Rules, said Douglas Bader
Are for the Guidance of the Wise
And the Obedience of Fools
Self Praise, Lord Byron cried,
Is No Praise at all.
(The Empty Vessel the Most Noise makes, my mother said)
The Fool doth think he is wise,
The Jester said, but the Wise Man
Knows Himself to be a Fool.
Should Obedience be our Touchstone, or
Is Disobedience Wise? Who makes the rules,
And, Why?
Who makes the rules, indeed, and why? Are the rules set in stone, or are they merely a touchstone with which to assay the worth of our work? Guidance or obediance - how important are the rules?
Mostly, I suspect, rules were made because they seemed to work - to produce the best results, as judged by the standards of the time and place in which they were made. Spelling and grammar rules give certitude to transmission of meaning from author to reader, it is believed.
Mostly, again, this is true - particularly when the meaning being transmitted can be accurately and precisely defined, as in the case of manuals and text books - but where would poetry and literature be without all the great rule-breakers? Shakespeare's writings would have been so much poorer if he had stuck to "the rules" that existed at the beginning of his career. No doubt he understood the language well enough to do amazing things with it as it stood, but he also knew how to change and add to it, and did so in ways that affected all English speaking writers afterwards.
Likewise Lewis Carroll and his Jabberwock - if he had stuck to the rules and canon of his time, would The Goon Show or Monty Python have emerged? What about James Joyce, or Jack Kerouac - what would their thoughts have looked like if written down strictly according to the rules of grammar as then applicable?
On the other hand, Hemmingway, Greene, Le Carre, Christie, or Child are scrupulous in their observance of linguistic norms, but have succeeded in turning out highly regarded and widely read work - it's a fine line between the pleasure and displeasure of the editor's audit.
How can we know if we are writing wisely or foolishly? Anne R. Allen addresses that question in her blog post The Rules of Writing.... and Why not to Follow Them, but, in the end, it might come down to as simple a question as "Are you enjoying what you just wrote"?
When you read it out loud, does it move you? Do the creepy bits send a shiver up your spine? Do you smile at the happy parts, or do those words take you once again to a beautiful place you knew, long ago? Is a tear welling in the corner of your eye as you read that paragraph about a lost love?
The rules are worth knowing, there is no doubting that - just as there is no doubting the value in stepping onto the road less travelled to see where it leads you; if the destination isn't what you hoped for, then try another track - serendipity is waiting for you, somewhere around the bend.
Thursday 22 March 2018
Saturday 17 March 2018
Crossed Paths
Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? An oft asked question, and a deceptive one; it seems to require a yes/no answer, as if only one of the options offered can be true. Both are true, of course, just as the seemingly contradictory proverbs and aphorisms offered by our elders as cliched forms of life advice were actually joined together as part of a broader truth.
Even the simplest moment in our story can be the focal point for all sorts of threads, long and short, from earlier panels of the tapestry of life. What do the activities, for example, of Louis Pasteur, Howard Florey, Tim Berners-Lee, Walter Weedon, the vagaries of DNA replication, Johannes Gutenberg, and an anonymous person who passed through the same air-space as me a couple of weeks or so ago, have to do with this blog post?
Florey, of course, is the person credited with the first trials of penicillin - without which so many people now living would be absent from the world. Without Pasteur, though, would Florey have known what he was trying to fight?
Berners-Lee proposed the information management system that became the World Wide Web - an invention that could be held up as an analogy for almost all human creativity; like most things we do, it has released into the world the best and the worst of all that the human mind contains.
Walter Weedon was one of my great-grandfathers, and the family stories say that his choice of second wife had a significant influence on the life choices of his two daughters by his first wife - one of those daughters being my father's mother. Both left home early after conflict with their step-mother, no doubt making different life choices than would have been the case if home had been more comfortable for them.
The Great Depression was in full swing by then, too, and would also have affected their options. The choices made by one of them (my grandmother) set a course that helped me end up here in the beautiful Blue Mountains. When I walk to the village today, I am walking the same streets and tracks they did, alongside the same stream they once waded in while their dairy cows grazed nearby.
