Seven Questions

In this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process.

1. Where do you write? (do you have an office, room, bus journey that you find yourself and your writing?)

I have a study at the top of our lighthouse that looks across the River Tyne at the old Roman fort of Arbeia. I sometimes have to be chased up to it of a morning from our perfectly acceptable kitchen table, but once I'm there I find it hard to leave till the middle of the night. I also have an office in Newcastle University that looks down on the big blank wall where we project poems for our text gallery, LIT. ('We' are the NCLA, or Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.)

I like to sit on the metro to and from work and scribble into notebooks or onto an iPhone: twenty minutes is a good meditative unit. Train journeys in general are helpful spaces for me. And I'm quite happy sitting in the backs of quiet pubs making a note or two. So that's like almost but not quite everywhere – I don't like to be noticed, but I don't mind other people being around.

2. How do you write? (into a notebook or straight onto a computer?)

I recycle printed sheets of A4 – turn them over to the blank side and attach them to a clip-board, date them, and off I go – work work, my work, shopping, travel times, whatever. I carry small notebooks in my pocket, a journal in my bag. Once something has been worked by hand it goes onto the screen, where it proliferates drafts on different computers I try to collate with a single memory stick, or uploads to various online storage options. Then it might go back to paper again, and back and forth. Some things, lighter work, usually starts spontaneously on screen, and then has to be copied out by hand. The only important rule is to keep it fluid, not to let it seem fixed too soon.

3. Roughly how much time do you spend each week on creative writing related activities? (writing, editing, correspondence & submissions)

All the time, really – either I'm teaching and administering for teaching, or I'm editing or introducing some project for the NCLA or working on a freelance project, or I'm translating or travelling to translate, or collaborating with a musician or an artist or fellow poets, or I'm writing in the interstices of the day and on my research day and on the days 'off' at the weekend and the holidays.

I take my time off throughout what I see as a constant working space, so I don't have much time for 9to5ers who think that I should be doing X by Y time, but the time off is often online networking anyway, which I regard as necessary play, blogging and tweeting and so forth to let off steam and test ideas out – not quite the same thing, but I attempt both in the same digital arena.

4. What time of day do you usually write?

During the working day I'm continually snatching at moments, but temperamentally I'm a night writer, and will sit with something into the small hours if I'm not exhausted. When I have carved out dedicated space, days or a week or two, I'll write from late morning onward (I'm a slow surfacer).

5. What does it feel like to write?

I wouldn't know, I'm not there: the words are, the possibilities are, but I'm only vaguely aware of myself as anything other than a territory in which this is happening, and even then it's usually to notice that I'm an inefficient retrieval system for some word or idea or book. (Having two libraries mean you're constantly leaving the thing you want in the other space.) I know what it feels like not to write, because the job will frequently step in the way, particularly of larger scale projects, which have to advance too slowly for my liking: sometimes it's a relief and sometimes it's a real frustration.

There's a rhythm to writing, a way of interacting with both the world and the imagination, and you have to fight quite hard to maintain it: I'm fairly passive, and quite resistant to my ego's ideas about how important it is, so I have to do a dance to keep everything ticking along in a manner I think is appropriate to my sense of duty to work and responsibility to myself and my family. The modernist Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid tried to write an epic called Mature Art and, in my opinion, failed magnificently. I'd like to think there was a way of living that was mature art – without the caps or anyone particularly noticing. I'm happy trying and quietly failing at that.

6. Are there any stimuli that will usually trigger you into writing?

It's always a little shaking of the perceptions and the preconceptions – a misprision of the world as we suppose it is inscribed. I see something from an odd angle and a possibility opens up. It can be a visual thing, for instance, I saw a white petal from an artificial flower lying in the gutter soaked by the rain, and couldn't tell what it was – ice or a scallop shell or a gull feather. It can be a conceptual thing, like realising that all the different kinds of poems I wrote – Scots, English; formal, free; page-bound, performance; home, travel; my own, translation – were all concerned with borders, so writing them became like responding to different muses. It can be a verbal thing – I read Burns' 'To a Mouse' and think about a chocolate mousse and realise there's a possible poem in the Burns stanza called 'To a Mousse'; then I sit in a Greek restaurant and understand there must be another poem called 'To a Moussaka'.

In many of these cases, the opening up of a possibility for a poem is the same thing as writing it – in some sense I've already begun. In some I realise it's someone else's poem. In others, I see I'm not in the right place yet, like I know there's something buried underground but I don't know where exactly and, besides, I left my spade in the other library.

7. What are you working on now?

I'm trying to finish two books: an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry from the last thirty years, which I'm editing and translating with two old friends, Yang Lian, one of the most prominent Chinese poets of the Menglong or 'Misty' generation, and his principle translator, Brian Holton. We're all still pals, somehow, though admittedly the book still isn't finished. It covers many of the principle figures from after the Cultural Revolution, through Tiananmen Square, and into the economic explosion of recent times. I was the inceptor, the one who said 'Wouldn't it be a good idea if…' and I'm also the 'finisher,' the one attempting to make these poems work in English, which sometimes means adjusting the tone slightly, and sometimes means going through them character by character in close dialogue with both Lian and Brian and, where possible, the author.

At the same time I'm completing my latest book, which is nearly there – when the title settles I'll know it's done. Like previous collections, it's a bit big, labyrinthine even – brevity isn't terseness; its music is a bit rough – perfection isn't finish; and it's a lot non-lyrical – those other muses tend to elbow Erato about. There's a thread of pilgrimage which goes through it: quite literally in the shape of a sequence of almost-Byronic nearly-Spenserians – if travel is a subject, quest is its theme. I'm writing about the nature of our encounters with places and people; because these are often encounters with poets and poetries, I'm trying to let a non-British, extra-European, ek-centric edge into the work. You'll tell me if it works.

*Bill Herbert
(WN Herbert)  is from Dundee, lives in an old lighthouse in North
Shields and teaches Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He is
mostly published by Bloodaxe and is finishing a book of poems and an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry.