Tag Archives: #Inspirationsforwriting

Small Town Kid Cover - The new voice in contemporary poetry

How to express an experience

Guest Blogging. Lovely! Let’s Express an Experience!

Recently I had the pleasure of contributing to Mandy Whyman‘s web-site as a guest blogger for her Writing Insights series. It was a wonderful opportunity and I enjoyed being able to contribute to someone else’s pages and audience. The subject for the post evolved into a discussion about ways to express an experience, so that a reader can access what a writer is trying to convey.

So. How can a writer express an experience? And how can it be made over into a written form, so that another person – a reader who is a stranger to the experience – can empathize with it and associated feelings. That was the challenge.

Show, don’t tell. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Storytelling is dependent, I think, on a process of gradual revelation. To my mind, it is akin to a visual process.

A reader will only feel an emotional quickening if they can ‘see’ the experience, and I’m acutely aware that readers have a diverse range of backgrounds and personal experiences – each of them unique. My own upbringing and background was in a small town in Australia, but . . .

But there is more. There is always more.

There is a wide breadth of reader backgrounds.

I was born in Germany. My parents spent a year there in the process of migrating out of old Yugoslavia. The first picture of myself in Australia is a baby in the arms of his grandfather, descending the landing steps of an aeroplane, in the middle of an Australian nowhere.

Someone else might have grown up in a London suburb, or a Zimbabwean farm, or perhaps rustbelt America. There may be another back story, or more, behind these first impressions, as well.

What does a writer want to communicate?

It is not my wish as the writer (as an autobiographer, perhaps) to tell a reader about the kid who grew up in the 1960s and 70s as though that was the only childhood possible. What I hope is that he or she will step back into a time and place with me, yes, but I then want the reader to use my opening of that door as an invitation to re-experience their own childhood and background.

The story of Frank Prem has its moments (did I happen to mention the time when I . . .), but overall is pretty ordinary. It is not the stuff of after dinner talk or sleepless nights.

The story of childhood and of growing up, however, is always filled with adventure and excitement and drama. It is these elements that can (perhaps) inflame the imagination of a reader. My objective is to engage the imagination in just this way.

Details are important, too.

So, what happened in my life back then that a reader might respond to? After all, a memoir or a recollection has to have some actual events to describe or to introduce the reader to.

Here are some of the things that I tried to convey as the experience of a small boy, and I’ve added the kind of questions that I hope my readers might be asking themselves as they read.

  • The annual town fete is on. There are wood-chopping competitions, Knock-Em-Down stalls, fairy floss on a stick. Carnival sounds fill even in a small town, starting with the garbled spruiking of a loudspeaker mounted on a car that no-one can understand, and don’t need to. People are everywhere, children are running all over the show ground. Excitement that even the adults are feeling. Delight at being among friends and neighbours in the noise and glamour of an EVENT!
  • What big local social event can you recall from your childhood that was long anticipated every year? A parade? A fete? The Agricultural Show?

 

  • For weeks we build a bonfire to light on Guy Fawkes night. Higher and higher, with rubber tyres and a straw man to burn on the top. Kids buy or steal crackers to let off on the night. Fathers hide secret stashes. Will we explode some crackers in the Deputy Headmaster’s letterbox again, this year?
  • Were there rituals in your local area on the big holidays and occasions? What regular or traditional mischiefs were indulged?

 

  • What is a sunset? Can you describe what it look like? Where do you see it – through trees; across a valley; outside your back door?
  • What is your Sunset memory from childhood? Don’t think hard, just allow an image.

 

  • What happened when the town was sewered for the first time? What changed? Did the toilet migrate indoors?
  • Moving toilets and laundries indoors was a generation-changing event in my community. Changing whole lives and especially, I think, for wives and mothers. Was there something similar that you experienced during your childhood? What effect did it have on your community?

How do you know your story has been effective?

When I first started taking my writing seriously one of the ways I tried to test my work and to get a sense of whether anything I was attempting had merit was to read to an audience. Live reading provides an opportunity to smooth the work, to make it flow well off the tongue. It also provides immediate feedback that goes to both, the content of the work and to the delivery. I learned to trust audience reactions and, over time, to write in a manner that might tilt the balance towards positive reactions. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

You are the author. So write what you want to say, but . . . write (express the experience) in a way that a reader, or listener, might best read or hear it.

My experience of reading the poems in my memoir collection Small Town Kid to an audience has been that there will be a queue of people afterwards with a desire, and need to tell their own version of the same stories, along the lines of those questions that I’ve posed above. It is a high form of flattery to have someone inspired to tell their own story, just through listening to one of mine.

‘. . . that was a good Cracker Night poem, but wait till I tell you about mine . . .’

And there, I think, is the key. To express an experience, the writing needs to be aimed at conveying an experience, but inviting the reader to find or re-visit their own equivalent. To see it dance before them again.

A Small Town Kid example

I’ll finish this visit with one of the poems from Small Town Kid. This is a small moment of childhood exhilaration. I hope you are able to feel a little wind in your hair, and a little racing in your hearts.

sweet maureen

I rode my bike
for sweet maureen
from beechworth to yackandandah

fourteen miles
of love-smit pedalling
down the hill
of the rising sun

a million miles an hour
not fast enough
but my breath
was taken away

I was drawn
down the road
descending like a bullet
from the barrel
of my rifle

drawn to ride
to sweet maureen

~

Emmylou Harris Wrecking Ball – music to write fantasy by

Musical Influences

I read recently that it is now twenty-five years since Emmylou Harris best album (arguably) was released – the Wrecking Ball album.

I won’t speak about Harris so much here, other than to say that I was introduced to her work in about 1975 or 1976 and have not wandered in my belief that she is the purest interpreter of other people’s songs, and a superb songwriter to boot. My choice for best Emmylou Harris song harks back to that era, and is Boulder to Birmingham.

Now that is a love song!

She has consistently, my favoured and favourite artist over all those years, and I incorporated my admiration for her as an artist in the poem titled and again in the Walk Away Silver Heart collection, the first part of my A Love Poetry Trilogy.

 

 

How does music inspire? Meet me at the Wrecking Ball . . .

Wrecking Ball, when it was released, came as a mood shift and a mindset change. A resonant confrontation with feeling and emotion.

The year twenty-twenty is a time made for such confrontation. Truly, no cuckoos, no sycamores. No Harlan to go back to at all, really. We seem to be living through such grim times that it is hard to find good reasons that are strong enough to dominate their counterparts.

Of the songs – stories, in truth – on that Emmylou Harris album, one of them in particular swirled in my mind and became a driving force in a writing project that I did not know I was undertaking (in 2018) until it was almost completed.

Neil Young wrote the title track with great poignancy, and at a time when I – who consider myself to be a private person – was striving for publicity and recognition in order to establish myself as a poet with a public persona and some credibility, the incongruousness and irreconcilable nature of the undertaking resolved as lines in my head, playing over and over:

My life’s an open book
You read it on the radio

Interview after interview, publicity post after publicity post. Public reading after public reading. And, eventually, in poem after poem to invoke an opening mood that ran consistently through each poem, and across an entire collection.

Writing fantasy for the first time

I had an opportunity during 2018 to contribute a poem to an anthology based on the dual themes of rain forest and fantasy, which eventually was oublished as  Short Stories of Forest and Fantasy, by OzTales. I’d never deliberately written fantasy prior to this opportunity and set to with enthusiasm, eventually contributing a post-apocalyptic, dystopian themed piece called blue dog.

I kept writing.

The poetry traversed simple fantasy within a forest to encompass life on a mining asteroid, and fighting a war while mounted on the back of a dragonfly named Isosceles. Many miles swept up in dreams of alternative experience, escape from the mundane, explanations for the inexplicable, all driven by the lines from Wrecking Ball that I held in my mind as a guide through the wilds of my imagination.