As for that anonymous person, well, I can't name you, even though I probably saw you, but you had been giving shelter to a mutated bacteria that was also setting out to seek a new home in the wider world - and it found my trachea. Its surface coatings were different to those of its ancestors, due to the inevitable coding errors that creep into genotypes during mitosis, and thus unrecognisable to my immune system.
No doubt, as it made itself comfortable in its new home, more transcription errors occurred, and many of its progeny were lost in the battle that ensued - but, for a while there, breathing was not an easy process. Thanks indeed to Florey and all the others whose efforts allow me to be once again sitting at my screen and keyboard, enjoying all the benefits that flowed from Sir Timothy Berners-Lee's genius.
Gutenberg was the man who put together so many disparate threads of human endeavour to come up with - almost 600 years ago - the processes that gave us, long before the World Wide Web, the ability to cheaply and almost indiscriminately spread our thoughts around the globe, so that they could be read long after the author had moved on to other activities, or even left the planet altogether.
What a boon his printing press has been to me as I was propped up in my chair, enjoying the benefits of Florey's work. I actually managed to make a small dent in my "To be Read" list, during which, I enjoyed The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, by Stuart Kells. Make some time for this one, it is worth a few quiet hours in a comfortable corner.
So many threads woven into my story that I can only partly know - so many more I may never know about; but what a pleasure it is go go searching.
Even the simplest moment in our story can be the focal point for all sorts of threads, long and short, from earlier panels of the tapestry of life. What do the activities, for example, of Louis Pasteur, Howard Florey, Tim Berners-Lee, Walter Weedon, the vagaries of DNA replication, Johannes Gutenberg, and an anonymous person who passed through the same air-space as me a couple of weeks or so ago, have to do with this blog post?
Florey, of course, is the person credited with the first trials of penicillin - without which so many people now living would be absent from the world. Without Pasteur, though, would Florey have known what he was trying to fight?
Berners-Lee proposed the information management system that became the World Wide Web - an invention that could be held up as an analogy for almost all human creativity; like most things we do, it has released into the world the best and the worst of all that the human mind contains.
Walter Weedon was one of my great-grandfathers, and the family stories say that his choice of second wife had a significant influence on the life choices of his two daughters by his first wife - one of those daughters being my father's mother. Both left home early after conflict with their step-mother, no doubt making different life choices than would have been the case if home had been more comfortable for them.
The Great Depression was in full swing by then, too, and would also have affected their options. The choices made by one of them (my grandmother) set a course that helped me end up here in the beautiful Blue Mountains. When I walk to the village today, I am walking the same streets and tracks they did, alongside the same stream they once waded in while their dairy cows grazed nearby.
As for that anonymous person, well, I can't name you, even though I probably saw you, but you had been giving shelter to a mutated bacteria that was also setting out to seek a new home in the wider world - and it found my trachea. Its surface coatings were different to those of its ancestors, due to the inevitable coding errors that creep into genotypes during mitosis, and thus unrecognisable to my immune system.
No doubt, as it made itself comfortable in its new home, more transcription errors occurred, and many of its progeny were lost in the battle that ensued - but, for a while there, breathing was not an easy process. Thanks indeed to Florey and all the others whose efforts allow me to be once again sitting at my screen and keyboard, enjoying all the benefits that flowed from Sir Timothy Berners-Lee's genius.
Gutenberg was the man who put together so many disparate threads of human endeavour to come up with - almost 600 years ago - the processes that gave us, long before the World Wide Web, the ability to cheaply and almost indiscriminately spread our thoughts around the globe, so that they could be read long after the author had moved on to other activities, or even left the planet altogether.
What a boon his printing press has been to me as I was propped up in my chair, enjoying the benefits of Florey's work. I actually managed to make a small dent in my "To be Read" list, during which, I enjoyed The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, by Stuart Kells. Make some time for this one, it is worth a few quiet hours in a comfortable corner.
So many threads woven into my story that I can only partly know - so many more I may never know about; but what a pleasure it is go go searching.
Wednesday 7 March 2018
Writing Rainbows
That famous tapestry The Lady and The Unicorn has travelled from France to Sydney, and it made me ask myself, what coloured threads would my stories add to the great tapestry of human history?
