With February and our daily prompts about to arrive the question of where and how to write raises its head. For many this is a huge problem with things like work, caring duties, illness and life in general getting in the way. For a start, we do not all have the same access to time and space to write so the trick is to look at what your typical day looks like and see where and how to fit in the writing. For some people there is no typical day and if that is the case then it is important to acknowlege that – there are still things you can do including laying foundations for writing later on when life calms down a bit, and experience life as building a mental library of things to write about later on – it is not wasted time just because you can not currently put words on a page.
One of our poets found themselves with a few years of hell, being a parent, a carer, recovering from illness themself and trying to work full time from home so they could interrupt their work day for various medical visits and for the parent craft days at school and so on. Social and creative stuff by necessity got shunted to the side. It seemed like a long long time, it was about three years, during that time they didn’t really get to write but what they did do was have a little recording device that wasn’t their phone but could have its files uploaded easily. This digital dictaphone went everywhere with them and when ever there was a moment and they thought of something they could just whisk it out and record their thoughts where ever they were – bed at 4 am, in the hospital waiting room, waiting for the kids after a school play.
Now that life is a little easier they have time to sit and write and have allocated one evening a week where an easy dinner is had and writing is the priority, it is the night with no kids’ clubs and the kids are encouraged to do their homework or something creative in the time period too. They are steadily working through a mix of new ideas and the bits they had recorded aided by speech to text software which, though still far from perfect, does mean they can correct rather a big chunk of text rather than having to spend hours typing it all up and listening to their own voice a half dozen times to get each recording down in a written form.
They intially struggled to get writing again but the notes helped them not feel overwhemled by the blank page and apparent lack of ideas and interest – stressed brains can shut down so one of the things they had found was during the stressful period they were generating fewer and fewer ideas, and if they had not had their recorded bank of ideas they feel they would have really struggled to get going again, as it was building the wanting to write and space and time to write took a good year after the major stressors and grief were dealt with – again sometimes you just shouldn’t “push through” but it is definately not wasted time. Ideas and concepts for writing are pushed down but not gone; they are, as a song writer friend puts it, “mulching” – they are fermenting and turning into something else that isn’t quiet ready yet.
There are many ways to write – start by looking at what space and time you have. Also experiment – what works for one person may not work for others, some can write on the bus, some need quiet, some dictate whilst doing their daily exercise. Maybe look at others’ writing habits to get some ideas.
Writing can be lonely, and that isn’t always a bad thing; in fact the peace and quiet can give you the space to think and to form ideas that would be lost if you tried to explain them first. However, sometimes working with others can be a tremendous help, especially if you are struggling with writers block. Collaborations are not for everyone – the work is never fully yours and you do not have complete control of it, and for some people that is a no go; but for others it can give them a freedom to make something not perfect, not exact and just different to what they might already be known for. Equally, there are different types of collaboration so some experimenting might be needed to find what works for you.
Types of Collaboration:
Anthologies
Anthologies are the simplet and most commonform of poetry collaboration, a theme or themes is put out and everyone writes something or scrabbles through their back catalogue/note books until they have something that matches and together a collection is created. Rarely do groups meet up to work on the anthology though some writing retreats and festivals as well some creative writing courses or even community projects do have this as part of the process. In that case you will find there will generally be physical meet ups, maybe walks and then sitting around together being given writing prompts.
Recently we went on a story telling equivalent and looked around an old church and ancient grounds in Wales and then we all sat wrote where we wanted on the site. Some people worked in pairs or groups and others sat alone. I personally took photos of things that I found interesting to create a mood board later and then sat and composed two poems. If people felt confident enough they shared their writing and feedback was offered and some works paired together.
There are also online video chat anthology and collaborative groups using platforms such as Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and Discord. We took part in a lovely project with refugee women last year run by the She Spoke collective that was absolutely amazing, and was an international collaboration across borders and in some cases into active war zones.
And that brings us to the second most common type of collaboration:
Collectives
Collectives are not just glorified workshop groups, they actively exist for a reason; a “shared vision” may be too grandiose a term but there will be some thread that connects them. Art collectives often pool resources and expertise. They take part in group activities and work on shows and other creative endevours together.
Collectives come about generally in two ways: people just find they have organically grouped together and need to become a little more official to, say, apply for funding to go on group outings or screen print themselves very special book versions of their group works… or someone has an idea and sets up the collective and starts recruiting. These groups tend to have stricter pathways and clearer visions and run on the “Build it and they will come” ideology – generally. Sometimes collectives are very closed and are not looking for new members so it is important when looking around to bear that in mind; and some, especially if there is a shop or premises to maintain, may have membership fees so don’t get caught short with that one as many will assume that is how all groups work and will not necessarily think to state the fee outright when you are intially finding out about them.
Internal structure and how you collaborate will be varied and differernt even within one collective let alone across the different collectives. Again it is important to find one (or several) that work for you and not to stay were you do not feel productive or happy.
Partnerships
Next is Partnerships, this is where you team up with one other person, often via email and send each other prompts or edit each others’ poems or write a stanza and send it to them to add their stanza or possibly even just a line at a time or sometimes even just a word!
These are mostly fun exercises and involves you being not “precious” about your writing because it will be screwed up and altered beyond recognition.
Another technique with this kind of set up is merging poems; each of you brings your work and you sit in a cafe or on a video call and you combine your works into one new whole. Again there are endless ways to make this work and the other writer siting there waiting for you is the drive some poets need to actually produce work.
These above options are the most common types of collaborative work but they are not the only type and that leads us on to the next few which to me are the more interesting and personally have helped me produce the works I have then performed at places and events such as literature festivals.
Public Prompts
This is where the general public give you prompts to write from or sometimes even lines or snippets of writing about how they feel or their experience of something. Performance Poets like Spoz use this method to create poems on the spot at music festivals or during school visits but it can also be used as a slower form of writing. Two such memorable such poems are about “pussies”: the first one, by AF Harold, was created when back in the early days of twitter he asked everyone for their pet cat names and created a fabulously whimsical piece with some swearing that he later unleashed on audiences; and the other was by Holly McNish who did a similar concept but asked for the slang terms for genitalia and came out with a darkly saterical hard hitting piece. Both of these poems were created using the same public prompt concept but are so vastly different in how they hit.
But twitter doesn’t exist anymore and social media is a bit of a mess these days so unless you have an established platform you may feel this form of collaborative writing can not work, but that is not true. For one of our projects around the Moon Landing Anniversary a few years ago we went along to events and physically asked people there and then to write down their feelings or memories about space travel and things like the moon landings. We collected some amazing pieces from people ranging from the son of one of the people in mission control to the conspiracy theorist who rode their bike into the stand we had during an amazing space-art installation at a local historical site.
Another project that has used this style of collaboration was a local history project that again asked for memories and stories of a specific street in a near by city. The final piece involved lion tamers eaten by their own lion!
And another was an allotment project where spoken word and rap artists came and worked with young people as they learnt to take care of their allotment space.
The scope for this sort of collaboration is huge! And sometimes local authorities are happy to fund such works.
There is also this in kind of a reverse… you can get prompts from sites like us here at WoPo or various Facebook Groups or from a writing tutor and just write. In many ways this is a loose form of collaboration and one that is so pervasive that most will not even think about it. Some of us at team WoPo work as writing tutors and create prompt and exercise sheets that we give out, and it is always a pleasure when someone comes back to you with a poem they’ve written from the prompts and sometimes even waving a poetry book containing their works. It is always amazing to find that the prompts have helped people.
And lastly I have seen poets with type writers at busy events and markets creating poems for queues of people – this I feel is more of a commission type situation but it could also be used as the foundation of these types of collaborative works.
Art from Art
This is my favourite form of collaboration.
A group in Oxford used to run an event were we would go through the special art exhibitions and write from the art works. Museums and Art galleries will sometimes have events for specific art exhibitions, one we were involved in was the Enduring Eye which was photography of the Arctic Exploration missions and things like the ships manifests with the names of the dogs and everything. The poetry that came out of this was amazing and ended up with a performance night and many of poems went on to be published in various publications and collections.
This is the most common version of Art from Art but can feel a little impersonal, there are more active collabrative versions such being sent other participants’ art – either their writing or visuals – and writing your own pieces from them. A photographer friend loves giving their images to writers to see what they come out with!
These visuals and words work really well for putting poetry collections and exhibitions together.
The art can also be things like listening to someones music, and poetry films.