What happened to the fantasy collection?

Where is that collection, now? Well, the only answer I have for that is to say that it is waiting. It has a name or, more true to say, several names. I have called it Od Ovo and other stories, after a teenaged character who’s name is drawn from a place that is so constraining it can only be that inferior location ‘from here/from this’, even if here is on another place in the cosmos.

It has also been named ‘abacus the stars’ to reflect the limits of calculation, and the pull of home on a journey across the universe. 

In truth, though, I don’t know what it may be called, in the end. I’ll publish it one day, whenever its turn comes. Until then, it remains as a small beacon shining in my mind, entwined with the songs of the Wrecking Ball album and Emmylou Harris. A warm place to stumble across from time to time.

A sample from the unpublished fantasy collection

I haven’t published any of the poems from the fantasy collection, to date. They bide quietly. Today, though I thought it might be right to share a poem from that set with you.

storm and the sea (bubbles of foam)

I called to joe
I said

there’s a boat
trying to fly
right out of the water

the wind
had taken a breath
and it was
blowing

even as I spoke
I saw a wave
lift up that vessel

then
crash it down
like a fragile toy
built poor
by some clumsy child

there is no light
to speak of
when you’re staring
at the heart
of the storm

grey-black cloud
green water

the white
maybe
of salt

even a man
is just a pale thing

a dark shape

a nothing at all
but the brilliant
shrieking song

of a wild wind

joe took me
by the arm

said

nothing here

nothing left

there is only
the sea

not even a board
from the decking
made it to shore

not a cry
that didn’t hail
from the wind of hell itself

nothing left
but storm
and the sea

some bubbles
of foam

~

To Claim a Poetic Form of one’s own

Poetic forms? No, thank you.

I am not a writer who enjoys writing to the old poetic forms. I prefer to claim a poetic form of my own making.

Galloping rhyme, quatrains, couplets, sonnets, haiku – I’m not a big fan of any of them.

Primarily, my perspective on these things suggests to me that:

the mastery of form conquers the creativity of content.

What I mean is that the effort required to achieve mastery of any one form is so great that it risks eroding the capacity to focus on telling the story.

I hold that this statement is true, for myself, at least.

Except . . . just this once, perhaps . . .

Seventeen Syllable Poetry

In a small way, though, I am just as attracted to structuring my stories into a rule framework as anyone. For this reason and as a small test for myself, a little while back I decided that I would see what I could using a syllabic restriction of my own choosing.

To claim a poetic form, I chose to work with seventeen syllables (in a nod to the oriental form of haiku), but with no other restrictions. In effect the challenge was to write a complete story in my usual free verse, but within the syllable count.

How can I write a poetic story in Seventeen Syllables?

My approach? Write the story/thought/observation I had in mind to my satisfaction. Then, adjust words by deleting and moving, and replacing, seeking to find or retain the same sense of internal music as I aim for in my more usual writing.

Often I have used an image, or a news headline as a prompt for the writing. The effect is to have the image perform some of the heavy lifting on behalf of the story, with the image drawing attention to the words. The words drawing attention to the image.

Some examples of Seventeen Syllable Poetry

Two examples of Seventeen Syllable work. I find that the need for brevity forces the introduction of a wistful, perhaps spiritual effect – rather like music played in a minor key.

Example #1: the only

To Claim a Poetic Form - Image 1 Moon and Cloud (https://seventeensyllablepoetry.wordpress.com/)

the only cloud
a traveler
through the blue

only witness

the moon

~

Example #2: bloom burst

To Claim a Poetic Form - Image 2 Allium flower (https://seventeensyllablepoetry.wordpress.com/)

 

the stamens have begun
rising

an allium
bursting
into bloom

~

Your view?

What is your view? Do you write to favorite poetic forms?

What is the attraction for you.

Do you favour mastery of form, or the elevation of content?

I’d love to hear, and if you’d like to read more seventeen syllable poetry. Click this link and check it out.