So why no posts?

I have been enduring the birth pangs of  creative writing since September through a course so composing a lot of poems, fiction and life writing. And also now active in a writer circle. Some of the poems can be seen on the micro random story site which is kept updated. Not sure where to post the fiction as the layout difficult to post. So not a lot of fiction reading at the moment. I am hoping for a Summer burst so will be able to review and discuss books then but I owe a lot of pre published reviews...sigh.

Sunday Salon: The free spirit verus the stern editor

To me at the heart of writing rests imaginative empathy but so often we struggle to tap into this rich source. Roger van Oech's argues that we kill playfulness and imagination with conscious/unconscious blocks such as

only one right answer
it has to be logical
follow the rules
play is frivolous
that's not my area
don't be foolish
avoid ambiguity
to err is wrong
I'm not creative

He goes on to offer a range of thoughts and approaches to break away from the internal censor. Do a google on him, he has a website that shows his approach in action. Freewrite for me is purely that, a means of freeing the imagination. As you learn your craft this may well help shape how your imagination works but you still don't need to pre edit. Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction explains this in a number of ways. First they explore the notion of hard and soft time. Soft time is allowing the seed of the story to grow in your imagination, do the research, have conversations, take notes, jot down fragments, do clusters, freewrites, biographies of the characters etc. You are building the scaffold, living the story. Hard time is actually doing the first and subsequent drafts. The more productive the use of soft time, the easier the hard time.

They divide hard time into two phrases which goes to the heart of writing which they argue is imagination + craft + editing. Without imagination writing is flat, without craft it can be indulgent and boring and without editing it lacks consistency and often sparkle. To start the story you need be a free spirit, who writes what they like regardless of grammar and social niceties but to finish you need to be a stern editor who kills any surplus word or scene and hunts with weapons of grammar and logic. The secret for good writing is know when to keep them separate and when to say who is in charge. So for the first draft let it rip with free spirit, then send her out for a herbal tea to let stern editor in to check out if the plot, characterisation, setting, dialogue, POV etc works, then send him out to check the exact nature of the spilt infinitive rule while she comes back to check it sings to the imagination of the reader. And then call him back and so on until the final draft when he is in complete control.

If you let her rule its nuggets and self indulgent scribbles, let him rule and its flat, hard labour with technical precision but who remembers the story. The twist in this is that once you have learned the craft of writing then you become a reflective practitioner which Donald A. Schon argued for in 1983. This exposed the fact that once professionals such as Doctors, Engineers, Teachers etc have a grasp of their technical knowledge they work best by intuition, imagination and so get results quicker then using this knowledge in a mechanical way. Confirming what innovatory artists and writers have always known.

So in short, I can see the purpose of using approaches to free the imagination and to allow this to create and help process the work at any stage in a writers development and not just a kick start for beginners. I also argue you have to learn the craft of writing which can allow for intuitive leaps or a maturing of how imagination can help create those early drafts. But also firmly agree that the stern editor has the final say in what gets released but never in what gets created.

Childhood Memories

I look around and imagine ahead twenty or thirty years. Will what I see still be there? My home, school or street, someone else’s memories of birthdays, school trips, cosy nights in, when I am a dusty video ghost too old for the shiny new box in the corner. What if it’s all gone? My school, a block of offices, my home a new housing estate. Do I become a Time Team observer looking for a turn in the road, a wall, a street name, anything that echoes that once I was there? Memories of neighbourhoods lost in the deafening roar of duel carriageway traffic.

As a man I look at the child that was me waving and smiling as I stand in the lost square dominated then by the genteel poverty of a Gothic vicarage. A brutal grey block of flats replaced it long ago for a retiree’s haven. Peter and I roll a snowball till it was bigger than us around the square and down the lane to the one cow farm. We run to stare at the large empty white fields with lonely grey trees wearing silver-white garlands. Shouting to the wind, fingers frozen, breath misting we dance. Large winter coats flap over bare knees and green wellies. Now all gone, Peter ten and happy in my memories only. The farm a weekend cottage with empty fields now vast housing estates for the discerning commuter.

On the other side of the square was the house of my birth: measles and whooping cough bedroom fires, frozen window pane stories, secret hideaways for reading. It was a grand house long reduced to paying its way. Its old pretensions could be seen in the washhouse and worksheds stretching down to the stone wall. Dolly tubs, copper boilers, rusting tools benches enabled wars, crushed fingers, and imagined friends. Now torn and twisted into a hairdresser, “highlights half price for pensioners,” jammed next to a bijou café for busy shoppers. The only fragment of the past left, the higlipigly stone wall still sweeps on and down the lane keeping it in check as it rises to twelve or more feet from the ground to end in a graceful corner hook.

