Journal Entries
The Stretcher - Valentines
Posted Feb 10, 2009
I hadn't expected the judges to set a poem in the first round, so I was taken by surprise by the instruction. "To tie in with Valentine's Day, we'd like you to come up with a love poem." To make it harder, they assigned each of us three adjectives which we had used in our previous piece. I was relatively lucky: my adjectives were "huge, rising, better."
I did one of my brainstorming exercises on each word. The adjective that interested me least was 'huge', because it seemed the most obvious. Write a Valentine from a tiny woman to her huge boyfriend. The other possibility that occurred to me was to write a Valentine to the Earth. That should be huge enough, but it would probably end up as an environmentalist rant.
'Rising' seemed more interesting. I toyed with the idea of love among revolutionaries, but I was more attracted towards the idea of love while climbing mountains. I've done a bit of hill walking in my youth and met my husband on a walking holiday. Or there was my liking for paragliders, which seem to me to function as a metaphor for the heart rising from the humdrum to joy.
'Better' seemed difficult because it is abstract. I could imagine a Valentine written by a patient after a long illness; or there was the idea of loving better. For once, I was tempted to unveil my heart and write about the difficulty of letting go of my beloved son.
So I wrote a sonnet. The sonnet is a traditional form, much used for love poems, by poets including Shakespeare. It is a handy length, at fourteen lines: long enough to say something worthwhile without being tedious. I've written sonnets before and I came up with something that, quite frankly, made me cry. People seemed to like it, but some said "It's not a Valentine" and "It's not about 'better'.
As a back up, I wrote a paragliding Valentine for 'rising', which was both more conventionally about 'love' and quite clearly about 'rising'. I was fairly happy with the poem but, beside 'For My Son', it felt synthetic. So I submitted 'For My Son' as my 'better' Valentine.
If the judges are really rude about it, I am tempted to set them a challenge. They can write a Valentine, based on one of three adjectives of my choosing. And I'll go and find a dictionary....
Discuss this Journal entry [6]
Latest reply: Feb 10, 2009
Stretcher - be rational
Posted Jan 28, 2009
The second challenge told us to 'prick a balloon with your rationality.' After a little thought, I came up with the idea of writing about cycling.
I come from a cycling family; everyone in my family has cycled. I have been cycling for nearly 50 years and I'm still going. But, when I worked in London, I was well aware of the animosity directed towards cyclists. Yes, many of them do ride on pavements and across pedestrian crossings.
So I went and did some research and got bogged down in statistics. ROSPA said that about a third of cyclists injured are children, but the Department for Transport said one fifth. Why the difference? It might be that the two organisations are using two different definitions of 'child' but I don't know.
It took me ages to draft an entry that I was happy with. Then I tried to put in red headings and couldn't get the Guide ML to work. AARGH!
It was a relief when I finally got it on the web.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jan 28, 2009
Stretcher - The Shell
Posted Jan 13, 2009
Phew, I thought. These torturers aren't such brutes after all! All they have asked us to do is "write a piece based around the word 'Shell'". That should be easy enough.
Then I wondered: "how will the judges rate these pieces, if they vary from carefully researched articles to passionate poems. What do I do, in other words, to impress them?"
So, I started with a brainstorm, writing the word 'shell' down in the middle of a page, and drawing lines off to all the things I could think of that were connected with shells. Next, I selected two branches that interested me: the military use of shells, and the idea of rockpooling, with its associated risks of drowning. In the course of doing a more detailed freewrite on these areas, I remembered the story of the Chinese cockle pickers.
I researched the story, by reading the BBC accounts of the disaster, and looking up 'Morecambe Bay' on Google. There were some interesting facts about the landscape and photos on the Morecambe Bay Partnership website.
Then, it was just a question of writing the poem.Hmm. I had covered 15 pages with notes, drafts and editing by the time I had a version ready for the website.
I posted it, and Dmitri said that it reminded him of William McGonagall's 'Tay Bridge Disaster' poem. Aaargh! I have every respect for Dmitri's views, so I did a partial rewrite. But, if I don't get anywhere in the Stretcher competition, I'm going for the McGonagall prize for Seriously Bad Verse!
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jan 13, 2009
The Stretcher - the beginning
Posted Dec 18, 2008
There I was, sitting in my comfortable house, surfing hootoo, when I came across a mention of 'The Stretcher'. Clicking into it I found -yikes - a picture of a piece of writing being tortured in a dungeon. What had the poor writer done, I wondered. Queried the judgement of QA?
Reading on, I found a description of a competition to find a star writer. At this point, I relaxed and made myself another cup of coffee.
"I'll leave this to the young things," I thought. "I don't particularly want to be stretched."
But ideas, once they have buzzed across your brain, don't willingly disappear. They keep buzzing back again.
"If I call myself a writer," I thought, "I ought to be writing. Anything, everything, the more the better."
So I sent in my application.
I don't expect to win. I'm entering as an also ran, but my theory is that the also rans are the most important people in a competition. After all, most competitions announce one winner and a few runners up. The rest are also rans. But, without the also rans, it wouldn't be much of a competition. The public might demand their money back if they thought that there were only five or so entrants. So, let's hear it for the also rans!
Discuss this Journal entry [9]
Latest reply: Dec 18, 2008
The Stretcher - The beginning
Posted Dec 17, 2008
There I was, sitting in my comfortable house, surfing hootoo, when I came across a mention of 'The Stretcher'. Clicking into it I found -yikes - a picture of a piece of writing being tortured in a dungeon. What had the poor writer done, I wondered. Queried the judgement of QA?
Reading on, I found a description of a competition to find a star writer. At this point, I relaxed and made myself another cup of coffee.
"I'll leave this to the young things," I thought. "I don't particularly want to be stretched."
But ideas, once they have buzzed across your brain, don't willingly disappear. They keep buzzing back again.
"If I call myself a writer," I thought, "I ought to be writing. Anything, everything, the more the better."
So I sent in my application. The next thing I knew, my feet were encased in a block of ice. What had I let myself in for?
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Dec 17, 2008
minorvogonpoet
Researcher U3099090
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."