Writing in the Gaps
Sarah Hemings, one of our Arts Council supported mentees, on writing in the gaps and having the time of her life.
I’m a parent to two teenagers (Annabelle 17 and Edward 14); I’m also a poet and a Chartered Librarian working in public libraries, and I regularly feel very thinly spread across competing demands (I also know that I’m far from alone in this). I frequently forget what day of the week it is, what’s on the shopping list I’ve managed to leave at home or (on a bad day) what my name is.
Sometimes I even get my children mixed up and forget who is at college this week and who is at school (and this sad state of affairs has not been helped one little bit by the current pandemic).
When I learned that I was going to be mentored by Fiona Benson, I spent the next few days trying to stave off a stress migraine that was threatening to overwhelm me. What are you thinking? I remember asking myself. You’re a working mother who already has too much on her plate! Where do you really think you’re going to find the time to do all that extra writing? It took me at least a week to calm down from this mindset and to convince myself that there MUST be a way of squeezing extra hours out of the standard-issue 24-hour day if I just put my mind to it.
Reader, I am having the time of my life being mentored by Fiona!
It’s challenging for sure, but what my tired, pre-mentoring brain failed to take into consideration was how thrilling it would be to see my poetry manuscript taking shape and improving dramatically as a result of being mentored. In other words, that the motivational push afforded by the sessions would make me find writing time in places I didn’t know time was waiting to be found.
I’d like to share with you some comments made by the poet, Jacob Polley in a 2017 article for The Guardian. Polley says that
‘writing a poem can be as much about the storing up of the energy before the poem’s written down as about the casting of it on to paper. One can have a strong sense of a poem being there, even when there isn’t anything there.’
Great, Jacob! Does that mean I don’t actually have to write anything down in order to make poems and call myself a poet? I rather think not, but it’s a great idea to think that even when we’re going about the other parts of our busy lives, the things we want to write are brewing inside us, developing, waiting for their exit point. Polley goes on to say that
‘if I’m writing a poem, ideally I should probably be kept busy for most of the day doing anything other than writing’.
As you can imagine, this was joy to my ears.
So, how did I actually find the time to write more than I normally would? I know that’s what you’re all wondering. Admittedly, I did take a couple of days off work to attend to some of the trickier editing that required a block of time at my desk and some serious headspace. Other than that, I have perfected the art of (as I call it) ‘writing in the gaps’.
Basically, I now see all time as potential writing time, no matter how small the slot.
I’ve realised that whole days of annual leave don’t actually benefit me that much as I can only write for 2-3 hours before my brain needs a rest. Smaller slots of time work better for me and allow me to focus down on a specific task (look at that last stanza, what can I do about that formatting, why doesn’t that word work there?)
So far I have written during my lunchbreaks at work, while waiting for the children in the car (ever the taxi), while waiting for appointments and last thing at night when the house is (eventually) quiet. I’ve discovered that I usually have a spare half-hour before I leave the house for work, so I sit on the settee with my notebook or a draft of a poem I’m working on.
The other day I started a poem in my head as I was cooking our evening meal! I dashed to write it all down, dinner was delayed (cue moaning teenagers) but my thoughts had been captured nonetheless. The poem I started that day is now a new poem to add to a manuscript I thought was complete when I submitted it to my mentor.
It seems that we all lead incredibly busy lives these days. But as I have found to my delight, when you string together all this ‘writing in the gaps’, you find that you have created something rather more satisfyingly solid and that real progress has been made.
Sarah Hemings is a Chartered Librarian from Bristol. A member of The Poetry Society and Trowbridge Stanza, she tweets at @SarahHemings1. In 2019 she won First Prize in the Gloucestershire Writers' Network Poetry Competition for her poem, 'Vestry'. She is currently editing her first pamphlet.
