Tortoise and Hare

When our little group of writers meet to share ideas and practice our craft, we often use "prompt based" exercises to get the creativity moving.  A word, a phrase, a setting, or an object - or several of each - is placed on the table and the a timer is set running.  The pens and pencils set off in hot pursuit and, after fifteen or twenty minutes has passed, an end is reached.

An end, I say, because that's where we stop, even though the finish that each writer was aiming at, if indeed they knew for certain what their target was, might have needed many more minutes or hours to achieve.  After a brief examination of each work by the group, another prompt is chosen, and the race begins anew.  I tend to leave these sessions in an uplifted and enthusiastic mood.  I seem to be one of those people who finds it easier to begin a work with some costraints in place - such as theme, setting, and a time limit for completion. 

I also leave with a collection of short pieces that need further work - sometimes they merely need tidying up, but more often the ending has to be written, and the middle properly fleshed out.  Then, of course, the beginning will often need a bit of a re-write as well.  Occasionally, I find myself with a page or two that could turn into much more than a short story.

Some teachers of writing insist that this is the best way to write - pick up the pen and set out on the journey, never looking back until the destination is reached, and only then commence the task of perfecting the work.

Is it better to rush forward, spilling words across the paper until the conclusion has been attained, and then go back to begin the painstaking review and reconstruction of paragraphs and chapters - or to shape each word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph into a perfect form before moving onto the next?

Is that even possible if the writer does not yet know the ending?

For the writer, though God of the Universe that is flowing from the Authorial Pen, is not - cannot be- Omniscient until the final word is on the page, and the new universe has taken its full shape.  Only then can the true relevance and aptness of each word and phrase be known.

Others advise that, instead of reviewing and reworking, the author take the first draft and hurl it into the fire, before starting afresh and producing a new body of work from the ghost of the old. Finding the "best way" to write is a question that is always lurking in the background - whether I am at my desk or not.

I recently read Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life"  In it, she examines the alternatives, and gives reasons why each method is good, without selecting one above the others - which left me wondering if Professor Tolkien had been having a dig at teachers of writing when he had Frodo say "And it is also said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'"

I will just have to keep wondering, I guess - and keep that pen scratching across the page while I do so.

Skewed points of view

I have been contemplating how my age, social and cultural backgrounds, and life experience, affect not only my point of view as I write a story, but the points of view that I inflict on my characters.

There have been occasions in writing group that some of us have attempted to write from a different pov than our natural position - different gender, for example, is a common prompt.  But there is also something I said to a friend some years ago about generation gaps.  I have really grown up in a different world to someone who is twenty or forty years younger than me.  When I am talking with someone of another generation, though we both say we are speaking English, the words have subtly changed their meanings from my time to theirs.  New words and phrases have been coined, old words have been put to new purposes, and some words have fallen from use altogether.

To some extent, I can understand my parents, because I grew up listening to them, and my children have the same experience with me - but even another half a generation later, the flow of language has swept onwards, leaving me stranded on the mud-banks of time.  Doctor Who does a remarkable job, all things considered, being able to talk to humans from so many periods of history (and pre-history, it seems)

The differences include the technology, but also significant cultural changes - my experience with the tension of the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear war is different to the experiences of people born since 1970, but that may be changing as we speak, and another generation may be experiencing the subtle "valley of fear" effect that impacted  the lives, decisions and thought processes of so many people who grew up in the fifties and sixties.

Likewise, my parents and grandparents had direct experience of the Great Depression, and one or more of the World Wars.  My grandparents saw the great Flu Epidemic that slew so many of those who survived the First World War.  I lived in a world where vaccination, refrigeration, mains electricity, treated water on tap, and push-button sewage disposal seemed to have always existed - they knew what it was to walk to the well, or the water tank behind the house, and they knew of the need to boil the water, and they saw the children die of diseases - polio and measles - that were to my generation just a distant rumour.  The evidence of that passing world was still to be seen, in the maimed survivors of the recent World War who could be met on any suburban or city street,  in the newsreels at the cinema that discussed the final defeat of polio, or the visits to the rural relatives who still lived on dusty or muddy farms, getting their water from well or tank, and lighting their houses with kerosene lamps.

Of course, the discrepancy in viewpoints is not just caused by temporal differences - geography can have a say.  The charmed life that I and so many like me have taken for granted has never existed in many parts of the planet, including parts of Australia, and still does not exist in places where it should.  It is possible that it never will. In the seventies, we dared to hope that a Golden Age was dawning for all the world - in 2017 we wonder if the world will survive, and some of us believe that we may already lived through the best of times.  Is that why dystopian novels attract such a following?

Of course, many things don't fundamentally change, but simply adjust their clothes or hairstyles - bigotry, greed, anger, and fear still pervade society, and are still used by politicians seeking to gain power for themselves without having to present intelligent and positive policies.

Technological changes have effects beyond the obvious - someone like me, who has lived through many such changes (as well as launching into a Thoreau inspired "tree-change" for a couple of decades) is often stunned when a younger person reveals an assumption that certain services have "always been around"  Try explaining black and white television to an eight year old in the nineteen eighties, or the previous absence of mobile phones to someone born after 2005.  Technology that is now ubiquitous is considered to be something that "no one could live without"

For example, I recently heard an historian talking about the complaints made to the Council of the City of Sydney over the years.  I had never heard before that, when gas powered street lamps were introduced to Sydney, a policy designed to save money meant that the lamps were not lit on the night of the full moon, nor on several nights either side of it.  What seemed a logical cost saving measure  to an accountant who may never have been out in the streets after dark was a serious nuisance - even a danger - to the many people who needed to travel the city streets after sunset.

Did that happen in other cities of the world as the first street lamps were introduced?  If I were writing a novel set in that time, what other such quirks might affect my characters as they go about their business??  It is hard to realistically imagine a future world in a novel, but it can be quite tricky to write about the past if we take our 21st Century assumptions with us into the novel.

Group Marathons

Daily life provides me with so much to write about, while giving me lots of reasons to procrastinate about writing.  Writing group, for a couple of hours, puts me in the company of people with a common purpose – to get something onto paper.  It is only once a month, and yet, if the other demands of life have distracted me too much, going to that quiet space at the library with other like-minded people helps me reset my priorites and get back on the writing track.

Katoomba Library kindly allows us the use of a study space – our group is one of the results of a public meeting organised a couple of years ago by the librarians.  One of those librarians collates and publishes some of our efforts in the Writers in theMist blog, on Blue Mountains Library's website and this has led to some of us launching our own blogs and seeking out other places to publish.

People drift in and out of the group, though a core has continued on – there is no constitution or committee, nor any fees, or rules, other than an acceptance of the principle that we are there to create, and to foster creativity in each other.  Sounds serious?  Sometimes it is – some works bring tears, and many bring laughter.  We pick on grammar and spelling, suggest alternative plot lines, and generally get lost in the joy of creative writing.  It is serious, and it is fun – and I wish I had taken my solitary habit out into company much sooner than I did.

We recently had a writing "marathon" day – bringing a plate of food to contribute to lunch, we gathered at the house of one of the group.  The house had the light and airy feel of a place by a beach in much warmer climes - it was the only sunny day in an otherwise rain-drenched month - and we sat down to the long table to write while looking down a wooded gully towards the vast expanse of rugged country that enfolds Sydney's main water supply.

The writing alternated between sessions of working in a group to various prompts, and working on a piece of our own, each in our own corner of a veranda or a sunny part of the gardens.  It is amazing how productive you can be when all the demands of daily life and all the opportunities to procrastinate have been swept away by the commitment to a writing day.

Our first prompt based session took a different approach to anything I had experienced – we wrote while music was playing.  Three pieces – Norwegian, Scottish, and Irish – stimulated some interesting and varied written responses.  I love music, and often have it on in the background while writing, but this was a particularly vivid and poignant selection designed to evoke deep feelings.

It is one thing to contemplate a phrase, or some word, object, or picture, that has been placed in the middle of the table by the moderator for a particular group session – you have time to rack your memory, mentally pick up, examine, or discard, any associations such words or objects produce – and another thing entirely to respond in writing to music while it is playing.  The response is visceral and immediate, swept along by the changing tone and tempo of the piece.   Music, like scent, can reach deep inside mind and memory to conjure images we didn't know were present, or had long forgotten.

What an amazing cascade of memory and association is often produced by the initial evocation – as the first image is drawn out of our mind, through pen onto the paper, it in turn wakes more memories and calls forth more stories – stories we have not thought of for years, or even decades. 

Working on an essay about the history of the Bush Fire Brigade I had spent twenty years with, I decided to jot down the names of a few people I might have to interview or otherwise include in the story. Each would have a few lines summing up who they were and what their part in that history was.

What should have been a page or two became half a notepad, as one name and its story called up other forgotten names, and their stories.  These were names I had not been able to remember previously, but the act of writing part of the story of that group opened the memory files of so many more people and stories, just as unexpected sights, sounds, smells, familiar faces or old movies, can also be windows into the vast storehouse that lurks within our little halls of bone and brain.

One day, perhaps, we will truly understand the human mind – how it collects and stores memories, and how we recall those memories – but, until we do, any talk of uploading ourselves into machine storage and living "immortally" in such a state is quite fanciful.  Which doesn't mean a good SciFi writer can't imagine what such a state might be like.  Anything is possible to a writer - even the impossible.