me.

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

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

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

Writing outdoors

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

Why are you a writer-in-the wild?

Please write and tell me about it.