Tag: mimi khalvati

Poet's Tips/

More words of advice from Mimi Khalvati

Having recently been to the last of Mimi Khalvati’s Lewes for workshops for a while, I realised I hadn’t been blogging about them as I used to. It was also time to clean out my ‘workshop notes’ folder, so here are a few more things I’ve jotted down from time to time – I hope you find them interesting. Even though I can’t recall or reveal the poems that prompted them, they’re all points that resonate with me.

On truth – you can’t / shouldn’t always be true to the real or original experience. It doesn’t matter if ‘that’s not the way it actually happened.’ Similarly, if you’re creating a ‘found’ poem, your selecting and framing of the material is part of the work, part of making it good.

On considering the whole at the same time as the specifics of a piece – you may have good reasons for every line break or stanza break, but you need to consider the whole poem at the same time, because what’s good for one line break may not work in the wider context of the whole poem. Turn the sheet of paper around and look at  it from behind to really ‘see’ the shape – is that really what the poem wants to be?

On music versus logic – Sometimes you need to keep something in for the music, even if it’s not logical or whatever. If an element of a poem is part of the musical composition then perhaps it has earned its place.

On deciding what the poem wants to be – what you set out to write may not be what gets written. Perhaps it’s a song, or a ballad. What does it remind you of – what are its ancestors? Is it two different things, and if so, which direction will you go with?

On understanding what stage your poem is at – this has nothing to do with how long you’ve worked on it – a poem can be finished without any re-writing, it can also be worked on for years and still be at the early draft stages. You may think each redraft should take you closer to a finished poem, but it’s not necessarily the case. (Sadly!)

It was Mimi’s birthday last week, so there was cake …

Mimi Khalvati Lewes workshop may 2014

Poet's Tips/

Mimi Khalvati on editing and what to bin

Notes from a poetry workshop

On Saturday I dropped back in on one of the regular workshops with Mimi Khalvati run by the excellent Lewes Live Lit here in my home town. I was lucky enough to be rewarded with a place in one of these highly popular groups about 18 months ago, and although I’ve been on a break from them, when the opportunity arose to re-join I took it.

As usual I took notes, and while many things discussed were specific to the poems we workshopped, there were a couple of strong ‘aha’ moments for me, which I thought I’d share with you here.

First of all, on the subject of a poem that isn’t working but that has some ‘good bits’…

Mimi described how she had recently been working on a poem at which she had made five or six attempts – not edits, but actual start-again different approaches. In the end, all she kept was one line. And the rest? Kept for a rainy poetry day when she might use them in another poem? Still lingering in her notebook under ‘good metaphors or phrases I could use somewhere’? No – it all went in the bin.

Her point was that when something isn’t quite working, poets are often quick to say “maybe I can put that great line into another poem” when in fact it’s worth asking the question “maybe I can put it all in the bin.” Not that it’s always the answer, but that we should be more prepared to let go. I know I’m guilty of this, and it may be the reason why I’ve one or two poems that have been rejected seven or more times, despite several re-writes. I probably need to go at them from a completely different angle and not be so wedded to certain lines.

Secondly, on the subject of editing …

‘”Nobody writes magical stuff straight off,” (well, most of us don’t!) “the magic usually comes in the editing.” What often happens, said Mimi, is that we create some magical moments in amongst some other writing that might be less than magical. The key is to recognise this and cut out the less interesting stuff. Only it’s difficult, because we think it’s all crucial, all part of how we got to the magical moment in the first place. But the reader may not need to see your ‘workings out’. Don’t worry about being clear or logical.

In other words, editing doesn’t just mean things like cutting out unnecessary adjectives or replacing uninteresting verbs, but really thinking also about the impact on the reader, where the real interest, tension and magic lie, and making sure other parts of the poem aren’t detracting from this. This really made sense to me. I’ve already looked at two of my current poems with this mindset and made some (hopefully good) changes.

Close readings/

From first draft to publication

Something of an experiment today. I love seeing those handwritten drafts of famous poems, with the crossings out and alterations, such as this version of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ at the British Library. I think it’s fascinating to see how people work on poems, and in workshops I often wonder how a particular piece is going to change, and why.

We don’t often get to see the full journey of a poem, so I thought I’d have a bit of fun with the idea and take one of mine to show how and why it changed, what happened when I workshopped it. It’s one that eventually won The New Writer competition and was published in their anthology edition this summer, in other words, ‘finished’ in one sense of the word (if poems are ever finished?) Warning: this is a long post.

Here’s the first draft (13-10-12):

Waiting for the bus

He cuts the engine at eleven twenty,
leaves the radio going, eighties pop.
Turning, I cup hands to my temples,

press them to the window, strain
to make visual sense of the black
outside. The driver sits back, lights up.

A few people look about to leave.
Heads slouched in sleep lift expectantly,
backpacks are pulled down from racks

Someone fills the aisle with his body.
Thigh brushing my knee, he murmurs
an apology. Next to me, Terry’s hand

on the headrest in front, taps along
to the Annie Lennox song that’s playing.
Let’s get out, he says, so we do, but

at the roadside I lose sight of my feet
and with them my confidence. Terry’s arm
is outstretched, pointing at a star

low on the horizon, adrift from Orion,
faint at first but stronger with each blink,
a desert lighthouse. It’s coming, he says.

From the minibus, a shout. Figures move
around inside, fetching their things.
Relax, I hear the driver say, not yet,

it’s at least twenty minutes away.
So we watch as the dot grows fat, splits
into four, ploughing the highway, thirty

miles in its own time, kicking up red dust.
I wonder at what point we are visible:
Giralia turn off, junction with Burkett Road,

midnight pickup, nowhere for a drink,
the drivers greeting each other, a dirty laugh,
radio patter in the background, Eternal Flame.

There were some things I liked about this – the radio playing in the background was important and I thought the detail of the eighties pop (Annie Lennox, Eternal Flame) were good. I wanted to get across the sheer blackness of the night, the emptiness of the landscape, the boredom of waiting. The key thing is the idea of the bus approaching from so far away that although its headlights are visible, it still takes ages to arrive. The loneliness, the sense of being utterly out of place.

But – although you could say there was too much ‘telling the story’ and ‘he says… he says’ I decided to go further down that route, make it richer, go into ‘overdrive’ mode which for me usually means the lines get longer and sentences denser. Should the sparseness of the landscape make the details stand out more? Would more detail of the inside of the bus throw the emptiness of the landscape into sharper relief?

The next complete draft was five stanzas of 8 lines. (Did I have a competition in mind??) Much of it was unchanged, but with some detail added:

…
A man fills the aisle with his body,
starts talking loudly in bent vowels.
Ocker – this from Terry, his hand
on the chrome bar of the seatback,
tapping to an Annie Lennox song.
  (from draft 3, 16-10-12)

The title had changed to ‘Leave no trace’, a phrase which appears in the third stanza. The original, ‘Waiting for the bus’ just sounded so pedestrian to me, especially as the bus is so clearly depicted. Need something more intriguing!

I wasn’t happy with the heavy blocks of lines, the look of it. So the next complete version was in quatrains, six stanzas, but much longer lines. I renamed it again, to ‘Midnight pickup, junction with Burkett Road’ and took it to a workshop with Mimi Khalvati and a group of excellent poets.

The comments I got were that there was too much telling of the story, that the ideas ‘peek through’ in some places but the heavy narrative was obscuring it. I’d altered the last stanza and wanted to end with the ‘swapping’ of the passengers getting off with those getting on, but in the course of so doing had introduced another, confusing theme:

…
I wonder at what point we are visible, Giralia turn off, midnight pickup.
The twice weekly ritual of hard grind across desert, stopping here
where there are no signs, for the swapping of human cargo, this thought
as we climb on, as behind us the radio fades to black: Eternal Flame. (d5, 20-10-13)

“Is it about human trafficking?” someone wanted to know, and suddenly images of a war torn landscape and body bags were interfering. Clearly the ‘human cargo’ bit was misleading. Mimi’s advice was to listen. Where’s the poetry? Cut the cord between what actually happened (if indeed it did) and what the poem wants to be about. “Tension between two elements is good but conflict isn’t.” She singled out the two middle stanzas as being ‘where the poetry lay’:

At the roadside I lose sight of my feet and with them my confidence.
Am I wearing shoes? What planet is this? Nothing above or around
but stars fat as glitterballs, too huge to fit my eye, impossible to gauge
where anything stops or starts in this landscape, or guess who’s here

with us, the nocturnals, how many sets of eyes. Our presence
is no more than a fly on a kangaroo’s tail – we will leave no trace.
Terry is pointing at a dot low on the horizon, adrift from Orion,
faint at first, but stronger with each blink, a desert lighthouse. It’s coming.

There was so much good advice to think about. I put the poem away for a month, then went back to it. The next version was pretty close. Suddenly the focus is quite different, and the ‘lost feet’ have been elevated to the opening line. The drafts are getting shorter so here’s the whole thing:

Midnight pickup

My feet are lost at the roadside.
You ask what planet this is –
impossible to say, or gauge
starting points in the landscape.
I hear the nocturnals: tenacious,
strutting. By day they scratch
brutal lives in the shadows,
dry faeces and shuttered eyes.
I can see nothing above or around
but glitterball stars too fat
to fit my eye, on black horizon
a single dot hanging adrift
from Orion, a whisper, faint
at first, but stronger with each blink,
a desert lighthouse. It’s coming.

My breath is as slow as it takes
for a dot to grow big as a bus.
I wonder at what point
we are visible, Giralia turn off,
junction with Burkett Road?
Can we really be found
in the frayed desert, will anything
stop here, where there are no signs,
for the swapping of humans,
attracting the invisible gaze
of lizards, marsupials, snakes,
their ancient paths disturbed?
I hang in your constellation,
unsure if my eyes are open,
trusting, heading North.

(d7, 22-11-12)

I was reasonably happy with this, but not entirely. So I took it to another lovely workshopping group. Immediately, things came to light that were so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d missed them: ‘nocturnal’ animals sleep by day, so what’s this about them scratching around in the sun? There was still some confusion and talk of aliens and prostitutes. Out went the metaphysical fancies ‘I hang in your constellation’ and poetical phrases ‘ancient paths disturbed.’ Great stuff.

So draft 8, which was the version I submitted – funnily enough it went back to tercets, just like draft 1, but the whole thing had become more sparse, rather like the desert. Out had gone all that stuff about the interior of the bus, the radio playing, the people. I kept the ‘swapping’ idea in there, just about. I was quite pleased with the lines ‘breath is as slow as it takes / for a dot to grow bus-big.’

Midnight Pickup  

My feet are lost at the roadside.
You ask what planet this is,
where the landscape starts.

I hear the nocturnals: tenacious,
their brutal lives a scratch
of dry faeces, leathered skin.

Above and around, nothing
but glitterball stars too fat
to fit my eye, on black horizon

a single dot hangs adrift
from Orion, faint at first
but stronger with each blink

a desert lighthouse – it’s coming
– breath is as slow as it takes
for a dot to grow bus-big.

At what point are we visible –
Giralia turn off, Burkett Road –
will they find us in the desert

with no signs to stop them?
And will the swapping
of people, backpacks, jokes

amount to anything here
stood as we are on red rock
bone on bone under black?

(first appeared in The New Writer issue 115, summer 2013)

Form/

Mimi Khalvati on form, and a few ‘banned’ words

Notes from a poetry workshop

Notes from a poetry workshop

Saturday was our penultimate workshop with Mimi Khalvati before the summer-autumn break. (By the way I realise the title of this post could be read as a pun -‘ on form’, geddit?? Um, sorry…)

This month, several of us got pulled up for the chosen form of our poems. Classic Mimi comments often sound like rhetorical questions. “What am I supposed to do with a short line on its own like that?” “Why would you write something that’s a classic ballad in free verse?” “Couldn’t you make this more interesting?” She looks at you with an expression of such disappointment you can’t really think of an answer, other than “I don’t know! I’ve let you down again and I’m really sorry!”

Anyway, either we’re all class A masochists or we do need this kind of talking-to in order to improve. So here are a few of Mimi’s comments that I jotted down. As always, please excuse the brevity. Hope they make sense, divorced as they are from the poems under discussion.

  • Be careful of words or images that work too hard and break the fabric of the poem. The reader wants her attention drawn to the poem, not the poet.
  • Many lyric poems (for example about a bird, or about digging or fishing) act as metaphors for something else, so be careful of referencing that thing explicitly if it’s already implied.
  • When writing in free verse you still need a rationale for your chosen stanza breaks or line length, otherwise the effect can just be ‘paragraphy’. And be open to the possibility of form – it may be that free verse isn’t doing the poem justice.
  • If you have one line of a different length to the others then it will attract attention. You need a good reason to throw in a odd-length line. It needs to stand up to close inspection.
  • Beware potentially archaic words – Mimi has a bee in her bonnet about beneath – apparently we never say or write it except in poetry. (Is this true, do you think?) Ditto within and for (when used to mean ‘because’.) And being IAMBs naturally both beneath and within are even more likely to lead us into temptation. O woe, thrice woe for our disappearing tongue!

 

Inspiration/

Judith Cair’s ‘The Ship’s Eye’ and other new reading matter

The Ship's Eye

Poetry Review & The Ships Eye

Judith Cair launched her debut pamphlet ‘The Ship’s Eye’ on Thursday evening in Brighton and the event was a sell-out, or rather a sell-over, as about a dozen people had to stand the whole evening. (Great for publisher/event organiser Pighog in a way. But I know from experience that packed events usually mean the next one is less than packed as people think ‘well if I’m not going to get a seat…’ especially as Pighog are now streaming their events live. Nice idea but if people choose to watch on the web then that’s £5 loss per person. Just sayin!!)

Anyway, more importantly, Judith’s pamphlet … she had said she was nervous about reading but you wouldn’t know. Her strong, calm delivery was a joy, and the way she started with all her thank yous, meticulously naming everyone, was testimony to her generous nature and thoughtfulness. Judith is a super-supportive workshop member and writes wonderfully. I’ve not yet read the whole pamphlet through closely but already I have several favourites, such as the moving simplicity of Cineribus Veris Patris Mei Dedicatum – I was slightly put off by the title but my schoolgirl Latin tells me it means something like ‘dedicated to the true ashes of my father’ (apologies if this is wrong!) the pamphlet includes many classical references/themes and indeed 3 poems are Judtith’s translations of passages from Homer’s Odyssey. Definitely a pamphlet I will be going back to.

Also through the door in the last couple of days – the latest edition of Frogmore Papers, and the big fat package from the Poetry Society with Poetry Review, Poetry News and various other bits, including a fascinating little anthology of the Foyle Young Poets – tomorrow’s stars? – you can read the whole thing online here.

Speaking of Poetry Review – I was excited to see how well Brighton poets are represented in this edition – not only John McCullough and Maria Jastrzebska but also Marion Tracy. Maria and Marion are both members of the Mimi Khalvati workshopping group I joined last year here in Lewes, and Marion’s excellent first pamphlet Giant in the Doorway (HappenStance) was published last year.

Lots of lovely reading matter to get stuck into when I’m on holiday next week.

Angst/

Notes from a workshop

workshop notes

workshop notes

Last week I was lacking inspiration, part due to work commitments and then a 3-day headache – ugh – so it was a pleasure to once more find myself in the interesting ambience of the Lewes Bus Station building for another workshop with Mimi Khalvati and the group of serious poets I seem to have inveigled myself into. (Can one ‘inveigle oneself?’ Hmm).

Sometimes in these situations I have a feeling of ‘this is not real’. I suppose it’s the usual ‘I’m an imposter and any minute now I’m going to be found out’ anxiety that I gather many women (especially) suffer from. A bit like jobs I’ve had in the past when I’ve sat in meetings and had the distinct sensation of acting like I know why I’m there, like I know what’s going on and my presence is making a difference. It’s not exactly the fear of being unmasked, like that scene in ‘Working Girl’ when Melanie Griffith is accused of being a fake and leaves the boardroom saying ‘sorry! sorry!’ It is something like that. But it also feels like I’m in a play, or someone else’s dream. There’s something fragile about the situation, grounded in nothing much. It’s like meeting a childhood hero in your kitchen or office. The strange mix of something that’s at once real and unreal. The feeling that it might be you who’s actually experiencing this or it might be something you’re dreaming or watching happen to someone else. And then wondering if there’s any difference.

Anyway, sorry for the cod-philosophical moment there – back to business – it’s very odd how sometimes in workshops there emerges a kind of theme. I remember a previous session where there were a lot of poems about water. And another where houses featured prominently. This week, dreams and fairytales came up quite a few times.

So in no particular order, here were some of Mimi’s general observations/comments that I made a note of … hope they’re of use /interesting.