What colour is tragedy, or triumph? What about the Bayeux Tapestry? It contains a great deal of both in its 70 metres of embroidered history. Is green really the colour of envy, or is it the colour of life? Are The Blues really sad, or should we turn to black to express real unhappiness? When you read a sentence or a paragraph, does it bring a sense of a particular colour?
What about love; is it the lolly pink of Valentine's Day cards and frilly, sequinned tutus worn by four year olds? Or is it some darker shade and hue? No matter now separate or independent we think we are, the stories we live and tell are all tinted by the stories around us, and those that came before.
Do you have, for example, a sense of darkness when listening to the news? Is it a looming blackness, or a dull grey mist at the edge of perception? Does the air take on a golden tinge when you hear good news, or some tale of heroism or beauty?
A well written passage can invoke, without actually specifying, a range of colours, as well as moods and scents and sounds. Not only the words used, but the tempo and rhythm also. A good example is found in the closing pages of chapter 5 of Book 5 of The Lord of The Rings. Tolkien's choice of words invokes gloom, fear, darkness, and hopelessness - the tempo of the language slows, and weighs down upon the reader, before, suddenly, the last few paragraphs completely change rhythm. There is brightness and speed and hope. Read the last two or three pages aloud and it will become apparent - not only the mood changes, but the colours.
Norman Lindsay is worth reading, too - did you know that he wrote quite a few novels? The artist's eye is evident in his choice of words for both description and action - always evoking the colour and tone of the setting and the actors. The first chapter or Dust or Polish contains this part description of one of the protagonists.....
"Her skin was of a pearly quality that showed up the refined etching of her amber eyebrows"
Lindsay's style is plainer than Tolkien's, who would vary his tone from common speech to high epic mode to suit the particular characters and action he was writing at that point. Lindsay's work is all set firmly in lower and middle class Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and captures the tone of that part of our country and its history quite well.
Continuing in the Australian voice, another book worth reading is Green Mountains and Cullenbenbong by Bernard O'Reilly - the man who found the survivors from the missing airliner in the McPherson Range in early 1937. As a bushman who grew up observing the life of the Blue Mountains and the Kanimbla Valley, O'Reilly uses colour to set the scene and the mood, as here, on the first page.....
"On Wednesday, 17th February 1937, day broke sullenly without the usual rich reds and browns which attend a Queensland mountain sunrise. A pale grey scum had spread itself over the sky from the sea...."
What about the opening lines of The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck.....
"To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The ploughs crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly..... .... so that the grey country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover."
Simpler language, and shorter words and rhythms than either Tolkien or Lindsay, but Steinbeck was setting the scene for the stark and unrelenting disaster of the Dust Bowl. In the first page, the colours change, and change again, reflecting the course of the seasons that led to the Okie migration. By the end of the page, all is pale dust.
Reading these works aloud is the best way to experience the craft that each writer put onto the page, just as it is the best way to proof read and assess your own writing. An interesting experiment in that respect is to ask someone else to read your work to you, and see what tempo and colour they apply to it.
What colour is tragedy, or triumph? What about the Bayeux Tapestry? It contains a great deal of both in its 70 metres of embroidered history. Is green really the colour of envy, or is it the colour of life? Are The Blues really sad, or should we turn to black to express real unhappiness? When you read a sentence or a paragraph, does it bring a sense of a particular colour?
What about love; is it the lolly pink of Valentine's Day cards and frilly, sequinned tutus worn by four year olds? Or is it some darker shade and hue? No matter now separate or independent we think we are, the stories we live and tell are all tinted by the stories around us, and those that came before.
Do you have, for example, a sense of darkness when listening to the news? Is it a looming blackness, or a dull grey mist at the edge of perception? Does the air take on a golden tinge when you hear good news, or some tale of heroism or beauty?
A well written passage can invoke, without actually specifying, a range of colours, as well as moods and scents and sounds. Not only the words used, but the tempo and rhythm also. A good example is found in the closing pages of chapter 5 of Book 5 of The Lord of The Rings. Tolkien's choice of words invokes gloom, fear, darkness, and hopelessness - the tempo of the language slows, and weighs down upon the reader, before, suddenly, the last few paragraphs completely change rhythm. There is brightness and speed and hope. Read the last two or three pages aloud and it will become apparent - not only the mood changes, but the colours.
Norman Lindsay is worth reading, too - did you know that he wrote quite a few novels? The artist's eye is evident in his choice of words for both description and action - always evoking the colour and tone of the setting and the actors. The first chapter or Dust or Polish contains this part description of one of the protagonists.....
"Her skin was of a pearly quality that showed up the refined etching of her amber eyebrows"
Lindsay's style is plainer than Tolkien's, who would vary his tone from common speech to high epic mode to suit the particular characters and action he was writing at that point. Lindsay's work is all set firmly in lower and middle class Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and captures the tone of that part of our country and its history quite well.
Continuing in the Australian voice, another book worth reading is Green Mountains and Cullenbenbong by Bernard O'Reilly - the man who found the survivors from the missing airliner in the McPherson Range in early 1937. As a bushman who grew up observing the life of the Blue Mountains and the Kanimbla Valley, O'Reilly uses colour to set the scene and the mood, as here, on the first page.....
"On Wednesday, 17th February 1937, day broke sullenly without the usual rich reds and browns which attend a Queensland mountain sunrise. A pale grey scum had spread itself over the sky from the sea...."
What about the opening lines of The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck.....
"To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The ploughs crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly..... .... so that the grey country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover."
Simpler language, and shorter words and rhythms than either Tolkien or Lindsay, but Steinbeck was setting the scene for the stark and unrelenting disaster of the Dust Bowl. In the first page, the colours change, and change again, reflecting the course of the seasons that led to the Okie migration. By the end of the page, all is pale dust.
Reading these works aloud is the best way to experience the craft that each writer put onto the page, just as it is the best way to proof read and assess your own writing. An interesting experiment in that respect is to ask someone else to read your work to you, and see what tempo and colour they apply to it.
Monday 5 March 2018
My Time of the Year
Suddenly it is Autumn - after months of trying to keep the water up to the fruit trees and vegetable gardens, the clouds, heavy with rain, have drifted in among the trees along the creek.
On a sunny day, that rust-coloured casuarina, beyond the orchard, would be humming with bees - now it is silent but for the steady drip of rain sliding down its needles to the creek below. The garden itself is in transition; autumn sowings of peas and brassicas and onions are beginning to sprout, while the corn and pumpkins continue to ripen.
The garden is thick with all the usual birds, feasting on the bounty that warm weather brings, and the migrants are wandering through as well - the grey fantails have been dancing about in the bushes and along the vegie beds.
In this part of Australia, Autumn is probably the finest season - it is abundant, beautiful, and comfortable. The soil is still warm, the work of Spring and Summer is coming to fruition as the pumpkins and corn cobs swell, and the apples attain their perfect colours.
Beans, tomatoes, and zucchinis lurk in every corner of the vegetable beds and the trees, even as they prepare for Winter, are putting out one last spurt of growth. Every season has its own beauty, but Autumn, after the searing heat and dry wind of Summer, though anticipating the frost and the snow to come, is the happiest of times.
As the weather eases, and moisture returns to the bush and the gardens, we can again indulge in the luxury of a campfire in the backyard, without fear of alarming the neighbours or the local fire brigade.
On a sunny day, that rust-coloured casuarina, beyond the orchard, would be humming with bees - now it is silent but for the steady drip of rain sliding down its needles to the creek below. The garden itself is in transition; autumn sowings of peas and brassicas and onions are beginning to sprout, while the corn and pumpkins continue to ripen.
The pumpkins seem to have enjoyed the long hot summer - all self sown, and turning up all over the garden.
The garden is thick with all the usual birds, feasting on the bounty that warm weather brings, and the migrants are wandering through as well - the grey fantails have been dancing about in the bushes and along the vegie beds.
The Grey Fantail, subtle cousin to the exuberant Willy Wagtail
In this part of Australia, Autumn is probably the finest season - it is abundant, beautiful, and comfortable. The soil is still warm, the work of Spring and Summer is coming to fruition as the pumpkins and corn cobs swell, and the apples attain their perfect colours.
A leaf curling spider has found a perfect place amid the corn.
Beans, tomatoes, and zucchinis lurk in every corner of the vegetable beds and the trees, even as they prepare for Winter, are putting out one last spurt of growth. Every season has its own beauty, but Autumn, after the searing heat and dry wind of Summer, though anticipating the frost and the snow to come, is the happiest of times.
As the weather eases, and moisture returns to the bush and the gardens, we can again indulge in the luxury of a campfire in the backyard, without fear of alarming the neighbours or the local fire brigade.
Even a soggy King Parrot makes a great addition to an Oak Tree in Autumn
Thursday 1 March 2018
Time and Tides
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" said John Donne - but "I am a rock, I am an island" sang Simon and Garfunkel. Every aphorism or proverb has its "equal and opposite" - and each contains its fragment of truth. After all, you should always look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost - for every proverb my parents or grandparents tossed at me, there was an opposite but apposite one waiting in the wings.
Perhaps we could compromise, and see each human as an island in a vast archipelago of such islands - our shores washed by the swirling currents of time, and gnawed at by the endless cycle of the tides of ageing, until we crumble at last and become the sand on the beaches of other islands further along the flow. For some reason that puts me in mind of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy.
Our stories do not progress in simple, uni-directional lines, but wax and wane like the moon and the tides and the seasons of the years, and ageing - of people or societies - would chart like a graph of tides overlaid on the trend of global warming; surging up, falling back, and surging up again, slowly trending higher as they eat away at the land. The high tides bring in the aches and wear and tear of life, then they fall back, and for a while, all seems well again.
Sometimes the high tide runs further up the beach than any we have seen before, and sometimes it is mild, and the seas calm, and the inevitable progression seems to have stabilized. It hasn't, of course - another king tide will be along sooner or later, or a sudden storm, or both at once. Of course, the ebb and flow brings good as well as ill, and so it should it be in our story telling.
Neither your reader nor your editor will keep turning the pages for very long if those tides and seasons of life are not in full play as line follows line. Your story is a mirror of the lives you have seen and lived, and should be just as complex and beautiful, as fearful and consoling, as life can be - embracing its contradictions and confusion and meaning.
I envisaged us as islands in the vast stream of life, but other writers have painted people as boats upon that stream, turned about in its eddies, cast upon its reefs or scraping on its sand-bars; sometimes fighting the current, and sometimes tossed and tumbled by the storms that sweep across it, but always moving. Of course, that's one of the joys of writing - you can have it both ways. Even Sherlock Holmes returned after Sir Arthur thought him thoroughly disposed of.
Perhaps we could compromise, and see each human as an island in a vast archipelago of such islands - our shores washed by the swirling currents of time, and gnawed at by the endless cycle of the tides of ageing, until we crumble at last and become the sand on the beaches of other islands further along the flow. For some reason that puts me in mind of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy.
Our stories do not progress in simple, uni-directional lines, but wax and wane like the moon and the tides and the seasons of the years, and ageing - of people or societies - would chart like a graph of tides overlaid on the trend of global warming; surging up, falling back, and surging up again, slowly trending higher as they eat away at the land. The high tides bring in the aches and wear and tear of life, then they fall back, and for a while, all seems well again.
Sometimes the high tide runs further up the beach than any we have seen before, and sometimes it is mild, and the seas calm, and the inevitable progression seems to have stabilized. It hasn't, of course - another king tide will be along sooner or later, or a sudden storm, or both at once. Of course, the ebb and flow brings good as well as ill, and so it should it be in our story telling.
Neither your reader nor your editor will keep turning the pages for very long if those tides and seasons of life are not in full play as line follows line. Your story is a mirror of the lives you have seen and lived, and should be just as complex and beautiful, as fearful and consoling, as life can be - embracing its contradictions and confusion and meaning.
I envisaged us as islands in the vast stream of life, but other writers have painted people as boats upon that stream, turned about in its eddies, cast upon its reefs or scraping on its sand-bars; sometimes fighting the current, and sometimes tossed and tumbled by the storms that sweep across it, but always moving. Of course, that's one of the joys of writing - you can have it both ways. Even Sherlock Holmes returned after Sir Arthur thought him thoroughly disposed of.
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