Bits and pieces

It appears that I haven’t posted anything here for three months, which is a bit of a shock to me – especially since ‘Write blog entry’ appears on my to-do list every week.

It’s a reflection of the fact that work has taken up an increasing amount of my time and – equally significantly – energy in recent months. As a result, I haven’t done a great deal of creative writing, and my new novel has stalled at chapter 7.

I will get back to it in due course, but in the meantime I have got a couple of things coming out this autumn. One is a contribution to an anthology of new writing about Watford FC that will be published at the start of the new season. It’s an extension of the sort of thing I write on my other blog, but much longer  – around 5,000 words – and more nakedly autobiographical. I’ll be interested to see how it fits in with the other pieces in the book.

The other is much shorter – a song which will appear on the new album by Blue Angel in the autumn. As I wrote last year, my friend Jason suggested I try writing some lyrics for him to put to music for a solo project he was working on. He also sent me a tune with a title but no words, and asked if I could supply something suitable. I took his title (‘The colour of summer’) and ran with it, and it’s this song that he and his collaborators have recorded for the Blue Angel album. I can’t wait to hear it.

More details on both projects when I have them.

Full circle

The first poems I wrote, back when I was 17 or 18, were really song lyrics, or as good as, with regular rhythms and simple rhyme schemes. That’s not surprising, really, as I’d been listening to pop and rock music for years, whereas the only poetry I’d read up to that point was centuries-old (notably the work of the metaphysical poets, which I studied for A level) that was never going to be an influence on my writing.

Gradually, as I read more 20th-century poetry, my own poems became correspondingly more modern, sometimes even verging on the oblique. Not that I was afraid to rhyme when the poem called for it, unlike some of the poets at the workshop I attended weekly for the best part of 10 years, who regarded a rhyme in the same way as a vampire regards a stake.

Towards the end of that time, I finally settled on a voice, and a style, that I was happy with. I started telling stories in my poems, assuming the voices of characters rather than expressing my own personal concerns, and it felt right. It also helped to confirm my feeling that I was ready to start writing ‘proper’ stories, in the form of novels, and I left poetry behind when I did so.

Now that I’m working on song lyrics (as I explained in a recent post), it feels like I’m combining both extremes of my poetry years. I’m writing verses and choruses with strong rhythms and rhymes, but in those verses and choruses I’m telling stories about characters. That’s a challenge in itself, because it’s hard to tell a story in three verses, or three and a half minutes.

Thinking about it, maybe I should dig out my old notebooks and see if there’s anything I can use from my teenage poems… Then again, no. Best let sleeping dogs lie.

Buddy, can you spare a song?

I haven’t had a great deal of time to work on my latest novel recently, but I have been experimenting with a different kind of writing: song lyrics.

This came about because my friend Jason, a talented singer-songwriter, mentioned that he was thinking of writing some new songs on the guitar. (He also writes and records electronic music as part of the duo Blue Angel.) He said he’d always written his own lyrics before, and he thought it would be interesting to sing someone else’s. As a writer, would I be interested in coming up with something for him?

As it happens, I used to write a lot of poetry, and I was a regular attendee at poetry workshops and readings for most of my 20s. Then I decided I was ready to start writing fiction, which was where (I was pretty sure) my true talent lay, and gave up poetry as a distraction. I never wrote song lyrics per se, but that was mainly because I couldn’t put them to music myself and didn’t know anyone who’d be interested in doing so for me. As a music fan, I’ve always like the idea of being a lyric writer.

So now I’m getting back in touch with a much more concise form of writing than fiction, and one where rhythm is a central concern. I’ve also been consulting my old rhyming dictionary for the first time in many years. It’s challenging, like using a muscle you haven’t exercised for a long time, but a lot of fun too. Of course, it may not come to anything – but in my head, I’m already writing my acceptance speech for when I win an Ivor Novello award...