  • When you have what’s basically a list poem, how will you meld together the various items on the list? If you use the same construction for each (eg active verb phrases like He puts out …. she ties together … they wait.. etc) it can get wearing. What’s the mortar that will tie the ‘bricks’ of the poem together? Maybe think about rhythm more, or bring in other tenses, sentence constructions?
  • We’re often told to avoid poeticisms, and yet one that sometimes slips through is a noun phrase that starts “what…’ as in ‘what stirred him at that moment was XYZ’ or ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Mimi says this is a sightly archaic construction – not something we tend to say in speech – beware.
  • General point on form – the structure needs to convey a thrill, just as much as the image or emotion you’re communicating.
  • Natural speech stress is not the same as metrical stress. When writing in strict metre it can be tempting to put in the little words that you might ordinarily leave out in free verse. But you can sometimes afford to drop the extra words and still keep to the metre. (This is something I need to work on – I tend to get drawn into ‘dumty-dum’ phrases if I’m not careful.)
  • Punctuation – it’s possible to be too punctilious! If someone is a fast reader, they may lose some of the excitement/interest if they are slowed down by commas or being too deliberately led. Specifying the pauses in this way can also put a big responsibility on those phrases to ‘scintillate’.
Poet's Tips/

Notes from Mimi Khalvati workshop

workshop notes 26-1-13

workshop notes 26-1-13

Yesterday was the first of our monthly workshops with Mimi Khaltvati this year, and as usual I came away with plenty of new insights and reminders. Here are some of the things Mimi said which I jotted down, as usual I’ve tried to stick to ‘universal’ comments rather than those to do with specific poems. Hope you find it useful.

On form/shaping/editing: Test out different forms, don’t just plump for the first way you’ve written something, which may be a bunch of uneven-length stanzas. Is that really the best you can do? It can make a huge difference – for example triplets can be more musical, lighter than big blocks of ten lines or whatever.

On villanelles – they need “strenuous thought”. You have to think backwards. You need to have arrived at a transformation in the last two lines, their meaning needs to have changed even though the words haven’t.

On consistency of register – if you use contractions (I’m, he’s etc) sometimes but not always, that will seems wrong. Beware mixing up idiomatic and archaic phrases, especially if it’s done to fit a certain metre or rhyme scheme.

On rhyme – ‘if you choose the wrong word to rhyme then everything goes wrong!’

On specific references to things the reader may or may not be familiar with: “it’s courteous as a writer to assume the reader is one step ahead of you. It also makes for better writing.”

On developing a critical faculty – ask of other people’s writing (as a precursor to asking it of your own) ‘what is missing? what more could be done?’ “A fierce critical faculty is a wondrous gift.” Be prepared to think in larger terms rather than just tweaking.

On beautiful language – it’s not enough to just write beautifully. Too much beauty can be soporific. (Mimi admitted literally falling asleep at a reading by a prominent poet – I couldn’t possibly say who – because it was all too lovely “the melody, the evenness of the waves…”). So how can you break up it up? You need a counterpoint. Look at what you’ve written and move things about if necessary – a strong start to a line can serve as a stake, a prop holding things up. You may naturally write beautifully – but your best strength can also be your weakness.

On tricky links – you can make ‘leaps’ (I took this to mean the idea of moving between seemingly unrelated images or meanings) – leaps are good – but they need to be ‘clear leaps’. If something is in the way, confusing things, you need to get rid of that, clear the way.

On developing a ‘forensic’ eye for syntax – check for missing subjects or verbs that change tense, confused constructions, missing commas etc due to long sentences with sub-clauses over several stanzas. (For me, this is a bit like writing HTML – every time you open a bracket or start a new ‘declaration’ you have to close it, even if it’s hundreds of lines later, with all kinds of embedded instructions in between. If you get something wrong the whole thing falls apart.  But it’s so satisfying when you find the missing inverted commas or bracket!)

Poet's Tips/

Mimi Khalvati on vowel music and editing with form

Notebook

Notebook

Our last workshop of the year with Mimi Khalvati on Saturday, and the subjects of vowel sounds and form were big topics. Here’s an extract from my notes, on the things that struck home for me this month.

Vowel music – paying attention to the vowel sounds of words (NB not how the sounds are written – it can’t be done by sight.)

Sometimes a chain of sounds emerges and this can reveal something about the emotional feel of it. Listen to the sound, what does it tell you? For example – the UH of but, come, cup etc can have an up-in-the-air feeling, a feeling of wonder, whereas the short I sounds of pin, trip, kin, can sound excitable, light. Think of the longer vowel sounds and diphthongs of peel, need, close, bows, low, ground – in being longer they are more settled, grounded, slowing down.

