Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part, it's making them work - Ian McMillan

Ian McMillan is finding solace in humour in these uncertain times.Ian McMillan is finding solace in humour in these uncertain times.
Ian McMillan is finding solace in humour in these uncertain times. | other
At this time of lockdown when lots of my work has, as they say, fallen off a cliff, I decided to ransack my memory and see if any of the writing-based money-making schemes I’ve come up with over the years might be revived to help me earn a bob or two.

Having trawled them from my mind’s depths and examined them in detail, I can safely say that I won’t be buying the island next to Richard Branson’s just yet.

The first idea, from sometime in the mid-1980s, was The Edible Line of Poetry. The idea came to me when I was running a writing workshop in a library and somebody had baked some scones for us to chomp on in the tea break. They were all laid out in a row along a table and suddenly I thought that you could write a word on each of ten scones so that you made a line of poetry.

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To use a well-known example, you could write ‘‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that walked on high’’ in icing on top of the scones, a word at a time, and then as you ate them the line would, to use a literary term, get redrafted.

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As ever with this kind of idea the devil is in the detail and try as I might I couldn’t come up with a line that worked. I tried The Tastier The Scone The Tastier Tasty Taste, which, if you ate one scone at a time, went through Tastier The Scone The Tastier Tasty via The Scone The Tastier, ending up at Scone The. Back to the drawing board! Mind you, I still think it’s a good idea if I could only think of a good line. Any suggestions? We can go halves on that island.

There were so many other ideas in those days; me and my mate John Turner came up with a wheeze we called The Poetry Waiters where people could order a poem with their meal in a restaurant. We even had letterheads done, but there were no takers.

I was going to make a living by entering slogan competitions because I figured that, as a writer, I was good with words and I’d be able to come up with enough winning lines to keep me in comfort for the rest of my life. I subscribed to a newsletter that kept me informed of the closing dates and the rules of dozens of these competitions each month and I got to work. I entered hundreds of them and I won nothing.

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No, I tell a lie: I won 50 Superman Lunch bags once and I gave them to the kids to take their sandwiches to school in.

I reckon I’ll revive The Poetry Waiters. Oh, I can’t: all the restaurants are shut!

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

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Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor

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