Time
When I say it took 4 days to write Selkie Skin, I really do mean 4 days. If you work a 9-to-5 job in an office and sit down in front of the computer all day, well that’s not nearly the number of hours per day I spent in my 4 days of writing poetry. I tend to start at midday and keep going until I simply have to sleep, usually 4 or 5 am. I usually stop to eat, but sometimes I find I’ve missed a meal altogether! Do I eat dinner at 3 in the morning? Yes, sometimes I do.I put a lot of time into this poem because, as usual, the story inside me demanded the time from me. This is not a simple story, or a snapshot of an event. Selkie Skin is a full story, with a detailed plot, characters, and many twists and turns. That all takes time.
Rhyme
And it’s poetry, with rhyme and metre. Rhyme is easy. Find two words to rhyme and put them together. You’re done. You can even get two lines which rhyme and have the same number of syllables, fairly easily. But that’s not the end of it. Read this aloud:There is a house beyond the blue hill
Underneath it is an orange mill
Those are two lines which rhyme and have the same number of syllables, but they have no real metre, or at least none which flows naturally – there is no rhythm to these lines. They don’t even stutter along in the same (bad) pattern as each other. When you read them aloud your brain says, ‘Something is wrong, I don’t like this’, and your brain is absolutely correct!
Metre
I won’t be explaining what metre is here, and I won’t be getting too technical, so you’ll need to look it up elsewhere if you’re not sure. Try this link for the basics:Metre (poetry)
Writing with metre can be difficult. Sometimes you will find the perfect word and the perfect rhyme, but if its metre is DUM-da-da and your line needs da-da-DUM, you simply can’t use that word. And that doesn’t just apply the end of the line. The entire line will have metre, so every word has to have the correct metre, at the place you want to put it within the line. My poem is 188 lines long, and that’s a lot of lines, a lot of words, a lot of syllables (2024 of them!) all needing to fit the metre I chose for the poem. And that metre is...
Dactylic tetrameter
I used the same metre in Forgotten Empires, and liked it there so I knew it would fit with the tone of this story.
And yes, as with that poem, you can also sing this one to the same tune as the opening bars of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by The Beatles. But please don’t do it. I must stop mentioning that!
Story
Of course, within these severest of constraints (which, by the way, makes writing this kind of poetry more enjoyable, not less), I also have to tell a story. The story may sometimes change, because what I want to say at a particular point won’t fit the metre, or because the metre forces me to use one word rather than another. When I say ‘forces’ I also mean ‘suggests’. I may find a word which fits, but which then makes me go in a different direction with the plot, or gives me further ideas for developing the story. That’s how I write most of my poems, certainly the longer ones. Everything is always open to change, if the changes are improvements.All of this together takes time, huge amounts of it. Imagine that you have a jigsaw with 2000 pieces, and that you’re constantly trying to move and fit the pieces together. You find a piece of blue sky, but where will it fit? You see another piece of sky, but no, it’s the wrong shape (the metre), so you have to keep trying until it fits. When it’s all put together you have the big picture, and I have a poem. Unless, that is, I’ve looked at the clear blue sky, decided I’d rather see a cloudy grey one, and now have to make new and more interesting pieces to fit my puzzle!
Selkies
I’ll talk more about selkies in a while, but for now all you need to know about them is this:In Scottish mythology, selkies, meaning “seal folk”, are mythological beings capable of changing from seal to human form by shedding their skin.That’s from Wikipedia, and if you need more you can read the whole entry here:
Selkie
From this point onwards I need to assume you’ve read my poem. If not, consider this a huge spoiler alert!
Dreaming
Let’s talk about a dream I had. The date was 13 November 2019 and when I woke up I wrote down what I remembered of the dream:A couple find a baby on a beach and take her home, adopt her and look after her. But when the mother dies the child is abused by the father in a terrible way. She runs away and the father pursues her, finding her eventually on the very beach where she was originally discovered. He is dragging her home when she gives an awful cry. The sound is answered by a population of seals who seem to come from nowhere and come ashore on the beach, surrounding the man and separating him from the girl. Some of the seals take human form and kill the man. Those still in seal form devour him. The girl returns with them to the sea. They are selkies, as is the girl.I didn’t really need a spoiler alert there, because that dream is not the plot of this poem. But, when I started writing it, that was the plot I had in mind. I immediately wanted to have the baby (it was still a baby then) appear after a storm. So the very first stanza of the poem I wrote was this:
Seething and surging, the withering thunderstormWriting something like that also helps me get into the correct mindset. I knew this would be a long poem, so would need a gradual build-up, but a few lines of high drama often gets the creative juices flowing more easily.
Lashed with a murderous, merciless roar
Shattering waves hurled invincible energy
Rearing as demons, they pounded the shore
At the time I wanted an island with a couple living on it, who find the child. Why would a couple live on the island? Could I instead use a monk and a nun? Change of direction again. Problem: monks and nuns do not and did not live in that way. Not one of each, together. But for a hermit (in the religious sense of the word) it would work perfectly. So far I had: hermit finds stranded baby after a storm.
Back to my dream. The central theme to it is an abusive relationship. So the timescale now became an issue. Did I want to wait, in my story, until the baby grew up? No. Did I really want to explore ‘man abuses child’ in this poem? I’ve done that before, many times, because there are terrible things done to children, and I write to bring them to light and condemn them. But I had the sense that I wanted to go in a different direction here. ‘Woman in an abusive relationship’ is where this poem really started to take me. That’s the direction I went. The dream led me to a certain point, then I simply took a fork in the road.
More forks led to me ‘the hermit is a monk who loses his faith and goes bad’ and ‘the storm is called when he does a deal with a devil’. Those led directly to ‘finds a woman’, ‘loves the woman at first, but his evil nature is revealed’. Much much later we find that the path leads to ‘he gets what he deserves... or maybe not... oh yes he does... but does she have a happy ending?’ and we’re all the way into spoiler town again.
Research
You’ll be best served by me not repeating everything I’ve read but simply guiding you to some of the material I found to be most useful.The Selkie-folk
Imagine a seal, which takes off its skin. Inside it is a woman. But she cannot become a seal again without the skin. What if someone steals and hides the skin? The web page describes how selkies live, how they shed their skins, and how their skins can be taken so that the selkie is forced to stay, unable to return to the sea. It also describes the ‘seven tears’, which is important to my poem, although I changed its meaning a little to suit the story I had in mind. There are other links on that page to more selkie information.
Monk – Hermit – Mendicant
A complicated one because monks generally live in monasteries, with other monks. Hermits live alone and don’t mix with other people, so that’s why my main character is a hermit. A religious one, so the information about monks was important too. He’s a mix of all I read about monks and hermits. I mention the word ‘mendicant’ in the poem – someone who ‘relies chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive’. That ties in with the boat delivering supplies of food to the island.
The Island
The hermit’s island is in the North, and so are the selkies, so in my mind it was a small, remote island, part of the Orkney Islands. One of them had (or has) a chapel on it, but chapels aren’t for living in, so I built him a hermitage.
The Middle at the End
Once I was well into writing the poem, I realised I had a beginning (call down the storm, find the selkie) and an end (the selkies rise up against the hermit) but no middle. I actually went straight from the selkie waking up to, in the very next stanza, accepting her fate and saying she would marry him. And in the next stanza he was taking advantage of her and planning to leave the island. That was some quick turnaround!So the very last thing I added was the gradual seduction of the selkie by the hermit, followed by his change in mood and abusive nature as soon as he got what he wanted. This was all to add weight to the idea of an abusive relationship, a universal truth found in all too many relationships, right up to modern times.
