The Gravy Post - #2
We talk about our next edition, live events, and upcoming submissions. Ralph tackles Stevie Smith, Nick considers writing madness and Jonny gives his take on Kid Lit and comedy.
First of all, thank you.
You. Yes, you.
Thank you, sincerely, and from the bottoms of our collective gravy-hearts. Thank you for subscribing, for reading, and for joining us on this new endeavour as we pilot the new Northern Gravy Post into it’s second edition.
It means so much that you’re joining us on this voyage. It’s always a nervous gamble, doing something new, especially something that relies on other people understanding the value and purpose of it. But here you are, and we couldn’t be happier to have you aboard.
As you’ve no doubt already read in our first edition, this is our unvarnished, undiluted, unapologetic take on writing, reading, publishing, and being part of the grand adventure we all call literature. When we started Northern Gravy, it was a gamble too. It was us thrusting our oars into the great, pitch-black abyssal darkness of the great unknown as we set out to discover if people wanted to be paid to be published, and more than that wanted us to do it. We were delighted to find that they did.
Now, we’re surprised and delighted again that you’ve joined us here, so cheers. You’re truly excellent people. But a special thanks goes to our paid subscribers, those who’ve jumped at the chance to help us to do more, reach further, and broaden what we do by pitching in with all-important funding. You’ve done something truly amazing, we’re humbled and awed by the response and it’s inspiring us to cook up extra-special things for the future.
Well then, that’s been a lovely moment, hasn't it? All of us together, giving a big cheer for being a part of something. It’s enough to make you teary eyed, isn't it? We certainly are. So, before we’re reduced to blubbering messes, we’d better get on with it and get stuck into the articles themselves. Once again, there’s three belters for you all to check out, one from each of us. See something you like? Does your opinion differ? Have you something you’d like to say about what you’ve read? Give us a holler, either by email or on Twitter, and let us know.
As we’ve made abundantly clear already: we can’t do this without you. So thank you again.
Edition 13 is coming soon…
We are aiming to launch edition 13 in August. Twelve writers (4 Fiction, 4 Poetry and 4 Kid Lit) will be paid for their craft and time. We also have a super article from the brilliant poet, Jo Bell. Jo is an established poet and long-term poetry advocate. They have been helping writers to find their best work for years, through online campaigns like the award-winning 52 Project, which helped scores of poets to publication and became a best-selling book.
Shortly after SUBMISSIONS WILL OPEN AGAIN! If you’re thinking about submitting to Northern Gravy there is no better time to check out our submissions page than right now: How to Submit to Northern Gravy.
Getting Away With Murder: The Art of Writing Suspense with Russ Thomas (online)
We’ve a real treat in store for you as best selling author, fellow Sheffield Hallam Creative Writing MA graduate, and all-round lovely person Russ Thomas will be joining us for an evening delving into crime writing!
Russ Thomas is the bestselling author of the DS Adam Tyler novels, which include Firewatching, Nighthawking, Cold Reckoning, and his latest work Sleeping Dogs. He is published by Simon and Schuster in the UK, G.P. Putnam's Sons (Penguin Random House) in the US, and is represented by Sarah Hornsley of Peters, Fraser + Dunlop.
Come along to learn all about the art of writing suspense, and get a chance to ask questions about his journey to publication.
Thursday, 22nd August. 7.30pm - 8.30pm
How to Write a Children’s Page-Turner with Piu Dasgupta (online)
We’re inviting Northern Gravy alumnus and children’s writer Liu Dasgupta to present on how to write a page turner for children. Piu will be discussing the genesis of her book, The Secret of the Snakestone, as well as breaking down her tips and methods for crafting an unputdownable read for younger readers.
Piu DasGupta was born in Kolkata, India, and grew up in India and the UK before settling in Paris, France, where she now lives with her family. Her first children's book was a Middle-Grade adventure called Secrets of the Snakestone (published by Nosy Crow in March 2024). It was an official Children’s Bestseller, a Times Children’s Book of the Week, a Book of the Month in The Observer, Book of the Week in The Week Junior, Book of the Day with BookTrust, and was included in the Spring round-up of The New Statesman.
Thursday 9th September. 7pm - 8pm
The following section will be FREE for the first few editions as a thank you to all the kind support we’ve received over the last three years. We will be giving you exclusive behind the scenes access to Northern Gravy.
If you want to support Northern Gravy considering becoming a paid subscriber for £3.50 a month. All money received will go directly towards paying our writers.
The Poem and the Poet by Ralph Dartford
Each month, our poetry editor, Ralph Dartford takes a personal look at a poem he loves and reflects upon its meaning and technique. This month, he examines the classic Stevie Smith poem, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’.
