Letters and Plays

Just a brief recap on my participation in the Month of Letters in February, which I enjoyed very much. While I did not manage to post something every day I did write a lot of proper letters including several to friends who I had not been in touch with for several years. I have had a couple of replies which was really wonderful, including a long missive from my Uncle Den, and I plan to keep going and try and write a letter at least every couple of weeks. The down side of hand writing is that I don't have any record of what I wrote to each person and so risk waffling on repetitively ... ho hum.

I have spent the last couple of days with Monkey down in London; she was having a break in the rehearsals for the London season (Fourth Monkey) which begins on 11th April. I am so annoyed that I took my camera but failed to take it out of my rucksack and so did not get pictures of us being silly in the Natural History Museum or eating Mexican street food at Wahaca round the corner from Waterloo station.
We very carefully copied down the instruction on how to find the Vault Festival and were glad we did because you would be unlikely to come across it by chance:

Leake Street Wiki commons

The entrance is off the notorious Leake Street graffiti tunnel (apparently also called 'Banksy tunnel') and the venue was in the railway arches under Waterloo, the performances were provided with added atmosphere by the gentle rumble of trains passing overhead.

First we saw a performance entitled 'Bitesize Chekov' by a small company called 'D'Animate'. Neither of us had ever seen any Chekov before. It was very physical and the three characters on the stage moved through a variety of scenes that gave us a flavour of his lesser known works (from the list on Wikipedia two of them were 'On the harmful effects of tobacco' and 'A Marriage Proposal'). Monkey said she liked this one better because of the clowning (and that doesn't mean red noses and grease paint type clowns, it's a theatre thing) that she learned about during her training last term and was enjoying seeing it put into practice. 

After going off to eat we came back and saw 'King of the Fucking Castle' by LAB Theatre, about a homeless man living by Edinburgh Castle who befriends a young homeless girl, and the story traces their volatile relationship over a few weeks. I felt that the atmosphere in the railway arches really added something to the performance and the two actors were utterly compelling; it really got across a sense of how homeless people experience life and how invisible they are. I am not sure I have ever heard the word 'fuck' quite so often in such a short space of time, it was more like punctuation than a word with any meaning by the time they finished. While the story felt a little predictable it conveyed some timeless themes about the need for human connection. We agreed that the most striking thing about the performance was the moment when they took their bow at the end, and the tension and anger in the stance and expression of the man were gone, and he looked like an utterly different person. 

The festival is finishing on Sunday but I would certainly recommend you look out for next year if you like that kind of thing. We are going to be looking out at Edinburgh for Charlie Tuesday Gates, who's show 'Sing for your Life', with taxidermy roadkill puppets, was sold out.

A Month of Letters

They say that the art of letter writing is dead. I can certainly attest to the fact that very few 'real' letters come through the system. Having said that I don't think that e-cards have replaced the traditional birthday greeting, a gif of dancing penguins is just not the same as something that clutters up the kitchen table for a fortnight. In the spirit of increased connectivity (the current buzzword it seems), and also supporting our most valuable postal system, I decided to join in with 'A Month of Letters' that someone posted on the Manchester NaNoWriMo facebook page. The idea is to send something though the post every day during February (excluding Sundays of course, since we no longer collect then ... though our 'Customer Service Point' is open for the collection of parcels, 12-4pm). It doesn't have to be a lengthy missive, it can be a note or just a postcard. The Month of Letters website allows for people to connect and exchange addresses and become temporary penpals, but I think even my limited social sphere will give me enough people to write to over the next month. I wonder if anyone will write back.

NaNoWriMo and all that

Savage Chickens

Well it amused me anyway.

I am not ready for NaNoWriMo. I am exhausted before I even get started having worked without a day off for three weeks (and anticipate probably doing so again next week). It is going to be a difficult month without Monkey here to keep me on track. As agreed at the end of NaNo last year I am planning a rambling fantasy story that will allow anything and everything to happen, fuelled by random suggestions from the adoption forums on the NaNo website. A starting point might be a decent title but Dunk's automated title generating website was rubbish.

I was hoping to have a photo to share of Monkey in her monkey gear (hoodies and stuff with the theatre logo) but it has not been forthcoming. We have exchanged texts and real letters but I have not got much information about what they do; she says it's too hard to explain and would just be meaningless anyway. They do sessions that are entitled things like 'Voice' and 'Mask' and 'Clown' (Clown is a favourite apparently). Next term they go full time and rehearsals start. She was only there two days and she got herself a job, in a call centre of all places, and it is enough to pay the rent. The second week she texted asking how to cook rice but apart from that she has not needed me at all ... I should be pleased that she has been so independent but I am feeling pathetically redundant and having to fight the urge to offer unsolicited advice.

 This is my Nano writing space, cluttered up with junk and not looking very welcoming at all. I think I am going to be able to procrastinate very effectively on Sunday by spending half the day sorting stuff out. 

Having worked on my fair-isle sweater quite a bit recently I have gone back to knitting hexipuffs. I started a second beekeeper project back in summer 2012 shortly after the first one but is has hibernated all this time. I keep looking at the photographs of the Monkey quilt and thinking how much I really want one of my own, so I have been knitting one every day while we watch Deal  and a couple more at knitting club ... at this rate it will take me about another four years. I am estimating at least 600 because they are smaller puffs. The current total has just reached 100.

Monkeys and all that

I won my copy of Scarlett Thomas's 'Monkeys with Typewriters'  from Jim Murdoch at The Truth About Lies over a year ago. It had pride of place on the bedside table but I had not managed read it. I started reading it before NaNoWriMo but then discovered I write episodic plots which was depressing ("Aristotle warns against the 'episodic' plot, in which several things happen, one after the other, but do so without each thing being caused by the one before." p.59). It is a writing advice book, based on her own experience as both a writer and a creative writing teacher. Firstly this isn't is a step-by-step 'how to write a novel' book, and I think that you should definitely be suspicious of anything that comes in that format. It is a book about novel writing, the first part taking us through the long history of stories from Aristotle and Plato, theories about fiction and the types of plot structures, drawing on examples from both classic and modern literature and popular culture when describing the things that make good stories and good writing. She does assume somewhat that her reader is quite well read, but it doesn't detract from it if you haven't read the books she specifically refers to and she seems as fond of Harry Potter as she is of George Eliot. She does spend quite a lot of time giving detailed examples of plot types, for example the 'rags to riches' plot or the 'stranger comes to town' plot, describing books and how they fit, but I found it all very interesting and helpful to visualise stories in that way. The second part has chapters on having ideas, plotting, characters  and how to put a sentence together (because if you can't write a decent sentence you certainly can't write a novel). It is a very readable book, she has a lovely informal, chatty style and is not shy about sharing the hard lessons she has learned along the way of how easy it is to write badly. This is not going to be a review as such because it's far too big a subject, but I thought maybe I would just a share a few nuggets of wisdom. 

Who tells the story?
"What you write will be as much a result of these decisions as it is a result of those you make about plot, character and theme. Would Great Expectations be the same narrative if it were narrated by Joe or Estella? Would Middlemarch remain the same if it were told in the first-person present tense from Dorothea's perspective? How would The Bell Jar change if equal weight were given to Esther's mother's version of the story? One of the most interesting questions to ask about fiction is therefore, Who tells the story? Before we even consider any of the other questions, we should ask, Who is telling this to me? And, maybe, Why? And, perhaps also, What's in it for them?" (p.228)

"When I first stared teaching sentence-level writing I felt uncomfortable because so much of it seemed to involve pointing out what was wrong with bad sentences, rather than celebrating the really amazing ones. But the point is that it is possible to define bad writing in a way that it is just not possible to define good writing. We can admire 'The lawn was white with doctors' all day long, but I'll never be able to tell you how to write it. I can suggest that you might cut all unnecessary words from your sentence about doctors standing on the lawn, but you might just end up with something like, 'There were doctors on the lawn.' That would be fine. It's a good sentence. It's a true sentence. but it's not a brilliant sentence. Of course, before we can aim for brilliance we must aim for simple truth (and if we get it right, our exact simple truth may well be brilliant). But again, this is hard to define unless we say what it isn't. It is only by studying false sentences that we can see what sorts of sentences are likely to be true." (p.308-9)

And adding to Stephen King's advice (and anyone else worth their salt it seems) on the subject of adverbs:
"Adverbs and adjectives can make sentences appear more serious or meaningful from a distance, but when we look close up we see that they can actually be very distracting, or even meaningless. They also lead to long-winded, 'wordy' writing, which is quite different from what we've been calling expansive writing. Wordiness implies that there are extra words that don't mean anything, or that tell the reader what to think. Most of the words could be deleted or rearranged and the sentence would be better as a result." (p.330)

Then down to the nitty gritty:
"Narrative questions will intrigue your reader and keep him or her reading. Will Cinderella go to the ball? Will Hamlet kill Claudius? Will Odysseus get home? Will Dorothy get home? Will E.T. get home? Will Eiji in number9dream ever find his father? A question like this will usually be the main reason we start engaging with a piece of fiction. We want to find out not simply 'what happens' (after all, things happen randomly all the time), but whether a particular question is answered and whether a particular character gets what they want or not." (p.373)

And finally, the novel at the top of a mountain question:
"How far would you go to rescue it? If you did somehow manage to leave the only copy of it on a bus, how devastated would you be? The answers to these questions tell you how important the novel is to you, and therefore how important it is likely to be to other people." 

