Author: Loreful Pursuits

Wasting Paper

Perhaps because writing’s such an isolated profession sometimes, it can be a little too easy to convince yourself that you’re just, so to speak, wasting paper. You read something over too many times and it becomes a little hard to process it properly in your own mind. If you’re particularly incautious, you start changing things – nothing much, a word here, a word there, perhaps a comma or two – and before you know it you’re in real trouble. Each change makes it harder and harder to process and, it turns out, to your now jaundiced eye, to have messed it up completely.

From here to “writer’s block” is but a step.

But I’m here to share a secret with you. Are you ready? You probably already know it, but say it along with me anyway, boys and girls: There is no such thing as writer’s block.

Ah-haha, you might well say, says you – what about my friend so-and-so … We all probably know of someone who’s suffered agonies when the words just won’t flow, but this is good news for them too and is not to belittle their plight. As I say, writers, if left too much alone in their own company, can start spiralling in on themselves, can start overthinking every little thing, can— well you get the picture. Or maybe with you it’s something different. I can’t necessarily tell you how to beat your own variant, but I can tell you one or two things that have worked for me in the past, in the hopes that perhaps by illustrating it, it will help you see a way past it when the wee beastie sneaks up on you the next time.

If I can’t think what to write about, I literally like to start wasting paper. Well, not entirely literally (ah, poor abused word), but I will get a writing-block (sorry, writing pad), and a fountain pen, for preference, and start writing “scratch” notes – just putting down whatever comes to mind or whatever seems to interest me at the time. If nothing else this might get the words flowing again. If I’m in luck, it might help me come up with a whole bunch of ideas for future as well as present use. Writing’s (sometimes) like a box of chocolates, you never know quite what you’re gonna get …

Another way is to put some headphones on and put a movie on in the background, and maybe some music too for good measure. This may seem like overkill, but when anything that might look like that malevolent leprechaun-impersonator writer’s block starts sticking its ugly head over the parapet, I say ‘no mercy, and pass the napalm’. In the light of the flaming ground afterward (which can look quite pretty if your imagination’s in the right place – or quite grisly if it isn’t) you might see the solution to your problems. It’s luck of the draw sometimes – although, looking at the fate of the poor leprechaun, probably not luck of the Irish … Anyhow, if it gets you to rainbow’s end, who’s to complain – leprechauns are good at dodging, and writer’s block is like a cockroach anyway – it’ll survive a nuclear detonation and be scuttling out of its hole just as you stagger out of the fallout shelter. So be of good cheer, and get writing …

Human Stories

Have you ever wondered where all the stories went? The ones that made that you feel glad to be alive … happy, loved, inspired? The ones that made the world seem a better, warmer, brighter place – and in the telling, made it so.

Did you ever wonder where all the heroes and happy endings went, or whatever happened to adventure? Stories like this are more than just words or pictures that dance across our imagination: they are an essential part of what it is to be human – and we feel their absence as keenly as we would feel the absence of our dearest friend.

Things like love, and truth, and good triumphing over evil – they’re stories too, in a way. But since when did that mean that they weren’t true?

And to prove it to you, I’m going to tell you a story. It begins, Once upon a time …

… How it ends? Well, I could say that all the best stories never truly end, but a more honest, or at least more immediate, answer is that I don’t know yet. I’m still writing it …

The World Goes Round

People think there’s no more room to do great things (mainly because other people tell them so), that all the great things have already been discovered.

Leaving aside that it’s a big old universe out there, sometimes the biggest discoveries are right in front of us, even literally staring us in the face.

It’s all a question of mindset.

Francis Drake took on the entire Spanish Empire with a single ship and circumnavigated the globe. Winston Churchill kept the fight alive against one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. A grammar-school boy from Stratford (you might have heard of him, his name was William Shakespeare) wrote some of the most enduring works of literature ever known.

It just goes to show, you never know what you can do until you try.

And sometimes you don’t realise what you have achieved once you have – but that is another story, as the saying goes.

Another grammar-school boy, this time from a little village outside Beaconsfield, in our own time wrote some of the best stories of the last hundred years. His name was Terry Pratchett.

Because, as he said, nobody ever told him it was hard. Nobody ever told him he wasn’t supposed to.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere …

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 …

‘Inconceivable!’

People sometimes aren’t very careful about the way they use words. One of those words, is “experience”.

Picture the scene (you’ve probably been there before): you’ve just been told by someone who has never met you, and who has perhaps glanced briefly over your CV, that you really don’t have enough or the right kind of “experience” for a particular job, and therefore they won’t be ‘progressing’ you through to the next stage …

Now consider a problem: why is it that highly skilled people are having trouble finding work that matches their skills, at the same time as employers are having trouble finding people with those same skills? Could it have something to do with the potentially confused way we are defining “experience” in the recruitment process?

What is experience? If we look it up in the dictionary, the key emphasis is on skills and knowledge. It’s about what we can do, or know how to do.

The way experience is often defined during the recruitment process, however, often seems to lean more heavily on things like the number of years employed in a certain capacity. Presumably because that’s easier to measure and verify.

However, seldom does the question get asked, just what does that actually mean? (Whether in terms of skill level or knowledge, or more importantly, how one candidate compares to another in terms of practical ability.)

In the verbal confusion, the meaning and substance of the word itself – what you can do or know how to do – gets lost.

Result? Skilled people who don’t make it through the initial screening stage, and employers complaining about their inability to find skilled people. And all the while, those same skilled people are being put off ever applying for that company again by recruiters telling them they don’t have the necessary “experience”.

