My notebooks now fill a large shelf – I have notebooks stretching back eleven years and I have no idea what’s in them! So the other day I took it upon myself to read through some and rediscovered some ideas, ideas that had been trapped between those tight-lipped pages. I’m sure I’m not alone – hands up if you have a mass of notebooks propping something up in your house. Now here’s what I suggest you do – read through your old notebooks, pull out those forgotten gems. I intend to try and get through at least one a month and am determined to not let future notebooks become dumping grounds. I shall make it a new habit to review all notebooks once complete and maybe even number the pages and draw up a contents page on the front via a big fluorescent sticker.

Ideas, good ones are rare beasts and need to be carefully stored – it’s no good making all that effort to note down that fabulous plot in the middle of the night if you’re just going to sling it into a black hole dolled up as a book – I wonder how many great ideas are lost out there in notebooks waiting for the whimsy of an over-eager de-cluttering session to send them forever to the landfill! Errrrrrrrrr!!!!!

I know that at some point the spine fell off that great book and it was discarded. Years later I regret that moment of hasty de-cluttering and wish I still had the book that filled so many of my school day evenings, spineless or not. I now have several stand alone dictionaries and thesauruses but I rarely use them! today I noticed that I almost entirely use online reference tools often having several tabs open at a time as I search for mouth-watering words with the yearned for rhyme, meter or stress. These free online resources are wonderful and so immediate offering up options for synonyms, antonyms, near rhymes and even a button to hear the word being spoken! However I do feel a small pang of sorrow for my poor books – gathering dust on the shelves, every year growing less up to date without their entries for “retweet”, “cyberbulling” and “OMG”. What I miss most is the random flicking that you can do with a physical book – I would regularly turn to random pages looking for words I hadn’t come across before. I’m sure there are more high tech ways of having a similar experience today, word of the day emails and the like, but its not the same as pressing your thumb against the pages and watching them blur until a spread falls open to reveal its delights. No doubt I am being a bit rose-tinted about all of this and I certainly won’t be giving up my online reference tools – but I think I may remember to press my thumb to the pages of the physical ones every now and then and see what treasures pop out.

I’ve continued to take photos but mainly whilst travelling or on the very sunday odd whim. This last couple of weeks however I have found my self obsessed, digging out my old Minolta SLR and taking photos on film!!! As well as digital and last week I came across some instructions for shooting water drops and for a whole day I was lost in watery bliss watching a paper cup drip into a sink, oh for simple pleasures.

Too often I find our hobbies get pushed to the sides, ironically – especially for those of us fortunate enough to do something we love. Often our job, even if it is artistic in nature, can force us into habits and have us forgetting the child-like joy that originally attracted us.

I feel great for having re-discovered my joy in photography and am going to make it my mission to not be a stranger to it for so long again – apart from anything else I feel that it has had a direct impact on me creatively as a whole – writing is by its nature a very wordy pursuit and it was nice to allow myself the indulgence of running free in an entirely visual medium.

See all the photos here

What are your forgotten hobbies?

Before the clock struck twelve on New Years Eve our lovely hosts got us playing a game known as “Put it back” where teams write celebrity or well known names (i.e cartoon characters, computer game characters, figures from history etc) on pieces of paper and place them, folded, into a hat. Teams then elect a member to pick a name from the hat and to describe the person on the piece of paper without saying their name. Each team gets a minute to try and guess as many names as possible from their elected team member’s, often strange, descriptions.the process then repeats each round has a different challenge as follows….

Round 1 – The elected member must describe the person using as many words as they like but, obviously, never using the actual name of the person.

Round 2 – The elected member can use only three words to describe the person – (never the actual name ! I’m sure you get the idea)

Round 3 – The elected member can use only one word.

Round 4 – The elected member can use only actions.

I tried this game for the first time last week on a a great project I’m working on where the focus is on ‘The Impact of Creativity on Boy’s Learning’. The teachers and I quickly found that the boys were happy to write names down on scraps of paper to put into the hat and to read the names when it was their time to describe/enact for their team. If they needed help we would provide it via a whisper, so that their team couldn’t hear!

By the end of the session the boys did not want to leave and were eager to continue the game. Given the boys enthusiasm, we thought we should repeat the exercise and push the amount of reading and writing that they do during the game. This week we brought in pictures of celebrities and cartoon characters etc as well as some faces that they might not know, such as famous explorers, painters and scientists.

