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- [00:00]
Winnie M. Lee
Well, good morning, everyone, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the LSE for today's event. This forms the LSE's ninth Space for Thought Literary Festival, which has been taking place all week around the theme of revolutions. So my name is Winnie M. Lee, I'm a PhD researcher here at the LSE and I'm also a novelist. So I get very excited every time the Literary Festival comes around at the LSE because it's an opportunity for people at this institution who are very caught up in researching and trying to understand the world, can use the lens of literature to understand the world. And I think literature and creative writing are a very important way for us to try to make sense of the things around us. So we're very pleased to have with us Bridget holding at the LSE today. Bridget's actually come over from France by way of Brixton, and she's a former screenwriter whose articles have appeared in Writing Magazine and the Psychotherapist, among other publications. She's also a UKCP registered psychotherapist and a former Associate lecturer for the university and has been a tutor for creative writing at the University of Exeter since 2008. So Bridget is also the founder of Wild Words. Her online and real world courses explore the relationship between ourselves, the world and our words. So before I hand it over to her, just a few housekeeping tips notes for those Twitter users in the audience. The hashtag for Today's event is LSELitFest. I'd like to ask you to please put your phones on silent so as not to disrupt the workshop. And this event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast, subject to technical difficulties. Also, after the workshop, there'll be a chance for you to ask your questions to Bridget. But right now I'd like to help you, ask you to join me in welcome, welcoming Bridget to the podium. Thanks very much.
- [01:50]
Bridget Holding
Good morning. So we're going to talk about rewild, your words. But first I just wanted to ask. I'm just going to ask you to do a couple of little, what I call writing experiments this morning. I call them experiments because I think when you talk about writing exercises, everyone has these flashbacks to school and goes, ooh, like this. And, you know, we can never get anything wrong when we're writing. I don't think it's just about playing with ideas and seeing what comes up. So they're called writing experiments. But for the first one, what I'd like you to do, just for two minutes, just to get us going, is I'd like You just to make a list completely randomly off the top of your head of anything which is getting in, which might get in the way of you today, which might get in the way of you being here, completely present in the room with us today. Okay, so it can be anything you like. It might be something physical. You might have a pain in your left hip. You might have a headache, you might have a stomach ache. It could be anxiety about money. Anxiety about what your son or daughter are getting up to today when you're not in the house, or your husband or your wife for that matter. Anything you like, just scribble it away. No one's going to look at it. It's just an exercise in getting stuff out of the way before we become present in a situation. You'll see why it's relevant as we go on to talk. So just a couple of minutes to do that. A good tip, too, is when you think you've come to the end of your list, just think to yourself, is there anything else? Because quite often there's something that's hovering on the edge of your mind. And when you think, is there anything else in that last moment? It sometimes appears. And you can jot that down as well. It's often the thing you don't really want to think about, I've found, in my experience. Okay, so when you've made your list and you've thought to yourself, is there anything else? And you've jotted down anything on the edge of your mind, just fold it up, put it away somewhere. We're not actually going to use it. It's just. It's quite a helpful technique, I find, just for clearing a space at the beginning of a session, be that beginning of a session of writing for yourself, beginning of a talk like this, beginning of anything that's going to happen during your day. Because a lot of this talk is going to be about how we can be present with ourselves, really. Ourselves as animals. Ourselves as animals who write and tell stories. Yeah. So there you go. So we're going to talk about rewording your words. I think to talk about rewilding our words, we first have to understand, don't we, what we mean by wild? Because wild's a word that's bandied about like anything at the moment. Virtually anything you buy at the moment is called wild something, isn't it? Because it makes it cooler, it makes it more invigorating, it makes it good for you, whatever it does. So it's a shame that the word wild in some ways is kind of losing its power, I think. But we can define it in many ways. People define it very differently. And I'm going to look first about the definitions that I use when I work. When I work with wildness in human beings and in words and in storytelling. So when we talk about an environment, we often talk about thinking about uncultivated, aren't we? When we think about wild, we're thinking about an area that's been left to its own devices without human interference. That's the first definition there. Growing or produced without cultivation or the care of humans. So that's what we think when we talk about an environment. When we talk about an animal, we're talking maybe about the second one here, which is living in a state of nature, not tamed or domesticated. So the idea of being untamed comes up, doesn't it, very strongly when we think about wildness and animals. Untamed animals. It's interesting also that this is a list that just came from Dictionary.com on the Internet. But it's interesting, as you look down, the definitions that are up on that webpage that you find they get less positive as they go on. The beginning ones are quite nice, aren't they? The idea of being untamed or uncultivated is quite pleasant. But once you get to the bottom, we're looking at things like uncivilized or barbarous. And the bottom one is great, isn't it, of unrestrained violence, fury, intensity. So we also have this association, don't we, with wildness as craziness, as something that's dangerous, as something that's uncontained, unpredictable, aggressive, and that coexists, that sort of negative idea of wildness coexists, I think, with the positive sense of what wildness is. But I think our association, in the way I look at it, our association with wildness as craziness, is a corruption, really, of the idea of wildness for various reasons. Because to be crazy or. Or to be aggressive or to be unbalanced or to be chaotic or to be dangerous is in some ways about disconnection for me, not about connection. And we'll talk more about this, but I believe very strongly that true wildness is about connection. Connection to yourself, connection to your storytelling or your writing, if that's what you do with your time. And connection to the environment in which you do that. So it's all about connection. So any time you talk about someone being wild and you mean they're out of control, for me, that's a bit of a Misuse of the word. And that's a corruption that's gone on over time for various reasons that we may or may not have time to go into today. Okay, so that's ideas about wild and what wild means. So I wanted to talk briefly about the idea of rewilding, ecological rewilding, because there's a great movement now, I don't know how many of you know about it, but it's for rewilding our environment. There are quite a few projects going on through Europe and in the Americas to rewild ecosystems. And there's a great definition here by George Monbiot, who's a great proponent of that way of functioning with nature. Who knows about George Monbiot? Who knows of George Monbiot? He's an amazing man. I think he's a journalist, activist, writer. He's quite challenging in his views often and he really gets heard because of that. I think he's an amazing man. So he gives a kind of summary here that I think is quite nice about what it means to rewild the environment. If we have spaces on our doorsteps in which nature is allowed to do its own thing, in which it can be to some extent self willed, driven by its own dynamic processes, that I feel is a much more exciting and thrilling ecosystem to explore and discover. And it enables us to enrich our lives, to fill them with wonder and enchantment. It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? I think that, you know, we could live in, or we could visit places of natural beauty that exist within their own way of functioning without interference. And that's something that he's putting forward as the way that we should go with ecology throughout the world. Okay, so there's a lot of ideas about wild and what it means, but the question is, how does that apply to words? Because I imagine most of you here, given that you've come to this talk, are interested in words in one way or another. How many of you are actually active, would you call yourself active writers or storytellers? Storytellers here, yeah. Virtually everyone. And how many of you are fiction writers as opposed to anything else? Yeah, half, maybe non fiction. Yeah. Poets. There's some poets in the room as well.
