February 6th 2023 - Stacking a new poetry habit

One of my favourite podcasts started up with its second season this month. The Bricklane Bookshop Podcast features a different writer in each episode who reads from one of their short stories and then discusses the story and the wider short story form.

This episode featured Manuel Muñoz and the one bit of advice I took from him was to start reading poetry as early as possible in your writing career. Poetry is something I've always struggled to engage with consistently but have enjoyed when I have. I often fall into the trap of trying to do too much at once. So instead, this time, I'm going to try stacking a poetry habit on top of my showing up at my desk habit.

Habit stacking is essentially where you rely on the success of one habit to create another habit which directly follows it, creating a routine of sorts. So once I'm done at my desk each morning (whether I've written anything or not) I'm now going to kick off the day with a single poem. 1 poem a day still means 365 poems a year and that's 365 more than I'm currently reading...

I'm 3 days into this habit and so far enjoying it. I have plenty of poetry in the house too so there's no need to rush out a buy a load of new books I don't have space or money for.

February 2nd 2023 - First of many

I'm back home from an event organised by Scratch Books at the London Library. It was an event discussing short stories. In particular, short stories that appear in Scratch's second book Reverse Engineering II. Which is an anthology of stories that sit alongside interviews with the writers, deconstructing how the story came to be.It's a great little book. And there are 2 of them. So far.

At the event were Tessa Hadley, Wendy Erskine and Ben Okri in conversation with Alison MacLeod. Three very different writers. They all shared brilliant excerpts from their work and discussed the craft.

I had a fab night. I was apprehensive about going. I'm socially nervous at the best of times, especially in loud rooms where I need to make myself heard. Soft-spoken fellow that I am. But I met someone outside the door who I had a good chat with throughout the evening. Then I met some attendees of the Goldsmiths course I'm in which was great. I met the creator of Scratch Books who I'd been in contact with only via email before. I even had a brief chat with Wendy before I left. Pretty good I think. Even if I now need some time to recharge my social batteries - I think I did well.

I hope I can make these kinds of events a regular thing. I'm reminded of Austin Kleon's advice in his book 'Show Your Work'. Creativity rarely happens in isolation. The myth of the lone genius is dangerous. Writers, even though we do the majority of our work alone, I do believe need a network. A group of people who will share the same passions, debate their ideas, or just be the one you can get drunk with on occasion. These events I think present a great opportunity to find those people to build your creative network. Though I will continue until my dying day to hate the term... "networking".

January 21st 2023 - Preparing for next week's course

I'm on a 6-day streak with my "show up to my desk" task. The timing is good I think as it's already paying dividends.

I'm mainly doing preparatory work for the Goldsmiths course that starts Tuesday evening.

The advice was to:

1. Immerse yourself in stories (no problem there)

2. Journal (again, no issue between my daily journal and my exercise book)

3. Complete a writing task

The writing task was to pick a prompt and write something up to 1000 words.

The first one I picked from a long list was: "Write a 13-word story"

This took me back to an online seminar I attended last year run by Jon McGregor. He was talking about ways of filling the blank page, getting started and generating ideas. His seminar in particular was what kicked off my habit of keeping a writing exercise book where I just make observations, play games and write whatever to keep in practice.

One of the things he spoke about was the importance of games or puzzles. How they can restrict what you need to write down to the solving of a problem. A story in 13 words sounded just like this. It's a problem to be solved, so I started there and then worked on variations around that.

1. First I just tried to write a 13-word story, with no extra rules.

2. Then I took a game of Wordle and used the 4 words that came from that, trying to fit them into a 13-word story.

3. Then I tried to write a 13-word story using only 13-letter words.

4. Then I took a 13-word sentence from a news article and replaced all of the words with the ones that appeared 13 entries later in the dictionary.

5. Then I tried to write a sentence that started with a 1-letter word and then continued to add 1 letter until I finished with a 13-letter word.

Nothing I wrote was very long but I ended up having to think creatively for each variation of the exercise and I ended up with some lines which could act as prompts to further stories.

Another prompt I liked was to start a story with a line of dialogue. There was a line of dialogue I'd recorded from a writing exercise in the park ("Come onnnnn - we're gonna get stuck in this fuckin' mud") that I liked the idea of starting with so I continued to write with that.

It's at 456 words so far with a working title of 'Wordle Mud and Terry'.

Looking forward to Tuesday now.