Category Archives: Notes on Craft

The Four Elements of Writing

by Andrew | Leave a comment

In workshops and editorial mentoring I often use a Four Elements practice. It combines an intuitive sense of creativity with a practical grasp of craft and technique to offer a fresh way of looking at writing. I am planning online Four Elements workshops for the near future, so I thought it would be an idea to describe this in more detail.

I started exploring the Four Elements shortly after I moved back to London and began to focus my editorial work on developmental editing alongside teaching creative writing.

Something that often comes up with early drafts is that the writing often seems overthought, or cluttered; it can feel self-conscious, as if it is trying too hard, and it perhaps lacks ease of expression, or vigour, even though the basic idea might be a strong one. I wanted to help writers find approaches that would be more intuitive, growing naturally out of their own inspirations and taking shape authentically in ways that connect with readers. I felt that instead of thinking so much about writing, we need to find ways to feel our way into writing and also bring in other dimensions of experience. I usually invoke Ray Bradbury, who in ‘Zen in the Art of Writing’ tells us that a basic mantra of writing is: Don’t Think.

This of course presents something of a paradox, given that the very medium we work in as writers – words – requires some degree of cognition and thinking. And we also need to think through possibilities that help us in the task of Don’t Thinking!

There are numerous ways to approach Don’t Thinking, in fact. I’ve studied and taught creative writing at Naropa University, the birthplace of the modern mindfulness movement, and have a strong grounding in contemplative approaches in the arts. The simple task of slowing down and paying attention to the everyday and listening to yourself are strong foundations for any creative practice. I’m also a big fan of Natalie Goldberg, and her Writing Down the Bones and her emphasis on free writing have been a profound influence on my teaching.

I also began to explore the distinction between the left and right sides of the brain, for example through the work of artist-teachers Lynda Barry and Betty Edwards. Though the two hemispheres of the brain are interconnected, the left side is associated with verbal and analytic skills – words, numbers, and structures – while the right is linked with visual and perceptual skills and with intuition. We could perhaps say that some of those overthought manuscripts are a bit too left-brained, and could gain from opening up more of the right side – though we don’t do brain surgery in Four Elements workshops; we just consider these ideas about the brain as a symbolic framework.

I took myself in other directions too, particularly when I signed up for a class in tarot at Treadwell’s bookshop at its old location in Covent Garden. I was already familiar with the symbolism of the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana, which offer powerful archetypes for storytelling, such as the Fool starting on his Journey, the mentor figure of the Magician, and the unexpected reversals of the Wheel of Fortune.

I now found myself drawn to the four suits of the Minor Arcana, with their elemental associations: Fire (Wands), Water (Cups), Earth (Pentacles), and Air (Swords). I began to explore the meanings and associations of the Four Elements in greater depth, and started to understand the range of their value to writers and artists. Through time they have come to play an important role in my teaching as well as my editorial work.

Sometimes it helps to focus on the elements individually, and sometimes to consider them in combination.

Fire is associated with energy, with the vital spark that brings writing to life and keeps it burning until the last word – we can think of this as the fuel for our writing, which can resonate in every sentence. I particularly associate fire with intention and theme: what are the ideas that inspire your writing, the passions that compel you to write? What do you want to achieve in your work? Sometimes, politics is involved in some way or other – and if it isn’t, what might that lack say? Paying closer attention to the craft of writing, I relate fire to developing the voice as an instinctively grown vehicle energising our stories. I talk about syntax, especially how we select grammatical subjects and verbs for the ways they can bring pace and charge to our sentences. I also like to think about the energy created through the conflicts, reveals and twists of dynamic plotting. What are the drivers of your story?

Water is related to the world of emotion. What does the writing make a reader feel? How does it move the reader? What lasting impression does it leave? I particularly relate this to the ways in which writers craft the inner lives of characters and work with point of view. On a sentence level, I consider how we can shift the tone with, for example, word choice, pronouns, repetition, rhythm, or sentence variety – the music in our writing.

Earth represents the material realm of experience, and its embodiment in words. Settings and the outer worlds of characters are obvious associations for earth: how are the sense perceptions that bring them to life evoked on the page: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures? Also, how does the story move forward with action and gesture (we bring in some fire here too), and what might be the roles in the writing, for example, of bodies and spaces, or sex and violence? I also pay attention to the grounding power of nouns relative to the moving energy of verbs.

I often discuss the practicalities of publishing and making a living as a writer as earthly concerns too.

Air brings us back to thinking and the world of mental formations – not as cluttered or overthought writing, but for its clarity of expression and ideas. I usually talk about the strength of its organisation: narrative structure, and the shape or form of the piece (here also bringing in some earth). And I often discuss symbolism and figures of speech, and return to theme: how has that initial spark of inspiration developed a consistent focus throughout the piece? What does the writing shed light on?

The Four Elements is a dynamic system. Elements do not work alone, but need to be cultivated in balance, and different pieces of writing emphasise different elements. A punk song might be all fire, whereas a boyband ballad might be a blend of water and earth (lots of feeeeelings, and the promise of S E X).

When reading manuscripts, I often think about the balance of the Four Elements too – even if I end up translating this into a different language for the uninitiated! For example, I can think of unpublished works of fantasy and science fiction that were really strong in their world-building and high concepts (earth and air), but lacked pace and emotional connection (fire and water) – they didn’t work so well as a story, but felt static, like a tableau. And sometimes intention (fire) is not apparent beyond an insistent urge to write about a particular topic, and focus and clarity emerge with a structured writing practice (air) that helps to fan those flames and stop them going out; writing prompts and exercises can also add layers of emotional depth (water).

In Everyday Magic and other Four Elements workshops I’ve taught at Words Away and elsewhere, we put these ideas into practice with readings and discussion as well as meditations and, of course, prompts and writing experiments. Writers seem to appreciate the new lens through which they can see their writing and experience it as a felt practice. Breakthroughs occur – writers often know at a subconscious level what needs attention, and a fresh approach that emphasises intuition helps them to experience their writing beyond just thinking about it or going round in circles or scrolling down a screen.

I should stress that in this context of writing and teaching we don’t dwell on the fortune-telling reputation of tarot; I know some people are spooked by esoteric practices, or have backgrounds in religious traditions that perceive the tarot as dangerous – in which case perhaps I should have put this paragraph at the very start to calm the fearful! And some writing friends have, I suspect, felt some of this is a bit woo woo and indulgent, with Andrew entertaining his inner hippie a bit too much. But, in fact, I no longer hide or qualify this; many, many people in creative and artistic fields have a deep-seated curiosity or experience with tarot or other fields such as astrology or the Kabbalah, and are open to their power as intuitive tools.

And, importantly, the arts need ways in which we can explore creativity freely, beyond the market and the grasping for a book deal, and the Four Elements offers a practical framework that is open to personal interpretation and meaning. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of ecological literature, and I’ve been finding the Four Elements resonating (of course!) in wonderful books such as Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

(That thing about grasping for a book deal. I mean: yes, we want you to get published. But I propose that that comes simply from writing a book that someone wants to read, and so often that sort of energy – that fire – is transmitted by an authentic book that is written from the heart rather than an agent or editor’s second-guessing of the market.)

In fact the Four Elements have a much wider reach than esoteric fields. The Four Elements appear in both classical and medieval philosophy. Then we also have the four humours and the four temperaments, and let’s not forget the four winds, the four gospels, and the four seasons (reinterpreted for literary studies by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism).