Have you ever sat on a beach with a sense of unease as you stared out to sea looking out at swimmers, surfers and small boats? I have, often. Ice cream in hand, anxiety rising. I’ve always worried that something awful is going to happen, that a tragedy will occur and that someone hapless and helpless will get into trouble and no one will come to the rescue. Where does this fear come from? Maybe it's my lifelong fear of walking into water. I was a nervous wreck in the school swimming pool, always clinging to the sides, not trusting the rubber ring and armbands whilst the school bullies pushed my head down and goaded me. It’s stayed with me. Perhaps these days, it’s the daily rolling news of poor people crossing the perilous English Channel, searching for safety and sanctuary. This month’s classic selected poem, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Stevie Smith is a stark reminder of those fears. Let’s have a look at the poem in a bit more detail.
Stevie Smith was born in Hull but moved away to London at a very young age. She was a much-heralded poet and novelist, unsentimental and with a sly humour which seemed to be out of step with any poetic movement that was occurring at her time. Smith was prone to awful illness (Tuberculosis) and subsequent periods of acute depression, and this is reflected in much of her work, and especially in ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (1957). Probably her most well-known poem. Technically the poem is of simple rhyming and half rhyming composition with just three quatrains with a sing-song repetition of the words moaning and drowning in the first and last stanza. The language is plain and relies on the emotional punch of its narration. The first two lines are beguiling and riddlesome.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
The man in question is either already dead or is in such a state of despair that he considers himself emotionally deceased. The third and fourth lines reveal the heart of the poem. That the narrator was misunderstood in his life, maybe depressed and isolated, always sinking and drifting away.
In the second stanza, the point of view changes to another narrator, perhaps a collective of narrators. The people who thought they knew the protagonist, but clearly didn’t. The people sitting on a beach, watching a heartbreaking drama unfold, judging. The two words ‘They said’ at the stanza’s end says so much.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
The poem concludes with the narrator speaking and telling his truth, but with what has gone before, we get the sense that he is not being heard. This is reinforced by the odd and brilliantly effective second line (which is bracketed). Is he still alive, but spiritually dead? The final two lines of the poem explain a lot, sum up the narrator's world view, his detachment from the world, his final act of rebellion.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
The overall impact of the poem is shattering and stays with you long after reading. It speaks of the universal feelings of helplessness and loss. Personally, it has always had a deep emotional impact on me, an overwhelming feeling of sadness. I (and many others) believe that poems are always in a private conversation with other poems. That they talk to each other, perhaps argue and fight. In my new collection, ‘House Anthems’ this is evidenced by the poem, ‘Swimmer’. It’s a poem that reflects on the refugee crises in the UK, the small boats and the disastrous failure of Brexit which has cost lives. My poem without doubt has been in conversation with Stevie’s, even if I didn’t know when I was writing it. Poems. They have an everlasting life of their own.
Further Selected Reading:
Stevie Smith. A Biography by Frances Spalding (WW Horton & Co. 1989)
Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith: (Faber & Faber. 2018)
House Anthems by Ralph Dartford (Valley Press 2024)
Further Listening:
Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast: Stevie Smith and William Carlos Williams (2021)
A Method For When Writing Seems Like Madness by Nick Jones
A lot of people say that talking about, thinking about, or doing anything adjacent to writing is still writing.
And to a certain extent, I agree. After all, writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You need to feed your brain, find inspiration, and have those all important ideas that will transform into words on the page.
But that’s really easier said than done, isn't it? After all, it’s all very well and good saying “put words on a page”, but how do you do that when you just can’t really find them, and more importantly what words do you put on the page? Will any do? What do you do when you’re stuck?
The answer is, at least from my own experience, is yes. Literally any words. Write just about anything. That might sound like absolute madness, but trust me on this… there’s a method in it.
The method I’d like to talk about here is something I like to call “The Typewriter Method”. I read a quote once that supposedly came from Mark Twain in which someone asked him how he wrote a book. His answer was “I start with a word, I put another one after it, and I keep going until I reach ‘The End’”. I’ve never been able to find that quote again, and it may not even be Mark Twain, but I took it to heart, and I’d like to explain how and why.
The principle of The Typewriter Method is very simple: you write. Yes, as basic as that sounds, you start writing and you keep going.
Where The Typewriter Method gets more intense is that, like a real typewriter, you can’t just go back and erase stuff. This is key. Do not go back. No matter how tempted you are to agonise over each sentence, word choice, or bit of punctuation… don’t. Don’t give in. Keep going. Keep moving forward. Keep getting words on a page. Keep putting one after another, working your way steadily down the page, until you reach the end.
But what if what you’re writing isn’t any good? What if you’re just churning out absolute rubbish? It doesn’t matter. You’re getting words on the page, and isn’t that essentially what writing is? What if you hit a bit where you don’t know what to write, a line you don’t know how to construct, words that you don’t know how to say? Just write yourself a little note, on the page itself, with what you want it to be and skip it. You can do this for anything, from a single line, to a scene, to a whole chapter. Just skip past it, and then carry on writing.
The second part of The Typewriter Method is to then go back and fix stuff later. Fill in those blanks, if you have any. Tidy up the ugly phrasing, the words that don’t work, the clunky dialogue. All the stuff that, normally, you’d be too worried about to think about moving forward with your work.
Does it work? From experience, yes. Is what you write really that bad? Sometimes. But the thing to remember is that, without words on the page, you don’t have anything to work with. Rather than being paralysed by the doubt of wondering whether or not what you’ve written is half decent, you can make a more objective judgement later. After you’ve actually gotten something written.
I’ve known many writers who’ve been paralysed by that doubt. By that inability to write for fear of not writing something perfect and wonderful. And I can fully see how any why that happens. Writing can be daunting. It can, for want of a better phrase, really suck sometimes. I go through phases of thinking that everything I type is utter dross and should be cast into the sea or buried under concrete to save other writers from how poisonously terrible it is. But I don’t stop writing. I keep moving forward.
Sometimes what I write is awful. In fact, a lot of what I write is just plain bad. But, now and then, I surprise myself and find that amidst the churn of words I’ve produced, there’s something in there that I genuinely think is decent.
At other times, I use it to write things like this article. Yes, it took me two hours to write this. I stopped and started it four times, gave up on it once, tried to write something else, and then came back to it. And now here we are. Reading a little bit of proof that The Typewriter Method works. And if you’re ever stuck when writing something, maybe it can work for you too.
Comedy and Kid Lit - Let’s talk “funny books” by Jonny Syer
I’ve been an improvised comedian as long as I've been a writer, coming up 14 years. If you’ve never seen improvised comedy lookup, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and all those plays that go wrong. This has allowed me to perform across the U.K, several times at the Edinburgh Festival and even a handful of times at the Crucible Theatre (acting in plays or musicals). Mostly these days we perform in Sheffield under the name The Antics (quick plug, we’ve got a gig at The Leadmill, September 2024!)
Several years back, partly due to an early midlife crisis but mostly because I was floundering creatively and feeling lost in my real world job, I enrolled on the MA Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam. From that, I met my co-editors Nick and Ralph and Northern Gravy eventually became what it is today. That course was the moment I started to take my writing seriously. I have since written a handful of short stories, gone through an Arts Council England DYCP year, written two books (the second I'm currently editing with the help of my mentor and all round legend, Lisette Auton) with the hope of bagging an agent in the not too distant future. The whole experience of the MA is an entirely different post, but in short, it took me two years to realise what I always knew - when I write I want to write funny.
The first thing to know about writing comedy, prose or poetry, is that not everyone will find you funny. It is what it is, and it’s something you just have to get over. When I perform in a show and we have a crowd of, say, 100 people, if I make 80 of them laugh that’s good enough. If I make 50 of them laugh, also good. If no one laughs and the stage falls flat, you learn and you move on. It just happens. Confidence is key. YOU ARE FUNNY. We all are, we just have to figure out how to put it across in an understandable way.
The unstoppable Louie Stowell, author of all those Loki books, wrote about this for Northern Gravy, she will undoubtedly know more than me on the subject when it comes to blending comedy with children’s writing, so if you haven’t already go check out the article, “How to Write Funny Books for Children by Louie Stowell”. Once you’ve read that, come back here and I'll give you my two cents on the subject. Done? Good. Welcome back.
If you did read the article you’d have noticed there was a tweet from Jeff Kinney included:
Sometimes people ask me how I come up with my jokes. I use a toolset called Systematic Inventive Thinking. Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, other tools... I grind away on a certain topic and sometimes something good will shake loose. Doesn’t look so funny at this stage! - Jeff Kinney
Jeff is breaking what is funny down to its most basic to generate lots of ideas. Some of the time when writing, a funny line will just POP at me, this is usually in the form of physical comedy or character based ideas, perhaps even a witty way to present an overused cliché. But just as often I might not be feeling funny at all and this is where Jeff’s technique can help us get those words down when we are struggling. Or at least generate ideas. So let’s give it a go? Just write, and then break the scene down again and again and again.
Idea: Seaside
A family day out at the beach, the weather app said it would be a lovely day. We turn up and it’s raining. The wet sand and hot air has brought out tiny spiders that live in the sand. A local air show is trying to push on, with limited things in the air. Sandy sandwiches and coffee that is too hot to hold. Use the sand as a coffee holder. A good idea until it falls over. Ouch.
Conflict and stubbornness. Which characters want to stay and which want to go home? One of them has to stay for the red arrows which NEVER cancel. Turns out, they do.
The sand spiders are multiplying. Tensions are rising. Someone forgot to put ham in the sandwiches.
Some idiot still insists on playing with a ball across multiple areas where people are sitting. Do they not know how to be British? We all have our areas. Do not cross the imaginary boundaries! A good stiff tut will fix things and make sure the ball doesn’t come near here again.
The only plane to make the air show is a local crop farmer (do we have these in England? Doesn’t matter). It crashed into the sea. Pilot is fine but the grump character we seem to have found can’t get over the day being ruined.
That was interesting… I’m not sure what I found there. Perhaps a grumpy dad? Maybe a granny. Perhaps the makings of a funny short story about an old couple visiting an air show. Who knows, but it’s something to go on. A seed of an idea. Maybe you’ve found something too.
I loved the phrase “A good stiff tut”. That made me laugh.