Sunday, April 22, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 20
There is a very appropriate zen tale of the
centipede who is asked how he manages to coordinate all those legs and promptly
falls into a ditch. Like the centipede we do a hundred things without ever
questioning them.
It is very difficult and takes a great deal
of diligence and practice to refashion your writer’s mind. Recent developments
in cognitive psychology show that the brain is almost infinitely plastic which
means that by adopting new habits and rituals we can reinforce new ways of
seeing and doing. The other day I watched a documentary as a young man, blind from eight years old, had
become a bat. We saw him cycling down a road making a clucking sound and
navigating by the echoes. He had realigned his brain so that he could see with
his ears.
Think of writing first as an every day
activity. We do it. We send emails, letters, fill forms, make lists. We sometimes
edit them afterwards, if we feel they are significant enough and would
represent us badly should we not do so.
In the same way that we might walk down a road and use the experience to
give directions to others, the process tends to be shorthand and reductionist.
We don’t convey the full experience of walking down the road. Writing can be
like that. A sort of minimal communication of a story, bereft of richness and
vibrancy. Are there ways of intervening with what has become a knee jerk
process? I think so. To change the very structures of thinking involves doing
things differently.
I stayed in the countryside one year and
while there I became interested in writing a book of aphorisms for management,
based upon zen conciseness and depth of meaning. The first took me two days.
Days! Ten words. Fifty letters. Pre-Twitter! The second took me a day. The
third took half a day and so on until I could write maybe five in a day. Two
months and I had produced An A to Zen of
Management. The fact was that I began to see words and meaning differently.
My brain became retooled. Here are two examples:
Autonomy:
an illusion, very material to motivation.
Coach:
every king needs his fool.
Since then I started to tweet using the
same newly shaped brain. Today, for instance:
Each
person comprises many selves but rarely develops more than one; the perfect
subsistence culture (@profjacksanger.com)
In Azimuth I adopted a horrendous new
punctuation for speech. My editor threw up her hands in disgust. But by using
it I found myself studying the nature of dialogue completely differently.
Instead of some superfluous conversation,
it attained at times (I hope) a touch of zen.
You can check all I say against the proof
in my books!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange
Kindle Amazon
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