April - National Poetry Month Challenge - Write a poem a day!

 I heard about this at a poetry workshop on Saturday in Western Australia. It's national poetry week in the US as per this link.

Here's another link for Victoria.

And here's one to Poets online, with a whole lot of poems in response to writing prompts. Actually, this one is not about April being National Poetry Month.

Me? I'm going to become a virtual citizen and a virtual poet and write a poem a day over April.

How about you?

Also, I'm going to try putting up a poetry prompt a day for you and me to respond to.  Here's my first.....



First Prompt:

Write a poem using this line:              Can I take you there?

Writing Tip 17 - Respect the Reader's Emotional Intelligence

I once worked in a field where I assisted young people with a diagnosed intellectual disability to gain open employment. It was a great eye-opener to learn that an intellectual disability does not equate to a lack of emotional or intuitive understanding, and that in some cases intellectually gifted people seemed to fall further behind in this other kind of intelligence than many of the people I was assisting into work.

My 'clients' taught me many things. In one instance, I was assigned to help a young man learn a particular route. He was learning how to independently use the bus and find his way around the city. We were to find the way from the bus stop to the train station in the city, where he could already independently catch the train home. The 'transport training' went something like this: 

Me - 'Now which stop do we get off at? Where do we go now? Where do we turn? Do you know the name of this street?'

He was very good. He didn't make a single wrong turn.

When we reached the destination, he turned to me and said with a worried expression, 'Will you be able to find your way back?'

It was a long time ago - I was young - but I haven't forgotten the lesson.

The lesson for writing is to assume that the reader is as least as emotionally intelligent as you are. This applies to children as well as adults. Writing fiction takes every bit of imagination and ingenuity that you have, and if the author is not learning something new or challenging through the writing, then it is likely that the content or ideas will be too banal for the reader.

What this doesn't mean is complicated writing. The writing still needs to be clear.

Writing Prompt

Like many of these, this is more of an editing, than a writing, prompt. Check through your work for instances of over-explanation, where you have assumed that you need to interpret or explain the meaning of an action or conversation, instead of allowing the action or conversation do its own work. (Remember, less is more. Except in those instances where it is less, of course!)

Writing tip 16 - write with your own voice

What do I mean by this? I think there is a difference between the daily conventions of living and what is expected in a work of fiction. Bear with me.

Let's say we generally adopt social masks to navigate our way in the world, behaving in familiar, conventional, predictable ways that most other people understand and appreciate. Like manners, our various roles and the form they take, create a kind of shortcut in communication which works well in public relationships. For more private relationships many of these roles drop away enabling able us to make deeper connections.

Fiction exists in an interesting space because it is a public expression that often strips away the social niceties. Novels are often about looking beneath the surface. The writer's exploration can give the story depth and substance.

In some ways, the relationship between a book and a reader can be the most intimate of relationships, and therefore the most honest. Honesty here does not mean that the author writes about the actual details of his or her own life and beliefs (that is memoir), but that his or her bulls**t meter regarding the literary creation is at least as sensitive as that of the reader. The novel needs to be absolutely honest within the logic of the world it has created. As writers, we need to become very clear about what we want to say through the text. This might not happen until the fifth or sixth draft, but it will happen if we work hard enough. There is no point trying to second-guess what we think the reader might want or expect to read. When I pick up a book to read, I want to understand what it feels like to stand in someone else's shoes. Only the writer's authentic voice can deliver this. It doesn't mean that the writer needs to bare their soul, but it does mean that what is told, is told with courage and honesty. This takes reflection, work and clarity.


Writing with integrity enables us to explore what we feel to be true for someone (not necessarily self as author) but within the logic of a character. This means trying to get to the bottom of what that fictional person might think and feel given their personality, history and circumstances. Pitched against these are the challenges that are thrown up, because it is through challenges that character is tested, and it is this that brings a story to life. These challenges need to be those that are difficult to solve. They need to be real challenges that people face in life, and the attempt to face the challenges needs to be real and human, even though it might not always be successful.

