A Writer's Process: Tiggy Hayes

I sneak downstairs usually in the dark like a naughty nosy child, warm up my conservatory and sit at the table.  

I have no lights on (except from the computer screen) and the windows look south (with east – west views) over a field and common land full of trees.  

The only company I allow, and is around at this precious time of the day is the dawn chorus from the multitude of birds that I always hear but never see.   The sun rises all round me and usually begins with a cacophony of sound from the birds, followed by streaking lights as the sun hits the horizon until I have a clear beautiful morning.  Today it is frosty and shining.

My current project is draft 6 or 7 of my book Memories, I hope to have published but have spent years editing. I wrote this as a skeleton for my first NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) in November 2010 but struggle with the editing of it.  I have had some fabulous feedback from beta readers and an agent who insisted I send it out rather than self-publish, she unfortunately took the wrong genre and it was not ready at the time.  I am nearer that stage now and would like to send to an agent this year.  

I am also looking back at my recent 2015 NANOWRIMO story line (Destination; a historical novel).    My husband cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats last autumn and I went as support for him in the car.  I used my time to create a historical journey visiting places my character might pass through.  Normally I would not look at this one for some years, 2 others waiting in the drawer, but I am working on an historical fiction course and this is providing the subject matter.    I have many other projects on the go; short stories mainly with an ever hopeful plan to sell them to womags, but the market for this is reducing and the pools of extraordinarily good writers increasing; I will have to keep writing.

Once I am on a roll, I find the writing really easy - I can write a skeleton in just over a month but I do live, breath and sleep the characters.

I am an avid fan of NANOWRIMO and find this an incredible way to allow a story to develop in its own manner.   I write short stories easily as well usually in a few days.  I do a little bit of planning and this then allows the words to tumble out.  Getting them down on the computer screen or paper quick enough is usually my problem.  I don’t know where the words come from and I often find I have a different ending or a new twist that was not in my planning at all.  The rough draft is usually good content but needs a lot of work to bring it up to readable material.

Editing! Editing!  I can go back and re-read something and tweak the grammar etc… but find it difficult to re-write bits. 

 I hate having to cut out the crafted words even when they don’t go….sometimes less really is more but I struggle.   I re-read and re-read but really find it difficult to read the words on the page as opposed to the words in my head (that should be on the page).  Time away from the project does help on this one.

I am a fan of Swanwick Writer’s School which I hope to return to again this summer.  I come away from the week feeling so inspired and really at one with the world, having people around me who thrive on words as well and do not regard me as weird!   I belong there and meet so many fantastically creative people who encourage, challenge but never make me feel inferior.

My biggest obstacle is I lack confidence in my own ability to write but I do enjoy the past time and love being immersed with a project. 

I write under the name of Tiggy Hayes and post to my blog; Dawn Chorus, not as often as I should.    

https://tiggyhayes.wordpress.com

The Surprise In The Dark

The other night I walked the fifteen minutes from the main road to our house, carrying a plastic shopping bag. It’s a steep, winding mountain track.

It had been a while since I’d trod that path in the pitch dark of a moonless night. As I walked, I remembered the extraordinary peace of being alone in the blackness, in a completely silent place, under a million stars. 

The next moment I realised that of course I wasn’t alone. There were rustlings in the undergrowth: hare, badgers, or deer perhaps. There were the creeping shadows of trees. There was also the wild boar. He snorted loud in my ears, a noise something like the exclamation of a surprised pig. Then he turned a panicked circle in the undergrowth close by. I knew the great size of him by the heavy cracking of the saplings. They are big, wild boar, and can attack when they feel threatened. Instinctively, I struck at the plastic bag as noisily as I could. He orientated to where I was, and racketed away into the bush.

I am pleased to have stepped a little outside my comfort zone that night. My daytimes these days are spent wrestling with updating the technology that runs the Wild Words ecourse. The whirring, the rattling, the turning cogs of my overloaded brain drown out every other sound.

There is so much movement inside my own head at the moment, that everything outside seems still and dead in comparison.  No wonder we human beings get lonely. We think we are the only creatures living, breathing, moving.

Last night, my brain stopped still in the presence of the boar, and I re-connected with something bigger. And somehow, when I met the boar’s presence with the striking of the bag, I turned a little to face my own fear, and my world expanded, just a bit.

