The Writer's Palette

Notebooks, workshop, and a visit to Durham

May 22, 2025

First and foremost to business. With your subscriptions, and with the addition of some money earned by me through writing, our latest donation to Medicins Sans Frontieres is £201.88, which means our total now stands at £631.46 . As we are nearly halfway through the year it seems it may be possible to reach a total of £1000 or more by the year’s end. In the beginning, I didn’t dare hope that we would achieve so much.

Thank you!

If you’re a newsletter reader or you’re reading my memoir and would like to make a donation please subscribe for a month or two and help us reach that thousand pounds. (It is easy to unsubscribe and I trust all those who intended to unsubscribe have done so successfully, if not please let me know).

Like most of you, I’m sure, I’ve been unable to bear the news this week of a renewed offensive in Gaza. I can only hope our money in some small way helps to relieve the suffering.

Now to matters of writing and creativity in general. An unusual thing happened to me this week, in fact it was very unusual, possibly unheard of before: I ran out of notebooks.

I discovered this fact just before the blossom workshop (mentioned in my last newsletter), run by the lovely poet Liz Berry. I rifled through the chest of drawers in my study, through stacks of books, through boxes and general papers but alas I could not find a single notebook I wanted to write in

There were one or two half written in, but a half written in book is rarely satisfactory as there’s a chance of any new work getting lost. There were a number with a few blank pages left at the end. It is a habit of mine to never quite finish a notebook, which may seem strange but I’ve found talking with other writers that it’s a common occurrence. I’m not sure why we do it. Maybe we are already anticipating the new notebook, or fresh writing, and need to move into a new space.

Without a notebook I wrote on some large sheets of plain paper which was fine. I loved the workshop, it was generous, gentle and totally inspirational. I cannot recommend her enough as a workshop tutor.

A day or two later on a trip to Durham I purchased two Pukka Pads from Ryman’s; for me they are the work horses of notebooks. I’m partial to a Pukka Pad, especially to the creamy pages of the slightly more expensive Pukka Vellum which the pen moves so effortlessly across. I like the way the pads fall open, so you can see two flat pages at once, and on the whole I like bigger notebooks where there’s more space to play and for the constant re-drafting, which particularly happens for me with poetry.

It occurs to me now that the notebook is the writers palette and the words are the colours arranged on it. In the blossom workshop Liz spoke about building a palette of words. This idea is not unknown to me. It’s something I’ve done before with other poets, in other workshops, but it was good to be reminded of how useful it can be to squeeze out colours in the shape of words, before we begin writing, whether in poetry or prose...

It works a bit like this: if you know you’re going to be writing something about say - a river, or a particular setting, or about a particular person, then you can prepare your palette beforehand.

Take your page, do as Liz Berry suggested and write your subject/object at the top

write seven words about the colours associated with it
write seven words about the sounds
write seven words about the emotions or feelings

Be as literal or as fanciful with this as you wish.

You may also like to write words referring to taste and smell and touch. When you finish you will have an artist’s palette spread with your colours=words, and the beginnings of a sense picture.

As you begin to write your poem, your piece of prose, your essay or the setting of your short story, you immediately have words at your disposal. You do not have to use them all but in this word palette I think you’ll find at least one or two which when combined provide inspiration and get the writing juices flowing.

Why not give it a try?

In praising Pukka Pad I am not denying how enticing a beautiful notebook can be - I have so many of them gifted to me, each one a delight, but I know I have a reservation shared with other writers that a notebook can also be too beautiful to write in, and that there is something liberating in the ordinary.

I wrote my Danny Beck novel, Blood Tide, a crime novel set in Newcastle with former prisoner governor Danny Beck as my private investigator, on three Vellum Pukka Pads. It was the novel that came closest to mainstream publication. Sadly, it’s no longer available as it once was as an e-book on Kindle. Read more about it here. I wonder if I should perhaps serialise it here?

I was very fond of Danny Beck, as I know others who read Blood Tide were. I wrote it in 2012 so there is a danger that it has become dated. This shouldn’t matter if it’s good enough. I’m currently reading my way through Ian Rankin’s Rebus series. I don’t read them one after another, often I’ll be reading something in between, but I turn to them when I can’t find a book I want to read, when I need the comfort of a book that I know will not disappoint me and a character who has become an old friend. There’s no doubt that Rebus is flawed, perhaps just one of the reasons we love him, nevertheless we can always rely on him to fight injustice and to care about those who others discard.

I’m still playing with ideas for my new project and doing my best to resist the feeling that I have to decide now what form it will take or what the outline of the story might be. I find this very hard. I have a tendency to always want to step in and solve a problem, not to stand back and let things play out. I’m trying to get to know my characters, in particular the youngest daughter of Thomas Ebdon, Durham cathedral organist, who the Little Count, Joseph Bouruwlaski lived with at the end of his life.

The daughter was called Elizabeth, virtually nothing is known of her. One of the delights in imagining her world is going to Durham and walking down through the Bailey to the river knowing that she too would have taken this path, that her feet would have echoed on the cobbles ( some remain still in the South Bailey) that she would have drawn her fingers along the rough stones of the high wall on west side, where she may have looked in at the cathedral garden.

This week in beautiful sunshine, and with a lovely friend, I began to retrace her steps.

To our surprise and delight we found the small Bailey church of St Mary the Less, now the chapel for St John’s College, open. We took the short path through the graveyard, admired the carving on the Norman doorway as we stepped into the smallest church in the city of Durham, into the simplicity of white walls and unadorned altar. Sunlight fell through stained glass, rippling and fluid on the stone flags of the floor. We breathed in the quiet, pious scent of hymn book and prayer, deciphered the plaque dedicated to the Little Count. We sat in silence imagining Elizabeth here, imagining what sanctuary such a church might offer for a woman tired of the great cathedral and its men.

It would have been Elizabeth’s nearest church. She would surely have sat here. I waited to hear the swish of her skirt, caught a fleeting vision of a woman and an assignation

What a gift that was…