- [09:07]
Winnie M. Lee
Yeah. Great.
- [09:07]
Bridget Holding
Yeah. So quite a range.
- [09:09]
Winnie M. Lee
Yeah.
- [09:09]
Bridget Holding
So we're all interested in words, aren't we? And how we use words and how we can look at the idea maybe of freeing our words. And when I work with words in the sense of rewilding words or wild words, what I'm talking about, there is some of the ideas that I've just mentioned in terms of the general sense of what wild means. So I'm talking about allowing words, for example, to be driven by their own dynamic processes, to be untamed, to be uncultivated, to do what they feel they need to do without us imposing unnecessary restrictions or censorship or limitation on them, which we do in many, many ways, both individually, societally and in various other ways as well. So that's what we're working with when we talk about rewilding our words. I think to understand what it means to rewild our words, what we need to do is we need to understand the role of storytelling to human beings and look at why we tell stories. So it makes me quite cross, actually. I think that society tends to think of storytelling and particularly writing as a profession as being something that's kind of a luxury, particularly fiction writing and poetry writing, more so maybe than non fiction. But it's very hard as a writer, I think, to feel that you're valid in what you do, that it's a proper job. Because people around you think, oh, they're just sitting, you know, you're lying on the sofa and you're just kind of daydreaming, or you're sealing yourself away in a room all day and you're not speaking to anyone and you're not doing anything important. When I work with writers, this often comes up with partners with families who just don't take it seriously. They don't believe it's a serious thing to do or an important thing to do. But actually, storytelling is fundamental to how human beings survive, and it's fundamental to how we thrive. It's not a luxury. It's absolutely basic. It's basic for many, many reasons. I suppose you could say the less important reasons are things like writing to gain perspective on our lives. If we write nonfiction writing to transfer information to other people via what they read that we've written, writing to entertain, writing to gain money, if that's what we do for a job. Those are all important. But they're actually the least important reasons that we write, I would say, and the least important reasons that we tell stories. Have you noticed there are stories absolutely everywhere? You can't go anywhere without seeing a story around you. If you listen to anyone's conversation, it's full of stories. If you watch films or TV or things on the Internet, they're full of stories. If you watch sports, games, involved in sports, they're full of stories, aren't they? Everything is a story. Human Beings, in fact, default into storytelling anytime we can. The only time we don't tell stories is when we're involved in a very immediate task that we have to concentrate on. Anytime we're not involved in an immediate task, we automatically drift into daydreaming about something. Or if we're sleeping, we drift into dreaming. So there's. It's actually easier for people to tell stories than not to tell stories. Stories are all around us. We live in a sea of stories. There's no getting away from it. And I think this is. Yeah, I mean, this is rather wonderful to appreciate as a storyteller. And very hard for many people to understand who aren't involved in writing or aren't involved in storytelling. There are two really, really important reasons, I would say, that we tell stories. The first is that it's increasingly thought that we tell stories in order to rehearse problem solving, to rehearse strategies for various life situations. There's really good evidence now that if you strongly imagine a situation or imagine performing an action, that the same neurons fire in your brain, the same neural pathways are opened and strengthened as if you were doing the action for real. So there's no difference really physiologically between doing an action and imagining it. There are also evidence. There's also evidence now that probably 80% of dreams that we have are about ways of problem solving. You're presented with a problem in a dream and you solve it. That's what the dream is about.
- [13:49]
Audience Member 1
Nearly.
- [13:50]
Bridget Holding
Almost always. So these are ways in which storytelling can be seen to be a way of helping us to survive, helping us to deal with problems in our life. That might make the difference between life or death in some situations. And certainly might make the difference between health or lack of health. Really important function of storytelling. The other really important function of storytelling is that it allows energy to be released from our nervous system. It's a way of discharging energy from our nervous systems. And it's a way of processing emotions. The two go hand in hand. So it's really important, also physiological reasons why we tell stories. If we look at how wild animals function, you'll see it sounds a bit like a digression talking about all of this stuff about wild animal functioning. But it does, believe me, it does all come round in the end. If we talk about. If we look at how wild animals function, what happens to any wild animal, this is human beings included, is that we're presented with a threat or an opportunity in our environment. Something comes up in our environment that we need to deal with, okay, we take that information in, don't we, through our senses. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we touch, what we feel. That's how we get the information inside. That's how we appreciate what's going on around us. And it's registered in our body via body sensations of various kinds. So contraction, expansion, muscle tension, release, heat, cold, vibration, those kind of things. That's how we register, don't we? Sensory impressions. Sometimes those bodily sensations become intense in various ways. And intense in a form that common to all of us, we understand. And so we label those emotions. Emotions are just intense forms of body sensations. So we label something happiness or sadness or joy or jealousy or whatever it is. The idea of emotions and the idea of body sensations is that that moves us into action. That's the point of it. The point of it is that we feel something and we react. We feel anger and we challenge someone or challenge a situation. We feel sadness and we go and we go and replenish. We go and resource re resource ourselves. The idea is to move from emotion into action. If we don't do that, we don't function in a healthy way. And our bodies don't go from activation into discharge. It's really, really, really important. The process of being an animal, a human animal, any kind of animal, is to raise our energy and then have it discharge and come back to rest again. That's a continuing process that we go through as human animals. And we're not well, if we don't go through that, if we're always stuck on a high and we never discharge energy, we're not well, and we're not thriving human beings. So how does that apply to writing? Well, I would say that a writer who's writing in a way that works well goes through exactly the same process. Because a writer is a human being, a storyteller is a human being. So what happens to that writer or storyteller when they're writing in a way that's going satisfactorily, is that they see, for example, something in their environment that causes them to feel a range of body sensations, which causes them to intensify various things into emotions, which causes energy to rise through their system and out it goes onto the page. Or if you're an oral storyteller or an oral poet, a spoken word poet, same thing. Except when the energy rises, you're taking that into performance in the way that any actor would as well. That's a healthy way to write, isn't it? And actually, you see, if you ever watch a writer write? You'll see that actually the way they move their hand on the pen, the way they type varies according to how they're feeling. Sometimes they're writing a scene that's full of anger, so you see this intensity about how they're writing. Other times they're writing a scene that's kind of full of joy or relaxation, and you see that also evidenced in how they are. They may not be moving very much if they're writing, they're sitting in one place perhaps, but you still see that going on in their bodies. Because they're still animals. We're still animals, even if we're writing. Very important. That's what I would call being a wild writer. What's also interesting about how animals function and even how a good writer functions is that some of that, quite a lot of that happens instinctually actually. There isn't time. As a wild animal, there isn't time to think about everything before you act, is there? There just isn't time. Think for a moment. You're a lion in a jungle, you're about to be attacked by something. You don't have time to think, oh, I'm feeling that, I'm feeling that, I'm feeling that. What shall I do? Maybe I'll do that. No, I won't. Maybe I'll do that. You'd be eaten, wouldn't you, in the time it takes to think that. Okay, so so much of the way that animals function is our instinct, isn't it? And instinct is not a hugely mysterious thing. Instinct is just this amazing ability that all animals have, including human beings, including writers, to take in masses of information very, very quickly and act on it without having to filter it through our rational minds. That's all instinct is. But it's hugely important. You will see as we talk a bit later, when we start to think too much, we sabotage the process. And we certainly sabotage our writing process when we think too much. So instinct is really, really important always in how we function. I'll just say as well, that process of taking in information, feeling it and reacting and acting from it is the same whether as a writer, whether you're writing about something you're observing. If you're a nature based poet, you might be writing about the movement of a river or a tree, mightn't you? You're taking that in and you're acting in response to that, you're writing in response to that. But it's the same if you're a fiction writer and you're writing about an imaginary world. You're writing something that's set in medieval England in the 14th century or like this. It's the same because of that fact that things we imagine strongly, it's as if we're experiencing them, okay? So if you imagine a world strongly enough, imagine a situation or an event strongly enough, your body will go through the same processes as if you were doing it for real, okay? So you've got the same stimulus going.
- [20:52]
Audience Member 2
On in your body.
- [20:53]
Bridget Holding
It doesn't actually make any difference whether it's out there or whether it's internal, whether it's going on in our minds. So this all points to the fact that we are natural storytellers. I like the phrase natural storytellers. I like to use it a lot, really, because it's interesting. We can all. You can sit in a pub with a writer and they can tell you these amazing stories when they've had a couple of pints that are a little bit tipsy, and these stories flow out of them. And these stories come out perfectly formed with a beautiful. What you might talk of as an Act 3 structure. Beautiful beginning, middle and end. And then the same writer can come into a room the next day and sit down and try and write and feel completely stuck, completely blank, completely frozen in an effort to write the chapter of their novel they were intending to write that day. Very interesting, because that person is a natural storyteller, aren't they? So what happens? What happens to us as human beings who tell stories so beautifully, naturally, when we try and do it consciously, when we try and bring something else to it, when we bring a formality to the process? And that's the question we're looking at today, I think, really, what happens? Why doesn't it always just flow? Surely it should always just flow if we're natural storytellers. Before I say more about what gets in the way, I just want to emphasize, I think, that for me, our job as storytellers, whether that's bloggers, songwriters, spoken word poets, fiction writers, journalists, whatever the form of writing we do, our job is to listen to the story that needs to be expressed and to find ways to support that expression in ourselves, to find ways to channel it. But to channel it in a way that doesn't suppress it, censor it, or limit it, as we so often do. I think that's really our most important job and the sort of aim for us as writers to over time become better and better and better at channeling without restricting, without restricting our words. I do think there is always a Story for each writer, a story that needs to be told. I think we each have a story that needs to be told. Because I consider it to be an organic process, A process that brings us as human beings, back to equilibrium to tell stories. So the story I might need to tell in this moment might be different from the story I need to tell tomorrow or next week. It might manifest as nonfiction. It might manifest as fiction or poetry. It could manifest in a whole millions of different ways. But it would always be the same story. Because it's a story of what my body needs to process, the energy my body needs to process. I don't think we need to know what the source of the need is particularly. But sometimes it's helpful. I think for writers. It gives writers confidence to understand that there is a particular story that they need to tell. And really, it's about tapping into what that is. It's about listening to ourselves and finding out what that is. Instead of listening to the world around us, which has a habit of trying to tell us what we need to be writing. Or rather than listening to the part of ourself that wants to make money and is trying to write for a market. The best stories come out of people who trust their instinctual writer, trust their natural storyteller, who trust that the story they feel really strongly and passionately about is the story that needs to be told. That's where writing comes from. That's where good writing comes from. In my experience, and certainly with all the people I've worked with. And when we tap into that natural storyteller, amazing things happen. We find that our words come up vibrant, alive, just like a wild animal. They jump off the page, they slip off the tongue, they flow. We have a feeling of satisfaction as a writer. It's a hugely different experience from the experience that many of us feel when we write of kind of slogging away and plodding on. It's very different. To tap into that real source of what we need to do is very, very different experience. I would say. So within how I talk about writing, storytelling, wild words. You'll see now that the role of the body is a very important aspect for me. I consider writing to be an embodied process. Many writers, I think, would think of it as something that comes from the head. Involves thinking. It's cognitive. I wouldn't say so at all. I think that it's an extremely embodied process. And in fact, the act of telling a story is the act of transferring your emotional experience as the writer or as the storyteller into Your character or your narrator. And then that is transferred to the reader or the listener. It's a direct line of emotion, actually, from writer, storyteller to character, narrator on the page to the person who's listening or the person who's reading. It's a transferring of physical, visceral, emotional experience. It's all about embodiment, I would say. For that reason, I don't believe that we can write about what we haven't experienced. And I don't mean events. Okay, so people are always saying that, aren't they writing tuition? People are always saying, you can't write about what you haven't experienced. You can absolutely write about climbing Everest if you've never climbed Everest. You can write about going for a ride on a camel in a desert if you've never met a camel. But what you can't do, I think, as a writer or storyteller, is write about anger. If you have never felt anger, or joy, if you've never felt joy or grief, if you have never felt some sort of process around grief. Grief is very different in different situations. But you understand what I mean. The level we're talking about is the emotional, visceral, embodied level, rather than an action level of where a story might be set or what your character might be called, for example. That is a reason to try and live our lives very broadly, very widely and very deeply. I would say if we want to be good writers, the way forward is, yes, of course, to learn writing techniques. But the way forward, more than that, is to learn to be embodied, to live in our bodies, to experience the world around us, to really get out and live. Writing begins with living. I would say, more than writing begins with sitting in a room learning how to do point of view, for example. So my work, as you can see, is most often about, I would say, the nature of the writer. Yeah. So nature in the sense of we are animals, so much dialogue at the moment is still about us and nature. What shall we do in relation to nature? And I think it's often forgotten still, because we don't quite like it. It's often forgotten that we are part of nature. We're animals, aren't we? So that's really what my work is about. But within that, I'm really interested in the trailblazing, flourishing world of what you might call new nature writing. I don't know how many of you consider yourselves to be nature writers in the sense that you write something about nature. Is anyone here an actual nature writer? Yeah. Great. So those of you who are in that world may have seen that there are amazing things going on with nature writing these days. It used to be if you walked into a bookshop, that the nature writing section was kind of hidden away at the back somewhere and all kind of cobwebby and stuff. Now, if you walked a couple of months ago into Piccadilly Waterstones in Piccadilly, and it was this, you know, it was the centre of the whole shop was nature writing. And I think that's still going on. So it's become a very energized world, the world of nature writing. Robert McFarlane, who is one of the leading lights of that world in this country, I think, describes it very nicely here. An ecology of mind has emerged in photography, film, music, the visual and plastic arts, and throughout literature. Values include placing community over commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, the deep over the shallow, the double acknowledgement that, first, human beings are animals and second, we are animals among other animals. I think that's really, really nicely put. When I started Wild Words, I came from very much from a sort of psychological point of view about ourselves as animals and psychological processes. And I was quite resistant at the beginning to bringing nature writing overtly into the world of wild words. And I think that was because I had kind of a rather tame impression of what nature writing was. I thought nature writing was kind of, you know, idealized portraits of the countryside written in the 19th century, you know, all about sheep and people lying around in the sunshine in fields, without a care in the world. So there's certainly a sort of pastoral tradition of nature writing that started with the Greeks, ended up in Renaissance England and moved forwards. And that tradition very much idealized the countryside and was quite. Quite passive and gentle in its approach to nature. That's not at all what's going on with nature writing now, I would say. I mean, it's a hugely broad field. There are people like Robert MacFarlane, like George Monbiot, who are writing kind of a mixture of theory and autobiography around nature. There are also some wonderfully profound autobiographies. I don't know, maybe some of you have read H is for Hawke, Helen MacDonald, a fantastic book about training a hawk, which is actually about grief. Or the Outrun by Amy Lipton, is another really good example of autobiographical nature writing. So, yeah, there's lots of those going on, lots of memoirs. There's also people like, I suppose people like Mary Oliver, the poet, amazing American poet. She could be considered nature writing, I think. She writes a lot about nature, for sure, although she falls into other categories as well. Well, but the range of what's going on in nature writing is huge. And lots of it is very politically challenging now, socially and culturally challenging. A lot of it's facing up to ecological problems, the problems with climate change. It's a very alive world, the world of new nature writing. So even if it's traditionally not been your thing to write about nature or to think about nature, it's worth kind of investigating because there's virtually. There's something for everyone, I would say, in what's going on, and a huge amount of energy behind it and some very, very vivid writing going on as a result of that movement. Whatever you write in, whichever genre you write, I would really encourage you. I encourage myself as well. I have to remind myself it's really, really good to get out into nature as a writer. Nature has so much to teach us as writers, doesn't it? Most of us write inside in rooms, don't we? Inside rooms where we have flat white walls, flat carpets where windows are closed, sounds are shut out, temperature is controlled, there are no textures because everything is flat. Most of us live in vacuums, really live and write in vacuums. And if we want our writing to be full of sensory impressions, sound, smell, taste, touch, texture, if we want it to be full of qualities of movement, vital, if you're going to bring your writing to life, then it's a fantastic idea to be outdoors, experiencing the length and the breadth and the width and the depth and all those qualities. The huge variety of qualities of movement, of sound, of smell, of touch, of colour. Nature is a brilliant place, as a writer, to expand our experience of how it is to be a human being, how it is to be a writer, how it is to be an animal. Right. So that's wildness, really. I'm going to talk in a minute a little bit about the ways in which we sabotage ourselves in what should be a natural process. But first, just for five minutes, I'd like to ask you to do another little writing experiment, if you would. And it's just doing really what we've talked about. I'm going to put the instructions up on the PowerPoint as well, so you have them just for five minutes. So very quick. It's actually very good to do writing experiments quickly because we don't think about them too much, which is exactly what we're talking about, not thinking too much. So this experiment is literally just to write about how it is to be an animal, human, animal, in this room, in this moment. Okay, so to describe Any sensory impressions that you experience at this time to describe any smells, taste, textures, colors, sounds, any sensory impressions that you're experiencing in this moment. And it's also to describe how those sensory impressions impact on your body. Okay, so given what's coming in at you, how do you feel? Is there any heat, cold, vibration, muscle tensions, you know, what's going on in your body at this moment? Okay, that's the second thing. So sensory impressions, bodily sensation, and then also just to make a note as well of any emotions that you think are there as well. Okay, so just five minutes just to experience yourselves as an animal writer, as we are here this morning. So the ability as writers, as storytellers, to describe settings, whichever genre you write in, whatever genre you write in, the ability to make concrete and visual settings and characters is all about describing things in sensory detail. That phrase, show, not tell, is bandied about a lot, isn't it? In writing, we learn creative writing, the ability to show things. The way we show things as writers is that we allow the reader or the listener to be inside of the body of the character or the narrator. So one way we do that is by showing them, allowing them to feel how the character feels, what they smell, what they taste, what they hear, what they touch, how they feel in their body. It's really fundamental to good writing. So it's useful. It's useful, this experiment, whatever kind of writing you enjoy doing. So we talked quite a lot about wildness in words. I just want to talk a little bit about what gets in the way. And then after we talked about what gets in the way of writing wild words, we'll also talk briefly about things we might do to encourage the wild writer, Things we might do to free up our words. Caged, okay. Opposite of wild, you might say, is caged. The definition of caged. A box, like, enclosure, having wires or the like for confining and displaying birds or animals. Anything that confines or imprisons prison. Yeah. It's not as cheerful, is it, as it is to talk about wildness. I think it's not great, is it? Feeling trapped, feeling caged, feeling imprisoned. Okay. But I think lots of writers, many of us, myself included, experience that at points, don't we? We experience times in our writing or our storytelling when we feel trapped, we feel frustrated, we feel like we're not able to express what we would like to express on the page or to the listener. So what gets in the way? One of the things, a fundamental thing about the way that human society functions is that we no longer have many opportunities as a human animal to use our instinctual drives. Okay, so the process I talked about, about the body becoming activated and discharging energy, it's hard to find places to use that in modern society, isn't it? There's a very nice phrase by George Monbiot who says something like, to paraphrase and something like, the greatest challenge we face as human beings is to open a packet of peanuts. But it's true, isn't it? It's like you sit there struggling with your packet of peanuts, but we never have to face. Very, very rarely have to face real threats in the way we live now. So what do we do with all that energy? We're animals. What do we do with all that energy that's building up in our system, waiting for somewhere to go? We don't know what to do with it. We don't know where to put it. And that results in lots of behaviors, I think, that are not very helpful for us. What we tend to do as human beings with our energy is we default into thinking. We default into our cognitive mind. We try and think our way out of things. We no longer know how to physically respond to threat and opportunity in our environment, so we try and think our way out of it. We have this wonderful cognitive part of ourselves, don't we, with this wonderful thinking mindfulness, but it tends to become overactive at the slightest thing. Have you noticed that? How much we overthink all the time as human beings? So what happens is we're faced by a sense of threat or opportunity to our environment Instead of making a physical. Instead of having a physical action and reaction to that, what we do is we try and think our way through the problems all the time. We try and guess the solutions, and if we can't guess them, we then try and second guess them and third guess them. And we get stuck in this, what you might call a loop of hyperarousal, whereby our nervous system, our system is aroused all the time, and we keep it aroused by going round and round in these looping cycles of thinking the whole time. And there is no way out of.
- [40:04]
Winnie M. Lee
That.
- [40:07]
Bridget Holding
I think, contributing also to a level of exhaustion amongst us as human beings. It's hard for us to find a release of that energy, to find ways to release that energy, which is why we talked about storytelling being very important as a release of energy. So we scroll repetitively through thinking, don't we? Through ideas. That also creates more fear, I think. I think it ramps up our levels of fear the more we think about Things that are bothering us, the more our levels of fear ramp up at the same time. So I'll give you one little example of how it might be to be a writer. Okay, so you are a writer, you have a full time job as well. So you only have one hour a day to write. And that hour a day is first thing in the morning before anybody else in the house gets up. Very common, common scenario. So you get to your desk at 6 o' clock in the morning and you sit down to write. You turn your mobile on as usual, check Facebook, whatever it is, and then just as you go to write, the phone rings. Okay, now a positive wild animal response to the phone ringing would be you make a clear decision either to answer it or to not answer it. Answering it is kind of the equivalent of fight ish in very simplistic terms. Not answering it might be sort of the equivalent of flight as an animal response. But you do one or other, you answer it, you get a quick solution to the phone call, you don't answer it, you turn your phone off, you go back to writing. Those are healthy responses. You do them quickly, without thinking. You do them instinctually. Quite often what we do as human beings, as human writers, is the phone rings and we go into a whole process of thinking. And the process of thinking goes something. Oh, no, who's calling me at 6 o' clock in the morning? This is my writing time. This is the only hour of writing I get in the whole day. I never have any time for myself. Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe I should answer it. It might be that neighbour who's in bed ill and they might need me to go take them over some food they might not have eaten for 20, 24 hours. Oh, it might be my mother, it might be an emergency somewhere. You know, it's like we go round and round and round. Should I answer it? Should I not? Should I answer it? Should I not? And that is exactly what gets in the way of every process as a human being and every process as a writer. Our inability to take quick, direct action based on the stimuli that's coming into our bodies. So it's just a very small example, but I think you probably get the idea about that, about what might be getting in the way in that situation. And a lot of those messages, a lot of those thoughts that go on in our heads as writers are thoughts that come from other people actually, aren't they? Particularly the ones that can be a bit negative or critical. So many of us have messages going around in our heads that were given to us as children were given to us a long time ago, either by caregivers, by school teachers, by whoever. Some of those messages for some people can be things like, you're no good at this. Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting your time? Why don't you get a proper job? Why don't you do something sensible? You know, all that kind of stuff. So a lot of the thoughts that go around aren't actually ours, are they? They belong to other people. They don't belong to us. And many times those voices that we've internalized from other people, we've internalized to such an extent that we no longer tell them apart from ourselves. Okay? So sometimes a message such as you're hopeless, for example, we don't even necessarily hear that as a voice in our heads. We might just feel it as a visceral kind of shrinking, a visceral kind of shame inside our bodies. So there's all this stuff going on, all of this thinking process, and some of it's not even ours. So there is a process also of separating out our own voice, what we want, who we are as a wild animal and a wild writer, separating that out from what belongs to other people. Because that's not part of our organism naturally, is it? You could say it's come to us from somewhere else. So it's another way in which thoughts can get in the way. And they're thoughts sometimes that belong to other people. This cycle of energy going around and having nowhere to go means that the fear tends to get higher and higher. And the problem with being a human being is that we don't always recognize whether there's a real threat in the environment or whether the threat is historic. So we get scared about things that don't really exist. Quite often if we feel frightened, we tend to attach that fear. The fear is sort of free floating. We tend to attach it to anything that's going on around us. We can end up scared. We can start off feeling frightened about a small thing and we can end up being scared. We're scared about everything around us, can't we? You maybe know that. So the fear ramps up and ramps up and ramps up if we're not using our energy in a healthy, skillful way. Many things happen when we live with that kind of low level fear all the time. One thing is that our rational mind starts to censor even further what we write. Okay, so, so it starts to limit what we think and what we write. It starts to censor our thoughts. So we become less Creative, actually. We can't think outside the box any longer. We're limited to things that feel familiar and feel safe. When we're frightened, we tend to hold on to things that are safe, aren't we? So we hold on to thoughts that are safe. We also hold on to writing routines that feel safe and familiar, even if they're not necessarily the best writing routine for us. We hold onto phrasing and vocabulary as writers that feel safe and familiar, even if actually a stronger way to write might be to expand on our vocabulary, expand on our phrasing, and find new ways of doing things. When we're scared, we also tend to listen to what other people think rather than listening to what we think ourselves. We don't tend to trust ourselves so much. We tend to reach out for somebody else who has something that feels more important than what we're saying inside our own bodies. So there's really, really negative effects. Go on. Very negative in terms of our creativity and in terms of how alive our words are on the page. I think that's enough about caged and trappedness. It's a bit dispiriting, but, you know, it's really helpful, I think, to be aware about these things. When we're aware of these things, we can begin to think what we do about them, can't we? When we understand how we function, we can begin to think. How can we bring words that have died because they've been restricted or limited? How can we start to bring them alive again? How can we free those wild words? How can we become a writer in the wild? How can we experience our own wildness, our own aliveness, as a writer, as a human being, as an animal? And just to finish off, I'd just like to present a few ways of doing that. Five main ways, in fact. Just say a little bit about each one, and then we'll have to. We'll bring it to a close and there'll be time for questions if you want to ask anything afterwards. So the first way I'd suggest to rewild your words is cultivate and enjoy your embodied experience, okay? So just to understand the importance of being in our bodies is huge in a culture that puts much more value on our thinking minds, okay? And we can do things to encourage that. We can be out in nature where there's winds and rain and lakes to swim in and snow to feel. We can put ourselves in environments where we feel, where we have an embodied experience. It's also very helpful, I think, as a writer, not to do everything on the page all the time. So if you're somebody who enjoys movement or painting or sculpture, it can be brilliant, I think, to take a writing idea or a story idea and just do other forms of art around that. How does your story manifest if you do it in colors and abstract colours, even on a page, how does your character from your story move and stick? If you actually physically perform your story, you'll find the whole thing comes to life and then you can feed that back into what happens on the page again. So something I often ask writers to do is to take their story and perform it either in front of a mirror or on camera, or even to get a group of friends together and physically perform it. Because in doing that, you just. You learn how your characters move, you learn how they speak, you learn about the quality of their voice, you learn about dramatic pauses in the action of what you're writing. So there's a whole load of benefits, even if you're a writer who's writing flat on the page, especially if you're a writer who's writing flat on the page, a whole load of benefits to taking that out into other art forms. Art forms that are often more, we could say, more embodied. Okay, if you're a dancer, take your story and dance it round the room. How does it feel to perform just a free dance around an empty space that is somehow in some way conveys your story? Okay, so these are things we don't always think of doing as writers. Because if you suggest on a course to writers that they start doing dance or movement or artwork or sculpture, they sometimes tend to want to hide under the desk. Because as writers, I think generally as writers, we tend to be the quiet type. I know it's a bit of a stereotype, but generally it's true. I would say we're not performers often as writers. Having said that, I think it is fair to say that many writers, many writers, fantasies to be a singer or a songwriter or a performer. It's very interesting that. So I'd just like you to check out with your. Yourselves at some point, whether there is a little part of yourself, the writer who actually would enjoy making a sculpture out of your story or painting it, or dancing it round the room or performing it to a group of friends. And then you'll find doing that, that. That feeds back into what you write on the page. And you will suddenly find that your words are this amazing roaring lion on the page, or the slithering slake or the squeaking mouse. But they have a sort of power and Energy to them that they didn't have before, if you find ways to embody them. Okay, the second thing is what I said before about nature, really, which is find opportunities to break out of your office, unchain yourself from the desk, break out of your office, and write in nature, even if it feels hard, because again, it informs. It informs the writing so beautifully. The third thing I would suggest is just to make aspects of aspects of yourself that are currently unconscious, conscious. Okay? So what I mean by that is when you write, look at what you write and look at the places in the story where it's not as strong. And then question, why is this part of my story not as strong? You may find, for example. I'll give you one example. I have a writer who sends you me her work to read. And she writes brilliantly. She's a fantastic writer, except when she writes about scenes of conflict. When she writes about scenes of conflict, she builds up to this great fight between two people. And as soon as she gets just about to the fight situation, she cuts out to another scene or she summarises, or she suddenly jumps somewhere else, or she talks about a teapot in the corner of the room. She does some really weird things when she tries to rout about conflict. And what we found over time is that the reason she does that is because she is really uncomfortable with anger in herself. She finds it really hard to feel it. She finds it really hard to stay with it in her body, and therefore she finds it really hard to put on the page. Okay? And she knows why that is. That's, you know, related to how her family functions. And we all have things like that. It may not be anger for you, but it'll be something. There will be aspects of your emotional experience that are harder for you to feel, to hold, to contain in your bodies, and therefore harder to put in a powerful way on the page. So we can learn a lot by looking at our writing and just seeing, looking at the weak points, noticing where it's not wild, where it's not alive, and then questioning what it is that we're unaware of that's going on with us as a human being and a human animal, and how we can therefore strengthen our writing. Okay? I'd also suggest that when you write, you write in two distinct stages, okay? That you write a first draft piece of writing from your instinctual writer. So you enter into really good contact with your characters. You write from the passion of your subject. You write from experiencing what's going on with your subject being inside the body. Of your character or your narrator. And you write without judging yourself, without being critical, judgmental about the quality of your writing. Okay? That's the first draft process. I then suggest that when you come to the second draft, that's the time at which you can start to bring in a kind of. A kind you might call a kindly critic, a kindly editor. And in the second draft, you can start to say to yourself, oh, yeah, well, yeah, that's good. And that's not so good. That's working well. And that's not working well. Maybe I could bring a bit more sensory impressions in here. Maybe I could change the point of view there. Okay, that's for the second draft. So what I'm suggesting is that the initial process of writing from the instinctual writer should be entirely separate from the process of judging yourself as a writer, okay? Because if you confuse those two stages, you get blocked. Writer's block is the stop of the flow of creativity by judgment, basically. Okay? So the best thing to do, if you can, is just to allow. Allow the flow in a first draft. Allow yourself to write with all the passion, energy, and power you have for the subject, and don't judge yourself. And then keep the judgment, keep the criticism for the next stage, okay? Separate out the two. Makes a really big difference. It should stop you getting blocked, stop you experiencing the terrible writer's block. And the final thing, just to finish what I'd like to say, really, and maybe the most important thing of all is just. It's so important as writers that just we learn to be ourselves, that we stop trying to be a writer and we just write and we write the story that needs to be told, the story that feels like it comes from. From our human organism. And that we trust the process, that we trust that because we're natural storytellers, we know how to tell the story. And all we have to do is we have to orient towards that and we have to follow it and we have to support it. It's not a big effort. It's more like the flow goes and you follow it than it is anything else. So just a process of trusting, really trusting that we know what we're doing. Even if some days we wake up feeling like we have no idea what we're doing at all, that actually, it's all there. It's all there. We don't need to do more than walk alongside it, I would say, and support the process. And there we are, you see, you're doing more work. Storytelling saves lives. And it really, really does. And so anytime you get challenged by your parents, your partners, your children, your friends as to why you're spending a year and a half sitting in your room on your own, writing your novel, and not making any contact with anyone. Remind yourself that you're doing something really, really important. Thank you very much. Right, how much time have we got? Chicken Winter. Okay, so we've got nearly 10 minutes. Nine minutes. Okay. So if anyone would like to ask anything, you're really, really welcome.
- [56:41]
Winnie M. Lee
Yeah. When you were talking.
- [56:44]
Bridget Holding
Oh, goodness.
- [56:45]
Audience Member 1
When you were talking.
- [56:47]
Bridget Holding
Is that good?
- [56:48]
Audience Member 1
Towards the start, about not being able to write about things that you haven't experienced and getting out and experiencing them. I thought of Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte, who were sequestered in their homes basically their whole lives. But some of our, you know, most famous works of writing ever were produced by them. What am I not understanding about what you were saying then?
- [57:09]
Bridget Holding
I think, yeah, I think it's the difference between experiencing events and experiencing emotions, actually. They had very. I mean, they both went through a lot emotionally. I think both those writers. I mean, it may have been on a small scale in terms of it was probably only going with their family members, but I think there was a lot of grief. Love and loss. And grief went on. And actually, I think they had a very. Probably had a very profound understanding of emotion. Emotional transitions, changes in emotion. Yes. It's the difference between. Do you understand? It's the difference between actions and emotions. What we need to understand as writers is we need to understand the emotional processes. It doesn't matter if you could live your whole life in a prison or in one room and you could still understand that depth of emotion wouldn't matter. Still be a brilliant writer.
- [58:11]
Winnie M. Lee
Thanks. So, obviously, I really enjoyed that you had mentioned that. I think 0.2 out of the 5 suggestions was to kind of get out of the office and get into nature, to. To kind of rewild your words. And obviously we're in the incredibly corporate room that we're trapped in at the moment, so it's kind of hard to be doing that at the moment. But when you run your writing retreats in the mountains, I want to get an idea of the kinds of activities or exercises that you do to get your writers into the wild and to interacting with nature and how that then kind of inspires their own writing.
- [58:45]
Bridget Holding
Yeah. Oh, thank you. I love that question because I love doing my writing courses in France. So there are lots of things I think it's really important to cultivate as writers that are connected with environment. One is an ability to go into the unknown, to go into an environment we don't know. If we write well, we have to go into the unknown. We have to be surprised by what we're writing. If we're not surprised and delighted by what we're writing, then the reader won't be either. So it has to be a journey into the unknown. Otherwise it's not going to work very well for the reader. So I try and take people into places that are unknown to them. So it feels adventurous. It feels like they're going into unknown territory, which is something that many of us very rarely do in our lives. Now, I also try and give people experiences that allow them to be in a very sensory place. So we do things like. We do great things, like you like this wine tasting. You know, it's a sort of wine where I'm. So we do wine tasting, but we also. Yeah, I try and give people embodied experiences. We swim in lakes, which is wonderful for the cold and the heat, and we go under waterfalls to feel the quality of the water. And we do foraging for food to get the variety of tastes that come from nature. So a lot about sensory impressions, I would say a lot about embodied experience, a lot about describing many different qualities of movement, finding ways to language, many different qualities of movement, and watching animals, watching the way that nature functions and seeing how instinct works, seeing how embodied and how instinctual and how healthy animals are when they are allowed to express themselves in the same way that human beings are when they're allowed to express themselves.
- [60:37]
Winnie M. Lee
So if somebody's not on living for troops and they're living in London, working.
- [60:41]
Bridget Holding
In their first job, what kinds of.
- [60:43]
Winnie M. Lee
Things would you suggest to them to try at least capture some of that while they're living in a city?
- [60:48]
Bridget Holding
I think there's a lot of nature, I think London, for example, most of you probably living in London. London's a great. I think there's a lot of nature around London. London has more green spaces, I think, than virtually any city in the world. I mean, there are a lot of places you can go. I think. I don't think at all that you need to be in the countryside to experience sensory impressions or nature or embodied experience or any of those things. You have lots of parks here which are fabulous. And what I think is very interesting in cities, the way that. Very interesting to observe the way that the wild tries to come back all the time. I love that about nature. It's like as soon as you stop building something or cutting your lawn, nature all comes back again. And that's something I think is easier to observe in built up areas than it is in the country. And it's more powerful to observe. It's fantastic to observe that every time there's a building site that's not actively being built on, all the plants come back. It's fantastic to observe the range of animals that come in at night in a city when everyone's gone to sleep. In a way, I think the experience of wildness in the city can be as powerful as, if not more powerful than it is in the country for those reasons. So I don't think there's any need to feel an absence of it at all if you're based in a city.
- [62:10]
Audience Member 3
Just because if you have an idea or like a kind of a story idea, they feel quite unnatural and invented. Well, each mine do. Or if you get interested in something that's a bit more academic, are there any exercises you can use to try and fit them into the stuff that you seem to be talking about, which is you just sit down and write and wait and see where it goes.
- [62:37]
Bridget Holding
You're talking about an academic writing, really Non fiction academic writing.
- [62:42]
Audience Member 3
No. So if I'm writing a story and the story ideas come from certain things and they feel like they are just thoughts. But when you sit down and try and write them, they just feel very dry. But if you try and write a character, yeah, it's great, you can do something. But then trying to actually get what you originally wanted to start writing about into that feels very unnatural. And I don't know how you kind of join the two together.
- [63:06]
Bridget Holding
Yeah. Okay.
- [63:07]
Winnie M. Lee
Yeah.
- [63:07]
Bridget Holding
Thank you. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think the answer always is to come back to that basic way of functioning. And I think actually it works equally for any subject matter really, which is coming back to an instinctual sense of what we're doing and allowing our body to write, if you sort of mean rather than trying to write from our head. And I know in some ways it can seem less obvious in certain types of writing, academic writing for example. And it can seem hard to gel. It can sometimes seem like it's going to be hard to stay on track if we work in that way, whatever kind of storytelling we're doing. But actually my experience is that we stay on track much better because I think the way we're used to functioning is very head based. So we're used to feeling like if we're not thinking about the direction we're going and following that, that it won't work, that we'll get lost or Sidetracked or distracted or we'll go somewhere else and not come back. And my experience is that it's the complete opposite of that, actually, that we fundamentally understand where we're going and we end up in exactly the right place rather than the opposite. So it's a process of trust, but it's also, I think, a process of trying it out and seeing over time that it works. Yeah. Because it's unfamiliar.
- [64:25]
Winnie M. Lee
One more question.
- [64:28]
Bridget Holding
Yeah.
- [64:33]
Audience Member 2
I have difficulty connecting this to academic work, which I do. You define a problem, you look for the evidence, you provide the evidence, you interpret it, and you make some conclusion. And I have a great deal of difficulty connecting anything that's bodily with this.
- [64:54]
Bridget Holding
Okay. Yeah.
- [64:56]
Audience Member 2
I mean, I would like to apply some of this to that, but I don't see how it works, particularly in statistics, which I do.
- [65:06]
Bridget Holding
Right, okay. Oh, that's a challenge. Great. Yeah. No, good question. Good question. So what is it that when you do that, what is it that. It's engaging the writer. I'm sorry, engaging the reader. What is it that's engaging the reader in what you're writing?
- [65:23]
Audience Member 2
It's engaging a very small and narrow group of readers who read statistical academic journals. And what interests them is the solution to some particular problem that's being worked.
- [65:39]
Bridget Holding
On in the field. Yeah, yeah.
- [65:40]
Audience Member 2
I mean, you remind them of what that problem is. Introduction. And then you say, I'm going to try and solve it this way or shed light on it this way. And then you zip on, and I have no trouble seeing the ending or feeling lost.
- [65:57]
Bridget Holding
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, in a way that fits beautifully into this storytelling model in terms of what you're providing the reader with is exactly what readers want, which is they want a problem to be solved that then solved. You know, which is the reason, like we talked about it, it's the reason we all tell stories all the time, is we have a problem, we solve it. So in a way, that's classic story. I think what you're describing is classic story structure, really, isn't it? And it's the classic way that we operate as animals as well, a problem to be solved that we then solve. And the problem to be solved in a way is the activation of the system, is the activation of when you're writing, there's a kind of tension within a problem to be solved, and there's a kind of a release of tension in when you solve it. And I think as writers, we feel that regardless of what the problem is that we're writing about, whether it's statistics or whether it's someone trying to climb a mountain in fiction, it's the same sense of tension around a problem to be solved and the same sense of release around the solving of the problem. And also, I think regardless of what you're writing about, it doesn't matter how factual the subject matter at the base of it is always that actually you are taking your reader on an emotional journey. You can't do otherwise because unless you're engaging them emotionally in some way, they won't be engaged. And I don't think that's any different for writing about statistics than it is from anything else. Actually. You have a reader who's interested in what you're writing about and what you're engaging them in about is the process of interest in the problem and the problem to be solved. So I don't actually think they're. I don't actually think that they're that far away, really.
- [67:40]
Winnie M. Lee
I'm really sorry, but we're short on time.
- [67:45]
Bridget Holding
Yeah.
- [67:46]
Audience Member 2
And I'm perfectly happy.
- [67:47]
Bridget Holding
Yeah.
- [67:48]
Audience Member 2
Nice and warm.
- [67:50]
Bridget Holding
Distracted.
- [67:53]
Audience Member 2
Shut off the phone.
- [67:54]
Bridget Holding
Yeah.
- [67:55]
Winnie M. Lee
So unfortunately we're short on time. We ran out.
- [68:02]
Bridget Holding
Is just that I absolutely believe that the more the wider your vocabulary and that comes from the wider experience of life, the better you write. I don't think it makes any difference what kind of writing you're writing about. And thank you. That's really interesting. We could go on forever about that.
- [68:24]
Winnie M. Lee
Well, thank you so much. Unfortunately, we ran out, but I'm glad there was a lively debate afterwards. We are going to have two more creative writing workshops in this room. So next one starts at 12 o', clock, but in the meantime, if you could please join me in thanking Bridget for coming to the LSC and taking part in the literary festival.