A Writer's Process: MJ Oliver

MJ Oiiver 

Nothing gets in the way of my writing, I'm very focussed.

I've amazed myself by discovering that I actually relish the performing of my poetry, whereas previouslyI'd always hated any kind of public speaking. I think it's because I love writing so much, love the process of discovery that comes with it, I just can't wait to share it with others. 

I'm working towards a collection of poems and prose-pieces, relating to my father, who was a Hobo in Canada during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This has involved lots of research (historical and family), which I've enjoyed balancing with fiction, where there were gaps.

I've found that writing poems in the voice of others, ventriloquising, can be a really powerful tool. 

I also write poems that relate to love and loss, of family and friends, in which I tend to identify with wild animals -- it seems to help in getting to the core of my feelings.

It also minimizes the embarrassment I feel when disclosing personal emotions, and at the same time, I hope, makes the poem more accessible to others.  

A Writer's Process: Kester Reid

Kester Reid was is a runner-up in the Wild Words Biannual Writing Competition

To write, I seek to experience authentically – unexpectantly, and unhurriedly. 

I respect every being and every force as something alive with a present power to animate our shared reality.  I await their messages, their teachings.  To express such experience is impossible. To integrate it is my only goal.

To reflect and write about it is to explore it again, to explore its essence, and share it perhaps. Poetry is the most honest way for me to do that. I go back there and look again, with words.

My piece for the Wild Words competition ‘Stream’,  began as a journal entry during my time living amongst the Achuar tribe of the Western Amazon. For some years I have been drawn to this particular tropical wilderness, and into tribal realities. The isolation, both cultural and physical, of such experiences, taught me a huge amount about myself and my cultural mode of experiencing. Wild forests and native friends taught me a more natural way, a more human way.

Stillness and observation are critical aspects of an indigenous lifestyle.  Cultivating these practices, and states, is vital to noticing the intricacies of the world around me – in order to thrive, physically and spiritually. Such a mode is a survival tool, but also the gateway to recognising the beauty and mystery of the world, which is a momentary happening to which I am integral, which pulses heavily on the waves of my own breath. 

I recognise the power of natural forces, the creativity there, and the mystery.  And suddenly, everything is alive, so alive – as alive as me. 

This intuition that my experience of consciousness is a marvel not unique to my own species is deeply connective – it makes me humble before the Great Mystery, it uplifts me as a part of the Great Mystery. 

‘Stream’ began with an experience I never intended to write about.  The same curiosity that drew me out to those forests, and down that particular stream, somehow guided me to explore it with words. 

The root of it all is out under the changing sky, and inside the wild mind.  Coming to close to the Earth, and all Nature, our nature. The rest is just reading and writing and honing – becoming more honest, more open, more honest.

I am pleased to be connected to the Wild Words circle.  Thank you.  

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.