As a psychotherapist I’ve worked in hospitals for people sectioned for serious crimes, and written the start of a novel, ‘Phoenix: Supersensitive’, based around that. My fellow tutor at Swanwick Writers’ Summer School this year was Simon Hall, the BBC’s crime correspondent for the South West, and author of ‘The TV Detective’ novels. We’ve both been on the crime front line. Fertile ground, I felt, for a discussion about the ‘wild’ in our characters (and in ourselves for that matter). Simon has this to say about wildness in character…
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Into the Darkness
Last night, late, I went and stood outside. I hoped to be exhilarated under a canopy of stars, but instead I was met by thick-hanging cloud. The sliver of the waxing crescent that was the moon, gave out little light, and my heart sank. Without a visual anchor my body and mind flailed, disoriented by the all-consuming darkness. My hand reached out, and I found the gravelly exterior wall of the house.
Read MoreThe Trampoline
Tired of staring at the computer screen, I decide I should practice what I preach. I put my coat on, and carrying my empty teacup for comfort, I take my notebook out into the garden. I will write something. There’s a broken trampoline, rusted into the ground. It has a surface like black oil, and a lopsided gait. I scramble up, and sit in the centre of the almost-circle.
Read MoreThe Reasons I Write Outdoors
The reasons I write outdoors:
To to be as passionate as Anais Nin
To be as awe filled as Mary Oliver
To dream as vividly as William Blake
To look as cool in our slacks as Ernest Hemingway
To look as hip in our shades as Bruce Chatwin
And because the best way to defend from enemy fire is by tucking a moleskin notebook into the pocket over my heart. Oh yes…
Wildness or Craziness?
I’ve been thinking about how to release emotion through words in a controlled and alive way, rather than in a way that overwhelms me and sabotages my writing. I’ve been thinking about a caged tiger. My words can sometimes feel like a captive animal, struggling to break free from its confinement. But what would happen if I unlocked a tiger’s cage, threw open the gate, and told him jubilantly, “You’re free, at last!”?
Read MoreLiberating Thoughts
This week, I am assailed by doubts about my writing. Fears niggle at me. They whisper, chirp and chant their repetitive refrains in my ear. If I don’t listen, they throw tantrums and shout. It’s no good. It’s not working. You’re wasting you time. Get a proper job. You want your friends and family to read this??? What I do know is that I mustn’t listen to them. I must not give them the time of day. To engage in a conversation with them never works. They always have a ‘but’. They never believe me. Attention just fuels them.
Read MoreThe Beech Tree
Yesterday, I went for a walk. I came across the Beech tree that pulls my attention every time I walk past it. Warmed by the sun, the slippery grey bark of that thick trunk smelt sweet. An abundance of verdant leaves jostled for attention in the breeze. That tree is a stunning example of the determination of living things to survive, and flourish. It doesn’t have the symmetrical shape of a storybook tree, but I can see that that is the template it is trying to match. It knows what it was born to become. However, it has met obstacles along the way, and has had to adapt.
Read MoreWhat are my Wild Words?
My wild words are the words that want to be heard and seen — as opposed to the ones I want to write. They are the words I keep caged in the depths of my soul. They are the ones I sometimes hear crying, or, even worse, the ones that have forgotten how to cry. They are the words that leak out, or that sabotage my life, in so many realised and unrealised ways. They are as often words of joy and peace as they are words of sorrow or anger.
Read MoreWhy Write Outdoors?
Why it is that I love to write outdoors? At first I was just desperate to unchain myself from my desk, break out of the building, and write in nature. I craved seeing something other than a computer screen. I wanted to feel the movement of the pen again, instead of just the striking of keys.
Read MoreThe French Experts
Last weekend I went from my home in the foothills of the Pyrenees, into the high mountains of the neighbouring department of Ariege. I had appointments with two expert animal trackers. I wanted to learn more about ‘wildness’ in order to go deeper into my work with ‘wild words’. My first meeting was with Serge, a wiry, self -effacing man in his fifties, sporting a moustache and 70’s shades. He’s spent twenty years tracking the Pyrenean brown bear. His job is to mediate, and to try and diffuse tensions, between the bears and the local shepherds, who regard the sheep as a threat to their flocks.
Read MoreTracks
‘The earth is a manuscript, being written and unwritten every day’. So said John Stokes. The responses to this quote by the workshop participants took my breath away. People wrote, among other things, about Everything is a track. Everything around us displays the marks of the passage of time.
Read MoreThe Fire
In the winter this house is heated solely by a wood-burning stove. It’s fairly labour intensive to chop logs. And it takes commitment to keep bringing them in, to keep the fire burning through the day. But I love it. We have something alive, something wild at the centre of our world. It hisses and cracks and roars just like any other wild thing. The Beech wood, with its silvery snakeskin bark, lights easily and sizzles. The Oak, its raised bark like the tyre of a four-wheel drive truck, is frustrating slow to catch. But once it does it smolders enduringly, with an intense heat.
Read MoreSnowed In
On Monday this week, I awoke and looked out of the window. There was nothing but white. I saw only the inconvenience. I would never get a car down the mountain track with that much snow. S***! That was the end of the meeting that I had booked with an animal-tracking expert for later that day. Now I would never know his secrets.
Read MoreWise Wild Words
Some quotations that have nudged at my shoulder, grabbed at my sleeve, or tousled my hair:
“The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition’.
Read MoreThe Disclaimer
I’ve employed artistic licence. I’ve removed complications and deleted repetition. I’ve given a sense of linear progress, a narrative arc to my journey. I’ve based it in one location, and focused it around one hero.
Really, this is not a ‘disclaimer’, it’s a ‘reclaimer’ and for that matter a ‘re-finder’. I reclaim my right to free myself from the tyranny of facts. In doing this I re-find the passion and power of my original experiences and pour it into words.
10 EXPERIENCES OF WILD
The Red Admiral butterfly flitting on to my hand, and settling a moment to dust his wings. Feeling touched by magic…. The sound of the Wild Boar cracking fallen walnuts and snorting, close to the house… The necklace of Lapis Lazuli I was given by my boyfriend. It’s silver veins sparkling like sunlight on water. Feeling loved…
Read MoreWild in the City
in travel, conversations
I live in rural Southern France, on a mountain. Yesterday I got on a train going to Paris, heading into a throng of 2 million people.
My work is based around the natural environment. It’s about exploring the ‘wilds’ out there, in order to understand how to bring that quality into our words, to find freedom in writing. I’m interested in those parts of ourselves- the spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual- that we’re afraid of. Our fear is such, that instead of acknowledging these aspects within ourselves, we project them outwards, saying they’re out there ‘in the wilds’ , in the ‘wild animals’.
Read MoreWriting Resolutions
What if, when I wrote, I was to infuse the sheet of paper with the star freckled galaxy? What if I poured the seas into my pen? And made every mark on the page, the scratch of a lion’s claw? What if, in the capital letter, was the howling of wolves? In the underline the mole tunnelling? In the flow of words the swimming of dolphins? In the comma the river whirling round rocks? In the speech marks the tweeting of birds? In the full stop the grunt of a boar?
Read MoreHunting for Mushrooms
in conversations, nature
We head into the dark centre of the forest, where even the intense sunlight of Southern France can only sometimes penetrate, freckling the ground. The tall, skinny pines wave wildly in the wind. Underfoot is a spongy layer of pines cones, decaying leaves and the bristling shells of last year’s chestnuts. Everything is mud brown, except the swathes of green ferns that fill the clean mountain air with a smell like freshly cut grass.
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