May 08 2023, 07:50
Inspiration
I've read three books in the last couple of weeks to do with creative writing: On Writers and Writing, Margaret Atwood; The Writing Life, Annie Dillard; About Writing, Gareth L. Powell. With everything going on in my life, the only way I’m going to write is if I have a clear purpose and a plan. This is always true I suppose, but I’ve seen several plans dissolve in the face of reality, and now I’m wondering if the problem is more in why I write than how I’ll write.
Almost all writers have to work in a job and write in their precious spare time. A few have enough money saved, inherited or earned by well-paid partners to allow them to give their writing full attention—hell a tiny proportion actually survive on income from their writing!—but this is rare. Margaret Atwood points out that as writers, our time is forever split between the imaginary worlds of our stories and the physical world of family, chores, jobs and our health.
On Writers and Writing is full of wisdom. For example, she says writing is a permanent record of our talent (or lack of it), so of course it can be hard to start. Like a musical score, it is brought to life by a reader, and we each have someone inside who we are writing for, whether we know it or not. That could be a memory of a parent figure, a lover, a course tutor, or some version of God.
I realised that for me writing is a spiritual act; it’s an act of nature and an expression of myself. Magazines have editors who accept or reject stories. Creative writing courses have tutors to provide feedback. The publishing game has agents. It’s easy to give these people too much power. Publishing needs gatekeepers, but writers need to own their shit and write for themselves. Writing is a spiritual act, a soulful activity, if done with the correct attention.
April 29 2023, 12:17
Walking with ghosts
I walked slowly through the centre of Swansea this morning after listening to Marc Maron on his podcast talk about Sweaty Marc, the version of himself in New York from the eighties that he remembers as he walks there today. In the nineties, I was mostly lonely and lost, and Swansea was my stomping ground, but Lonely Mike doesn’t haunt me in the same way Sweaty Marc does Maron. It’s an apt image though, because I’m a little lost now, twenty-five years on. The novel isn’t coming on its own, and I’m not doing the right things to help it along.
I made the decision to concentrate on my software career this year. I started a new job in September, and I’ve passed my probation, but there are redundancies happening all over the technology sector. I don’t feel particularly safe yet. At the end of March I started on a hectic, high profile account, so it’s been vital I get to grips with everything quickly. I’ve been waking up at five am thinking about work problems. I haven’t been in a job where I’ve felt so challenged in a long time. It’s taking all my energy.
But I had a dream the other night. An elegantly dressed woman is with me and a man on a balcony in a nightclub. The man is very drunk. She whispers to him that they should go on somewhere else. She’s sober and taking care of him. I want to go home, and I think the man’s had enough too, but if I don’t go with them they’ll be alone without me, and that feels wrong in some important way.
Perhaps I need to readdress the balance after a month that’s demanded everything I have. The man in the dream is a bit of a battered shell, and the woman is trying to look after him, but I need to step in and suggest... other options.
April 12 2023, 20:31
Puzzles
At the start of the day a deployment of code went awry and at the end I was a go-between over my still-hospitalised father’s boxer shorts. Life can be ridiculous.
On Monday I went to see John Wick 4 and ate a terrible hot dog. The person serving sprinkled it with dried (!), crunchy onions. Then yesterday I watched the first half of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte. The two films serve different parts of me. Michelangelo Antonioni — I am Michael, my uncle was an Anthony who is now with the angels. He was rich, although he might have denied it. Our last conversation was an argument over Brexit. I told him it would cost the country untold damage, and we’d be back in the EU eventually. He made some argument about the unfairness of laws on unpasteurised French cheeses. It’s a sad memory.
My new work account is the mobile app of a well-known supermarket. On the train home I read A Study in Scarlet, my first Sherlock Holmes novel. All I could see in my mind were Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. I need some sleuthing skills to unpick some work puzzles, but first I need to discern the important ones. Not all puzzles are created equal. (Hm, that reminds me of other things. Sigh.)
April 03 2023, 06:46
Matrix
Walked to Southside for a coffee. Why? I’m thinking of Gwen Bell, then Neo/Keanu. I deliberately left my notebook at home. I need some time without a pen in my hand. Re-balancing... something. Gwen, Neo and Keanu are seekers of different kinds.
