Creative Digest #8: Environmental poetry; lessons from playwriting; my favourite semi-colon
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at how poetry engages with the climate crisis, what novelists can learn from dramatic writing, and considers a 'perfect' punctuation mark.
Welcome to the eighth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
Upcoming event:
Tuesday 23 April, 5pm: Postgraduate online taster session – Jonathan Gibbs looks at the plots of Sally Rooney’s supposedly ‘plotless’ novels and asks what lessons we can learn from them. Register for your free place here
Questions of Environmental Poetry
By Rebecca Tamás
I’m currently working on my second collection of poetry*, a large part of which considers questions of ecological grief, environmental consciousness, and our relationship with the nonhuman world. As I do so, my mind has been constantly returning to the question of how contemporary poetry might engage with planetary crisis, a topic that sometimes seems too huge and complicated for language. I’ve been asking myself – which poets and collections have found an intelligent, affecting way through, and into, our current environmental moment? Who can I learn from?
One book that I’ve been coming back to regularly is Scotland based poet Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection, Life without Air (Granta Books), which was shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize. What Lafarge’s collection offers is a fresh kind of ecological poetry, one that merges a lyric voice and an experimental sensibility, so as to meet the reality of our damaged, knotty relationship with the nonhuman.
Life Without Air makes a multitude of connections between human beings and the world of the nonhuman. However, unlike some more traditional ‘nature poetry’ Lafarge does not use the environment as backdrop, or as simple fodder for poetic metaphor. Rather her book is a work of true interrelation with the nonhuman world, that never falls into easy or holistic union. The long poem ‘Dredging the Batou Lake,’ for example, considers a lake in Inner Mongolia, poisoned by the mineral mining that feeds our smartphones, flatscreens and green tech. For Lafarge, this site opens up the unsettling and toxic links between human affect, capitalist oppression and environmental chaos:
… lest we forget
the screen of your phoneturned green from the night
you cried into its face, as thoughthe very pixels could impute
a body’s affects …and which were the hands of the woman
who built it? the ghost-handed
mother who says there and there
The nonhuman is bounced off and responded too, its reality used to widen and expand the speaker’s capacity for understanding her and her friend’s own experiences and feelings; at the same time as bringing into view the queasy exploitation of vulnerable human beings, and nonhuman spaces, that create our everyday reality.
The poems also avoid the sentimental valorisation of the environment which ‘nature poetry’ can sometimes be prey to – in these poems there is no sense of the nonhuman as an innocent space where we can let go of our worldly troubles. In ‘aggregate air’ we see:
… city skins
grown thick with corporate
heraldry, scabbing the air
tight to wound …
whole flyovers
cracked with growing pains.
This is not the idealised fantasy of nonhuman as untouched ideal, but rather is a raw rendering of the messy closeness we share with what is not us – the connected sufferings of people and environments under the unbearable pressure of societies built for profit, not wellbeing. I know this is a book I will keep learning from, and with, as I write.
Lessons from playwriting
By Jessica Andrews
In my own writing practice, I find it very beneficial to read and write across forms. Writing poetry, memoir, essays, journalism, creative non-fiction and for screen have all informed my fiction, by teaching me new skills.
I am currently adapting Rose Glass’s acclaimed horror film Saint Maud for stage, in collaboration with Live Theatre in Newcastle. This is my first endeavour in both playwriting and adapting another writer’s work, and I have already learned so much by working across forms. It serves as a reminder that writing is ultimately practice-based: we can learn new techniques by studying craft, reading books and listening to other writers speak, but we can only truly hone our skills through the practice of writing itself.
Here are some lessons I have learned so far:
1. Let your dialogue haunt the next scene
Your characters might have a conversation in one scene that is seemingly mundane, or that contains a profound or important line. The ‘shadow’ of this conversation should hang over subsequent scenes, or the story in general. For example, if a character casually mentions hating bananas, this should re-emerge at another point in your story. Everything that happens in your work should matter and deepen your reader or audience member’s interpretation of character and events.
2. Work with living tension
While your overall narrative or character arcs will have forward momentum, each scene (or chapter) has its own individual narrative arc, which is composed of rising and falling tension. A scene shouldn’t simply move your characters from one place or situation to another. Events, dialogue and description function to mislead the audience, or to develop the relationships between your characters. Characters should be unpredictable, and they should misbehave, in order to create tension, which engages your audience. The motivations between their words and actions do not have to be immediately clear: your reader or viewer should do some work to understand your characters’ motivations, or the true arc or meaning of your story; that is part of the satisfaction of reading or watching a sophisticated piece of work.
3. Create subtext
Effective dialogue is all about building subtext. In reality, we rarely say exactly how we feel, due to social or cultural conventions, the nature of our relationships, because we are worried about being disliked, or because we want to protect another person. Within a play, novel or short story, characters might have a conversation about something mundane, like the weather, but the writer builds subtext beneath their words, through the use of setting, gestures, mannerisms, actions and pauses. Subtext is an effective literary device because the reader or viewer experiences the story by ‘reading between the lines’, which means they are actively participating in your world, as opposed to simply being told what is happening.
4. Make sure every word counts
Within a play, every word must be learned and spoken aloud by an actor, which means that every word must have a specific purpose. A line should never be beautiful just for the sake of it; each element of your writing should be active, in that it prompts an actor to react in a way which propels your narrative in a particular direction. Lyrical writing must also be purposeful: your use of language must reflect the tone and texture of your characters’ lives.
5. Remember physicality
In a play, each of your characters is embodied by a living actor, inhabiting a physical space. A director will choreograph the movements of actors’ bodies in collaboration with your words. In a novel or short story, it is easy to forget that characters have physical bodies, which move through a particular space. Our characters’ bodies are tools we can use to create subtext or implicit meaning; often we might think or articulate thoughts which juxtapose our actions. Within a play, much of this work is done by the actors, but the language must give them scope to act, and to experience multiple conflicting feelings at once, as we so often do in reality. The sensory elements of the world you are building are equally as important as your characters’ interiority and dialogue. Think about how their emotions might manifest in their bodies, and how this determines the ways in which they physically move through the world.
6. Include motifs and symbols
Within a play, characters often encounter repeating themes, motifs, images or sensations, which define the limits of your world. These motifs can be as subtle as a repetition of a line or symbol, or the use of a particular semantic field. A play or piece of fiction should have a ‘self-contained’ narrative arc, but the semantic or symbolic world of your work should also feel contained and cohesive; each moving should subtly link to each another, creating a whole.
While novels, short stories and plays are distinct forms which require unique skills, working across different disciplines can allow us to approach our work in new and interesting ways. Writing for stage has refreshed my prose by allowing me to consider it through an unfamiliar lens.
The stage adaptation of Saint Maud will run at Live Theatre in Newcastle from 10th Oct-2nd Nov 2024. You can buy tickets here.
My favourite semi-colon
By Jonathan Gibbs
I wrote in an earlier Creative Writing Digest about how the semi-colon and comma splice seem to belong to very different narrative styles. I gave some examples of the comma splice, from Katie Kitamura’s novel A Separation, but didn’t give any examples of the semi-colon. So now, to balance things up, I want to share what might just be my favourite ever semi-colon.
It’s from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early (and quite long) short story ‘May Day’, published in 1920, which features a bunch of privileged Yale graduates partying in New York as riots go on in the streets below. The story follows a number of characters over the course of little more than a day, but here is a paragraph about a young woman, Edith, ruminating on her ex-boyfriend, Gordon Sterrett.
Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired; she wanted to get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening. All evenings were her evenings.
There are two semi-colons in this extract. The first one is perfectly good. You might call it a textbook example: in Fitzgerald’s close third person narrative it seems to show the workings of Edith’s mind, how she moves carefully, reflectively, from one thought about Gordon to another. But it’s the second that goes beyond textbook to achieve a rare brilliance.
“She was a little tired; she wanted to get married.”
A semi-colon essentially takes two complete sentences (in the first example they’re quite long; in this one they’re shorter), places them in a set of weighing scales with the punctuation mark as its fulcrum, and then asks you, the reader, to ‘weigh them up’, to consider them in conjunction with each other. In this case, you’d think that the two sentences weigh massively different amounts. Wanting to get married is far more significant than feeling a bit tired, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe, in Edith’s sozzled thinking, getting married weighs about the same as being a bit tired.
The semi-colon that joins the two thoughts is deeply ironical. It shows up Edith’s thought process as – not rushed, exactly, but ditzy, slipshod, flawed.
And compare to the punctuation at the end of the paragraph. Here, as her thoughts move on from thinking about Gordon to the actions she’s going to take to win him back, her head seems to clear, and her thoughts separate themselves into discrete, coherent sentences. Again, the punctuation gives a clear picture of the character’s state of mind. Syntax as the basis of characterisation.
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Rebecca Tamás is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry.
Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater, both published by Hodder & Stoughton. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and is teaching the Creative Writing Workshop this term.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is currently writing a book on the non-academic or ‘literary’ essay.
Department news:
Rebecca Tamás was recently a guest on the poetry podcast 'The Poetry Bath'. You can listen to her interview in two parts here (part 1) and here (part 2). Her second poetry collection will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Jessica Andrews’ stage adaptation of Saint Maud will run at Live Theatre in Newcastle from 10 Oct-2 November 2024. Details here.
Joe Thomas’s new novel, Red Menace, is published by Quercus. It follows White Riot as the second in a trilogy of novels set in East London, and will be followed by True Blue.
Deepa Anappara's second novel, titled The Last of Earth and set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.
Deepa is also co-organising a conference on decolonisation in Creative Writing teaching and publishing with Farhana Shaikh, an editor and lecturer in Publishing at De Montfort University. Please see here for a call for abstracts.