Writing Prompt

Track through a section of your story or manuscript and put a mark next to any areas where the writing feels contrived, or where it doesn't quite work, or where it feels a little bit 'fake'. Are you writing with your own 'voice'? If not, what is it about this section that feels wrong?

Try editing the section back, or out, and see if this strengthens the writing. Think hard about what you really want to say, or not say.

Writing tip 15 - create an emotional graph

Art moves through emotion

A work of fiction is not simply about what happens. It gives a sense of the experience of what happens. Emotion is a critical factor - although it's not always easy to get the right balance.

So I would suggest looking at your manuscript from the perspective of emotional engagement by creating an emotional graph. This is borrowed from my few years of acting experience.

This can be an actual graph, or simply take the form of 'note to self''. The latter might involve going through the entire manuscript once it has been put aside long enough to enable you to read it with fresh eyes, and putting a mark in each spot where you lose interest with it yourself (the theory being that if you do, possibly someone else will). You might put a different mark where the text is particularly engaging to you, and analyse why that might be so.

For writing to be engaging there need to be highs and lows. Highs, plateaus and lows. Plateaus are important too, I believe. A story of all highs, or lows, becomes a high or low plateau, and can be as dull as one which simply trundles along going nowhere emotionally. (On the other hand, I think a story with all highs and lows can be emotionally exhausting).

This is not to say that the highs and lows can't be subtle, or that they need to involve raw human emotion. Many aspects of a story capture my attention when I'm reading. An interesting piece of information or well-argued point can be just as interesting (to me, anyway) as a more dramatic occurrence.

How do you improve the graph, or lift interest in the story? I always think the particular is more interesting than the general. If characters are to live on the page and to feel real, we need to experience details of what it is like to stand in their shoes, or at least in the shoes of the character, or characters, whose point of view is being explored. I think this is better if the balance of detail is more external than internal (action, interaction and dialogue, rather than expounding the philosophies of the author through the character's inner machinations. Not that there's anything wrong with inner machinations but if there are inner machinations, I have always thought it was best to challenge my own beliefs as an author, rather than express them. Why? In an attempt to continue to see things from different points of view. Nothing new about externalisation, by the way. It's frequently called "show, don't tell.")

Writing prompt

From your manuscript, lift out what you consider to be a problematic chapter and read through it with an eye to identifying where it engages your interest, and where you feel less happy with it. This will provide information with regard to some serious editing and rewriting. Check with a trusted reader before changing it to make sure that you are not throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

Writing tip 14 - Feel your way into the story by using the relationship between antagonist and protagonist

To plot or not to plot, that is the question.

I must say, I really enjoy a good, nicely-paced story, and if the characters have depth and believability, I think the writer really hits the jackpot, at least in terms of personal satisfaction.

Either approach can work  - plotting up front, or working the plot out after writing enough to know what it is that you really want to write about - this time. I like to explore first - to simply start writing so that I can uncover what the story might be. And I like to do this by throwing characters together to see how they will interact, especially if the relationship is fraught. I speak to myself strongly beforehand. I tell myself to be prepared to edit ruthlessly when I have finished playing around. Even the most hard won and beautiful (in my own imagination) phrases , sentences and paragraphs (even chapters) might need to be left to litter the cutting room floor, if the story is to emerge with some coherence, pace and credibility.

Antagonists and protagonists need the same amount of exploration and development if the story is going to fly. It's the old thing of what the protagonist wants, and what is standing in their way. Wants lots of things. Lots of things standing in the way. And it's probably best to make the character delivering the obstacles more substantial than (the proverbial?) straw man.

To discover what the various elements are, requires exploration and time to let the mind drift around the problems. If the solutions come too easily to the writer, the likelihood is that they will be easily anticipated by the reader. They also need to come from a substantial place. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of characters (the good and the not-so-good) need to bubble up from the unconscious part of the mind.  (In recent discussions with radio presenter Margaret Throsby, Margaret Drabble and Martin Amis agreed to such.) If the unconscious is the source, the information needs to be coaxed; allowed, not forced.

So there it is again. Take time. Write your way into the story. Trust that you will find your way. Eventually.

