Making NaNoWriMo Work For You

November is National Novel Writing Month. 

I applaud that project, and any writer who steps out over the parapet to take part in it. When you commit to the daily word count, it won’t only be others who await the results you’ve promised. You’ll also be setting up high expectations for yourself. The pressure will be on.

For some writers, at some times in their lives, it’s just what they need. NaMoWriMo is a virtual community, where the peer network can guide and inspire superbly. 

But for other writers, this headline of a month can exacerbate what we tend to do anyway as human animals, and human-animal-writers, which is to set unrealistic goals for ourselves that we then fail to achieve. 

This is a dangerous pattern for a writer because once we’ve failed to achieve a goal, it is evenmore difficult to achieve it next time.  We can end up spiraling down into a vortex of unfinished projects and decreasing confidence.

What we need to do this NaNoWriMo is set ourselves up to succeed not fail. We want to create a virtuous circle, not a vicious one. To do this, it’s imperative that we set realistic goals with regards to how many words we can write each day, given our other life commitments. It’s often better to complete a shorter project than half-finish the next War and Peace. 

Underestimate, rather than overestimate.

Even if you write only ten words of a poem a day, or manage to spend 15 minutes in your private writing space, if that fulfills your intention, you’ll feel satisfied. As writers we need to stop beating ourselves up about what we don’t achieve, and notice how much we do achieve.

Applaud your own efforts this NaNoWriMo.

 

Good luck! 

Competition Winning Story: Leaves

By Alice Penfold

She was a leaf. Weathered from the stormy nights, when the evening exhaled its shadowy smokes and clouded the light into sleeplessly lying, she felt herself fragmenting. Like a commuter carriage, crying for extra space, her own branch was overcrowded; each being jostled to stay rooted. Stemming from her withering spine, yellowing wrinkles were beginning to spread across her paper-thin skin - tea-dipped, discoloured from dry routines.

Time had continued to pick at her skin. Her once smooth hues of blushing emerald were jaded, now, worn down by the relentless demands of raining hail, shouting down onto her exposed flesh and leave her no choice but to stay the clinging victim, with no power to overthrow the self-appointed dominance of the sky’s ever-replenishing army.

Of course, she knew, too, to look for the glowing moments that had passed during the rolling days. The summer week when a gentle gust had embraced her and her fellow passengers, a breeze that helped her breath as the yellowing light lay glimmering on her resting self. Although she had been grown to reside alone, she had found herself waving, for no reason except the affecting season, at those delicate souls that shared her space, who had been thrown by the thundery hands of fate to take a similar route to her own.

She had to take her leave, soon, as the wind wound through the thinning air and the tug of moving on became too strong. It was a fallacy, she knew, to think she could choose when the crossroads of her next step would come. Stoned by one stormy encounter – not from firing above, this time, but by a rocky rebellion below – she was made redundant, her stem splintered near completely from its grip on her tree’s outstretching arm. A merciless creature, dressed in leather boots and armoured in a buttoned up coat, had screechingly raised a rough-edged rock above its squealing head, and thrown, thoughtlessly, towards her shaking place of residence. Having stampeded to pieces the peace of the ending autumn bodies below, it was only natural that this creature would find more victims. As the boulder bombed through her fragile frame, she realised in an instant that she would have no choice but to let go. Like a trying toddler gripping to the reaching bars of a climbing frame, her own joints already weakened over repetitive efforts to stay on the known road, she knew her next path was coming. This wasn’t a place that she could cling to forever. Despite the ever-going, ever-growing weeks that she had been wishing for a natural break in the cycle of her clouded days, the harsh reality of choice still left her frozen.

Drops continued to descend. Weighed by polluting pellets bulleted from the smudged skies above, she was soon to lose her grip. Yet the expected route – the fall to the crunching floor at the base of the trunk – was, to her, simply not an option. Layered in spongey tiers, iced with winter’s whitening chill, previous leaves lay in infinite wait, forgotten in their likeness; they each added to the padding under frantic feet and heavy heels. She knew the well-worn path would keep her too downtrodden.

It was an unexpected ray, piercing through the defensive skin of the leafy barriers above, which made her see a less predictable path. To her right, fighting the biting attacks of the unrelenting gales, clung another, his stem half-torn from the stability of a separate branch, a metre or so below. She could not say for certain, but if it had not been for the sun’s brief triumph over the smoky smudge of haze that suffocated her surroundings, she did not think she would have spotted him.

Waving, she leant forward, slightly, letting the breeze catch and bring her to his attention. They connected.

