Putting Your Heart into it

Writing with Vulnerability

This morning, while walking the elderly dog, I ran into a village friend, let’s call him Nial, though that isn’t his real name. Nial is in his 70s, maybe even older, and is wonderfully stoic and opinionated. He walks six miles a day with his collie dog while listening to audio books. We often stop and talk about the state of the country. There is usually swearing. Since he found out I’m a writer, and working on a big project, he usually starts any conversation with ‘how many words today?’ He’s like my writer’s Jiminy Cricket; my external conscience, reminding me to sit down and just write.

Today, no words. All this week, actually, no words. I don’t tell him, but I’m feeling a bit lost right now, a bit vulnerable. I’m still getting up to sit at my desk for the writing hour, still feeling my heart lift when I see a flock of jackdaws cross the orange-streaked sky, still placing my fingers on the keys. But not working on the book. I’m a bit washed out and need to reset my brain after spending January catching up on funding applications, catching up on the magazine, judging poetry competitions. I feel like I might never write again. I also had a few big rejections for poetry lately, work I thought was secure and homed, and now I’m sucked into a pit of imposter syndrome and feeling like I don’t really belong. Belonging, and that sense of not belonging is a big theme in my work. The big project is also sort of about not belonging. I’m finding it unusually difficult this week to lay my heart out on the slab.

I tell Nial that I’m still getting up but that funding applications have taken precedence. Without funding I don’t have the opportunity to spend chunks of time on writing. “I don’t understand it” he says, “I do in a way, because I’d like to write, but I’m no good at it. But I don’t understand why you do it.” Nial doesn’t read well, or write well, he’s got no formal education and left school at fourteen. One of the things we have in common is our working class background. He is fiercely intelligent and driven, and held very high positions in his work, has made huge differences in the charity sector too, he’s a man who sees what needs doing, and does it. He has done exceptionally well for himself. “Why do it, if you can’t make a decent living off it?” I pause for a minute then tell him it’s art, it’s a compulsion. “Ah, like an obsession” “yes, something like that”. Yes, something like that.

Then we talk about how many artists are in the village and how none of them live in the ex council houses at the scruffy end of the village, where my house is. The scruffiest house. We part ways, I head off and I’m still thinking about the conversation when I return home to make a short video for a competition I judged, because I can’t afford to travel to the presentation night. Why do it, why put your heart on the slab when financially, for most of us, the career of having one’s heart examined is not financially viable? There’s a tiny inkling of belonging in the idea of the compulsion, the art, that this is who I am, and my oddness, my square peg/round hole self is not at odds with being an artist.

As a writer, to make yourself vulnerable, whether that be through content or form, is undeniably frightening. It’s why so many writers get stuck in the comfort zone of well used phrases, or well used styles. This week Maggie Smith described the necessity to push through that feeling of vulnerability, to experiment and go further with your work as a writer as something more than just aiming for your best work. She says:

I tell my MFA students this: The risks you’re taking in your work now aren’t just for you. You’re writing permission slips for the writers who come after you, writers who’ll see in your work new things to try—with form, with content—that they might not have considered before. Maggie Smith

You can read the full article here:

A Pep Talk

I think we all feel it; the fear of exposing your heart, of trying to do something different. And it doesn’t go away. Katherine May, a New York Times bestselling memoirist talked about the weeks before the launch of her latest book recently, and I felt quite moved by the small worries - getting the right outfits for interview, the right lighting. And the pleasures: holding the book in your hands for the first time. All stuff done around, embedded within the mundanities of life - packing lunch boxes, scooping the cat litter tray.

And while all this is happening, you will see your book in everything. Each news story you read, each conversation you hold: it is all you can do not to say, ‘I wrote about that.’ These ideas that you have nursed into being will seem not relevant so much as intertwined, knitted through the fabric of life in a way that is irresistible to you. You have to share this because it is urgent and necessary. Katherine May

Things you will do in the month before your memoir launches

Last week I missed out on the launch of a friend’s book. Victoria Bennett’s book ‘All My Wild Mothers’ was one I’d seen, not quite at conception, but in the early stages. We’d worked together. Vik had employed me as mentor, not that she needed it, she’s a brilliant writer. Sometimes mentoring is about editing, sometimes it’s about guidance, in this case it was more about confidence building. Vik was wonderful to work with and I hated not seeing the book drift out not the world at its launch - I was double booked that night. I wish I’d seen the pleasure of that moment, the completion of it. This week she wrote about what happens afterwards. It will be a familiar read to anyone who has had a book published, something I recognise myself: the strange slump of the book being ‘out there’ and you no longer being in control of it. She’s recently moved house to a fairly isolated location and I can’t imagine how overwhelming all the endings and beginnings must be at once. But she’s brave, resilient. It’s brave to put you heart out there.

On patience

And then here am I, in my little office, procrastinating about the writing project, not quite able to lay my heart open this week. One thing that has helped, though, has been running the Dawn Chorus writing group, which I do as part of my work with Spelt Magazine. As I was talking into the camera this week, as the sun was rising and everyone in the group was waiting to get started, I realised I should be taking my own advice - writing needn’t always be a self flagellation. It doesn’t always need to be about getting a certain amount of words done a day, just committing to a project is sometimes enough. Sometimes, it is enough to sit in a room with like-minded people, even a virtual one, and to write what you can. Sometimes you can’t be vulnerable, sometimes you can’t put your heart on the butcher’s block. It is enough to make yourself gently accountable, to say - not today, but I’m not walking away - and to mean it.

Being vulnerable is difficult, sending work out, applying for funding knowing you might get rejected, being rejected; these are painful things. And why should they not be? Everything is written through the lens of the personal, why shouldn’t it feel personal to then have that work rejected? But it’s not just about you, your voice, and don’t forget that your voice IS worth as much as any one else’s voice, your voice might be the mirror that someone is looking for, might be the permission they seek to be vulnerable on the page themselves.

Upcoming Courses and Workshops

If you’d like to join me for next month’s Dawn Chorus, you can do, the next sessions start on the 13th March. Here’s the link: Dawn Chorus.

If you’d like to work with Bloodaxe poet Sarah Wimbush for a couple of hours in her Spelt workshop, you can. It’s on the 18th February 11-1pm. Here’s the link: Writing the Rural.

And if you’d like to work with R.M. Francis, lecture in creative and professional writing at Wolverhampton university, we have this four week zoom course. You can find out more by following this link: Burrowing Down to Base

If you want to come and chat to me about how to get published, I’m at York St John university on 6th march as part of their How to Get Published: Agent and Editor Panel Discussion. You can find out more by following this link: How to Get Published.

Thanks for reading.