The Creative Writing Coursebook

Beginning to write is a process of learning to look at the world differently. To be able to construct vivid, believable narratives a writer needs to develop a sharp eye for the details in the world around them, details that are often easy to miss in the hustle and bustle of everyday living.

The details of a story are the point at which character and setting begin to take on their shape, where the story starts to come alive in the mind of the reader. It is here, in the cement of a text, that a story will stand or fall.

It’s not just any detail that a writer looks for, it’s the telling detail like that moment when the woman in the chip shop, ordering double egg and chips, dropped her purse and her Weight Watchers membership card fell out. Or the second-hand wedding dresses in the window of the Relate charity shop. The small ironies that most of us encounter in our everyday lives can provide a writer with some of the best material for fiction. But we have to unpeel our eyes, resensitize ourselves to our environment. How many of us could write an exact verbal description of our journey to work? How often have you passed that crumbling warehouse and not noticed the graffiti: ‘Elvis Lives’? Or realized that they’ve changed the supermarket on the ring road from Tesco to Kwik Save?

Describe your world to yourself as you move around it. What best describes your living room? Your street? Your town? Who lives here? Write lists of words and phrases and try to be as precise as possible in your observations. Get used to knowing and understanding the meanings of words, buy a good dictionary and read it. The broader your vocabulary, the more ideas you will be able to express.

When constructing a narrative you need to think quite carefully about how you are presenting details to the reader. What kinds of details are important to the narrative? What type of world are you trying to create? Focusing too much on irrelevancies will throw the reader off the scent: Do we really need to know what your character’s had for tea, what colour their bath mat is? (If, of course, the tea is poisoned or the bath mat has a revealing stain then these might be your moments of telling detail.) In many ways it is what you filter out that focuses the reader’s eye on the important details.

Next time you read, slow yourself down, tick off the sentences that create a strong visual image of the story in your imagination. You will find that a series of complex visual and textual prompts have created an image of the story in your mind. Take this example from F. Scott Fitzgerald:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many coloured disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaid in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

This scene comes from a moment where Gatsby – reunited with his lost love, Daisy – is showing off his opulent house and possessions. Consider the effect of the detail in this passage. The ‘thick folds’, the ‘sheer linen’, the ‘fine flannel’, the ‘soft rich heap’, the ‘coral and apple-green’. There is an extravagance that borders on mania in the way that the pile of shirts becomes suffocatingly larger. And Daisy’s dramatic response fits the mood and tone of the wealthy New York set that Fitzgerald is satirizing. What does such an opulent wardrobe suggest about Gatsby’s character? He is the enigma at the centre of the book, the man whom no one has ever met but everyone claims to know. Why is he showing Daisy all his possessions? ‘While we admired he brought more’ hints that the shirts only have value for Gatsby when others are admiring them. Certainly, Gatsby displays more shirts than he could ever wear.

Pinning your writing down to specific detail is the first way to develop good practice. Learn from reading other writers. Don’t settle for bland or vague adjectives. Words such as ‘nice’, ‘good’, ‘dark’, ‘bad’ are so general as to be insipid. Only use metaphor if it is pertinent and surprising. Develop a sensory understanding of the world, how perfumes, sounds, textures and tastes reveal character and place.

1. A butter-yellow Ford Cortina, key scratches on the bonnet, spelling out a word or a signature, can’t tell which. A peeling Canaries sticker on the bumper, green and yellow seat covers. Magic Tree air freshener hanging off the mirror. Crumpled McDonald’s bags on the back seat.

2. He’s wearing a shirt the colour of ectoplasm, vile fluorescent green. He’s on his second can of Red Bull, which smells worse than his aftershave, and he’s laughing out loud at something on his phone. Oh God, he’s trying to catch my eye.

When you write, take time to draw a few quick verbal sketches, which describe where you are, where you’ve been, who you’ve been with. What are the key details that define your environment? Writers develop the ability to take a moment and split it into its component parts – what he or she was wearing, how he or she looked, how he or she gestured.

