THE ORGANISED WRITER

I promised some time ago to write a short piece about how I personally organise my writing and my projects. I'm by no means suggesting this as an example of ultimate organisational skill but only as possibly giving a wee bit of advice and ideas that may be useful.

I don't separate my writing and professional and personal life into silos-that doesn't work for me. So this is, I guess, how I organise my whole life, in terms of trying to achieve my goals with the minimum amount of fuss and stress.
The major reason I make a big study out of this is because I am, at heart and by nature, a complete airhead!

The uber-template for my work is provided by David Allen's Getting Things Done or GTD as its known. His best-selling book by the same name is available everywhere. Allen begins his strategy for organising information into CAPTURE. If useful info flows past you and into the big sea, there's loads of good stuff you're going to miss-ideas, research, creative solutions, inspirational thoughts and deadline dates as well as opportunities. So capture it all and consign it like a great steaming pool of potential into the IN-TRAY.
Then on a daily basis you dive into this pool and bottom out the whole thing. Letters/emails/ideas on post-it notes/bills/unfinished poems/doctors appointments/execution warrants etc,
Each item is subjected to a formula-Can it be dumped? So bin it! Can it be done in less than three minutes? Then do it? Does it need to be deferred? So put it in a place where you'll pick it up again such as a @PROJECTS FILE. Is this item dependent on someone else? So slap it in a @WAITING ON file that you'll follow up appropriately
when the time is right. Create the files that work for you-we're all very different. But don't have too many action files.
The classic GTD process looks like this:



David Allen's website offers a range of GTD tools which are well made though a little pricey. Crafty folk can make their own. I would strongly advise getting a TICKLER FILE which is simply 43 folders labelled 1 through to 31 and 12 folders with the names of each month. You can place stuff in here that will ensure you come across it at the right date. A good labeller is also an essential tool for labelling your various folders or even your children-so you don't forget their names! A stapler that you can whack is also highly recommended. I also use a metal stacking desk-top system to store my current folders and my tickler file upright where they're all at hand.
I think the great thing about David's system is that, once you 'get it' and trust it then you can let go of remembering all that stuff which is a great stress releaser and I think a real aid for creatives.

For WRITING I carry a MOLESKINE notebook everywhere-they're just about the best I've used. At some point I transfer my writing to a hard backed and divided A4 notebook, again by hand- I use an Oxford FLINGBOOK. I use MINDMAPS to write my poems in this book and though somewhat arduous to do all this by hand I regard this step as an essential re-write. The completed poem or piece of writing is then ripped out and filed in a loose leaf file with a small sticky label with the name of piece written on. This eventually becomes a hand-written manuscript and it is this file that is typed into my computer as I hurl my quill pen to the floor and enter the digitised age. I use a 24 inch Mac Intel and write nearly everything in SCRIVENER-far and away my favourite writing program. Later they'll be exported to WORD but I rarely use that to actually write. If I'm on a PC I use PAGEFOUR which is similar to SCRIVENER but not, I feel, quite as good. I also use a Mac Laptop but mine recently blew its logic board so I'm unhappily using a Dell. I also use a dictaphone to record my work and read it back to myself. Currently I use tape but I'm considering some method of getting them onto cd's-I can't recommend enough listening to your own poems while you're cooking or taking a dump-Poetry is oral. Sometimes a poem won't reveal/expose itself until it's heard.
I write anachronistically with a Silver Parker filled with real ink. I keep a load of little supplies like sticky labels, index cards, scissors, pencils and highlighters and a very important RED PEN in a robust little zippered pouch. I always keep a couple of index cards in the back of whatever book I'm reading to keep a note of particular references or quotes.  I keep a range of 'Tombo' coloured pens for my hand drawn mindmaps near at hand. Like many writers I am almost sexually aroused by stationery supplies and am often to be found in such places gently fingering materials from the top shelf! (Enough of that! This is not a confessional piece!)

I have a Shorter Oxford DICTIONARY and a Roget's THESAURUS for reference. I'm not keen on any style instructors or grammar manuals like Fowler's or Strunk and White. (They've become a publishing opportunity for those people who enjoy wagging fingers and shouting such as Lynn Truss and John Humphreys. Language is alive and moves like a big dirty river-something these guys don't seem to realise. If you want to read something from someone who knows and loves language-try Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue' or Guy Deutscher's book or anything by Stephen Fry.)

On the computer I use EVERNOTE and YOJIMBO for capturing info like snippets of quotes or websites or visual info that I can sort through at leisure. I also use NOTEBOOK from CIRCUS PONIES SOFTWARE which is a digitised MOLESKINE and a lovely little program. The best mindmapping programs are MINDMANAGER and NOVAMIND and are easily available on the web.

I always use Mindmaps if I'm at a meeting or lecture and want to record information or actions.

If I'm writing all day, I do it in bed by the way, surrounded by my papers and tools and wearing my pyjamas. I only discovered them recently when I had to go to hospital-but honestly, pyjamas seem to be a uniform of the subconscious allowing a stream of creativity to flow through. Once you're dressed you're back in the Real World. For females I'm presuming long flowing nightdresses with fluffy collars would have the same effect. Or you could write naked I suppose? Whatever floats your boat! Me I'm sold on pyjamas-with buttoned shorts. (Not trousers with white cords-that would be 'Carry on Poet!' Don't do it!)

So there it is. I hope there was something there that was useful. Do let me have your comments and success to your work!

Tony.

A poem from the dark-side

Some poems dip toes into little pools of darkness. Others just dive in, to rivers of shit. As Jung memorably said- we do not grow by turning always into the light but by making the darkness visible. Though this is one of the darkest poems I've ever written, I hope you enjoy it. The image of relationships ending in acrimony and hatred or betrayal, that always comes to my mind, is of bloody and cruel trench warfare. Of slaughter. As family mediation is one of the strings on my bow of being, I am witness to a lot of this. I suppose, to continue the analogy, I'm one of the stretcher bearers running round gathering up the bits. I once had a powerful dream of separated parents as medieval knights jousting, using their children as lances-'splintering against their shields of hate.' Of course it's not always like that. Many people, probably most, end their relationships with quiet dignity even heroism. But that doesn't make for the best dark poetry!
And yes...For a while I was a soldier there myself-bewildered and trench-footed.
This is an inverted sonnet-that is, with octet and sestet changed round and without punctuation of any kind, apart from the bracketed (to us), and the paltry comma after 'you, and me' to create a sense of separation, topsy-turviness and confining loss.
This is from my nearly completed collection 'The Book of Three Rings.' For which I am currently seeking a publisher!


LIVING WOUNDS

Kindness is a language that is dead (to us)
A gag that swells within our strictured throats
We’ve laid the concrete over our green fields
And cut down all the trees and crucified
It all upon a cross of hate and pain
Hammered in with poisonous nails

Our insides spilled out in a bloody trench
Beneath the clouds of deadly gas-the stench
rises from the corpses of the family friends
Lying half-buried in the sodden mud
Beyond them by a blackly blasted tree
Lies something that once was you, and me
It lies now in a desecrated tomb
For we've been born again-as living wounds

From a 1994 Notebook

I felt a frozen thought fall from the book shelves. Morning light danced on the carpet as it crawled across the floor and wound its way upstairs and under the bedroom door.

Onions/Carrots/Potatoes/Celery/Cauliflower/Green-Red Pepper/1 small cooking apple/Tomatoes

...I am amazed that such an attractive woman should do such a job. We are in the lakes, somewhere, in some kind of park. She becomes cold and although I dearly want to fuck her, I go running round her. Run miles to find the car and bring it to her. Running like a little boy trying to please the headmistress when all I really want to do is come all over her. She is best described as willowy...reed-like...as if glimpsed through gauze.

Yet again of Sharon. She ends up sharing my bed with some other guy but I fuck her anyway. It's good.....................(water damage has removed words)...I am sure that she knows. In fact the radical fact is that she doesn't, but something profound had changed. Some atmosphere of trust has dissolved. But by God, it was good fucking her.

There was this awful time at the bedside. Holding that hand that the fucking demon arthritis had swollen then withered into a claw. I felt a surge of something deep in my body, something cold entered my heart and i knew with unshakeable certainty I was feeling death on me. I knew she was going to die. My head began to swim. A chair scraping on the floor sounded like a car crash. A toilet flushing sounded like a great river breaking its banks.
'Tell me' I demanded suddenly fiercely, urgently...'Do you love me?'

Flowers from her grave.

'Even the darkest night has an end. Even the brightest stars must ultimately be extinguished. Even the all-conquering mountains must collapse into their own bony entrails. There is no forever-that's just blind faith. There is only the knowledge of now and some unreasoning certainty about tomorrow.
More than that is too dreadful to contemplate. What the early Church did not realise is that one moment in hell is for all eternity. The experience of hell never leaves...never leaves.'
'You've put a foot in hell then?' smiled the newspaperman.
'I-have-been-there-yes...I should say that.' He spoke the words with such intensity that the smile drained from the newspaperman's face like air from a child's balloon.

Pancakes/Spinach/Ricotta1/4/ Gorgonzola 1/4/Parmesan1/4/Spring Onions/Mozzarella1/4/Double Cream/Butter/Milk

A contagious silence billowed and eddied around the house, peopling it with ghosts-stairs creaked, slithering hands rubbed wet windows in the rain. Floorboards groaned like restless sleepers and with the last ebb of the sun it became a dormitory of tiny noises.

TVP/Chunks and Mince/Turmeric/Mung beans

INTO THE BONES OF A POEM

I wrote recently that I would unpack a poem from my impending collection to indicate a bit about how it emerges from the chrysalis of thought into the form, meter and rhyme of a whole, complete poem.

Here's the original poem in all its uncut glory. When I wrote it I thought it was a finished thing; when I returned to it, it seemed so unfinished as to be hardly started.

FORCEPS DELIVERY-POET'S BLOCK

Contractions have ceased
for two weeks.
There has been silence.
No little kicks or movements.

But now I birth this
being back to life.
Push out this new sound.
It is a pub-delivery.

A message from the omnipotent stars?
Postcards from the Pleiades?
No-just these small words
Like tiny fists, opening and closing
in the gloaming.

Well,it's an experience just writing that out without interfering! The poem was about a fallow period in the middle of a creative frenzy of some nine months when most of 'The Book of Three Rings' was written. A period when I had given up work to concentrate on writing and other stuff-real work!

I experienced this period as some kind of pregnancy and that's what got me thinking about this metaphor. Poems were dropping like daily babies on the floor and the first word 'contractions' came in to my head.
But the rhythm in those first two lines is unhappy-making. A first line of four syllables and two stresses and a second line of three syllables with two stresses. Why not join the line up to make four clear stresses-tract/ceased/two/weeks?

Contractions have ceased for two whole weeks

It's certainly a lot clearer with a regular four beat line(tetrameter)though there's no getting away from the ugliness of 'contractions'-not a nice word! Maybe I should have put 'Contractions they have ceased for two whole weeks' but the 'they' seemed to contrive the line into pentameter in a very artificial way. It seemed to take away some truth, and all and everything,even the laws of prosody must bow their heads to truth. Non?

'There has been silence' seems a bit obvious and lacking the fear that went with the lack of creative juice-would it ever return? So it became:

An all pervading silence surrounds me.


This is much better with it's sense of that almost palpably oppressive type of silence and my comfort zone-the iambic pentameter. Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum.

No little kicks or movements with its terribly clumsy beat becomes:


No swimming in the limpid sac-no kicks

Of course I'm in danger of doing my metaphors to death here but really there's no going back so the author just dives in with a clear and colloquial declaration:

So now I'll birth this bugger back to life:
PUB DELIVERY! THE FORCEPS OF PURE WILL!

This starting to be a bit of a piss-take with the capitals signifying a shouted line. We must not take ourselves too seriously hence:

(medicated with the sacred hop)

I decide to keep the next couplet pretty much as it is but change 'stars' to 'gods'.

A message from the omnipotent gods?
A one-off postcard from the pleiades?


The poet is confronted with his own hyperbole and confesses his sins pentametrically:

No way! Just fucking words and words and words.

But like a good poetic sneak just can't resist returning to his clever metaphor and giving the ending a gloss as if the closing door has had a makeover. In poetry this showiness is generally a fault. The poet is seduced by his ever more outlandish metaphors and similes. Like a drug-addicted lover who we just can't leave. Ah, that old seducing mind!

So we have:

Like tiny fists on waving stalks.
Like dumb mouths opening/closing, in their sleep.

So the re-written poem is:

POET'S BLOCK

Contractions have ceased for two whole weeks.
An all-pervading silence surrounds me.
No swimming in the limpid sac-no kicks.
So now I'll birth this bugger back to life:
PUB DELIVERY! THE FORCEPS OF PURE WILL!
(medicated with the sacred hop.)
A message from the omnipotent gods?
A one-off postcard from the pleiades?
No way! Just fucking words and words and words.
Like tiny little fists on waving stalks;
like dumb mouths opening/closing,in their sleep.


I think it's lots better but I hate to see my hubris so nakedly displayed!

Success to your work!

Jen Hadfield wins 2009 T S Eliot Prize!

Jen Hadfield is the youngest poet ever to win the T S Eliot Prize. She is prodigiously gifted as a poet, and has a voice that melts the legs and caused a mild palpation in this elderly gentleman's chest! Hear her read on the magnificent Poetry Archive-(Very well done indeed Andrew Motion). 'Nigh-No-Place,' her second collection reeks of the harbour-smells of Scottish islands-those God-droppings set in sapphire. There is a lilting thread that gently weaves a skein through all the poems. Language used like brushes of gentle light to articulate the moods of weather, the blashy-wadder, the inner moods. Here sheep and cats and dogs are characters. There is a refreshing sincerity in Jen's poems (when I went back to my own work I was appalled by my poetry's gravitas, its metropolitan disdain or pehaps the frown it wears as it looks around for victims...Ahem.) Jen's poems have none of that-they are indeed fresh, open and young. I wish her well in what promises to be a very fruitful career.
Buy the book and read it slowly rolling the words inside your skull as you would a good wine in your mouth. There's iodine from the seaweed gathering in your nostrils as you read this verse. Sit with it and carry the poems around for a few days. There's a waft of Lagavulin here. These poems take you back to what really matters-they mind you what your poetry's for.