Tag: Writing

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

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

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

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

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.

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:

The Six Blind Men & The Elephant

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

Another storytelling update! This week I told a story in school for the first time – popping down to tell The Six Blind Men & The Elephant to my son’s class, who are looking at Buddhism. It’s a lovely wee school and the kids were very welcoming, a string of high-fives lined up on the way in and the way out. I’d planned a straightforward telling with some questions to follow, but once we were in the moment I started calling on the kids for ideas of what the blind men thought of the different parts of the elephant. They loved getting involved, which is a lesson for future tellings. Afterwards we had a fantastic chat about the importance of sharing – and of knowing how other perspectives can deepen and strengthen our own knowledge – and then we went round the class, imagining how the bits of our own favourite animals might resemble something completely different. It was a lot of fun.

I was packing up when they asked me for another story, and their teacher kindly gave me the time to tell it. I shared Gobbleknoll, and this is where the fluidity of storytelling showed itself so marvellously – even as I was telling it, I sanitised the tale and teased out the bloodier elements – and I thought nothing of stopping to expand or explain something, even to spell out some words. My knowledge of the story and my prior tellings gave me the freedom to tell it for this particular audience on this particular day. That was exhilarating and wonderful and fun and right. The kids loved Rabbit and his stone shoes and his ears tied down. Gobbleknoll has nothing to do with Buddhism – I could have told The Vain Crane or The Tigers & The Strawberry – but it went over well.

I’m learning several more stories at the moment – Aioga, The Name, Three Golden Heads Of The Well – and more and more, I’m finding my own ideas and instincts stepping in. Adding a few words of description here, or a colour there – adjusting a clunky dynamic between two characters – expanding or reducing dialogue. A story is not a box with walls, but a gateway – a road.

I’m learning.

The Magic Bowls

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A quick post in celebration of communities, no matter how small: having finished my storytelling course back in March, I recently met up with my classmates for the first of an irregular and very informal story circle. We met at Kendal Castle towards the end of the heatwave, with just the thinnest edge of cold creeping into the evening. It seems to be a wonderful year for swifts, and a score or more of them barrelled overhead. I told The Magic Bowls, which I first heard on Jay Leeming’s superlative Crane Bag podcast, then later found another version online.

I’m understanding more and more the looseness and freedom of storytelling; to let the story find its own shape in the space between the teller and the audience. I added quite a lot about the man and his wife at the beginning, because I wanted more love and empathy than the written version suggests – I wanted him to have a reason to come home, rather than keep on walking. I invented descriptions for the tree spirits, with moss for hair and snailshell eyes. Jay’s version turns the burly men into barbers and I kept hold of that, because it’s perfect. I added some participation in the banquet scenes, calling on the audience for their favourite meals: ‘Yes! They had pizza there too, covered in basil and oozing mozzarella!’ Stories evolve. A storyteller needs to give them space to change and grow and flow.

I don’t know how long it took to tell The Magic Bowls – only that it was my longest piece so far, and by some distance. Perhaps 20 minutes? I probably could have timed it or something, but also: much of my joy in storytelling is how ephemeral it is. In a world where so many things are digital and pinned into pixels forever, I like the fleeting moments. I talked too fast at times I think. I need to learn to dwell in some images for longer, not least to vary the pace throughout. I reckon this will come with experience.

Our circle will meet again in a month or two – no idea what I’ll tell, but I’ve a huge list of stories to learn, stories that really sing to me; stories of trees and bees, stories of loss and belonging, and stories which might not be stories at all, half-images summoned from the depths of murky memory. Leviathans inside us all – born with stories already in the cords of our beings.

Gobbleknoll

~ simonsylvester ~ 3 Comments

.

There was a great grey lump of a hill that ate people…

…and Rabbit’s Grandmother told him never to go there, and Rabbit being Rabbit he went there as soon as he could, and he thundered his paw on the flank of that hill and called out, ‘Ho! Ho, Gobbleknoll! Open up! Show yourself! I want a word with you…’

…but Gobbleknoll knew Rabbit was trouble, and Gobbleknoll stayed shut.

So begins Gobbleknoll, a short folktale I came across in an Alan Garner collection and originally from the Sioux people. I performed it at the Brewery open mic last night, making for my first public telling, and first time performing since the Stealing Thunder storytelling course.

I added some bits and removed some bits – an extra beat in the middle, and a tweak to the end. Stories evolve. They flow like water from person to person to person, always changing and yet always water. I loved giving the story space to breathe – feeling it settle into the contours and corners of the room. It seemed to go over okay – lots of people spoke to me at the interval or after – most simply stating how good it was to hear a folktale. Adults aren’t given many opportunities to be children, and that’s one of the great gifts of storytelling. Storytelling shuts the door on the scream of life, if only for a moment.

Next up I’m reuniting with my peers from the story course… we’re forming informally, meeting irregularly in a circle to share new work. I’m preparing a story called The Magic Bowls for that one – it has the most wonderful twist.

Storytelling then. Feels like I’ve begun. If I get the chance, I’ll record my take on Gobbleknoll and pop the audio on here.

Open up.

I want a word with you.