Category Archives: Literature

The deliciousness of talking about writing

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I had the delicious experience of meeting an author whose book I edited. Our conversations had been by email and he wanted to meet the person who “knows me so well now”.

He also wanted to ask questions about some of the editing decisions I’d made and I was happy to oblige. Having to teach another person about my thought processes would give me the chance to discover them myself.

One of the things I discovered is that the energy of a piece of writing comes from what’s not said; from the folds in a text, the pockets of unarticulated thought or emotion. The trick in writing is to be present to these folds and their potentialities, without pursuing them. To be at ease with their unsaidness; to have lost one’s fear of the unsaid. That’s when a text becomes pliable, robust, just quiescent enough.

***

In my own book writing, I recently drew up a list of rules: my rules of the game for writing the book. One rule is to give up intensifiers. Another is to make it as simple as possible “but not simpler”, as Einstein said.

As a leader I interviewed put it,

Once you get it really simple, then you’re able to communicate it at different levels.

***

Image: Joan Miro, Landscape, 1927

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Writing that’s almost right

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It’s become a cliché, to kill your darlings when writing. There’s even a literary journal by the same name. But no matter how often I hear the injunction, it doesn’t make it any easier to do the deed.

I’m up to what I think of as the second practice writing. It’s the writing after the first practice writing, and before – long before – the real writing which will occur one magic day in the future when a glorious, effortless stream will commence pouring. So long as it’s practice writing I can just about manage to sit down in the meantime and do the daily target of words I’ve set myself.

The problem with the second practice writing is the high proportion of darlings, the felicitous words that pop from nowhere, the delectable turns of phrase, the evidence of my subtlety. Every one of them leads me on a frolic that can last for days, though it’s a rather limp frolic, overcast as it is with the feeling of defiant deferral.

It’s not that they’re wrong, the darlings; that’s the problem. It’s that they’re almost right. And they can flourish in all kinds of situations, not only writing. Take the world’s most famous knitter, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot. She’s just held her nose and kept on knitting to an advanced stage of a very intricate baby blanket, even though she knew there was a niggle at about the six inch mark. She’d checked and re-checked, and it wasn’t an error. An error would have been easy to face. No, it was just something not quite right, a “line”, she said, that had appeared in the work. Eventually, of course, she had to face it, and come up with a solution.

That’s how it is with darlings. You can run but they always, always, catch you up.

The best words I’ve ever heard on the matter come from W. G. Sebald who also links the challenges of writing with the making of fabric. That a writer of such grace and power knew the problem intimately gives me comfort. Maybe you too.

That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.*

***

* W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

The current coin of language

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If, by some chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced. Whether friendly or hostile, the reply always missed fire, and the attempt to communicate had to be given up. This was true of those at least for whom silence was unbearable, and since the others could not find the truly expressive word, they resigned themselves to using the current coin of language, the commonplaces of plain narrative, of anecdote, and of their daily prayer. So in these cases, too, even the sincerest grief had to make do with the set phrases of ordinary conversation.

***

My kingdom for the truly expressive word! Like Camus’s citizens of Oran I’m searching for a new word, a new language. Not to express my grief, as in this beautiful, passionate segment from his masterpiece, The Plague, but to express my intuitions in the book I’m writing. For anyone reading who’s new here, I’d tell you what the subject is, only I’d give you the wrong idea!

The current coin of language just will not cut it. I want to convey something magical, unguessed-at, stupendous and all I’ve got to work with is the “L” word.  No wonder philosophers have to invent new vocabularies.

***

While we’re on the topic of the current coin, I came across one of those infallibly delicious books of corporate speak, The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit. Here are a few gems to take you into the weekend.

devil’s advocate: 1. one who adopts an opposing view in a nonpartisan way for the sake of testing an argument 2. common passive-aggressive tactic for saying “I completely disagree with you.”

dotted line 1. refers to an uncodified or informal reporting situation on an org chart 2. you supervise an employee but are not given the title, money, credit, respect, etc, for doing so; a cost-effective strategy.

