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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| A Trident of Laws When I was young and had just half a novel and a collection of pretty awful poems behind me, I decided that no one had anything worth writing about until they were at least forty years old. This did not stop me from trying but it proved pretty true in my case - everything up to that age was basically teenage angst and getting rid of ideas that were as practical as a cardboard swimsuit. In my early twenties, I had a friend who was studying for his master’s degree in English Literature. He wrote a lot of poetry, even more than I did, and his stuff was beautifully constructed and polished, like a favourite old car lovingly attended to. I was less aware of it then but now, on looking back, I realise that the great weakness of his writing was that he didn’t really have anything to say. His poems were gorgeous constructions of delightful words but they contained nothing. I think my theory on writing and age was a subconscious recognition of this. At the same time, I had another friend, an artist aged just over forty. He was known as the finest painter in the country where we lived and his technique was indeed phenomenal. He had the ability to paint anything he could imagine. I understood this because I was in the last throes of trying to be the greatest painter in the world. It was partly my inability to reproduce the paintings in my head that stopped me in my ridiculous ambition and enabled me to turn to writing. There was a problem, however. Although my artist friend produced some brilliantly executed stuff, it was empty and pointless. He once admitted to me that his latest painting was based on an idea from a book his wife was reading. When your ideas are second- or third-hand, it’s time to find out what’s wrong. Everything became clear to me when the guy showed me some of the paintings from his youth. They were messy, imprecise and careless in style, but showed enormous passion and depth of emotion. They were far, far better than anything he had done in the last ten years and I suspect that he knew it. Certainly, he was aware that he had controlled his creative urges during that period while he schooled himself in technique. He wanted to be able to paint absolutely anything and was prepared to sacrifice the time to gain that ability. The trouble was, by the time he got there, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. It became clear that the road ahead was like a narrow path between two precipices - what mountain climbers call an arête. On the one side I should forget writing anything worthwhile until I was much older and, on the other, I should not chase after technique but allow it to come naturally through experience. To some extent, at least, I have kept to this intent. For many years I wrote very little creatively, although it has always been impossible to stop myself honing whatever writing I was doing, even business letters and notes to myself. They told me this blog should be informal and not to bother too much about grammar and spelling. Hah, as if that were possible. I suppose that I could say that I’m old enough now to have a few things to say. A very good internet friend of mine taught me that memory is a wonderfully rich mine of stories that others find interesting (to us, they’re just what happened). And the silly philosophies of youth are long buried in the long march through reality. At the same time, I have not been swayed to acquire technique and I still have no idea what the various names for poetic meter mean. One has to stay at least a little wild or become tamed and boring. And now, at the age of seventy-two, I find there’s another matter to be attended to. I learned it in the course of writing The Gabbler’s Testament twenty years ago but only recently have I understood it in relation to my other “laws.” There is a chapter in that book that required me to bare my soul in a way that I had never done before (it also required me to write the longest sentence known to mankind but that’s another story). It was pain to write it but resulted in the best chapter in the book. So I have a trident of laws for writing: leave it until you’re ancient and have something to say (check), don’t go running after perfect technique (check) and your heart, your deepest secrets, are where the best stories are (well, that one’s being checked). You’ll just have to read me if you want to find out if it all works. Word Count: 807 |
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