Category Archives: On writing

Plagiarism and integrity

Posted by —

7

Yesterday, I said I considered it wasn’t my business if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. I view it as a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and, anyway, they’re welcome to it because there’s plenty more where that came from.

The power of the integrity point is not to be under-estimated, as I learnt a couple of years ago.

A student in the US wrote to me offering me money to take my blog offline for a week or two. She was about to submit an essay for her college course on the writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, and she had used some of the points from two posts I’d written about him. Before I had a chance to reply, she wrote to me again asking me to disregard the previous email. She apologised, and said she had changed the essay to make it clear she was using quotations from this blog.

I still find this pretty thrilling. Someone taking the time and effort to make her actions and the breach of integrity crystal clear, and giving up her ordinary human concern for looking good.

Did you know the word “integrity” has from time to time been the most popular search term on Google?  Integrity, in ourselves and others, is  immensely attractive and compelling.

***

Image: Shoes, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Blog readjustment

Posted by —

5

It’s been bothering me that writing a book seems to demand I hold back the best ideas and insights gained by talking to people being leaders in the world until some as-yet-mythical publication date. If my book is published by a publisher, it may be years before it is published. If I publish it myself, it may be years before it reaches the audience I want it to reach.

In the meantime, as Goethe said, life is sweeping by, and all the while, remarkable people are living remarkable lives, transforming themselves and the most unpromising of circumstances into pure gold, while another group starves for want of joy and power and meaning in the world, the kind of joy and power and meaning available to them too if only they could know it was possible.

It’s seemed to me for some time that another type of book publication is needed. Something that allows instalments to be published and content to be written on the fly, as in the time of Dickens. Or something like the literary or political pamphlets that were previously a staple of publishing.

For these reasons, I’m choosing to take a different approach to this blog. From now on, I’ll be sharing more of the content I have previously been reserving for the book. I’ll also be using, with their permission, the real names of leaders and their organisations I’m writing about.

This might mean some content in the book will have been first published on this blog. I don’t foresee this will be a bar to book publication because the paradigm of book publishing is being entirely re-written, and it’s becoming routine for content to exist in a blog form and then a book form. I don’t foresee it will be a problem for potential book readers because the material will be integrated in a different way and there will be plenty of new material.

I’m also creating it that the book material will occur as entirely fresh and compelling, regardless of whether it’s been previously referred to in some other form.

As for the potential hazard of people borrowing ideas or stories, I choose to follow Seth Godin’s line on this. He is great in many ways, and his renunciation of the stance of proprietorialism is one of them. It’s never much interested me if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. For one, it’s a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and secondly, they’re welcome to it, for as George Gershwin reportedly said when he lost a song he was working on,

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m originating this stuff. I’m just a conduit for writing that wants to be written. I’m shepherding into words material that already exists, even if it hasn’t yet been said.

***

Image: Farmer sitting at the fireside and reading; by the glorious, inimitable Vincent van Gogh, courtesy of biblioklept

Out with “hard”

Posted by —

14

At the beginning of this year, I was complaining to my coach about an ongoing personal issue. It’s a well-rehearsed subject this one, and I was giving it yet one more turn around the block. She put it to me that I was always having to have the issue “handled”, always feeling I had to be dealing with it in some way, and she asked me to consider a proposition.

Say if you were to declare a holiday from the issue? Say if, for this year, you were to say you were not “doing” the issue? By all means, communicate and respond as normal with the people involved, just don’t be “working on” or “doing” the issue.

This was startling to me, and very exciting. And so I did it. I declared I was not dealing with the issue in 2012.

Four months later, the results are remarkable. I’ve discovered nothing actually happens when I don’t deal with the issue. It doesn’t all go to hell; in fact, it’s the reverse.  Since I’ve given up trying to force or fix the matter, things I’ve wanted to have happen in the area have arisen of their own accord. In addition, I’ve got back the time and energy I previously spent dealing with it. I hadn’t realised how much of myself I was giving to the issue, and all to no avail.

The other day I saw another way to use this practice.

There’s a general agreement out there in the world that writing is hard, and unless it’s hard it’s no good. There are umpteen blog sites dedicated to the issue, and the stand-out is Steven Pressfield’s.

Pressfield has it that writing is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, and he named his book on writing accordingly, The War of Art. He talks every week on his blog about the struggle, the beast he calls “resistance”, the hard. His commenters do likewise.

It’s a very common view; Pressfield is only the keeper of its flame. It pops up everywhere, and I’d been getting more and more seduced by it until the other day.