Gen  X/Gen Y interface 1. the workplace dynamic between employees who are members of Generation X with their younger colleagues, who are considered part of Generation Y 2. oil and water 3. Gen Xers, former latchkey kids infused with cynicism who entered the barren job market of the early 90s and took any position they could get, then scraped their way up to a passable living and a modicum of responsibility, were then charged with the duty of supervising a group whose every childhood whim was catered to, who got their first jobs in a flush economy that overcompensated new recruits, who are emboldened by an unearned sense of entitlement …

brain dump   1. to communicate a large amount of information, particularly when handing off a project to someone else 2. to have someone place a foot-high stack of files filled with their illegible notes on your desk, clog your inbox with a dozen or so messages and talk to you for twenty minutes about useless information regarding a project they’ve been working on for six months 3. an act that is followed by the statement, “So, is that clear?”

onetime expense   1. a cost that is incurred a single time 2. a way of justifying and writing off a costly, and huge, mistake.

it is what it is   1. something is what it is 2. empty statement; used when there is nothing to say about something, or when a situation is so screwed up it’s not worth making an effort to fix it.

living document 1. a document that is continually updated and revised according to new information relevant to its contents, with the goal of maintaining its accuracy 2. a document that is supposed to be continually updated and revised according to new information relevant to its contents, but isn’t – either updated, or accurate.

***

Away from the flat earth

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I’m reading the short stories of the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and they are a revelation. Not even the fact John Updike thought highly of them can put me off.

As Updike said:

He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place.

Ah, if ever I were to write fiction, this is what I would want to write: fiction lifted away from the flat earth.

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Chutnification: Part 2

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If you’ve visited the Taj Mahal you’ll know it’s one building as you enter the gateway and look down the long approach, and another building up close. Because, up close, you see the glittering whiteness is studded with precious and semi-precious stones like glacé fruits.

William Dalrymple’s book White Mughals works in a similar way.

From a distance, it’s the story of the vast and surprising intermingling of British men and their Hindu and Muslim bibis (wives) in the sumptuous, highly political Indo-Persian culture of India in the late 1700s. And the central story of Dalryimple’s book is the most vivid instance of this intermingling: namely, the scandalous love affair and marriage of the English Resident (Ambassador) in Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, to the 14-year-old Muslim princess, Khair un-Nissa.

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Chutnification: Part 1

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Salman Rushdie coined the term chutnification to describe modern multiculturalism. It could apply just as well to the process by which non-Indians become Indianised.

In White Mughals, William Dalrymple recreates a vast episode of chutnification that occurred around 1800 in India, as the Mughal empire which had ruled India for centuries began to implode, and the East India Company, to transform itself from trading entity to mighty colonial power.

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Dictionary of Stupidity

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A Frenchman named Jean-Claude Carrière once wrote, with a friend, a Dictionary of Stupidity.

The book, he says in a conversation with Umberto Eco, has been reprinted many times and was inspired by the thought,

Why study only the history of brilliance, why only masterpieces and the great milestones of the mind? Human stupidity, so beloved of Flaubert, seemed to us far more widespread – obviously – but also more fertile, more revealing and in a certain sense more accurate …

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The palm at the end of the mind

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The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

(Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens, 1954)

*****

Can I tell you how that penultimate line excites me?

*****

“I felt a funeral in my brain …”

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It’s a great line, isn’t it? “I felt a funeral in my brain ..”  Emily Dickinson could really write an opening line of power and strangeness. She is to the poetry world what Tolstoy (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”); and Daphne du Maurier (“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”) are to prose.

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inkpop pops for aspiring authors

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Want to get your writing reviewed by a professional editor?

Want to discuss the review with the editor?

Then head over to the luscious new inkpop, brainchild of HarperCollins Publisher. inkpop specialises in young adult fiction for readers and future authors.

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