PROCESSING THE PROCESS

My approach to writing is very methodical, some might say painfully so. For a long time, I worried that this made me lacking in some way – the need for structure, to go through a set process for each poem, seemed to me to be the antithesis of creativity. I envied friends and classmates who, when given an automatic writing task, could come up with an immediate, compelling flow of ideas in just a few minutes, as though they had a stash of ready-made options filed away in their brains, poised to be pressed into action whatever the prompt or theme might be. Meanwhile, I would crank out, at best, a couple of strikethrough-littered lines, but more often than not just a random set of thoughts. But the thoughts would eventually become fragments, and the fragments would become poems and so after a while I began to cut myself a little slack, focus more on the destination and less on the journey. Which – since I’ve been asked to talk about process – goes something like this…

Much of my work seeks to explore the personal as political and the everyday as a means of documenting the undocumented. Memories often provide the impetus for my writing, especially when connected with familiar content or items from popular culture, such as advertisements, music, or consumer goods. Intertextuality in its broadest sense is another common source of inspiration, with materials ranging from the books on my shelves, song lyrics and record sleeve notes to instruction manuals for domestic appliances, eBay listings and product packaging. In terms of how this translates into process, I might start out with an object or a figure – who could be someone I know or someone in the public eye – and from there excavate the memories and associations this brings up for me. At that point I will do some research to make sure that I have facts which back up or inform my personal recollections and observations, which might involve virtual sources courtesy of many hours spent down internet rabbit-holes or engaging with actual objects. These may remain as merely starting points for my thinking, be alluded to in the work, or sometimes appear as fragments of text within the poem. Once I’ve gathered together a set of links, quotes and images, I will start to write notes attached to these, relating them back to my original idea but also just collecting any other random thoughts and observations that emerge as a result. These notes will then guide me towards an overall ‘feel’ for the piece, or what I think that might be. This often changes quite significantly from the starting point, generally becoming less anecdotal and nostalgic and moving [hopefully] towards something more universal, which piggybacks onto personal experience and interpretation with the intention of creating a piece with wider meaning.

While I naturally lean towards writing shorter pieces, I rarely have a sense of how long a poem is going to be. Having figured out the background, I will start writing and just keep writing until I think I’ve run out of things to say. Currently, I tend to work in unpunctuated prose blocks, a throwback to when – terrified, and considering myself very much a prose writer – I was first experimenting with poetry on my Creative Writing MA course. Having seen something in the tentative and really not very good poems I was producing that might benefit from this kind of form, the suggestion was made to me by Dr Ágnes Lehóczky (thanks Agi!). I found it incredibly freeing just to focus in the first instance on the words, without worrying about line breaks or where to put a comma. My writing often aims to create snapshots, a sense that the reader is eavesdropping, has happened across a conversation part way through and will leave again before its conclusion. With the capacity to be intense, claustrophobic, but also somewhat random and playful, the form felt, for me, a great way to express this.

I am terrible for editing as I go along, even though I know I should probably try not to. It makes the process of writing rather slow and painstaking – especially at first – but I find that I need to get quite a precise couple of phrases in place (not necessarily the opening) and then start building the poem around these. I will typically spend two or three days on writing a first draft (if it’s a short poem) and then take a few days away from it before going back to re-edit, followed by a longer break and another round of revisions. After that, I will revisit it as I see fit – and depending on any deadlines that might impact when I’m prepared to let it go! I will always get feedback from trusted friends in workshop groups who I know will be honest with me about the work, and I would probably do this on the second or third draft. Occasionally, I will have only one or two drafts of a poem, but four or five is more usual, and sometimes as many as seven.

Reading this back, while I hope what it shows is the careful thinking behind my putting together a piece of writing, I’m still not sure if the overriding picture is of someone too bound up with process to possess any real creative spontaneity [why hello, Imposter Syndrome, come on in, grab a chair]. But, for now at least, this seems to be what works for me. And that is really all I am qualified to talk about.