An even more interesting version of this leads us to out final section:
Events
This may seem an odd one but can produce some wonderful works and are nearly always an interesting experience. At the very edge of it you can take a note pad to an event and sketch and write, just on your own, as you are inspired by your surroundings, considering the envirnment to be shaping your thoughts. But a more active collaborative version is to work with festivals being an “artist in residence” or just on a one off and working with dancers and musicians and even light engineers to become the centre of the art piece – penning or forming your words as these very different artforms unfold around you. Some may want you to share your words as they are happening, giving a strong improvisational element – whilst others will expect you to be writing away. It is important to make sure everyone is expecting approximately the same thing from the experience – you do not want to trip up a ballet dancer and you might not feel comfortable being plunged into a sudden rap battle.
This does not just go for art either – I have been invited to be the visiting poet for tech events where duties were opening and closing with a poem but also walking around observing and writing and in some instances live blogging which is not so much of a concept anymore but you would sit and update your blog or website as the event was happening.
All of these are wonderful things to try and there will be even more we have not thought about or have forgotten to include. Why not have a think about collaboration and put some feelers out for people to work with?
It’s the half way point of the month, this can be where life starts to get in the way and the novelty of the challenge starts to wear off. So how do you keep momentum going?
There are several ways that people have found useful but not everything works for everybody.
1) Set your own goals… so if you have already completed the challenge and are wondering where to go next set yourself the goal of completing the same within a week (so half the time).
2) If you have been struggling and know that there there is just no way you can completed it and are suffering from the “why bothers” – you can sit back and look at what has and hasn’t worked for you, which exercises were good and which weren’t. Stream line the process so that you are not trying to complete everything and achieving nothing.
3) You are struggling to bring any poem to completion but have done tones of writing – this is fine, this just means you are going to have a fun time editing after the writing frenzy has passed but you might want to mark yourself a time period for editing in the calendar so that the work doesn’t just sit there almost complete for the rest of your life.
4) What’s the point? Some people struggle with setting their own goals and writing for themselves so why not make it for other people. The easiest way to do this is to decide the poems are going to be submitted to magazines or entered into competitions. Publishers websites will normally have the current sort of stuff they are looking for on their website somewhere.
5) View this month as the warm up for Nation Poetry Writing Month in April rather than the real thing. This is the proactive to get you up to speed.
Every writer that I have ever spoken to has had either a bad or an isolated childhood. Some have had childhoods that were both at once. Some self-isolated, withdrawing into worlds of their own creation where exciting things happened that they could understand, unlike the dull-seeming emotional complexity of the adult world. In any case, a writer must always be a reader first and nothing in the world gets children to read like removing all other entertainment options.
My family was always on the move. I left the town of my birth (Waynesville, North Carolina) a few weeks after a surgeon carved me from my mother’s womb. I was taken to Edinburgh where I lived in an underground flat (beside St Giles Church) and lingered there long enough to learn to speak and pick up a warped version of the local accent. When I was two, my father joined the navy as a chaplain and we moved to Subic Bay in the Philippines. While we were there, my parents met the lady who would become my foster-mother, my sister was adopted, and my brother was born. At seven (nearly eight) I returned to the states and spent the next five years sloshing about in swamps and switching schools (from the semi-posh private that expelled me for re-animating a cow’s heart with a car battery, to the insane Seventh Day Adventist venture whose principal prayed over me in existential despair because I ate a ham sandwich) before my mother’s health and my father’s finances collapsed to the point where I had to be placed in a South Carolina orphanage. When I emerged, I was fifteen, silent, and emotionally scarred. But I had grown into a poet.
I left school, worked for a veterinarian (performing more than a few illicit surgeries) and wrote poems, in secret, which I buried in the yard.
I ran away from home as a young teenager and went off to university. While I never graduated from high school, my test scores were high enough to earn a full scholarship. While I was there, I made the kind of friends who noticed when the irritable urge to write was on me and who said things like, ‘You’re being a bitch, Bethany. Go write and don’t come back until you’ve finished something you’re willing to show us.’ When I finished, they read it, and offered helpful, loving criticism. I started studying my art openly, and seriously. I had very good teachers. I went on to get my masters at Trinity, Carmarthen and my PhD at Aberystwyth University where I met my husband, and greatest supporter, Matthew David Clarke.
