Posts Tagged "Writing"

On literary cannibalism

Posted by yseult on Dec 5, 2011 in Writing

A pretty aggressive article by Laura Miller on Salon.com on her problems on NaNoWriMo. While I won’t go into the ironic ridicule with which Miller is covering herself ranting against writing when she herself has already been published, as if to say ‘Ah… you know, it’s actually not that interesting’. But we’re not looking at the Mona Lisa here, rather the opposite.

First off: I like her point. I don’t like her writing, much too verbose for what she’s saying, or rather repeating over and over that reading is more important than writing, because – after all – writing will out on its own.

But see, the lady has a point. Or half of a point. Because without reading how can anybody aspire to actually write anything decent? Miller is right in emphasising:

I say “commerce” because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”

That, I personally find shocking. While I’ve been struggling to keep up my reading pattern of at least one book a month ever since getting pregnant and juggling a full time job, I would never one minute put my writing in front of my reading. Both are symbiotic and I realised that the first time I thought ‘wow… you’d think this is Lord Byron’s soggy writing’ when reading something old of my own feather. We are fundamentally influenced by what we read and even more so immediately after we’ve read something. This influence is proportional to the length of the book or the length of the author phase that we are going through. I am sure others have witnessed this slow tendency to start writing in large, expressive sweeps after reading a Brontë novel.

While I don’t savour Ms. Miller’s venom as much as other commenters have, I do salute her drive and her message: we need to encourage people to read more.

Ask yourself, would you like to read an epic three part novel by an author that hasn’t read Shakespeare and is almost illiterate in terms of world literature and writing?

I wouldn’t.

There used to be this rite of passage that in order to write, you had to read the classics to understand the finer workings of good plot, of good character depiction etc. and namely to what my mother (and Rilke) used to call ‘form your mind’. This, of course, is an ongoing process and at the end, the things we write at the end of our lives are fundamentally different from what we write as teens. But that’s the point. Without progression, a novel can neither be good nor bad. It would just be a very boring play. Called Waiting for Godot.

Godot never came.

Hence no progression.

Makes for a bad novel. But a great play.

Without knowing these subtleties, without referencing them, we lose this fundamental and important element of human culture that makes progress even possible: mental and literary cannibalism. Without it, everything will become just an occurrence. A singular event in the minds of currently living persons. As opposed to a literary act that is realised within a set of events lined together through time and that through quotation and citation becomes a strand that makes up the fabric of human creation.

Keep it simple.

Posted by yseult on Jul 7, 2011 in The Odd Philosophical Question

Keep it simple.

It’s an art.

I’ve been struggling with this. A lot. For a long time. While I may seem to be very ‘straight to the point’ and quite guided, my mind is a constant firecracker, spawning little sparks of intuitions and thoughts and it has taken a lot of learning to work with it (instead of against it and trying to constantly change it. I am sure that I would have been a perfect candidate for a Ritalin dose in today’s school system).To learn to focus on one spark only, maybe two. To really focus on one argument, one question in a discussion and keep in tune, instead of blasting off.

But of course focusing does only so much, when you can’t stop or turn down the sequence in your head or your inner dialogue. So, most of the time I am discussing things with my husband while in the background two other train of thoughts are battling it out and I am planning the meals for the week ahead.

That is also the hidden reason why J has no patience with me showing him things on the computer. I simply move too fast and am doing three things at the same time. It makes me a lousy explanator, but a great supporter when something about his MBP is not working as he wishes.

For me, keeping it simple, cutting myself off and really listen to what is being said in my own head is a challenge.

It’s an art.

No. The fact that there are certain techniques involved doesn’t mean that it excludes the artistic value. My techniques are artistic in their very core. Technic and techniques comes from the greek word techné litteraly meaning ‘art’.

Reaching peace of mind. True silence that will allow you or me to create what we can, is work.

And yet, everyone is an artist at it.

Why silence and creativity go together

Posted by yseult on Feb 20, 2010 in Communication

Silence and creativity are linked and if we manage to free the one with the aid of the other, we might not just become better artists or better ‘creators’, but also we might achieve better understanding of ourselves and the people we are hoping to reach.

One of my twitter contacts – Masafumi Matsumoto – is following the Artist’s Way at the moment and his insights on his blog on this experience are pretty revealing and a great read.
This week, he has issued a challenge to everyone who’s reading him and following him, to simply ‘not read’. One of the exercises of The Artist’s Way is to abstain yourself from reading for a week and observe the effect on your own creativity.
Now, the Artist’s Way is something that has become very popular in the mid-80ies and the synthesiser of this method Julia Cameron has opened the creative pathways for a lot of people with her method (which incidentally came from years and years of teaching courses with the same aim. In that the book differs a lot from other ’self-help’ or ’self-teaching’ books on writing, creativity, and artistic expression.) and with the rise of chatter of our everyday online and social life oversounding our creative selves from our, is as relevant as ever.

When I came across the Artist’s Way a couple of years ago, I struggled greatly with the ‘reading abstinence’ as an assignment. This was before the internet became more a means of communication and exchange, and still was a tool for research and the occasional replacement for a physical written letter.
Reading is an integral step in the construction of our shared social and personal realities. The universe we construct around ourselves and within us are made up of various kinds of building stones: reading is an integral part of the cement that link those stones. It’s not just the dialogical nature – explained best in Gadamer’s method in Wahrheit und Methode – of every text, but much more the witnessing a thought outside the confines of our own mind that hold these said building stones together. Without it, they become a wall that keeps us within our own reality and soon cannot be overcome by any argument or realisation. Or to say it differently: instead of stepping onto those building stones and looking ahead, we step down and dig ourselves into the ground and the building stones just become a wall keeping our gaze from the horizon.

While I still hold the above, coming back to the Artist’s Way – thanks to mma323 – and that famous week of reading abstinence I see the profound truth in Cameron’s exercise that I failed to before.
Because today I deeply feel that the overall chatter that surrounds us today has increased and continues to increase still. It’s suggested to us by a whole set of social pressures that we need to be efficient, constantly online, constantly reachable and constantly ’there’ or something is wrong with us. That pressure of efficiency then pushes us to fill every little minute between greater actions such as work or shopping etc. will said chatter. A quick check on your email here, a quick read through the latest headlines there and the small moment that could have served in silence to recollect ourselves and our thoughts is gone. This immediateness and the contraction of distances between people make for a rise in stress that can be remedied fairly easily. (Fairly easily, because recent studies concerning the peer pressure through Facebook et al. suggest that leaving the chatter for a while can actually harm your social contacts.)

But for what? In the Artist’s way, the goal is clear: to free your creative spirits and pathways, free yourself to write, draw, paint, express and in the end find yourself again. Web 2.0, where the emphasis lies on the exchange and the us, makes this even more important. Whereas our exchange on the web is based on the basic structure of ‘I transmit’ – ‘You comment’ – ‘We discuss/exchange etc.’, the Artist’s Way emphasieses a return to the ‘I do’ – ‘I create’.
In a way it goes back to the first step, before you share. Redefining ‘what’ you transmit on the Web and through the new media. Without that the content of what you want to share becomes vacant, empty and we then immediately start to fill it up with nonsensical self-production. We all do it. All the time.

So, maybe the lesson here isn’t just: stop reading, stop using this or that service, but rather: think about what you share and don’t lose yourself in it.

A reading abstinence certainly helps to get a clear idea of what we all consume on a regular basis. It also serves to give value back to what we really end up reading rather than being intellectually bulimic with our everyday intake of the written word. Because in the same way bulimia is disproportionate and leaves you without healthy nutrition, so is and overuse of the new means of the transmission of knowledge and opinion in the digital age.

Creating patches of silence in our lives will not only open up creative influences, but it will also give back value to our interactions and that in turn will lead us to a better understanding of each other, because only when we have the feeling that people are actually listening to what we have to say and not just quickly taking notice of it, can we assume the true basis of exchange and mutual understanding.