Consider how you can subvert expectations. The owner of the car in the first example is most likely to be a man, but what if it’s a woman? What does this say about our cultural expectations? Details are always loaded with significance; use them precisely, don’t go for the obvious or the stereotypical.

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes talks about detail as that which impacts upon the memory when an image is out of sight. When you try to remember an image or a scene, what is it that most sticks in your mind? Look at a photograph, close your eyes and try to recall the image. What is it that you remember? Is it the red of her shoes? The shape of the tree? The way he’s smiling? The yellow chairs? Try to describe the photograph. Break up your gaze into jigsaw bits, then fit it back together on the page.

If you were to give one hundred people the same photo to describe, they would all write it down differently. They would pick different details, use different adjectives, have different cultural references. Training the eye is about learning to articulate your own perspective clearly. It’s a cliché, but no less pertinent, that writing is a journey of self-discovery, of finding and defining things you didn’t know you thought about yourself, about the world, about your place in the world. The keen eye that picks out all the telling detail has to be aware of the angle and the object of its own gaze.

The infamous narcissist Anaïs Nin said that the world only became real when she wrote about it. To this end she kept copious diaries in which she recorded and constructed the story of her life. She created herself on the page as a character in a world where everything was heightened, more romantic, more passionate, more extravagant. She created herself as a character that she would go on to use in her novels. She knew that writing was indulgent, and she revelled in it.

Get to know yourself. Write a few essays, express your opinions. What do you really think about that film you went to see last week? For me, one of the great joys of writing is articulating something I have felt but never expressed before. The phrase ‘coming to terms with’ means precisely that: finding words to express experience. At this stage it’s complete self-indulgence, you can say what you like; there are no witnesses, no audience, just you and the page.

Creative Writing Workshy

Ali Smith

Writing, from day to day, is like dealing in a series of controlled explosions that vary in speed, in size and in stretch; can stop, hang mid-air like Cornelia Parker’s sculptures of exploded things suspended at the point of impact. Writing – writing anything at all – is to invite a dynamic meld of anarchy and discipline, to leave our prints in the fizzing, fuse-lit possible places between order and chaos. Did you know that our hearts hang between order and chaos with every beat? That every heartbeat is subtly different from the last, and that too much order, conversely too much disorder, will explode or implode a heart?

I always think that the act of writing, strung as it is between instinct and edit, is an occupation best done in solitude, at least in the first instance. Teaching creative writing workshops gives me irritable bowel syndrome. Something about the concept (and about how I can say yes and then regret it and worry about it for weeks) inflames my gut in what might be called an explosive, sometimes an implosive, manner. I can’t make up my mind whether this is a commonsensical and protective physical urge from the notion that writing is always best done alone in a room with a pencil and nobody watching, or a perverse and antisocial response, the response of the lazy and the vanity-ridden person, who uses something like Cocteau’s comment – that asking an artist to talk about art is a bit like asking a plant to discuss horticulture – as a lame excuse for not wanting to articulate. Then again, I’m drawn to Cocteau’s suggestion. Here’s the fact: I’m green, I’ve got roots, I need water. Give me a pencil, some paper, an empty room; I really don’t want to talk about it, I want to do it. Talking about it is just another way of putting off doing it.

All of which is a cunning cop-out kind of inarticulate thing with which to preface this piece, since workshops offer exactly one of those possible lit spaces, exactly the anarchy–discipline dynamic I began this section with.

Most of the following exercises are things that were made up on the spot in workshops and for workshops or culled from other people’s workshops, in other words made up by other writers less fearful than I am of talking about it.

2. Some Useful Three-Word Lists for One of Those Here-Are-Three-Words-Now-Write-a-Paragraph-that-Uses-All-Three Exercises

Have the workshop participants read out their hundred-word stories created under the haiku method above. Now ask everybody to change the gender of one of the characters in their stories, without changing anything else, and read them out again alongside the originals. What happens? How much of the story can stay the same? How much of it changes or shifts and why? This is an excellent way to bring preconceptions to the surface or to spot them in prose.

Now choose just one of the stories the class has been working on. Copy it onto the board or photocopy it, so that everybody has a copy of it to work from. Then assign everybody in the room a different tense into which to put the story. The comparisons are / will be / would be / could have been / might be fruitful. Ask some people to choose a mix of tenses to see what happens to the story then. Ask one person to use a different tense each time a verb is used.

Choose a good full-blown sentence from somewhere. One of my personal favourites is the first line of an Alan Warner story, called ‘Car Hung, Upside Down’, which goes: ‘The car hung, upside down high above the earth, in the leafless sycamore tree.’

Minutely edit. Start with almost nothing, the impact of

The car was in the tree.

Compare it to the impact of

The car was upside down, in the tree.

Then compare the impact of

The car hung upside down, in the tree.

And so on, with

The car hung, upside down, in the tree.

The car hung, upside down in the tree.

The car hung upside down, in the tree.

The car hung upside down in the sycamore tree.

The car hung upside down in the leafless tree.

The car hung upside down in the leafless sycamore tree.

The car hung upside down, in the leafless sycamore tree.

The car hung upside down high above the earth in the leafless sycamore tree.

The car hung, upside down high above the earth, in the leafless sycamore tree.

The car hung, upside down high above the earth.

The car hung in the leafless sycamore tree.

The car hung in the leafless tree.

The car hung in the sycamore tree.

The car hung in the tree.

Keeping Your Eyes Open

Alicia Stubbersfield

When I’m making notes which may end up as material for a poem, I think of that perfect note-maker Dorothy Wordsworth, tramping along with brother William, recording description and comment so that he could ‘recollect in tranquillity’.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a Dorothy. I don’t have much time either, so my notes are scrappy things written in a little book I keep in my handbag. I often wonder where male poets keep their notebooks but have never asked. These notes, though, are important despite their brevity and allow me to trawl back through my responses to experience and to make connections.

My connection, as a woman poet in the year 2019, with William Wordsworth comes from recording those scraps at all. It also comes from the development of the scrap. After days and nights of Welsh rain, the field across the road from my house was flooded so badly that two swans took up temporary residence. I recorded the fact and the way their necks made a perfect heart shape in the instant I was watching them. There’s plenty of serendipity involved in being a writer. The important thing is to see the heart shape, write it down in your notebook and then go back to it later.

Swans mate for life and make a wonderful metaphor for enduring love. I’m more interested in what goes wrong in relationships. The temporary quality of the lake on the flooded field offset by that fleeting glimpse of the swans’ necks forming a conventional symbol for love made the kind of contrast I’m interested in. I find an image that is essentially visual and then subvert it, develop it, make it resonate in a new way. Faithful swans washed up on a flooded field allow me to tap into what we know as well as what we don’t expect.

Developing an image needs the other four senses. And this is the simplest element of writing and the one we forget most easily. Think of the importance of smell. That wet-dog-drying smell of small schoolchildren, the smell of pavements after summer rain, the smell of the person you lust after. A familiar smell can transport us back to childhood in an instant. Smell, like taste, is difficult to describe but will work hard for you in a poem. The reader will be transported without scratch and sniff, by the power of your description. In a poem about a lover going away with someone else I have the girl sleeping in his shirt so she will ‘wake smelling of you’. Smell becomes a metaphor for her loss as well as a strong physical detail in the poem.

Taste, too, allows another layer of physicality and abstraction: ‘the cigarette-and-wine taste of you’ or ‘how desire tastes in someone else’s mouth’. These are clear enough and open enough for the reader to fill in the absolutes.

Texture and sound are equally important in letting the reader imagine the scene clearly. In a poem written in the voice of a human cannonball I wanted to make the inside of the cannon as real as possible, so I used the sounds of the circus, which she can hear outside the cannon, and the feel of the metal on her skin. ‘I hear tigers roar in the distance’ and ‘Cold touching my skin, seeping into me.’ The sound of tigers emphasizes her isolation and the cold ‘seeping’ into her becomes a metaphorical cold and represents her relationship with her father.

Physical details become metaphorical in the writing and so allow the poem to take on another layer: the physical becomes metaphorical and allows the reader to connect in a more profound way. The choice we make about the physical details, the use we make of the senses, allows us to have control over our material, to direct our readers and to allow the reader to make the poem their own. Leaving room for the reader is important but not so that we edit what we want to say to appease some imagined person. Many of the women writers I have as students have great difficulty finding their own, confident voice. Speaking out above the noise of our mothers and grandmothers can be almost impossible and I certainly found, and find, it difficult, although the way women talk to each other can be the beginning of writing.

My mother was my first audience. I learned to tell stories to keep her entertained, to describe exactly where I’d been, who I’d seen, who had said what to whom. ‘And what colour were her shoes?’ she’d ask, pursing her lips at the unsuitability of white shoes in winter. ‘How common.’

I learned to edit my experiences. If I didn’t want my friends to appear common, and I didn’t, I changed the colour of their shoes to black patent, which were ‘plain fancy’ and, thus, acceptable. I rehearsed the amusing bits of an evening out, the quasi-tragic highlighting the elements that would entertain. The most important thing, however, was the detail. What kind of clothes was she wearing? What colour? What cut? What does that say about her?

My mother maintained that she knew what I was thinking, and I don’t think I ever fully accepted that she didn’t. But she didn’t. No one ever does know what someone else is thinking and that’s what makes the job of the writer interesting. We, somehow, have to communicate our thoughts, whether speaking or writing, and that takes us back to the five senses.

The elements of my social life that I remembered and edited for the benefit of my mother were usually visual. I’ve already mentioned the clothes people wore but, as a writer, I am interested in more than that. The exact colour of the shirt he wore the night he dumped you tells us about him, about your mood, about his place in the world. That rip in the sleeve matters. In my poem ‘Letters Home’, which is about the versions of our lives we choose to tell others, I list the things the girl in the poem can tell her mother and the things she can’t, creating contrasting images inside the head of the reader. She can describe ‘the books / snack-bars with plastic cups / lads playing football’ but not ‘. . . coffee / or waiting in the kitchen for a kettle, your back against the fridge / then green mugs, a bottle of red wine’.

Each of the things on the list resonates beyond just what it is. The details carry much of the emotional weight of the poem.

Making connections between the different aspects of our lives is important. Sharon Olds writes about the death of her children’s gerbil, and all of us who are parents know how important those little deaths are. We can write about the effects of the bigger deaths by reducing them. Shortly after my mother died I found myself writing about the deaths of animals: the pet sheep, a hen that curiously laid an egg as she died, which was a gift of a metaphor. So much so that a friend who is also a poet accused me of making it up. The trick is to spot the metaphor and use the simple event of the dead hen and her egg to reflect feelings about the death of a parent and that which is left after such a death.

I live in the country and am very conscious of the turning of the seasons. The leaving and returning of the swallows or curlews gives a structure to life that makes sense to me. The advent of spring with the gradual colouring in of the hedges and lambs hiccuping round the field may sound romantic but is juxtaposed with the blood and death we encounter in the poetry of Ted Hughes. Once in a poetry workshop I brought a poem that was set very much where I live; lush countryside full of wild flowers, particularly poppies, which I used symbolically to show the disintegration of a relationship. In the poem the woman rescues a wounded swallow from the cat and cups it in her hand, aware of its incredible smoothness. I was fictionalizing experience, using the place with which I was familiar, describing an incident with a wounded swallow as it had happened to me but giving these to fictionalized characters and making the elements significant within the narrative. A member of the group workshopping the poem was disdainful of its authenticity because of the setting, thinking that it was too ‘Laura Ashley’, believing ironically that I had made up the setting and the relationship was real.

The temptation to respond with ‘But that’s what it’s like’ or, ‘That’s what happened’ is often a strong one, but literal truth is not important to the emotional truth of the poem. I may have a strong idea of an image I want to pursue, or want to write about an incident that happened, capturing a particular moment, but when I have started to write, something else takes over and the poem begins to have its own energy and dynamic. At that point I feel it’s important to follow that energy and see where the poem takes you. That’s not to say I’m not controlling the line lengths, the stanzas, maybe even the rhyme, but there is something more there, and it is that which gives the poem its emotional truth and the indefinable charge that makes a poem work.

Writers have to be alert to everything around them, to the strange little connections and contrasts that become symbols for the way life is. The making of the poem comes afterwards. We dig out our own clay and then shape the pot of the poem later. The possibilities are endless, from the fine porcelain of a villanelle to experimental pieces that barely look like poems at all. Each one will come from experience and will be transformed by imagination.

Try the following exercise, which will mimic the process of note-making and the establishing of connections.

First choose an object of some kind and place it in front of you. It can be the blue vase you bought in Greece, full of Greek sea and sky, or it might be the pink pebble you found on the beach at Llandudno, or something as simple as an item of clothing. Pamela Gillilan has written of the shape of her dead husband’s feet in his shoes and Tess Gallagher of two women smoothing out a man’s black silk vest so that the vest almost becomes the dead person.

Once you have the object, describe it in as close detail as possible, including all the five senses without forcing it. Taste might just be the remnants of that morning’s toothpaste, rather than anything directly associated with your object. And that leads me to the important part. As you write, let your mind wander and call up any associations at all, then write those down, too. You might include the weather outside as well. Try, after a while, to bring yourself back to the object.

You will now have plenty of notes to work on. These can be shaped any way you choose but an excellent model is Ted Hughes’ ‘View of a Pig’, where he moves from a description of the pig to musings on death, back to the dead pig and musings on its life and then to other experiences he has had with pigs before coming back to the dead pig again. The important element is to allow the connections between the object and your other ideas to be shaped by the poem. In this way the object can become metaphorical and add a layer of significance to the description. Like swans touching their beaks on a temporary lake in a Welsh field.

Articles of Faith: Using Objects in Poetry

Esther Morgan

I start with Doubting Thomas. In the New Testament, Thomas is famous as the disciple who is only convinced in the risen Christ when he sees the crucifixion wounds for himself, when his fingers can actually touch them. Christ’s riposte is to tell him, ‘blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’.

This is all very well for a religion. Religions require faith. Poetry is not a religion. I ask my students to imagine that Doubting Thomas is reading their poems. He is not prepared to take anything on faith; so what if you are happy or sad or angry, why should he believe you? The only way you can convince him of the truth of what you are saying is by making him feel it; with his eyes, his ears and, yes, his fingers.

I have found that using objects early on in a poetry course helps students to begin writing in a way that will satisfy the most doubting of Thomases. Focusing on an object sensitizes us again to the physical world, an alertness that tends to diminish once we’ve left childhood behind. By using objects I am trying to help students (and myself) recapture a sense of wonder, which in turn helps us rediscover or strengthens an excitement in the possibilities of language. The two are closely connected; just as we tend to use language in a formulaic way in ordinary life, so we can be lazy in the way we encounter the world physically. We spend a great deal of time editing out our environment, not noticing its richness as we tick off our tasks for the day.

There are other reasons, too, which make working with objects of particular value in the writing of poetry. One of the differences between poetry and prose is, I think, a question of focus. Whilst acknowledging that there are areas where the two genres do overlap, in general, poetry is more tightly and intensely focused than prose. An analogy I’ve developed is that reading prose is like walking into a room and switching on an overhead light: you can see everything in the room at once. Poetry, on the other hand, is more like walking into the same room and switching on a torch: although you don’t see all that’s there, what you do see appears with greater intensity by virtue of that single beam.

The first exercise that I bring to class is designed, therefore, with two aims in view: to encourage this intensity of focus and to bring the senses back into writing. I ask the students to forget about meaning and messages, and to become like children again, exploring the world with a child’s curiosity and immediacy.

I bring to the class a selection of household objects, which might include, for instance, a candlestick, cheese grater, light bulb, scarf, corkscrew, pepper grinder, etc. Before distributing these to the students to write about I ask them to close their eyes. I tell them to explore their object purely with their hands for a couple of minutes. Touch is a sense that it’s easy to neglect in writing, dominated as we are by the visual. Asking them to explore their object through touch in the first instance is a good way to start the defamiliarization process. When they are ready, they can open their eyes and make notes on what they have just experienced. They then explore their object further using their other senses, making notes on the appearance of their object, any sound it might make, taste, smell, etc. I then tell them to widen their writing to include any memories or other thoughts triggered by their objects. At this stage they shouldn’t be worrying about poetry with a capital ‘P’ or shaping this raw material. I give them plenty of time for this exercise, so that they are forced to keep going, to keep noticing more and more detail.

What becomes evident as they read out their pieces is the extent to which this exercise helps them to re-imagine their object. In the same way that a word repeated over and over begins to sound bizarre, so an object scrutinized with such attention will start to shed its everyday invisibility. So pepper grinders become armless women who scream when their heads are twisted and rain bitterness, a cheese grater becomes a steel wall of tears, or a light bulb the lost eye of a Cyclops. The exercise shows how a description of external reality can lead to an exploration of emotional and intellectual territories; the kind of journey suggested in Mark Doty’s definition of description at the head of this chapter. With this discovery comes the pleasure in knowing that (theoretically at least) writers should never be stuck for something to write about. If a simple object can be so extraordinary, can yield several pages of notes, then surely there should be no such thing as writer’s block! It also distracts students from the perceived need for Poetry to be Profound (lots of capital ‘P’s). This desire to say something important from the start, as opposed to discovering whether a poem has something to say in the course of writing it, can often cramp the student new to poetry.

I often use this exercise myself in my own writing practice and find it helpful in focusing and intensifying my writing even if I don’t then go on to develop the material it triggers. Sometimes a finished piece has been the result, as in the following poem, ‘Avocados’:

I like the way they fit the palm,

their plump Buddha weight,

the slight squeeze for ripeness,

the clean slit of the knife,

the soft suck as you twist the halves apart,

the thick skin peeling easily.

Naked they’re slippery as soap.

I serve them for myself

sliced and fanned on white bone china

glistening with olive oil

or I fill the smooth hollow

with sharp vinaigrette

scooping out

the pale buttery flesh.

I follow up the initial exercise described above by asking students to extend their imaginative engagement with their object by giving it a voice, that is, writing a piece in the first person from their object’s perspective. To help them find a way in, I suggest thinking about a ‘Day in the Life’ of their object, visualizing where it spends its time, how it is used, etc. I ask them to consider whether their object has all the senses or whether it is deaf or blind and what kind of ‘character’ their object has, for instance if it is aggressive, friendly or lonely. The surreal aspect of this exercise is also useful in ‘creating anew the universe’. A useful poem to discuss, which shows the possibilities of this technique, is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’, which interestingly was itself written as an exercise. I leave them with the question as to how Plath manages to create a voice for the mushrooms that sounds convincing, and also ask them to consider what else the poem might be about.

This two-step object exercise is particularly helpful early on in a course as it seems not to ask the students to be too revealing of themselves. I say ‘seems’, as it often does provide a personal insight into a writer’s concerns, but it nevertheless offers new writers a fictional veil. Asking them to write on something that is both arbitrary and ordinary can also free students up to experiment in ways which they might be reluctant to do faced with the task of writing that difficult poem about their mother. On both counts, this can be liberating for students who have not yet got to know each other (in a British context at least!).

By the third week of a course I tend to move on to more personal exercises, which nevertheless still use objects as a point of entry. One in particular I’ve found useful in helping students develop a distinctive voice, by which I mean a use of language which is uniquely their own. This involves using objects as a way of prompting memory. I’m aware that the topic of memory is examined elsewhere in this book, so I won’t go into detail here, except to say why I think the use of memory can be key in the discovery of voice.

In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, Seamus Heaney lists the various influences that have helped shape his own language: the catechism, the shipping forecast, Irish folk songs and legend, the accent of his particular part of Ireland. Significantly, the first poem in which he felt he was successful in getting his ‘feeling into words’ is ‘Digging’, a poem which is based on memory and the idea of writing as a kind of retrieval, an excavation of the past. This was the first time he felt he had managed to speak with his own voice, instead of ventriloquizing the mannerisms of other writers.