Writing makes me feel like a real person, for as long as I am doing it, and not like something somebody made up. Writing is fun, but it is not something that I do primarily for enjoyment. You know you are a writer if it is what you have to do in order to live. You know that you are a writer if you will forgo sleep, food, or career advancement in order to get it done. You write in order to please God, please yourself, or advance the horizon of human knowledge one small fraction of a centimetre. You write because to do otherwise is a kind of spiritual suicide.
If you want to write well, you must read everything. Read fifty pages of prose for every one that you write. Read fifty poems for every line of yours. Read old things. Read new things. Read for, at least, five hours a day. It’s not impossible. Sleep less. Stop watching television. I work on my writing for a total of eight to twelve hours a day. I read (and write) at the gym. My favourite writing place is on the stepper. I set that machine to high and then let her rip. This enables me to sink into my work, to lose myself totally. Sometimes, I forget where I am and look up, inky and confused; wondering where all that time went. Then I go home and get to work editing. I’ve drafted all of my books at my local gym. It takes me less time to draft than it does to edit. I read one novel and one collection a day. Text books take me a little bit longer, but I read them too. I favour psychology, art history, and biology.
Lately, I’ve become very interested in forms. My last two books (Crown of Thorns, Oneiros Books 2013, and Undisturbed Circles, Lapwing 2014) are composed of sonnet crowns with acrostics. The sonnets in Crown of Thorns are very loose in terms of structure. They vary from eleven to fourteen syllables per line and are augmented by an acrostic that runs the length of the left margin. They are autobiographical and deal with my family life and my time in the orphanage. The crowns in Undisturbed circles are much more structurally complex. Here is an example, taken from the form key at the beginning of the book: The Labyrinth is a heroic sonnet crown. This piece is technically intricate. Each sonnet is prefaced by a brief narrative prose-poem that I used to set the tone for the grouping. The sonnets themselves are enhanced by 28-character double-acrostics that runs down the left hand margin and continues down the right hand side of the lines. There are fifteen acrostics for fifteen sections and, taken together, they form a poem that contributes to the narrative. The first fourteen poems end with the same line, drawing the reader further into the story. Since this is a heroic crown of sonnets, the final sonnet is constructed of the first lines of the previous sonnets, laid out in order. Each sonnet is followed by a 5×5 (five lines of five syllables) that tells a dreamlike parallel narrative. ‘The Labyrinth’ is a map of my mind; not all of it, of course, but it hits a few of the highlights.
A poem from Undisturbed Circles can be found here.
I am interested in form because I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a pretty bad case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both conditions are very ritualistic, in terms of symptoms, very structured and limiting, but they shape my thoughts in such a way that I can see things about the world that other people seem to miss. I am interested in the odd freedom that can be found inside of a prison. We are limited by our brains, our histories, and our cultures, but somehow, as a species, we manage to bring beauty out of those rusty old traps. Strict adherence to form allows me to generate a sense of myth, and an intensity that my free-verse poems never allowed. I do not think that poetry can ever be ‘safe’ or conventionally acceptable and still remain true. Truth is dangerous. Form is dangerous; the temptation is to allow the form to overwhelm the narrative. The goal is to create a narrative that disguises the form, so that deeper levels of meaning are present for those who want to dig them out, but are not necessary in order to read or enjoy the text. Challenge is a thrill for some people – myself included.
Lately, I have been working on a series of acrostic sestinas and acrostic sestina crowns. The acrostics run down the left hand margin. I am interested in the obsessive tone that the sestina demands, and I would very much like to use one to create a working, fluid narrative. Currently, my pet project is an acrostic sestina cycle that re-tells the story of Job. You can see an example of one of my acrostic sestinas on Ink, Sweat, and Tears. More examples of my work are available, should you be interested, on my website: BethanyWPope.com.
About the Autor
Bethany W Pope is an LBA winning author, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards, the Cinnamon Press Novel competition, and the Ink, Sweat and Tears poetry commission, placed third in the Bare Fiction Poetry Competition and she was recently highly commended in this year’s Poetry London Competition. She was recently nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program, and her MA from the University of Wales Trinity St David. She has published several collections of poetry: A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), and The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014), and Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014). Her first novel, Masque, shall be published by Seren in 2016. Her work has appeared in: Anon; Art Times; Ampersand; The Galway Review; The Prague Review; Sentinel Quarterly; The Delinquent; De/Tached; The Writer’s Hub; The Blue Max Review; Envoi; Poetry London; New Welsh Review; Poetry Review Salzburg; Sentinel Literary Quarterly; Every Day Poems; The Brooklyn Voice; And Other Poems; Magma; The Prague Review; Words & Music; Music & Literature; The Coffin Factory; The Quarterly Conversation; Tribe; Turbulence; Tears in the Fence; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Bone Orchard; Acumen, The Antigonish Review, Bare Fiction, The Broadsheet, Ariadne’s Thread, The Black Light Engine Room, The Lampeter Review London Grip and Planet. Her work is due to appear in the following anthologies: The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear), Gothic Anthology (Parthian Books), and Raving Beauties (Bloodaxe Books).
Rhyme and rhythm are useful devices for poets. An interesting exercise is to make a table of rhyme, this can be done by hand using a ruler or on the computer with spreadsheets. Take the ending sound at, then make a column of all the one syllable words that end with this sound – cat, sat, mat etc… not everything may rhyme with the way the word is pronounced so have a second column for such words or a devision within the cell of the spreadsheet to cope with this.
Now make a column for all the two syllable words that end in at, another for the three syllable words and so on until you run out! Then if you want you can think of slant or half rhymes that could go with your chosen word ending. Maybe the words have ot at the end or at in the middle etc…
These tables can be extremely useful if you are creating a rhyming piece, they can also be useful if you are trying to avoid an obvious rhyme as they will give you a plethora of other words to use. The syllable break down helps you find the right length word for poem so that you do not have to twist and distort the rhyme (unless that is what is wanted).
This exercise can also be helpful if you are trying to avoid accidental rhyme too – if makes you more aware of what does and does not rhyme and those little sneaky almost rhymes that can ruin a good prose poem.
If you are really lucky and managed to complete both WoPo and NaPo you will now have about 60 almost poems.
Some of these will have to be chucked but alot of them will be some thing that can be polished into a poem gem.
Those April poems probably need to sit abit now though so that you come back to them with fresh eyes! Start with the WoPoWriMo poems – sort the wheat from the chauff (ie take out the good ones and chuck the rest!).
Submissions for the Chap Book and the Anthology will be open until Midnight Sunday the 30th of May – remember you can submit up to five poems and read the guidlines on weather to go for both poetry collections.
Then why not take part in National Poetry Writing Month in April! Many of you have been saying how you miss WoPo so here is your chance to do it all over again 🙂 Or maybe you could use it as a month of revision for those poems you have already?
We know several die hards have already signed up and are ready to go with this new poetry challenge.
Thinking you’ll run into difficulty with finding inspiration for another month of POETIC INSANITY? Why not look back on the writing excersises we did in Febuary and see if they spark any creativity?
There is also the newletter which always contains extra writing stimuli 🙂
Plus we will be post weekly idea generating tid bits on this site through out April.
Those of you signed up to WoPoWriMo Poems feel free to post your NaPoWriMo poems there if you wish.
We hope you’ll join us for this extra challenge! Though we do appreciate it clashes with Script Frenzy another fantastic writing challenge!
Repetitive strain injury is an issue with writers and artists so make sure your ergonomics are sorted out! This may seem a bit extreme for poem writers but think how much time you spend sitting hunched over reading – get up every hour, go for a walk, have a stretch, do a little yoga!
This will not only help prevent you injuring yourself, it means you’ll be getting some exercise – and as a writer it is important you exercise!
It is all too easy to fall into the trap of sitting at your desk all day drinking endless caffeinated drinks and eating salty or sweet snacks. This can be very detrimental to your health if done for long periods – and yes we are moaning ninnies but we just thought it best to warn you!
Having said that we hear one of the WoPoWriMo’s team members loves having a bowl of dry cereal to munch on whilst writing or reading! Another prefers yogurt covered rasins!
Writing of any sort can seem to be an activity full of hurdles that are not just simply too hard to jump over, but may take a pole vault or, if you’re really unlucky, mountaineering kit.
However, all hurdles can be overcome and the first issue is really identifying what they are. Only then can you start to think of ways of solving them – or maybe just planing a route around them.
Here are some good on-line resources to help with hurdles:
Ok well it’s one but if you know of any others then please add the link in the comments field, with some writing so we know you are human and not a spam bot!