This article was first published on January 17th 2013

A Writer's Process: Sebastian Lander

I don’t know whether I should call my writing a process – it’s more a linguistic version of throwing paint at a canvas when I have the time, and inspiration deigns to drop in.

I write sporadically, often at the kitchen table, even though we have a quiet studio at the end of the garden. Being in a space where there’s the opportunity for distraction somehow lends energy to my writing. And I can always put my fingers in my ears when I need to focus.

Sometimes I tap at my laptop in bed, reference books spread around me. It feels indulgent, an emotion I am ironically trying to indulge. My writing has the tendency to slip down the list, in favour of seemingly more productive priorities.

 

I have worked with words for a number of years. That question, ‘Have you got a book in you?’ has long been in the back of my head and, on occasion, on other people’s lips.

It’s only now that I am trying to get that book out, and I don’t even know if it will be any good.

Currently I am researching and writing about a character in Elizabethan England. The research part threatens to stretch endlessly into the future, unless I am careful. Meanwhile, fact and fiction are locked in a gladiatorial wrestling match in my head, fact holding itself up as truth and fiction championing freedom. I am learning to make room for both.

I try to visit as many places as I can which will enable me to resurrect the past. Lines pop into my head and I write them on my iPhone, puzzle pieces to be later worked up into a hopefully faithful 16th century picture. When I am writing, I light an incense stick. For me, the smell evokes everything Tudor, bringing with it the nostalgia of childhood visits to historic houses.

 

I find that I have lots of ideas and can really visualise how I want my writing to read in my head. When it comes to fingertips on keys, it doesn’t always match up.

And then I start labouring over the language, which can weigh it down.

I have fixed on finishing my book by the time I am 40. Just completing it will be an achievement in itself, let alone anything else. Hopefully, those splodges on canvas will eventually take some sort of meaningful form.

The 'New' Nature Writing

Wild Words at Swindon Festival of Literature 

It’s the beginning of the season of festivals of literature, and writers’ summer schools, in the UK.

 In the last two weeks I’ve presented my work in Chipping Campden and Swindon. At both festivals I felt warmed by the generosity of organisers, and the passion of my workshop participants.
 
In London, with a spare moment between commitments, I decided that what I wanted to do most in the world was to spend leisurely time in a gigantic bookshop with comfy chairs and a café. Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus was on my route, and fitted the bill very nicely.
 
Once upon a time, not that long ago, to find fiction, or non-fiction, that took connection with nature as a theme, I would have been crawling into the most obscure sections of the bookshop and dusting off cobwebs. No more.
 
Imagine my delight when centre-stage on the ground floor, and featured in the front window, were books collected under the shining title ‘New Nature Writing’.
 
But what exactly is ‘new nature writing’? In an article in The New Statesman, Robert Macfarlane (something of a king in this emerging literary genre), defines it well. Read here.
 
It has, as its core value, an appreciation that human beings are animals, that we are animals among other animals. It values community over commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, and the deep over the shallow.
 
It turns out that at Wild Words we’ve been trailblazing. The kind of writing many of us practice, is selling like hot cakes. We’ve become a trend. That makes me very happy. I’m happy that people who make a choice to cultivate an appreciation of the natural world around them, and to record it, are now considered amongst the coolest people you can meet (didn’t we always know it!)
 
I spent a glorious day in that bookshop, fuelled by carrot cake and Earl Grey, sifting through a pile of (as yet unbought, and untarnished) ‘new nature writing’ books.
 
What’s exciting is how broad, deep and wide the genre is. It takes in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. It fuses nature writing, travel writing, philosophy and psychology. (For specific examples, see Macfarlane’s article).  An interesting strand is that of the memoir writers, such as Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun. These writers have turned to nature in times of difficulty and disillusionment, and have found it has everything to offer.
 
There can be a perception that nature writing is a little ‘tame’. The pastoral poetry tradition, that can be traced back to the Greeks, and extended into and through Renaissance England, idealised rural life and landscapes. It is partly, if not mostly, responsible for that view. 
 
Central to what I communicate with Wild Words, is that writing inspired by contact with nature can be imbued with a force that goes way beyond that. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the beauty and majesty of nature. Recognition of its power to soothe us, and restore us to health is sorely needed. However, the new nature writing is much more than that. Rightly so, given we human beings dig ourselves ever deeper into a hole, in relationship to That Which Sustains Life.

It’s groundbreaking, thought-provoking, politically challenging, society changing. It’s awe inspiring stuff.  It connects people. It’s a route to re-find the animal in us. The wild.
 
Not everyone who comes to Wild Words is interested in the genre of ‘nature-writing’ and that’s fine. Every skill we hone here is applicable to all writing in all genres. But, maybe, with this new take on an ancient tradition in writing, those of us who are interested to try their hand at it, can come out the shadows.
 
We’re no longer regarded as something akin to train spotters, we’re cooler than Madonna.
 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

Those of us who choose to spend time in nature, consider it normal. It isn’t. Most people only read about it in books. There’s even a term for the wide range of problems that can result from the modern phenomenon of dislocation from our environment- Nature Deficit Disorder.
 
Have you had contact and experiences in nature that have formed or informed you, or which have echoed other themes in your life? If so, that gives you something unique to say. Write about it. For those who haven’t. 

 

Between The Lines

Saturday’s Vide Grenier (village jumble sale) turned up an exciting find. For one euro I bought a letter, unopened. It bore the stamp of the German authorities, a Polish place name, and the date 1942. 

Seventy years after its intended reading, I sliced into the envelope. Inside was a single folded sheet of notepaper, still crisp and white. The spidery writing was blobbed with the uneven ink of a fountain pen.  My mediocre grasp of French didn’t stand a chance.

In the three days before a friend came over and translated it, several war epics played out in my mind. Occupied territory… wartime secrets…code breaking…a letter stolen… the intended reader dead…

I was on the edge of my seat when it was eventually read out to me. The writer talked about the price of bread, and how far advanced the spring was. And then, well, that was it. Not one reference to the war, or the political climate. Not a mention of fear, hatred, or the thrill of lives lived close to death.

It said nothing, and yet it said everything- about the censorship, the restriction of free speech, and the monotony that are the marks of living under occupation. It made me think about how much is revealed by the absence of words on a page. Often absence is more telling than presence.

When we write, we carefully compose our ink marks. Perhaps we should also consider how to use the white spaces; the no man’s land of paragraph breaks, the pauses between words, the blank page at the end of a chapter.

Technically speaking, white space gives the reader a moment to breathe, to process, to reflect. Paragraph breaks signal changes in location, or allow us to take leaps in time. But we can make use of the absence of words on a more subtle level also. 

We could, for example, have our character be asked a question, and reply only with silence. Or, our character could choose not to mention a huge subject in their life. The ‘elephant in the room’ has a powerful impact.

If we can just look past the proliferation of symbols we will see that there is wildness hiding in the shadows of our words.  

The Weekly Prompt:

Look at your page of writing. Instead of focusing on the black ink marks, be interested in the emptiness between the words. Notice how the white sky of the page wraps perfectly around your letters. How the ground of it supports them. What is being spoken by the absence of words?

When you next write a story or poem, have the intention to allow the white page to reveal. In this way the reader will discover the answers to their questions, rather than being a passive recipient. If they are spoon-fed the words, you deprive them of the excitement of the exploration.

This article was first published on May 4th 2013

A Writer's Process: Andy Stevens

Great! I’ve the whole day off to write.

I’ll open up Final Draft and finish that knock-out script I’ve been working on. In a few days’ time, I’ll send it off to the BBC Writers Room. That’s a mere formality though, isn’t it? It’ll get snapped up, they’ll appoint someone famous to direct the show for the telly - like Stephen Frears. I’ve got it all planned out – late night BBC4 slot at first then over to prime time BBC2. The Baftas and the Golden Rose of Montreux will follow then off to Hollywood to negotiate with Netflix to produce an American version with plenty of canned laughter!

I’ll make a coffee first though.

This coffee’s good. Those little pods that come through the post from that exclusive Coffee Club are wonderful. They give just the right amount of va, va, voom to get one started. You know what, while I’m savouring this coffee, I’ll log in to ‘BBC Listen Again’. I’ll quickly catch up with ‘In Our Time’ and ‘Round Britain Quiz’ to sharpen up the grey matter prior to opening Final Draft.

Wow, I actually got two questions right in ‘Round Britain Quiz’.

OK then, let’s get started! Oh, wait a moment, it’s 1100 now and I’m feeling a bit peckish.

I could kill a p-p-p-p-penguin right now. Let’s quickly see what’s in the biscuit tin. Good Lord, it looks like Mrs Draco has taken austerity to heart and expanded its coverage to include biscuit procurement – there are only bloody Malted Milks in here! Things will be very different once I’ve submitted this script. Until then, I’ll have another coffee and dunk this Malted Milk.

Right, OK, I’m back in front of the computer and ready to…blimey, there’s a Siskin on the feed station outside my window, I must get a picture of it for my year list.

Bugger, it flew off! If I want it to come back, I’ll have to fill up the feeders and hang some fat balls – it shouldn’t take too long.

I fed the birds but unfortunately Mrs. Beasley from next door heard me – she can talk the back legs off a diplodocus…and she did.

Oh dear, it’s lunchtime. I’ll make a cheese sandwich then sit back down at the computer.

There was something I needed to do today…what was it? Catch up with ‘Happy Valley’ on iPlayer? Or was there something else?

A Writer's Process: Bridget Holding

Written on 20th March 2016

Today has been a perfect writing day. In that I have arrived at the evening with a real sense of satisfaction. The poem may not be finished, but it knows where it’s going.

Writing on a Sunday is sometimes more productive than during the week. Probably because all those small administrative things that usually niggle at me, seem to have no sway at the weekend. It’s the day of rest after all. Not that writing is exactly rest. It can be hard work. But it nourishes me.

This morning I awoke without an alarm at around seven, and had the start to the day that is most conducive to my writing process. I lay in bed a while, seeing what was present for me in terms of feelings and body sensations. 

Today is the spring equinox, and I knew I wanted to write something on that subject. However, I know from experience that if I don’t let what’s already there be heard, then that will block other expression.

Sometimes I just brainstorm on to a piece of paper with words about ‘what’s in the way of my writing today’.  However, today, there was one strong theme.  Sadness. So I made a cup of tea, propped myself up with pillows, and wrote down the words that wanted to come from that place of sadness. I was blessed with a strong image, so that helped me to find a path of self-expression from the feelings.

Once I was up, showered and breakfasted, I looked at information on some of the themes around the equinox, on the internet. I always feel a little like this is not what a poet is meant to do, but I’m enjoying bringing some astronomy and physics into my poems on ‘the turning year’. I like that specificity. It’s grounding my work.

What really sets me on fire as a poet is building a path from the microcosm of the movements of my own inner experience (body sensation and feeling particularly) to the macrocosm of the movements of nature, or the universe, or other abstract themes.

Aristotle said (I’m paraphrasing) that ‘the greatest of thing of all, is to be a master of metaphor’ I aim at that. Why not aim high! So, I found in the information and videos of the earth moving round the sun, some movement words that allowed me to feel that rhythm in my own body.

Then I stashed some paper and a pen, and my phone, into my coat pocket, and went for a walk. I’m lucky enough to live in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I walked two hours up a mountain, which really feels like going into the wilds.  I tried to feel into my animal self. Not to think, but to stay with the embodied experience of walking, alert to my environment, taking in sensory impressions. As words came to me, I jotted them down. I returned with two pages of hand written notes on various facets of my subject.

I ate lunch and took a siesta. Sleep for me, is like a wave clearing the beach. When I awoke I was in my body, and ready to go back to the poem.

I’ve been happy with today’s poem from the beginning. It found a form and shape immediately. I knew the pace, where to put the reader’s attention, the outline of it, from the outset. So today has been about filling that outline in.

This afternoon’s work (I meant to work two hours this afternoon, but worked four) has been about two things.

First, I’ve been doing small physical movements to feel deeper into the moments of movement in the planet I describe in the poem. Sometimes I might, for example, repeat a small tilt of my hips, which mirrors the tilt the earth makes in my poem at the equinox, perhaps fifty times. The words rise up from that embodied experience. If I am patient enough to wait and be with it.

The second thing I did this evening, when I had a good-enough first draft, was to consciously bring all the senses into the poem- I want the reader to smell, touch, taste, hear, and see the colours. That took some time. And some thinking myself back to the experience of walking this morning.

And then there were some internet facts to check too. Quite a few as the poem seems to be expanded to a story about three countries (not to mention the planet as a whole!)

Although I was hoping to write this poem in a day, it’s not finished. As quite often happens, it’s turning into a longer poem than I had intended, and is taking longer than I hoped.

It’s hard work too. Somehow I forget that between writing each poem.  Stringing words together on a mountain top, is really just the beginning of the day.

I realised at the end of this afternoon, that I need to bring the spring mountain flowers more alive to the reader. And the sensory impressions aren’t quite there. To do that I might have to walk back up the mountain again sometime this week, and bring some back.

