Search

Sam van Zweden

Writer

Open Search

Please understand, this visit was not my idea.

Dear Delicate Progeny of Wonthaggi Secondary College,

Tomorrow we meet for a workshop on poetry writing. I hope you believe I know what I’m talking about, and understand that the unleashing of the artistic mashed potato inside of me was the idea of the English department, and not myself.

Having said this – I hope you appreciate the fact that I went to pains to show you brilliant things written by ’emerging’ young people, and I hope I do not confuse and scare you away from writing poetry forever more. I hope I can manage to make words more exciting than you thought they were, and I hope you take away at least one tiny thing that helps you look at your poetry differently. If I can manage that, it was worth it.

Regards,

Sam.

0

Word Play

I’ve been reading a bit lately about word play, and how important it is for kids. The many ways they (we) do it are fascinating.

I didn’t often play with words myself. I was a very careful child, I tiptoed around words until they were absolutely mastered. No word would leave my mouth until I’d thoroughly chewed on it and felt confident it would come out perfectly. My mum wondered if I was behind the other kids who uttered such adorable things as “pasghetti” and “amberlance” – I remember going to the doctor when I was about 5 for a regular check-up – I remember being at the doctor a lot as I was such a small kid. During this particular check-up they were talking about a heap of developmental stuff and he asked me to draw a person for him. I did, and he told my mum I was in front of the other kids my age, because I drew people with necks, which other 5 year olds apparently did not… So Mum felt better about my development, and I continued only spitting out fully-cooked words like “spaghetti” and “ambulance”.

One word I do remember playing with, though, is my Opa’s name.

I remember crawling under a bench in the shed – my grandparents were market farmers, and they had enormous sheds that smelled of earth and carrots.

I made a little song out of Opa’s name, crouched under the bench as he washed carrots. As I got splashed with water, I sang – “Opaaaa-ha-haaaa-ha-ha!” I sang it with such joy, letting out my gleeful little “ha-ha-ha!”s. Opa must have loved it, because he still asks me now if I remember singing his name, and he still remembers the tune I made up for it.

Next week I’m running a poetry workshop for year 9’s at my old high school. What I wish we could all keep, if only for the sake of poetry and writing, is the ability to play with words. To have fun and just let out our own joyous song, even when it’s nonsense.

1

Dressing Down

When the decorative parts of me
Are forced away from the world,
I am little more than
A shrivelled Christmas Tree.

0

Am I Hitler?

Papers turn to confetti in my hands.
You tear my words from end to end,
A scritching switching of sympathies
From the days behind us
When you stuck them to your forehead,
Like a game of Guess Who.
Celebrity Heads.
Always the same questions –
“Am I alive?”
“Am I an animal?”
“Am I Hitler?”
“Am I Hitler?”
“Am I Hitler?”
Back then, you never were,
But everything since has changed.
Now my words are confetti, which I throw in some delusional celebration
And there is nothing on your forehead
But creases.

0

Five Moments

All the blogs I read seem to be awash over the last few days with questions and ideas around writer’s block.

My favorite exercise to move the blockage is an exercise which distills my writing, or anything, into a series of five moments. What results is usually a little poem, like a still life.  I can use this to make a vomit draft into something different, or to move a piece I’m writing onto somewhere new. I always get ideas where my mind is forced to fill gaps, and this distilling seems to create much stronger images between the lines than any large slab of my writing ever does.

Today:

Walk in –
Leans into me.
Kiss his dream-sweat head
“Thai food?”
Leave.

1

Poetry Workshop

I was recently asked by an old teacher of mine to return to my high school for a day early in December and run a poetry workshop as an end-of-year activity. I thought about it for a while – 16 year olds can be harsh. How do you teach poetry? What if they don’t buy my “I-know-about-writing” act?

Eventually I accepted though.

Uni is finished for the semester. I’m waiting on a call or letter from RMIT, started this new job, writing… So my spare time now is all about this poetry workshop.

I think the best way to do it is by going through a few conventions/techniques, and attaching an example and an exercise to each. The session only goes for 90 minutes so I can’t get too far into things, but they’re young’uns so that’s probably good.

What I’m struggling with is what to use as examples. These kids are 16, I don’t remember what poetry I studied (if any) at that age. I’m thinking about using some Robert Adamson stuff as an example of the use of metaphor, he does that ridiculously well. Other than this, I’m a bit lost as to what to use.

So if anyone reading this here fine blog remembers what they studied in the way of poetry at the age of 16, please oh please comment and let me know. I’d really appreciate some direction, I’d hate to confuse these kids with non-accessible stuff and scare them off writing, or discussing it with the class…

 

S

5

The Aloneness and Togetherness of Writing

I apologise for the week-or-so-hiatus… I’m working on a rather large school assessment (the last for the year!), and am starting a new very hectic job on Thursday. I have also been asked to run a poetry workshop at my old high school for students going into VCE as an end-of-year activity. Besides all this, there are friends to be seen, gigs to be attended (one of which an upcoming blog will cover), HBO to be watched… So, in short, hours aren’t long enough for all I’m trying to get done.

I have, however, still found time to dip into The Reader

I’ve been thinking about what writing is, and has to be. And I’ve realised that it has to be something that happens both absolutely alone and surrounded by people… Let me explain.

Tiggy Johnson’s article, “Red Haze”, talks about the aloneness of writing, and she speaks about her personal struggle to balance writing life with family life – finding the alone-time, putting down only what really needs to be put down straight away, hoping you can ‘feel it’ when you come back to notes after the kids are all in bed. Tiggy’s writing career is a mesh of quality time with family, and stolen wee hours with words.

What got me about Tiggy’s article, though, was the way she’s haunted by ideas even after they’ve happened,
“I wrote the words on a train, hours ago, but they’re still cycling…”
I know this feeling too well. Waking up at 2.45am, just two lines in my head, telling myself ‘they can wait, they can wait!’  …but they never can, and then I’m up and scribbling before they get away from me. Sleep after this is impossible, because that was only two lines, the rest is yet to come.
This waking up at 2.45am and scribbling and laying awake, this writing on trains, this interruption of life by an idea, this is a very alone place to be. And it needs to be.

Steven Amsterdam is the very talented man who wrote this year’s The Age fiction book of the year. (Go him!). He also wrote an article for the reader, titled “The Workshop”, where he looks at the togetherness that’s needed to write effectively. He talks about how you tend to get in your head about it when you write alone.
I do this. I crawl up in the cavity next to my brain and hold my words close to my chest. Being in your head about your writing is fine, and great, but only really when you’re in the process of writing.
Steven talks about how he finds workshops absolutely necessary to pull him out of his head.
“I could never achieve this alone at my laptop,” he says.

Chuck Palahniuk touches on this alone/together dichotomy in the introduction to his “Non-Fiction” short story collection.
“The lonely end of the spectrum … You plan and research. You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything. You let the telephone ring. The emails pile up. You stay in your story world until you destroy it. Then you come back to be with other people.
If your story sells well enough, you get to go on book tour. Do interviews. Really be with people. A lot of people. People, until you’re sick of people. Until you crave the idea of escaping, getting away to a…
To another lovely story world.”

I guess what I’m getting at with this lengthy, ill-thought-out ramble is that sometimes as a writer it’s easy to get lost in your head, at 2.45am, naked with a notebook and bedside lamp. But in order to get anywhere, this aloneness has to have a ‘both/and’ relationship with togetherness, not an ‘either/or’ relationship. It’s an absolutely necessary cycle.

1

The Terror of Actually Writing

TheReaderCover-SmallToday’s post was prompted by John Pace’s article in The Reader (pictured left), titled “Re-Draft with Craft”. It got me thinking about drafting, something I truly struggle with (and I suspect a lot of people do… like Dan Brown, and Bryce Courtney’s more recent work?)

While Pace’s article is directed at screenwriters, I believe it applies to all forms of writing, or even all forms of anything that requires drafting.

Pace gives some fantastic advice about drafting (obvious, yet helpful – this is how most creative-type advice seems to be, especially the helpful stuff), such as cutting out unnecessary “hangover” words in order to write punchy, economic pieces. What stood out to me most about this article, though, is something that spoke to my constant fear of starting.

I have long embraced the term “vomit draft” to describe that first terrifying committment of word to page. I pussyfoot around a piece, thinking on it for too long, scrapping it before I even get it onto a page. Pace suggests the more apt rule, “be wrong as fast as you can”, coined by Andrew Stanton (screenwriter of Wall-E and Finding Nemo). “Just get it down,” says Pace. “Don’t worry about its merit”.

Yes, I needed to be told this. I’m not a brave writer.

Later in the reader, Simonne Michelle-Wells, (in “A Letter to my Younger Self (from the time machine)” ) sits her younger self down for a chat, saying:
“You didn’t draft enough. Drafting and editing are not the same things and you happily convinced yourself they are. Editing requires sweat. Drafting requires blood. Tossing out an errant comma and deleting reams of superfluous adjectives is a leisurely jog compared to the marathon of unpicking a rambling narrative arc or killing off characters in the name of expediency.”

For such a long time, I have convinced myself of the same thing. Pace talks about one screenwriter who sits down to re-draft in front of a blank page. No cut-copy-paste, this writer starts again from scratch, with faith that the ideas that count will resurface.

THAT is brave writing.

Monica Wood’s “Pocket Muse” tells writers, “you have to be willing to write badly“… and I think that’s the key here. Without a willingness to “be wrong, as fast as I can,” I can’t even start to get it wrong. I’m too safe, too much of the time.

4

The Reader

TheReaderCover-Small

Two days ago, I recieved my copy of The Reader. This is a collection of fiction and non-fiction pieces by people involved in the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

I have to say, I was so excited to get my hands on this, and though it’s quite a diminutive publication, it packs quite a punch. I’ve so far only read about five articles, but it’s got me laughing, thinking, and wanting to lock these little tidbits of writing wisdom away in some part of my mind. I know they’ll come in handy.

So over the next few blogs, I want to share with you the places I’ve been taken by The Reader, what it’s prompted me to think about and research, and what I’ve come away from it with.

Until then…

2

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