NOTES on. writing // head notes

With a couple of book synopses, chapter content plans, and funding applications and evaluations to write this month, my daily writing practice has becoming a series of 'head notes', but that's okay.

I’m eager to write everyday. Partly because it’s so incredibly cathartic but also because I know that good writing requires a framework of discipline and continuity in which the lyricism can sit. Sometimes it’s just not possible to get to fit everything in, however, and that’s okay. If you can’t get to the computer to get those words down, there’s always the writing tablet in your head for what I call head notes.

Writing for me happens, not just when I’m sat at a computer but also when I’m out riding my bike, or on a run, washing the pots, or slumbering in a tent at a festival. Sentences form almost as frequently as I breathe in and out and so I try and find ways to make those sentences or pieces of content stick without writing them down. I then file them in my head for later use.

As example, on packing up my tent after a few final days working at Glastonbury I noticed that, despite the intense heat and parched grass all around, the underside of my groundsheet was riddled with small cakes of mud. I didn’t want to pack away a dirty tent and so I found a piece of wood and began scratching them off. While performing this relatively mundane task I began to wonder where the mud had come from and then realised that these cakes were indeed worm casts. While I had been slumbering the worms had been keeping me company all along.

It was this last sentence that stuck with me. The idea that the worms were at the festival too, and would continue to roam the fields of Worthy Farm long after we had gone. I was excited by this connection with nature. That the weight of me did not hinder their progress through the soil and the important work that they do. That the worms were part of the festival too and had been since it began in 1970s from the early days of T Rex and David Bowie to this year’s headline sets by the Foo Fighters and Elton John.

I’ve also been making lots of head notes that relate to my next book. Ideas around ownership, placemaking, and ways to get your nature fix outside of the home. In this case it helps to have an umbrella subject, something under which to gather ideas. Visiting a community garden I might be admiring the flowers or the decor but I’ll also be aiming to think more deeply about what it means to develop or need such a space; who visits here and why. I don’t always need a notebook for these ideas as they are automatically filed in my mind under the remit of my book. They have a place to go.

Saying that I’m hoping that the damp festival and now construction site that is my house will calm down somewhat through July, at least providing pockets of writing time. And having just seen Pulp last night in Finsbury Park just a few days after getting back from Glastonbury, I’ve put my dancing shoes away for a few weeks and am using my restored energy to push forward various work projects – writing and gardening at the heart of all.