At the juncture of the wall and workshop, before the garden proper starts, was a chicken coop: boiled eggs for Sunday treats, chicken dinners for visiting relatives, cockerel sounds beating out the day. Afterwards, the rest of the two acres ran down to the rabbit and ferret cages as a vegetable garden. In its centre was a large leafy cox’s apple tree and running along side the wall were gooseberry bushes. Autumn was spent in picking and storing either gooseberries for jam or apples wrapped in paper for eating wrinkled in the spring. I shake my head: the tree is firewood, the bushes torn up, the chickens flown, the rabbits and ferrets sold. And the garden of leafy cabbages, cane turrets of runner beans, feathery carrots covered with tarmac-a bed for cars.

On boasting: writing for sunday scribbles

In my head all writing is good
on the page it rises to poor
on the 3rd draft I have hope
but soon default to unsure

When the reader is unsure
you have to rewrite in hope
that imagination will come good
knowing that you not they are poor

Yet in your heart you aren't poor
your writing is out there and good
bestsellers on hold as the public unsure
on how to understand writing's best hope

Alas hope soon dashed as web-site hits poor
so crash back to unsure and wannabe good

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

How do you define your humanity, your worth and the meaning of the good life? Did the last book you read, the last poem heard, the choir on Classic FM, the last serious piece of reportage in the newspaper make you think, widen the space for thought, help you engage more as a citizen? Did you make a note of the words that hit a spot? Remember to look that book up when next in the library, wonder what that old book of essays would be like you came across in the second hand bookshop. Perhaps as you get older do you see a pattern in what moves you in music, what is good writing and which political ideas increases the possibility of greater freedom of expression and those that close the creative spaces down?

One way to describe this book is to see it as Clive James 40 years exploration to make sense himself, his work and the world around him through works of the well-known, forgotten, cut-short or bogus mainly western intelligentsia. These are over but not confined the past 150 years. He also throws in 20th century film stars, fashion designers, TV broadcasters, jazz musicians and reporters. The format is over 100 individual pen-sketches grouped in alphabetical order of individuals that have aroused his interest with as sentence, comment, or thought and been inked over the years in his journal. From these seeds grows an essay that critically reveals more about the idea or the character or the context but done in his usually witty light foxtrot prose. Knowing that nothing worse then a judgement on writing style not seem here are three extracts.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (p.177)

`And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days’

On the face of it, Drieu’s valedictory testament was absurd. It was 1944, after the liberation of Paris; he had never made any secret of collaborating with the Nazis; his deeds were done and his time had run out. And his entire personal disaster had been because of his interest in politics. Already resolved to suicide, he was attributing a deficiency to himself in the very area where he had been most obsessed.

Chares De Gaulle (p.258)

After a life of misery, Anne de Gaulle, who had a severe case of Down’s syndrome, died choking in her father’s arms. She was 20 years old. At her funeral, de Gaulle is reputed to have said, “Now she is like the others”. The awful beauty of that remark lies in how it hints at what he had so often felt…For us, that overhear the last gasp of a long agony, there is a additional poignancy of recognising that the Man of Destiny lived every day with an heavenly dispensation he could not control. But to be faced from day to day with a quirk of fate not amenable to human will is sometimes the point of sanity for a man who lives by imposing his personality-the point of salvation, the redeeming weakness.

Miguel De Unamuno (p771)

The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes.

The quoted passage makes more sense when we trace what he meant by eternismo, the eternal. He didn’t mean an appeal to transcendental values: he meant attention to the profane reality that is always there. On the same page…he wrote the universal is in the guts of the local and circumscribe, and that the eternal is the guts of the temporal and evanescent … (memo to myself and younger readers: all guesses about tone in a foreign language should be checked with someone who speaks it for a living).

If you have gone… “er never heard of them” then that’s a major theme of this book which examines the fate of those intellectuals and their works in the fall out of the Red and Fascist terrors of the 20th centuries as well as the South American dictatorships. Voices lost as they are swept away to death camps, or corrupted to stay on the right side of the prevailing political winds. Books left as floating corpses as the Saloon life of St Peters, Vienna and Paris sank and burned in the 20’s and 30’s:a tradition with roots in a different form of Jewish prejudice. Another theme is the cant and empty postures by usually left wing intellectuals during the Cold War that would have resulted in a long death in the countries they claim to admire.

I have sympathy with this augment having seen at first hand the middle class student Trotskyites who saw the working class as the ideal except when meeting the wider trade unions membership and ordinary people. Who naturally were seduced by the media to not grasp the wisdom of their leaders in waiting. I was one of those who joined the Communists in the 80’s but had no illusions of what they were doing in Russia and China. I saw the dedication and faith that the little band of activists in wanting to change things by active mobilisation rather then electoral engagement alone. Of course we would have all been the first to vanish in any of the systems that we were assuming the UK to be. But read the book and you don’t see the poverty and lack of opportunity and social justice that creates the Left. I still see politics of changing the agenda more important then the politics of elections and would tackle the illusion of liberal democracy not with the charge that they are not democratic but that they see democracy stopping at the gates of the factory or school. Other notions such as Social Capital and Environmental Justice movements show currents shaking off traditional notions of Electoral Socialism.

These are minor quibbles for what is timely reminder what we are losing in this country with an Education system that fetishes churning out workers and not enabling citizens. Clive James reads many of the books he discusses in their original language, has a lively interest in how films, TV, poetry are creating our cultural life. He can judge and put into context what the writer or performer is offering. Can you? Would you try? See what you lose if you don’t try.

In a conversation on Picasso’s Guernica Matthews asked his students to…look at their inner response…what sound do you hear from the painting?... the room exploded in howls of pain and rage. The door flew open and two students from the hallway stuck their heads in, their expressions resembling the faces in the painting itself.

Said one participant, ‘Suddenly I saw that these art forms were making a claim on me. They were saying, “Wake up! Live your real life.”

Stanfield, R.B. (2000) The Art of Focused Conversation p.2

Sunday Salon: A quiz

Pop me a link back in my comment box if you do one


1 WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE

Meaning I take it in the family as we are all named after someone either because they were before us or had the same name. Given that my birth names were Michael John you can also throw in a few Saints, Angels and Popes. Strangely, my mother named all of us sensible names such as Elizabeth, Julia, Dawn, David and Helena. But as the boy names were in the top 5 most popular names of the decade hardly original. The girl's names were in the top 30 so they missed being called Lisa, Mary and Susan

2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED

When someone read one of my practice stories and told me they had cried. Really cry was when my son discovered the pain of a broken heart and knowing that I could do nothing but hold him as he learned one of the prices of growing up

3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?

I was taught two systems of handwriting at school badly and being deaf at the time lacked spacial awareness so can't write neatly( or draw or read maps!) and with the advent of typing what clarity there was has long gone. I have to even do stream of conciousness writing on my laptop as I can't read the top of the page by the bottom. My mind works too fast for my hand is my other excuse.

4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE LUNCH MEAT?

Quaint question really, assumes you sit down to lunch which is not the norm in my working world. I am either on trains to somewhere or at meetings. In both cases trying not to eat the soggy sandwiches and dream of salads. The other assumption is that all of us eat meat, and we don't. But if I did the only two meats that I like and miss is corn-beef sandwiches( farm house white bread with pickle) and bacon sandwiches with brown sauce. You can take the lad out of the working-class but not the working class out of the lad. When I was doing a social work placement in Wales, it got back to me that the staff found me intellectually intimidating but realised that I wasn't a middle class prat as I liked pork scratchings( if you have to ask best you didn't) and had mushy peas with my chips

5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS?

Yes but he is on the cusp of being an adult in four months time where did the time go?

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?

Yes, I like my own company and would at least understand why he was so often the odd one out as he went about the world

7. DO YOU USE SARCASM A LOT?

Now this seems to be a word used by Americans and the English in slightly different ways. In the UK this is negative and borders on passive-aggressive but in USA it seems to be linked more to when we say someone has a dry wit. So yes that's me

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS?

Yes but why would anyone want to know that?

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP?

Well, I have thought about it but blind as the bat without glasses and would only see streaks of colour. And yes I know its about the physical thrill but I want to see where I am falling and rising.

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL?

Wheatabix not that naff oatabix that turns in to slush as soon as you threaten it with milk

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?

No, nor do I put them on a rack, nor polish then weekly.

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG?

Emotionally yes. Physically no or ever but can take a bully out at an 100 paces with a verbal comeback... as long the 100 paces is maintained.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM?

Vanilla but not that floppy runny stuff, it has to be real out of a tub.

14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE?

Body posture

15. RED OR PINK?

Red

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVOURITE THING ABOUT YOU?

Easy bored if something or someone not interesting

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST?

The Father I never met

18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU?

Well it depends on volume but I am not doing this a email but as a challenge on the blog net.

19. WHAT COLOUR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING?

Another pitfall in American and UK language as this could mean you are asking me about my underwear habits. Logically as we call them underpants we should also wear pants but we don't we wear jeans or trousers...sigh. Its jeans and no shoes

20. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE?

Baked Beans on toast

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW?

Black Ox Orkestar. A European Jewish folk quartet of musicians from Montreal, Canada that formed in the summer of 2000 to explore their common Jewish heritage/

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOUR WOULD YOU BE?

Black

23. FAVOURITE SMELLS?

Sadly bacon grilling

24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE?

My wife

25. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS?

Yes, he a sarcastic American survivor who loves books and the same type of books I do but of course he is too tough to admit guys as friends

26. FAVOURITE SPORTS TO WATCH?

None, never

27. HAIR COLOUR?

Blond-brown hair, bleached blond eyebrows and blond-ginger beard and bleach-blond body hair

28. EYE COLOUR?

Blue

29. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS

No. Tried but over sensitive eyes

30. FAVOURITE FOOD?

Fish and Chips with mushy-peas, white bread and butter and a cup of tea

31. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS?

No tend to try and watch better movies

32. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED?

Batman-it was with son so not one of the art-house films I tend to like. The last one was The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh

33. WHAT COLOUR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING?

Muggles Black t-shirt

34. SUMMER OR WINTER?

Winter

35. HUGS OR KISSES?

From strangers... yuk. From wife kisses and from son hugs

36. FAVOURITE DESSERT?

Sherry triffle

37. MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND

Them that like quizzes

38. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND

Them that don't

39. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW?

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James

40. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD?

Don't have a mouse pad

41. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON T.V. LAST NIGHT?

Celebrity Come Dancing- don't be snooty its great fun

42. FAVOURITE SOUND?

Train announcing it's Bristol next station

43. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES?

Stones before 1970

44. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME?

China

45. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT?

Telling stories and writing 50 word stories

46. WHERE WERE YOU BORN?

Markfield, Leicestershire

47. WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK?

Those that want to give me answers

48. WHAT TIME IS IT NOW?

12.00 noon on Sunday, 5th October

50 Book Challenge read and completed from January to Mid September 2008

These are the books read for the 50 book challenge by genre collection. I also partially read another 5 books which were cast away into book hell. All but two have been reviewed on my notes of a book dreamer blog site should you want to know more.

I start a university creative writing course on the 27th September so reading and writing for pleasure goes in the slow lane until next summer. I will continue to do the micro stories and poems on my other site but again at a slower rate.




Contemporary Fiction and Cult Literature
A novel in Letters by Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal
Crash by J.G. Ballard
Fresh by Mark McNay
How German is it by Walter Abish
How to avoid making Art by Julia Cameron
i, Lucifer by Glen Duncan
Its Superman by Tom De Haveland
Money by Martin Amis
Slabrat by Ted Heller
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Tidewater Tales by John Barth
The Women in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
Uncle Petros and Golbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis
Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

Writing guides and Poetry
52 ways of looking at Poem by Ruth Padel
Alternative Scriptwriting by Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik
Writing tools by Roy Peter Clark

Humour
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)… by John O'Farrell
The Book of Erotic Failures by Peter Kinnell
The pirates! : in an adventure with scientists by Gideon Defoe
The Pirates in an Adventure with Whaling by Gideon Defoe

Short Stories
Beware of God by Shalom Auslander
Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan

Fantasy Romance
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Crime, Thrillers and Mysteries
In the Miso soup by Ryu Murakami
Jasmine's Tortoise by Corinne Souza
Lang by Kjell Westo
My Soul to Keep by Melanie Wells
Pashazade by John Courtney Grimwood
The Contractor by Charles Holdefer
The Wanderers by Richard Price
The White War by Mark Thompson
Yellow Fever by Steffan Piper

Essays and reportage
Notes of a dirty of man by Charles Bukowski


SF
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
To say nothing of the dog by Connie Willis

Crossover/Children fiction
The Giver by Lois Lowery

Historical Fiction
The Saddlebag by Bahiyyih Nakhijavni

Autobiography and Biography
The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton

Cultural studies, History and Politics
Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
The White War by Mark Thompson
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore