Monday, July 30, 2012
Mind muscle
The mind is a strange sleight of hand trick
of the brain (to mix metaphors), without which it cannot exist. Damage the
brain and the mind is impaired. Nevertheless, we differentiate them so that the
mind becomes the subject and the brain becomes the object in their
relationship. The mind represents the driver and the brain represents the
vehicle which carries us through life. The most significant element of the mind
is the will because (we are led to believe) it precipitates our brains to do
things for us. Unless it fights the mind’s battles for it, we become slaves to
everything around us. It makes us a puppeteer rather than a puppet, autonomous
rather than dependent.
I know this is a rather slanted and
reductionist summary of a vast literature on mind and brain but it gets me to
my main thrust, one I have approached in previous blogs. One that bears
innumerable mentions, I feel, for any writer or thinker.
When you say that you want to stop trying
to master something because your head hurts, that is the time to keep going.
You have to exert your will (therefore your mind) to make your brain do the
business for you. It is best to treat it as a tool that needs constant tempering.
This is why I have said that only by writing every day do you begin to perceive
real subtleties in the relationship between imagination and expression. Encapsulating
as much information in as small a wordage as possible can only be achieved by
practice and the brain actually learns how to do it by constant exercise. Thus
your very wordy one thousand page book is reduced to 300 pages because you use
metaphor and simile and concise phraseology.
I am intrigued by this process. Having
produced a book of aphorisms called An A
to Zen of Management I turned latterly to tweeting. The restrictions on
length of tweets should be seen as a mind-muscle challenge. How much can you
say in so little wordage? Most tweets say very little. They appear to be
vomited on to the page rather than sculpted and placed there.
It does make your brain hurt but mastering
the concise sharpens your brain tool fantastically!
Tweets at @profjacksanger
Words at www.chronometerpublications.me
Thursday, July 26, 2012
All writing is fantasy
These blogs are shoehorned into travel. I am now in England after days in Cahors, Chartres and Calais. Whether they are stylish and durable footwear is another thing.
I tweeted the title of this piece this morning @profjacksanger because I was taken by the notion that whatever I have executed as a writer, whether in the guise of an academic, a novelist, a playwright or a poet, required, even at the most stringent point in my portrayal of realities, imaginative dressing. No matter how diligent I was at stripping words of any spurious, arty-farty subjectivity, the results were never more than a nod in the direction of verisimilitude. As I said in a recent blog, we are what we write. We are never utterly disinterested and objectively scientific. Life since Plato's illuminations, has been seen to be illusion and writing does little to pull back the curtain that veils the truth of the nature of existence. Thus it is a relief to have left academia and its false gods and self-deceptions for the rich, imaginative world of 'fiction' which, to my mind, luxuriates in its lack of pretence that it is actually nailing reality.
In that unalloyed modesty, it may say as much about our universe as any so-called factual account within the scientific establishment.
www.chronomterpublications.me
Labels: #Writing and objectivity
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Writers and Jung
In the deepest well of the writer's imagination is all the good and evil of the universe. In this we must be adherents of Carl Jung. In many of my preceding blogs about the art of writing (should that really be the psychology of writing?) I am taken with what that Jung proposes: there is something beyond the mechanical, projected, intentional in our scribbling. Derrida talks of 'meaning leaking' from our work no matter how much we try to control it. The universal unconscious is, indeed, the deepest well where everything lurks, good or evil, fantastical or prosaic. The more we write and allow ourselves to trust this repository of human experience, the more we will drag, dripping from its depths, stuff beyond our ken - and the ken of humankind.
www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: #Wriing and Jung
The Writer is revealed
Writing is meditation. The page is a mirror. Khayyam's moving finger traces our changing features as we age. We write ourselves into knowledge. All of our history comes into play. Not only what we think we remember but also what we don't know we remember.
In Azimuth the assassin comes from east of Samarkand along the Silk Road. The place is an explicit (and exquisite) memory as I visited there just after the Russians pulled out but there are many elements of his sudden, mysterious eruption on to my pages that came from beyond my knowing. The same with the African mercenaries. Bits come from my time in Ghana regarding their values, much from somewhere else.
