Category: writing

My Virtual Reality

On By Mick CanningIn ageing, environment, publishing, writing25 Comments

One of the things about growing…older, let’s say…and I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing, is the growing realisation that we’re never going to live in that place that we are convinced is perfect for us, or have the day to day lifestyle that is everything we want.

One consolation for the writer, even if it’s rather a shallow consolation, is the opportunity to write these places and lifestyles for ourselves. For the last year or so, nearly all my creative writing has been rather experimental, which is one reason I’ve not put much up on here. Rather than focusing on writing the complexities of a story arc, I have been very much concerned with the character of the characters I have written, and possibly even more concerned with the environment they occupy.

In a way, then, I’m exploring different versions of myself – although that, surely, is what all writers do anyway? – and it is instructive how much all of these versions have in common. For anyone who knows me, the information that these scenes involve almost nothing of town or city should come as little surprise. But it’s a learning process, a personal learning process. And even the photos I’ve chosen to accompany this post serve to reinforce what I already know about myself.

And the other strand that occurred to me as I thought about all this, is how it has brought home to me that the priority in my writing – my absolute, number one priority – is that first and foremost I am writing for myself. Whatever I write has to please a rather demanding reader; myself. And if that means my writing is even less ‘commercial’ than it was before, then so be it.

Strangely, this seems to have removed the pressure of time. I’ve always ended a writing day either pleased with the amount I’ve written or berating myself for not having written more. As if that was the sole measure of how successful or productive my day had been! Now, though, writing just for myself, success can be equated with how good I feel the output is; and by ‘good’ I mean quality (as defined by me, for me). So even a few lines that work well may be a good day’s work. I think this time pressure, this fixation with writing a certain amount each day, is a purely commercial pressure; an I-need-to-finish-another-book thing.

So goodbye to that. It’s not for me.

We Do Violence

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing8 Comments

Yay! Day seven of my Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So project. I’m jolly impressed I got this far, although I say so myself. And I’m quite pleased with this one. Although, like all the others, it’ll benefit from some work on it later.

We Do Violence

We all occupy two places simultaneously:

Wherever we happen to be in the physical world,

And wherever we currently inhabit in our heads.

The trick is to get the two to coincide.

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We interpret our landscape as we walk,

Inflicting our thoughts upon it, changing it,

Or at the very least changing our perceptions of it,

Rather than being truly open to the experience.

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To achieve that, like a meditation

We need to let go of our thoughts.

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And the worst of these interpretations,

Is this absurd need to name everything.

We begin to only look for particular things.

And filter out those we cannot name.

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We do violence to the landscape in this way,

Subverting it from what it is, to what we wish it to be.

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We need to listen to the landscape in silence,

undistracted by thoughts or by words.

Words are, at best, a poor substitute for things.

As soon as we name a thing, we claim it as our own.

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We limit it to our own understanding, and we dilute it,

By placing it in the company of other things

That we name the same. It is akin to taking away the

Individual names of people and referring to them all as person.

Quick!

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing7 Comments

Day 6 of my poem a day for a week or so project. Almost there! And this one is a bit of an experiment…

Quick

Quick, the useless and the wistful,

The deceitful and the unwary,

Come now to me, for I must be honest,

For I must write my poem

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I have things to say which I must first discover,

Although this seems to take so long.

But time is perfectly without fault and

Time alone will determine how long I must take.

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I am forever reinventing myself

Plunging in to find out what resonates

Immersing myself in this life

Until I understand or tire of it.

Sigh

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing15 Comments

Poem number five in my Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So series. Snow outside, test cricket on the TV, beer in the cupboard. That’s my day sorted, then.

The sea sighs for you tonight.

It sucks at the shingle

And smears your footprints

Like a wet thumb rubbed across writing.

Where once you walked and left your

Prints, it gently wipes the land clean.

Lovingly it lays its cheek to the ground

And nuzzles your memory.

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We are more than specks

In the infinity of time and space

Yet somehow we need to

Make sense of our lives.

Rock endures

But so does the wind and the rain.

More so, in fact, since in the end

Mountains are levelled

And the wind and rain remain.

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In the end the passage of many feet

May be more durable than

Dwellings of stone.

I Made A Vow

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing5 Comments

Day four of the Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So project and a bit of a rush, today, as I’ve been assembling a shed (as you do). Another one, therefore, which will benefit from a revision when I have more time.

In Tripoli I made a vow to travel light, my eyes wide open,

Travel all the time I could, to take my chances when they happened,

Planned to seek out strange new places, take some risks see new horizons,

One thing alone I wanted now, the promise of the unexplored.

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And I remember where I was, the time of day, the type of weather,

Early morning, early March, this was a time of change for me,

A time for taking big decisions, time to turn my life around,

Time to leave things in the past, the time to turn another page.

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At the time I made that vow, I yearned to go along the Silk Road,

Travelling any way I could, and though that sadly never happened,

Other projects came and went, journeys all filled with adventure,

Baking deserts, frozen mountains, close to home and far away.

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I knew the world would not be kind, it would not make my journeys easy,

Whatever it might offer me, I’d leave myself completely open,

Embrace the rain, embrace the wind, embrace the temple and the hillside.

This was my private pact with life and to this day I’ve not yet finished.

Dragon

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing8 Comments

A Poem a Day For a Week Or So number three. I had fun with this one.

