World Mental Health Day 2014: The Talking Cure

For World Mental Health Day (10 Oct), here’s my poem ‘The Talking Cure’, as published in The Pickled Body literary journal earlier this year.

Advice to Writers: Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing

More writing tips today, this time from poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist, Margaret Atwood – one of my favourite writers. What I love about these lists is they give us a little peek into the minds of writers and what matters to them.

In this case, an in-flight writing trauma looms large – the muse, after all, can strike at any time – which makes me dearly wish all 10 of her writing tips were about covert creativity in constrained environments, or the relative advantages and disadvantages of writing across various modes of transport…

• Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

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Advice to Writers: Hilary Mantel’s 10 Rules of Writing

More advice to writers, this time from Hilary Mantel, double Booker Prize winning author of Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012), and the first woman to receive the award twice.

• Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.

• Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

Advice to Writers: Sarah Waters’ 10 Rules of Writing

Great writing tips from author, Sarah Waters – although she talks about the rules of writing novels, most are equally true of poetry.

• Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It’s worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me to . . .

Advice to Writers: Sharon Olds

“I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page.

Advice to Writers – A.L. Kennedy’s 10 Rules of Writing

Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. ­Consider what they say. However, don’t automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

Have more humility. Remember you don’t know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.

Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

The Art of Seduction

Over the past week, Poetry Foundation have posted tantalising snippets of gorgeous, succulent love poems, teasing and tempting us into a relationship with the original works. They’ve even compiled a treasury of love poems in all its various guises – from friendship to first flush, from the depths of passion to love long-lost.

Well, I’ve fallen.

Here are my favourites to round off a week of love offerings.

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