As Inigo Montoya famously said in the movie The Princess Bride, ‘You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means …’

Could it be that these potential employees have a great deal more experience than these recruiters have ever guessed at? Or would that just be ‘inconceivable’ …

Screening Out

Screened out. You tailored your CV to the job description, you made the best application you could, and still – screened out. Is this a familiar story to you?

For those of us with web analytics, LinkedIn profile-viewing figures, and a tendency to ask inconvenient questions, it’s possible to gain some quite illuminating (although seldom very elevating) insights into the recruitment and screening processes prevailing at many well-known companies.

And for whatever reason, I can’t help wondering if there’s something wrong with their whole approach.

Do recruiters sift through to find interesting applications or do they try to toss as many as possible out and see what remains? The way recruiters talk, would seem to indicate the latter.

What’s the difference, you might ask? (Glad you did.) It’s the difference between the baby and the bathwater: the recruitment process has become so fixated with throwing out the bathwater, it’s forgotten to look after the baby.

I collect examples of copywriting howlers (or if not howlers, then, at least, sloppy work, simple punctuation mistakes, things that fall outside reasonable matters of taste and judgement), things that have been published, and widely (often by companies “with a cast of thousands”). The results are not edifying.

Sometimes I have to wonder, if recruiters themselves are “screening out” – because from the look of things, many of them are just not paying attention.

How is it that candidates with highly sought-after transferrable skills get routinely ignored for jobs for which they are well qualified? Not “not offered the job” or “not interviewed by the hiring manager”, but “not even making it past the initial screening”.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat (who has nine lives, after all) seems to have done for Curiosity. Is this a reflection on companies’ recruiting processes? Or is it a reflection on recruiters?

Has recruitment come to this, that the old cliché ‘You’re not paid to think!’, has become a commonplace?

On one level, you can sort of understand it, on another it’s completely baffling.

Yes, it can make sense to semi-automate some processes, especially, say, if you’re overwhelmed with applicants and you need some method of sifting the most-qualified for more-detailed consideration.

But surely if a candidate has skills and abilities that are high-level and uncommon, and in short supply, the presumption should be, let’s see who else is interested before discounting them.

Maybe this reflects a deeper trend, one of failing to see, or be interested in, the extraordinary potential gains that come from treating individuals as human beings, rather than as mere replaceable (and disposable) widgets in a machine they’ve lost the drawings for.

That’s a challenge in the meantime for those who find their lives short-circuited or put on hold by the caprices of a flawed process. Not because of any misguided feelings of entitlement on their part, but because they just want an honest chance, and with the process as it stands, they don’t often get one.

Flights of Fancy

Nothing is more fatal to good writing than the temptation to let others tell you what or how to write, against your own best instincts. Writers are only human, and we can all only do our honest best — and we write best when we are most freely ourselves.

An idea that evolves on the page and takes on a life of its own, is more powerful because it comes from within us, and expresses something fundamental about being human.

That’s not to say our every utterance should be inscribed in letters of gold on blocks of polished marble for the benefit of future generations — merely that we write best when we write from the heart.

We may, sometimes, get a little bit carried away (with ourselves, or otherwise), and have to edit out a lot of surplus material. But if we didn’t write it in the first place without trying to second-guess our every thought, we’d never write anything.

And sometimes we just have to take the rough with the smooth – because, sometimes, we have to go through the rough to get to the smooth. Or else the “rough” has a character that’s all its own.

The whole business of writing, as with life itself sometimes, is often about doing our honest best at the time we do it.

It’s about having the confidence to be ourselves. You don’t look to others first for their approval, or for fear of what they might say. Life is too short –so you might as well be yourself.

It is in our flights of fancy, when we let our imaginations flow, our fingertips dancing across the keys, that we as writers are often at our most truly human.

It is when we choose to be ourselves, in everything we do, that we develop who we are: as writers and as people. That’s when we are at our most fully alive, and when we can truly call ourselves human beings.

Let the flights of fancy, flow: and whither they goest, we too shall go …

Dances with Destiny

A little kindness goes a long way. All the way to the heart, sometimes. And, as so often, it’s the little things that make a big difference in our lives.

It may be the little things that build up incrementally, or that happen on a regular basis — a text, a hug, a kind word. Or it may be the isolated little incidents and events, too small to notice at the time, and maybe even afterwards, that change the direction we go in at a crucial time in our lives.

So, little things can make a big difference. Not just when they happen to us, but in how the way we act affects the lives of the people around us. A small kindness at the right moment can change the course of our entire lives, and be the turning point in our existence.

Life is full of such turning points, little crossroads that, cumulatively, amount to a whole heap of difference. They may not mean much in themselves, but in their effect, they live on long afterwards.

That’s why you never give up, no matter how hard or hopeless things can seem at times. Because the future is not written in the stars, or in stone for that matter. It is within ourselves — we get to choose the directions and journeys that we go in and on.

We may not have a very good idea of where we’re going at the time, but we know it’ll be worth it when we get there.

Life, in short, is full of surprises, and nobody ever lost money by refusing to second-guess them.

Similarly, in writing: we may not know how it’ll turn out at the time, but we sit down and write, and suspend our disbelief for a while, and, lo and behold, we surprise our readers (and our doubters) — as well as ourselves.

Our lives, like all the best stories at the time they were written, are yet to be written. We can go dancing with destiny any time we choose. We just have to learn the steps, move in time with the waltz, and never fore-limit our own future: because we’re the ones who are writing it — one step at a time, one dance at a time, one day at a time.

You can dance, or not – it’s entirely up to you. But if you don’t dance, how will you ever know what you’re missing?

Destiny’s smiling at you – you wouldn’t want to disappoint her, now …