Month: March 2018

The story lives…

~ dianadevlinblog ~ 1 Comment

My wee journey into Young Adult fiction is proving to be immense fun. I’m heading for 14000 words and really enjoying it. I have a few characters I’m getting to know well, especially Jess, my protagonist. I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for her drunken mother. Her back story is grim.

The thing that has surprised me most in writing this story is how the characters direct the twists and turns of the plot. I’ve heard writers say that they didn’t know where their story was going and were allowing their characters to decide the next move. I always thought that sounded like horse manure – but now I realise how true it is.

I wake up thinking about my characters’ world, it’s like a wee snow globe I carry about with me in my head. It’s time I got off my blog now and gave the globe a little shake…

StAnza 2018

~ dianadevlinblog ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the blog piece I did for Erskine Writers’ group, just a snapshot with my impression of the event.

 

StAnza is an international poetry festival that takes place in St Andrews every year in March and runs for almost a week. Renowned poets like Liz Lochhead, Don Paterson, Miriam Gamble and Douglas Dunn mingle with newbies and poetry lovers from up and down the country, as well as from abroad. I treated myself to two days of poetic heaven, spending every last penny I had on poetry collections and anthologies (plus several coffees).
The highlight of the weekend for me was a workshop intriguingly billed as A Double-voiced Bird, which I had been invited to participate in after a selection process a few months ago that required me to describe my own poetic process involving bilingual approaches. Led by acclaimed Berlin-based poet Ulrike Almut Sandig, the workshop involved the creation of a kind of patchwork poem distilled from members’ prepared lines, complete with bilingual elements in German, Scots, Dutch and Italian. To say that I was surprised by the resultant piece would be an understatement. In just under two hours, a group of seven poets who had only just met – and one was a ten year old child! – spliced, diced, negotiated and rehearsed a brand new collaborative poem, which we then performed before a packed hall of poets, writers, visitors, publishers and editors, some stopping to take photographs and film us performing.
The feedback from audience members who approached us was startlingly positive and encouraging and I left the hall feeling overjoyed to have been part of such a refreshingly novel experience.

Procrastination

~ dianadevlinblog ~ Leave a comment

How many diversions, digressions and deviations can a writer cram into their day? I’m heading for a world record! And all because I have taken on the challenge of starting a young adult novel. It’s only supposed to be the first thousand words, plus a blurb, for a competition my writing group is doing. Easy, right? I’ve written short stories much longer than that. So why am I tripping over boulders in my head the minute I pick up my pen? I think I know the answer to that one: prose terrifies me!

It’s true. Poetry is like a bubble bath at just the right temperature, immersion in sheer pleasure, and hard to get out of. Prose is more like a freezing cold shower, exhilarating for a short spell but leaves me with a headache if I stay in it too long. Poetry moulds itself to me like a quality mattress, it knows and fits all my corners and hard to reach bits. Prose is a friend’s spare futon by comparison.

But now I really have procrastinated enough. I have conceived my heroine. I now need to give birth to her. Anyone got any gas and air?!