Traces of the Four Elements can also be found in fields of psychology. The questions in Myers-Briggs tests, for example, ascertain how you make decisions or interact with other people: At parties do you enjoy getting into the action on the dance floor (fire), or do you prefer to have intellectual discussions one on one over a glass of Merlot in the kitchen (air)? And, notably, Carl Jung’s ideas about the quaternity identifies the four psychic functions of intuiting, feeling, sensing and thinking, which roughly correspond with the values of fire, water, earth, and air.

And of course there are many other systems of working symbolically. Buddhists add to the four a fifth element – Space – while the Chinese have a Five Elements philosophy too, though the elements are different ones: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Seven chakras are found in Indian culture. I also invite writers to think in terms of other frameworks: how might you find qualities of animal, vegetable or mineral in your writing? External categories do not need to define us, but are structures that help us in looking at the world – so why not make your own?

Perhaps consider your own intuitive powers: if you are a cook, for example, how might you relate to your writing in terms of ingredients (veggies, sugars, raising agents), method (baking, slow-cooking, flash-fry), presentation and form (snack, midweek meal, tasting menu, banquet). Writers will usually find strength from working with points of reference they respond to intuitively.

Whichever symbolic system you follow, it will possess its own alchemy – your capacity to create something from your own creative spirit. I like the simple balance of the Four Elements – and also the fact that four different qualities are about the most I can hold in my head at one time.

I often hold workshops and masterclasses in person and online too – some draw on aspects of the Four Elements, and some have more of a craft focus. If you are interested, subscribe to my blog or drop me a line via my Contact page.

And if you’d like to explore the Four Elements in your own writing, take a look at this simple exercise: Looking For The Four Elements. Or try one of these specific exercises devoted to Fire, Water, Earth, or Air. Or try some Field Work.

You can also read this interview about the Four Elements practice.

 

I Never …

by Andrew | Leave a comment

As a writing experiment, use the prompt I never … to write a list-based piece exploring the inner and outer lives for a main character, starting every sentence with the phrase I never. Write for ten minutes, making this a free write, keeping the pen moving and seeing what comes up; if you find yourself halting or drying up, just write I never … again and let a fresh association surface for your character. Try to include specific and concrete references: project inner feelings on to physical objects, introduce particular settings, make detailed references to other characters, create complications.

I do recommend writing by hand for that organic connection between pen and paper and body and soul. But too sometimes a keyboard works better for some writers – comes naturally. And sometimes we get cramps in our hands, or our writing is slower than our thoughts – though too there’s no harm in slowing down occasionally. Explore, perhaps, and do whatever works for you.

In this instance, think about the choice of the word never, which is often used in contexts related to regret or loss or lack or failings or yearnings on the part of character: super plot drivers. You could even make the nevers a list of blatant denials (lies). What surfaces often goes to the heart of your character’s plottings.

Also: the list form has distinctive effects.

It comes easy, and has a cadence and a rhythm.

It enjoys the simple forward-moving power of the right-branching syntax of everyday speech; variations in the patterning of the sentence can add emphasis and curiosity.

The repetition has a powerful insistence that digs deep into your character’s basic drives, subconsciously drawing on instinct instead of depending on overly thought-out writing.

The list is a straightforward form to write, too – once you run out of something to say about a particular never, you can start a new sentence and find something else. Lean into the scaffolding you have created.

I have posted elsewhere about the particular charge of the list as a form: Variations on the Form of I Remember.

You can also use similar power prompts such as

  • I remember …
  • I don’t remember …
  • I want …
  • I don’t want …
  • I know …
  • I must …
  • I should …
  • I need …
  • I will …
  • I can …
  • If I …
  • When I …

Some of them (I never, I don’t remember, I don’t want) have a tendency of drawing on darker material – what Natalie Goldberg might says ‘pulls in the shadow’, which as Natalie says can be the real ‘juice’ in writing.

Repeat variations of this exercise for your character on different occasions. Maybe try these for ten minutes every day for a week. Let this character’s urges and insistences inhabit you for the whole week. Then, making this a practice, in following weeks repeat these exercises for other characters. See what surfaces. Then take this material into your story.

