Piazzolla, Poetry and Pretension: a little contemplation of failure

So last night I went to see 'The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires' at the Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds.  I'll leave my esteemed colleague Nat to wax lyrical about the music, but briefly I thought it engaging and well played, occasionally brilliant - particularly the final piece of the first half, a wonderful duelling duet for violin and cello.

The rest of the evening was mixed.  Seemingly the effulgent product of cellist Matthew Sharp's doubtlessly brimming mind, it wanted so very badly to be a disorienting impressionistic swathe of sensation - but was not.  It was, however, a lot of very good musicianship spoiled by mediocre and unnecessary ego-stroking, and obscured by the paraphernalia of dance.

That dancing first: I'll admit without reservation that I just don't 'get' dance.  It is a medium, like any other, the difficulties of and dedication to which I appreciate; but for whatever reason it leaves me cold and slightly embarrassed.  Clearly I have issues.  The Tango I could tolerate, but the contemporary sections... sorry, dancers.  You had nice legs, but keep them out of the way of the musicians next time; I wanted to look at the harpsichord.

Secondly, 'cellist Matthew Sharp' is not only 'cellist' (indeed he is, and a good one, and needs no enclosing quotes) but, allegedly, 'singer' and 'performer of poetry'.  Sharp?  Stick to the strings, there's a good fellow.  A singer you are not, though had you restrained yourself to half an octave in the middle of your range, perhaps I would not have felt so inclined to displace my attention.  As for your reading of poetry - well, the poetry in itself was merely bland*, but your performance of it really banged nails in the coffin of my tolerance.  Perhaps you should tone it down next time by asking Brian Blessed to read in the style of Marley's Ghost.  Difficult as it is to type with a deep, smug vibrato, the repeated am-dram drawls of WwWwWwIiIiIiIiNnNnNnNnEeEeEeEe had me so upset I removed my spectacles.

OK, so it wasn't a disaster.  The idea was interesting, the music was good, the musicians were good - the dancing was not my cup of tea - but a better effect would have been obtained, I think, by placing the dancers elsewhere to allow the musicians themselves more of the stage, and by employing a dedicated vocalist who could perhaps both sing and read without all that ham.  'Cellist Matthew Sharp' threatened to Tango at one point.  I am so glad he did not.  Rein in the presentation, keep it modest, and the show will be better for it.  Or let the music speak for itself, because it is more than capable of doing so.

*

In keeping with my literary tendencies, this performance reminded me of the importance, in any creative endeavour, of being open to change.  It was apparently the first performance of this particular arrangement, and did indeed feel like a work-in-progress.  There was something of the partly-revised first draft about it.  In writing I'm very aware of the need to crack on and finish a piece, and then the difficulties and general hard graft of attempting to perfect it - but there comes a point with every one at which it is important and useful to give it to someone for assessment, consideration, feedback - whatever you want to call it when people who are not yourself take up what you have done, and let you know what they think.  Performance is one way of doing that, and a very good one too if your work is of a performable type.  It has been said that art progresses by allowing itself to fail differently every time, and I would agree that 'failure' is not a thing that is either as dramatic or final as we are used to thinking.  Nor is it a bad thing.  There can be no movement without leaving something behind, no development without adaptation.  Do not be afraid of lacking perfection, for as everyone knows, there is no such thing.  Not really.  Maybe a lie, but that's all.  So even if the main event was less than perfect, it is not only acceptable to be so, but desirable: there can be no progress from perfection, and we learn nothing by getting everything right.

*

*After the show, I found some Neruda: it was much better on the page.

You may read more intelligent and informed musical commentary at Plink, Plonk, Plunk.

Photo of Brian Blessed in the BBC comedy Blackadder from bbc.co.uk.

In Praise of the Typewriter

A few months ago I bought a manual typewriter.  I remember my mother's enormous and frankly horrific electric Adler office machine way back, which shook the dining room with its carriage return - and a small blue manual in a grey hard case with gingham lining that I used to write spy codes on when I was very small... my sister had a Red Fox, a plastic-bodied model from W H Smith.  There was nothing majestic or mysterious about typewriters twenty or thirty years ago - there was nothing escapist about them, nothing obscure, nothing recherché, nothing deliberately aimed at removing oneself from the current trends in the technology of writing.  They were the current trend, though computers were beginning to appear on the home market and even the humble Sinclair ZX Spectrum pretended to the dizzy heights of professionalism:

Well, we got rid of those machines and I moved on to those all-in-one word-processor/printer units that looked like them, and then on to Windows and Word.  Progress?  Perhaps.

After a few upgrades, downgrades and side-grades (more on which in a later post), and copious amounts of hand-written drafts, I fancied a change.  Internet to the rescue - I snagged an Olivetti Lettera 35 for less than a tenner in excellent condition, loaded with a ribbon, and with its hard carry-case.  One trip to Halifax later, and here we are:

It's a nice machine.  I have very little to compare except memory, but it's easy to type on, makes all the right noises, and it's very satisfying indeed to pull a full sheet from the roller and lay it to one side, done.

To write this way is an interesting exercise in self-control.  Computers encourage an endlessly-rewritable text, one in a constant state of flux, one that is never even drafted so much as evolved in the same place constantly - every piece of work written on the computer is a palimpsest, but one with no inherent superiority over its predecessors.  There is no evolutionary evidence when working on a computer - no pile of erroneous cast-offs with which one can judge progress.  No map, only a present location.

Typing is different.  Typing is ever forwards.  There are no erase, undo, copy and paste - no corrective (let alone auto-corrective) behaviour without serious effort (Tipp-ex, anyone?).  To type is to engage fully with the act of writing - to type is to make writing.  To type is to see where you have been, from start to finish, and to know that whatever you write, it remains embedded in the archaeological srata of the work of its time.  To read a typed draft is to trace a journey, not just gaze at a space that may or may not be the desired one.

In this, typing shares something with handwriting.  Drafting in pencil or ink is to really forge something that is a kind of embodiment of the person writing it.  I have written about this before so will avoid repetition here - but the nature of physical contact with material and the ease of making adjustments, marginalia, and annotations gives writing greater freedom than when merely blackening pixels on a screen.

Even today, some well-known authors use typewriters.  To do so makes one not wilfully perverse, nor a neo-Luddite, nor a throwback.  To type need not be some faddish retro chic, some quirk of style that has no root cause beyond the desire to appear one way or another.  To type, for the best reasons, is to be, simply, a writer - and, simply, to write.

***

Recently the last British typewriter rolled out of the Brother factory - apparently they were selling around 30 per week by the end of 2012.  Still a respectable number, I think, given the way computers - desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones - have swamped our lives and become absolutely normative in so many respects.

BBC News item
BBC News video item
BBC Radio interview with the writer Paul Bailey

And you can still get ribbons...

On the Pen being Mightier than a Big Pink Sword

By now I'd be surprised if most of you haven't yet discovered the wonder that is the Bic For Her range of pens.

Why ever anyone thought that designing a pack of pens to resemble feminine hygeine products is beyond me - as is the fact that someone, somewhere, though it a great idea to even market pens directly at women.  Slimmer?  Softer?  WTF?  I can't decide whether Bic are being anachronistically patronising or cleverly anachronistic.  This isn't the 19th century any more, these are pink (and purple, for the 'edgier' woman, presumably), in a way only heretofore approached by a) the 1970s and b) the Argos catalogue "girls' toys" section.  I can only surmise that their misguided sexism is deliberately aimed at the kind of idiot who buys whatever their stupid shiny magazines tell them to, as long as there's room in the bag besides the chihuahua.  And while we're at it, where's my Bic For Him in military drab with retractable pocket-knife, car-key torch and 'tasteful' nude etched on the side?  I feel neglected, though being a man cannot say this in public.  Good job nobody reads this blog.

The happy result of this bewildering use of gendered-product tropes is the sudden effusive plethora of comedic reviews on Amazon - some of my favourites can be read here, here and here.

Pens are not the first product to garner such attention.  This, and this, are both excellent examples of customer favourites.

A curious thing, the internet.  Reading these reviews reminded me of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.  A Victorian collection of historical examples of similar phenomena, the book is well worth reading still.  The chapter on the beard tax should chime with those sick of governmental pocket-picking, that on the South-Sea bubble those browned off by institutional hubris.  Spriteful Amazon reviewers, I think, would have fun reading Mackay's accounts of buzz-words and popular fads.  If you can find a copy, I recommend it.  Some things do not change so very much; though whether Bic will thence realise their marketing for the retarded relic it is remains to be seen - as does whether the price of a good laugh at such backwardly focused branding is worth the impedance to progress of gender-neutral perception towards a more egalitarian view of humanity.

Evolution, part 1: The Thin Grey Line

People have been writing things down for several thousand years, and telling stories for goodness knows how long.  Certainly now the bulk of our storytelling is done via the written word, though oral traditions are still alive (open mic nights, reading to children etc).  Most of my readers will be familiar with the Brothers Grimm, or at least some of the stories they recorded.  Two hundred years ago, with industrialisation changing the ways in which people lived, they were prescient in collecting orally trasmitted tales with roots going way back, and without their efforts perhaps we would not have those stories today.  What will become of the stories we tell now?