If you are interested in writing fiction this is the kind of book you could read over and over, scribbling in the margins and folding down the corners of pages; it's not a book to treat with respect but one to use until it falls apart. I feel inspired to go forth and pick apart my favourite book to see how it works.

Literary DIY

Here I am in avoidance mode again, five and a bit thousand words to write before Saturday and I just *have* to get this random blog post written.

Mark Crick has the cheek to list himself inside the back cover as a photographer ... I mean he's not even a bloody writer for heaven's sake. I think it is an injustice to refer to these stories as 'parodies', I think 'homage' is much more appropriate, because although each take a mundane task and elevates it to literary significance, and many are very amusing, it shows a deep respect for the strengths of each writer's style. Apparently there is another book called 'Kafka's Soup' in which he writes recipes from significant literary greats, but in this one he tackles the difficulties of those little DIY jobs that everyone neglects. In addition to the stories he does pictures to illustrate each one, in the style of famous artists. (Here is 'The Wallpaperers' after Picasso, illustrating 'Hanging Wallpaper with Ernest Hemmingway')

I have not read all the authors, but having recently read Wuthering Heights I did enjoy 'Bleeding a Radiator with Emily Brontë'. I am not that tempted after all now to try Haruki Murakami but am very curious about Elfriede Jelinek. 

Going to just have to give you a couple of little tasters because there's not much else to say about the book.
Here from 'Unblocking a Sink with Jean-Paul Sartre':

"Like a throat in paralysis, the sink will not swallow, it will not take any more of the filth that it has been forced to drink for so long. I look into the dark vent, straining my eyes to see what has fouled the pipe. Something glistens in the dark; the filmy surface of an eye, round and wet, is looking back at me. A foul smell emanates from the throat, a odour of sickness, nausea. I won't stand for it. I won't. The glistening surface disappears and the eye closes. There, in the filth it has come, the Blockage." (p.124)

Never read Hunter S. Thompson either, and this is a little scary (from 'Putting Up a Garden Fence with Hunter S. Thompson'):

"At some point after removing the top from the bottle I must have passed out. When I came round I could hear the dry thud of spade on earth and the rattle of pebbles against steel. My attorney was still digging. I looked out into the garden but he was nowhere to be seen. Holy shit, I thought, the sound of digging had burnt itself onto the retina of my ear. I'm cursed to hear it for ever, like the rhythm section of ... Then I saw a flurry of dust fly up from the ground and the sound stopped.
'Help. Somebody fucking get me out of here!'
Either the mescaline had worn off or my attorney had reached a tricky point of law. I staggered out into the garden; as I reached the site of the first post, the empty bottle fell from my hand. The hole was now seven feet deep and the eminent Samoan, still in his business suit, was thrashing on the ground and dancing, like his feet were on fire.
'Snakes, they're coming up out of the ground. As soon as I cut the head off one, another one appears. Get me out of here!' " (p.94)

And more subtle, from 'Reglazing a Window with Milan Kundera':

"All governments oppose transparency. They oppose it because they know that with transparency come fragility. Such is the nature of glass. Windows can certainly be made from material more flexible or less brittle than glass, but what is required more than anything of a window is that it is transparent. All other qualities become secondary, from which Tomas deduced that transparency creates fragility.
The crack in the pane seemed to Tomas the first sign that the fortress he had so lovingly constructed was no longer impregnable. All his adult life he had maintained between himself and the outside world an invisible barrier through which no one was allowed to pass. When he believed that he could keep her at a distance like all the others, Odile had found a way through, and the broken window proved finally that Tomas had been deceiving himself." (p.25-6)

It occurred to me as I read that it would make a brilliant writing exercise, since in many ways writing is about making the mundane fascinating.

