Writing Advice

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Write drunk, they say, and edit sober

They don’t say whether to edit hungover

Recycle the empties

And recycle the emptiness

And when the demons come

(And they will come)

To steal your pens and hide your files

To crowd the corners of your eyes

To rob you of compass and courage

Sing to them, and sing again, and scatter some crumbs at the door

Sharpen your quills by lanternlight, whale oil smoking

Sharpen your stanzas with strop and flint

Go for a walk in a wood

Give your ravings to the jackdaws, they will listen

For your words have both feathers and claws

Make your paper from the pulp of your heroes

You don’t need them anymore

So write what you know

And what you don’t know

And write what you know that you don’t know and most especially

Write what you don’t know that you don’t know

Get lost in a city, get lost in a room

Lose yourself upon that empty page

The maze from which you cannot be recovered

Bones left to moulder in chambers and corners

Until your skull rattles in the dark, saying

Yes, I see it now, I’m ready

And you reach with fleshless fingers for the notebook

There is no such thing as a perfect notebook

They are all perfect.

Postcards from places you’ve never been

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Is it morning? Or is it night? Sunrise? Dusk? Noon? You leave your lodgings. Hotel? Hostel? A stranger’s house, a blanket on the floor of the parlour? In the lobby is a dusty man at a dusty counter, watching a silent television. He looks away when your eyes meet. Is it raining outside? Or scorching sun? Bright again and humid with mist? Sweltering or snowing or sorry with sleet? You walk on. You walk to the main square. Is it teeming with vendors on market day? Or is it empty, ghostly, stirring with old newspaper? Are there statues? Monuments? Sculptures? Lampposts? You’re hungry. Are there cafes? Are there street stalls? Is there a man in a low window, selling dumplings and bread, or pastries, or crepes in paper cups? Are there pigeons squabbling for crumbs? Gulls? Sparrows? You walk on. You turn away from the main square. Wander the backstreets. Most are houses, tenements of flats, but some are shops. A wigmaker. A dentist. A carpenter. A shop selling accordions and concertinas. A shop selling puppets, the window draped with marionettes. Laundry strung between the houses. Scaffolds, ladders, aerials. Classical music, radio static. The sound of sports commentary in a language you don’t know. A gap between two houses opens onto a mason’s yard. There is no one in the yard but half-finished carvings stand in stacks and towers. Are there mice here? Are there small white cats? Are there stray dogs? Are there children? A woman stands on a balcony wearing a man’s jacket, smoking a cigarette. An old man sits on a step, both hands on his walking stick, soup stains in his beard. You walk on. You walk until you come to water. Is it a canal? A river? A fountain? A wharf? A harbour wall? What does it smell like? Are there boats? Gondolas? Barges? Junks? Ferrymen? Pontoons? You cross a bridge. A beggar sits halfway, a bowl between her feet, two copper coins in the bowl. The stone stairs are scalloped. The backstreets open into a narrow square. A busker plays the violin. He is blind. You walk on. Here is a tall building. Is it a church? A temple? A ruin? A library? A hospice? A guildhall or a college? The door is huge and padlocked and there is moss on all the windowsills. You walk on. You walk on. Keep walking. Look around you. Look up, at the rooftops, the skyline, chimney pots, balconies, downspouts, carvings, tiles. Look down, at your feet – at flagstones, or cobblestones, or wooden boardwalks, or bare dirt and dust. Can you hear a far-off train? Can you hear a foghorn? Can you hear the screaming swifts? Can you hear the children singing? Are they real, or did they die two hundred years ago in a fire that swallowed the street? Can you hear the hammers, chisels? A trumpet, a cello? Hawkers in the market. Cooks quarrel over the price of meat. Small pink flowers grow in gutters. You walk on. You walk on. You come to a small dark shop, a hole in the wall. Mementos, beads, hats, pencils, miniature saints. There is a dusty rack of postcards. You scan the images, pictures of this city and its people. One postcard in particular catches your eye. It reminds you of someone. An old friend, maybe, before they moved abroad. An estranged family member. A lover with whom you argued every bitter, awful, wonderful day. Whoever it is – someone you haven’t seen in a very long time – but this postcard, this shop, this street, this city, this sky – reminds you of them. You buy the postcard. Keep walking, if you wish. But when you’re ready, you write the postcard. Something here conjures your past – something here speaks of your future. Stand at a strange counter. Buy a strange stamp. Is that a toucan? A gunboat? A god? Pay a penny, or a pfennig, or a few centimes. Send the postcard.