We are what we write - but we are also written by our writing.
www.chronomterepublications.me
Writing is meditation. The page is a mirror. Khayyam's moving finger traces our changing features as we age. We write ourselves into knowledge. All of our history comes into play. Not only what we think we remember but also what we don't know we remember.
In Azimuth the assassin comes from east of Samarkand along the Silk Road. The place is an explicit (and exquisite) memory as I visited there just after the Russians pulled out but there are many elements of his sudden, mysterious eruption on to my pages that came from beyond my knowing. The same with the African mercenaries. Bits come from my time in Ghana regarding their values, much from somewhere else.
We are what we write - but we are also written by our writing.
www.chronomterepublications.me
Friday, July 20, 2012
Sci
Fi Fo Fum, here comes the blood of a future man
Writing
a short sci fi novella this last month was a pleasure. (Sex: Future Imperfecti). Pure imagination. No research save for the
years of reading that no doubt helped to shape it. Twist ending. Voila. Here’s
a snippet, taken after a rather visceral opening, an account of a player’s death
in a game simulation:
He was recovering fast. As
always, he could not recall the mental trauma just before death though he knew
it had been intense. Even with players like him the psyche needed careful
protection. There were concoctions that could replay it from his memory again but
unlike many of his friends he never dwelt on the past, it was the transiency of
pain that appealed. “Fantastic!” he laughed. “Phenomenal! Outrageous! Worth a
month’s pay.”
“That’s what Mortality costs,”
said ABZ-, admiringly. “You certainly know what to spend your allotment on.”
They lay side by side on the bed of air in the vaulted chamber, their
fashionable loose fitting white bachelor robes floating around them. A-Prime107’s apartment was chic and
hi-tech in the extreme. There was not one retro appliance or stick of furniture
or soft furnishing anywhere to be seen. He loved the air-press islands that, on
his voice-activating command, would provide bodyfit shapes on which he could
recline, wherever and whenever he felt like it. He loved the shell’s capacity
to become any colour he desired, currently the palest blue, as well as the
opaque or transparent modifications that came as basic. At this moment they lay
on minutely rippling air which massaged A-Prime’s aching physique. A-Prime tended
to have the shell of the chamber on mirror-translucent, maintaining privacy
while allowing him to look across the urban wrapping, ninety percent of which
was silvered bubble like his own.
“It takes it out of you,
doesn’t it?” reflected ABZ-, “The body suffers from the mind’s torture.”
“I’m ok. I got on to level 7.”
“Arghh! That’s no-go! You
are a freak. That’s why you have a Prime rating!” ABZ- had never gone further
than basic, level 1 on the death programs before feeling sick. Indeed, he was
worried that they sent back info to the authorities if anyone got as far as A-Prime
was doing. Everyone knew that there were built-in detectors. Every game could
be looped back to Central.
It’ll be out in a month or so, when my
editor has put down his scalpel, needle and thread.
All my output at:
www.chronometerpublications.me
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Being
Caught short: the novella
It was like this. Having spent ten years
writing Azimuth and pouring into it
everything I could regarding the metaphysical, the fabulous, the adventurous
and the quirky so that it became an adult’s fairytale without fairies but with
gods and heroes; no that sounds a bit of a put-off, as well - allegorical,
that’s the word. Oh, read it and be enthralled and tell me what it is! Anyway,
like any long term relationship come to an end, I soon needed the thrill again.
So I wrote Through a Mirror Clear: a
Gothic Love Story about taboo in family life. Meanwhile, I continued to
market books through these blogs and tweets but the old yearning took over
again and I have just today finished Sex:
Future Imperfect, a science fiction novella.
Novellas are an interesting form. You
haven’t time to really develop characters through action but have to make them
rounded enough to be believable, immediately. It’s akin to going to a party and
chatting with someone and ending up in bed with a relationship to look forward
to, it seems so right. They must jump off your page ready formed in the same
way. Also, in my case there has to be more of a sense of the ending at the
outset to help drive direction. Normally I refuse to think about it, wanting
the characters and the events to push the plot along and discover for myself the
ending almost at the same moment as it comes into sight on the page.
