Why do you write?

I think fundamentally a lot of writers will say the same thing. You don’t choose to write, you just feel you have to. I’m happiest when I’m writing. I’m essentially quite a solitary person and I like being on my own. Writing fits in with that perfectly.

How do you compose a poem? Do you have a method?
I prefer to use my laptop rather than pen and paper. I know that doesn’t really sit with the image of a brooding poet wandering the cliff-top alone composing misty lines, but my laptop gives me the ability to juggle with lines, to edit, to delete and to replace them with ease. I like a poem to look tidy when I’m working on it as it helps me to think better. For those reasons a laptop is best. Of course, I always carry a notebook because you never know when something will come to you. I also always carry a voice recorder, which I find hugely useful.

Poems or ideas don’t stay very long on my recorder or notebook before they get transferred to my laptop. The actual poem construction process for me has remained constant throughout my writing life. A few poems will pretty much write themselves in the first draft. The vast majority however, will go down very roughly. I have a document on my laptop called ‘crap poems’ and it’s where everything goes first to be worked on. Once a rough outline has been written the poem gets transferred to the document of the book I’m working on at the time. I then tend to go through that book, changing, tweaking and rearranging poems. I’ll probably work on a few poems in a couple of hours. I find short twenty-minute bursts on individual poems work well for me as a general rule. That’s pretty much the process I keep repeating until the book is finished.

One thing I should add is that I prefer to work in café’s rather than at home. I like the buzz of a café, I like the ever changing people and the moving environment. Mind you, I have to be quite specific. I can’t work where there is music playing (unless it’s classical at a very low volume) so it’s not always easy to get that perfect marriage of bustle and calm. When I find a café that suits me, I’m pretty much a permanent fixture. It doesn’t take long for the staff to know that the lad in the corner on his laptop drinks a large black coffee in a takeaway cup. Takeaway cups keep the coffee warmer longer.