The Hole In The Wall

When we write we set up a world in which the reader views our story through a series of frames.

Writing is an on-going process of choosing what places, people, objects, and information to withhold or reveal, and in what detail. We need to make these choices according to the effect we hope to achieve. Do we want to build tension, raise drama, or release laughter?

It’s not unlike a series of film shots. In one frame a man walks down a dark street alone. In the next the mugger is there, arm round his neck, tugging at the bag. Surprised, shocked? I hope so. The effect is created by bringing something from outside the frame, in, unexpectedly.

Thinking about frames reminded me that one of the principles of Japanese garden design, is called ‘shakkei’ which literally means ‘borrowed scenery’.  

Here, a frame of trees or fencing, or perhaps a hole made in a wall, is used to capture an element from outside the garden that is poignant, or emotive, and make it part of the composition.

When I think of this idea, I always think of the maze that is the South Devon lanes. The hedges on either side of the small roads are six feet high. I drive along, seeing nothing except the road, until, quite suddenly, there’s a gate. The view opens up and I’m both flying free and finding my feet simultaneously. Open fields stretching to the sea, and endless sky. Breath-taking.

In the spirit of shakkei, I went for a walk yesterday.  

Going up the hill, and round the corner I was immediately aware of what was hidden and then gradually revealed. The first frame was a square of green wire in a fence. Inside it, the far mountains. The wood of a child’s swing created a moving frame, the view ever-altering. There were also caravan windows, the scratched Perspex distorting the sunlight and abstracting the view.  And then finally, and most wonderfully, in an upstanding slab of concrete, a small round hole revealed the pink glow of the sky, so ethereal in contrast with the hard material that enabled it.

I see now there’s a reason that galleries frame paintings. Things just look better through a frame.

The Weekly Prompt

This week, borrow some scenery, and create your own shakkei. Go for a walk outside and look for natural frames. Alternatively, construct a simple frame and take it outside with you.

When you notice a natural frame, or actively frame something- what does it bring to your experience of the environment? What effect does it have on the reader to describe that view in words? Choose different frames, and notice how your choices about what you emphasise, and what you leave out, change the story you tell.

First published June 7th 2013

Inspired By Nature: Sue Johnson

My work and the natural world are closely linked. I am fortunate to have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia where I interpret some words and names as a specific taste.

For instance, ‘world’ tastes of pink blancmange, ‘feather’ tastes of whipped cream and ‘thunder’ tastes of thick porridge. These sensations never change and can’t be switched off!

Since 1st January 2013, I’ve written a poem a day every day. I discovered that, even on days when time was a problem, I could always find a few minutes to scribble the draft of a poem in my notebook – usually sitting in a car park and watching the clouds or focusing on a bird or a tree. Some of these poems have gone on to be published in small press magazines – often with minimal alteration. Others have been developed into longer poems or they’ve formed the nucleus of a short story or a scene from a novel.

A friend of mine keeps a nature journal which includes photographs, pressed flowers, sketches, feathers, leaves and short poems. It occurs to me that this would be a brilliant idea for developing a series of story boards for a short story collection.

Obviously, not all my poems ‘work.’ This doesn’t matter. I have great fun recycling them.

If you fancy trying this, it involves scissors and glue and you can create more than one version. Print off a copy of a poem that hasn’t worked. Cut it up. Add six new words, a colour and a sound. Reposition the words. Play around with them until you’ve got something you’re happy with then glue them in place.

At the end of his life, the artist Picasso said he regretted not playing more. I’m determined not to let this happen to me.

If I do get stuck with a writing project I find that a walk amongst trees or by water helps me to sort the problem.  I’m also lucky to have a summerhouse in the garden where I hear blackbirds on the roof and the scent of lavender and honeysuckle drifts in through the open door.

Nature is playful. Look at the way the clouds move. Look at the common names for wild flowers – what could you do with ‘enchanter’s nightshade’, ‘fox and cubs’ and lady’s smocks?

Listen to the sound of the wind and the different birdsongs.

For a long time now, I’ve looked on the words I create as being like a seed bank. They will yield a harvest when the time is right.  

www.writers-toolkit.co.uk

Movement and Rhythm

In ‘The Poetic Principle’, Edgar Allen Poe says,

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

Poets out there will probably feel comfortable with that definition. Prose writers perhaps less so. But the line between poetry and prose is a blurred one, and those of us who write prose would also do well to embrace it.

Virginia Woolf describes how,

A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it ... 

Our job then is to transfer that life, movement, and rhythm into words on a page, that others may know it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his journal, presents us with a fine example of how it reads when you do it well. This is his description of the movement and rhythm of a wave.

Aug. 13 — Heavy seas: we walked along the sea wall to the Kennaway Tunnel to watch them. The wave breaks in this order — the crest of the barrel 'doubling' (that, a boatman said, is the word in use) is broken into a bush of foam, which, if you search it, is a lace and tangle of jumping sprays; then breaking down these grow to a sort of shaggy quilt tumbling up the beach; thirdly this unfolds into a sheet of clear foam and running forward it leaves and laps the wave reaches its greatest height upon the shore and at the same time its greatest clearness and simplicity; after that, raking on the shingle and so on, it is forked and torn and, as it commonly has a pitch or lurch to one side besides its backdraught, these rents widen; they spread and mix and the water clears and escapes to the sea transparent and keeping in the end nothing of its white except in long dribble-bubble strings which trace its set and flow.

Wild words indeed.

Wild words have a broad range of expression, and vocabulary. The verbs are strong, and varied. They mostly stand alone.

When describing a person’s passage down a street, that person doesn’t just run, they canter, charge, and gallop. When describing their conversation, they don’t just talk, they squeak, they howl, and they rant. Strong verbs rarely need an adjective. Adjectives are used with great prudence.

As living, breathing creatures, Wild words are flexible and malleable. The wild storyteller plays with rhythm for strongest effect. A rhythm can be said to be a ‘regular recurrence or pattern in time’.

Wild words have rhythms, as varied as the gaits of the numerous wild creatures.

Rhythm can be achieved in many ways: including by choice of sentence length, by use of white space, by assonance, resonance and rhyme.

The basis of their rhythm is iambic, the di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM that spoken English has always moved to. The wild storyteller knows that when these rules of internal rhythm are broken without good reason, the result can be clotted prose, writing that does not flow.

Wild words play skilfully with listener and reader expectations, noting the effect that a change of rhythm has on those receiving the story. 

The Monthly Writing Prompt

Write about water: the sea, a lake, river, pond, or rain storm. Describe it, in poetry or prose, with precision. Look closely, and be curious. Can you reflect and heighten all its varying moods  through the use of rhythm in your words? 
 

The Roaring Sea

I used to live close to the sea in Devon. Now I live in the mountains in France.

The change is refreshing. My environment is largely untouched by human hand and is therefore teeming with wildlife. It’s an aliveness that endlessly enthralls me. 

But this week I am back in the UK, and with my first sight of the ocean, a wonderful and terrible sense of loss gripped me. I remembered that the roar of the sea was the first truly wild animal that I encountered and learnt to relate to, when I lived for periods of time on beaches in Devon and Spain. Running around on beaches was also where I learnt to play with words, rather than be a prisoner to them.

I used to enjoy walking the shoreline just as the tide turned, and collecting what the ocean had thrown up over night. Each day it gave gifts, wonderful and unexpected: seeds from plants in the tropics, tins of food lost from ships. It also took. I knew a woman who was walking her dog on the beach on a stormy day, when the dog was swept out to sea.

In being in close proximity to push and pull of the tide, the life and death-bringer, I also learnt a lot about the necessary process of creation and destruction in my writing.

So often we are frightened to really experiment, to take the risk to bring something truly new into being. We are equally frightened to edit, to let go of words, phrases, and paragraphs in our writing that do not work. When we hold our writing that tight, are so fearful, our words can never live.

I found that when I stood unafraid in front of the roaring sea, when I could accept the inevitable gain and loss, and find a rhythm in that process, I could also stand unafraid in front of my words in the same way. Then they were free to express their power, to be wild.

The Weekly Prompt

Go to the edge of water. It could be the sea, a lake or a river. If possible choose a body of water that moves, that seems alive.

Write about the experience. How does it sound and smell? What colours and textures are contained within it? Also think about metaphor - if it were a wild animal, what wild animal would it be? How do you feel about being lose to it- does it attract or repel you? What memories or associations does it being up?

A Packet of Nuts?

There’s a tendency to focus on the ways in which we are no longer in contact with wildness.

In his book ‘Feral’, George Monbiot bemoans that the closest we now get to nature is “feeding the ducks in the park”, and “the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts”. In short, he says, civilisation has squeezed the wildness out of our environment, and out of us. When I’m teaching in London I sometimes get rather melancholy about the absence of nature around me. Did you know that when the foundations of Trafalgar Square were dug in the 1830’s, builders exposed river gravels crammed with the bones of hippopotami, straight-tusked tigers, giant deer, giant aurochs and lions?

But the truth is that it’s not all doom and gloom.

We can choose our world view, by choosing our statistics. We can be glass half-full, rather than glass half-empty people.

After all, new forms of wildness are being discovered all the time…

Recently, a species of bird that is completely new to science, The Cambodian tailorbird (Orthotomus chaktomuk), was found - hiding in plain sight in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh.

And it’s just been announced by World Wildlife Fund, that more than 400 new species of plants and animals have been found in the under-explored Amazon rainforest in the past four years. They include a newly discovered species of monkey that purrs like a cat, a flame-patterned lizard, a vegetarian piranha and a frog the size of a thumbnail.

So how does this relate to our wild words?

Firstly, we should never give up hope that the passion and power that has become deadened and buried through overuse and over-familiarity, can re-find it’s wildness, and right under our noses, in fact.

Finding the wild words is like finding any other wild creature. It’s in the moment of awe-filled discovery that they live. And it’s through the variety of expression and movement that they move the reader.

When those words begin to purr, when they leap and roar, it’s then we know we’ve unleashed the wild in them.

The Weekly Prompt

Write a 1000 word, fiction, or non-fiction piece, in prose or poetry, using the following prompt:

“the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts”.

First published November 19th 2013