I told myself yesterday to put the writing weight down. There is too much else going on to add the pressure of writing a novel. Life before art. Life is an art, yes, but you get my drift. I’m chaining myself to a rock when I need to be swimming.
Dad’s hoping to come out of hospital this week. He’s always on the back of my mind. And I started a new account in work, before I had completely finished the old one, so I’ve been doing both until today. A mind-stretching exercise and I’m glad it’s over. It’s a short week. I’m looking forward to the Easter break.
Maybe I can put some of this Neo coding energy into a character in the book. (I can’t help myself, but there’s a gap between thought and action.) If I’m stuck in a matrix, what sort is it? Writing? Capitalism? Our budget spreadsheet is a matrix. Reality? (There’s that word again.)
Keanu Reeves is in a relationship with Alexandra Grant, a visual artist, who on her website says her work asks the questions:
How do the languages we speak and the images we see form how we think and exchange ideas? How can artists and writers work to create and influence culture in an increasingly technology-driven world?
March 14 2023, 19:16
Hospitals
My father is in hospital again. Both his legs are swollen, which is fairly common with heart failure, which we’ve known about for a few years, but one of his arms has also swelled up, and he’s out of breath doing the slightest things. The practice GPs thought it was better to treat him at home, but the lymphoedema nurse was adamant it was something else. My moderately stressful trip shoehorning Dad into a VW Polo for an assessment in an inaccessible part of one hospital became an eight-hour wait with the triage team in a bigger hospital. As part of his admission he did a Covid test... which came back positive. The only people he sees are the district nurses who dress his legs, so it was probably them. He’s asymptomatic—I took him for his last vaccination in November—but after a whole day face-to-face lifting him in an out of chairs, I feel like I’m playing Covid roulette with a full chamber.
I’m letting off steam. He’s in good hands. I hope he’ll be home in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m working from (childhood) home, I miss my family, I’m tired, and I feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a full-time carer. At the same time, it’s a privilege to be able to look after him like this.
Hospitals are emotional places. There’s nothing like an admission ward to make you feel grateful for your health. Dad might be old and ill, but I’m still young and well. I have to remind myself because my boundaries in this are both hard-won and ever-fragile.
February 21 2023, 20:18
Content apocalypse
This is the tipping point. I’m fifty in two weeks. I’ve watched fifty percent of the 800 films I own, and even less of the books. The amount of time I have left is constricting, but the number of books and films I own keeps expanding. Something has to give.
I need a new philosophy. What I consume (bleurgh) must feed (this is family trauma speaking) whatever I am creating. I envy those who have perhaps always done this. Collecting and list-making is the hoarder’s comfort. Part of me wants to watch and read everything, to learn every language, to play every instrument, but the excess of wanting all this, never mind getting it, is enormously destructive. It’s like over-eating. It’s a form of nihilism. It’s choosing not to choose because I’m afraid of getting it wrong. Instead, I could consciously make a path and accept the consequence—choose an author, a book, that feels related to the novel I’m writing, or pick a film that speaks to something bubbling under the surface that I can’t yet grasp. Maybe it’ll be useful and maybe it won’t, but I’ll have severed my chain to the immovable boulder of infinite possibilities.
Elizabeth Filips, my current YouTube guru-crush, preaches ‘soft discipline’. She means, trust your intuition as to when you do things, and don’t get bogged down in systems and rigid structures. That same knowing-what’s-right works for picking books, tweaking a sentence, choosing clothes in the morning and improvising a meal. It requires being sensitive to how I feel and what I think, and to wonder why I feel and think that now. As a straight man who loves intelligence and empathy in others, Elizabeth Filips is ripe for anima projection. Libido flows through the anima—life force, creative energy, motivation, call it what you will. Intuition is my inner feminine.
Films are a safe way to experience the extremes of life, and books too, probably all art, but in excess they can also be a defence against actually living. It’s time to make some choices. All of my watchlists and TBR shelves make me feel like I have a plan and a project, but this leads to my father’s version of my predicament, which is thirty-eight more years of reading and TV. It’s a decent life, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want it. I can imagine other options.
February 18 2023, 18:26
Emotional weather
I’m staying with Dad for the weekend, and because he’s having some new health problems, it’s quite hard work. My mother was always the anxious one. I wonder now, in her absence, how much she was anxious for everybody, in the literal sense of taking on other people’s anxiety. Dad is getting more and more anxious as he gets older. He hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he’s eighty-eight next month. He’s doing amazingly for his age, but he’s rarely been ill, and has escaped most debilitating conditions until now.
I made a list of the reasons this is a tricky situation for him, me and my sister, which I’m not going to share here, but this weekend more than ever I find myself influenced by the emotional weather in the house, which matches the drizzle coming across the Atlantic. He’s miserable, frustrated, afraid and generally grouchy, but in between he is also drily funny, easily distracted by sports, caring and good company. We watched Bullet Train last night, which we both found gross and very amusing. These are the breaks in the clouds.
Today I’ve spent solid time with him, but also escaped to Swansea, Porthcawl and Aberavon. My part of North Yorkshire is much colder and drier than South Wales, and I forget how these weather fronts can define the days. It finally stopped raining mid-afternoon, so I went to my mother’s grave to say hello. A woman left the children’s graveyard with her hood up, hiding her face. I spotted a hawk floating over the nearby woodland. It was quiet.
I’ve still got time with my father, but this stretch of illness feels different to previous ones. I can’t tell if this is my misery, or if I’m infected with the gloom over this house. Caring for others is also a seemingly endless exercise in reinforcing boundaries.
January 22 2023, 16:04
Writing jiggle
`The photo above was taken this week in the bar at the City Screen cinema, York—I was sitting at the same table almost a year ago when I had the idea to become a creator on Patreon. I love little synchronicities like that. I also love any opportunity to take an anniversary to reflect. I’m pleased with the consistency with which I’ve posted to Patreon, but I feel guilty that I’m not giving enough value for people’s generous support, so I decided to jiggle things around.
There is now an extra, cheaper tier on my Patreon, Strange and Beautiful, for $3/£3 per month. I’d like more patrons in 2023, and to write more for them.
The existing Weird and Wonderful tier remains $5/£5 per month. (Yes, it’s more expensive in pounds now, Patreon adjusted the exchange rates.) This is where the podcast will live, and everything else, including new fiction. Patreon solves the problem of my reticence to publish fiction online. It’s private and paid for, so the ideal place to digitally self-publish pieces that can still go on to become other things.
My plan is to post to Mastodon with my usual daily shizz, to Twitter if something seems to need a wider audience, to this blog for longer reflective pieces, and to Patreon for everything else. People don’t seem to favour websites, even with RSS making a comeback, so it makes sense to cross-post my blog to Patreon. Then patrons can get everything in one place.
As an aside, I’m starting to see the positives of being on Mastodon. It’s a quieter, more civilised space, with lots of interesting people. The statistics are more hidden than on Twitter, so it’s less addictive, and there are fewer voices. I’m hopeful my relationships from Twitter will stay intact somehow no matter what happens. Musk will either kill Twitter or eventually bail.
It does all seem a little complicated, but I’m hopeful and excited to give it a go.
December 31 2022, 20:01
Elisa Gabbert on why writers write
Twitter shines at surfacing what I need, when I need it, in this case Elisa Gabbert’s 2022 book list, within which she links to her Paris Review essay, Why Write?
That essay sings to me. Gabbert says that Joan Didion wrote fiction to find out what the pictures in her mind meant, and she give several examples of other famous writers who start their stories with an image, or a dream, and chase it down in words, including Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis and William Faulkner. It can feel cleansing to get the image onto paper, and the act of writing is often a painful test of endurance.
Jean Rhys only wrote when she was unhappy. George Orwell wrote for the political good. Dorothy Parker was particularly happy when writing, but loathed the business of being a writer. The rewards of writing, meagre as they are, are doled out indiscriminately, and she says no writer deserves anything more than any other.
One passage stood out to me, on the periods of not-writing between longer works:
Tillie Olsen, in her 1965 essay “Silences,” called the not-writing that has to happen sometimes—“what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)”—instead “natural silences,” or “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.” Breaks or blocks, times when the author has nothing to say or can only repeat themselves, are the opposite of “the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.” The unnatural silence of writers is suppression of the glimmer. This is Melville who, in Olsen’s words, was “damned by dollars into a Customs House job; to have only weary evenings and Sundays left for writing.” And likewise Hardy, who stopped writing novels after “the Victorian vileness to his Jude the Obscure,” Olsen writes, though he lived another thirty years—thirty years gone, gone as that novel in the apple tree. She quotes a line from his poem “The Missed Train”: “Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me.” And this same fate came to Olsen herself, who wrote what she wrote in “snatches of time” between jobs and motherhood, until “there came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities became too much distraction for the writing.” I read Olsen’s essay during a period in my life when stress from my day job, among other sources, was making it especially difficult to write. I didn’t have the energy to do both jobs well, but I couldn’t choose between them, so I did both badly. Like Olsen, I’d lost “craziness of endurance.”
She concludes that the reason her default state is writing is because it helps her “do better thinking”, and when she’s thinking well, she has more chance of writing...
...that rare, rare sentence or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought—the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good, like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect—you’re alive!
She writes for the pleasure of solving a puzzle, but a puzzle that only she knows of, and in finding a pleasing solution, finds joy in sensing her own unique spark in the universe.
Read the essay in full at The Paris Review.
December 31 2022, 16:09
Bedrock
I write in my notebook every day. This is the bedrock of my writing practice. It’s where I work things out. For years, this has meant coffee at a Caffè Nero, and 30–60 minutes with pen, paper, and Twitter. This is writing as therapy, where I clear my tubes of gunk, note what’s on my mind, and pay attention to dreams, fantasies and feelings. Twitter is intrinsic to this, because it’s where I fish for images, ideas and quotes, like flicking through an endless magazine for data about my unconscious state. Before I get on with the day, I curate my stream. I’m always editing. It’s a bit of a curse. Twitter has become a rather soulful game, where I can express my enjoyment of a cup of coffee, say good morning to distant mutuals, acknowledge unexpected sadnesses, celebrate successes, and (un)knowingly repeat patterns.
Things get murkier when a piece of writing requires more than five minutes of thought. This is where the editing curse is worst. Of course, the end game of the editing curse is complete censorship, which is writer’s block. I post longer pieces about writing, my life, films and books on my website. My writing perfectionism doesn’t afflict me so badly in non-fiction—when a thing is clearly expressed, it is done.
Stories are another matter. There is no perfectly expressed story. I don’t publish stories on my website. I pretend Twitter isn’t publishing, but of course it is. I learned early in my tweeting life that once a line is published, it’s dead. Some essential energy is gone and I lose interest. I develop stories in digital tools offline, like Word, or Ulysses, but sustaining my attention on writing a story has been impossible this year.
Hold on, strong emotions incoming. Deep breath. I’m fed up of writing about how I (don’t) write. I’m fed up of the self-imposed pressure. My anxiety has crushed the fun out of both reading and writing. Twitter is neither. What if I’ve been going about my creative writing practice all wrong? Have I just been rationalising my addiction to effectively an online social game? God, on the one hand I wish I took my writing more seriously, and yet that inner editor, that censor, is deadly serious.
When I wrote The Complex, I had several MA deadlines and a publishing deadline to keep me on track. My editor believed in me. I was invested in the idea of becoming a published novelist. My desire for validation made me drop everything and push writing into every gap in my calendar. The emotional mathematics was in favour of writing—the belief that it was worth the effort was greater than the belief it was not.
I’m not saying that was a healthy way to write. I definitely need to lighten up. In 2022, on a deep level, writing new material wasn’t a priority, and perhaps that’s correct. My life has been rich enough without it. But I am curious. Going into the new year I’m going to do some gentle excavation into my beliefs about writing, because I’m realising I’ve lost touch with what fiction means to me. If there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose.