The working process

I’ve been really interested in reading how other people go about creating work and especially enjoy the fact that some people, like Charlie, do similar stuff to me. Now I’m not a disciplined poet, i don’t have a day of the week where I sit down and scribble furoiusly in the hope that something marvellous arrives as the product of my labour. In fact I’m a lazy poet, I wait until the muse, or whatever this thing is, strikes me over the head, leads me by the hand and demands that I get this stuff on to paper, napkin, newspaper, dictophone or the inside cover of the book I’m reading.

So when for whatever reason something has made itself known to me I get it down and then leave it. When i first starting writing this was unheard of becasue i was always desperate to get the poem completed, not in a nagging way but in a way that was really satisfying. I don’t have that urgency now as i feel that the ideas seem to need a bit longer to permeate and really take shape on my mind. Quite often i have lines that i know that are the end of something, this has cropped up in a lot of people’s blogs when talking about the writing process, or i know they are opening lines but i just don’t know what to. Playing guitar always gives me ideas and i find more freedom in just spouting the words out of my mouth as i bash out some chords rather than sitting with the spectre of a blank notebook and pen.

When i write longer pieces or know that i have to get something done to deadline as in the case of a commission i tend to write narratively, there’s some kind of structure there, be it the imposed structure of time, so the poem may start in the morning and end at the night or the structure of getting to the end of the story, findng out how, why something came to be the way it is.

I write in fits and starts, bursts of ideas followed by days of thinking I’m not a poet, why did i ever think i was a poet. I tend to spend a lot of this time reading other poets and getting into the vibe of how poetry flows, listen to lots of music and walk a lot. I then go back over my work and think ok that bit’s fine that bit needs to go and have another burst of writing and the process starts again.

Quite often i forget things, have a cracking line that I don’t write down convinced that it’s so good i’ll remember it, but i very rarely do. My single piece of advice to myslef would be to sort this out and write everything down, if it’s rubbish you can always get rid of it, but once it’s gone…….