You need to do one of three things (or a combination of them) to be a successful writer-performer.

You have to tell a story. If you’re going to perform for an hour, there has to be something more than just observations or gags –taking the audience on some sort of emotional journey is vital. The other thing that’s important is to make them laugh or entertain them. If you want to do social commentary, then you have to be funny, or else you’re just hectoring people. The third thing you have to have is ‘wow factor’: there has to be a little bit of aural spectacle. I saw Saul Williams do a fifteen-minute set at Latitude and he was going so fast that I couldn’t follow it. People were impressed with the way his mouth was moving and the sounds he was making.

I’ve never been in a situation where I have no idea what to write next. The ideas stack up and you have to work your way through them.

There are things you can do that will work in performance but not on the page. I felt if I wanted to start putting stuff in books, then I needed to get better at putting my stuff on the page. I read James Fenton’s Introduction to English Poetry and Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, and did lots of research about form and meter. Now I know that you need to go away and learn the rules and only then can you break them.

There’s a culture of learning on the job these days. Audiences aren’t that discerning about style: it’s more about content. I could have carried on what I was doing in 2007 quite easily and still got loads of gigs and good reviews but I knew that if I wanted to enter the page poetry world, then there are reviewers who know what they’re talking about and a rigorous level of peer review. When my first pamphlet was reviewed, people were engaging with the way I’d written things, as opposed to ‘this poem was about such and such’. And that was exciting.

So whether people are doing too much too young… maybe you’re only going to get that opportunity when you’re young. That’s what the Beatles did, didn’t they? The Beatles made pop music, albeit good pop music, but they reached a point where they thought they should start writing decent lyrics and make more interesting music. And that Beatles model is the model that works.

There’s nothing I did when I was 21 that I am in any way pleased with. I’m kind of impressed with my gumption, for going out there and doing it. And if people did sneer at me then, saying I was a bad poet, it didn’t really matter because that wasn’t what I was really going for.

When you do something for long enough, you get better at it and you want to really start mastering it. And that’s the process that I’ve been through.

Luke Wright is currently touring the UK with his new poetry stage show, Cynical Ballads. He will also be curating the Poetry Arena at Latitude Festival in July. Visit www.lukewright.co.uk to book tickets.

tuc stand-up for decent work 18 by philosophyfootball available by CC by 2.0 (c) 2010

Are you a budding writer-performer who needs more time to focus on your work? You might be interested in applying for our Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund.