The making of a born writer

I'm a natural, me,
a born writer. No,
that's a lie. Let me, then,
atone with the truth...

I think I'm becoming a good writer within the bounds of my repertoire. That is, I am pleased with some of my writing when I later go back and read it afresh. This is an accomplishment.

It is, however, only a start. And it has come at the expense of much time and effort: the dozens of how-to books, books on viewpoint, on style, on characterization, on editing, on dramatization, on genre, on grammar; the prize-winning or short-listed novels, poems and short stories I have read and taken as my benchmark; the hundreds of pieces of writing I have reviewed on YouWriteOn in return for sometimes invaluable feedback from other writers and, occasionally, from editors (several of my works have made the coveted No 1 spot); the hours spent with fellow writers at Original Writers and with fellow members of the Poetry Society at Stanza Groups or in performance at the Poetry Cafe, and all the support and encouragement they have given me; the writing courses - Open University, Faber Academy, Arvon Foundation - that have brought me into contact with successful writers who have generously shared their insights and encouragement; the bale of rejection letters that has helped me keep everything in perspective.

And now I am chronicling the year - this year, 2012, the year of the London Olympics, of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, of global recession - in rhyme as the Slush Poet, a project that is stretching my abilities and keeping me safe from the 'Shiny New Idea Syndrome' (thanks to Ryan Graudin for the diagnosis!) that has previously afflicted me.

And taking up nearly all of my time.

Yet when the poet Katrina Naomi, who is my tutor at the OU, recently recommended to her students a couple of books that she said had inspired her early in her career, I didn't hesitate to buy a copy of both. 'Writing Down the Bones' by Natalie Goldberg is about letting go of the inner critic and just creating; 'The Artist's Way' by Julia Cameron is a twelve week course on inspiration. They sit before me now like fresh margaritas on a parched man's garden table.

But when the heck am I going to find to savour them properly with all my other commitments?

Aha, I have a plan. On 31 December 2012, when the Slush Poet posts his final poem, I will be free sip those margaritas, pick up some of those shiny new ideas and give them a jolly good rub. And here's what I'm going to do: the first three months of 2013 will be given over to reading them both, in parallel, all other work put on a back-burner while a relight my inner furnace. And to make sure it happens I am going to set up a new Twitter account called 'MyLyingSelf ... hold on a second ... there, done it. Now I'm going to tweet at myself (using Hootsuite to pre-schedule tweets en masse), so that my best-laid plan is actually impressed freshly upon me on the 1st of January - like a waiter appearing out of nowhere with those lovely salt-rimmed drinks on a silver platter.

In the vale of Slush poetry

I am almost three months into this project, writing as the Slush Poet to chronicle 2012 through the medium of poetry, so now would seem a suitable moment to pause, to set down my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary and my fountain pen, and to take in the view. (That in itself is fanciful: I write almost exclusively on a computer using Google Docs, with frequent nods to Dictionary.com and B-Rhymes; but that's okay, we'll call it a metaphor.)

I am breathless. I keep falling behind; by the time I've wrung a poem out of my fickle muse, the world has moved on and there are new news events to versify. Today I am up to date, tomorrow I will begin once more to fall behind.

What can I see from my resting place? Poetry surrounds me, as does life itself; but what I'm most concerned about is the trail of poems I have left behind me. So far, I have written thirty-four poems, most of which I have published on the Slush Poet blog site. That's about one every two days. I've tried to vary the form, the timbre, the length, the voice. I want the poems to be enjoyable as a continuous sequence capturing the essence of, if not the year, at least my year, 2012 as I lived it and as it touched me.

But are the poems any good? I think some of them are. I've had a lot of encouragement from readers, not just from my friends but from people I previously didn't know. Some of the poems have had a better reception than others, but that doesn't mean the others should be omitted. Would you really want every day to be your birthday?

Who am I kidding? We all know it takes time to craft a good poem, a long time to craft a great one. It takes more than two days. So, why go on? Perhaps because the pressure to produce a poem every few days is what I need to make me grow. I'm realizing that deadlines (even self-imposed ones, maybe especially self-imposed ones) are a creative spur. Without that pressure to produce not just another poem but a different poem, would I really be so varied in what I write?

So where is the Slush Poet heading next? Like you, I'll have to open the papers tomorrow to find out.

The Zen art of literary Ex-Lax

We’ve all been there, squatted upon the same spot staring at the same blank space for hours on end while words and forms back up behind the strangulating sphincter of premature self-editing. Commonly known as writer’s block, straining to do the rewrite before the rough draft. It’s like trying to squeeze Mother Mary from your arse.

Last night I spent over three hours rearranging pairs of slant-rhyming words, trying to write a poem about, as it happens, the riots outside Bagram airbase. Result: flatulence. It stank. Every artefact I strained onto the page was a monstrosity. Eventually, more from frustration than from wisdom, I set about writing something completely different, a poem about my father, and this time the words flowed smoothly onto the page and then seemed to arrange themselves into lovely eight-line stanzas while I watched agog.

