Honesty can enhance your writing
17 June 2008
I was due to run a morning’s workshop at Airedale
High School, Castleford, last week [delightful and
fabulous kids by the way] and the teacher organising
the session, Lorna Hutchison, emailed me to say that
one of the school office staff, Susan [ a keen writer
who was going to take part in the workshop] had come
across a big feature on me in Writing Magazine.
This was a surprise; I had heard that I was going to be mentioned in the monthly periodical, but thought it might be a few sentences about my website and podcast. I popped into Leeds to look at a copy, intending just to glance at it perhaps, get a free ego-boost, and ended up buying four copies.
The writer Crysse Morrison, a friend, had based her article, in July’s issue of the magazine, on how honesty can enhance your writing . And she quoted from my story Exile, which appeared in Four Fathers, [published by Route], a few years back. In this collection of stories, four male writers write about their own fathers, and come to some conclusions about what can sometimes be a difficult relationship.
Crysse describes how I tackle the challenges of writing about my father, when she writes,
"From eighteen years of bruising encounters, just two are enough to show an essential truth about his childhood experience of fathering: the effect of violence and army life, and the underlying care so rarely expressed".
As a writing assignment, Exile was one of the most difficult I have ever undertaken; confronting some painful truths and memories about my younger self, made me squirm when I wrote about them. I literally relived some of those experiences as I typed them up on the screen. It wasn’t exactly writing for therapy, which can in itself be a positive and respectable outcome of writing, but writing to understand or make sense of the past.
It was so satisfying to have this struggle for honesty recognised in the article by Crysse Morrison [part of the generosity of spirit and fellow feeling that infuses most writers I know]. It was also good to have her praise for the quality of my writing, in the following,
"every word in this story is placed with deliberation, and every line crafted and pared to the bone’"
And why did I buy four copies of the magazine? Well some to show friends, and one, at least, in some subconscious part of me, to show my Dad, even though he has been dead for over twenty years.
It was after all Fathers’ Day on Sunday.
www.writingmagazine.co.uk
www.route-online.com
www.cryssemorrison.co.uk
This was a surprise; I had heard that I was going to be mentioned in the monthly periodical, but thought it might be a few sentences about my website and podcast. I popped into Leeds to look at a copy, intending just to glance at it perhaps, get a free ego-boost, and ended up buying four copies.
The writer Crysse Morrison, a friend, had based her article, in July’s issue of the magazine, on how honesty can enhance your writing . And she quoted from my story Exile, which appeared in Four Fathers, [published by Route], a few years back. In this collection of stories, four male writers write about their own fathers, and come to some conclusions about what can sometimes be a difficult relationship.
Crysse describes how I tackle the challenges of writing about my father, when she writes,
"From eighteen years of bruising encounters, just two are enough to show an essential truth about his childhood experience of fathering: the effect of violence and army life, and the underlying care so rarely expressed".
As a writing assignment, Exile was one of the most difficult I have ever undertaken; confronting some painful truths and memories about my younger self, made me squirm when I wrote about them. I literally relived some of those experiences as I typed them up on the screen. It wasn’t exactly writing for therapy, which can in itself be a positive and respectable outcome of writing, but writing to understand or make sense of the past.
It was so satisfying to have this struggle for honesty recognised in the article by Crysse Morrison [part of the generosity of spirit and fellow feeling that infuses most writers I know]. It was also good to have her praise for the quality of my writing, in the following,
"every word in this story is placed with deliberation, and every line crafted and pared to the bone’"
And why did I buy four copies of the magazine? Well some to show friends, and one, at least, in some subconscious part of me, to show my Dad, even though he has been dead for over twenty years.
It was after all Fathers’ Day on Sunday.
www.writingmagazine.co.uk
www.route-online.com
www.cryssemorrison.co.uk