Telling the goddam story

"This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit." (Second foreword)

At the suggestion of pretty much everyone on the interweb I got a copy of 'On Writing' by Stephen King from the library. I read 11/22/63 earlier this year and loved it and would consider myself quite a King convert. This book is part autobiography, part writing advice. The back cover blurb implies to the reader it was written as a result of a near fatal accident, however much of the book had already been written prior to King being hit by a van in 1999. It traces the course of his writing life, from his early beginnings doing the high school newsletter, sending stories off to science fiction magazines through to the publishing of his first novel and onwards. It is modest and unsensational, emphasising hard graft (as most writing advice does) and the art of connecting ideas. I liked the tale of how he came up with Carrie, taking a story he was writing about a high school girl who is being bullied and then reading something about telekinesis, and putting the two things together. He makes it all sound so simple. The book has three main parts; a CV, a toolbox and on writing, followed at the end by the story of the accident and his subsequent recovery, but the whole book is scattered with snippets of advice. In the life story part he recounts many pieces of advice given to him by others and how it helped him. I like this one from the editor of a local newspaper he works for while at school:

" 'When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story,' he said. 'When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.' " (p.56)

In the toolbox he makes this neat little analogy about fixing a screen with his uncle Oren and having the right tool for the job in hand. He talks about grammar and sentence structure and gives us some wonderful examples at the extremes of writers breaking the rules. The idea being of course that you have to know the rules in order to break them effectively. He argues that it is paragraphs that are the important building blocks of writing. He takes small pieces of writing and picks them apart to point out why they work and what role each sentence takes in the process of the story. It was all very helpful. He highly recommends Elements of Style by Strunk and White as a standard text for writers. Basic advice such as avoiding the passive tense:

"I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of  England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty." (p.136-7)

and erasing adverbs from your writing (easier said than done I fear):

"Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. ... With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn't expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point across. ...
Someone out there is now is accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day ... fifty the day after that ... and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you can see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's - GASP!! - too late." (p.139-40)

 - followed by extensive examples of why he's right, how if you use the right word the adverb is just redundant. However then he also warns against using excessively elaborate vocabulary instead. The plea is for simplicity.
He goes off on other tracks too, talking about background research and how to get published. He gives advice on rewriting and editing, giving us a real example of his own work and the changes he made to it (the rule is always to cut!). I liked the bit about swearing and censors, about how things must have context and be real for the character. And then there's the questionable value of writing classes and retreats, which had me rethinking my recent plans. Here talking about his experience while taking two creative writing classes at college:

"I brought poems of my own to class, but back in my dorm room was my dirty little secret: the half-completed manuscript of a novel about a teenage gang's plan to start a race riot. ... This novel, Sword in the Darkness, seemed tawdry to me when compared to what my fellow students were trying to achieve; which is why I suppose, I never bought any of it to class for a critique. The fact that it was also better and somehow truer than all my poems about sexual yearning and post-adolescent angst only made things worse. The result was a four-month period in which I could write almost nothing at all." (p282-3)

The book is scattered with anecdotes from his life, people he meets and things they say. He is plainly a writer who notices and remembers things, the essence of what makes him successful I guess. You get ideas from paying attention to life. 
So here it is boiled down:

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." (p.164)

"The space can be humble ... and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk." (p178)

"In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech." (p.187)

"This isn't the Taj Mahal we're visiting, after all, and I don't want to sell you the place. It's also important to remember it's not about the setting, anyway - it's about the story, and it's always about the story." (p.204-5)

Digging in the Dark

I bought 'The Consolations of Philosophy' by Alain de Botton some time after Dunk and I went to Oxford where we saw an exhibition about his work. What is good about this book is that it is very much written for the non-academic reader, for someone who might ask the question, "What's the use of philosophy?" It has a reputation for being cerebral and remote from real life, when in fact it is quite the opposite, and is concerned essentially with the way that human beings choose to live.

"Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order  to avoid suspicion and unpopularity. Some of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical and practical judgements described as 'common sense', which dictates what we should wear, which financial values we should adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow and what domestic life we should lead. To start questioning these conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgements are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny." (p.9)

It seems to be the job of philosophy to do just this, even if, as poor Socrates found, it annoys people so much they demand your execution. So through the millennia philosophers have set out to question assumptions about the way humans live. Socrates was executed on the order of a jury of 500:
"Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth's relation to unpopularity: errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it." (p.29-30)

The book is a browse through the variety of worries and concerns that human beings suffer, and the ways in which various philosophers have addressed these concerns. Rationality seems to be at the root of most philosophy, the use of reason and logic to understand. I like this one from Epicurus on death:

"Epicurus was especially concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. If one thought rationally about mortality, one would, Epicurus argued, realise that there was nothing but oblivion after death, and that 'what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation.' It was senseless to alarm oneself in advance about a state which one would never experience." (p.59)

Epicurus is very in tune with the current notion of downshifting and simple living, with him emphasis on satisfying the simple basic needs of human beings and avoiding excessive consumerism, placing more value on things like simple pleasures and the importance of friendship. Botton's definition of an 'acquisitions list' for happiness consists of: a place to live, friendship, 'to avoid superiors, patronization, infighting and competition', thought, and (tongue in cheek I guess) a strange obsession with Madonna by Giovanni Bellini.

We then move on to Seneca. What I enjoyed so much was that each chapter gave me a whole new way of looking at things, and that I found ideas within each philosophy that were already part of my own thinking, but articulated them in a way that I have never bothered with. Seneca introduces the element of 'Fortune' into human affairs, that things happen to people and it was not a moral judgement on them:

"We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing  will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter that Seneca invoked the goddess. ...
The cornucopia was a symbol of her power to bestow favours, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies. She would scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed shift the rudder's course, maintaining an imperturbable smile as she watched us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear in a landslide."

His 'praemeditatio' sums it up:
"The wise will start each day with the thought ...
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said 'a day' had granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires." (p.91)

An idea of 'justice' is inculcated in education and in most religions; that if you are honourable you will be rewarded, if you are bad you will be punished. Then when you have acted correctly but bad things happen there ensures confusion, a feeling that maybe you were bad after all and deserve the punishment. There is an appeal to 'injustice', which shows a continued belief that the world should be fundamentally 'just'. But it isn't. Seneca's own life became a perfect example of his philosophy at work; he loses everything after falling out of favour with Claudius, a situation which could have led to self-blame, bitterness and resentment, however:

"Seneca's political failure did not have to be read as retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress."

While it sounds like it could potentially be a little depressing I found it quite enlightening, because he also emphasises that events and inanimate objects are not deliberately conspiring against you, that nature and the world are neutral in relation to your existence. It is kind of at the root of that slightly twee quote about accepting the things you cannot change, changing the things you can and wisdom to know the difference. Sometime, despite this, people so often give too much weight and importance to things and events outside their control. It is not a recipe for passivity and acceptance but for the use of reason to not waste energy trying to alter the genuinely inevitable, but to save it for the things that are alterable. A neat little conclusion:

"To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. We should place a fireguard between the noise outside  and an internal sense of deserving punishment. We should not import into scenarios where they don't belong pessimistic interpretations of others' motives. Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious." (p.105)

"When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, 'Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.' " (p.108)

The book then jumps several hundred years to Michel de Montaigne, who lived in France in the 16th century. The influences however travel as thread through history, since everyone has been influenced by those who came before, and such a thing is never more true than when it comes to philosophy. The ancient greeks loom large right through to the modern day thinkers. Montaigne was another who worked hard as questioning the assumptions of his culture, but also to question the authority of great thinkers:

"It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clairty and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves...

But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is not printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits. ... 

Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital  to creative work in their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an appreciation of their strengths." (p.161-3)

What I really liked about him is that he thought, and reiterated frequently, that leading an ordinary quiet life gave you just as much insight into the human condition as being in the thick of politics and 'society'.  And he was equally critical of pretension in writing and philosophy:

"It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable fear ones do not. ...

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style  is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say." (p.157-8)

Schopenhauer gives us our consolation for a broken heart; a philosophy born, I felt, out of his own inability to find love. He defines for us the life force, or will-to-live, the thing that disrupts our rationality and makes life so damn difficult.

"He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms - but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself. ...

We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems - and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image." (p.199) (and the quote continues here)

And thus:
"We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge." (p.202)

"Few philosophers have been thought of highly for feeling wretched. A wise life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to reduce suffering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.

Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of philosophers have always been 'cabbage-heads'. " (p.205)

Who would have thought that Nietzsche would have been the one to make me laugh. My ex studied Existentialism at university and Nietzsche was much a topic of conversation in our house for a while, from whence the expression 'existential angst' entered my vocabulary, and very useful it has been too. Botton's description of it however I found to be much more positive and life affirming than I had understood. He understands life as the balancing of pain and pleasure, that life's satisfactions are nothing unless hard earned:

"Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples, and ask yourself whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. ...

Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable." (p.215)

So, a clumsy and woefully incomplete and incoherent examination of a wonderfully enlightening book. It has inspired me to read some more philosophy and to try and get my head round some new ideas. The best advice however comes, again from Nietzsche, right at the end, and I read it as NaNoWriMo finished. However it puts the 30 days nicely into perspective. How to write a novel:

"One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present; one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer ... one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human action, disdain no signposts for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise for some ten years; what is then created in the workshop ... will be fit to go out into the world." (p.217)

Oh well.

The Scroll

Greetings from cloudy Sussex. After our intensive night of writing I have popped down to spend a few days with my sister Claire. We had made plans to go up to London for the day for a bit of culture and I was browsing 'things to do' sites ... and what should pop up but the information that the original scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote 'On The Road' back in those hectic three weeks in 1951 was in London for the first time and on display at the British Library (it's there until 27th December).

We really, genuinely didn't notice the 'no photographs' signs. I stepped back to see if we could get a better view of the whole thing when I realised. Fortunately no one came and told us off, and it turned out that the one shot Claire took of me shows off the scroll really well as it stretches away into the distance. 

It is an object lesson in silencing your 'inner editor', one of the bits of advice that are doled out to help NaNo participants to reach that coveted 50,000 words. For Keruoac it was all about avoiding interruptions to the creative process of what he called 'spontaneous prose'. Although written in one go the details in the story had been meticulously recorded in a series of notebooks made during the long road trip that he took with Neal Cassady. There are some minor XXXX type corrections but otherwise the text flows down the paper in a continuous stream of words. I discovered in searching that you can buy a book copy of his original first draft, which I can see would have some curiosity value for writers, to be able to literally see the editing process in action. You can see on the scroll itself, for example, that when he wrote it he used 'Neal' throughout; his name in the final version is replaced with Dean Moriarty. There are sections on the scroll that have been crossed out in pencil and regular little notes in the margins. It was fascinating to see and I was glad I had the opportunity, such a significant piece of literary history. 

In another room we browsed the first draft of 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' by Wendy Cope (utterly illegible), some Angela Carter, saw Jane Austen's writing desk and the original hand written words to a couple of The Beatles songs. The Magna Carta was being 'rested' so we missed that, but all in all a very worthwhile spur of the moment visit. I was just sorry I hadn't bought my laptop as it would have been fun to be able to say I had written a few hundred words sitting in the British Library.
My original review of On The Road can be visited here.

The Night of Writing Dangerously

In NaNo-land, in sunny California, they have a fundraising event during the month of NaNoWriMo called "The Night of Writing Dangerously'. Now whilst our version of the event was not quite so luxurious, stylish or sparkly, we had fun nevertheless (isn't that a good word).

Creature likes to update her word count regularly, so to record our night's achievement we made a permanent record of our starting numbers at sundown:

mine:

 Creature:

I looked up sunrise, found to be 7.43am, and set an alarm that was to be our stopping point.

We decided on the 1000 word mark to be our first halt (she had to wait for me and was getting twitchy.) Tish came home from dancing class and pulled a face at the thought we had eaten all the sushi ... but we saved her some:

 Writing continued apace throughout:

Midnight marked cake time. I had made us a rice krispie cake to celebrate the half way point (though had well surpassed that by now). It was rather too sticky so much finger licking ensued:

We broke up the intensity of the night with some randomly selected episodes of Gilmore Girls, the 'basket buying' episode and the 'egging Jess' car' episode. Creature tried to insist we could write and watch, but laptops lay abandoned for a brief while (I worked out how to use the self timer on the camera too):

 During the early hours it began to get a little chilly so we snuggled up under the blanket. The slight blur here caused by the speed of our fingers vibrating the very foundations of the house:

We soldiered on, I was determined I was going to reach the 30,000 point before succumbing to sleep (Creature had been sure I would barely make it past 2am). The hours seemed to slip by once we got past 1am and we hardly noticed the tiredness. Tish popped back in around five and popped some more sushi as a early snack but left us to it. I finally began to flag and admitted defeat at around 6am and we decided to call it a night. Final totals were recorded:

mine:

 Creature:

Giving us a nightly word count of 5456 and 6275 respectively.

We retired to bed well pleased with ourselves.

The doorbell rang just after nine ... the men arrived to do the cavity wall insulation!

Pre-NaNo post

NaNoWriMo is upon us again tomorrow so I will be reading less, knitting less, and (fortunately) working less, and hopefully writing much more over the next 30 days, but not so much here. Creature and I shared the Macbook last year, and though it was ok as she often wrote at night I decided it was time to invest in another laptop. Apple no longer do the Macbook so I got myself a reconditioned Macbook Air; it is very shiny and very silver and very lightweight, and has a keyboard that glows in the dark. Here they are talking to each other and making sure the new one is up to date on all of my fastidious little preferences:

I dashed off to Sussex at the weekend at the secret instigation of my niece Natalie, who planned a family get-together for my sister Claire's 50th birthday. She was quietly enjoying a crappy film on Saturday afternoon when mum and dad knocked on the door. Then as they debated dinner plans I arrived. Sunday morning Auntie Ann arrived and, as Nat got on with cooking a massive dinner in their tiny kitchen, our brothers Bart and Giles arrived; the whole thing reduced her to tears (good ones). A lovely dinner was had by all, including also Bart's partner Vieanne and Giles' two girls Aisha and Miranda.