The difference, of course, was that I knew exactly what I wanted to say – and that I said it without a great deal of constipating thought. I won’t strain the metaphor as far as I might here, but be assured my writing was fluid. The lesson? It is so easy to criticize what you have written, but for heaven’s sake wait until you’ve seen what it is!

So relax. Now wait patiently, sculpting knife in hand, for the raw materials. Hail Mary!

Watch out below, those might not be poems hatching!

I, the Slush Poet, am beginning to regret my decision to chronicle 2012 in verse. When I hatched the idea at the end of December, I failed to anticipate several factors: the voracity of my hatchlings, the paucity of inspiring news to feed to them and the fickleness of their eclectic appetites.

Writing a poem a day is easy (unless, like Niall O’Sullivan, you restrict yourself to terza rima). What is hard is varying the style and voice sufficiently to avert a suffocating boredom from afflicting both poet and reader alike. I think I have managed admirably so far, judging by the varied comments left on the Slush Poet blog or tweeted straight at me.

But it is becoming a strain. What occupies the world’s news media changes much more slowly than I ever imagined. There are only so many poems one can write about greedy bankers or royal arse kissing. And I don’t like to be too obvious in my responses to the news. Finding a tangential link that fertilizes my wordy organ is getting harder: I think it might be going numb from over-use. Each new day brings instead of fresh headlines a mounding urge to lay. I look for golden eggs, I find guano.

My dad's mushroom

I have never told my dad that I love him. I have never felt the need before now. I am sure he knows anyway. But now that he's been diagnosed, now that the prognosis has been handed down - now that he has his Macmillan nurse - I want him to know he means more than the world to me. But, like I said, he probably knows already.

See, Dad is a lorry driver, a trucker, a haulier - or at least he was until he retired a quarter of a century ago. You can't have a conversation like that with a lorry driver. The years of retirement haven't softened him. He's greyer and he's nearly deaf, but he still fills every cubic inch of space ever allotted him. Outside he's lost none of his stature; it's inside he's doing a vanishing trick.

He has a tumour growing round his oesophagus. He calls it his mushroom. At eighty-six, doctors can do little more than slow its growth, its theft of my father, with radiotherapy. He says he's going to beat it, kill the filthy fungus before it kills him.

If I turned up and blurted out my love for him he might reappraise his odds. I'll write a Sapphic ode instead.

This is not a protest

A friend contacted me yesterday (in fairness, he contacted quite a few other people too) and asked me whether I could provide a poem in support of Bradley Manning, the poor sod being put through the nail-studded wringer that is the US justice system for leaking military secrets via those sterling folk (he winks) at WikiLeaks. I said I'll see what I can do. After all, I don't like to say 'no' to friends who ask nicely, not even to ones who come over as rather too earnest on issues I care little about.

But why didn't I care, or at least not care a lot? I think it's a question of perspective. Bradley Manning is said to have leaked material that he knew was classified, and knew that by doing so he would be breaking the law, and that as a private in the US Army he would be prosecuted through a court martial, and given the nature of the material he supposedly leaked, that his prosecution would be dissimilar to, say, a six month sabbatical on Hawaii. So he did something unlawful, he knew it was unlawful, he was caught and he is paying the price. What's to care about?

That's one way of looking at it. There is another. Take he did something unlawful, and change the last word to wrong. See what I did there? Move from a legal viewpoint to a moral one and the Bradley Manning case looks very different. Suddenly we can see how someone in Private Manning's situation - who is exposed to the reality of a military-political campaign that differs markedly from that being shown to the citizens of the United States and Britain (Bradley is a citizen of both; he was born in Wales); who witnesses the suffering inflicted on, and endured, by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and who became horrified at the deliberate misinformation of the folks back home by both the military and their political masters - might feel morally obligated to expose what he sees as crimes against humanity.

It seems to me that there are many wrong reasons to protest about the treatment of Bradley Manning: because he's one of your own, because he stuck it to the pricks in uniform, because he struck a blow for liberty (and you happen to believe in the power of crystal healing), because other people are protesting about it, because democracy has had its day, or because you believe in a Utopia where there are no secrets, no wars, no rulers.

But there is also a right reason: that maybe what he did was right. And if so, he has been abysmally mistreated, vilified when in truth he is a hero. I do not know if this is true. But if it is, I hope justice eventually prevails.

And that is what the poem I submitted, I am not a protester, says.

I have fractured my creativity

I attended the T. S. Eliot memorial meeting of the Royal Society of Literature tonight at Somerset House in the Strand. Anne Chisolm introduced David Harsent, Lavinia Greenlaw, Emma Jones and Ahren Warner, who read poems and discussed what it is like to 'be' a poet.

David Harsent talked about how every poet is compelled to have a day job, a proper job that provides an income, and how the tyranny of the quotidian results in 'fractured creativity.' By 'day job,' he seemed to have in mind the hell of speaking engagements and writing residencies. He should try spending eight hours a day staring at a spreadsheet. Maybe it would inspire him.

It is London Fashion Week - dawn of the dud, the hip parade, top of the totty - and an event was in progress in another part of Somerset House during the poetry readings. It was like listening to Vivaldi when teenagers are playing Dubstep in the next room.