Group Notes: Writing for Change February 2025

What we need to write

Huge apologies for the delay in sending this out - after we met I had a busy couple of days and then swanned off to Prague for the launch of Give Birth like a Feminist in Czech, as you do!! I’d never been to Prague so I took the chance to stay for four nights, and I had a lovely time exploring the city and even travelling out for a day to another city in the CR, Kutna Hora. Now I’m back and it all feels like a bit of a dream… I’m sure I’ll write more about it once the travelling dust has settled…

Meanwhile, a belated thanks to everyone who came to this month’s session of Writing for Change. We explored the idea of ‘what we need to write’ (in both meanings of the phrase). Next month we will meet on Thursday 27th March and the plan is to focus on pitching to papers. This session will be helpful in terms of honing ideas and ‘getting to the point’, even if you don’t fancy the idea of actually getting your writing published by a paper / website etc! I’ll send out more info nearer the time, though, but for now, here’s a summary of the Feb session as an aide memoire for those who attended - and you can still try out the writing exercises on your tod if you didn’t make it…

So at the start I shared a few thoughts about ‘what we need to write’ and how the session was inspired by a few things, first and foremost the terrific amount of writing advice I’d seen floating around on substack notes recently, and how sometimes, seeing other people’s tremendous writing cabins in the woods or hearing about how they make copious notes in their set of alphabetised leather bound notebooks each morning, can sometimes be counter-productive, making us feel like we are not ‘proper writers’ if our ‘routine’ is not really a ‘routine’ at all, but something more chaotic and haphazard. I wondered if there is something in there about women writing, too, because we often have to write in the margins of motherhood, and often don’t have that mythical ‘room of one’s own’.

I read you a poem, An Argument with Wordsworth, by Wendy Cope.

“Poetry ... takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”
(Preface to the *Lyrical Ballads* )

People are always quoting that and all of them seem to agree
And it's probably most unwise to admit that it's different for me.
I have emotion - no one who knows me could fail to detect it -
But there's a serious shortage of tranquillity in which to recollect it.
So this is my contribution to the theoretical debate:
Sometimes poetry is emotion recollected in a highly emotional state.

I wondered, do we have to have certain things in place before we feel we can write? And could this sometimes be a way of self-sabotage, of blaming external factors for our lack of output? “If only I had the perfect desk / room / pen / notebook / tranquility” etc. But maybe that’s never going to happen for us, and we have to write anyway.

Exercise 1: ten mins.

“What I need to write” (in the first meaning or sense of the phrase).

We then all talked about this, then had a break, and then…

Exercise 2: ten mins.

“What I need to write” (in the second meaning, as in what I need to write about, what I need to get written).

We then reflected on the session overall:

• Am I writing what I need to write about?

• Am I waiting for something to be in place before I write? (something physical like the right equipment, something psychological like permission or confidence)

• And what do I need to do about all of this?

I’ll leave you with something else I mentioned in our session - Stephen King’s sarky take on writing retreats. I particularly like the line about the oyster, and I definitely feel that sometimes the chaos of life, in my case with three children, is actually good for my writing rather than getting in the way of it, as he articulates so well here…

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From On Writing.

In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s wonderful tragicomic novel East is East, there is a description of a writer’s colony in the woods that struck me as fairy-tale perfect. Each attendee has his or her own little cabin where he or she supposedly spends the day writing. At noon, a waiter from the main lodge brings these fledgling Hemingways and Cathers a box lunch and puts it on the front stoop of the cottage. Very quietly puts it on the stoop, so as not to disturb the creative trance of the cabin’s occupant. One room of each cabin is the writing room. In the other is a cot for that all-important afternoon nap….or, perhaps, for a revivifying bounce with one of the other attendees.

In the evening, all members of the colony gather in the lodge for dinner and intoxicating conversation with the writers in residence. Later, before a roaring fire in the parlor, marshmallows are toasted, popcorn is popped, wine is drunk, and the stories of the colony attendees are read aloud and then critiqued.

To me this sounds like an absolutely enchanted writing environment. I especially liked the part about having. your lunch left at the front door. I imagine it appealed because it’s so far from my own experience, where the creative flow is apt to be stopped at any moment by a message from my wife that the toilet is plugged up and would I try to fix it, or a call from the office telling me that I’m in imminent danger of blowing yet another dental appointment. At times like that I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece.

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. And the larger the work looms in my day - the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna - the more problematic it can become. One serious problem with writers’ workshops is that I hafta becomes the rule. You didn’t come, after all, to wander lonely as a cloud, experiencing the beauty of the woods or the grandeur of the mountains. You’re supposed to be writing, dammit, if only so that your colleagues will have something to critique as they toast their goddam marshmallows there in the main lodge. When, on the other hand, making sure the kid gets to his basketball camp on time is very bit as important as your work in progress, there’s a lot less pressure to produce.

And what about those critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter’s story, someone may say. It had something…as sense of I don’t know…there’s a loving kind of you know…I can’t exactly describe it.

Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.

And instead of pelting those babbling iditos with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can’t describe, you might just be, I don’t know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

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I hope you enjoyed his dry sense of humour, for me it reminded me so much of my Canadian dad, who I must also write about one of these days (maybe if I just go to a cabin in the woods, I’ll get around to it).

See you next time xx