Hello!
It’s feeling quite Spring-like in my little corner of the world today – I am out of the house without socks for the first time this year! We will see how that goes… So, in this edition of my highly irregular newsletter I offer you a competition closing soon, and all the online workshops I’m teaching in the next month or two to keep your writing muscles warm, and then a short instalment of Permission Corner, with some recent thoughts after having taught two writing courses in the past few weeks.
I’m judging Retreat West’s West Words microfiction competition, so if you have a little gem under 200 words, send it in by March 31st, I’d love to read it, in any style or shape! On Tues April 9th I’m running a Hybrid Writing For Poets Zoom workshop for the Poetry Business – come and unbox your words! Places are limited, details here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thepoetrybusiness/1176943. A few days later, on Fri April 12th, I am teaching a one-day Arvon Zoom course, Write a Short Story In A Day, in which we’ll explore everything that goes into writing all kinds of short stories – from beginnings to middles and ends, not necessarily in that order! - so you’ll emerge with at least one draft of a new story. No need to have any story ideas in advance, no Fear of the Blank Page here, we’ll sort that too. Details and booking here: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/online-writing-day-short-story/.
I’m encouraging more hybrid writing on Zoom for members of Mslexia’s Salon on April 29th, details here – https://mslexia.co.uk/salon/. And you heard it here first – I’m running another Magic of Collisions writing workshop for Retreat West on Sat June 9th, come join us to create sparks and find new stories/poems/hybrids, booking and details here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/retreatwest/1177665.
Coming soon: a webinar for Nine Arches Press on poetry, prose and prose-poetry; a reading for Winchester’s Loose Muse – and another residential Arvon course on magical realism. Stay tuned!
Permission Corner
It’s been a fascinating experience teaching two writing courses over the past month – a 5 week Zoom hybrid writing course for the London Lit Lab, and a 5-day Arvon residential course on poetry & short stories – and I wanted to share some thoughts with you. One of the most rewarding parts of teaching an Arvon course for me are the one-on-one tutorials with each participant. I always ask everyone what brought them here, what their writing (or not-writing-yet) journey has been. Over the twelve years I’ve been lucky enough to teach these courses, I’ve become more attuned to certain phrases people say, which I can then ask about, and these phrases are to do with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”. In the last newsletter, I talked about the Inner Critic – but this time, these “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” come from real people.
Every single one of the amazing and talented course participants had at least one voice in their head that came from someone else saying to them – sometimes years and years before – “You can’t write that”; “You should get rid of that character”; “That’s not something you can do in your play/short story/novel/memoir/poem”; “You need to make all your short stories longer”; “A short story/poem/play has to be…”; “No-one’s going to understand your story if you write it like that”; “Plays/short stories/poems can’t be about...”. These are just a few examples of what I heard, and these voices came from all sides, from family members to members of writing groups to literary agents, and they were said to writers at the beginning of their writing journeys as well as those much further along.
You know, just writing that list upsets me. I had to stop typing here in the cafe I am sitting in with my coffee and 80s music playing in the background, and breathe. I know those voices. I’ve heard phrases like that more than once over the past 25 years. And let me say this very clearly: NO-ONE SHOULD BE TELLING YOU WHAT YOU SHOULD AND SHOULDN’T WRITE. Especially when you’ve just started putting your first words down on the page. But also: ANYTIME.
Yes, you might have asked for feedback from someone, might even have paid someone to suggest edits, changes. But these are always suggestions because it is your work. It is your writing. As I said to my Arvon group, writing is not a democratic activity. When every single person in the critiquing group on my MA in Creative Writing 21 years ago told me my short story didn’t work, that no-one would believe that ending, somehow – even though I’d never had anything published – I knew they were all wrong. I stuck with my short story, and that became my first published (broadcast on Radio 4) piece of short fiction, and the title story of my new collection.
I spent much of my time in those one-on-one tutorials the other week passing on permission to each writer to let those voices go – in some cases, when the voices have been whispering in your head for years, it might take a ritual like writing the phrase down on paper and burning it! It can take time, it’s not easy to exorcise these voices, but the start of the process is to spot it, to know that it’s not your voice, and to gently ask it to be quiet. We’ve had some similar discussions in the online Zoom course group, and I can see how easy it is to mistake someone else’s voice – whether a real person or the Inner Critic (where do you think the Inner Critic gets their shoulds and shouldn’ts from??!) - for your own voice telling you what you’re doing is a waste of time, it’s silly to “play”, it’s “too frivolous”.
It’s not. We’re all allowed – to play, to be “silly”, to take inspiration from wherever we want to, to write what we want in the way we want to write it. It’s your work. Write it for you first. You then might want to send it out into the world, want to show someone, but don’t think about that now. Don’t let anything or anyone stop you from doing the writing, that most precious thing.
Tania x