In novellas, too, there is a bounty placed
on every word you don’t use. Spareness counts. The plot drags you in and spits
you out, even if it is a psycho-drama. In the case of science fiction, a future
world has to be painted in a few sentences and it must be sufficiently
technological for the reader to feel that time has moved on and that it is a
believable step away from the present. Anyway, I suppose the novella should
feel that it could have been a fully-fledged novel but there has been a
distillation which gives it the punch of a glass of spirit.
From what I’ve read, the novella is the
medium with the message for today’s computers who want to read a whole story in
a day. The sound byte generation. We shouldn’t be snooty about it. At the end
of the day we are providing a service, a refueling of the imagination.
All the books mentioned above can be found
at:
and in one form or another on Amazon Kindle
where I write as both Jack Sanger AND Eric le Sange
Labels: #Writing: the novella.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Let
the Good Times Not Roll too Soon
I have been heavily involved in writing a
novella over the last four weeks, which led to its completion this morning, at
least in first draft. It’s the first time I have written sci fi (in my Eric le
Sange body) and, like most novellas, it had to have a twist ending. Somehow,
the idea of writing a fifty to a hundred page story without a big clout of an
ending seems to me to be anathema. Even in Azimuth,
each chapter has twist endings and the two narratives, at the end of the
trilogy have proven already to have upturned its readership with delighted surprise.
I approached the ending of the sci fi
story: Sex: Future Imperfect with
mounting excitement (excuse the unconscious pun!). After all I only worked out
the twist myself as I was going to sleep last night. So, I began developing the
narrative towards my imagined ending and then, just at the point where the
twist is introduced, I downed tools and went off into the garden to look at the
mountains (see photo in last blog). Why? Deferred gratification. Indulgence and
delight. I was putting into practice something that I have learned over the
years. Defer the best bits as long as possible to let your mind envelop them
and tease out all the ins and outs and consequences. Really enjoy being the
author for moments like this are to savour. You are the first reader of your own
work. Make it great for yourself.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Reasons to be Cheerful Part 2
Here's the view from my window as I write this. As you can see I am not in a bordello.
Part One, if you remember, advanced the notion that the business of writing contains within it an almost mystical reward. For a man it is his, admittedly minor, sublimation for not being able to give birth, in the real sense. For a woman who is childless, maybe the same, I have no idea. For a woman who has been fruitful in flesh and blood terms, maybe it acts as a delightful coda. Perhaps someone could enlighten me!
Part Two is a bit of a
hazy ramble I am beginning to feel. One or two friends have written asking me
whether my ebooks are half as successful as 50 Shades of Grey has been. I feel
confused at what my response might be. Do I just say no!, truculently, and
forget it? Do I enter into a disquisition on how I am pursuing the noble, artier
end of writing not the seamier end? (This is a dodgy response since sex plays a
key role in two of my books under the name of Eric le Sange, an appellation
which separates my genre writing from my heroic (!) offering, Azimuth!) Do I
just say that I don’t need to write a bonkbuster for I can get by in my garret
here in the Pyrenees on a modest pension and my reason to be cheerful has already
been covered in Part One. Maybe I could say that my offspring (curious how some of the
progeny of sixties hippiesque creatures like myself are a bit coy and defensive
if their father writes any sex scenes at all) would find it difficult to have a
father renowned for his prurient pen wielding.
Labels: #Writing. 50 Shades of Grey. Prurience in the literary endeavour.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Communication
from Beyond
Before you get uppity and think I am an
adherent of spiritualism, I am not! But since this is a meandering set of blogs
about the process of writing, I thought I’d take a look at inspiration. Even for the hardened writer, never mind someone
suffering from the dreaded block, there may be a brief period when he or she
casts around for some catalyst or other to propel the pen across the virgin
page. In earlier blogs there has been much discussion on the gathering of data
for the novel but where does the author find a state of mind that might
precipitate looking for a launch pad?
It is easy to make a list of possible
sources of inspiration; autobiographical events, news stories, criminal cases,
anecdotes, books you have loved, people you have met. Yet these represent the
mechanical beginnings, explicit sources that you can link to your tale. What
about prime movers that are non-explicit but somehow make it possible for you
to cast around for one of the above stimuli? For example, some writers submerge
themselves in music. The nuances of emotion that stem from such experiences are
not literal but nevertheless causal – or at least contingent. Then again,
writers have always been known to isolate themselves in landscapes, whether
they be the lake poets of the British C19th or present day hideaways in
Provence. There is a growing band who immerse themselves in other cultures,
imbibing the mores, the sights and sounds to give their novels an exotic
ambience. The need to research is these days a precondition for a large group
of authors, a troubling fact for me. I spent a great deal of my professional
life as an academic researcher (look elsewhere on this blog site) and have come
to fiction largely because I want to exercise the imagination rather than fit
stories into real, well-realised settings. Though I enjoy this house in the
French Pyrenees with its stupendous setting, the people here and their customs
have never entered one line of prose in my books. The mountains may have, but
incidentally, not as a result of copious note taking. The mountain that frames
the final book in Azimuth is more like a Japanese Fuji than Canigou, the sacred
Catalan/French mountain upon which my house perches.
But, as an amusing post script to the
above, a stimulation I have felt on a few occasions has been the visiting of the
graves of writers. It’s certainly not a religious experience. It’s not spiritualist. Maybe it’s a bit
Buddhist or Hindu if you follow the line that when we die we disaggregate into
individual atoms and become part of the future aggregation of another
individual. Oh, and another aside, I don’t make trips to graves as a central
thrust of travelling. But If I’m there and one turns out to be nearby…! Thus,
Robert Graves in Majorca, T. E. Lawrence in some country churchyard in the west
country, Robert Frost in New England, Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and,
by far the greatest experience Novodevichy Cemetery in St Petersburg. Here, in a really small area in the middle of
the city are truly majestic poets, writers, composers and artists. Phenomenal.
If ever you want to write but can’t get the pen out of your desk drawer, try
communing by the grave of one of our own, a writer now deceased. People tell me that I am the least
sentimental person they have met – so what I say is not sentimental. It’s more
like a private ritual in a belief system of one! This very motif is played out
in Azimuth. How much of what we seek
and believe ‘out there’ in the world, is really ‘in here’?
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Friday, July 13, 2012
A
Reason to be Cheerful: staying true to your art
Even if you are not interested in the lives
of great artists I am sure common knowledge will have filtered down, like
rivulets and streams into the great river of shared consciousness, that many
artists we now regard as ‘great’ were not recognized as such in their own lifetimes. By
artists I am including every medium, not just Van Gogh and his ilk. Perhaps
writing is the least tenable part of this thesis in that, unlike the paint
stroke, the word has a capacity to become rapidly dated and best sellers
particularly so – unless you go back to Dickens and Tolstoy et al. Will Booker
prize winners be read in twenty years time? One or two but the majority not.
This is because writing has the quintessential capacity to speak of the now and
most reading revolves around the now just as pop makes up the vast proportion
of music, being immediately gratifying and then unsatisfying. Most art
fulfils a primary criterion and that is to give pleasure to the passing of
time; the series of connected nows, if you like. The greater the art, the more
attenuated the sequence of nows, stretching even across generations and epochs like Shakespeare.
There is obviously a scale of values
implicit in this debate. Because of the technological revolution the writing
media is now more varied. Tweets, blogs, articles, essays, poems, plays, novels are
all forms that we have to fit consciously into our subjective measurement
of worth.
In the end it is the Jungian universal
unconscious which will be the final arbiter because great art communicates through
it via a mysterious process of connections, both explicit and implicit.
Catching the zeitgeist can make for overnight success but slow burners get
there too – and sometimes only after translation into another language or medium such as film.
As artists and here we are discussing
novelists in particular, we can and maybe should be driven to try to reach the
highest levels of expression but we shouldn’t be dismayed that our oeuvres are
not recognized in our lifetimes. We must console ourselves that the fulfillment
of making narratives that would never have become born without our individual
existences and unique experiences, is a particularly major reward.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The
Janus in the writer
I tweeted a couple of hours ago about
schizoid writers, of which I am obviously one! Why do it? Why be two people? Why write under different
names? We know that for many reasons writers have (like stage and television
celebrities) opted for an alias (in this case a pen name). This can enable them
to lead a private life as well as a media focused one, or become a different
gender more acceptable to the reading public of that genre, or disguise a
profession which might not take kindly to a writer of outré fiction. Whatever.
