You never know when frisky seagulls, a
turd left in a pair of pyjamas and a nun in a hurry will lead you to writing
award winning poetry.
The writer Lesley Glaister, talks about
using ‘memory refracted through imagination, and often unconsciously, into
something new’ mixing it with more recent events. She calls it ‘the real stuff
of fiction’, giving emotional punch and ‘truth’ to our work (thanks to
Anderson’s Creative Writing book for this).
So, enough with the theory. She’s
basically saying that we take our past experiences, chuck them in a mixer and
blend them with more recent memories to give us impactful and emotional fiction.
A lot of my comedic work is based on
the peculiarities of real-life events, but fictionally masked. The following
three poems that I recently had published on Witcraft,
are three such examples:
One Night Stand Seagull was inspired by
witnessing two gulls ‘getting it on’ on a rooftop while I invigilated Higher
Modern Studies.
Nun In A Nissan Micra was created from my
husband’s grumpiness when a nun overtook our sluggish camper van on a motorway.
Jobby In A Washing Machine came out of
not checking the contents of a pair of pyjamas before putting them in the
washing machine (which weren’t mine and I didn’t put the pyjamas in the washing
machine either).
You can read these little ditties here. And they even gave
me an Honourable Mention for them too. Happy days.
So, you never know when life will send
you those little nuggets (or jobbies) when you’re looking for something to
write about.
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