I’ve going to put it online anyway. We are writers sharing the process, after all.

I’ll sleep soundly tonight.  In touch with the wild.

You can read my poem 'Spring Equinox-March 2016' also on this blog.

Spring Equinox- March 2016

Today,
the Earth raises her chin,
and puts an even face to the sun.

Drops her tailbone to feel
the straightening of her spine
As a plumb line hanging in infinity.

Raises herself on curling toes
locks her eyes
throws out a leg,

And pirouettes.

She’s up on her points
suspending time.

All that idle talk about our sun,
that ‘rises in the east, and sets in the west’
Is only true today.

Only today,
her spinning is a pause
in which
the earth resets itself

And day and night sit evenly on the scales.

**

Here,
in France,
it’s still a forlorn sepia world
I walk out into.

Prehistoric
Of lichen and moss and rock
Cold, hard things.

Leaves cling to petrified trees
like rags on a beggar.
Hollow, flaking branches
Perish to dust on the ground.

The sticky mud coffins the winter damp.

But still,
there’s a warm tease in the breath of wind
that catches my cheek,
and ruffles my hair.
Lavender and thyme on her breath
A whisper of  seduction.
A promise of life.

Until,
slicing through like a blade
chill air from the poles
breaks up the party. 
Snapping
Leave it out. Leave it out. We’re not there yet.

The equinox tussle.

**

And the Earth?
She turns us so fast that we are paralysed.
Caught in the spell of this day.

**

But I know
that Nature. The Artist. 
Besotted by colour,
is preparing her paints.

Mixing great vats of them.

On the mountainside I see
She has spattered
a dash of violet here,
jonquil yellow there.
Sprayed pink and white
through the hedge.

Tenderly blotted each spilled drop with a cloth
Fanning it out to the petal whorl.

Grape hyacinch here,
march marigold there.
And the cherry blossom
running wild in the hedge.

**

A Japanese man I meet buying bread
holds his breath as he tells me that
the whole of that nation
hangs on news
of the sweep south
of the cherry blossom front.

Broadcasters agitate over
first petals sighted
in the north of the country.
Five to six flowers opening
On sample tree fifty-three

Poets sits at the trunks,
hog-bristle brushes poised,
Lips parted to receive
the seventeen sounds.

**
At dinner,
an Indian friend
sighs, doe-eyed, over memories
of crowds gathering in Mumbai
dizzy with expectation.
Clutching plastic zip bags
gaudily coloured powders.

Young men pacing
like athletes on the blocks
tying handkerchiefs into triangle masks
flexing their throwing wrists.
And arching their backs
to relieve the growing pressure
in their groins.

**

And then what?
The spell of the day cannot last forever.
The sap will rise. 

**

There comes a moment
when the Earth feels the strain,
and the position can no longer be held.
She must adjust her line.

She releases her cramping leg
tilts her back
raises her face imperceptibly towards the sun.

With the pouring out of daylight
All hell breaks loose on the earth.

**
In France,
fierce heat on mountain tops
melts snow.

The run-off swells streams,
reanimates the bodies of animals
sending them scampering
beside themselves
senseless.

In Japan,
a cascade of burgeoning blossom
awakens cries of delight.
The newscaster skips
and the haiku poet trembles
as he hiccups the words
“This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —” 

**

In India,
with the whistle
and jeer
and surge of the crowd
paint is scooped, slung- shot, wrist flicked
tipped, and blown.
It cakes laughing mouths
clogs ears and nostrils
coats skin that it will take a month to scrub clean.

Scarlet, gold and indigo explode in the sky
like fireworks
then drop silent as falling stars.

A world bursting into bloom.

**

When daylight fades on the equinox dance
the sap keeps rising
and rising.
Life turning over
to reveal her dark underbelly.

In France,
in my dusky garden
stray cats screech
and fight to the death
for the right to force themselves on one another

In Japan,
a man stabs his neighbour
to possess number thirty-three.
The most beautiful cherry tree.

In India,
In the shadows
Gangs of young men
Fuelled
Pant crimson like dragons.

Young women, rainbow-dyed
sense danger
scuttle indoors
Pull bolts.  And huddle.
As the pack
stealing permission from the festival
howls in pursuit.

Laughing and cursing,
shoulders batter front doors
To gain entry.
To claim the predator’s prize.

**