You could also do simply for yourself as personal writing that might – or might not – feed another creative project.

This is a useful exercise to carry out as part of your planning or alongside your drafting, or perhaps if you are getting stuck in your writing. It’s helpful with plotting – I used this in a couple of plotting workshops for The Literary Consultancy this week. Such simple prompts can really help with the sorts of primal work that writing often needs, that digging for fossils that Stephen King describes in On Writing.

I also think about Anna Burns talking about her instinctive writing process and discussing it in this interview.

And another powerful use of the list structure is Zoe Leonard’s remarkable I Want A President, which I used recently in a Finding Your Fire workshop for tapping into and expressing our intention in writing. Note the effects of repetition and variation – the emphasis, the accumulations; the POWER.

I always love to hear about those ways into writing that come natural, come easy (well, I should qualify that: we do have to do the work of showing up, which isn’t always easy). Prompts such as these often raise things that nudge our characters into the sorts of situations that make for good plots.

Meanwhile, on an entirely other note: pictures of tulips, above, as it’s already time to think about which ones to order for delivery in the autumn … I think that is Ballerina with, I think, Queen of the Night?

Revising and Editing Zalon

by Andrew | Leave a comment

The Zalon: what a great idea for Kellie Jackson to take her Words Away salons online with Zoom.

I was the guest at Monday night’s inaugural Zalon, when over 80 writers of the ever widening Words Away community (now playing simultaneously in California and Oregon and Portugal) showed up to discuss Revising and Editing.

Some things we talked about:

* The distinction between plotters and pantsers is one I don’t really believe in: any writing needs both planning and freer-style composition.

* And while we are at it, can I add that I truly loathe the words pantser and pantsing? They feel like demeaning descriptions for an intuitive and exploratory stage in writing.

* First drafts are not shitty, but precious – even if Anne Lamott’s essay ‘Shitty First Drafts’ is essential reading. No draft along the way is shitty if it gets you where you have to be: again, why cloud your thinking about your early forays with such negative terminology?

* Editing is just as creative as writing your first draft: a holistic approach.

* Clarify your intention: decide what the pay-off will be – for you in the writing, and for the reader in the reading.

* Really take the time to take stock of your narrative content (characters, settings, dramatic situations), and work out what’s at stake before you dive into detailed and committed work on narrative style and form – unless, of course, style and form are what’s really at stake, i.e., they contribute significantly to the pay-off. To help, sometimes it makes sense to do exploratory work on the side, away from the main body of your manuscript: writing experiments, freewriting, journal writing, reading.

* Understand the difference between writing and publishing. Something else I forgot to say: much about revising is about technique – commanding craft in ways that gives your writing greater energy and force. But, too, much in publishing is about taste, however much you polish your manuscript. If you are interested in being published, agents and editors will be assessing your writing based on personal preferences and fashions too.

* It really helps to find trusted readers with whom to exchange work: writing partners or writing groups. Not only do you get a fresh pair of eyes on your writing, but you develop editorial skills to bring back to your own work too. I wish there were a good place for writers seeking writing partners to meet, but social media often provides a starting point. To be revisited …

* Something I never got to say: of course we proofread our cover letters and submissions, but doesn’t it get a bit prissy and gatekeepery when, during presentations to budding authors, agents and editors scold writers about typos? Of course we know we have to proofread our work! But in the age of the autocorrect even the best of us make ducking mistakes. And we have to save something for the ducking copyeditor, don’t we?!

Be professional, of course. But to me it is far more important to pay attention to: not being boring, and writing something that makes us want to READ ON. When I am reading a cover letter or synopsis, I’m looking for signs of life, not carefully chilled prose.

Things I find more of a turn-off: comma splices and run-on sentences (which unless you’re writing stream of consciousness can suggest a lack of clear thinking): convoluted syntax; opaque writing (a catch-all term for many forms of dull prose); writers who are looking for ‘a blueprint for publication’ (a big red flag for me – my usual reply being ‘Sorry, I’m busy for the coming year slash rest of my life’).

Thanks again to Kellie for asking me along – I look forward to attending other Zalons, which are a great way of sustaining connection and community while we are forced to stay at home.

I hope to run an online course on revising and self-editing later this year – subscribe to my blog if you’d like information in due course.

 

Blog posts on revising and editing
The posts linked below describe in more detail exercises useful in revising as well as other practical tips for drafting:

Revising: A Craft Checklist

Suggestions For Self-Editing – various practical tips

Childhood Revisitations – a writing experiment I mentioned in the Zalon

A Gift on Every Page – including a few ideas for formatting your manuscript for reading and editing your own work

The Retype Draft

Spring Clean-up – thinking symbolically about revising, in this case using analogies from gardening

Great Annotations

Working With Feedback on Your Writing

Tell Me A Story and A Book Is Not A Film – popular posts on my blog about choices in narrative style, which are often important decisions during revising

Rejected, Or Declined?

When Does A Writer Need An Editor?

Definitions of Editing: Structural Editing; Copyediting; Proofreading – a series of posts describing editing from the points of view of both writers and publishing professionals

 

Resources and books useful for revising that I mentioned (or meant to)
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Stephen King, On Writing
Nina Schuyler, How to Write Stunning Sentences
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (a great exercise: applying its ideas to a favourite book or a work that somehow influences your own writing)
Ronald Tobias, 20 Master Plots
Susan Bell, The Artful Edit
Scott Pack, Tips From A Publisher: A Guide to Writing, Editing, Submitting and Publishing Your Book  (which includes an excellent discussion of models of publishing – not directly relevant to revising quite yet, but a context all authors need to grasp)

 

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (and Life)

by Andrew | 2 Comments

I’m interested in ideas about story that deviate from the usual nagging about conflict – ‘Where’s the conflict?’ ‘This narrative arc lacks conflict’ etc., etc. The idea of conflict works well for many books, and especially for the visual media of films and plays. But too conflict can account for an awful lot of formulaic writing. I often raise this matter in workshops, quoting St Ursula from her classic writing guide Steering the Craft.

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is an essay by Ursula Le Guin that explores some of these ideas in more detail. It has recently been republished in a bijou volume by Ignota Books. Le Guin posits that ‘the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story’, even if the hero has frequently taken it over. She critiques the linear ‘Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’ where fiction is embodied as ‘triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now)’.

For Le Guin, that sort of story is represented by weapons – ‘long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing’. The killer story.

Instead, Le Guin proposes a different object to represent the novel, and opens a space to discuss a different type of story: the life story.

The daughter of eminent anthropologists, Le Guin draws on the idea that the earliest cultural invention was a container that held items that had been gathered: ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ The mammoth hunters might ‘spectacularly occupy’ cave paintings, but in reality it was the gatherers of seeds and nuts and leaves and berries who provided most of the food consumed in prehistoric times (they worked less hard than we do today, apparently). Thus we reach the Carrier Bag Theory:

A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

And working out the nature of the things held in that container often relies on something other than resolving conflicts, or even finding them in the first place. This container (or life story) can be ‘full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand’. For writers, negotiating the nature of those relationships within the life story often forces us to dig deeper in the writing, drawing out greater feeling and purpose as we interrogate connections.

I relate this to something Ocean Vuong says in a 2019 podcast, where he is critical of the dominance of conflict-driven plots in the conventions of creative writing:

The way we move through the world … tension and drama happen simply by proximity. The way chemistry works, you have oxygen and hydrogen: fine on their own. Put them side by side and all of a sudden: water.

I often prefer to look for tension rather than conflict in writing – a subtle difference, I feel. The tension of anticipation: what’s coming out of the bag next? The tension of loss: how will what’s left behind adapt when we take something out of the container? The tension of newness: what happens when we add something to our bag of tricks? 

Such questions are, I feel, often more interesting and sustaining than asking who’s fighting who, or demanding an inner conflict. Warfare is soooo 20th century, after all, and don’t we have enough neurosis already – do we really need to add more?!

I jest – but only a little. Conflicts and inner turmoil are the substance of many of our stories. I’m just inclined to think they are often not enough, and that we emphasise conflict at the expense of other things and at the risk of creating further conflict in the world.

My friend Bhanu Kapil gave me a copy of Carrier Bag Theory as a gift as we sat in the café in Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road just after Christmas; what a different world that now seems! This great epic we currently find ourselves in – a vast public health crisis with the potential for economic calamity – could be framed as a war against a virus, and certain politicians and pointless rentagobs are certainly playing to type as their first close-minded response is to cast blame at other politicians or at people from other countries. 

But in truth, isn’t the best resolution to such a crisis not one based in conflict but one that relies on cooperation? See Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US in the 1930s. See the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War. See the foundation of the National Health Service in the postwar era. See the GI Bill. See the ingenuity and expertise of scientists collaborating in the creation of a vaccine. See the sacrifice and public-spiritedness of health workers and supermarket staff and community volunteers. These are not stories whose primary drive is conflict. These stories have a utopian impulse, and require kindness and openness and truth (and certainly not spin or lies). These stories require imagination.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is a short book, and the Ignota edition adds a scintillating preface from the publishers Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, as well as illustrations. It also has French flaps! (We love French flaps.) It also includes a thought-provoking introduction by cultural theorist Donna Haraway, who tells the stories of three bags she has brought back from a trip to Colombia. One is embroidered, one is intricately knotted, one is crocheted, and all three carry the stories of the activists and artists and environmental campaigners and craftswomen she met there. For Haraway, each of these bags ‘grows from, and demands a response to, the urgent questions about how to tell stories that can help remake history for the kinds of living and dying that deserve thick presents and rich futures’.

Ursula Le Guin has touched on these ideas in several essays gathered in the collection Dancing at the Edge of the World, which is where I first read ‘Carrier Bag Theory’ (and thanks to Ignota for sending me back there). One very short essay, simply called ‘Conflict’, is critical of the ‘gladiatorial view of fiction’, and finds Le Guin asking us to locate the conflict in EM Forster’s classic definition of plot: ‘The King died and then the Queen died of grief’. She even questions whether the plot of War and Peace ‘can be in any useful or meaningful way reduced to “conflict,” or a series of “conflicts”?’

Another essay, ‘Heroes’, takes Le Guin’s critique of the conventions of heroism and heroic stories further. As the author of one of the greatest pieces of winter literature – the trek across the ice in The Left Hand of Darkness – Le Guin has long been fascinated by accounts of Antarctic exploration. But then she comes across an entry from Shackleton’s diary – ‘Man can only do his best. The strongest faces of Nature are arrayed against us’ – and she startles herself with an instinctive reaction: ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ 

What is false is the military image; what is foolish is the egoism; what is pernicious is the identification of ‘Nature’ as enemy … Nobody, nothing, ‘arrayed’ any ‘forces’ against Shackleton except Shackleton himself. He created an obstacle to conquer or an enemy to attack; attacked; and was defeated – by what? By himself, having himself created the situation in which his defeat could occur.

Plenty of stories have conflict to the max. I love looking at the Hero’s Journey. And I love horror movies and westerns and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the tortured psychodramas of Tennessee Williams.

But sometimes we need more than goodies and baddies, or triumph and defeat – not least as in someone’s defeat lies resentment and the seeds of future conflict.

We need life stories, as well as killer stories. We need truths. In storytelling, conflict is not enough.

