HOW I WRITE by Paul Surman

Paul Surman: HOW I WRITE

As I imagine many people do, I write to make sense of the world in my own terms. Among other things, George Orwell spoke of sheer egotism as number one on his list of reasons for writing, and I recognise that in my younger self, but writing has also been redemptive. The more I wrote, the more self critical I became, until eventually, I wrote for the love of writing and the expression of ideas. It should be mentioned that I have Asperger’s and that helps with its tendency to obsession and focus, and writing can turn negative feelings towards a positive outcome.
 
As to how I write, various things come into play. I don’t have much time for romanticised ideas of inspiration, without the hard work of thinking, and I enjoy thinking. Also I am obsessed with consciousness, what it is and how it feels, and that is often a starting point. I follow things through. Sometimes it is two disparate things I feel there is a tension between, and I try to understand what that means. At other times I see something and feel a tension inside myself, a kind of weather report indicating a poem is coming.
 
Occasionally a phrase arrives, like a screen grab from my passing thoughts, that can only be eradicated by writing a poem. In my collection to be published in July 2022 there is a poem that started from a line about “me coming in from the rain”. I have no idea where it came from, but a poem came from it. More recently, returning from London, the phrase “walking away across fields” kept passing through my thoughts, and eventually resolved into a poem. There are many ways poems come into being, but in my case they come from a fundamental dissatisfaction, an itch that must be scratched, a picture that must be straightened before I can be satisfied with life again. There must be tension of some kind or the writing will either fail to happen, or be dull and flat. It is an endless task and often exhausting, but it has become a way of life. I wouldn’t care to live life “off the peg” always consuming things other people have made. I have had the great privilege of inventing myself in words, and as far as I am concerned there is nothing more satisfying.
 
Paul Surman
February 2022
Paul Surman is the author of Seasons of Damage and Beauty and his third poetry collection, The Ghostly Effect, is to be published in July 2022