It is because our memories are unique to each of us that using memory in writing can be so constructive in developing an awareness of our own voice. But how can we access our memories in a way that is vivid and detailed? Famously, a madeleine did it for Proust’s narrator in Remembrance of Things Past, and taking this as an example, I encourage students to find their madeleine equivalent, their trigger that will release the past.

One method of achieving this is to ask them to think of someone they know well and to write a list of possessions that they associate with that particular person, taking care to be as precise in their description of these objects as possible. I then ask them to choose one of these objects, the one that seems most resonant to them, and to write for a further ten minutes or so, introducing any specific memories which the object triggers. The resulting pieces are often very powerful; one student wrote about the jacket her dead father used to wear, another on a miniature writing table which once belonged to an ancestor who died young, another on his grandfather’s violin. Each time the exercise seems to produce memorable work, often of an intensely emotional kind. A similar exercise asks students to write about the object they would save from a fire. In these exercises, the objects become icons, part of a personal vocabulary of experience and remembrance. I’m not advocating that all poetry should be based on memory and the personal; there is an equally important place for fantasy and fiction in poetry. But as a way of accessing a living spring of language (in the same essay Heaney talks about poetry as an act of divination), as opposed to the kind of language students think is poetic, these exercises can provide a valuable starting point.

Speaking personally, one of the delights of writing and reading poetry has been the way it enriches my experience of the sensual world, alerting me to things that would otherwise go unobserved. For me every poem is an act of retrieval, an attempt to record the transient. Some may fail, but the very fact an attempt has been made seems to me a positive to set against mortality. With this observation I seem to be moving into the realm of general meanings myself, but perhaps that’s because I believe that Poetry is important enough to deserve its capital ‘P’ after all.

What Are You Looking At?

Paul Magrs

I once saw a terrifying medical documentary in which a patient was blindfolded and his brain was hooked up to some kind of scanning device. The medics could watch his mind on a screen and in it they could see flashes of the guinea pig’s thoughts. They were like solar flares, passing from one side of his skull to the other; all crimson and gold. And that, the voice-over told us, was in a quiet room with his eyes covered. When visual and aural stimuli were returned to him, the invisible activity inside his head was greatly increased. It looked like fireworks going off.

I wish I’d taped the documentary to show my students. This is how much is going through your mind, even when you are not even thinking about much. The world crams itself into us through all our senses and even when we think we’re having a lazy time of it we’re mulling things over, making connections, trying to see sense.

Do this now. Write down, in list form, the next ten things that pop into your head. Can you unscramble them?

Some people claim that they can clear their minds and think of nothing. I never believe them, really.

When we come to write, then, no wonder it’s difficult to get a handle on our thoughts or the world and learn to control and shape them. It’s hard to select. In this section Julia Bell talked about fixing on the telling detail and Esther Morgan wrote about renewing your engagement with everyday objects. Both are strategies for seeing the world anew; for stripping away the layers of conditioned reflexes and habitual behaviour. Defamiliarization is the game Esther Morgan’s playing with her exercises; making us look at quite ordinary things in new, extraordinary ways. It’s like that parlour game where you have to put your hand inside a bag and, without looking, guess at the object inside.

Remember those photographs you used to get in puzzle books and comics? The ones where they showed an everyday object from a strange angle or in extreme close-up? Play this trick on yourself. Pick some objects and go into extreme close-up. A shower head becomes a UFO, the bottom of a fish tank becomes a drowned city.

See what an alteration of scale can do to your writing. By seizing on the tiny details and expanding them, by exaggerating them, you are making them into something much grander and exciting.

By looking at the familiar in an unfamiliar way, we are slowing down the process of observation. This is a good thing; slowing yourself down in writing can be extremely productive. It makes you aware of your decisions and selections at every turn.

There is no way we can ever get down everything that goes through our mind. In that medical documentary the solar flares were far too quick ever to be recorded. They were before language, it seemed; they were faster than the speed of words. This is probably a good thing. I can think of two novels that try to set down everything that goes through one character’s busy mind, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. Both bored me in the end, and I think, in a way, they were meant to. In both, the reader is swamped by the myriad solar flares.

We need to sift through experience and observation and seize upon what Julia Bell very properly calls the ‘telling detail’. Some people have this knack straight off. You can hear it in their conversation, as they gossip or tell some shaggy-dog tale or reminiscence. I’ve been lucky enough to know quite a few extremely funny, engaging talkers and often they are people who would never think of writing. They can’t seem to believe that their talent as witty, vivid conversationalists would translate to the page. Yet I think the skill involved in making a verbal anecdote come to life involves the selection of the right, telling details and, together with a knack for suspense, punchlines, revelations, mimicry, what we have here is the makings of a writer.

Think about the stories you already tell about your life; about your past and your family. How do you remember them? Usually, it’s through vivid hooks and memories, and that’s how you explain them to others. If I think about a particular teacher at school, it’s because the first time I saw her she had purple hair and glasses like a visor. If I think of another one, it’s because her clothes looked as if she’d made them by hand out of curtains and carpet. These are the things that stick in your mind and that will stick in your reader’s mind.

Our eyes will always flick to the most interesting part of any scene we enter. We’re so used, now, to so much input, to receiving so much information, minute by minute, in our hyper-technical world, that we flick ever faster to the most interesting thing in front of us. We’re ultra literate in reading signs and absorbing information. As writers, we need to slow down a little, take stock, and really think about why our eye is drawn in this direction or that. Adverts, both in magazines and on TV, are interesting here. Great skill is employed in catching our attention and passing on a host of messages to us. Much of this selling is done subconsciously, or the messages we are meant to receive are inferred somehow, through association and other related seductive means. It’s good to be sceptical about adverts; to stop and wonder – what are they really trying to say to us here? How is this collection of images meant to pique my interest? What am I supposed to be looking at?

Take a number of adverts from magazines, newspapers, the television. Which details in their imagery stand out? Describe them. Do you think you are looking at what you are supposed to?

Now do the same with some paintings, from postcards or an art book. Which details leap out at you? The obvious ones? The more obscure ones? Are you looking where you are supposed to?

In many ways, writers are often the kid in the back of the class. The one who should be watching and listening to the teacher at the front. Often they’re looking out of the window, staring at the patterns in the cloud, the football team on the field, the pedestrians going past outside in the rain. They are looking where everyone else isn’t looking, and that is why, at school, they were the one that the teacher threw a piece of chalk at.

Everyone is drawn to look at different details. You have to learn to be confident in your own view. Let your eye wander and take down what it is you’ve picked out. There’s nothing more compelling for a reader than seeing the world through the unique view of somebody else.

A writer friend of mine came round to our house one night recently, and on the doorstep she turned and I caught her staring up at the window of the baker’s opposite. I followed her glance, knowing that she would have found something interesting to look at. And, indeed, up in that lit window one of the bakers was, without a scrap of self-consciousness, taking off all his clothes for the street to see. He wasn’t doing it on purpose, I don’t think, and he wasn’t making himself that conspicuous, but this writer’s eye had gone straight to him.

Let yourself be nosy. As people, we are trained not to stare too long. If you watch a streetful of people out shopping on a Saturday they don’t look around them much. Commuters are the worst. People heading home on buses and trains keep their eyes straight ahead and you’d think they hardly saw anything at all.

Go into town. Stand in a crowd or sit on a bench. Look up at the roofs of buildings. Stare at the gutters. Watch who goes into and out of shops. Watch what other people do when they don’t think they’re being observed.

I once saw the writer and actor Dirk Bogarde standing alone in the middle of a busy street in Manchester. He had an extremely famous face, but no one recognized him. He stood still as they swept past and he was grinning, staring all around him, up to the tops of the buildings and at everything about him. He looked so happy to be taking it all in.

inveracity	gowan	vulsella
cribble	durmast	obovate
flux	zedoary	sauba
dag	monophobia	isthmus
parergon	sockdologer	bort
fractal	incarnadine	deodand
cat	dog	rain

2 TRAINING THE EYE

Julia Bell