Having finished editing earlier this week (hurrah!!!) I thought I’d focus on something entirely different this week, and have a look at my long-neglected poetry.
As I have volunteered myself to do a reading next week, it seemed sensible to start looking at what I wanted to read. I rely on three tried and tested pieces, but my friend tried a fourth one in Cornwall, so that’s available too. I also decided to look out some older ones to update a little, and some new pieces I’ve been working on.
The key thing is to find pieces I really feel confident in reading, because it is something that I find terrifying. It’s not just whether people think my poems are good or not – to some extent that’s irrelevant unless they pelt me with rotten vegetables; most of these things are very polite. It’s about the confidence to share work, and the reality of listening to my own pieces. I can hear limitations when I read to an audience that I couldn’t hear when I wrote them, or read them to myself. Different orders affect the flow of the poems and allow me to identify similarities I didn’t know were there.
I also tend to stick to just a few for a number of other reasons – but knowing that my poetry is probably going to be self-published does allow me to use it more widely. My decision not to enter anything into competitions this year has also freed me up (anything considered ‘published’ cannot be entered) to use some of the newer pieces which I might otherwise have kept aside.
I have taken to thinking of my poetry as the fun, personal side of writing and the novels as the business side, which is a false distinction really, but one that keeps things in perspective. The two are utterly dissimilar.
Apart from focussing on the poetry, I’ve also been enjoying my new courses. It’s great to immerse myself in something new and cooking up interesting dishes and getting recipes from around the world has been a welcome change. I am also looking at food lists, and the food people eat, and thinking about characters who could eat these things, or the places people would go to buy them. It’s good to remember that what you see as normal, or usual, is very different from another person’s perception.
It’s also got me thinking about my lifestyle. Writing involves a lot of sitting down, or moving from one bookcase to another – it’s fairly sedentary. The research stages can be more physically active – visiting sites, houses, libraries, museums, beaches – whatever it is, the research is the active part. But once I get to writing proper, I end up sitting down for days at a time. So, I need to change that; to break up the writing time a little. An active brain needs stimuli, so I need to seek it out!
Just one other news today – I found this article about the power of photography today; having focussed on a photo in Thursday’s post I thought it tied in nicely. It’s interesting to see how other people view their images.
I am off to trawl through piles of poetry – the reading is on Thursday so I’ll let you know how it goes then!
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
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