Notablegnome
Registered
- Joined
- May 11, 2023
- Messages
- 43
- Reaction score
- 49
- Age
- 62
- Location
- Yorkshire, England. U.K.
- Website
- stuartrushworth.wordpress.com
I have had many dry periods over the years and they do gnaw away at your confidence. However it was often the case that I was putting myself in front of the words, meaning that I was being over-controlling, which given that writers are concerned with details is too easy to do.
I once visited the Dylan Thomas exhibit in The National (Welsh) Poetry Centre in Wales. There I discovered that Dylan Thomas wrote like a painter. I am also an artist and so this method of writing intrigued me. Dylan Thomas would have a scribbly sheet on which he would write phrases and names and settings and single words that came to him. They were rather like a painter's palette - the words and phrases being anywhere and everywhere. Then he would select phrases for the page and move them around and produce the basis for a poem. This could very easily have been the basis for a story.
When I returned home I realised that I was doing something similar myself. I was scavenging from old attempts and creating new text. One thing I would say though is the vital ingredient is to have a character with a genuine motivation for doing what they are doing. With poems the emphasis is most often on the language and the layers of meaning, while with stories the characters have to be focussed on doing something or getting somewhere or achieving something.
Dry spells are very frustrating and these suggestions may not help. A friend of old once explained to me that I could not always be 'breathing out,' sometimes I would have to 'breathe in,' by which he meant I would have to take in a bit of life and then engineer or compose my own response to it. Going for a walk in a natural place helps me in my visual art life. Natural places return us to a kind of balance.
I once visited the Dylan Thomas exhibit in The National (Welsh) Poetry Centre in Wales. There I discovered that Dylan Thomas wrote like a painter. I am also an artist and so this method of writing intrigued me. Dylan Thomas would have a scribbly sheet on which he would write phrases and names and settings and single words that came to him. They were rather like a painter's palette - the words and phrases being anywhere and everywhere. Then he would select phrases for the page and move them around and produce the basis for a poem. This could very easily have been the basis for a story.
When I returned home I realised that I was doing something similar myself. I was scavenging from old attempts and creating new text. One thing I would say though is the vital ingredient is to have a character with a genuine motivation for doing what they are doing. With poems the emphasis is most often on the language and the layers of meaning, while with stories the characters have to be focussed on doing something or getting somewhere or achieving something.
Dry spells are very frustrating and these suggestions may not help. A friend of old once explained to me that I could not always be 'breathing out,' sometimes I would have to 'breathe in,' by which he meant I would have to take in a bit of life and then engineer or compose my own response to it. Going for a walk in a natural place helps me in my visual art life. Natural places return us to a kind of balance.