At the start of the game we went through all of the images as a group and filled in any gaps in their knowledge, asking them how they would describe each image in the game, as we did this we suggested (we never made it compulsory) that they note down what they say in order to help them during the game. All of the boys took notes in some shape or form, some elected to draw symbols to help them if they were unable to spell the words they needed.

It was great to see how much writing could be generated through this simple game. There is the potential to hang a lot of ‘learning’ off of it as well – the images could be characters from a book they are reading, or faces from history! All of the boys used their notes and had great fun competing in their teams. I will definitely use this exercise in future workshops and think I may try to add a forth round where they must mold the person out of dough. If you give this exercise a try in your classroom or workshop let me know how it goes.

This is a game developed with teachers at Thomas A Beckett school in Worthing. The focus is sounding out letter sounds. The game is similar to the original with a “Grandmother’s footsteps twist” One child – The Wolf stands at one end of the playground with her back turned, the rest of the children group at the other end and call out together “WHAT’S THE SOUND MR WOLF” To which Mr wolf will reply with a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) word such as pot, dog, log, mum, dad etc (we had an adult accompany the wolf holding a sheet full of CVC words from which the child could choose) The group of children must then move towards the wolf sounding out the letters of the word so for LOG they would say the sounds “L” – “O” – “G” at any point the wolf can turn around, if she does so the other children must freeze because if the wolf sees them moving they must return to the back of the playground. Once the wolf has turned her back again the children will once again ask “WHAT’S THE SOUND MR WOLF” and the process repeats. At any point the wolf can shout out “Dinner Time” at which point the other children must flee the chasing wolf to the back of the playground (home). If a child manages to tag the wolf they become the wolf themselves! If the wolf catches a child – that child will become a wolf – this keeps the game moving and ensures everyone gets a go – be they bad at fleeing or great at sneaking!

The year 1 children we were working with took to this game very quickly and got very competitive about it. We saw children who would normally cringe away from reading or sounding out doing these activities with enjoyment as they focused on enjoying the game.

Image Credit – earth_voyager

A question that is often asked of playwrights is “Do you plan your play or do you just write?” I am sure there as many responses to this question as there are writers – but since this was asked of me recently I thought I’d give you my tuppence worth.

When I first started out I definitely did not plan – I enjoyed and still do enjoy the thrill of going full steam ahead into a piece of writing and the excitement of not knowing where you’ll end up. However there are issues with this technique, it is no friend of plot! As I would often discover halfway through when the original steam had run out and I was left wondering “What happens now?”

I always had an aversion to planning, feeling that it would somehow stultify the writing process. What I have since found, however, is that when done correctly, planning can enhance the discovery of the unknown. I’m by no means a planning purist but I certainly need an outline before I can write a scene and what I have found is that as a scene develops the plan will change!

My studio is littered with index cards and various means of attaching them to things, from wires, to bull dog clips to blu tac to pins. I start with a rough outline of how the play will develop following the main “wants” of the characters and track how these “wants” play out along with any sub-plots. Invariably I find that as each scene that is written it changes the plan both ahead of it and behind it often drastically so! You may ask “What’s the point of a plan if its going to change” to which I would say that the plan allows you the ability to change and gets you to a point where you can confidently make that change.

I am currently researching the cultural history of the city for a play that will go into R&D (Research and Development) later this month. I have created several plans for this piece each building on the last but none were quite right until the scenes started to take shape. It is at this crucial point that the theory becomes reality, would that character do that thing? Is that high point really a high point when played out? Is there something more interesting that could be done? Does the character say something you did not expect?

In my process the play only becomes real once the scenes take ownership of the plan and divert it to their own course, come alive and tell you what they need and want. To my pleasure I have found that this dual way of working provides all the thrill that originally got me into writing in the first place and adds to it a focus, a direction. It is tantamount to the difference between reading a guide book and actually visiting a place – without the guide book you wouldn’t know where to go, but until you go there you won’t know what’s going to happen!

This thematic overkill shouldn’t really surprise me, my latest play at The Unicorn Theatre “Bye Bye Planet Earth” detailed the journey of the earth’s children as they are sent to Mars following the death of our planet and my last picture book “An Invite from the Queen” was all about getting kids to eat more healthily, so I guess sustainability and all things green are close to my heart – I just never expected to be drilling holes in plastic boxes to accomodate 250g of red worms!

It’s clear I’m just experiencing the general trend of awareness about the environment that has nipped at our combined conscious ever since a hole was first found in the sky. It seems that somewhere between the oil crises, the oil leaks, the recycling bins, the food programmes and the freaky weather something has sunk in. It definitely feels that more people are moving towards positive action in terms of living more sustainably from taking the recycling out to building entirely self-sufficient homes. Having recently watched Mike Bartlett’s fantastic “Earthquakes” at The National, this trend of awareness pleases me no end – it suggests that we are at long last realising that we all have to make changes in how we live our day to day lives in order to ensure a future for the next generation, the generation that will see the worlds population close to doubling! Imagine seeing double the number of people on the underground at rush hour! I’m also discovering that there is no end of information and projects to encourage people to more sustainable lives. On researching my worm composter I found loads of Youtube videos and DIY guides for building a home for my little slimy friends and in my humble borough there are several community growing projects for the green fingered. Is this theme likewise affecting you?

The first day of the workshop saw a smaller then hoped for turnout in young people and we were slightly worried that it all might be a bit of a struggle without the large numbers envisaged however we were blessed with a fantastic bunch who immediatly bonded and rose to any challenges we set them.

After a series of skills based workshops in breaking and poetry we set the group the unenviable task of creating a performance fusing words and dance within five minutes – as we know I am all in favour of time pressures and this little challenge was too good to miss. The young people took the challenge head on and created a brilliant piece that seamlessly fused the elements.

On our second day we begun work on our final piece (this is a three day project and we decided that our final product should be some sort of Choreopoetic performance) We were totally impressed by the young people who ran into the space at 12pm on the dot (our official start time) and without so much as a knod from us began rehearsing. Not wanting to stop the flow we abandoned our plan of warm-up games and allowed them to lead in a process they were comfortable with. Once they had perfected their piece from the day before we once again ran through some more skill sharing exercises with them learning how to use accumulation and cannon in both their dance and their poetry. We then became very cruel workshop leaders and informed them they had half an hour to use all their text and all their moves into a performance for the staff at UKCCA!

This was certainly a baptism of fire as the young people  worked hard right up to the arrival of our impromptu audience and despite not feeling 100% ready they gave a brilliant performance.  Once the audience had left, the group felt a little disheartened that they hadn’t done as well as they could, missing the point that they pulled something together in a very short space of time. We discussed the positives of their experience and what they had learnt – they all agreed that they were scared and that they would work twice as hard to ensure that the following days performance would be without fault.

The final day was fantastic the group pulled out all the stops wanting to “prove” themselves and that they did – they presented a Choreopoetic piece which was simply brilliant fusing their newly learnt break dancing techniques and recently written poetry that told a real and mythical story about the origins of break dance and hip hop culture.

The UKCCA Staff loved it and the young people were clearly beaming with pride and were very grateful that they had been through their baptism of fire the day before in order to prepare them and inspire them for the final performance.

If indeed funding streams are drying up (can you tell I’m still hopeful!) for the arts what are us humble artists to do? I think the answer lies in finding new and innovative ways of making our art pay, in an ideal world there would be funding and we would all skip happily into the sunset with our commissions under our arms, but given that that future is not guaranteed I think we all need to be seriously thinking about how we can make our art sell! about how (dare I say it) we can make our art commercial! Will this be a good thing? A healthy thing? A terrible thing? I don’t know – but I do know this – if we’re to survive we’re gonna have to adapt!

Image courtesy of Tadek Kurpaski

While sweltering in my studio I thought I’d see if anyone had an old fan they no longer want and composed this little request…

I’m a children’s poet who’s getting very hot
I’m baking in my studio and losing the plot

I’m trying to write poems with consistent rhyme
But my pen keeps slipping cos I’m sweating all the time

So I’m putting this request to the freecycle clan
Please, please, please has anyone got a fan???

Not only did I get offers of Fan but offers written as poems – and here they are…

Hello Poetryjoe
Don’t be so full of woe.
We’ve got a fan
For just such a man!
The fan is not Japanese
But it will puff a breeze.
When you have time
Between composing your rhyme,
Give us a call
Our kids will adore
To open the door
To a freecycle man
Collecting his fan.

By Hannah J Parker

I got a fan, it’s here on my shelf
it rattles and wobbles and might mess wiv yer helf
cos I found it one evening just left on the road
but it works
if you want it
just let it be knowed.

By WH

Now why can’t all transactions work like that.

find out more about freecycle at www.uk.freecycle.org