Who to?

Ritual

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Yet another poem from a not-poet. I wrote the first draft of this at a Rosy Carrick workshop at the Brewery Arts Centre a couple of months ago. Rosy challenged us to attach a bad memory to a broken object, and then to fix the object. My bad memory was a lucid nightmare I had as a kid: paralysed with fear in early-morning light while fog boiled from an open cupboard door. When I found my voice I screamed the house down. That was the bad memory; I patched it with the help of my wife, walking a fell in the fog to rebuild a fallen cairn. The poem evolved from there, as these things do, and now it isn’t much about that childhood fright at all… which I suspect was the point of the workshop.

I kept working on that first draft in my notebook, then spoke it into being over several more sessions. I’ve written before about the value of reading work aloud; that’s never more true than with poetry. I know my poems have rough edges. I like rhymes to land sometimes, but I really really don’t like rigorous structure… I want the sounds to scan more than the words, and that can sometimes feel stilted on the page. Printed words are pinned in place but sounds – oh, the sounds – they’re alive and inherently unique to my voice, my breath, my cadence, my emphasis.

We recently watched an absolutely stunning documentary called Come See Me In The Good Light, about the American performance poet Andrea Gibson and their battle with ovarian cancer. The film is sensational. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. For the purpose of this post, I was amazed to see Gibson sing their poems as part of the writing process – not singing words like the lyrics of songs, to a melody – but vocalising the metre of the sounds – and then finding the words that fit that metre. I think this is why their work has such astonishing momentum, that barrelling tumult of sound that sweeps the listener along. I don’t pretend to anything as crucial as Gibson’s work, but that search for flow, for motion – that feels important to me.

Anyway. My poem is called Ritual. It was recently awarded runner-up in the Verey Books Poetry Prize 2026, a thing which left me equal parts humbled and flabbergasted. It’s both lovely and strange that my poems-not-poems appear to be landing right side up.

If the widget has worked, then here it is below. Enjoy!

A Home On The Sand

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I don’t really consider myself a poet. On the few occasions I write them, I’m always quietly surprised that my poems seem to strike a chord with people, as it’s not a form I feel I can commit to while storytelling and prose sing so much louder. That said – every so often there’s something which can only be a poem – often when I’m angry, or sad, or awestruck.

Awe is important to me. Awe is my religion, unhooked from any god or scripture. Any interaction with the wilder word is my worship. A goldfinch on the teasel, whale bones on the beach; spiderwebs, the graves on Isle Maree. When I was commissioned to write a poem for filmmaker Dom Bush, it was awe that spoke to me.

Dom has made a stunning film about the National Trust reserve of Sandscale Haws. I spent a day there, whipped by wind, wandering the dunes and the low tide shoreline, picking my path about the many million shells, watching terns, counting caterpillers on marram. Sandscale Haws has Viking roots – the name is sandra skali hawse, a home on the sands – and an industrial legacy of brickmaking. I drew on both in my poem, as well as the myriad species that live and thrive in the Duddon Estuary.

I’m sharing only my few words here; if you’d like to see the whole film, it’s here.

Telling tales

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Wee update with my news – over recent months I’ve been telling stories wherever people will listen, from my story circle to Verbalise to Kendal Mountain Festival to a headline slot at Ink Deep (a new spoken word night in Kendal). I told 30 minutes of stories at that one – The Name, The Pear Drum and Facing The Giant, finishing with a short Eskimo story called The Spirits of the Northern Lights. I also recorded a 90-second version of that one for National Storytelling Week (now been and gone). My telling looked like this:

It’s strange how much goes into a single story, even one as small as this – I spent a week of dog walks and school runs practising Northern Lights – partly because I needed to get it under 90 seconds, but mostly to find the flow in the words and build some phrases into muscle memory.

