Sunday, 27 May 2012

Why the need to write?


Okay this is a tricky one. I’m sticking to my self imposed one hour deadline for each blog so I may have to do additional parts to this if I miss something major which I’m likely to do.
I’ve mentioned before that writing is something I have enjoyed since I was a kid, I have notebooks from primary school that testify to my ability to write in a straight line but the hint at storytelling ability…that evidence may not hold up in court. I read a lot when I was young (that’s another blog) and I recall that I tried to write but I can’t actually remember what. My first real memory of trying to write ‘something’ is at around 9 or 10 I think, so what I want to discuss in this blog is what is it exactly that makes me twenty plus years later still want to write…and be confident enough to know it’s something I want to do for the rest of my life.
I’ll start by saying I don’t know and am not qualified to describe what a ‘creative’ is and I am not going to attempt a description. I’m just going to use that word so that I cover the range of people who may be artists, designers, writers, etc. I have met many creative people from an enormous range of disciplines and subjects that either make their living (does that mean pay the bills?) through their creativity, or attempt and hope to do so one day. I have also met so many people that may not consider themselves creatively inclined and work in jobs that at first understanding don’t necessary seem creative.  I know though, that they have fantastic imaginations and their minds work in a way that forms ideas I, and many people, would never be capable of. And what is interesting is that some of those people when you talk to them would say I’d love to do stand up one day, I’d love to write a book one day, I’d love to start my own company one day and so on and some of those I believe genuinely would like to and others say it for effect. There are also those who have absolutely no interest in anything like that whatsoever and harbor no desires to do something outside of the life they have set up for themselves and there is nothing wrong with that at all, what makes one person happy and fulfilled does not apply to the next person.
So it makes me feel guilty immediately as I don’t believe I have anything more important to say than any of those that I have just described, I don’t believe I have a deeper insight or knowledge of life than anyone else. In fact, isn’t it incredible when you speak to someone about something personal, say you’re having trouble at work or difficulties in your relationship or what ever it maybe, they come out with the most unexpectedly caring, thoughtful and meaningful advice that you would never have seen coming, it is really touching and it makes you realize that no matter the façade (most) people have a genuinely caring soul. I would love them to write something, sing something, paint something, etc. but if they don’t want to then they don’t want to. Maybe they will one day, maybe they won’t, and it’s not for me to push or decide for them. So I have to get over the fake narcissism I’m guilt tripping on myself, because it’s not that. I don’t want to write because I feel I’m better than anyone else, I simply have an innate love of writing and I want to talk about the things that I am feeling.
I feel better once I have spent time writing. Perhaps you have a similar feeling once you have trained hard at the gym, or gone for a long walk, had a tough day at work…all can be painful, hard and testing with many moments of wondering why the hell you are bothering but ultimately once it’s over and done with you feel better. I can’t comment on the science behind it, I’m sure there is a release of endorphins or similar which explains it. As with the gym say, you also know you are getting better, that’s why it’s called training, you are not the master, you have not got to perfection and you never will, there will always be something.
I guess like most children I used to make up stories, thought I was a good liar, made up worlds and secret clubs with friends, and enjoyed escapism. I never had an imaginary friend but then that was replaced with the books I read and the stories I made up. It’s strange to reflect on it because I have to admit the need to make stuff up has never left me! Adulthood is definitely another blog of its own but to quickly say, the need to write has only got stronger but not just for its own sake (the enjoyment alone of writing and making up stories); it has taken on a greater importance for me, the older I get the more I feel I have something to say and that, regardless of audience, I need to do it anyway. I want to express myself and for me, that means writing. It is maybe for that very reason that I have found the confidence to write as an adult, that I have lost my fear of criticism (replaced by appreciation of it), I am not writing a story that I am worried if my family would like, my teachers would tell me off for, my friends would laugh at…none of that matters to me at all. And also, I am not writing for those things that become so apparent as an adult in and around everyone, fame, money, adoration (I smell another blog on those). I don’t care if I write a hundred stories and not one person likes them, I feel better for writing them, it makes me happy.

Hour’s up. I’ll come back to this another time for sure.

RGR
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Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Patience and Calm


Wanting things can be a real pain. Those who want the latest material things, the latest mobile phone, the latest trainers, the latest gadget and the countless other things we see advertised every day can get really down when they calculate how many months or years it will take to save up the money, or find out the specific version they want is sold out or only available in Japan. Then you have those who want to achieve (there is nothing wrong with wanting material things by the way…I’m typing this on my lovely new mac and I bloody love it…I’m just not focusing on that in this blog) and that’s a bit harder to do a month-by-month plan for. You can’t say, in 4 weeks I will have wrote my first song, by 6 weeks, recorded my first album, by 10 weeks got a record deal and by 12 weeks be an international superstar. Now, of course you can aim for that and hope for that but it’s not as straightforward as saying I save ten pounds this month and next month I save another ten pounds and then I have twenty pounds and I can buy that thing I want that costs twenty pounds. Now, it’s also different talking about fame, that’s definitely another blog, I’m not putting that in the mix here.
What I think is really hard to do is to have patience; to me it’s a skill to acquire, an exercise to train in every day and something to always remind yourself of. Sometimes it’s actually a good idea to say by week 4 I want to have written my first song, that’s discipline, it’s forcing you to work hard, to achieve…and hanging around all day for inspiration to deliver you a perfectly composed hit is only going to have you reaching for the razor blades, but, what is also important is to be calm and patient and reflective when it comes to the end of those four weeks and you look at that piece of work and say to yourself “I’m not really happy with that”, (substitute a more choice set of words if you like…) that’s good, that means you are taking your work seriously and are not prepared to release anything you are not 100% proud of. I bet you 99.9% of people release it anyway, I know I’m guilty of that, but it’s so much more worthwhile when you take a minute and think it through…what is wrong with taking another week, re-reading it one more time…give yourself that chance.
All journalists, editors and the like are probably laughing their backsides off right now but I’ll defend myself by saying I’m not talking about doing a job for someone else, paid or otherwise; I’m talking about doing something for you. Struggling with something creative and personal is a very emotional process. Tell yourself you are allowed to have moments of panic, moments when you cannot possibly imagine a way this is going to end the way you want it to, you’ll never get it finished, you’ll never be happy with it, etc, etc. That means you are not selling yourself short. Once something is out there, there is no taking it back, sure you can re-release it, create a revised edition and so on but that initial product will always be there and you should make sure you are happy with it as it’s got your name on it and no one else is going to take the blame for it…even if it is someone else’s fault! Someone behind the scenes is pressurizing you or whatever the case may be, no one else is going to know that, it’s only going to be associated with you and you alone so make sure you are as strong as you can be and fight for the output you want.
            A good but frustrating moment can be when you are happily working away at something and suddenly you have an idea that changes its direction or it naturally progresses along a route you didn’t foresee and you start to realize it’s going to be a bigger beast that you expected…well you should be happy, right? That means you are developing and your creative muscles are flexing…but all you can think about is how much longer it is now going to take you, how many more nights in are you going to have, how many more nights at the pub are you missing...am I ever going to do anything else! Again, patience, it may be the right thing to do to carry on working hard and focus solely on it, or you may think you need a break and a weekend away will do you good so the work can be put on hold for a few days, either way, do what you feel is right and you will finish it in the end. A totally ridiculous analogy (but one that I will write and embarrass myself with anyway, remember I’ve got an hour deadline for each blog so give me some leeway…) is when I am waiting for a bus and people are rushing to get on and someone at the back of the queue (if there is one, I feel quite old fashioned even saying that) is trying to push in and so on…I often say to myself, just be patient, don’t get stressed or mad, don’t start swearing…the bus will only drive off when the last person gets on, no sooner, so I often just take a moment, let everyone else get on and then slowly and calmly make my way on at the end, everyone is on and the bus continues and I will get to my stop in just the same amount of time as if I had pushed in. Of course, the argument goes that if we were all so polite as to constantly stop to let the person behind us on first then we’d all be stuck in a cycle of pleasantries and no bugger would ever get on and we’d never move off…but you know what I’m trying to say. You will get there in the end, just keep working hard, have patience, remain calm and try and enjoy it along the way.
            I’ll relate this to writing but of course it can be anything: there is only so much time you can commit. You may have a full time job, or many, you may have children, you may have other family commitments, you could have a number of things that take up your time. Try and get a certain amount done every day if you can, like anything routine and practice are key. However, be patient! If you miss a day, well so what, just make sure you do it the next day. Don’t get upset if you get delayed for a good reason. If you are writing a story and a great idea pings into your head so you start writing something else for a bit, don’t get frustrated that you haven’t worked as much on the first one as you would have wanted, that’s fine, they’ll both get finished in the end. If you need to rewrite a scene do it, if you need to change a character, do it, if you need to make an amendment to something you have already amended twenty bloody times, do it, and so on…If you want a six pack stomach then you have to do sit ups every day. If you want to grow a beard then…erm, you don’t shave every day (that’s not so relevant that one, ignore), there is no shortcut, you have to work hard and dedicate time to it every day. However, that alone is not the answer, so make sure you learn to be patient as there are so many things that need to be done in life that you can’t expect it all overnight.
            I’ve got tonnes of ideas and I want to get them all out of my head NOW…I want to write more skillfully and beautifully NOW…I want to publish my next story NOW…but I also want to be able to remember to enjoy my life at the same time. We'll get there in the end.

RGR


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Monday, 21 May 2012

Conditions


It’s a difficult exercise for me to work out how I can translate the issues I want to write about into action. How can I put down in writing through plot and/or character a particular subject without making it seem like I have made a very flat two dimensional person exist with the sole purpose of being a walking advertising slogan for that subject?  I’ll give you an example. My first short story “The Silent Spaces” was constructed with a few different issues in mind. I won’t talk about all of them, and I won’t explain why I wanted to write about them, let’s just say I did (and of course talking about this in no way gives anything away about the character or plot of that story so if you happened to have read it then don’t think this explains anything, it doesn’t I promise! They’re just factors to think about that led me in that direction, make of their value what you will…) So, a few of the issues I wanted to explore may or may not be known to you, anxiety and panic disorders, derealisation, depersonalization, demophobia, ochlophobia, specific social phobias and social anxieties, glossophobia and throw in any other general fear disorder you want. You may by chance know people who are at one end of the scale, who hate leaving the house, are on multiple prescriptions and you don’t feel like being around when they lose their temper…or it may be you; you may be someone who gets ever so slightly nervous when they have to make a presentation at work but no more than that. There is nothing unusual about any of that, there are countless conditions and we don’t have a lifetime here to go into them all. What is, I think, going to be a lifetime lesson however, is how to make conditions believable and real in a particular situation…how to introduce it. Do I want to talk about for an example a man who happens to have a fear of confined spaces by having him accidentally locked up in a contortionists box, therefore I need to invent a character who is a contortionist, and so perhaps I need to set my story in a circus, therefore maybe I should set it in Ancient Rome, and…and…and…and before I know it I’m wondering what the bloody hell happened to the idea I had in the first place! That’s where skill and confidence comes in, not saying I have either, but it’s what as someone who likes to write, hopes to acquire the more they produce. So when an idea for a short story comes to mind, I used to panic as I really wanted to get stuck into it but I spent so much time wondering how I was going to construct a story in order to explore this one particular idea that I never got anywhere. I’ve got lots of other blogs planned where I’ll be talking about my views on being able to build up a story or how to create a character so I’ll digress to other areas soon enough but this seems a good point to remind everybody that I am a novice! I’m by no means writing a tutorial here, or giving a lecture, I’m simply giving you my opinions on my writing as I go along. So…back to conditions, it is an obvious thing to say but there is one condition that seems to have been involved in a fair share of subjects, since erm, language flourished…heartbreak. This is where it is interesting to compare and ask yourself why is it so hard to write about something (or write something original and meaningful) once you have thought about it. You won’t have read many books, watched many films and so on that have not included at least one character or situation that involves the painful subject of love being lost, destroyed, ruined, stolen, etc. it is something we all experience and all have our own take on, it is something so specific to everyone that goes through it that it feels like only we have genuinely felt this level of emotion, other people don’t understand, other people don’t know what it’s like and a plethora of other defensive mantras physcotherapists hear on a hourly basis. That’s what makes it such a common theme, it is a universal suffering, we can all relate to it; perversely that is perhaps why other darker themes are so popular too, murder, crime, revenge, etc. because although we don’t all necessarily go through it, we may all think about it! I hope I don’t sound unhinged when I say that I imagine a lot of people have thought about doing someone in…although of course knowing they never would in a million lifetimes. However because it is enjoyable to be an innocent voyeuristic participant to this sort of thing it becomes a theme we look for. I’m not particularly interested in those types of thing, I enjoy good thrillers and murder-mysteries like everyone else but when it comes to writing I have other things I want to explore. So I have a challenge. How do I write about emotional issues that I haven’t actually been through? How do I write about a specific social phobia if I don’t have it? However, that’s the fun and the enjoyment and the thrill of writing, I can be whatever the hell I want to be! I don’t want to make stuff up that is totally unscientific and nonsense therefore research is hugely important (another blog on that coming up), but you don’t have to be a murderer to write about murder, you don’t have to be a bank robber, secret agent, prison escapee, and so on to write about those things…so yes, to be truthful and honest is fundamental, but in the sense of conveying your feelings towards those subjects.  Does it help to have suffered a terrible break up in order to write convincingly about break ups…I’m not sure… my instinct is to say yes, but then, would I say the same about murder…no…so then I have to conclude that if you want to write, then write! Write about anything and everything you want to; if you can make it feel genuine, engrossing, captivating, believable then that is the skill of a good writer.
                  Anyway, my hour is up. To conclude, some of my stories I hope will be different to what you may expect, there are a lot of subjects that I want to cover, some may be a bit ‘weird’, some may be a bit ‘unusual’ but it all depends on your experience and objectivity, they may not warrant your attention at all…some stories will be more ‘normal’ for sure, some will be the sort of drama you have access to everywhere, however my hope is, the better I get, the more I practice, the longer I keep at it (give me five years as a minimum people come on) then the more I will be able to write in a way that conveys something as common as love and heartbreak and as different as demophobia with similar conviction…in a way that tells an interesting story that people will enjoy and be challenged by.

RGR
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Sunday, 20 May 2012

'The Hitch' and People That Impress


As I predicted before I left I used Saatchi’s ‘Be The Worst You Can Be’ more like a self-help referral guide to making yourself feel better before I went out on my own (it helped by the way, it’s very funny and insightful in places) and Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ was unmoved from my baggage, it is now on my ‘To-Do’ pile of books that I have every intention of reading but for one reason or several dozen I haven’t yet…however, yes, ‘Hitch 22’ I couldn’t put down. I thought I would share my thoughts, not on Christopher Hitchens specifically, but people that impress in general and how they help me to write.
I happen to like Mr Hitchens and I happen to share a lot of his views but I can see why people do not like him and I can see why people would take umbrage with his opinions but (I would hope) even his enemies would credit him with skills and attributes that make him the important figure he is (sorry not to use the word ‘was’, it feels like I should refer to him in a way that shows his meaning is still alive, for those of you who need to look him up (Christopher Hitchen's Wikipedia Link), he sadly passed away last year from cancer). Talking more generally there are thousands of people that have certain terms applied to them when they get to a certain position in the public’s eye; sayings like, ‘an institution…’, ‘heroic…’, ‘a leading figure…’, ‘intellectual…’, ‘veteran...’, it doesn’t necessarily have to be because they have spent decades working on a subject, although it does seem more readily applied to surrogate father/mother or uncle/aunt figures, but more because they are readily associated with a cause. You don’t have to believe in that cause, you don’t even have to believe in that person, commentators on public life seem to be more trusted than politicians say, but they have an undeniable influence on what we read, watch and hear…we all have our favourites, they could be musicians, actors, authors or any number of public/semi-public people that we tend to listen and believe more than others (or they could be your grandmother).  Those are the people I am interested in, I can’t list them, everyone reading this will have their own inclinations, some will be extremely famous and hugely influential in the mainstream media, some may be underground/obscure less well know figures; but I’m not worried about how radical or not someone’s views are; I’m keen to understand why those people influence us in a way that changes our lives. I’ll keep reminding you (actually myself) that I’m linking this all to writing so bear with me if I do veer off occasionally.
I want to write stories that convey the topics I’m interested in and one of the main tools to do so is to create characters. They are my vehicles of expression but they are limited to my total sum of knowledge. If I never accepted any external information into my brain then I’m stuck with what I’ve got and I would have to twist, re-twist and re-twist some more of what I already carry. Imagination is boundless as they say but that’s okay if as a 32-year-old man I have already gone through the educational system and had access to information and other people’s views all my life and know how to think for myself. If I was cut off now then how much could I say is new of what I come up with? Convert imagination into physical matter then I may have ideas the size of several planets stored away ready to be unlocked and molded but what is interesting to me is how other people, people who impress, have the potential to unlock those ideas for you. I read about how The Hitch talks about this or talks about that, or travels here and travels there; and I think I want to do that or I want to write about that. Would I ever have done so if I had never read his books, or seen his debates on YouTube? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean those ideas and interests weren’t there lying in wait for the Hitch to jog them out of their hiding places. The same goes for all those people that have inspired you one way or another, they may reveal a concept so brand new to you it takes you somewhere you never would have got to alone…or they could have just slightly nudged you…just enough…to make you take the metaphorical jump. Both, I think, are as important as each other. We all have so much we want to achieve yet we are chained by constraints, our health, our finances and so on and so on.
As I mentioned, there are thousands. It would be impossible to say who these people are, they are everywhere, and they can be in the least likely of places. You may love them or you may hate them. What the problem seems to be is energy…what I mean by that is that the passion, euphoria, inspiration, or whatever you feel like calling it seems to disappear soon after we close the final page of the book, the final curtain goes down, the concert finishes, the argument dies down, etc…we feel empowered and energetic and we rush off to make a go of it our way and then…soon enough we tire…we go back to our normal lives…we return to acceptance. Those people that impress seem to never lose that burst of energy, of course I’m not suggesting they don’t need to work hard or a blessed with genetic material that the rest of us don’t have so it’s easy for them; I’m suggesting in fact the very opposite thing, THEY WORK VERY HARD! That seems to be it, they go through turmoil like all of us, they go through those painful difficult stages of life and what makes a lot of them so special is that they go through far worse than the average person ever experiences or has forced on them. Yet they continue. They persevere. I hope that by reminding myself of this, every time I read a book, watch a play, watch a film, listen to a song, watch an interview, watch the news, tell myself something is too much of a risk, see someone do something very normal walking down the street in front of me or see someone do something exceptional on the other side of the globe, I remember that just to live is hard work but to do more is impressive...so get writing.

RGR


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