Month: January 2018

The Past Was Human

History, or indeed any story, often isn’t as straightforward as we like to think. For one thing, there are some surprising things that have, so to speak, slipped our memory down through the centuries.

Like the time Elizabeth the First rescued Scotland from the French, and didn’t try to outlast her welcome.

Or the demagogues of the French Revolution whipping up the winds of war for their own ends, as Mam’selle Guillotine claimed yet another victim.

Or Francis Drake sailing round the world, and taking on the whole Spanish Empire with a single ship.

A lot gets forgotten in history …

But we can vividly remember and rediscover it if we read widely enough.

There are, if we choose to look, many unexpected “aspects” of history like that, which suddenly make something that seemed dull, full of life and colour. Strange how that happens when we remember that the past was human.

When there’s a battle for the soul of mankind, as there frequently is, it’s important to realise what’s gone before. Because otherwise, the tides of history will sweep us out to sea in a strangely familiar way … and it’s déjà vu all over again.

The Wastepaper-Basket of Life

The writer Rudyard Kipling apparently had – in addition to the usual wastepaper-basket of a writer writing nearly a hundred years or more ago now – a kind of box or case labelled ‘Notions’, where he kept notes, ideas, unfinished stories, and the like. Things he’d like to come back to later, or maybe turn over in his mind some more.

I imagine Kipling – writing by hand, and with no word processors (and only later in life starting to experiment with typewriters, even) – probably knew as well as anyone, that writing takes place inside our heads as much as it does on paper, and that the things that really matter, are decided more by instinct than by conscious design.

“Guess I done overthunk it again …”

If there’s one thing a writer knows about, it’s those times when the words aren’t flowing – or life isn’t going right – and we find ourselves really, really overthinking things. As if, if we could only analyse something enough, we could think our way out of it. As if everything somehow must or ought to be the result of our conscious intentions.

To borrow a line from Shakespeare (the original writer’s writer), ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’ … What we choose matters, but it’s far from the only thing that does.

The Screw-Up That Made Good:

Life’s a little bit like a writer’s workroom. We have all the things in progress, the unfinished stories, the scenes we are, so to speak, still writing by living them – not to mention the overflowing wastepaper-basket of things we know or don’t know – and, and this is important, we have always by our side a belief and insight that is at the core of what a writer does, and of what human beings do every day: “The story isn’t over yet.”

Our worst mistakes, the ones that maybe even keep us awake nights, are by no means as bad as they seem – and certainly not as bad as we think – and it’s only by making those mistakes, that we can learn from and rise so far above them, as to be actually glad we made them in the first place.

Now isn’t that something worth believing in …

The Elephant of Surprise

A small confession:

Blogging’s a bugger, but there you are. That’s the practical working motto of a working writer with a deadline to meet and no idea what he’s going to write about.

It seems an awful thing to admit, but the way that things get written sometimes, indeed, very often, probably, is by writing just whatever’s on your mind – and, more often than not, it turns out better than some meticulously planned magnum opus from the genius around the corner. Spontaneity still has something to be said for it, apparently.

The Unexpected Pachyderm:

This is what I jokingly refer to as the Elephant of Surprise – it’s the elephant in the room and the element of surprise … thus, the Elephant of Surprise. It sums up what experience ought to have taught us by now, but which ego makes us forget: surprise is vital.

What do I mean by surprise? I mean that you have to be open to being surprised. If you know just exactly what’s going to happen, in every detail, not only is it not going to be much fun to write (and possibly not even that much fun for the reader), but it’s also likely going to be wrong.

To whir is human …

Let me explain. Your subconscious tends to be a much better writer than you are – it’s a writers’ cliché by now. But it sums up, that conscious design loses to subconscious creativity every time.

Not to mention all the little idiosyncratic “imperfections” you lose in the process. It’s those little imperfections, in context, written in the heat of the moment, that give life to what you’ve written, and that, cumulatively, make it as near to perfect as it’s going to be for anything written by human hands.

Dung manifestin’:

The secret to good writing in this context, is that it’s written in context. It’s your honest best at the time. And that, my friends, is the Elephant of Surprise. Please don’t feed him (or her, I’m never sure which) peanuts on the way out – it distracts him (or her), and then I have to take time out of a busy writer’s schedule (I wish) to muck out the stalls.

But then, maybe that’s the writer’s lot – up to your knees in elephant dung with no way out, and then, just when you were ready to throw up your hands in despair, comes the surprise that you weren’t expecting, and nor was the reader, and life is fun again …