A Writer's Process: Heather Taylor

Helen Ellwood

When I began writing Message in a Bottle, I wasn't thinking about publication, I simply wanted to escape the pain of a spine-damaging car crash.  By thinking about my time living as a South Seas castaway, and recording my memories on a Dictaphone, I was able to distract myself from my disability.

As the years rolled by, and my health improved to the point where I could sit up and use voice-activated software, I began to believe in my story.  In reality, who goes to an uninhabited desert island to get away from their troubles? I did, and it was a story worth telling, yet for some reason I couldn't finish the wretched thing.

Originally, I'd gone to the island to have an adventure and thereby heal my grief. My mother had died only the year before, and I couldn't cope. I ran away to ‘paradise’, tried to face my demons and returned alive, but did that really make a story?

Self-doubt kicked in.

In 2011, I gained a few writerly tools and a dose of self-confidence from Bridget’s writing course at Swanwick Summer School, and a year later gained the interest of literary agent Meg Davies. At this point, I was still focusing on the travel adventure; putting my inner journey second. 

I failed to hold Meg’s attention, but my next re-write, in which I focused more strongly on the inner journey, got long-listed for the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2014. So far so good, but Bridget felt I hadn't yet reached the heart of my story. Something indefinable was missing.

I’d gone to the island to find freedom from grief, yet once there, I’d remained emotionally restrained. Why hadn’t I been able to yell and roar – to heal? Why hadn’t I been able to challenge my companion when I needed to? Why had I let the press walk all over me?

As I read through my manuscript with an open mind, I realised my book was actually about authenticity.

I was brought up to be a well-behaved child.  Unfortunately, I became too well-behaved; I grew into an adult afraid of authentic self-expression.  I was a wild child in conformist clothing. This inability to speak my truth dogged my adventure on all levels. 

I had found the heart of my story. My journey was complete.

By writing my thoughts and feelings in italics, and showing my actual speech and behaviour in normal text, my latest rewrite explores the mismatch between the two; giving rise to insight and personal change, with a refreshing touch of humour, all set in an exotic and claustrophobic environment.

I am very grateful to Bridget for helping me give birth to my Desert Island memoir.

"When you get to the heart of your story, the journey is complete." 

Bridget Holding 2015.

My Writing Day: Heather Taylor

It started with the digging out of an invasive type of fuchsia.

It believed too much of its own publicity at the expense of other, more subtle beauty, choking the roots of the variegated Ilex and smothering the Pulmonaria saccharata. And so the Phygelius rectus had to go. The roots were thicker than fingers, clutching the ground tightly. I excavated meticulously. Not one tip could remain.

I swore through my sweat in the garden and reasoned through my tears in the therapy room. All I wanted was to make sense of things. Writing helped. So why, since April, had the words stopped germinating?

So, I dug. I trowelled. I sifted stones and unwanted roots. I forked in manure. My bed smelled of that first breath on late November mornings. What happens overnight to produce that fertile odour? The ground revives itself. It does. What happens in the dark, below the surface? While we sleep, with no human meddling, there’s a fast fermentation, then, that bouquet before sunrise. That’s the smell, the aroma of my bed, my border, ‘six inch under’.

And now, while root and worm wrestle in the cold, lightless damp, there are leaves skittering on the surface, scratching in swarms. I don’t quite understand their language. What could this dead, dry vegetation be trying to say?

So I tidy and clean tools and sharpen shears. And in my tidying I find a black bin bag behind the potting shed. It is weighty. I untie the knotted top and the sack breathes over me the ripe November dawn. I inhale deeply and rejoice in this rich, friable leaf mould. 

A Writer's Process: George Tardios

George Tardios 

Beginning is the worst part. Once I begin writing onto a blank sheet of paper, I have broken the frozen-mold, and all should then hopefully flow. Subsequent ideas cannot be apparent unless I put down the first, however clumsy it may appear.

The surprise then is that my imagination is loosed, and ideas rain down thick and fast, but they seem to be coming from another source! I am adamant that whatever I write doesn't come from me. I am merely a conduit. Thankfully, I have been chosen to have amazing words channelled through me by some other creative source.

Recently completing 'Buttoned-Up Shapes', a book of poems, I initially felt that my ancestors were banging me on the head, saying "We want to be recorded. To know that our words and deeds exist". So, I put down whatever came into my head. I'm sure they were carefully dictating.

The difficulty then is to keep this up, which means you have to make the effort to daily choose a space at a certain time and keep to it for a certain number of hours. In Cyprus this summer I wrote a book 'Stanley's Footsteps'. I woke at six am every morning and worked for six to seven hours.

At the end of the day, before going to swim in the sea (thank God) I felt unreal, my balance was unsteady, my wife would have to gently guide me, I was discombobulated! Yet I would have to keep it up next day and the day after that if I wanted to receive further information to finish the book.

Ted Hughes used to every morning, without fail, walk to his garden hut armed with a kettle of hot water for tea/coffee, and sit there for hours, whether he wrote or not. He believed in 'discipline'.

A Writer's Process: Diane Wright

Diane Wright

My creative process initially fires up as our writing tutor announces our homework:- ’Fresh Fruit - a personal story’  - a poem, diary piece or short story, to be shared the following week.

Prickly panic immediately stabs my armpits as the familiar fear of creative lockdown looms; the dread of ‘nothing to say’.  Over the next five days I use every writing opportunity to clean out the cat litter tray, defrost the fridge even repair a fallen hem!  Two days to go and finally I sit down to write knowing I need to write and feeling both scared and excited.

Both emotions are welcome.  I no longer try to reason the fear away -I wonder if it’strying to protect me from perceived rejection and ridicule that have strong roots in earlier and unhappier times.

So I pick up my pen and encourage myself to play with ideas around ‘fresh fruit’ and see what emerges.  Very soon, wordsemerge stuttering and fumbling onto the page. Trying to convey dribbles of juicy pear and frigid white hulls of November strawberries in fluorescent supermarkets.

As I write, a thread of narrative starts to weave my ideas together and I am writing about my dad, then gravely ill, and his love of homemade fruit salad.  It becomes the story of an adult daughter and her ‘fruitless’ struggles to please her unreasonable father. 

My pen digs deeply into the page as I describe his petulant demands for Scottish strawberries in Winter and how his ingratitude wounds his daughter.  It lightens when I start to describe the’ fresh figs in postwar Paris’ anecdotes, and the daughter’s unfailing loyalty towards her father, as she patiently listens and laughs as if hearing all this for the first time.

My first draft is messy and now like freshly mixed bread dough needs conscious shaping and time to ‘ prove’.   

I find editing my writing tortuous,  as the perfectionist part of me scrutinises every word and phrase for meaning and ‘fit’ yet a romantic sentimental streak in me is reluctant to cut out any original ideas.  It feels disloyal somehow, like casting friends overboard a dinghy, I might never get them back! 

At some indefinable point, the process is finished, any more deliberation and the spark in the piece will die.  So now, I look forward to receiving feedback, reminding myself that for me, it’s the process rather than the finished piece that’s most precious to me.   

A Writer's Process: Autumn Barlow

Autumn Barlow

Writing is a journey that is individual and this has two important consequences: one is that it is a personal journey to a unique destination, and the second is that people are on different stages of that journey.

At the moment, I am an entertainer. My writing seeks to make people laugh; if this were Tarot, I'd be the Fool, and I'm happy with that.

The process might seem superficial. It is one that I have honed over the decades; on my journey, this is what works for me.

I keep the pool of inspiration filled. I read, widely. I seek out culture both high and low, and I explore new places, a lot. It all goes into my mind, and often emerges in surprising ways. I don't begrudge taking an afternoon off to walk around town. It's all part of it. I need to be human to write about human life.

Often I have one spark that comes to me as a sentence or an image. I let it roll around my mind for some times. I am always working on multiple projects at different stages. I seem to have a knack for compartmentalising.

Once the idea has grown and I have a character with a problem to solve, then I sit with a large sheet of paper and some post-it notes and I outline their arc. I split the paper into sections and make sure I have exciting scenes to look forward, well-scattered through the book.

If I am not excited about writing it, I don't do it. If it's boring to write, I tell myself, it could be boring to read.

Then I type up each chapter as a short paragraph. I do this on a laptop, often away from home, in libraries or cafes. I find novelty sparks my creativity.

Finally I sit at the desktop computer and I set myself strict word counts. Some may find this intimidating. I write in bursts, aiming for 3,000 to 5,000 words a day. I let the energy of the tale drag me along.

Then I put it aside and work on another project before returning to edit it.

I try not to get bogged down in other people's ideas of what a "real writer" should do, or act, or say, or be. I know my aim: to entertain. And I work hard to please the reader.

A Writer's Process: Adrastos Omissi

Adrastos Omissi was short-listed in The Wild Words Biannual Writing Competition

I find that the stories I write that work best are often largely without process or without a conscious goal. They come from long reflection on an idea or a feeling. You think about it, you play with it, you chop it up, and then suddenly, often when you’re doing something else, a story seems to just happen inside your head and you write it down as quickly as you’re able. This was one of those.

 In the Valley of the Shadow was one of many I wrote in the months after the death of my grandfather, and like a lot of these it deals with the theme of death. Confrontation with death is so impossible for the human mind to grasp that we react with panic, fear, and denial. I tried to capture these feelings in my story whose main character, through the concept of his eternal life, finds himself utterly trapped: too scared to die, but too dead to live. The story tries to capture a moment within this endless life he has consigned himself to when real feeling – in this case, of pain and loss – finds him and he can only react the way that he has taught himself to, by retreating from the truth that life and death are – and have to be – sides of the same coin.

For me, a story often revolves around a key phrase or theme on which you try to hang the rest. Within this story, there were two points of focus that I tried to draw. The first of these is the opening word, ‘uncoffined,’ which I hope will draw the reader with its strangeness. I wanted it to evoke the horrible impropriety of a dead body – that feeling that it just shouldn’t be the way it is.

The other is the smell of pine, a smell of childhood for the character. We all tend to ignore smells most of the time, but at certain moments it can be a very powerful sensation and it connects us to our memories in a way that no other sense can. We are all, I think, haunted by smells from childhood that fill us with a bittersweet sense of a lost past, and I wanted that idea of a smell that anchors the character to a life he has lost to be the driving motif of the piece.

My Half-Formed Words

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…

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. :-)