Starting in October and going forward, I have decided to talk honestly about the business of how I write poetry. There are people who teach how to create poetry, how to format it, how to submit and how publishing in general works. I am not seeing that many people doing work on what you need to do with your brain and mental attitudes to make that stick, grow and then evolve. HI THERE.
Let’s see if we can change that.
I am a bit of an evangelist when it comes to habit-forming. None of this, it must be stated, has anything to do with poetry. All of it has to do with the most difficult mental health period of my life, and how sometimes it is never about anything else than making it through the basics of existence unscathed. How can you build habits when simply living is complicated enough?
There are people on Substack offering pretty much every flavour of support for creatives: learn to be self-sufficient or work in a group to improve your art, tap into astrology, use tarot or herbal remedies… the list is literally endless. My particular problem was not being able to communicate. I have had many periods in my life when I became non-verbal. It came to a significant head in my 40’s.
Poetry has unlocked many previously inaccessible abilities. It evened out what became an often inhospitable mental landscape, which was sent into crisis when I became perimenopausal. Looking back on what has taken place, there is a definite sense of relief things are settled and identified to give me time to learn and grow again. A phenomenal amount of both those things has taken place since 2009.
I am immensely grateful to both my husband and kids for their love.
What has altered my professional success in the last year can be very easily quantified: determination. What underpins that is routine. I make time to write, every day. Even when fallow, inevitably something will come out of my brain and onto a page, a screen, as a series of notes as to how something can be improved. In the last month, my writing has been on how to better organise the house.
We’ve lived here for a very long time, and only now am I beginning to have a grip on keeping things working smoothly. I often wonder how the hell I managed to do such a decent job on co-parenting two kids, because lots of time has been lost to disassociation and sheer blind panic. In the last month, the 20-year-old and the 24-year-old have passed driving tests. Both are thriving.
It was their routine, in the end, that gave me a chance to create.
The biggest changes for me took place when I began to make space where nobody else was allowed to disturb the writing time, when it was (mostly) respected by everyone. I have a battered PostIt note on my secondary notice board which states ‘Mornings Are Yours: let no-one take them away from you’ which was written when the youngest started attending school.
Not all plans are ever perfect, and it took many, many years before I could finally establish a long-term writing habit. Practice, repetition and reassessment formed the foundation of everything. However, none of that matters one iota if there is not enough time in which to work. This is the biggest issue, and the continuing tyranny: TIME IS THE RESOURCE THAT UNDERPINS EVERYTHING.
Learning how to make time is as subjective a skill as learning to write.
It is why retreats and ‘writing hours’ and special places to work are becoming so attractive to many creatives. It’s also a subtle magnification into how we value our own time as a commodity. When you pay for something, especially in the modern world, the rules change. You’ll look for value, to get the most from the experience. Crucially, this also makes writing a privilege, which it should never be.
The biggest single means by which you improve your poetry is to spend a regular amount of time on it, as often as you possibly can. If you can try to do it every day, and stick at it for seven years, I can attest that magical and unexpected things can and do happen. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but honestly, this is the best place to start. It works for lots of things as well as poetry, too.
The sooner you can establish ground rules and order, the easier doing becomes.
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