The River: Forget about the words (advice from Ted Hughes), by Kaspalita

This is not one of our river of stones guest posts, as it's by Kaspalita, but it is a 'River' post... Kaspa has found some advice from Ted Hughes that he wants to share. The river of stones is our mindful writing challenge. Properly notice one thing each day, and write it down. Click here to find out more.

Kaspa writes: As I write this, the antepenultimate day of 2011 is drawing to a close. I have just closed the curtains behind my writing desk - the seal grey clouds are fading to black. Fiona and I spent the day in the famous Welsh book town, Hay-on-Wye. The last bookshop we called in was off the main street, just around the corner from the small concrete library. The Poetry Bookshop is housed in the Ice House, an 18th Century stone building. Fiona and I had ample time to explore all its wonders. We were accidentally locked inside by the shopkeeper.

I think the three of us must have been engrossed in our various readings so completely that Fiona and I failed to notice the shopkeeper leaving, and locking the door, and he failed to notice us crouching behind the short bookshelves.

I found a couple of telephone numbers on a post-it note stuck to the till and eventually managed to get hold of one of the shop's owners to come and let us out. I heard her laughter down the phone and couldn't help smiling.

The book that I had been so engrossed in reading was Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making, based on a series of radio programmes he made for children. I fell in love with the first chapter whilst I was stood in the Poetry Bookshop, and the point of this ambling post is to share a little of Hughes' wisdom from there with you.

He suggests that his own poetry writing was an extension of the animal catching that he did as a child and teenager. Hughes says that writing a poem is like capturing something alive, something that exists outside yourself.

I like this idea a lot, but it was this piece of advice for writing poems that I wanted to share with you:

... You do not have to worry about [words killing each other] as long as you do one thing.
That one thing is, imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourselves into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to worry about commas or full-stops or that sort of thing. You do not have to look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears your mouth, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into the words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them ... then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. After a bit of practice [...] You will read back through what your have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

Put your whole attention on the thing you are writing about. Do not worry about the words. Put your whole attention on the thing, and you will capture a spirit.