Crisis and Opportunity

The response to the Wild Words Competition for this half year (it closed last night), has been amazing, but the high number of entries perhaps not surprising…

In our recent confinement here in France, I stood on a hillside close to my home and felt a new appreciation of the magical Pyrenean landscape stretching out before me. I felt my mortality, and the fragility of the natural world. I felt a passion to take it all in while restrictions to movement allowed it.

I thought of the Second World War, of the many resistance fighters who hid in the mountains here. They gathered and planned, sleeping for years in the caves, in the name of liberation, of freedom.

They were the hunters from the villages, the only people who were both armed, and knew the ancient paths; they knew them like the back of their hand. They were remarkably successful, most of them surviving, because they were human animals in their own environment, tracing ancestral routes through the mountains, protected by forest cover.

With threat and danger on every side, in every moment, they must have been always on hyper-alert. That fear is not something I would ever want for them, for anyone, and yet, how alive they must have been. Alive to their environment, to the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and textures, to the heat and the cold, to the expansions and contraction in their bodies, to their mortality.

As I stood on that hillside, my senses sharpened by a thrill of freedom, I felt that I was seeing it for the first time. And then, because I’m a human being who writes, avidly, my next inclination was to record it in words, in order to heighten that appreciation, to observe in more detail, to see more, to remember more.

As writers, we strive to give our reader/audience an experience of freedom, we also strive to feel flow and liberation in the process. We yearn to take an imaginative journey into the unknown, where there is adventure, curiosity, discovery. We desire our words to reflect the strength of our inner experience–of imagination or memory.

This is a fascinating time to be a writer. With climate crisis, and the pandemic (not to mention Brexit), has come something of a collapse of traditional structures, of ways of thinking, of trust in authority.

This is mirrored in the writing world, where the market is less clear, and traditional genre demarcations are less definitive than they were.

There’s a chaos all around us, and it’s a great opportunity.

When life is stable, and the status quo is unchallenged, we tend to look up to those we consider authorities, and try to act on what we’re told is appropriate, the right thing to do. In writing, this manifests as following the rules of the craft, (and believing others do that better than ourselves).

There are, of course, many positive sides to that, why not look to those with experience and expertise for guidance? The downside, however, is that it’s a turning away from trusting ourselves. And then, there can be a gap between what we want and need to put down on the page, and what we feel we should. Problems arising from that–consciously or unconsciously applied–can include:

- We force words

- We load words (try to tell the reader what to think)

- We summarise/write in a superficial way, jumping over detail

- We repeat ideas, phrases and words

- We change point of view in a way that doesn’t support the reader/audience experience

- We default into cliché

- We move from big emotion to big emotion without sufficient transition (melodrama)

When traditional structures collapse, we might flounder around for a while wondering where to turn, how to feel safe again, who to trust. But then, if we take the opportunity, we choose to embrace our internal authority, our intuition, our innate knowing of the way to proceed.

We orient to act from the sense of what our project feels like it desires to be–in all its richness and variety–without getting pulled into should and should nots.

We orient to focus on the underlying writing process, on the positive role of imagination, storytelling and words in our life, rather than get stuck on where to put this semi-colon or that em dash.

We orient to make contact with the emotions of our character/narrator, without cutting off from feeling because it’s too much (known as block, or overwhelm), i.e. because we’re scared of ourselves.

We orient that our words be as transparent as possible, to offer a window on to the experience we’re conveying.

What would happen if we just told the story, being true to it, without fear of how it would be received or judged?

These times are a call to shamelessly immerse in imagination, to reclaim language, to value storytelling for the life-saving entity that it is.

Joy, passion, peace, and the nourishment of words, to each and every one of you this holiday season.

This is the lead article from the December 2020 Newsletter. If you’d like to receive the writing prompt that accompanies this article, sign up on the website homepage, for the Monthly Newsletter.

I’d be delighted to hear about your experiences . You can comment below, write in the Facebook group, or contact me privately via bridgetholding@wildwords.org

Thank you to wild photographer Peter Reid for the photograph.