Dragon

This serpentine and massive body,

Tough dark brown scales about its girth,

With emerald green draped carelessly

Lies sinuously upon the earth.

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One huge, long, foot, so saurian,

With wrinkled toes, long tapering claws,

Sweet scented earth clings yet to them and

Rain drips in the shocking maw.

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Cowards’ blades have cruelly felled it

Here, of all enchanted places!

Huge and sad and impotent

Lies still amongst its golden pieces.

Mud

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing10 Comments

The second of my ‘Poem a Day’ poems. Just getting this far is a bit of an achievement, I suppose, although I’m not particularly happy with either the meter or the rhythm. It feels as sloppy as the day itself was. But I think it has potential if I do a bit of work on it sometime later.

Mud

Today, the sun has been sent into exile,

Leaving just a weary daylight.

It has gone, and we shall never see its like again.

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In the steady rain,

Climbing this hill is an act of defiance

A far more daunting prospect than usual.

It is like a resistance.

One step forwards and two steps back

I slide and slither upon the track,

Barely keeping my footing at times.

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In places, mist curls beneath the trees

Where the birds voice their own defiance

Loud and clear.

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Beneath the endless grey,

Still lower clouds like smoke from gunfire,

From shell bursts or industrial disaster

The earth torn up and churned

From countless toiling feet.

But other than the birds,

I have the world to myself.

Clutch

On By Mick CanningIn poetry, writing10 Comments

I thought I would write a poem a day for a week or so. Here is yesterday’s. Of course, if this goes like most of my projects, I’ll probably give up tomorrow. We’ll see.

Clutch

Crook-backed

Misshapen

Bent and jug-eared

Skeletal spindle-shanked and

Shaggy ancient

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Like troll

The rising sun leaves it forever

Frozen on this hillside

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Mid-clutch

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Ice coursed through crippled limbs

Wedged and clinging

Four hundred years too much

In the end

Sunday Supplement – 4

On By Mick CanningIn music, reading, Sunday Supplement, walking, writing9 Comments

I’ve been playing this album for much of the last week. the first I had heard of Sharron Kraus was on Chanctonbury Ring, the album she worked on with Justin Hopper, based on Justin’s book The Old Weird Albion. Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow is filled with beautiful haunting songs in the folk tradition, with more than a touch of otherworldliness about them.

My world is full of paths that are too well trodden at the moment. I suppose everyone’s is, really. All the paths nearby on the common and through the woods are overflowing with dog walkers and families out for exercise and relaxation, and without going further afield it is difficult to find anywhere to walk in solitude. So a longer walk is demanded this week, out to fields and woods and rivers where I know I shall meet hardly a soul.

I think I shall resist posting progress reports on my writing in future, since I jump from project to project and no sooner do I say I’m doing a final edit of x, than I am working on y and have shelved x for the foreseeable future. I have, for example, found great difficulty in finishing A Good Place, revising the plot and the ending for the third time now…

It’s downright embarrassing, really.

I’m finding writing very difficult at present, though, which is one reason I’m not posting on here very often. Like everyone else, I just need to hang in there.

And I’m reading An Indifference of Birds by Robert Smyth.

This is another book about birds, but in this case it looks at how birds see us and how we affect them. And by extension, it looks at how we affect the whole of the natural world, and the enormous damage we are doing to it. But if that sounds horribly gloomy, the book is a delight to read – beautifully written, and filled with observation and information. Do buy it.

And look after yourselves.

A Busy Time in West Bengal

On By Mick CanningIn A Good Place, lockdown, travel, writing23 Comments

For the last couple of months, during Lockdown and its easing, I have spent an awful lot of time up in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal.

bookshop (2)

Okay, that’s not strictly true, but for most of that time I have spent my working day revising, re-writing, and editing A Good Place, my novel set in a fictitious hill station there. I have some new characters to weave in, some old ones to remove, and the story line to alter in several major ways, including a different ending.

I finished the first draft some nine months ago, but there were parts I didn’t feel entirely satisfied with then, and my beta reader unerringly picked those out for major revision. I then spent a while thinking about the story line and took out nearly all the final third of the book and chucked it.

That left me with a lot to rewrite.

Much of the problem stemmed from the fact that after I published Making Friends With the Crocodile, which is set in an Indian village with peopled with all Indian characters, I wanted to write a novel dealing with the British who remained behind in India after partition. A kind of balance to my writing. That was all well and good, but I began writing the novel before I was completely satisfied with the story line, and the more I wrote of it the less I liked it. So I kept changing the story line as I wrote rather than doing what I really should have done, which was delete the whole thing and go away and write something completely different, waiting until I knew what I really wanted to write. But I’m now content that I have the story I want to tell, rather than Just A Story.

Consequently, I have been virtually living in West Bengal during these days, inevitably leading to yearnings to be there in person. Which does nothing to ease the feelings of frustration at enduring the travel restrictions of Lockdown.

050a

However, one of the advantages of having several projects on the go at once, which I always have, is that I can switch to another for a while when I need to. Last week, then, I spent one day giving a final edit to a short story which gave me the opportunity to spend the day (in my head!) in rural Sussex, which was very welcome. Especially as that is somewhere we can get to now, with a minimum of hassle.

And A Good Place? I’m glad you asked. I think I’m close to finishing the second draft, which will be a blessed relief.

Just so long as my beta reader doesn’t throw her hands up in horror when she reads it…