'Rules we live by'

Cognitive Therapy says that we each have a set of beliefs or 'rules' we use to interpret the world, including our perceptions of ourselves. We may not always be aware of them, and certainly we aren't always aware of the effect they are having on us. If we are depressed or anxious, we can find out what beliefs we have that might be underlying how we are behaving and feeling.

A215 suggests a few different ways of thinking up characters, but I wondered whether starting from these 'rules' might be an interesting alternative? If someone believed these things (but didn't necessarily know it) what might happen? How might they behave?

"My sister is better at everything than I am."

"The truth gets you into trouble."

"Whatever I do, it won't make any difference."

When I combined the various rules with characters of different ages, genders, professions and so on, it sparked off a few ideas.

Boredom = fear of failure

I've come up against a wall today. Or rather, an upswell of boredom has overtaken me. I've just started the first chapter of the fiction section, and have been reading about different approaches to creating characters. Each time, I come to an exercise, I 'just don't fancy it'. I took myself out to Queen's Lane cafe hoping that richer stimuli than the fire and the motionless cat would knock some enthusiasm into me. But no, I just felt mildy bored, with a cup of tea I didn't fancy and had to pay for. Insight came when my musings organised themselves into work thoughts. I'm sure that as they did, I must have visibly slumped in my chair: work makes me comatose with boredom quite frequently at the moment. That's when I got it: I feel bored when I'm scared of failing at something! I turned it round in my mind a bit to work out if it's right, and it just felt more convincing.

I've found plundering memories and sensual detail easy: I've even had some good feedback, so it's started to feel safe and the temptation is just to go on doing it, rather than search for characters less related to my experience.

After that, I just did the next couple of exercises. I don't think I did them particularly well, but that's the point. I have to be much, much better at risking 'failure', and seeing far fewer of the possible outcomes as failure in the first place.

Dialogue

Last night, our tutor group conference got going: we all started posting pieces and commenting on them. I got some very positive feedback, which is encouraging! In particular, because some comments were about the Silver Jubilee poem. I feel quite uncomfortable about poetry at the moment. I find it the easiest thing to write, but I'm not very convinced that I'm doing it 'correctly'. I'm looking forward to finding out more when we get to that part of the course.

Our tutor group has been very positive and pleasant, even while sharing honest criticisms. The main conference is a little more 'prickly'. I had an interesting discussion last night with Andy about conference etiquette. Mornev had posted some work into the Cafe for comment and others had replied to her with suggestions. Then, one person started a new thread and commented that her work needed more action and less waffle. I thought he hadn't handled it very well. I'm quite sure Mornev wouldn't have minded that comment directed to her but starting a new thread and talking about her in the third person was, to me, a little like going to the next table in the pub and starting to criticise someone behind their back (but in a loud enough voice for them to hear!) Andy thinks that with all conferences you just have to take a deep breath and never take anything personally because the medium of email just breeds misunderstandings about intention or tone. After reading the A215 Cafe for a few weeks, I have to agree! Funnily enough, I read Mornev's piece after reading all the feedback and had to laugh when I found it quite free of waffle - clear, simply written and evocative!

My one frustration at the moment is lack of time. I'm itching to spend all my time writing, thinking about writing, blogging or reading or commenting on people's work.

Just flowing

On Sunday I did the freewriting for TMA01. I started with a cluster about 'ring'. After depressingly circular, paralysing marriage associations and some lame divergences into ring tones, things started to drag. A break: a drizzle dash to the dripping log pile to get the fire going, yet more tea and then another try. This time I started from 'road sign' and things started to get going. First an excursion into bizarre road signs like this one.



Then I started thinking about the place name signs you drive past and just wonder - why? Cold Slad, Nether Wallop, Fryup. This led to thoughts about the legends behind place names (inspired by the mythology around the village I used to live in, Osmotherley).

