A Chink Of Light

tiptoeing towards the sparkle

Sea-sparkle at Walcott, Norfolk, 14 August 2024.

Hello and welcome, my lovely between the moons friends.

I have been pondering the process of writing, and trying to find ways of fooling my perfectionist self into ‘just starting’ without any thought of whether or not the scribbles will turn into anything I will be happy with or feel is worth sharing with others.

Now, I know I have posted before about my nature pages practice which is a technique for doing just that. Go for a walk - even a short urban walk will yield something interesting, I can almost guarantee - and as soon as possible afterwards fill a double page in a notebook with your memories and impressions and observations without reading back or even, preferably, taking your pen off the paper. (Of course, these guidelines can be adapted if you feel more comfortable working on a phone or laptop right from the start. You could limit yourself to three to five short paragraphs, for example.)

If you’re anything like me you will be amazed and pleased by what comes out. You can always type the piece out and neaten it later but here you have a dated - yes, make sure you do add the date - jewel-like vignette capturing one particular moment in one specific season that can never be exactly replicated. Even if you don’t read what you have written until years later it will have value - maybe especially so. Whether or not you see a practical use for it right away, you now have raw material to expand on, to extract a paragraph from to become a poem, or find a single line that feels like a mantra. The bottom line is that without even trying, you will have built a nature diary that you can refer to year after year to see when the swifts arrived or the date that you witnessed an otter playing in a local waterway.

As I said before, please don’t feel you’ve failed if - like I did - you promise yourself that as an incredibly simple practice you have to do it every single day and then, inevitably, you’re ill or the weather is awful or one of life’s challenges gets in the way. Like getting back onto a horse, just jump on again and you will be glad you didn’t give up entirely.

Well, this is all well and good, and I believe in my words.

But I have to admit I go through phases where I haven’t been out for a walk, or the walk is very much the same as the previous day, but I still need to write something. Often, I find it hard to start in case it’s not very good, by which I mean that it doesn’t sparkle like I feel it should in my mind’s eye.

I’ve tried several methods of getting out of my own way and just sitting down to write, and sometimes they work. Author Beth Kempton’s writing workshops are lovely (she has a free Summer Writing Sanctuary starting next Monday, 19 August if you’re interested) and she is a great believer in starting with a prompt and letting the words ‘spill’ as she would say. Prompts can certainly be helpful if they resonate, but still I hadn’t found a practice I could rely on and I didn’t know why, as it should be so easy to put pen to paper, even randomly, if you love to write.

‘Gather’ - summer herbs collected from the cottage garden.