Writer Noel Williams discusses the impulse that led him being Resident Artist at a Sheffield arts centre
Noel Williams
Noel Williams writes poetry and prose, and is the resident artist at the Bank Streets Arts Centre, Sheffield. His poems have been published in Iota, Sarasvati, Inclement and Candelabrum, among other literary magazines. He is currently focusing on the Women and Warfare project, a collaborative poetry venture examining women’s practical and emotional role in warfare.
What inspired you to become a writer?
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, since about the age of six, when I wrote my first poems and stories. If I’d any inspiration at an early age it would be Enid Blyton, Jack London, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe and Rupert the bear.
I wrote avidly until I became a “serious” academic, around the age of 29, when most of my creative writing dried up, and I spent my time writing about writing, rather than doing it.
What was your first poem about?
The first I can remember, written around the age of seven or eight, was about the aftermath of a birthday party, and began along the lines of “Said the cup to the plate, ‘I think you’re rather late, for the crumpets and the trumpets have all gone’. Said the plate to the cup ‘I was in the washing up’”… and so on.
More recently, since I’ve been pursuing a career as a serious writer and poet, (the last couple of years), my poems were largely about my own personal life, about childhood and relationships, and people I knew who had died.
This, I think, is quite common amongst poets starting out, and tends to yield mediocre work, but I think it’s essential for a poet to work through the personal possibilities to discover where she or he might have something a little different to offer.
Following this, I’ve been trying to extend my range, and deal with subjects that are more of a challenge and require some imaginative leap to get to.
How did you come to be Resident Artist at Sheffield’s Bank Street Arts Centre?
Bank Street advertised Residencies. I didn’t really know what being a Resident Artist meant, or what it would demand of me. However, it came at a time when I was thinking that my magazine and competition successes now meant I should be thinking about a collection.
I thought being in an artistic environment, perhaps meeting people with similar interests, and setting aside dedicated time to write would help me create such a first collection.
I couldn’t really see why Bank Street would want someone who was just sitting around with a notebook all day long, so I also offered some slightly off the wall ideas I had for “poetry off the page”, which I’d been toying with for many years.
These proved really interesting to them, because of possible connections between my work and other artists, so I think that’s why they selected me. As it turns out, they’ve become much more important to me and the “normal” writing has taken a little bit of a backseat.
What inspired the Women and Warfare project?
Part of my exploration is to find out why I’m doing it, and when I have a collection that feels right, complete, then I should know why I’m doing it. You see, I’m not too clear on my own motivations. Several things combine, some more noble than others.
On the noble side, I felt that women’s role in warfare is underplayed and not often lauded, yet women have as strong a role as men and their experiences are just as defining, whether directly engaged in combat or not. So there was a strong reason to tell some of the stories and try to redress the balance.
On the less noble side, I’ve always been interested in warfare, in military history, but as a poet I felt it was somehow wrong to be interested in uniforms, strategy, casualty figures, how Napoleon won at Austerlitz and so on. Is this just “boy’s stuff” or are there important things to know?
I felt that trying to place myself in the woman’s position would tell me something about the “maleness” of a fascination with war. It’s rare to find women playing war games, for example. It’s relatively rare to find women warriors, even though they have been, and are, plentiful. Is this because women want to avoid war more than men? Or do men keep women out of war? Are men warmongers and women peacemakers? Or is war one more domain of male dominance which women wish to take part in, can do as well (or better?) in?
However, it was actually my wife’s idea in the first instance, because she knew of my military interest, and could see how a historical project might interest me. So, in fact, a woman led me into the project.
I also wanted to have some collaborative elements to this work, although in the beginning I wasn’t quite sure what this might mean, and I felt that this topic was specific enough to be meaningful to lots of people, yet also general enough to find many personal, family and history stories that could make it easy for people to take part.
What are the biggest challenges of writing?
I try to write good prose as well as poetry. So far, apart from in my early life, I’ve succeeded with poetry but only had one story (perhaps two) enter print. So one challenge is to get my creative prose on a par with my poetry.
A second is continually to improve. Every poem is a series of delicate choices, and every time a word lands on a page, many other choices are instantly taken away. I’d quite like to create a poem in which those choices remain unchosen, letting the reader explore the possibilities rather than the poet fixing them in place (and, indeed, I have one digital project exploring this possibility) but really I believe that there is a “best” version of a poem, and that the poet should strive to find it.
Keeping the discipline is also hard. I have no difficulty finding things to write about, but disciplining myself to complete each task, to the best of my abilities - ideally, to push beyond my abilities and do better today than I was capable of yesterday - that’s quite difficult.
Another challenge is being honest with other writers. I value very much the critiques my fellow poets, and other writers, give, and almost invariably they lead to improvements in my work.
However, it’s a difficult thing to critique someone else’s work well. It’s not too difficult to find the positives in a piece of writing, but finding a constructive way to critique a piece of writing is a skill in itself. Doing it so that a writer can actually learn from it and improve, without feeling a slap to their self-esteem, is an art.
What do you enjoy most about it?
I enjoy most the initial thrill of something new discovered. I find this more in writing novel-length pieces than in poetry, but sometimes it happens in poems. The experience is well-documented in other writers’ accounts of the work: when the text is so compulsive, so fluid, that it feels as if someone else, or something else, is writing through you, rather than you doing the writing.
I think this is pretty much an unmatched human experience, when it happens. Often in my experience it’s because I’ve touched some area of my understanding or experience which I simply know so well it can flow naturally and unimpeded, without prompting - something close to the core of what makes me tick; or, sometimes, because I know my project so well, have internalised it so thoroughly, that my unconscious is bursting with it and all I have to do is find somewhere to prick the wineskin.
Slightly below that thrill is the joy of starting something new. I’m full of ideas most of the time, and many of them get to the page. That new, brilliant idea; that perfect image; that really clever phrasing. There’s hardly a day when I don’t get one of these thrills.
The problem is, half of them then turn out not to be quite so brilliant on later inspection. And half of those that past muster get put aside without serious work. And half of those worked on are never completed. And, for many of those completed, I’ve got so bored by the end, or I’ve so far lost track of the original excitement, that they come out sentimental, feeble, silly or trite.
Whose writing do you admire?
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, John Keats, Shelley, Dylan Thomas…
I find my loyalties amongst contemporary poets tends to fluctuate a little, depending on the kind of work I’m focusing on myself, but generally it’s the more lyrical poets: Helen Farish, Mimi Khalvati, Helen Dunmore, Carol Ann Duffy. Of novelists, I admire Ian McEwan most, I think Atonement is far and away one of the best novels of recent years, and I found Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go profoundly moving.
However, I find I read most often writers such as Helen Dunmore, Margaret Atwood, Kate Atkinson, Hilary Mantel and, slightly old fashioned, Elizabeth Taylor. I’ve noticed a prevalence of female writers in what I read, and mentally I equate this with an emotive and intuitive prose (which is also what I found in McEwan and Ishiguro), although probably the most powerful moment I’ve encountered in any contemporary novel was a pivotal sentence at the heart of John Banville’s The Sea.
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Undoubtedly it was earlier this year when Orbis magazine submitted my poem Skating Close for the Forward Prize, Single Poem. This is probably one of the two most prestigious UK poetry prizes and you cannot put yourself forward for it, so this meant more to me than any of the prizes I’ve actually won, because it effectively said I’d written one of the UK’s 120 best poems of 2008.
Given the total number of -poems written in the UK in a year, I am very proud of this, and, though I wasn’t shortlisted, all six of the shortlisted poets have strong repute and several collections. I’ve none. This, more than anything, has made me think I might actually have something worth offering.
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
Write: you’re not a writer if you’re not writing. So turn up at the desk, and put some words on a page. It’s not good enough merely to knock ideas around in your head (although this is a good start, of course) you have to keep at the business of bruising pages black and blue.
Read: you’re not a writer if you’re not always looking for the next thing to read. Read around. Read anything and everything. Stretch yourself. Read Mills and Boon, the Bible, Pam Ayres, hip hop lyrics, J. K. Rowling, Sean O’Brien, the Sun leader, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Ian Macmillan, Sophie Kinsella, Jordan - everything and anything. Learn from them, and then do better.
Accept that there will be times when you will be disheartened. You will be rejected. It will take you longer to get recognised than you deserve and it will be harder than you expect. Allow yourself to scream with frustration, to burst into unreasonable, selfish tears, to rail against a foolish and stupid world that cannot recognise your talents. Then recognise that these releases will not help your work get published.
In order to get published you have to realise that you are putting your products into a marketplace, and so do everything that might promote your work, get your work seen.
Take every opportunity that comes along, no matter what it is, or how small. In my experience, the more open I have been to possibilities, the more possibilities have come along. Every failure should lead to learning, and every time you learn, you’re closer to success. So, if you take an opportunity and fail, you will do better next time, because you’ve learned. And if you take an opportunity and succeed - then why on earth were you hesitating in the first place?
What are you working on now?
I always like to have several things on the go at the same time, knowing that some will come to fruition, and some will not, but never sure which way things will go with any particular project. With “Off the Shelf” coming up in a month, the “Women and warfare” project is my priority. It includes a written collection of currently about 30 poems in draft, but with plans for around 50 in total; also the collaborative audio installation; about eight “poetry objects” of different kinds; and three digital poems.
I have around 20 other conventional written poems in various states of evolution, probably half of which will eventually be completed. Hopefully, I’ll have the collection in shape before the end of the year, and so will be starting to look for a publisher in December or January.
I’m also writing a story which I hope will go into a collection based around King’s College, Cambridge. I’m a third of the way through a novel for children called “How to kill Francesca. Twice”, and I have two other children’s novels (Mordred’s Tooth and The Lost Resort) fully drafted and awaiting a proper edit.
I’m also working on the outline for a romantic novel, of which I’ve about 10,000 words, and I have reviews of eight poetry collections to write, too.
For more on Noel please visit http://noelwilliams.wordpress.com/
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Thanks for the insight. Some very good advice here about writing, and marketing. Very helpful