There are more rewards, than taking a shorter cut - characters that feel like real people with hidden pasts and actual lives. The story, too, feels less contrived than those where something is sketched out that hasn't involved detailed thought.  One way to think something through is to write it down.

Good plotters, on the other hand, might be able to do this very well without playing around so much first. And who knows, for my next novel, I might try that. I might try that again.

Writing prompt

Grow your antagonist. Start by writing down everything you know about him or her. Then make them have an argument (or two) with your protagonist where each tells the other what they really think of them. Make them argue back and defend themselves. No holds barred.

Happy international women's day! Do something nice for the special women in your life...

Have a great day!

William McInnes and Sarah Watt - Worse Things Happen at Sea... a great read!

Well I'm not sure if I can include this in my list for the Australian Women's Writers Challenge given that it is a collaborative work between award winning filmmaker Sarah Watt and actor/writer (writer/actor) husband William McInnes, but I don't think it matters. This is the first of my Perth Writers Festival purchases that I have read from this year, and one that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone.

Worse Things Happen at Sea is a book that celebrates the small (profound) beauty of everyday life and the people that have touched and enriched it. At times it had me laughing out loud (William McInnes really is a very funny man!) and the next minute I was blubbering away, pleased that I'd chosen the privacy of my own lounge room to read.  The one thing that permeates this book is love, in the broadest and best sense of that word, and the understanding that when we approach the world primarily with love, it gives us the courage to see and experience so much more that is positive and good, and to live life more fully, than we could if we were to approach it only with fear.

It's a great read and we (the public) were lucky to have the lovely Sarah Watt in the world long enough for her to tell this beautiful story and to make Look Both Ways and My Year without Sex. We are lucky to continue to have William McInnes to bring us writing and acting that gets to the heart of things, and makes us smile along the way.

Writing tip 13? Become like a painter... or an actor..

I'm no artist, but I did try my hand for a while when I was writing the first draft of my first (and only, so far) novel, faces mainly, and a little bit of landscape with figures in relationship to the landscape. The big problem to overcome when transferring what you see to paper is overcoming your own perception, and the struggle to eliminate interpretation (what you think is there as opposed to what is there). I don't think it is possible, or even desirable to completely eliminate interpretation, but I do think that the struggle is important.


My father's painting 1971

What happened when I began painting was that I started to imagine how I would depict the things I saw in a painting, and I began to notice light in a new way - how it fell on objects, and faces - and the sources of light. I started to see light and shadow as a series of patterns.

Light and shadow as a series of patterns

Something similar happened when I was doing acting classes years ago. I started to see movement and gesture differently to the way I had seen it before. The small things began to take on more significance than they had before. I don't do it all the time, but when I am in writing mode, this could be my mantra:  Observe. Deconstruct. Imagine (daydream). Creatively reconstruct to create the work of fiction.

I think that both painting and acting filtered into my creative writing in a number of ways, but just two things that the experience has taught me is to look for what visual artists call the negative spaces, and what my most influential director called playing opposites. This helps in the search for the bits that a cursory observation of people and events misses. It is a way of getting behind my own preconceptions and prejudices to see how things might appear from someone else's point of view. It doesn't mean I have to throw out dearly held values, but hopefully it does help me to widen my view. It also taught me to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong in how I saw situations, and that I was almost always missing something.

There is a theory in psychology called Personal Construct Theory which suggests that we all form theories and beliefs about the world and other people, and that the older we get, the more entrenched these beliefs become, and the less likely we are to admit new information or evidence that contradicts our pre-existing theories (especially if they work for us). Seeing things from another perspective takes courage, because it can temporarily destabilise our own carefully constructed platform. But by shaking up our own perceptions and theories through our writing, by 'playing opposites' to see what we can discover, the writing will be so much more interesting and it will help to uncover our own blind spots and move us beyond cliché.

Writing Prompt

Identify a scene in a piece of your writing that is not working well, and experiment by rewriting the scene from another character's perspective, or by adopting an opposite emotional state to the one underlying the current scene.

Use what you can from this exercise (all or some) to incorporate into the current scene.