Tag: creative writing

swanning around

Once more, my head seems to be stuffed so full of cotton wool, clouds or feathers that there’s no room for a single useful or original thought.

I do have a set of rather lovely photos of swans I took recently but I think pretty much everything I’ve written that features birds, feathers or flight has already appeared on the blog at some point, so I’m lacking words to accompany the pictures.

I would have thought that swans should be inspirational and make writing easy as the adult female is a pen. These, though, seem to be mute swans.
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skeletons in the archive

Once more, I’ve sat down at the computer without any idea of what to write. I don’t think I’ve ever really worried about suffering with writer’s block, but often days and weeks go by without any new ideas surfacing.

One reason for continuing with this blog is that it forces me to write something, even if it’s just re-posting a poem from the past; it makes me dig out an image or two to go alongside and forces me to combine words and ideas into some form of logical structure, some kind of complete unit: essentially, it reminds me that however little new creative writing I am doing, I still consider myself a writer.
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the how, the why, and the big picture

Yesterday I was talking about writing with a non-writer friend. He asked why I don’t write fiction (which, after all, is a lot more saleable than poetry), wondered whether I actually enjoy the process of writing poetry, and suggested that I should use the voice memo option on my phone to help with my writing.

I’m not sure I managed to give suitable responses to his various points, but it did get me thinking about how and why I write.

And having thought, I’ve decided that there’s an element of oyster to my writing.
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new every morning

I’ve said before that I dislike poetry readings and author appearances where the writers spend more time explaining than reading their works, so I should probably avoid giving any explanation of the where, the what, and the why of this piece except, perhaps, to label it as a first draft of creative non-fiction.

Since it is a draft and I expect the finished piece may end up being something quite different, I’d be particularly pleased if anyone wants to make comments.

New every morning

Anne lies with her eyes shut.

She is awake, but the world is not yet ready.
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auguries

I’ve been thinking about the presidential inauguration and wondering if I might be able to work a neat pun into this post. Something based on the prefix in being combined with the root augur – that the inaugural can’t augur well.

But that seems a little contrived, so let’s move swiftly on and talk about poetry.

The last two inauguration ceremonies – and, frankly, the only two I’ve really paid much attention to, presumably because of the live reporting via the internet – have both included poets reading their work; but it turns out poems have featured in only five presidential inaugurations.
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