 

Related posts and further reading/listening on storytelling and Ursula Le Guin

Plotting: Conflict, Complication, Curiosity, and Connection    – from my own blog

Only Connect – from my own blog

A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution – another take on this essay in Ploughshares; note how it particularly pays attention to an alternative cyclical view of time

A Novel is a Dark Bundle by Abi Andrews

Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Videogames by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Steering the Craft – my own review of the book on writing fiction that I recommend most frequently to writers.

Ursula Le Guin: Steering the Craft – interviewed by David Naimon for the Between the Covers podcast

The Worlds of Ursula Le Guin – tv documentary (on BBC iPlayer while/if you can get it)

Great Lives: Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin at 85

Ursula Le Guin at 80

A Whitewashed Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, Slate, 16 December 2004

 

 

Food in Writing

by Andrew | 1 Comment

On Sunday I taught for the first time at the Victoria and Albert Museum: a workshop on food in writing called Food: Bigger Than The Page.

We started off talking about food as a genre or genres (plural) of writing. Some books of food writing have an investigative or campaigning approach, such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and then there are works of food history such as Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England and Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

Someone also brought up the name of one of the great food writers: MFK Fisher. And I forgot, oops, to mention Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, which was inspired by the blog she wrote cooking her way through Julia Child’s classic cookbook – if you are interested in the publishing process, you might enjoy this piece from the publisher Knopf on The Making of … Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Moving on to the use of food in fiction and memoir, we discussed the role of food (and hunger) as symbol and driver of plot in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, then explored the part that food plays in activating memory, using Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Nigel Slater’s Toast.

Paying attention to the ways in which all five senses create images that bring writing to life, we listened to some poems by William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell and Meryl Pugh. (Meryl teaches popular courses at Morley College and the Poetry School, should you be interested.) Some of these poems celebrate food or everyday life in very straightforward ways, while others have more layered meanings.

And then, after a brief palate-cleansing meditation, we became hunter-gatherers: we created Word Hoards of our sense perceptions by getting intimate with mint and star anise and kiwi fruits, and carrots and lime-blossom tea, and a fancy tiny pear called Piqa Reo (Waitrose, we salute you – and you’ve even given us a further way to use the Q tile without a U in Scrabble) (though the lime-blossom came from Gaia in St Margarets – support your local indie!).

We then paid a visit to supermarkets in California with Allen Ginsberg and Armistead Maupin, and created some characters of our own by thinking about the ways in which food acts as a social marker.

We fitted in a snack-sized look at recipes in food with Heartburn by Nora Ephron (and Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel also got a mention here). And then we finished off by discussing recipes as a form for poems with ecopoet Jack Collom – something to try at home?

I had a lot of fun putting this workshop together – see the links and titles above and also below in the list of resources. Thanks to the V&A and everyone who came along – and especially to Stacy for thinking a writing workshop would be a good idea (I first met her when I attended a V&A book club for The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver – I’m going to tell myself that Frida Kahlo led me here). Thanks also to Michelle for the photos (and the kind words) below.

 

Further resources

Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter, eds., Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing

Mark Kurlansky, ed., Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing

Jill Foulston, ed., The Joy of Eating: The Virago Book of Food

Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food (practical advice on writing about food)

Diana Henry, What Goes On Behind The Scenes Of A Cookbook (for more about the creative and production processes, and Diana Henry is an inspired writer and cook too: I have enjoyed many of her recipes)

Lynda Barry, Syllabus and Making Comics (great on creativity – you might also enjoy this interview with the genius herself: at the least, watch the first five or ten minutes)

Plus, just because, a gorgeous piece of food/cookery writing on candied oranges I read earlier today.  (Will edit for candied oranges: a trade, anyone?!)

 

And before I go: as I type, I believe there might be one space left on the day-long Four Elements workshop Water Ways on 8 February, which explores how we evoke feeling in writing, and I’ll also be looking at food among other experiences of the earthly realm in Earth Works on 21 March. More info via the links at the Words Away website.

 

One of our frondy inspirations.

 

Such a grand setting!