Thursday, May 10, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 34
Once you are writing every day and your
imagination begins to bulk up on its muscle, ideas come to you many times every
day regarding plot lines. I said in an earlier blog how some writers carry an
ideas book in their pocket and note down the significant in what they are
experiencing whether it be the looks of a person, a few lines of dialogue, a
landscape, or a telling aberration in their physical or mental worlds. Some
writers have files of recorded data which see them through the lean times
when, otherwise, a portcullis of a writer's block might fall across productivity. The notion
of having such a resource is more appealing as a concept than a reality for
many writers. You only have to look at the planet to realize that humans find
it difficult to plan and conserve, against the future. We exploit instead.
Anyway, as I said, ideas come to you (like dreams) the
more you make ready for them and reward them with records of their appearance!
Here is a typical example. I watched a
documentary last night on science and the light it casts on the nature of life.
Like many such programmes it did not quench my thirst. I’d love to know what is
the factor that stokes up the extraordinary mechanism that we call DNA. At one
point in the programme it was stated that scientists over the next decade or
two will create the first unicellular life form. Immediately I thought of a
neat Sci Fi short story. At the moment these cells are made and escape from the
laboratory, a cataclysm wipes out humanity. Over millions of years they develop
into the varieties of complex life we see today; until scientists reach the
point where they can create their first unicellular life form… The twist in the
tale involves the realization that we are in a never ending loop of creation
and destruction. Very Hindu. It would have to be written so that this is disclosed
at the very end of the tale.
In The
Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler suggests that creativity, in the main,
comes from taking two disparate pieces of knowledge and bringing them together
to create a third, already known but not, until then, with any connection to
the first two. This happens in music, maths and comedy. In music, the final
movement may resolve the countervailing nature of what has gone before. In
maths, the QED in an equation (forgive my O Level knowledge) produces a pleasing
line of proof from separate and hitherto unconnected pieces of mathematical information. In comedy
we have the punch line. I even use
the latter to set the scene in the website for Azimuth:
A samurai once asked Zen Master Hakuin where he would
go after he died.
Hakuin answered “How am I supposed to know?”
“How do you know? You’re a Zen master!” exclaimed the samurai.
“Yes, but not a dead one,” Hakuin answered. – Zen mondo
Hakuin answered “How am I supposed to know?”
“How do you know? You’re a Zen master!” exclaimed the samurai.
“Yes, but not a dead one,” Hakuin answered. – Zen mondo
On a grand scale, a novel does the same.
The ending should be an intellectually and pleasing denouement which brings
together what seems contradictory or paradoxical and shows that a logic
pertains to all the books events.
Azimuth by Jack Sanger (paperback and PDF
at www.azimuthtrilogy.com)
Azimuth (separate volumes of the trilogy) as ebooks
also on Amazon Kindle
Labels: Writing: Plotting your ideas.
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