From the archive: Stuck In Our Thoughts

As human beings in modern society, we no longer live in an environment where we are called upon to use our instinctual drives- to respond physically to danger, or to pro-create in order to survive.

We crave that sense of flowing energy, of aliveness. Unable to access this it, we try and use our rational minds as a substitute. They make a poor substitute. Human minds have a tendency to over-activity. They scroll repetitively through the same issues. They overanalyze, they worry, they are anxious. Imagine, for example, you are writing. Just as you feel the words start to flow, the telephone rings.

Instead of taking pro-active action to either answer the phone and deal quickly with the caller, or, to ignore it and carry on writing, the thoughts proliferate. I wonder who that is? Should I answer it? If I answer it that’s the end of my writing for the day. But if I don’t answer it, well, it might be Jimmy needing my help, or Gran, or it might be that new neighbour locked out of her house. I’m not sure what to do. Damn it, I’ve wrecked the writing now anyway! And round we go.

All this rumination uses up energy that could be channeled into the action of writing. It also keeps us trapped in a loop of hyperarousal that is not fulfilled. We freeze in body and mind. Energy is not released on the page, but remains trapped. The story cannot form itself fluidly and naturally. The words do not live on the page. Instead they mirror the state of our body and mind. They are static and lifeless.

The experience of being frozen is commonly referred to as ‘writers’ block’.

Some of us know the extreme form of this, when we unable to think, to get our hands to move on the keyboard, or when we stare for hours at the blank page. Many more of us, however, experience it in more subtle ways, as a sense of creative frustration, or just as an inability to get power into our writing.

 The Weekly Prompt

 Thinking of writers’ block as a physical, rather than a mental state can help us to address it. When you next write, notice any moments when you feel ceased up, frozen, or static in your body. Conversely, also notice any times when you feel movement, or flow in your body. This is the beginning of the process to free the wild words.

This article was first published on August 22nd 2013

From the archive: The London Square

The suggestions as to where I could run ‘Wild In The City’ weekend workshops have ranged from the rambling 88 acres of Hampstead Heath, to the smallest, most secluded square in Bloomsbury.

And actually, I am more drawn towards the latter. I fantasise about my assistant’s eyes opening wide as he reports back, ‘I’ve found the perfect place’. He then places a heavy, golden key into my hand.  ‘The Perfect Place’ would be hidden in the beating heart of the city, sandwiched between Georgian houses, and ignored by bustling commuters. It would be bounded by ornate Victorian railings. Tendrils of Persian Ivy and Clematis would make a climbing frame of the railings and reach for the sky. As the key creaked in the lock, a secret garden, a wild green space, would be revealed to me.

Later, when I land back from my fantasy, I begin to wonder: why is my ideal venue small and contained, rather than one vast, unbounded space, like, say, Hampstead Heath?

My sense is that Hampstead Heath is the ‘catharsis’ of Wild Words venues. It’s a great place to run wild and ‘let it all out’. But ‘letting it all out’ can be the worst thing a blocked writer can do. Contrary to what is often taught, unleashing an emotional and literary explosion often causes the writer to freeze up more, rather than doing the opposite, and enabling flow.

No, the answer lies in another approach. The answer is in the quiet containment that I’m reminded of when I think about that secret garden square. It’s in facilitating words that are charged with emotion out on to the page in a controlled way, like tendrils pushing their way out from between railings. When we do this we channel creative energy. It’s then that we find the power in our words.

The Weekly Prompt

Close your eyes and imagine:

You’ve seen a poster on a city street: ‘Wild In The City: Weekend courses located in secret wild spaces in the heart of urban areas’.

Now imagine that a heavy, golden key is put into your hand. Feel the weight of it. You know instinctively that this key unlocks a gate that gives you access to the place in your mind where the wild words live.

Imagine now that you walk through the city with that weighty key curled in your hand. Follow you feet as they lead you to the lock that the key will fit. No need to think about where you are going. Your body knows.

You reach that place. The key fits the lock. It turns.

Now, write for fifteen minutes about what it is like inside the secret, green space in the heart of the city.

This article was first published on 10th October 2013

From the archive: The Beech Tree

Yesterday, I went for a walk. I came across the Beech tree that pulls my attention every time I walk past it.

Warmed by the sun, the slippery grey bark of that thick trunk smelt sweet. An abundance of verdant leaves jostled for attention in the breeze. That tree is a stunning example of the determination of living things to survive, and flourish. It doesn’t have the symmetrical shape of a storybook tree, but I can see that that is the template it is trying to match. It knows what it was born to become. However, it has met obstacles along the way, and has had to adapt. 

At the beginning, it was planted too close to an old stone wall and had to force itself into the cracks between the squared stones, in order to get breath into its ever enlarging shape. Now several stones are suspended like Christmas baubles, carried ever upwards and outwards by the branches.

At some point also, the ground on which it stood gave way beneath it, and it found itself hanging precariously from a cliff edge. Since then it has grown almost horizontal, prevented from falling by clinging roots. But still, it keeps getting bigger, orientating towards the light that it needs, sucking in nutrients from the soil through its stretched and straining roots.

What I see when I look at it is its drive to express itself, its flexibility to meet the challenges of its environment, and its ability to come back to equilibrium after violent interruption.

Standing there beside it, the steadfastness of its trunk giving way to the quivering leaves, I know that the writing journey is about allowing my innate knowledge of who I am and what needs expression, to guide me. When there’s that knowing in the woody core of my being, then my fingers in contact with the computer keys, the pen, and the page, are as released and open to the light as those leaves.

A writing prompt

Observe a tree, bush or plant. How does it embody its history? What do you notice about its growth process?  What has threatened it? What obstacles have got in its way? Now, stop thinking. Pay attention to how you experience the rhythm of its movement (or lack of movement), in your body. You might, for example, notice feelings of contraction or expansion. Write about your experience, and relationship to this living thing.

This article was first published on July 25th 2013

The Path Of Least Resistance

This month, some tips for helping you to begin to close in on what the one story is that you need to tell, as it hides in the undergrowth of your mind. And then a discussion about finding the easiest way through. 

1. One way to discover the story you need to tell is to think about what you want to achieve through the telling and work backwards. Do any of the following speak to you?

-I just love making things up.

-There’s a part of me that is always hidden away. I want to let it out.

-I want to feel creative, be creative.

-If I’m really honest, I just want to be published writer. I’d like that status.

-I get kick out of being on stage and performing my poetry.

-To express my feelings.

-I know through writing I try to bring order to my world, to feel in control.

-I’ve had a difficult time recently. I want to move on. If I write a story that’s based around my experiences, I think that will help.

-I’m an old lady now. I’ve got stories I need to tell’

-I’ve got to write reports for work. My colleagues are telling me they’re boring to read. I’d like to learn some techniques to make them entertaining.

-I want to improve my grammar and spelling in a way that keeps my interest.

-I’ve got a fantastic idea for a book/film/poem. I want some support to write it.

-I want to meet other storytellers.

2. The best stories are often the simplest. I began my writing career as a screenwriter. In screenwriting there is a term KISS- ‘keep it simple, stupid’. Myself, I’m not sure about the ‘stupid’ bit, but it remains broadly true. There is a difference between complication and complexity. Complications are plot twists and turns. Complexity is depth of character. If a story has too many complications there is not sufficient room for the characters to move through a range of emotions, and there isn’t time for the reader to experience those emotions and process them alongside the character.  Many new storytellers (and some old hands as well), try to put too much into their stories. Don’t be one of them. A good way to gauge if your story is simple enough is to imagine you are telling it to a child, (or find a real child to tell it to!) And complexity- well that’s welcome, but that’s for later in the process. As you choose your initial story idea all you need is the skeleton of the plot. For now, you don’t need more than that.

3. Choose an idea that’s ‘extreme’. When I say extreme, I don’t mean that it necessarily needs to contain battle scenes with thousands of soldiers. I mean emotional extremity. Make sure your idea has the potential for extreme emotions: happiness, sadness, jealousy, anger etc. It’s interesting to note that the stories with the fewest characters or the shortest timescales can sometimes be the most extreme in this way.

4. Choose an idea that has the potential for tension and conflict. Again, low level simmering conflict at the family dinner table is as effective as world leaders gathering to try to end a war. 

5. Pick an idea that screams for visualisation. You want your reader or listener to be able to see the story in their mind. So you need to be able to see it first.

6. Above all, remember that you are a natural storyteller. If there’s a story that swills round your brain and keeps coming back and back, there’s probably a reason. It’s probably a story that needs to be told, and a story that will work. And that’s regardless of any doubts that your rational mind hurls in your face. 

Words Are Clay

It can also be useful to remember that wild words are living, breathing creatures, adaptable and evolving. (Just like the wild animal. And the wild storyteller). Follow in the footsteps of Herman Melville when he says,

‘God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft- nay, but the draft of a draft.’                                                                        -Herman Melville Moby Dick

You can’t get it ‘right’ or wrong’, there is only engagement with an ongoing process.

Try to view words as physical substance (again, more closely related to your body than to your mind). The most important post-war Italian novelist, Italo Calvino, did just that. In a letter to one of his critics, he explained how to view his work:

The written page is not a uniform surface like a piece of plastic; it is more like the cross-section of a piece of wood, in which you can see how the lines of the fibers run, where they form a knot, where a branch goes off. 

-Italo Calvino Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

Your job is to play with form. Stay light around the process. Treat it as clay to be formed.

The Path of Least Resistance

In the opening of his book ‘The Path of Least Resistance’ Robert Fritz tells us an interesting fact about the city of Boston. ‘The Boston roads were actually formed by utilizing cow paths. The cow moving through the topography tended to move where it was immediately easiest to move… Each time cows passed through the same area, it became easier for them to take the same path they had taken the last time, because the path became more and more clearly defined... As a result, city planning in Boston gravitates around the mentality of the seventeenth-century cow’.

He takes this fascinating fact as a starting point for a discussion on how we can create pathways to achieve our personal and professional goals.

The challenging terrain of our lives can include mountains of expectations, rivers of anxious thoughts, and the bogged ground of habits. There is an art to moving with ease, and navigating with flow. It makes sense to put in place a structure that supports us to find the easiest route through.

Often, we need to start by being really honest with ourselves. For example, I think I want to write words that are brave, and vivid, but when I look closer I realise that I have great deal to lose by writing in a way that challenges society, or my family. Until this conflict is resolved, the energy will not move along the path I intend, because it is not the path of least resistance.  If I keep trying to meet an unrealistic target, and continually fail, my confidence will spiral downwards.

To see the Writing Prompt that accompanies this article, you'll need to sign up on the Wild Words website homepage to receive the Monthly Newsletter, or join the Wild Words Facebook Group.

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.

From the archive: Urban Green

I left London when I was 30 because I was desperate for my eyes to be able to swivel their whole arc, to see wide and distant views, to smell clean air, and to rest in silence.

The other week, almost exactly ten years since I left, I went back. I spent two days walking the streets in search of a wild green space in the heart of the city. I was on a quest for a location for the ‘Wild In The City’ weekend workshops that are starting in the spring.

Twenty-five percent of the capital is made up of public green space, and the variety is tremendous. I saw the most regal royal parks, the most ragged parts of Hampstead Heath. I went into community gardens smelling of lavender and tomatoes, and locked myself into the seclusion of a private square in Bloomsbury.

Each one of those green spaces had a very different feeling, but all of them held a certain power. Their power derived from their juxtaposition with the concrete, metal, and glass that loomed over them, and from their ability to keep human progress at bay.

Suddenly there seemed to be so much space and silence in the city. And so many stories.

In Nunhead Cemetery, ghosts rose from the overgrown graves. In St James Park, the pomp and ceremony of monarchs came alive. In Greenwich Peninsular Ecology Park, tales of working in the gasworks in the 1880’s, and roars of victorious Olympians, seemed to hang in the air, even as butterflies, newts, moorhens and reed warblers went about their everyday business.

Not everything in cities is controlled by human beings. Not everything plays by our rules. There is room for the unpredictable, for those who live by intuition. There are quiet, inspiring places for the writers who seek to create a space into which magic might come.

The Weekly Prompt

This week, instead of working at your desk indoors, write something outside. If you live in an urban area, take a walk into the unknown to seek out a quiet, green space. Learn something about the history of the place you are in. See what inspiration you find. 

This article was first published on 20th September 2013