There are many issues tangled up here.  One is the act of storytelling - by what means do we share what we have to say? - another, the nature of those stories - are we more individualised and isolated now through devoting our time to personal items of technology, or has it made us more globally collaborative? - do we tell stories to each other by mouth, or via our keyboards? - and how long will these stories last, and where will they go?

I hope to post about some of these things in the coming weeks.

Expect some level of haphazardousness, if that's a word.  If not, it should be.

***

In keeping with the two main threads running throughout thig blog - the uses of technology, and approaches to writing - I made this short list:

Evolution of writing technologies (or, sometimes the way forwards is the way back)

• handwriting
• typewriters (manual, electric, electronic)
• word processors
• portable electronics (WPs, notepads, PDAs, laptops, netbooks, iOS etc)
• retro-enthusiasm (DOS, steampunk ethic etc - desire to simplify)

I have tried all of these.  I wrote a novel by hand, with a fountain pen; I typed it up into an old standalone hardware word processor; I transferred that to MS Word; and now I have it as a Scrivener project, awaiting its final (and I mean FINAL) polish.  A couple of years ago I decided I was sick of the modern word-processing/DTP environment and dug out an old PC, installed DOS 6.22 and hooked up a dot-matrix printer.  I bought an Alphasmart but as DOS has no native USB support I picked up a Tandy WP-3 as well.  I carry a notebook with me everywhere, and still draft almost everything in longhand.  But at some point, all my work ends up on the computer, currently a Mac Mini, and is processed using Scrivener, Pages, and (gasp) Text Edit.  I've even just bought a typewriter (more on which later).

Why?  Am I wasting my time?  Does it even matter?

I believe it does.

I have not yet found any one environment in which I can comfortably make notes, draft, re-draft, edit, polish and finalise any text-based document of any kind, of whatever complexity, with anything like a smooth and manageable workflow.  Perhaps it's down to preference, but I would much rather keep all these activities separate.  By taking each process discretely, I can more easily come to grips with what it is that stage entails, and more effectively complete it.

It almost exclusively begins with paper, and a pencil (yes, the one in the header of this blog).

Paper has been around for a very long time.  Scribbling with a small hand-held implement is quick, convenient, cheap, requires no batteries (and thereby precludes any concerns about either the duration of the working window, or the time spent recovering it) and is quiet and instantaneous.  Keep a notebook in a pocket, and you need never be concerned about losing ideas while your laptop boots (or not), or just checking Tw*tter or Farcebook before you begin writing and thereby forgetting all the ideas you were ready to get down.  If you enjoy writing with a drink, you need never worry about spillage (paper dries out rather more successfully than electronics, I find) and a new notebook is something less intimidating on the wallet than a replacement machine.

The process of drafting by hand also forces a kind of speed limit. If I write fast, the words become illegible pretty quickly (though my slow handwriting is not much better).  As someone who can type at a reasonable speed, I find handwriting slows me down, allowing more time to consider the impact of the words as they come out, and to perhaps more effectively select them in that slightly elongated period between their appearance in my imagination and the scrawling of them on the page.  Truman Capote's famous remark about Kerouac might apply here.  There is an argument against editing oneself while drafting, but I do not believe that to be the same thing as making a more refined choice in the first place.

Editing by hand is also a valuable process.  Regardless of the tools I have used in drafting a piece, I will obtain a printed copy for further work.  I make changes in pencil...

...and changes to the changes, again in pencil.  Once I am happy (or the pages are obliterated beneath a heavy cowl of carbon, which is more likely) I again type up the results.

This might seem a long and laborious process, and it is, but it allows one to pay much greater attention to the evolution of a text than any equivalent electronic method.  I have never enjoyed any software version of this process.  Nothing shows me what I have actually written like a stack of paper with notes all over it.  Scribbling in the margins of a story, or writing alternative versions of a paragraph on the rear of the page opposite, is easy, immediate, and permanently visible - the original has never been erased, so fears of recoverability are invalid - and the simultaneity of visible alternatives gives easier, and perhaps greater, scope for intersecting choices to be made.  It could even be said that the process of editing by hand is a story in itself, and by reviewing your own efforts as they are permanently evident in this way is a sobering and educational activity for a writer.

For all these factors, I value handwriting on paper above all other tools.

Interacting with the broader world, however, is another story, for another day.

Later.

***

There is a nice piece about writing by hand here:
http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/high-wire-act-why-i-started-writing-by-hand.html

Neil Gaiman talks of his reasons for writing Stardust by hand in this old but informative interview:
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/mar99/gaiman.htm

And yes, I drafted this blog post in Text Edit...

On Obliqueness

Life is not a problem to be solved.  It is not a linear, fixed thing with a single definitive path through from one end to the other, though we all have start and end points in common.  Life is to be lived, and that means whatever you think it means.  What is at stake is not what we make, the results of our labours - but our approach to ourselves, to our lives; and by accident almost, as an effect of that approach, our labours will give up their own results without our having to worry too much about what they are.  Of course they will concern us, and we can more specifically direct our efforts contextually as we go - but I suspect those of us who are writers are writers not because it is a career that suggested itself based on promises of financial security, or of opportunities to progress through tiers of command.  It is just something we do, and we don't stop, which is what makes us writers.  Within that, we can make choices about what to write, more or less - but deciding to be a writer is not something we really do.

Do we even choose what to write?  It is a commonplace that subjects choose the writer, not the other way around (1) - thought any writer would perhaps say they select their material from what is available to them at any given time - whether that is a theme for a novel, the name of a character in a short story, or a stylistic device in a poem - we sift our minds for possibilities every step of the way.  Less clear is whether we are able to affect what constitutes that raw material.  We live our lives, and that is what we contain - first or second hand.  The question then would be how much of our lives we have control over in any direct fashion, and yet another commonplace arises in response - that we are all products of our environments.

Perhaps.  I doubt many of us think on that as we write.  The job of a writer, in writing, is to invent as well as to describe, and we do that in innumerable small ways, and it may be that commonalities are what binds the writing to the minds of its readers.  Gaps in knowledge can be patched, deficiencies in skill can be practised away - but fundamentally our writing will exhibit us, its writer, in every quirk and nuance.  To smooth those vibrations would render our work lifeless.  No artist should aim for that.

***

This week I have been reading John Kay's book Obliquity (2).  Its gist is that objectives are best approached askew - Kay referes much to the business world, but several ideas can be adapted more generally.  He suggests that the most successful decisions are those that are based on adaptive responses to changing expectations and unforseen circumstances - something that creative minds will intuitively recognise in their experiences of creative processes - and that directness, by which he means an unwavering notion of control over predicted outcomes, is more likely to result in spectacular failure.  How does this apply to writing?

Raymond Chandler (3) once wrote "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand".  This strikes me as small-scale direct: problem, meet solution.  The trouble is that it's a problem in itself - how does one explain or deal with this sudden event, and maintain context?  Improvisation of this sort can lead to artistic doom rather quickly.

Borges' forking paths (4) may prove a better metaphorical approach - our work is a garden of the mind, and there are paths through its making - we do not construct an object a priori, but adapt an evolving path based on a number of fixed points.   The joy is in the mutability of that path, while knowing that those fixed points - entrance, centre, multiple exits - remain.  By which, I mean cause, theme, and interpretability, among other things.

Our best writing will come as a shifting response to a fixed but complex problem.  Anything less oblique would read like a shopping list of plot points, thinly linked by distraction.  Our best writing is evolutionary and re-readable in as many ways.

Our best writing cannot be fully planned.  Sit down and say "I shall write my masterpiece" and expect only failure.  Sit down and write, on the other hand...

***

For those who are interested in oblique practice, try the Oblique Strategies card set, designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt - it can be purchased in physical form, and can be found online in various forms (for example, this one).


1. Ye gods. http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-a-Topic-for-Your-Novel
2. John Kay http://www.johnkay.com/books
3. Chandler's Law http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChandlersLaw
4. I am not beneath a link to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths

(DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with any of these links and have nothing to gain from their inclusion.  I use them only to illustrate my point.)

The Blunted Pencil, or How I Waste My Time

Having watched the first three Harry Potter films for the first time ever this week, I decided that should I become as unutterably wealthy from my work as Ms Rowling, I would employ an artist to craft miniature ice sculptures for my evening tipple.

"Bring me a whisky," I'd growl, "and put a swan in it."

***

I have wasted a great many hours over the last few days browsing the internet, refreshing Tw*tter, and generally looking out of the window and despairing at how many dandelions there are in the garden, and how quickly they grow back despite my best and repeated efforts to dig up as much of the roots as possible with a bent trowel from the £1 shop.

I have come to accept my laziness as a natural part of the human spirit, though perhaps others would see it as a needless vice.  Either way, I am not too old to change, surely.  It just requires tenacity, though I am not sure I like the sound of that for it implies work.

Aside from banishing dandelions and beheading the seedpods of rogue Welsh Poppies, I am happy to admit, slyly, that I have also been able to reduce my backlog of stories in need of editing to merely two.  This is a good thing.  For too long I have been starting things and not finishing them, and it's about time I got on top of all that.  I have a vast heap of spontaneous beginnings, disassociated middles and even a couple of endings - it's the tying together of this multitude of elements that is the hardest part.

As I began last time, ideas come easily.  This is good.  The trick to writing, as in life, is to focus on a path, while being aware of the plenitude of alternatives.  The process begins when we are young, and are asked to choose only one of three gobsmackingly amazing toys, or later at school when we are asked at too young an age, an age at which we are still rolling in the beginnings of ourselves, to choose subjects of academic study, while being threatened that bad choices now will ruin us forever.

This is bad.  Pressure does not always help us decide.  It may help us pick, at whim and with the nagging fear of impending regret that will no doubt assail us when we inevitably fail to prove ourselves as worthy contenders, and instead reveal ourselves to be the bums we are - it may help forge us, and perhaps being on a path is better than being lost away from one.  Still, I cannot help but think we are trained from childhood to rush into life as a dog that is thrown a stick will rush into oncoming traffic.

What has this got to do with anything?  Well, I was almost ready to miss this week's entry and go back to some random detritus floating on the surface of the internet - cats involved in amusing circumstances, likely.  Now I have a blog entry instead and I can say I've kept up to it.  Minor achievements do add up.


This week I have been shortlisted in a competition over at 5 Minute Fiction, and would be grateful of any votes for my piece "Love Story".  Naturally, you may vote for whichever you like.

Also, I have signed up to Burrst, which is very new and seems to be a kind of space for collaborative feedback.  I am not certain I require feedback, but for those who are interested, it may be worth taking a look as it develops.


Finally:

On my comment last week that to be a writer, one must write - it seems Epictetus is with me.

Be productive.

On the Writing Process

Ideas are easy to come by.  Any writer worth the name will have more ideas than they can ever hope to reasonably include in their work without shoe-horning them in at awkward angles, making the work ugly and difficult to pick up.  Writing short-form fiction is a very good way to hone a minimum or optimum quantity of ideas into a single, coherent and hopefully beautifiul object, which , regardless of the nature of those ideas, suggests something greater than itself without needing specific reference to it.

Throughout, it seems to me, the key elements of the process are a kind of naive intuition, and hard-nosed technical focus.  Perhaps a combination of the two seems odd to those who do not write, but I suspect those involved in other creative disciplines would recognise it.

Naivety and intuition are essential I think in generating material of interest.  Writing without passion, oddity or surprise is only going to leave readers cold; but no amount of passion can make a successful piece if it is badly shaped.  Technical strength is necessary, and that requires balancing the objective and subjective sides of one's reading of one's own work - an arm's length kind of proximity to both the guts and the mind of the piece.  Reading one's own work with the mindset of a reader, rather than a writer, is not easy, and takes patience and practice.  Often the first steps feel clumsy, as when one learns a new musical instrument - but over time those awkward gestures become second nature, and can be enjoyed rather than struggled against.

Having taught Creative Writing classes for several years, I have tried a number of ways of helping beginners begin and more advanced, practised writers to finish: in-class exercises like writing from a picture, stream-of-consciousness blasts, idea-pooling, field trips and freedom, all accompanied by analysis of published, sometimes well-known, text - and, of course, feedback between peers and myself as a group leader.

My own initial ideas and abandoned drafts are plenty.  Often I return to them years after they were started and make something new of them.  Often it takes me a year or two to really finish a piece of short fiction - I hesitate to use the word 'story' as the word almost predetermines expectations - but the purpose of writing is not to be quick.  It is to be right, to make something that, however long it takes and whatever form it takes, is the right thing in and for itself.

That sense of rightness uses some of the initial intuition I talk of above - and only comes from the relentless application of a technical understanding of the machinery of words and ideas.

Achieving these is the result of a good many years of reading creatively as well as writing; it is the result of letting your work out into the world when you fear it is unready, and being prepared for both the best and the worst news of its progress.  Feedback from trusted peers is essential - that is, those who you would want to sit with and discuss what it is you do.  They need not be writers, but should be readers.  Perhaps they should be your audience.

There is no magic in writing - just bravery, playfulness, a willingness to dive from things into places you would rather not, and a duty to the results that preculdes giving up or being satisfied for very long, if at all.

Writing is hard work.  I would not recommend it to those considering it as either a hobby or a career.

Still interested?

Then write.


(There are too many links of interest to add here, but for those in the early days or mid-life doldrums might like to look at The BBC's Writersroom, National Novel Writing Month, and Writers & Artists for advice, support, inspiration and other handy nuggets)