I've been working through Chapter 3, collecting memories, associations and sensory details from hot summers in the 1970s to write an autobiographical account in the present tense (Activity 3.6). I think this is what made it all came together in my mind, and off I went. First of all, a proto-poem about the fancy dress my brother and I wore for the Silver Jubilee street party: the Queen and Knave of Hearts. I started writing in my brother's voice about my huge strop when he stole one of my tarts (imagine my mother trying to keep a straight face) and suddenly an idea for a story sprang up: village legend getting mixed up with reality in a small boy's mind, all written in his voice. I splurged out a rough draft of 400 words or so and I'm itching to work on it more!

The reflection part of these writing activities motivates me tremendously: I'm learning so much from how ideas are released, worked up and transformed.

Last night I dared to show an old friend my student poems, and she did a critique that was immensely useful, including suggesting I just knock the last verse off one of them. I feel I'm over a hurdle: she can make suggestions and I just enjoy it and don't feel like giving up!

Captured in dialogue

My tutor has set an activity for us before the day school: writing down twenty things we say often (and getting the help of our family and friends to decide what they are). The group are going to use them to write autobiographical poems. So far, Andy has contributed, “Are you making tea?”, “Will you rub my shoulders”, “Ca-at, chipstick, where are you?” and “I’ll get up in five minutes”. Hmm. I’m not sure this is a self-portrait that I feel comfortable about! It’s an interesting thought, though. I think I’ll be noticing what other people frequently say over the next few days!

At the Guildford day school I gate-crashed last week, we started with a group chant(!) and then wrote a poem or short story using each letter of the alphabet in turn. The silent writing was difficult under time pressure, but starting from the only thought in my head (ANXIETY) I managed something. It was interesting because it didn’t occur to me to start anywhere but A, where it did to others. It just shows again how you need to think around things, look at them in different ways. When the tutor asked for volunteers I forced myself to read aloud to break down the fear. I couldn’t look at anyone, I was so tense, but I did it and felt more relaxed afterwards!

I had to love the buildings at the Surrey University campus. This one runs parallel with the railway. Can you tell?

Perhaps there’s a transport theme?

Be a Magpie

This is my big lesson for the day, or the last few weeks, really: there is something in everything. Even the banal or everyday can be tipped up, peered at with half closed eyes, questioned or otherwise manipulated into something fascinating.

It slows life down deliciously. I’d already worked out the way to experience life at the speed of a child; notice every bit of everything (even cleaning your teeth); never autopilot through days; and get close up, look from different angles, get physically close. Have you lain on your back on your upstairs landing lately? I did last week, in my pyjamas, bare feet against the cold wall, while Andy brought in the Tesco shopping. I’ve never had a relationship with the hall before, now it’s something more than a transit zone.

Every course exercise at the moment is about taking bits and pieces from here and there, asking questions about it, letting it take you on tangents, and using it when you can. Today in the Day School, as three of us developed a group story from the characters each of us had created, those details started to pop in from all the freewrites, memory associations and even from eavesdropping on the train, and everything got richer.

Next steps: focus a bit, grab some of the swarming snippets and do something with them. Tomorrow.

Emotion, but no 'tension'

I wrote my first poem in years this week, tears streaming down my face. I got up in the night, feeling miserable, and headed downstairs for a hot drink, the company of the cat by the dying embers of the fire, and to write. Then I did what I used to do in all those years when I wrote a diary: I just wrote, and out it all flowed. At first it was rational, in sentences, organised, coherent, and then gradually it was staccato lines, raw, with repetition and suddenly there it was. A thing, which could be a poem. It's pretty stark now, and it surprised me when it just appeared like that. Afterwards as I sat there looking at it (feeling much better, as it happens), I remembered back to the last time I wrote poetry at just such times.

I've never really shown anyone those poems from student days. My English teacher, Mr Thurlow, always said that good poetry needed "emotion and tension". I interpreted 'tension' as technique and never credited my ourpourings much. Now's my chance, though, to see them as drafts, as starting points and try to make them better.

Hey, it's exciting - maybe I'll even dare to post the raw new poem when I've worked on it a bit (or in the less open forum of the tutur group conference).

While my nerve is on the ascendent, I'm going to share one of the student days poems. I'm just dying to scrawl some self-deprecating justification but no, I'm just posting it.

More A215 inspired changes

I'm thinking again about how things have changed since I started the course, because it isn't just that all my senses seem more open than before.

It takes far longer to read anything: I become more deeply immersed, wrapped up not only in the plot and the characters, but in the writing itself. This has happened to me before, in fact it's what inspiring writing is for me: I keep being brought up short by the sheer power of the words. One of the best examples is in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. Will loses several fingers in a knife fight, they fall to the floor and he sees them lying there, ’like an apostrophe’. I had to put the book down for a few minutes to recover from the horror of the image.

Sylvia Plath writes like this too. No description of insomnia ever matched this one for me:

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

(whole poem)

The new experience is that I'm slower at reading all kinds of writing, because I'm taking it to bits, thinking about why it's bad, or what makes it powerful, exciting, or emotional.

It extends to every media. Last night I watched two episodes of 'Life on Mars', the story of a policeman who is run down and apparently transported to 1973 (or is he really in a coma back in his own time and imagining it all?)

<Aside: can you believe that Wikipedia has an entry for this already!?>

As I was watching the scene where the testcard girl leaves the screen to harrass him, I couldn't help thinking I could really see how you might get to this plot from clustering/ freewriting about the 1970s!

Back pressed against radiators

If you were looking for the younger me, you’d find me leaning against the nearest radiator, knees up, my face in a book. You’d need to take hold of my shoulder and shake me, to snap me out of it. Being lost in a story, and the itchy heat between my shoulder blades in a draughty house were intoxicating.

My early life was lived in story snippets; face down in the long grass, breathing in the earth and creating small life stories in the yew bush (The Castle of Yew, Lucy M Boston); up a tree, in the woods, surviving bravely for an afternoon (Brendon Chase, BB); scribbling in a notebook then discovered, explaining my own poisonous scribbles to my Mum, tears streaming down my face (Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh).

The books that mattered were those which conjured up hidden worlds (The Borrowers, Mary Norton); suggested I could do anything (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Roald Dahl) or left me tearful during the final chapter, at the thought of no longer being with the characters (Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido).

Seeing more, hearing more

It's Sunday afternoon. Having taken most of the day to get started, birds are singing in the street as the light fades. I've only noticed because my desk is getting dingier and the pool of light from the lamp has become too small. I need to turn the overhead light on. The mist hasn't lifted all day. When I was running, the sky and the still river were the same grey, so the river looked as if it flowed straight into the sky.

It seemed quieter than an average Sunday. I noticed the footbridge over the weir squeaks rhymically as you run over it, and carries on alone as you run up the slope on the other side. Some eights were out, and they must have been better crews than I was ever in. They slipped up behind us with only a couple of audible strokes of the blades, and then silently glided past. In an unbalanced boat there is always the chaotic noise of water on blades as the boat is tipped to one side or the other. I remember how perfect it felt, the first moment we balanced the boat and heard only the hull slicing through the river.

I'm working through the activities from Chapter 3 today and the focus is on 'writing what you know' and trying to make use of all your senses in your writing. I think it has made me notice more in daily life, as my run helped me see.

Poised

A215 officially starts on Friday but from the high frequency pings as new posts pop into the online conference and the many blog posts, it feels well under way. It's rather like being poised on my bike at the top of a steep, rocky, loose downhill, handle-bars gripped tight; full of fear but exhilerated; no idea what'll happen on the way down but ready for it.

A215 is a tough downhill for me. Since school I've had a tiny belief that maybe I'd be good at writing and a gargantuan fear of failure and derision.

I'm convinced I have nothing of interest to say, my life experience is inadequate and I'm far too lazy to get anything done. I picture my inner critic and my self belief as badly matched warriors, so maybe this picture sums up the course for me (Google Image Search delivers an image for every occasion as ever) .



Imagine how happy I am... I've dipped into the first two weeks of activities and it's a revelation. The focus is short activities to prompt ideas and get the writing habit started. I thought I hadn't a creative thought in my head, and within a few hours I was proved wrong. Haikus were fun (although Andy says they shouldn't span a line break as most of mine do) and best of all I'd managed thock my inner critic on the shin, and feel small stirrings of contentment with what I'd written.

Phew. I hope it carries on like this!