As the hazy cloud consumed the final desperate daylight hours, she knew that time was flowing too quickly away, like sand spilling through the gaps of a broken sieve. The wind switched direction, taunting its paper-thin victims, the rain washing away each leaf’s vibrancy; a howling chill ripped through the swelling vein on her left side, leaving her stomata sweating for breath. Now, then, was the moment to go. Taking a deep breath, she let her stem loosen its grip on the spindling twig to which she had been clinging for too many identical hours and felt herself snatched by the unstopping storm. She was wading through treacle, every step forward stealing the air from her frailing frame. With perseverance against nature’s forces, though, she changed her direction just a fraction, in order to pass by the one leaf who had caught her sight from so far away. Her shimmering edges brushed past him and she embraced the tingle of his touch that, for too long, her lonely routine had forbidden her from feeling.

He felt it too, they knew. Soon, whilst the grey-smudged skies were increasingly subsumed into unseeing obscurity, he found the strength, too, to loosen his desperate hold on the bark below. He wrapped his being around her crumpling skin, the tiny hairs of her skin stroked by his midrib and margins. They twisted as one through the attacking shadows, fighting away the bulleting rains and grip of ever-going gusts. Together, too, they mustered the strength to plough through the night and to reach the spot that few fellows had been able to reach before. It was a quieter patch – the challenges to reach it leaving it far less travelled – by the edge of a trickling river. They rolled down towards the earth – like footstepping down each rung on a rickety ladder, their certainty of success increased as they approached, hearing the twinkling notes of the water chime against the rocks underneath. There, they settled, letting their pores drink and their bodies stretch along the cool pebbley surface, sheltered from the wind’s ferocity by the protective arms of the stream’s largest evergreen. Their union, they knew, had made all the difference.

Summer Solstice Writing Competition Winner: Alice Penfold

Alice Penfold. Winner of the Wild Words Summer Solstice Writing Competition 2016

I am delighted to have won the summer Wild Words writing competition!

I have always loved creative writing, particularly thinking about how to write different perspectives and how the same characters or settings can be seen in such different ways, depending on the subjectivity of the viewer. In addition, the power that words have to be interpreted in multiple ways has always been at the heart of my writing.

It was whilst reflecting on the impact of homonyms in writing that I was inspired to write ‘Leaves’, a piece drawing on its meaning as both a noun and a verb. I wanted to write an abstract piece reflecting the challenges that change and leaving things behind can bring.

To create my story, I combined my love of word play with my passion for writing in the natural environment.

For me, nature and in particular, a keen and active observation of the world around us – its colours, its details, its changes – can provide the basis of such a range of writing.

Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, has always been a favourite of mine, and I wanted to draw out its ambiguity as both a poem of hope and uncertainty in my writing today.

I took the poem and some blank paper to my local park, to observe the falling leaves in detail and consider the metaphorical implications that I could draw on and describe.

I am feeling even more re-inspired to create further stories – and to frequent more parks with nothing but an inspirational poem and blank sheet.

Just A Set Of Signs?

This week a friend sent me this beautiful poem. If I were to receive a poem a week from a friend, well, life would be perfect…

From March '79

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language

I went to the snow-covered island.

The wild does not have words.

The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!

I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.

Language but no words.

Tomas Tranströmer

(Translated from the Swedish by John F. Deane. You can find the original, and hear it here.)

It’s got me thinking. We can use words, but not really be communicating. Sometimes I’ve been asked to read stories and memoirs, and found they are like that. There may be a set of signs on the page, but they have left me unmoved, and with only a vague sense of the characters and world they are describing.

Conversely, language is not always a set of signs that we can use verbally. It can also be something more subtle- a rhythm, a felt sense, an atmosphere. Communication is the key. The important questions are: How do want to affect our reader? And, how can we convey the essence of the world/person/thing that we are describing? This thought process has led me into the work of Jeanette Winterson. She writes, in Art Objects,

‘The artist is a translator; one who has learnt how to pass into her own language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams, from the body, from the material world, from the invisible world, from sex, from death, from love. A different language is a different reality; what is the language, the world, of stones? What is the language, the world, of birds? Of atoms? Of microbes of colours? Of air?

So we go on learning our craft, trying to make something meaningful of these black marks on the page.

The Weekly Writing Prompt

‘Words but no language…language but no words’.

Write a non-fiction or fiction piece, in prose or poetry, using this line as inspiration.

If you’d like to publish it as guest post on the Wild Words Facebook page, I'd be delighted. 

This blog was first published on April 5th 2013.

A Writer's Process: Kate A. Hardy

I used to have a boyfriend whose creative processes came to life at about two in the morning.

He could work all night, cocooned in his dimly lit room, working on scripts and emerge briefly at around six in the morning when I was feeling at my most artistically productive . . . needless to say, the relationship didn’t last.

    And so it has continued. Six-thirty in the morning, in bed, with tea, that’s my writing time. The day hasn’t really started, lists of stuff to be done, safely downstairs. Dreams still cling and the previous days visual and audial impressions have been stocked ready for use – consciously or subconsciously. On the rare occasions that I don’t work at that time I feel slightly distracted all day, a niggling cloud hovering over my personal horizon.

    So, the writing process itself . . . I want to make structure but often (mostly) that seems to be an elusive thing, less so for short stories – an idea presents itself and refuses to go away until written down at least in a skeletal form. As they are short (5,000 or so words) it’s easier to craft a structure, a beginning, middle and end.

  Novels, for me, are more of a vast plane stretching out with a million possibilities

However much I try to plan, they take on a form of their own – usually fabricated by the characters themselves who seem to decide themselves what is about to happen next.

    This spontaneous form of working is exciting and I never find myself staring at a blank page wondering where to go next, however it does mean a lot of work later, rewriting, figuring out plot continuity elements and reining in the more ‘tangenty’ aspects of my writing.

    After my early morning a start, real life starts to encroach.

I pack up the ideas for a while and deal with the everyday. At some point I will walk dogs. For my writing process it’s vital to walk and think, look at trees, clouds, buildings, peoples’ gardens, etc. Most ideas seem to spring from my body being engaged in movement – swimming, particularly.

    Throughout the day, when possible, I will edit and re-write, write blogs and generally carry out stuff associated with writing, but the actual, real writing is an early morning activity; anything I ever write late at night will be stilted, probably incomprehensible and will need to be deleted at six-thirty the following morning . . .    

Writing Effortlessly

There are two things in my life, particularly, that have always invigorated me, and that I’ve instinctually known how to do without strain. Writing is not one of them (unfortunately).

However, through them, I’ve understood how to write with maximum ease, and enjoyment. 

This morning I did one of them. I went jogging. Surprised by the sudden chill of autumn, and lit by autumn’s soft light, I made it up to the ruined Cathar castle, and looked out over the Pyrenean mountains. Layered one in front of the other, the furthest silhouettes were still tipped by snow, recording last winter. The jagged sides of the nearest were carpeted with trees, their leaves just on the turn towards the completion of the seasons.  

On the winding track down, I met an older woman, in shades and slippers (really). She was struggling to keep up with her Cocker Spaniel.  She caught her breath and exhaled her question. ‘Did you go right up to the top?’ I nodded. Looking exhausted at the very thought, she replied, ‘my husband says I should do that. But it’s such an effort, isn’t it?’ I assumed the most sympathetic face that I could muster whilst jogging on the spot, and with a bon journee, we both went on our way.

But the thing is, it isn’t an effort. Not at all.

Firstly I don’t consider myself a ‘jogger’. It’s just that sometimes I put on trainers, and loosen my body up a bit by moving it on down the road.

I start very slowly. I go absolutely with the level of energy that is present for me that day. I ease into that, whether it’s a fast pace, or a slow pace. I stay with my bodily experience, and don’t aim to go any particular distance, or move at any particular speed. I watch the change of energy. Usually, the act of moving releases more, so I naturally speed up. But sometimes it doesn’t, so I don’t. Sometimes I feel I could push just a tad further into that store of energy. I do that, and watch what happens.

I see that thinking speeds me up. If I get lost in trains of thought, and lose connection with my body, I find that I am racing, disconnected from my physical experience of flow. Effort and resistance move in, and it’s no longer enjoyable. I am duller in body and mind, rather than more alive. 

If I jog in the right way, I arrive back on my doorstep invigorated. If I don’t, I’m exhausted.

The same is true of dancing. It’s about feeling the rhythm of the music, and allowing my body to respond. Not expecting.  Not hoping or fearing. Just waiting patiently for the responses, the messages, and answering.

I’ve taken these principles and applied them to my writing process:

1. I am someone who writes, rather than ‘a writer’ per se.

2. I never count words. Instead I put myself in my writing environment for a certain length of time, stay there whatever, and see what emerges.

3. I move my hand on the pen, or fingers on the keyboard, in response to the energy that arises. Sometimes I edge into it a little. Sometimes, I stop myself from moving away from a task, kindly. But my golden rule is never to force anything. (That risks plots, characters and phrasing being born as lifeless as forced flowers).

4. I have an outline of the section of story I’m going to write next beside me as a signpost, but otherwise I set up as few expectations for myself as possible. I do not berate myself for what my body/mind cannot do on any given day.  It’s my whole self that has a need to tell the story. I have to allow that to be what it wants to be. That’s the whole point of being someone who writes.

This is how I’ve learnt to write in a way that sustains through the months and years of long projects. This body-based learning has done more for me than any techniques offered to my rational mind. 

The Monthly Prompt

What small, physical activities do you do, without effort? E.g. are you an expert chef, lover, cyclist, make-up artist, singer or swimmer?

How could you apply what you know in other body-based arenas to your writing? 

A Writer's Process: Teresa Benison

My first thought when asked to write something for Wild Words was, what about a piece on The Writers’ Day?

Except, this writer’s day isn’t terribly interesting: desk; caffeine; fuss the cats; admire the collared doves roosting in my tree; lunch, then the same thing all over again….

Ok, so what about some musings on the process of writing?

A long time ago someone told me ‘you can’t call yourself a writer until someone else calls you a writer…’ It was seductive and, being young, it made a sort of sense. I see this now for what it truly is, a deeply damaging statement.

I do believe in the importance of connecting with those ‘someone elses’ (readers) but ‘being a writer’ is more than that. It is not what I do, it is what I am.

Story runs deep for me, it always has, and it is everywhere.

Once, walking through Cambridge city centre, I saw a sign on a lamppost advertising, ‘Public Executions’. In a flash my brain was off, transporting me to a dystopian future where executions habitually take place outside John Lewis with the BBC in attendance to capture reactions from the family and friends of victims.

It took me longer to write that paragraph than to envision it. There was a split second between seeing the sign and realising I’d misread it, that it actually said ‘public exhibition’, but that was more than enough time for my brain to go into overdrive. Moreover, for me the reality was far less interesting than my imagining.

So what I would like to do here is celebrate the fact that these days I embrace such moments. They are the flipside to the nag of self-doubt that I’m sure is common to many writers.

I have learnt to trust myself and my process. I never cease to relish the wildness of words and the power of story.

Story bubbles in my brain like a slow-cooking pot; add to that the special alchemy when story is transformed into words, words which take on a life of their own in the mind of the reader… what could be better, more exciting than that?

There you have it: a fragment of this particular writer’s process. Thank you for reading to the end, but now it really is time to get back to the cats and the caffeine, for I sense another story brewing…

Teresa Benison is a writer living and working in Cornwall; visit her at www.teresabenison.com

A Training Guide For Writing Wild

A student told me the other day that the thought of going outdoors to write terrified her.

In response to our conversation, I jotted down a few ideas which I hope will support you to just get out there. Take them with a pinch of salt  :-) 

-If the computer or television is more familiar to you than the world outside your front door, acclimatise slowly.

Start by venturing out into your garden (assuming you have one), then take on your local park. After that you should feel confident to go further…

-Get familiar with darkness.

Try lying in a dark room for twenty minutes, without falling asleep. You could also put on a blindfold, and feel your way around a room, or garden. Notice how the senses other than sight will come to your aid. See that your fears are bigger then the reality.

-Practice with texture under your feet and hands.

Exchange carpets and varnished floorboards for barefoot scurrying across your pebbled drive.  Swap flat white walls for touching brick and stone. Touch plants (carefully) that you usually consider too spiky.

-Consider going ‘off-line’.

Leaving the phone and Wi Fi behind is the new trend, have you heard? To really go into the unknown means to rely on your own resources, rather than those of your mother/partner/friend/therapist at the other end of the line. Face the reality that where you’re going there may not be a phone signal anyway. To prepare for this, turn your phone off for ten minutes, and see how it feels. Then progress to twenty minutes. Go up incrementally from there. When you can do three hours -the length of the writing of the first draft of your epic poem- you’re ready.

-Decide where to go.

You want to go into unknown territory. It will give you the sharpness of attention that’s conducive to vivid writing. But you don’t want to go anywhere that will frighten you too much, or where you place yourself in danger. A scared writer just freezes up, that is not creative.

-Make your destination information available on a need-to-know basis only. 

Threaten teenagers with loss of privileges if they contact or come looking for you in anything other than a REAL emergency (borrowing money/the car, trips to the supermarket for Nuttela etc… are not classed as real emergencies).

Finally. Remember. You deserve some time for you. Take it. Without apologies or excuses.

The Weekly Prompt

Put the six encouragements above into action :-)