Monday, May 07, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 32
The advantage of
writing a blog is that you are not restricted by the logics of publication.
Your various outpourings may overlap and reiterate what has gone before. Like
much of writing it has a special capacity for helping you articulate what is an
evanescence until it is put into words and becomes moored in your thought. When
I was an academic we used the phrase, writing
yourself into knowledge. The
act of writing can be, therefore, a primary act of formulation.
One of the absolute
pleasures of writing is finding that you have conversed with your unconscious
and drawn into view a flame which had, until then, remained a trickling line of
smoke indicating there was a fire somewhere. This fishing into the depth of
self becomes easier over time as you learn to trust it. Like a sportsman or
woman, at the height of his or her powers, who plays intuitively, beyond the
intercession of thought, you are hardly aware of the substance in what you have
written until you examine it later, as its first reader. It is then that you
have to decide how authentic it is, how much is plagiarised or pure! The
pinnacle of such experience is in writing poetry which, like music, tells its
truths as a potent alchemy that is more than the mere words on the page.
Meanings echo and ricochet away from it, ad infinitum. The more you work with
your imagination, the more it comes up trumps. The result can be an insight
akin to that delivered by ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream of consciousness’, a
kind of authorial therapy, but it can also be the route that takes you into exciting
realms beyond the conformity of your previous work.
This process evidences
itself most in the way you manage the themes that underlie your work. I have
already discussed their place in your narratives. Finding a fresh way to
express the complexity of these themes can result directly from the unusual
metaphors and insights that erupt from your unconscious, unfettered by the
shackles of logic. And this is also true of descriptions of places, people and
events. Having no fixed sense of any of these and allowing the creative juices
to bring them to the fore can produce the strikingly real and unusual. The
plasticity of your brain can either be increased by the appeal to the
imagination or decreased by a rigid approach to expressing exactly what you
have pre-ordained.
I watched a programme
last night about human survival in the icy wastes of the far north. An igloo
was built. It was almost exactly how I described an igloo being built in Azimuth. Now, many of you would have
googled the strategies for building these ice houses before writing. Fine. But
then you have the problem of making what you have researched seem natural and
part of the flow of the narrative. When I wrote it, I WAS there with my
characters solving the problem of how to survive a terrible night and so it
came out in the very portrayal of traits, place and dialogue. I hope I am not
sounding too vain here, it is as dispassionate as I can make it and, as I have
said before, you can check my introspective analysis by reading the relevant
section in the third Book, The Final
Journey.
Azimuth by Jack Sanger, the paperback trilogy from www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth as separate E-Books, The First
Journey, The Second Journey, The
Final Journey) from Kindle Amazon or as PDFs at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
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