This is Why Writing is Awesome.

Today I got roped into an off-stage skills learning days for 14-15 year olds in the theatre that is a fundraising client. Basically, 60 teenagers split into little groups and travelled around the theatre and had 2 minutes with a representative of many of the 'off-stage' skills it takes to run an arts organisation. I was the resident writer, as you'd probably guess.

After meeting all of us off-stage staff, we reassembled on the stage and they talked about what they learnt.

Writing was the only skill amongst all those on offer that did not necessary require university, could be learnt in your own time and off your own back, and all activity associated with training for it, save the price of pencils, was free.

They seemed to get that, and to like it. And I was so proud to tell them what I do. This is why writing is awesome.

I just thought I'd share.


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Writing, blogging and Stephen Fry

'Stephen Fry's Planet Word' was a BBC programme that ended  a week or two ago, but I only managed to settle down to watch the final episode last night, so apologies for the slight delay.

It was a really great series, and I thought this episode was the best, and would be the most interesting to share, as it talks about writing in all its incarnations, including Twitter and blogs (skip forward to around 46:00 for talk of blogging and Wikipedia).

Do you agree with their predictions for the future of books and blogging?







Yes, I'm Crazy: Nanowrimo 2011

Yes, I'm crazy, but I'm going to do Nanowrimo this year. I know lots of other people are going to be doing it too (250,000, or something like that) and they're not crazy (necessarily); the thing that's tipping me over the edge into 'crazy' is that I'm going to write 50,000 words ON TOP OF all the other things I have to do.

And therein lies the reason for doing it. I can't prioritise writing my novel at the moment because I'm just so damn busy, but when I look back at the month just gone, I think busy doing what? Sure, I earn some money and socialise a bit and see a few films and play with the cat every half hour or so, but time just seems to pass unmarked in everyday life without some teeny, tiny accomplishment of my long-term goals. And my long-term goal is to write.






Some Great Advice from Charles Bukowski

This will either fire you up massively, or make you want to die. Either way, enjoy.

So You Want To be A Writer by Charles Bukowski

'if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.' 

 

From All Poetry.







An Open Letter to All Writers of Books

Dear writers,

Hello, how are you? I hope your days are productive, your verbs are appropriate and your advances are suitably high. I do not wish to fall out, as I love and respoect what you do. Really. It's just I have a small bone to pick with you.

Your chapters are too long. Yes, I said it. A pertinent issue it might not be, in these times of no money or hope, but your chapters are rambling and often irregular, making it difficult to tell whether I am better off starting another one or finishing where I am, without flicking forward to find the next break and inadvertantly seeing the precise word on the page that gives everything away. It's a type of K-Complex I think, like hearing your name in far off conversations. I can't help but see 'yes', she sighed', 'she surrendered' or 'she died'. It leaps at me when I'm looking for the chapter break, so I don't like to go looking.







An Obvious Truth

   

 

Not that we aren't trying to mimic that, of course...

 







Confessions of an Elle fan

     Now, as fans of good writing in all its forms, you'll forgive me for wandering off books for this one particular blog post and straying into the not-so-oft mentioned world of magazines (Elle, to be specific) to talk about some particular writing to be found there.

     Or not, as the case may be. 

      Let me explain.







Book Quote Friday: Bohane

You know, sometimes you come across a book that shatters your concept of what a book could, or should, be with a new hook, a fresh turn or a incredible imagination stretch. You lay it down halfway through and exhale deeply, incredulously, not wanted to let it go from your hands but needing to take a break to come to terms with the onslaught. The magical and spell-binding onslaught. You’ve had that, right? This book is one of those. 







Over-Egging the Pudding

     As some of you may have noticed from my general absence and my slow comment replies in the first half of June, I have recently been away from my desk and en vacance around the south-western region of France. It was tres jolie et reposant, travelling from Bordeaux to Biarritz, Beziers to Bergerac (I didn’t plan those alliteratively) in weather conditions often not dissimilar to the UK (i.e. cloudy with a bit of rain) but occasionally glorious. Anyway, if you look at that route on a map, you’ll see it goes straight past Lourdes.







Warpaint: Harnessing a Mood

     One day last week I went to see one of my current faves, Warpaint, play, and they were delish. DELISH. Wonderful. Sexy, heady, lo-fi joy. The whole set was an unrelentingly hypnotic and cohesive wonder (as is the album). How/why, I hear you ask? Well, my friends, it is because they have harnessed a mood. That’s how/why.







Literary Locations - will your work always be better in you live in Paris?

       Many aspiring writers, myself included, have fallen for the idea that to write anything interesting or of worth, you must be living on the edge in one of the world’s great capitals, sleeping by day and slave to the bright lights and pen by night. One must really live, one must really feel, one must drink and smoke by the Seine with one hand on an earth-shattering idea and one foot in a pit of destitution. How could one write in a daylight hours after a good night’s sleep and a morning of adaptive suburban socialising? I must be Hemingway: leaving my wife whilst fighting the Fascists and spending my last dime on the whisky that is ruining my life.







Book Quote Friday: Why Limit Yourself?

     Why limit yourself to reality, when I know (I just know) that you can imagine so much more happening in your head? 

      There's a whole look of stuff that can happen to a whole lot of people in just an average day when you open the door to the surreal and nonsensical and dream-like, as hopefully today's book quote will illustrate...







The Truth About Creativity

     I saw this, I laughed, and then I felt so much better.
 

[via]

Click [via] link to see it large.







Book Quote Friday: Disguising the Big Stuff behind Vampires and Wolves

     I know, the last thing the world needs is another book blogger talking about vampires and werewolves. I’ll say it here: this is not a post about Twilight or any other YA adult vampire series. Nope, what I’m about to talk about here is the sexy older sister of those series, who’s had a couple of bad marriages, owns a gun maybe and has more than a few [emotional] scars. She is also hilarious and terrifying and has some big things to say about some big ol’ things. Yep, you guessed it: I’m talking about Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series.

 







Literature in Art, Part Two: The Cult of Beauty

     After spending the morning at the V&A exhibit that featured in Literature in Art:, Part One, I spent the afternoon at the V&A’s newest exhibit, The Cult of Beauty. This major collection focuses on the Aestheticism that developed in Britain in the latter half of the 19th century, which featured Keats, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Oscar Wilde as the poster boy, believing in truth, love and beauty as raison d’etre - in fact, all those lovely, life-affirming things they sing about in Moulin Rouge!. 

     Of course, finding literary inspiration in a movement that contained quite so much actual literature was never going to be hard; especially when it was so coloured by bohemia and decadence, sensuality and romanticism and a deep appreciation of the ephemeral beauty of life. The poetry practically writes itself, doesn’t it? 







Book Quote Friday: Kew Gardens

     Today's post comes from a short story that entered my life long ago, but recently re-entered it thanks to the swag obtained from the Vintage Open Day: ‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf. It is an ecstatic account of a sunny afternoon spent amongst the flowers, which sings with lyricism, colour and life. It is stunning, as hopefully the quote below, the first paragraph of the story, will demonstrate:







Book Quote Friday: Searching for the Apolitical

     Whilst involved in the conversation about whether writing needs to be political to matter on this blog a few weeks ago, I tried to think of a novel that, rather than engaging with the politics of its era or setting, shunned any discussion of them, and was all the the richer for it. So often the personal struggles of characters are wider political commentary, and on occasion, if they is no political feeling in a novel, it can be unclear whether they were shunning involvement in it or whether there was just nothing going on at the time.

     A thought then came to me, a whisper of a memory of a review, which turned out to be this:







Does Writing Have to be Political to Matter?

 As you may recall, I recently had my flash fiction piece 'Snow' nominated in the 3 Quarks Daily Art & Literature prize 2011 and that I ranked as high as a semi-finalist before not making it through to the final six. The finalists who did get through (found here) became these eventual winners:

1. Top Quark: Namit Arora, Joothan: A Dalit's Life
2. Strange Quark: Edan Lepucki, Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
3. Charm Quark: Elliot Colla, The Poetry of Revolt 







Book Quote Friday: Releasing your Inner Bitch

     This passage from 'The Pursuit of Love' actually made me snort in bed the other night:

     ‘For dinner, Linda wore a white chintz dress with an enormous skirt, and a black lace scarf. She looked entirely ravishing, and it was obvious that Sir Leicester was much taken with her appearance – Lady Kroesig and Miss Marjorie, in bits of georgette and lace, seemed not to notice it. Marjorie was an intensely dreary girl, a few years older than Tony, who had failed so far to marry, and seemed to have no biological reason for existing.’







Find The Ideas You Want To Work With

     Something I’ve not heard bandied about much on writing blogs and the like is the idea of reading philosophy to find the ideas that you want to work with in your fiction. I think it’s perhaps quite a good one as without ideas, stories can’t exist. And who have the best, biggest, most out-there and profound ideas? Philosophers, of course.