Playtime by Tracy Darnton

I’m sharing my latest procrastination task – setting up an escape room for writer friends on our forthcoming day retreat.

This means that I’m looking anew at every item in my house as to whether it can be repurposed as a writing exercise/escape room task. Wooden spoon and mixing bowl? Excellent for the writing an abstract recipe exercise. Tiny objects? Perfect for my six objects in a story task.

Paint colour charts? I’m sucked in by the possibilities of titles like ‘Between Dog and Wolf’ and ‘Invisible Green’ or a detective called ‘Juniper Ash’.

I’ve been reading Michael Rosen’s Book of Play! Rosen’s book sets out all the learned reasons why play has developed and why it matters. It’s full of play suggestions and I realise that many of those, especially the wordplay, have been part of my day-to-day since forever. In fact, the way I play around with ‘What if' scenarios or make my characters do improv. is a big part of how I develop a book idea, especially as I am not a plotter thinking about mid-points and Three Act Structures.

Far from growing out of this once the kids left home, I seem to be liking ‘play’ more and more as I get older. Is it OK to just like playing, even though I am getting on in life? I took part in an ‘adults only’ craft session at the Wellcome Collection based around the In Plain Sight exhibition. That’s always one of my favourite places to visit in London for interesting ideas and a strong element of play and creativity about the way information is presented. And I was the oldest there by a good twenty years. But, so what? (That's a photo of my eye in the middle).

 

This week I’ve also been distracted by making small, woolly wigs for cardboard avocados (Don’t ask!) But, dear reader, I enjoyed it.

Let’s hope that the friends I’m ‘locking’ in the escape room have a similar playful approach. We’ll soon see.

My issue is that once my brain sets off in that direction, I find it hard to rein it back to the task in hand. So diligently adding to my WIP, ticking off every 500 words, is a monumental effort.

Speaking of which, my word target beckons. After I’ve set up some more bookish anagrams and turned a cupboard into a time machine….

 

  

Tracy Darnton is the author of YA thrillers Ready or Not, The Rules and The Truth About Lies. She tries really hard to be a grown up. You can follow her @TracyDarnton on Twitter and Instagram.  

Putting Away Childish Things – Ruth Hatfield

Ok, I know there are certain traits you probably shouldn’t carry from childhood into adulthood with you, like the tendency to throw yourself on the floor and howl when someone asks you not to pull a chair onto your head. But does there really come a time when you have to put away your toys and ‘grow up’?

I’m not sure. Putting away your toys doesn’t necessarily mean you become a grown up: it seems to me more a sign that you’ve closed down your thinking and decided that you know how things are, and that the time for experimentation and play has passed.

My nearly one-year-old daughter is doing something new. I say ‘new’ – it’s been done by every single baby since babies began. But she has discovered it for herself, and it’s got me thinking about the usefulness of ‘childish’ things. She’s learnt the words ‘hat’, ‘cat’, and ‘tractor’, and she’s begun trying to figure out what they are. Hats go on people’s heads. Cats are alive. Tractors have wheels. Which means, logically, that if you put a book on your head, it must be a hat. If a man walks towards you, he must be a cat. If the vacuum cleaner has wheels, it must be a tractor, and so on.

She’s a baby, so I get it – there’s a whole lot of context she just doesn’t understand yet. But it also makes me play with silly ideas. What if that vacuum cleaner hoovered up potatoes? What if that man really is a cat, in disguise? What if everyone used their favourite books as hats and walked around wearing them, and you saw someone wearing a book you loved or hated?

What if we lived in some bestselling dystopia, where wearing books was the law…?

Endless questions. Mostly inane (apart from the last one, that’s my next novel). But I like toying with silly ideas and I always have, since I was a child. At the heart of it is both a desire to remove myself from the everyday, and a desire to understand what the everyday is, in relation to all the other things that it could be but isn’t. I suppose this isn’t a particularly childish desire, but it manifests itself in childish ways – I wish I could still play those endless games of ‘pretend’ that I acted out with friends in the playground at primary school, and which required no work, no polish and no finesse, just endless streams of new ideas.

Baby At Play With Very Hungry Caterpillar Hat

My daughter also empties a box, puts it on her own head, and tells herself it’s a hat. In time, I’m sure the box will become a car, then a pirate ship, then a moon rocket.  One of the best things I did at the Charney Manor retreat this summer was Helen Larder’s excellent workshop on the lawn – a group of grown-ups playing kids’ games (trying to steal ‘treasure’ while capturing members of the opposite team was a great one) and having a riotously brilliant time.

Again I wonder – why is the act of physically playing something that we grown-ups reserve for special, organised situations? Why don’t we do it more? It would make writing so much easier. When I was a child I wrote my stories everywhere – in cars juddering along tiny lost roads, trailing up hills swishing sticks, playing those endless games of ‘pretend’. Now I sit at a table with a pen in my hand. Mentally, it works. But physically, it isn’t exciting.

I know that there are inevitable consequences of growing up. The luxury that I had as a child to trail along behind my parents on a walk imagining families of mice living in the dry stone walls was only available to me because somebody else was reading the map and making my sandwiches. But it seems a shame that alongside the adult’s increase in responsibility also comes the adoption of a more ‘adult’ persona, sometimes against our better desires. Those childish things we loved made us into the creative adults we are – why should we ever feel we have to put them away?

Of course adults do play – actors certainly do – but very often under somebody else’s direction, or in an organised group. How many adults still play with Lego, acting out all the lives they’ll never get to live? Reading a book is basically creative play, but it’s still someone else’s world, delivered to you. Writing a book is creative play, and it’s entirely your own world, but sometimes even the act of writing gives creativity a purpose that I’m not sure it always needs. 

Maybe there is a time for putting away childish things. But I think there’s also a time to consider taking them out again, and just seeing what happens.

To Drive The Cold Winter Away by Tess Berry-Hart

It's still winter! The bone-shaking chill of a new January with its winds, ice storms, broken healthy resolutions and humourless deadlines (tax payments, school applications, etc) can make even the bravest of us want to curl up in a cave next to a blazing fire and hibernate until spring arrives.

And to some of us who suffer from depression (episodes of persistent sadness or low mood, marked loss of interest and pleasure) either constant or intermittent, winter can be one of the hardest times. Depression being a multi-headed hydra ranging from many states of unipolar to bipolar, I'm not suggesting that there is one single type of depression; for instance not all of us are affected by the winter or weather, while some people who don't even have depression in the clinical sense might be experiencing a mild case of the winter blues, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Creativity is like a fire that we can stoke to drive away the cold winter (whether physical or psychological, internal or external). So I'm deep in my cave trying to work out ways that I can stoke my creativity without resorting to biscuits!

Bibliotherapy's been around for a while now, and is the literary prescription of books and poems against a range of "modern ailments" - including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. A form of guided self-help, it's not exactly a new idea - the ancient Greeks spoke of "catharsis" - the process of purification or cleansing, in which the observer of a work of theatre could purge themselves of emotions such as pity and fear through watching and identifying with the characters in a play. All of us in the modern world can attest to the feeling of connection and joy when an author so precisely describes a state that we are ourselves experiencing, and the nail-biting, cliff-hanging state of knowing exactly what our heroine or hero is going through. We root for him or her because s/he represents ourselves battling our own demons in an idealised meta-state.

But how does bibliotherapy work? According to the various proponents, it helps perpetuate a shift in thinking, so that things are not so inflexible (black and white thinking, for all you cognitive-behavioural depressives out there!) which is crucial to tackling depression. Being able to gain distance and perspective by viewing problems through the lens of fictional characters means that in real life our fixed thought-patterns which contribute to our problems can start to become unpicked.

And of course, identification isn't the only joy to be found in books; good old-fashioned escapism is surely the reason why many of us read so avidly. A new world, a new family, a new life, perhaps even new biology or physics, takes us away momentarily from the mundane world so we can return refreshed, hopefully to see our lives with new eyes.

I've obviously been self-medicating for a long time, but I always called it comfort-reading. By comfort-reading I mean a well-known book that you can plunge into at will like a warm bath or a pair of slippers. At school when I was anxious about exams or bullies I would find solace in re-reading the heroic adventures of Biggles or the magical quest of Lord of the Rings; at university it was in the dreamy memories of Brideshead and the vicissitudes of Billy Liar or Lucky Jim. When I started my first office jobs I would read 1984 or Brave New World (odd choices for comfort-reads but I think it was to remind myself that things could actually be worse!) but when I started writing my own books, I ...er ... stopped reading for some years. I think my tiny little brain could only take so much exercise!

I started comfort-reading again when we first had our children; during long and frequently painful breast-feeding sessions my husband would read my childhood favourites Charlotte's Web and Danny the Champion Of The World to me as distraction and encouragement. And these days my prospective comfort list numbers hundreds of books; for me, reading is re-reading.

So what could I take to bolster myself against the winter chill? I've written myself a prescription but I'd be interested in hearing yours!

1) A dose of James Herriot's short animal stories, to be administered when needed (they are nice and short so you're not left hanging after a few pages) or chapters from Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat, or virtually anything by PG Wodehouse;

2) A daily dose of half an hour "joy-writing" - half an hour in the morning when I can sit down and let ideas spill out onto the page. (If it ends up with me writing about what happened last night then so be it. It can often lead to something more ...)

3) A small creative project on the horizon, easily identifiable and manageable, that I can look forward to; in this case getting a small group of actors together to read through a new draft of a play that I've written (there'll be a blog post on this soon so stay tuned!)

4) Connection with others - I'm a member of a local book group, which not only makes me keep on top of what new books are coming out, but also participating in the joy of discussion; there's nothing more frustrating than reading a good book only to realise that nobody you know has read it!)

So I think that's enough to start barricading myself up against the January snows!

But what about you? What kind of comfort-reads do you enjoy to drive the cold winter away?

Creativity and Play - Heather Dyer

I've been teaching a class called Developing Creativity. It's a lifelong learning class, so there's a really interesting mix of ages and the class includes an abstract painter, two businesswomen, two poets, a watercolour artist and a forensic scientist.

Having only ever taught creative writing before, I was keen to introduce exercises that each of them could apply to their own projects. So, at the end of the second session I asked them all what they wanted from the course.

I was quite taken aback when, as one, they shouted: "FUN!!"

I rolled my eyes and I thought: "pearls before swine!"

But then I got to thinking that maybe they were right, and that it was they who had a thing or two to teach me about creativity, and not the other way around.

Because creativity and play have a lot in common.

In order to be creative, we need to develop the same attitudes and state of mind that we do when we play. Firstly, we must be completely absorbed but not too attached to the end product. We must remain fluid and able to respond spontaneously in the moment. We must let the game take us where it will - outside any preconceived notions or linear thought processes. We mustn't be too anxious when we play, or too self conscious (perhaps that's why adults play so little). Play requires that we forget ourselves, let go, and see what happens. Exactly the qualities required for creativity.

A long time ago I asked an older, wiser writer friend if she knew a cure for writer's block. She said she met with her fellow writer friends once a month just to do writing exercises. I told her I didn't have time for that and that I needed to focus on getting this book done. She replied that she found the exercises helpful because they helped her to 'take it all less seriously'.

There was a pause, during which we looked at one another and I knew that there was a lesson in there for me, somewhere. But I didn't take it. Now my students are teaching me the same lesson. Perhaps it's time I listened.




Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

When Writers Play - by Rosalie Warren

How often do you play? In your work, I mean? In your writing, if that's what you do?

Most writers start out, I think, by 'playing' at writing - however young or old we may be at the time. In those early days, writing is probably a hobby - perhaps an escape from real life in the form of a dull or demanding job and/or a challenging home life. At the beginning, we are often bursting with enthusiasm and ideas, and what we lack is the space, time and (perhaps) expertise to get them into shape.

If we persevere and have a hefty dose of luck, we may end up earning something for our efforts. In the past, if not so much so today, some writers could make a part-time or even a full-time career out of it. If they were very lucky, they might even become rich, though of course most never did, however good they were.

The danger is that as our writing careers progress, it's so easy to lose that intial sense of fun and play. Writing becomes the thing we have to do - either to please a publisher or even just ourselves. I'm all in favour of self-discipline - the 'sit down at your desk at 9am (if only!) so the muse knows where to find you' and the 'minimum word count per day' frame of mind. Mostly, these things work for me. But it's when I lose that sense of play that trouble looms.

I've experienced this before, way back in another life, when I studied for a PhD and then became a researcher and, eventually, a university lecturer. As a student, my research was mostly fun. OK, I was lucky - I know that PhDs can sometimes be a terrible slog. But I happened upon a topic that fascinated me, had a good supervisor and made encouraging progress from the start. My main problem was combining this with caring for two young children. Not easy, but still, on the whole, satisfying and fun.

The fun continued when I gained an EPSRC research fellowhip for three years to do postdoctoral research. In fact that was eaiser, as it was actually a 2-year fellowship spread out over three years, which suited me fine.

The trouble started after that. My marriage broke up, which didn't help. I spent a year looking for a job in the city where my ex worked so my children could see us both. After months of struggling to get by, doing tutoring and gardening and PhD supervision, often all at the same time (well, in the same morning, anyway), I managed to get a lectureship at a unviersity. Perfect - except that I was now so busy, with several hours' commuting each day, a high teaching load, masses of admin, supervising students, giving pastoral advice, etc etc etc - my research slid into the back seat. It was no longer fun - and all my creativity dried up. It became something I had to do - in order to keep my job - and something I had to do well. In the odd hour or so between other commitments, I had to come up with earth-shaking new projects and theories. Hmmm....

The human brain just doesn't work that way. Or mine doesn't. A move south (the children older now) and a new job helped a bit at first, but the pattern was soon reestablished and the commute even longer. What's more, I now had an invalid mother-in-law waiting for me with all her demands when I got home - and two teenage step-children. Then my mother died and my father (110 miles away) became very ill. Something had to give and it was my health. I had a breakdown and was very lucky to be offered early retirement on a small pension, which put me in a position (just) of being able to fulfil my lifelong dream and spend my time writing.

That was wonderful - and still is. But just recently, six years on, writing has begun to feel like work. Like something other people expect of me, rather than a game I play because it's fun. And yes, there's bound to be some of this. I have obligations to my publisher and I want to help and encorage other writers as much as I can. And anything worthwhile is sometimes sheer hard slog. But I'm very wary of losing that sense of play.

Last week, after a month or so of hard work, I decided to give myself a few days off. Just a couple of days' messing about at home, not trying to do any writing at all. I even gave myself permission to stay in bed all day (bliss!) Catching up on reading, listening to Radio 4, dozing on and off...

Heaven. And then, after an hour or so of this, a little idea popped up, which I hastily scribbled down. After half an hour's scribbling I got out of bed and transferred it to my computer.

I kept writing until 11.30pm and at the end of the day I'd done 6500 words (very unusual for me! Possibly an all-time record. Usually 2K a day is my maximum for new work).

It all goes to show - take the pressure off and the ideas will bubble up. Maybe not always, but often.

Of course, finding time to play is not easy, for many people. But if we can - and if we can give ourselves, even occasionally, whole mornings or whole days just to mess around, with permission not to produce anything - who knows what might happen?

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
— Heraclitus 500 BCE, philosopher

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.
—Carl Jung


Happy playing!
Best wishes
Rosalie

My blog http://rosalie-warren.blogspot.co.uk/
My website http://www.rosalie-warren.co.uk/
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Follow me on Twitter @Ros_Warren

Let’s Play! by Emma Barnes

Last weekend I went to see Swallows and Amazons. It’s a musical version, currently touring theatres across the country, and probably the best children’s show I’ve ever seen.


As well as being funny, clever and moving, having a great story and songs which are still going round and round my head, it was also thought-provoking. John, Susan, Titty and Roger are – wait for it – twelve, eleven, nine and seven (and the seven-year-old can’t swim) when they are set loose on their yacht, unaccompanied, to sail and camp around a Cumbrian lake.

Better drowned than duffers
if not duffers won't drown

is their father’s famous rationale for this decision!

As it happens, the children I was with were roughly these ages. I imagined waving them off from the jetty with their sleeping bags, compasses and pen knifes – and a couple of hours later the police arriving on my door. I’m not sure which precise law forbids you from sending kids afloat, alone, in the Lake District. But there must be one.

Maybe even in the 1930s that scenario was a tad unrealistic. But now it has become utterly incredible – and something has been lost as a result. In fact Play England made this very point in the show's programme. Children thrive on outdoor freedom and the chance for imaginative play.

I’m already well aware of this issue. I write books for children which are set in the here-and –now. I write about mischievous, curious characters having everyday adventures. And what a lot of problems that gives me with the action, in today’s constrained world.

If I want my young character Martha Bones to run away from home – as she does – where is she to go? Her 1930s equivalent My Naughty Little Sister struck out for the middle of town. (She also took trains unaccompanied- as a pre-schooler!) In the twenty-first century that’s just an impossible dream.

Martha ends up camping out in Next Door’s garden instead.

Children in 2012 can’t ride their bikes to their friends’ houses, jump on a bus, explore the woods or camp out alone. Just William would have surely exploded from the pressures of staying home all day. Or would he just have been glued to an x-box instead?

The imagination, however, is still its own realm. Like many authors, I’ve been on the road this last month, visiting the many schools who have been having their annual Book Week. (Why do they all choose March? But that’s another issue.)

It’s fascinating to come into contact with young readers, and to see their imaginations at work. In the workshops that I do, I try to give them the freedom to roam, to play around with their own ideas, without the preoccupation with planning, spelling and punctuation which is often inevitable in school hours.

Their imagination takes them all kinds of places – OK, sometimes rather gorey places for my taste – but also to funny and exotic worlds of their own imaginings, as they invent their own “naughty characters” and record their exploits.

It's this playfulness that we need to nourish - in school, at home and maybe even on the waters of Lake Windermere...

Emma's latest book is How (Not) To Make Bad Children Good
Emma's website