Working with vowel sounds is a good critical tool – sometimes you can hit on the right sound but it’s the wrong word. This is a common problem – you can’t let the word go, because you know there’s something right about it, but you don’t know why it still seems wrong. Lots of things sound similar, you have to work through other words with the same sound.

Still thinking about sounds – if you use a foreign name or word, should you worry about people not reading it with the right pronunciation, and thereby spoiling their ‘hearing’ of the poem? Mimi says you should trust a ‘good reader’ to make the right call and go with it. ‘Don’t write for bad readers!’

Form – when the form doesn’t quite work you must wonder about it. Form is an unforgiving editing tool. Go through and look where you’ve put line breaks, enjambments, stanza length, anything that sticks out (eg a strong, unintentional rhyming couplet in the middle of free verse) and try playing with the form, stanza and line length etc.
On the other hand, don’t force your poem into a specific form if it doesn’t quite fit, eg by ‘padding’ in order for the metre to be correct. Trust in the direction the poem is going and don’t be wedded to an idea if the language suggests otherwise.

Poet's Tips/

More Mimi tips

Here’s my round up of tips from Mimi Khalvati as recorded in my notebook on Saturday…. yours to do with as you see fit!

  • On the subject of clarity and coherence (does one need it? should one worry about it?) Similes are clearer than metaphors, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Mimi’s advice is to use similes ‘to see where you can go’ with the subject, and find the metaphors from that. Then you might want to ditch the similes. It’s a form of distillation/crystaliisation – taking your material and distilling from it the good metaphors. This is what might make it fresh, particularly if your topic is one that’s been done many times before.
  • On too much narrative – you don’t have to ‘situate’ everything. Less of a story, more intense, is what you need to make it a poem.
  • On internal rhyme – there’s nothing magic about it, it’s just English. ‘It’s impossible to write ten lines without some sort of internal rhyme’. Ouch!
  • ‘It’s terribly hard to write a simple, pure, love poem without it sounding trite.’ Pay attention to the sounds, every syllable, every vowel. Sometimes a single word will wrong-foot you. Keep testing it, reading it again and again to hear how it sounds.
  • The sensual, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual – which of these is to the fore in your poem? What’s the balance like? Something to consider. Intellectual (a ‘think’ poem) is more unusual, so might be fresher. Everyone focuses on imagery, so how about fresh ideas, new ways of thinking about something?
  • On titles – ‘let the title come from the opposite side of the brain to where the poem has come from’ – for example if the poem is a bit odd then resist the urge to make the title factual or explanatory. (I wasn’t quite sure about this but it was food for thought… plus I need all the help I can get with titles so I will bear this in mind.)
Poet's Tips/

Workshop with Mimi Khalvati

Aren’t we lucky in Lewes? A bona fide A-list poet comes down here from London each month to offer her wisdom and help us improve our writing. And I am finally in! After a year or so of champing at the bit I now have a place, and enjoyed my first ‘official’ workshop on Saturday at the salubrious venue of Lewes Bus Station. As well as Mimi there’s also a fantastic line-up of poets in the group, so I feel really privileged.

Here are a few extracts from my frantic note-taking of Mimi-isms, in no particular order… (I know these sound completely random and out of context they probably are, but I’m partly doing it to remind myself of what was said)

  • Don’t say the same thing several times
  • Be careful when editing not to lose the tone, if it’s crucial to the poem
  • On line length, if you’re unsure: find an important line and try using that as your line length
  • Ask yourself “am I going this way or that way?’
  • If you aim high you have more work to do
  • Writing formal poetry is 50 times harder than free verse (I liked this one!)
  • You sometimes need to be bold and not care what readers think/feel
  • Doubt in the mind of the reader is good. Don’t worry about taking things too literally. Sometimes  it’s a sign you need to read more, and read more ‘illogical’ stuff eg Selima Hill. If people don’t understand that’s their problem!
  • Avoid signposting (ie nudging people), plus a few more ‘over used’ words hit the dust (ask me if you really want to know!)
  • Try swapping nouns or noun phrases and see how it sounds – mess things up a bit – to stretch yourself into unfamiliar territory

Happy days!