Here’s a little nugget of wisdom from Robert Frost, from an interview with him in The Paris Review:
All thought is a feat of association: having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew. Putting this and that together. That click.
I hope you have a clickety-click day.
I’ve been wrestling with fear around my writing for quite some time now.
Since my first poetry book Exposure was published in 2003, I’ve struggled to believe my writing is good enough (for whom or what I’m not exactly sure). I’ve tussled with doubts about my worth as a poet. I’ve been tormented with thoughts about how others might view my writing or wonder how on earth I managed to get published.
This is in spite of many people buying my books; in spite of tons of feedback about how my poems have affected readers in many wonderful ways; in spite of some delightful moments of optimism and self-belief.
It’s like the act of putting my work out there for all to see has made me self-conscious, like the child who suddenly comes to understand what it is to be naked, discovers what it is to be embarrassed and therefore must hide.
Three published poetry books later and my belief in my own writing ability continues to dive. It seems I have created a negative feedback loop that I now desperately need to break.
Knowing that this is a common issue among writers, artists, musicians and other creative types has done little to alleviate my non-stop internal chatter. More worrying to me is that these feelings of inadequacy and fear of criticism have definitely affected my capacity to draw organically from my creative source, to write for myself, to write what I know.
That’s why the following sentence from a book called Art and Fear1 jumped out and smashed me right between the eyes today:
…fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.
This elegant statement encapsulates beautifully how two spears of fear are paralysing my ability to generate my own, best work.
Now I just need to find ways to:
#1. stop thinking I’m not good enough
#2. stop thinking the world agrees with #1.
If you have any ideas, hints, tips or tricks, I’d love to hear them!
1 thanks to Amy Matthews for the chapter
Last week I wrote my first Villanelle ever.
And today I wrote my first Sestina.
Challenging, fun…
…and revealing.
Metaphor expresses truths we neither recognised nor had words for in literal language.
Gabriele Rico
I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment of course any decent idea folds up its paws, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
Ray Bradbury
So, many years later, I’m trying on the mantle of student again!
I’ve started a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. I’m going to see how well we fit together.
My two lecturers/tutors this semester are Amy Matthews and Jill Jones.
And the classes are an interesting mix of people, which should make it a rich and rewarding experience. (Cliché, anyone?)
I’m glad to report there’s plenty of reading being read and writing being written.
I will post more snippets of poetry here soon.
I was inspired to write this post after reading about Graham Nunn’s favourite bookshops. One of those was Shakespeare and Company, and it reminded me of my visit there almost nine years ago.
When Sylvia Beach opened a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1919, it soon became a haunt for well-known writers of that generation including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. When no publisher wanted to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sylvia Beach published it in 1922 under her shop imprint.
Following the Nazi occupation, Beach closed her shop and was sent to an internment camp. Although she returned to Paris in 1944, her bookstore never reopened.
With its motto ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise’, George Whitman’s bookshop – which used to be a monastery in 1600 – has hosted many well-known writers since he opened it in 1951. It used to be called The Mistral, but he renamed it Shakespeare and Company in 1964 in honour of the late Sylvia Beach.
The shop is full of cubbyholes with low ceilings and mini stairways, and is a delight to explore. Like its predecessor, Shakespeare and Company on Paris’s ‘Rive Gauche’ became a sanctuary of sorts for writers and thinkers. They could always bank on finding a bunk to lie on and a book to read.
Thank you for reminding me of a wonderful place, Graham.
Okay, so here’s an excerpt from a poem I wrote after doing the free writing exercise I described in my previous post.
I opened the SA Weekend magazine, selected the headline, and off I went. Here’s the first half of the resulting poem. Enjoy!
Thereby hangs a tale…
The night-black bat
with buggily-busting gut
paw-paw plumped
spiderliciously sated
gazes longingly
from his branch
where he and his family
hang (out)…
He nurses to himself his
sordid
socky
secret.
He can hear the
seductive swing
of humans’ items
on the clothes line.
His little bat-heart beats
ten times faster
than the rate at which the
sultry
socks
sway
in the night breeze.
© Jennifer Liston 2010
…
Who would have thought that a headline in a weekend newspaper would have lead me to write about a sockaholic bat? As some might say: go figure!
What do you think?
I attended a fantastic workshop recently run by poet and novelist Lorraine Marwood. She shared three techniques with us to stimulate our writing ‘flow’.
My favourite one was the ‘free writing’ exercise. In the centre of the table, Lorraine placed a big selection of cards with questions printed on them. We each chose a card. With a timer running for five minutes, we had to answer the question in writing. We were not to stop, think or edit, for the entire time. This meant writing ANYTHING that came into our heads as a result of the prompts. Then for another (timed) five minutes, we reviewed what we’d written, selected a few key words or phrases, and wrote a poem including them.
The results were bizarre, interesting and downright entertaining.
Since then, I’ve done this exercise about eight times. I usually open a page of the newspaper and select a headline or a phrase at random, although once I used a word from our new vacuum cleaner’s warranty booklet!
I love this process. It kick-starts my brain, and the free or unconscious writing that I vomit forth brings up some very interesting stuff indeed! I probably have the guts of six or seven fairly decent poems so far.
It’s great fun; I never know what my incessantly chattering and eternally ‘on’ brain is going to serve up. I’ll definitely keep doing it.
Maybe I’ll share a few unedited lines from one of these random poems in another post.
Here’s the start and end of a poem I wrote in 2002.
This is its first time getting an airing (even a virtual one).
One hundred nautical miles
Scarlet
star lit night
becalmed
in phosphorescenced waters
…
up on deck
lying side by side
under an ink velvet
silvered canopy
one hundred nautical miles
already between us.
© Jennifer Liston 2010