Group hand-out: Higgins 43
Our 43rd meeting took place outdoors because of the lockdown ...
Saturday 1st of August 2020, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Pathways and paragraphs
- inspired by Francine Prose and Robert Macfarlane.
We walk paths …
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own. … Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.
Of the poet, Edward Thomas: To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. … He imagined himself in topographical terms. Corners, junctions, stiles, fingerposts, forks, crossroads, trivia, beckoning-over-the-hill paths, tracks that led to danger, death or bliss …
Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.
(pp 17-26 ‘The Old Ways’ by Robert Macfarlane 2012)
… and we can imagine paths …
What If This Road
What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side; who would not hanker
to be going at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go?
Sheenagh Pugh
(published in Being Alive 2004)
… and we can write in footsteps, lists – pathways or paragraphs
1. 11:00 a) 5 sensory words from where you’re sitting/standing
Paragraphs: In ‘Reading Like a Writer’ (Aurum Press 2006 pp75-6), Francine Prose cites advice from Strunk and White: ‘The Elements of Style’ 1959
“… As a rule, begin each paragraph either with a sentence that suggests the topic or with sentence that helps the transition. … In narration and description, the paragraph sometimes begins with a concise, comprehensive statement serving to hold together the details that follow … But when this device, or any device, is too often used, it becomes a mannerism … in animated narrative, the paragraphs are likely to be short and without any semblance of a topic sentence, the writer rushing headlong, event following event in rapid succession. The break between such paragraphs merely serves the purpose of a rhetorical pause, throwing into prominence some detail of the action.”
‘In the hands of a master, even the shortest paragraphs can be enormously powerful, as are the last two paragraphs of Raymond Carver’s 1971 story ‘Fat’:
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.’
(You can read the whole story here: https://genius.com/Raymond-carver-fat-annotated)
b) Let’s experiment with short, maybe 3-sentence, paragraphs based on our observations. You might like to explore the effect of … adopting particular voice and perspective, varying sentence length, placing certain details first or last …
2. 11:30 Writing walk, talk and write.
In his travel book, ‘The Old Ways’, Robert Macfarlane writes that walking helps us know things. He cites JB Jackson: ‘For untold generations we travelled on foot over rough paths … the road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were.’
Of the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines, he writes ‘ … as they walked they broke the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it. Each track had its corresponding song or story.’ (The Old Ways’ Penguin 2013 pp26-30)
The word ‘investigate’ derives from Latin - vestigium "footprint, track".
Wander at will for ten minutes or so. As you go, collect a list of sensory words/phrases from what you see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Lay your own thoughts along the path so you can find metaphors. Think also of how much your path is prescribed, how much it speaks of other stories – and how much it’s your own. Are you making your own way, or is it making you?
Then sit down and write.
12:30 Come back and share – just lists of sensory language, paragraphs – or something longer.
If you’ve written during lockdown, you may wish to participate in Higgins ‘Making COVID-19 History’:
https://www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk/Whats_on/Making_Covid_19_History.aspx
Saturday 1st of August 2020, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Pathways and paragraphs
- inspired by Francine Prose and Robert Macfarlane.
We walk paths …
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own. … Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.
Of the poet, Edward Thomas: To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. … He imagined himself in topographical terms. Corners, junctions, stiles, fingerposts, forks, crossroads, trivia, beckoning-over-the-hill paths, tracks that led to danger, death or bliss …
Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.
(pp 17-26 ‘The Old Ways’ by Robert Macfarlane 2012)
… and we can imagine paths …
What If This Road
What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side; who would not hanker
to be going at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go?
Sheenagh Pugh
(published in Being Alive 2004)
… and we can write in footsteps, lists – pathways or paragraphs
1. 11:00 a) 5 sensory words from where you’re sitting/standing
Paragraphs: In ‘Reading Like a Writer’ (Aurum Press 2006 pp75-6), Francine Prose cites advice from Strunk and White: ‘The Elements of Style’ 1959
“… As a rule, begin each paragraph either with a sentence that suggests the topic or with sentence that helps the transition. … In narration and description, the paragraph sometimes begins with a concise, comprehensive statement serving to hold together the details that follow … But when this device, or any device, is too often used, it becomes a mannerism … in animated narrative, the paragraphs are likely to be short and without any semblance of a topic sentence, the writer rushing headlong, event following event in rapid succession. The break between such paragraphs merely serves the purpose of a rhetorical pause, throwing into prominence some detail of the action.”
‘In the hands of a master, even the shortest paragraphs can be enormously powerful, as are the last two paragraphs of Raymond Carver’s 1971 story ‘Fat’:
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.’
(You can read the whole story here: https://genius.com/Raymond-carver-fat-annotated)
b) Let’s experiment with short, maybe 3-sentence, paragraphs based on our observations. You might like to explore the effect of … adopting particular voice and perspective, varying sentence length, placing certain details first or last …
2. 11:30 Writing walk, talk and write.
In his travel book, ‘The Old Ways’, Robert Macfarlane writes that walking helps us know things. He cites JB Jackson: ‘For untold generations we travelled on foot over rough paths … the road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were.’
Of the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines, he writes ‘ … as they walked they broke the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it. Each track had its corresponding song or story.’ (The Old Ways’ Penguin 2013 pp26-30)
The word ‘investigate’ derives from Latin - vestigium "footprint, track".
Wander at will for ten minutes or so. As you go, collect a list of sensory words/phrases from what you see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Lay your own thoughts along the path so you can find metaphors. Think also of how much your path is prescribed, how much it speaks of other stories – and how much it’s your own. Are you making your own way, or is it making you?
Then sit down and write.
12:30 Come back and share – just lists of sensory language, paragraphs – or something longer.
If you’ve written during lockdown, you may wish to participate in Higgins ‘Making COVID-19 History’:
https://www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk/Whats_on/Making_Covid_19_History.aspx