Into the Blue - writing with clarity and simplicity

The only way to become a writer is to write. I tell this to anyone who asks me. But what to write? A dozen years ago or more I began a writng exercise of a daily paragraph to fit the (then) Facebook restrictions of forty words. Since then it has mutated into a sort of daily blog of where I live on the West Cliff Green in Bournemouth. I set myself some fairly arbitrary rules which are that it has to be posted on the day it is written. There must be no rethoughts or corrections later. It has to be written entirely about the West Cliff Green And, most important: it must reflect exactly what I see and hear there and then. The West Cliff Green is a tiny area of grass and trees sandwiched between a row of apartment blocks and the sea cliff. It is, by modern measurements, about the size of three football pitches. You might think that writing about the same time place day after day is very restricting but the more I do it, the more I see and hear the more I notice and the more i have to write every day. It has become a daily blog somewhere like a phenological record of the people and animals I meet and how they change with the seasons. Because I have kept this exercise going over all this time I am now able to compare any one day with previous years. I have now migrated the Facebook post to my website as “From the Green” and I’m able to include some of my rather clumsy photos. They have to obey the same rules as the writing. Although this started purely as an exercise it has enabled me to refine the rest of my writing in direct obervation and simplicity of description. If you enjoy writing in this way I can only recommend you look at the works of Matsuo Basho and Thomas Hardy, both of whom discovered the art of writng down what they observed with clarity and simplicity. Or perhaps, stand on the Cliff edge of the West Cliff Green, where the land meets the sea and the sky and write down what you see.