It’s been a year since I started storytelling with incredible tutors Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey. In that time, as well as the stories above, I’ve learned The Talking Skull, Aioga, The Fox Woman, The Magic Bowls, The Hobyahs, Two Tigers & A Strawberry, Stone Soup, Raven & The Whale, Six Blind Men & an Elephant and Gobbleknoll. That’s a small repertoire, yes, but growing all the time, and most of all – I’d feel confident going back to any of these stories. I’ve told each of them to myself (and the dog) dozens and dozens of times. They’re part of me now… even if the dog is sick of me .

Learning and performing traditional tales has upended everything I thought I knew about stories, energised me personally, and also reinvented my writing practice. The simplicity and clarity of folk tales is so utterly grounding – I’m increasingly trying to incorporate that simplicity into my own prose. I’ve also started writing longhand, rather than on a keyboard, and this too has been transformative. I’ve always plotted and planned and noodled in notebooks, but very seldom written extended prose by hand. Taking a novel to the notebooks has been an extraordinary thing. Everything becomes much more linear and causal – and if it isn’t connected, it’s easier to spot a fracture in the narrative. Slowing down to handwriting speed – probably less than half my typing speed – has also slowed my thoughts, giving space to notice and dwell and follow interesting threads. It’s steady and feels somehow more truthful. Most radical of all – I suddenly have countless more moments in the day in which to write. Whereas I once needed a minimum of half an hour, a cup of tea and a playlist to sit down and write – now I’m scribbling ideas and phrases in minutes here and there, from boiling the kettle to the moments before bed. It’s still early days as a process but I’ve been staggered at how staying in touch with my prose makes it all the easier to keep writing.

As to what I’m writing… ah. Enough to say that something I’ve daydreamed about for almost twenty years is quietly taking shape. I’m writing without agenda or plan, dwelling in spaces between ideas and images, forging some links, breaking others. I’ve given it a name but I’m not ready to share that yet.

It’s all stories. Onwards.

Fox Woman

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Another tale, another telling; at my last story circle, I performed a Siberian folktale called The One-Eyed Man & The Fox Woman from a wonderful collection called The Sun Maiden And The Crescent Moon by James Riordan. It’s a story I first heard on a podcast told by Daniel Deardorff. By way of drums and dreams he seized me by the scruff and never let me go; when I started storytelling, The Fox Woman was right at the top of my list of pieces to learn. It’s longer than Gobbleknoll or The Talking Skull, about 20 minutes or so, and I’ve been working my way up to it by way of shorter tales.

There’s an otherworldiness to this one. The titular One-Eyed Man is a pretty small part of the story – the journey belongs entirely to the Fox Woman – her anger, her longing, her choices, her consequences. It holds at its heart a crystal truth about moving through life; about what a person should tolerate, and what they cannot. It’s about ageing, changing, desire, belonging and peace. It’s vast and it’s wild.

The Siberian stories are strong. I’m currently reading The Turnip Princess by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth: 72 folktales and fairy stories collected roughly in parallel to the Grimms, then lost for over a century in a city archive. As with my recent reading of some Russian stories, I’ve been struck by how many of them are structurally quite weak; elements appear at random with successions of unconvincing ‘and thens’ disconnected from what’s already happened. What I admire in the Siberian stories (as with Inuit stories) is that most elements of the story happen because of something else – the magic remains wild and vital, but the threads of story are causal and connected, rather than consecutive – at times almost random. As a side note, it’s fascinating to see the movement of stories through time and place – there are quite obviously elements of Grimms throughout The Turnip Princess, then what crops up but half of Three Golden Heads Of The Well? (Another story high on my list to learn.)

I’m off topic. Back to Siberia. The stories are rich in blood and fat and sinew. Eating, not eating; animals that talk to people; the Moon sneaking down by night to steal a bride; clayman, raven, elk. Animals are completely and vitally integrated with people – survival depends on food, and food is meat, and meat is animals, and animals is hunting. This is the prism through which almost every story plays out; from the mythic to the domestic, tales of tooth and blade and fur and fire. Odd thing for a vegetarian to say, but count me in. I’m there.

Telling The Fox Woman went well, I think, I hope. Ten of us met in an old Quaker graveyard high on Fellside, looking out across the town, with a large ginger cat slinking through the long grass, and the last of the summer swifts high overhead, and a robin ferreting through wild blackberries. I brought in repeated motifs to bookend the story, and that seemed to go well; one of the jokes didn’t land at all, but the other landed superbly. I extended the scene with the baskets of skins, which felt to me to make sense to the story, and I removed the scene with the reflection in the pool. I managed not to rush – to slow down and relish the flow of words. I’m increasingly drawing on my well of prose and poetry when conjuring the images. I still have a very long way to go in using my body and voice and face, and this is something to work on.

Next telling is at the Brewery open mic supporting Rose Condo – either a Zen koan called Two Tigers & A Strawberry or Queen Albine, depending on how angry I am on the night about English nationalism. Chances are I’ll be quite angry.

Elbow / King Creosote

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Well I don’t know. You wait six months for a gig then two come along at once. Two concerts in two weeks for me and Mon – first King Creosote at the Brewery, and then Elbow at Castlefield Bowl in Manchester. Two very different performances united by virtue of being bloody wonderful.

King Creosote was in the Brewery’s biggest space, the theatre, but also incredibly intimate by virtue of us being on the front row and in actual touching distance of the stage:

Kenny played loads from his FIFTIETH studio record I Des and a handful of classics, and it was brilliant – I especially loved Burial Bleak. His creativity and relentless curiosity were in full play. Props also to his ‘support act’ – alter ego KY-10 – half an hour of ambient techno and spoken word – the story of a seagull called Hrafn meeting with the ocean through the medium of jellyfish. Energising and enchanting and totally transporting.

Elbow was a different sort of thing – we drove down to Manchester and stayed the night as an early birthday present. This was our second time at Castlefield Bowl (after Bloc Party a few years ago) and we were once more blessed with glorious sunshine. Support act The Slow Readers Club were strong – they were new to me, but on the same sonic spectrum as Editors/Future Islands/Joy Division. Elbow emerged at sunset and played two hours of absolute belters. I was moved to tears by penultimate tune My Sad Captains; one of my favourites, and the song I used as a lullaby when my children were young enough to want such things.

Oh, long before
You and I were born
Others beat these benches with their empty cups
To the night – and its stars
To be here and now, and who we are
Another sunrise with my sad captains
With who I choose to lose my mind
And if it’s so we only pass this way but once…
What a perfect waste of time

.

The Talking Skull

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

A quick storytelling post on the back of another Verbalise at the Brewery Arts Centre. The slots are 4 minutes, and I’d struggled to find a piece I liked that fit that time frame – despite having loads at 1-2 minutes and several at 5-6 minutes. Eventually I settled on The Talking Skull; originally from Cameroon, I think, and a story I’d known for a long time before I started telling any myself – and one I heard completely reinvented by Nick Hennessey when I was on the storytelling course.

While keeping the structure the same, Nick moved the action to the gibbets and heaths of old England, bookending it with singing and drums and a clutch of corbies. I’m nowhere near drumming and I’ll never be a singer, but his translocation of the story was so deft and absolutely something to learn from. I shifted mine to the mosses of south Lakeland and used a Baron of Kendal for the villain. It’s a fantastic wee piece and I loved telling it – and I loved exploring how the bones of a story can hang with different skins. That’s something to remember.

My son drew the backdrop for the projector – much obliged that lad – and many thanks to Ann The Poet for the photo.

Autopsy by Brian Turner

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I’ve just rediscovered this – posted on Youtube almost 10 years ago (!) for my friend Kirstin who teaches English at secondary school. She asked loads of her friends to record their favourite poems for her class, and this was my choice: the shattering Autopsy by Brian Turner. I don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time, but I’m very happy to do so now: