Evie Wyld is Booktrust's third online writer in residence.

  • Don't write the x

    Posted Wednesday October 28th 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    In my last blog I spoke about starting somewhere and I’ll just carry on from there since I haven’t had any questions to follow up on. One of the most common complaints I hear from poets is, ‘I’m struggling to write an x’ (where x is a poetic form that might equal sonnet, villanelle or some similar abstraction) – and I’m often tempted to say, you shouldn’t be writing an x, you should be writing a poem. However, what my real response tends to be is something along the lines of: try writing what you want to say first and worry about the form later. It goes back to what I said in my first blog about being a writer of no fixed format; I believe that writing should be of no pre-determined form either. Writing is expression; form is craft: conflating the two is a certain recipe for writer’s blocks and other such ailments. 

    One of the joys of writing for children is the use of the full range of senses – sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch – which elevates the writing to a more interactive experience, an opportunity for exploration and learning, but this is also a…

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  • Oranges and parrots

    Posted Friday October 2nd 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    Oh my, is that the time? I’ve had a hectic few weeks backpacking in America – well, my daughter was the backpack and we were in the city mainly, teaching in Belfast, and chasing buses in London. And then there’s beautiful Manchester where I am right now.

    So, to start … Well, poems usually come to me, but sometimes, especially if writing is your career, you have to pluck one from somewhere. I’ve always thought of writing as an act of conjuring – conjuring memory, images – to explore ideas. One of the ways in which I like to trigger a new poem is to give myself little writing tasks; a recent one was, write something with taste, touch and a tree (notice the ‘T’s? yeah, I like to stretch myself). The result was: 'The air tasted of salt, a cold distillate of long gone rains. She placed her hands on the tree root behind her and sat on them.' It went on for longer, but I usually discard most of what I write, take the idea I like best and use it as the seed of something bigger. From that, I took the first line and it’s currently waiting…

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