Today was Ely Writers’ Day. This isn’t a day created by us, but by a group of people known collectively on Facebook as Ely Writers Day1.
I thought it would be rude for a member of Ely Writers (us!) not to turn up for Ely Writers’ Day (them!), so I booked my place and entered the short story competition.
Dominic O’Sullivan: poetry
The day started with a workshop-style poetry reading session by Dominic O’Sullivan. He asked us what we thought the purpose of poetry was. There was a range of different answers. I said that you could use it to play with language in a way that you can’t in prose.
Dominic also asked us to write three lines of poetry about the Fens2. I wrote3:
Flat, stark, nothing to see
Caity Ross
But a line of poplars far away,
Cathedral towers, clouds and sky.
After that, Dominic read out some poetry he’d written. His poems were short and pithy. He recommended writing about things that made you angry, like he did about the new Cambridge University boathouse4. The boathouse was built despite local opposition5, which apparently surprised Cambridge Boat Club6.
Talking about things that make you angry reminded me of a poem I’d written at work once.
Whole mountain ranges were being made about one tiny molehill, hour after hour, day after day. Eventually, all the tea in China couldn’t free my mind of it, so I took out my notebook and wrote a short poem about it.
The relief I felt after that was better than if I’d let off steam to another person, and that other person didn’t have to suffer my negative energy either. Win-win. This led me to the conclusion that an important use of poetry is catharsis.
I enjoyed the interactivity of this talk and I could identify with the poems he read out.
Rosemary Westwell: copy editing
Rosemary shared with us some snippets from the last book she’s had copy-edited and invited us to spot what changes her copy editor had made.
This was less mere prescriptivist7 fanciful ideals, as I’d feared, and more making sure the author writes with clarity, so the reader can understand what they mean. It’s important, of course, that the writer’s voice still be heard in the finished product: Rosemary’s copy editor encourages the author to ignore anything they don’t agree with.
This was an interesting talk that showed us just how important copy editing can be. I recently read a book that was written badly. The story itself was fine, but when you get a sentence that shows and tells the same thing in one sentence, along with point-of-view changes in a single paragraph, it’s too much.
Sylvie Short: novel writing
Sylvie talked about what she has learned about writing novels. She encouraged us to trust our instincts: if it feels wrong, it probably is wrong. Sometimes, if it feels really wrong, it’s best to put a writing project aside for a while and come back to it with all the experience we’ve garnered in the meantime.
She gave us an example of a novel inspired by real-life experiences she’d started. She had to stop because it was going nowhere, but when she went back to it a year later, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with it.
She read an entertaining passage out; you could perhaps predict what was to happen in that piece, but it was written in a way that we could conspire with the narrator and share in their schadenfreude.
Roger Rix
Roger was inspired by something he read in one of Philip Larkin‘s8 letters:
I think there is a poem to be made out of letters.
Philip Larkin, 25 April 1964
Roger took phrases from the letters and rearranged them into poetic form and called the collection Philip Larkin: the Secret Poems
Sadly for Roger, this, and similar work based on other poets’ letters, caused no end of difficulties with the copyrighted material (i.e. the letters). One public discussion in the Times Literary Supplement9 later, and Roger has learnt a lot about permission to use copyrighted material.
It reminds me of university, where there were strict rules about plagiarism in our submitted written work. One of my characters will fall foul of his university’s plagiarism rules, causing his life to become even more of a mess than it is already.
All in all, it was a good day, and it was good to have the opportunity to talk to other writers, even if I didn’t win the short story competition!
References
- Ely Writers Day at Facebook.
- The Fens at Wikipedia.
- 2022. Pylons and Poplars at Ely Writers.
- 2016. Opening of the new Cambridge University Boathouse at Ely at University of Cambridge: Sport.
- Cambridge University boathouse plans criticised by environmentalists 2013 at BBC News.
- ‘Surprise’ at Cambridge University boathouse objections figure 2013 at BBC News.
- Linguistic prescription at Wikipedia.
- Philip Larkin at Wikipedia.
- The Times Literary Supplement (TLS).