The other day it occurred to me I could simply do what I’d done earlier in the year with the other issue. I could just declare I wasn’t “doing” hard for a particular period of time. So I have declared for the month of May I am not doing hard. If I’m writing or contemplating writing, or doing some other task, and it starts to occur as “hard”, I will do one of two things:

  1. lay aside the task and do something else
  2. do the task in a way that does not occur as hard.

At the end of May, I’ll assess how it went and make a declaration for the period beyond or another declaration entirely. I’ll tell you how it goes.

***

The deliciousness of talking about writing

Posted by —

5

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

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Writing that’s almost right

Posted by —

8

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

A place beyond Irony

Posted by —

4

It’s not only a new vocabulary I need to write the book on the “L” topic, it’s also a new style.

***

The hardest thing I ever did on this blog was give up irony. It is my one true achievement. Irony was my indulgence, my laugh, my shield. It kept me safe, spread its wide and beneficent branches over me. Gave me shelter to mock and preen and exchange lascivious looks with others.

I was a fully paid up member of the kingdom of Irony, a place that sometimes feels like the only country on earth.

Continue reading →

The current coin of language

Posted by —

5

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

Posted by —

0

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.

Continue reading →

Perfect little bon-bons

Posted by —

6

There’s a kind of story I particularly like. It’s short and based on some real-life episode, and has a certain tang. Nothing as blatant as a hook or a twist, which I find boring, but something … what? An unexpectedness is not quite it, nor an ambiguity – far too strong – rather, something like a small wrinkle. And it’s not an artistic wrinkle, you understand, but its antithesis, a wrinkle against all intentions including the author’s. And the story’s.

It’s a perfect little bon-bon, a palate cleanser, refreshing rather than nourishing, leaving one restored and primed, not sated. Unlike many lesser imitations and contemporary journalism, it refuses punch-lines and other cheap thrills, including resolutions-at-any-cost and rhetorical closing questions.

It eschews the authorial intrusion; yes, with these little babies, you’re on your own when it comes to working out what to think. It is scrupulous.

There is one such bon-bon in the current edition of The Monthly. Written by the crime author, Shane Maloney, it tells the story of the early life of the German cult photographer, Helmut Newton, the “king of kink.”

***

Newton, born Neustädter, was the “pampered son of a weathy button manufacturer.” At 13, already “besotted with photography and obsessed by sex”, he bought his first camera; at 18, a month after Kristallnacht, “he fled his beloved Berlin for the Far East.”

In 1940, he was shipped to Australia as an “enemy alien.” He picked peaches, “joined the army and spent the war unloading freight trains in Albury.” On discharge,

he changed his surname to Newton, took Australian citizenship and used his deferred pay to open a tiny studio.

One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne actress named June Browne, aged 23, walked into his small Flinders Lane photography studio, “looking to pick up some extra cash as a model.” As Maloney tells it, “when his standard pick-up technique failed, he recruited her as his sales assistant.”

Within a year, they were married. He told her,

Photography will always be my first love but you will be my second.

They remained together for the next 57 years, until Newton crashed his Cadillac into the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and died. By that time June had become a renowned photographer in her own right, using the ironic pseudonym, Alice Springs.

***

For a decade or so after their marriage, the couple lived in Melbourne, with Helmut photographing “baby outfits for New Idea” and oil refineries. Meanwhile, June “garnered laurels” as an actress, including winning Actress of the Year award for her Saint Joan at the National Theatre.

In the 60s, they moved to Paris, and Helmut became a celebrity. June, with no French, lost her acting career. One day, something new happened.

Newton, bedridden with influenza, suggested she cover a commercial job for him. The client didn’t notice and soon she was shooting for Elle and Depeche Mode. In need of a professional name, she shut her eyes and stuck a pin in a map of Australia.

As Alice Springs, she “produced memorable portraits of the era’s iconic faces – Catherine Deneuve, Dennis Hopper, Terence Stamp and Charlotte Rampling.”

She is now 88 and still going strong; still, Maloney says, with “a sharp eye.”

***

Images: Helmut Newton by Alice Springs (top); Saddle 1 for Vogue Homme by Helmut Newton, 1976 (second); Woman by Alice Springs (bottom)

Napping with the greats

Posted by —

2

Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Gustave Flaubert and Vladimir Nabokov all did it, Churchill, moreover, with a whisky and soda accompaniment.

Each of them, according to the daily schedules of the Great featured in a recent Lapham’s Quarterly, had a daily nap or “lounge”. The schedules make for amusing reading. And relaxed living.

Continue reading →