writing

As a writer, I’ve always felt it important to open myself up to new experiences. I mean, not like sky-diving or swimming with sharks but experiences that will intrigue and excite me… rather than scare the life out of me. By doing this, I find I am able to fill my head and my heart with new inspiration and insights.

In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests something similar. She instructs the reader to go on ‘artist’s dates’, on which you take yourself off somewhere new for an hour or two to focus on experiencing something you wouldn’t day-to-day.

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn website also regularly talks about the importance of filling the creative well (I’ve followed Joanna for some years now, and can recommend her website if you’re interested in writing and/or publishing).

With all this in mind, I didn’t put up any resistance when on the 2nd of January my historian of a husband suggested a ride out of London in the direction of Rochester. Though I was yet to return to the laptop in an official capacity, I understood a new environment would be the perfect stimulus to kick-start my creativity in 2019.

Once we’d made the short hop from Victoria, we spent a good while roaming the passage ways of Rochester Castle, which boasts a 12th Century stone keep.

Over the last couple of years I’ve started writing murder mystery novels – or cosy crime novels as they are now perhaps better known. While wandering the stone steps and corridors of the castle, I started to think about what a great chase scene you could have in a story if you set it in a relic like this one.

Inspiration isn’t just to be found in the grandest places however. My fourth novel, which I’m currently in the process of writing, happens to be rather concerned with bookshops. I’m sure you’ll agree then, the importance of me visiting as many bookshops as possible in the name of research. Rochester definitely delivered on this score. I wasn’t going to walk past ‘England’s largest rare & secondhand bookshop.’

I may have come out with one or two volumes under my arm, for it is said that authors can never read enough. I also overheard an endearing conversation between a father and daughter who were trying to solve a riddle set by the bookshop. When you unraveled it, you found the shop’s hidden ‘fairy door’. I didn’t go on the quest to uncover this gateway to the fairy world myself but, who knows? One of my characters might in a future story or poem.

The current protagonist I’m working with is a tea-obsessed, crime-solving librarian so it may come as no surprise that this sign hanging outside Mrs Tickit’s Pantry caught my attention. It also seemed like a sign from the universe that it was time to sit down, eat and drink. I’m always looking for signs like these but just as in the case with the bookshop, it is all in the name of research as I have to make my character’s visit to tearooms and similar places seem authentic. Sssh. Yes I do.

The last portion of our day was spent exploring Rochester Cathedral. I was particularly taken by the curves and the arches of their crypt and spent quite a bit of time photographing the different patterns and shapes the beams made. Story-tellers are always looking for intriguing interiors where they can set some dialogue or action. I’m not ruling out a chapter set in a crypt in some future adventure on the page. I don’t know if or when I’ll use this experience but there are some experiences in my journal that have sat for almost twenty years before coming in very handy in one of my creative works – there is no expiry date on these things, I’ve found.

Circling and weaving through Rochester’s enchanting architecture, more than a hundred ideas for characters, interactions, dialogue, settings and feelings zipped through my mind. I captured some of them in my journal and ‘threw some fish back for another day’, as we say round our way. Due to the dwindling January daylight we were in Rochester less than six hours in total, but as you can see the experience was rich and inspiring.

If you have creative aspirations for 2019, I wholeheartedly encourage you to find even two hours a month to go somewhere new and fill your creative well. It could be as simple as walking home from work via a different route, going to a free event organized near you, going to see a film you wouldn’t ordinarily go and see or visiting an area of town / coffee shop you’ve always meant to go but never quite made it to. It doesn’t have to be expensive or in fact cost anything at all but taking your mind to a new environment and sparking your curiosity often makes our creative hearts beat faster.

Yesterday, I took this photograph by Cod Beck, a small river that runs through my home town of Thirsk. Twenty years ago, at the age of seventeen, I used to sit by this river and fill notebook after notebook with poems. The flowing of the water aiding the flowing of the ink.

The poetry was terrible. I can assure you this is not false modesty. It was the typical stuff you’d expect from a Sixth Form poet about death and the fleeting nature of youth. But I enjoyed writing it. It was a safe space, a blank space, set apart from the rest of my somewhat stormy life.

Shortly before my eighteenth birthday I stopped going down to the river to write poetry. I had my heart broken for the first time. It was broken cruelly and with very little room for closure on my part. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to write poetry. I couldn’t find the path back to the vulnerability that poetry demands, and I grieved for the precious, unquantifiable thing I knew I’d lost.

I still wrote. Nothing could prevent that, it’s a compulsion. But I wrote other things. Surface things. Articles. Blogs. Reviews. Non-fiction books. Nothing that risked revealing too much about the person behind the pen. Eventually, I wrote two romance novels that were as dry and sarcastic as I was. I was proud of them, and I still am but there is a certain evasive nature to them. My characters are all rather insistent on dodging precisely the same thing the author had dodged for many years: true intimacy, being seen by anybody for who you really are.

Ushering the characters in my romance novels back into an open-hearted lifestyle however, was the first step in me changing my own course and achieving the same. True healing began in the writing of those books, along with a conscious decision to start trusting others in a way I hadn’t for two decades. Within the safety net of a deeply supportive relationship, I was able to explore my romantic and sensual life again and through that self-exploration, I found inspiration for new stories, and the desire to write poetry once more.

In the year just gone I have had my poetry published in several journals and magazines. I’ve performed my poetry, out loud – my whole body shaking with fear – at several poetry events and I stepped in to lead a Poetry Masterclass at Keats House as part of my role at City Lit college. I have allowed myself to be seen. This stepping out of the shadows culminated last week when I published my first poetry chapbook and to my great surprise it topped two Amazon categories in the first few days and has settled itself at the top of the chart for hot new releases in Women’s Poetry.

The reviews have been dizzyingly positive. Did these readers somehow know, somehow see? That the page was a veil and behind it I was just a human woman at once both terrified and exhilarated? Did they sense that publishing this book was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life?

Last night I returned to the river. To watch the ducks paddle and squabble over nothing in the early dusk. There, I thought about how the last twenty years had led up to this moment of becoming and how even though life’s river winds and bends in ways we would not choose or expect, there is hope to be had in the idea that all those many currents are carrying us to the place we’re meant to be.

My first poetry chapbook Water Signs is available now. To purchase your copy, click here.

To listen to me read some poems from this and other collections, click here.

Tag: writing

A Ride Out to Rochester

Becoming a Poet: My Journey from Source to Mouth