One of the rare occasions when we are all six together has to be captured for posterity:

The last two days have been spent fixing Creature's duvet cover ... you can see how it used to be back here in March 2009. I bought her a new mattress and new bedding but she wanted to keep her old cover. I added another strip of stripes down each side and a border of black velvet and voila!

in the winner's enclosure ...

Well ... it has no title so don't bother asking, it has not much of a plot so don't bother asking ... but I passed the 50,000 word mark this morning at about eleven o'clock. It has lots of lovely happy people living quite contented ordinary lives, there was very little conflict or upset. I said to Dunk that you would only really like to read it if they were your best friends, but otherwise it's very dull. Creature insisted I had to make something bad happen or kill someone. So I did. It made the last few of thousand words fly by, so it was worth the sacrifice.

Creature and I went to the library a couple of nights ago and she picked up a book that was in the wrong place and went to put it back. I opened it at random and began reading, and to my delight/horror I find that I write just like Josephine Cox, so I plan on taking it up professionally since according to her (very brief) wikipedia page she sells a million books a year.

I ended up working in the bedroom and the desk looks very sparse as the treats have been thin on the ground, apart from the endless supply of tea that Dunk has bought me over the last fortnight. The story is not done, in fact I am resisting writing the closing scene and am currently going back to fill in a few of the gaps. The story is all over the place and my biggest task is to make a timeline and ensure that everyone ages at the same rate and people don't talk about stuff that hasn't happened yet. But over at NaNoWriMo they don't mind if it's rubbish, I still get to order my t-shirt.

In praise of the iPad

I have been sharing the computer with Creature over the last nine days as we both tussle with the NaNoWriMo situation. When she is writing I have been using Writer on her iPad and am now an utter convert. The damn thing had annoyed me after I bought it because it didn't like Facebook much and that's what she wanted and so she still kept wanting to use my laptop, in fact it had been pretty much relegated to a games machine, plus the Babe has some lovely interactive story books that she really enjoys.

But this week it has really come into it's own. I signed up for Dropbox which is a freebie (for the minimum storage) where you can send your files up into 'the cloud' and they will be safe there until you want to access them. So I type on the iPad after Creature had taken the laptop off to her room, then I upload them to the Dropbox, and then in the morning, while it's still dark, I sneak in and pinch the laptop back and download from Dropbox and put what I have written into my Scrivener NaNo novel file (and then I update my word count total just to annoy her because I am now at over 23,000!)

I was describing to Dunk this morning how much I was enjoying typing on it, and he described how if you take one to pieces you find that the internal components are so carefully arranged to ensure perfect balance of the iPad while you are using it. It just seems so wonderful that the designers have taken so much care and thought. As a user you would only notice such a thing if they had got it wrong, you just take it totally for granted and it is so essential to how it feels when you hold it in your hand. I use so many things in everyday life that are badly designed that I am truly astonished how much I am enjoying it (and I think Dunk liked it that I was finally appreciating the finer qualities of an Apple product.)

(Very very brief excerpt from the first draft over on the other blog.)

More on writing

A couple of days ago I revisited the Guardian article on 'Ten rules for writers' and on the recommendation of Hilary Mantel I bought a second hand copy of 'Becoming a Writer' by Dorothea Brande. Though the opening is very inspiring and encouraging to anyone with writerly aspirations she then says something which was at once depressing (for being so frighteningly true) but which also lays a heavy weight of responsibility:

"The influence of any widely read book can hardly be overestimated. If it is sensational, shoddy, or vulgar our lives are the poorer for the cheap ideals which it sets in circulation; if, as so rarely happens, it is a thoroughly good book, honestly conceived and honestly executed, we are all indebted to it." (p.19)

I anticipate this book will have some interesting food for thought.

I have also been keeping up with my 100 Words every day so far this month, the ones I have been pleased with are included over on Leave No Sign.

Novel Writing

Originally a newspaper column in the Daily Telegraph 'A Novel in a Year' then became a book and I have been using it for the past couple of months as a basis for a bit of writing practice for NaNoWriMo.

The book consists of alternating chapters where Louise Doughty introduces an aspect of writing, from creative prompts, to character development, to metaphors, and so on, then she gives the reader a writing task and then in the following chapter she recaps on the responses to the task given by participants on the website. Sometimes this was interesting but to be honest a lot of the time I would rather have been able to read more of the contributions than the little edited snippets that she gave, with too much of her saying 'this one was interesting' and other people did this or that. More real examples would have been more helpful. I confess I wasn't really giving it that much of my attention and I'm sure if you devoted yourself to the book as a project it would be very helpful. There were lots of interesting and useful bits of advice on the subject of writing from Doughty herself and other authors, and she didn't in any way try to make it seem like a walk in the park. There is no getting around the fact that it is hard work to write stuff and invariably what you end up with will be utter rubbish.

I keep thinking to myself that 1700 words a day is not very much, though of much of the time I will be doing my day job as well. Of course making stuff up is a whole different kettle of fish from writing blog posts, and even they can take several hours to cobble together. I am really feeling like I can use all the advice that's out there when tackling such an adventurous project. So, a useful little book, though you still need your 1% inspiration before the real work starts.

NaNo gloves and all that

NaNoWriMo preparations are warming up. Over on my other blog (they have been proliferating a little recently) I have been joining in with Magpie Tales, a weekly creative writing prompt, and have also started writing 100 Words a day for October (got to start somewhere if we are going to be doing 1700 a day during November), you can read them on the 100 Words website without joining up I think.

I sat for a couple of evenings and knitted myself a pair of fingerless gloves (pattern only available if you are a Ravelry member), in what was left of the lovely lambswool and silk, so that I can type and still keep my hands warm on those chilly autumn mornings when I am too mean to put the heating on. I am still working on the hoodie for Tish that I started back in August, it is slow because of being fine yarn, but also because of getting distracted by other stuff.

Am racing to the end of War and Peace (100 pages of epilogue!!) so expect a mammoth review some time soon.

And Creature has been out joining in with the protests again, they made themselves into a gang of zombies with the assistance of the marvellous Emma and became 'the generation of the living dead', making their voices heard during the Tory Party conference that has been happening in Manchester this week.

This book with change the way you think and feel about your life

So in preparation for NaNoWriMo I have been doing some exercises from the book 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty. Now, allowing someone to read something I have written is going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to writing a book, so in the spirit of not thinking everything I write is utter tosh I will post some of it here. This is exercise number 8 and the remit is to write a paragraph from the point of view of an inanimate object. She uses the example of 'Skepticism Inc.' by Bo Fowler, which is an entire book written from the point of view of a shopping trolley (which I am now going to have to add to the TBR list as it sounds excellent). Anyhow, this is what I wrote:

I am going to change your life. At least that's what it says on my cover. It's a bloody grand claim if you ask me. I mean, I'm only wood pulp and a bit of glue when it comes down to it, oh, yes, and the ink I suppose, that's the slightly more important bit. Right now I could do with something that could change my life. I am in a bit of a sorry state. My spine is very dried out and my cover is peeling at the edges, I was only a cheap mass produced thing (don't forget the grand claim, they were anticipating a high demand for copies and wanted to maximise their profits). My pages are worryingly loose in some places and going decidedly yellow. A while ago I did spend some time on the bedside table but since then it's been many years on the shelf, gathering dust. I suppose I should be grateful, the things you hear about, the terrible places some of us end up. Even a box in the attic seems bearable compared to the recycle bin, or worse still … the incinerator. We would try not to scare the new ones, especially those that say things like 'Jeffery Archer' on the front, so it is only mentioned in a whisper, but we all know the rumours, the fate awaiting those who fail to live up to their promise. Even having 'international bestseller' is no guarantee these days, though you are slightly more secure if you win something. I have sometimes wished to be a Mills and Boon, they just go round and round the charity shops, lots of owners, lots of new sights and plenty of interaction with the readers. The covers are a bit naff, all those swooning women in flimsy blouses, I rather like mine (it has a lotus flower morphing into a wrench), so it's a trade off really; quality content and cover make up for the lack of attention. When it comes down to it I would rather be read just once and have a real impact than have a hundred readers but be instantly forgotten. I am the kind of book that people have heard of, my reputation precedes me. At the time of my publication I was the biggest thing around, my back-cover-reviews say things like, 'original', 'explosive' and 'unforgettable', those where heady days. It's been quiet in recent years though so you can imagine my delight when I found myself picked out and put in a small pile by the bed. I am in good company here, Sylvia Plath for goodness sake, I mean I'd never even heard of the one I was next to on the shelf. I'm trying not to get too excited, I don't know if my message still has the appeal, times change, but you never know. Life is definitely looking up.