Writers are Hunter-Gatherers

GATHERERS
A lot of writers talk about the gathering stage of writing. This stage can involve reading around the literature which relates to your novel, reading books by writers you admire and books on a similar genre and theme.
The gathering stage is also the time for research.
 I've recently been researching the little ships which left Hayling Island for Dunkirk, for my novel, HIDDEN, coming out next year. This photo shows me on the bridge of Count Dracula, moored at a boatyard on Hayling, which went to Dunkirk, May 31st 1940. She rescued over 700 men.

The gathering stage of writing for me also involves a lot of thinking, perhaps not even taking notes, just thinking and thinking myself into my characters and situation until I come to the point where I am ready to write.




HUNTERS
But recently it has occurred to me that there is a stage before the Gathering. That is the Hunter stage. History is a great passion of mine and I think that I would have been most at home at the end of the Ice-Age in the great days of the nomadic Hunter-Gatherers, who followed the herds of edible animals along the the edge of the Ice Sheet. Once they had tamed horses and could ride above the landscape their sense of freedom and engagement with their environment was probably the greatest in human history. It was also a time when I believe women would have had more freedom than later on when people settled in one place and were more easily controlled.

This is a close-up of the old flint beds in the chalk seams on Hayling. There were thriving Iron Age communities on the Island and a very important salt industry which eventually attracted the attention of the Romans.

If I had lived at that time I would have been a healer, studying the plants for medical properties. My mother was a nurse in the Navy in the Second World War and she taught me a lot about managing illness.
I think I would also have been an artist, painting my stories on animal skins and carving beads for jewellery.




And yes, all this is very fanciful, but then isn't that exactly the characteristic a writer needs? Here I am, living in 2010, in an equally rich and challenging environment and my calling is to be a writer of fiction and poetry.As I have been writing since childhood, my antennae are always up. I am always hunting through my world, for stories and words, landscapes and images and once I have settled on a new project - poem, short story, novel - only then does the gathering stage begin.

This is the stage of greatest focus. If I simply continue to hunt I will have a notebook full of What ifs? and no finished product. There is always another great story out there waiting to be written and my antennae are so sensitive, I see possible stories and poems everyday. But I have to take control, decide on my focus and start the long task of gathering before I begin the momentous work of actually writing and crafting my idea.

How do you hunt and gather? Share your ideas with us.