Category Archives: Writing

Unknown's avatar

The daunting process of finding an agent

by

This is the time of year when family used to wearily supply me with another copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which I would then hunt through looking for likely targets. I’d read up on each agent’s specific requirements, and then measure out the ingredients to send to them. Sadly for me nothing baked into anything. So I gave up.

Then today I listened once more to writers discussing submissions, and I saw suddenly that the clue is in the word ‘submission’. That’s what it feels like after aching hours of drafting and tweaking, and rearranging according to each agent’s rules, especially if there’s not even a peep in response.

Anyway, while I sit here bleating like a sheep stuck on the wrong side of a fence, I think sometimes of J K Rowling. She created a whole world, then submitted it again and again, until finally ‘kapow‘! She succeeded because she did not give up. So, even if I can’t create a world as magnificent as hers, I can at least work on the not giving up … for now.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Where are stories from?

by

“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

I’m not sure who said the words beneath the photograph above. I’ve seen them listed as a North American proverb, but can’t get closer to their origin than that.

Since finding the quotation, I’ve been thinking about it. I have an idea where facts are supposed to come from, and the truth. But stories? Perhaps children are the true gatekeepers of stories, happy always to follow them into the unknown, to escape along their paths into the land of make believe.

As adults do we lose that ability? I certainly seem to have less of it. It’s as though a muscle has wasted away, overwhelmed by the day to day and the every day. However, I’ve discovered that the camera finds stories. It slows life down. Catches it for a second and holds it there, like a challenge.

Take the photograph above. The fact is that I was photographing the birdlife on the Thames. The truth is that there was a man feeding the geese just out of sight of the camera. The story begins “once upon a time …”, and includes a bossy white gull, some obedient soldier geese, and a daring raid on the Tower to rescue a young river swan who the ravens want to make their king.

Who knows how it will end?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Breathe

by

I heard the poem Breathe while in a car, wending my way through traffic. The words were clear and simple, the final image being of the respite found in a forest where the trees pass no judgement, allowing one simply to ‘be’, free from the stresses of expectation.

Here is the final verse of the poem – best read slowly:

” … and she sat there for hours
not wanting to leave
for the forest said nothing …
it just let her breathe”

Becky Hemsley

Later I looked up the poem and its author. It has been written by Becky Hemsley, and is part of a poetry collection of hers called Talking to the Wild. The second poem that I heard her read was called Like a Girl. Both poems were lovely to hear. They sounded like wind chimes of hope above the dark dark news of conflict that flared up later on the news.

(My thanks to Becky for allowing me to use the final verse of her poem in this post)

Here she is reading Like a Girl

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023