The week after: the notebook and the next poem
Keeping going after the showcase
Young writers in spoken word poetry are people who write before writing is anybody's job, usually between thirteen and nineteen, and what decides whether they are still writing a year later is almost never talent.
It is whether a habit, a notebook and a room survived the week after the showcase, when the lights go off, the audience goes home and the poem that took a term stops being urgent.
The flatness after the showcase, and what it actually is
The flatness after a showcase is predictable, ordinary and temporary, and naming it in advance is most of the cure. A performance concentrates weeks of work into six minutes and then removes both the deadline and the audience at once, so the following Tuesday has no shape. Young writers commonly read that emptiness as proof that the poem was a fluke, or that they have run out, and a workshop that says nothing lets them conclude it privately.
Three moves work in that week. Take seven days off writing on purpose, announced in advance so the gap is a plan rather than a failure. Then read rather than write, because reading is the only reliable way to refill, and poetry read in the fortnight after performing lands differently than it did before. Then come back with one small prompt and a fifteen minute limit, not with the next big poem. The next big poem is the thing that keeps young writers frozen for a month.
A notebook habit that survives a term
A notebook habit survives a term when it is small enough to be boring, and it dies when it is set up as a daily poetry practice. The instruction that works is collect, do not compose: one line, one overheard sentence, one thing seen, dated, most days. Ten minutes, not an hour. Nothing in it has to be good, and nothing in it has to become anything.
- Date every entry, because a notebook without dates cannot be mined later and a dated one becomes a record of a year.
- Write the ordinary specifics, such as the number of the bus, the name of the shop, what somebody actually said, since those are the details that make poetry particular.
- Keep one page at the back for first lines only, which is where a stuck writer goes.
- Copy out other people's poems by hand, marked as theirs, because it teaches structure faster than reading does.
- Reread the notebook once a month with a pen, marking anything that still has heat in it.
A workable rhythm for a young writer is one finished poem a month, which is twelve a year and enough for a pamphlet by the time somebody leaves school. Set against that, the daily writing prompts sold as a route to a book are usually a way of producing 365 fragments and no finished poems. The prompt work in Starting from a prompt is designed to be finished, which is the difference that matters.
What young writers schemes actually are, and how to check one
Young writers schemes fall into four groups, and the confusion behind most searches for the term is that they look alike from the outside. There are national poetry competitions and awards, some free to enter and some charging a fee. There are residential courses and summer programmes, several of them run by universities in the United States, which charge fees in the hundreds or thousands and involve, for a UK reader, travel plus an ESTA or, for a full time programme, a student visa. There are anthology publishers, which invite school entries and then offer families the printed book. And there are membership associations and clubs, which sell a subscription rather than a place.
None of those categories is automatically good or bad, and prestige is not a thing anybody can verify from a website. What can be verified is a short list of facts, and checking them takes ten minutes:
| What to check | Where it should be stated | What a straight answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | An about page, with a charity or company number | A named organisation registered somewhere findable |
| What it costs | Next to the entry form, before any personal details | Free, or a fee stated in full with any waiver explained |
| Whether selection is real | The rules, and the number of entries published | A stated number of winners, not everyone who entered |
| Who keeps the copyright | The terms and conditions | The writer keeps it; the scheme takes limited publication rights only |
| What publication costs the family | The terms, and any follow up email | Nothing. Being asked to buy the book is the signal to stop |
| Whether the deadline is real | The entry page over two weeks | A fixed date that does not roll forward whenever you look |
One more check belongs to the adult rather than the young person: whether entering costs a writer their first publication rights, which can quietly disqualify a poem from competitions later. A teacher or librarian reading the terms once, before thirty pupils enter, is worth more than any amount of enthusiasm afterwards.
Where a young writer in the UK can go next, for nothing
A young writer in the UK can go a long way next without paying anything, which is worth saying because the paid schemes advertise and the free ones mostly do not. The Poetry Society runs the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, free to enter and open to writers aged 11 to 17, and Young Poets Network, a free online platform of writing challenges and resources for poets up to 25. Its SLAMbassadors youth slam championship ran from 2001 to 2018 and is worth knowing about only so that a search result for it is read as history rather than as an open door. First Story places professional writers into secondary schools serving low income communities. Arvon charges for its residential writing courses but runs a grants scheme that can cover the whole fee for a writer who cannot pay, and it also works with schools. Scottish Book Trust, Literature Wales and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland each support writing for young people in their own nations, and Apples and Snakes, the spoken word development organisation based in London, runs programmes for young performers in England.
Closer to home there is usually more than anyone expects: a public library with a young writers group or a room it will lend on a Thursday, a local open mic that runs an early all ages slot, a school magazine, and a county or borough youth arts service. The stage side of all this, the open mic and the slam night, is a route of its own, and the writing side keeps running through How to write a poem. A young writer who performs once a term and finishes one poem a month has a body of work and a habit, which is the whole of what this stage asks for.
What makes a workshop still exist in its second year
A workshop still exists in its second year for structural reasons rather than inspirational ones, and every one of them is boring and fixable. The first year runs on the energy of whoever started it. The second year runs on whether the thing was built to survive that person having a bad term.
- Fix the slot in the timetable and in the room booking system, for the whole year, before September.
- Recruit a second adult from the start, since a workshop with one leader ends when that leader changes job.
- Secure a budget line, even 50 pounds a year for notebooks and photocopying, because an unfunded club is invisible to a senior leadership team.
- Keep a register, which is what turns attendance into evidence when the slot is challenged.
- Produce something visible each term, such as a showcase, a pamphlet or a display, so the work exists outside the room.
- Name a senior sponsor who will defend the slot in a timetabling meeting nobody else attends.
- Write a handover folder: the prompts that worked, the running order from the last showcase, the consent forms, and the list of poems that got a reaction.
Two practical constraints belong in that folder as well. A visiting writer working with young people needs the right criminal record check, which is the Disclosure and Barring Service in England and Wales, the Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme run by Disclosure Scotland in Scotland, and AccessNI in Northern Ireland; the National Association of Writers in Education publishes a professional directory of writers who work in schools, which is where to look for one. And the group needs a way in for people who arrive nervous in year two, which is where Nerves, and what to do with them earns its place, because the young person standing in the corridor deciding whether to come in is the entire second year in one moment.
Spoken word poetry survives in a school or a library the same way a choir or a football team does, through a slot, a register, a budget and a second adult, and not through anybody's passion. The workshops that last are unglamorous and dependable, and the young writers who keep going are the ones who found somewhere that was still open the following Thursday.