For me there was a decision to be made. I had
an academic career as Jack Sanger and when it ended I wanted to write at least
one fine book. It turned out to be a trilogy and took me ten years. Azimuth was its name and you can read
the early reviews at: www.azimuthtrilogy/reviews
I was happy with my name moving over to
embrace fiction at this point. But what next? I felt the need to go on writing
and many of the blogs before this one talk about the motivation and psychology
of writing. I also wanted to be experimental in different genres to see how it
went. I had already written plays that had been produced – though not in the
West End? What about crime fiction? What about an intense sexual novel? What about sci fi, of which I am an
expert but so far only as a reader?
Yet writing these would not be the same as writing Azimuth. That book distilled so much knowledge and experience of
what I had learned as an academic; philosophy, sociology, psychology and tried
to transmute it into a saga, an odyssey of strange and fabulous adventures
which would lead the reader to question the nature of reality just as I had.
So, wishing not to besmirch the brand of Azimuth, yet try to establish a
reputation as an adept, amusing and highly capable author I opted to wear the
garb of Eric le Sange
www.chronometerpublications.me
The name was half-lifted from a 1970s French film called Serail where an English writer named Eric Sange, stays in a French house to pen a novel. And here I am in France in my French house, penning away!
www.chronometerpublications.me
The name was half-lifted from a 1970s French film called Serail where an English writer named Eric Sange, stays in a French house to pen a novel. And here I am in France in my French house, penning away!
Labels: #Writing: a rose under any other name, alias. pseudonym, pen name
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Writing: the heart of the matter
I am feeling a sense of dismemberment. My
greedy hands that played until recently with the minor characters in Azimuth are itchy to do something else. The
fifty blogs on writing that preceded a foray into the literary lives of walk-on
parts, represent a sizeable contribution to the debate on how a writer’s
psychology is played out in his or her work. Not that my hands direct my
writing. Do they? Sometimes I go into a haze and letters, words, sentences
appear before me, filling the page with unique meanings that no-one else could
have written. It’s deeply meaningful, this act of creation. When I was about
twenty, my close friend, a pianist - now dead - used to say about la
difference, “Women are, men do.” His musical compositions were sublimations
of giving birth, he used to aver.
What is this leading to? I tweeted yesterday
about a programme on television about the heart. A rather intensely sad
presenter was wandering like a ghost from expert to expert trying to work out
why his heart was broken at the loss of his wife to severe clinical depression.
All he was sure was that it was not a brain thing. It was a pain in the chest
thing. He started with Leonardo’s heart drawings which showed the dissected heart
not as a pump but as a mysterious chambered glory of swirling flows. He compared
it with the science of the ipost-ndustrial age which isolated the heart,
emphasising its mechanical utility to the body. This view has pertained until
very recently. At school I was taught that the heart was a pump. Indeed, it
turned out later during my life that a mechanical pump could take the place of
the diseased organ and circulate the blood admirably.
However, in the last few years of medical
exploration the heart is shown to be so complex, the blood flows so reminiscent
of Leonardo’s drawings that one is mind-blown at the infinite complexity of its
workings and purpose in the body. It is a wonderful creation of chaos and order.
But what turned present day research into a vindication of anecdotal and poetic
understanding of the heart over thousands of years of human history, is the
discovery that the heart has its own neural network, independent of the brain.
Indeed, when it comes to emotion it can be the heart that informs the brain how
to react to events in the world. Heartfelt, broken hearted, heartless, a heavy
heart, lighthearted. Terms we took as symbolic are actually attached to real,
organic responses to the world.
I have often felt that really good writing
comes about from a melding of the intellect and emotion, creating a sort of
controlled passion which we call the creative imagination. Now, at no risk of
sounding like a cross between a writer of bodice rippers and academic
treatises, I can say that fine writing must involve both the heart and the brain.
Labels: Writing - from the heart