The Creative Identity

Try This

An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable who can make people laugh. -Will Rogers- A non sequitur is an illogical statement which elicits laughter because of the juxtaposition of the two elements. One must have at least a basic grasp of logic even to recognise the non sequitur. I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know. (Groucho Marx) Big Sale - Last Week! Did you get that one? How about this: Clean and decent dancing every night but Sunday. Humour is difficult and a little scary for the uninitiated but extremely rewarding to read when well-written. I suggest you get hold of A Cat Called Birmingham and You Can Take The Cat Out Of Slough... (both by Chris Pascoe) if you want to read effervescent, laugh-out-loud humour in just about every line. But for now, don't be scared, try your hand at humour. Write a non sequitur from this: The court awards your wife £ 1000 a month for support. Read more →

Excuses, Damn Excuses

When I wrote about not having time to write, it did not occur to me that those few paragraphs would turn out to be particularly meaningful. I have been engaged in an email discussion with a friend of mine ever since, talking about how hard life feels and how easy it is to make excuses. It is evident to many who write, and to just about everyone who would like to, that 'I haven't got time to write' is as lame an excuse as 'I am too busy'. Once you start looking at your life arrangements, you quickly realise that there is time to write (especially when you un-busy yourself a little). What then? Do you actually leap from your chair, fist-pumping the air and running to the first available table with a notebook and a pen? No, you probably don't. You are infinitely more likely to find another excuse. This problem with excuses is one that afflicts people across all professions and all industries at one time or other. I do find, however, that writers are incredibly apt at manipulating excuses in order to delay the sitting-down-in-front-of-the-screen moment, when the inner sound of one's own brain being squeezed into creative effort is about as pleasurable as running nails up and down a blackboard for hours. I understand that my words on this, and other such related matters, may occasionally sound as if dictated by a conceited sense of self-assurance built over years of practice, as if I were telling... Read more →

I Don't Want To Do This Any More (But I Will)

Image by Katarina K Many aspiring writers leap into an extensive project with enthusiasm, talking about it to everyone within earshot and then some. Then days and weeks go by, months pass and one day, a well-meaning acquaintance enquires about it and you’ll find yourself grasping for a non descript answer. As you walk away, rosy-cheeked and uneasy, you ask yourself why on earth you can never keep your mouth shut. There is more than that though, as the feeling that was already creeping on you, on and off, is here to stay: you really don’t want to do this any more. This despondency, compounded by a deep sense of loneliness, is part of the writing life, as much a rite of passage as the hysterics reserved for the publisher who announces yet another draft and yet another delay. I realise even too well that these words are unlikely to be of comfort to you; if truth be told, they are not of comfort to me either. I am not writing a novel but I have written a PhD and for all writing purposes, and at over 80,000 words, I can certainly define a PhD as an extensive writing project. I put it to sleep late last summer and now it has returned from the dead, as many PhDs do, requiring revisions. And I don't want to do these revisions. I am not the first, nor am I going to be the last, student who is faced with the prospect... Read more →

Try This

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. -Truman Capote- Digressions often irritate me in novels, but, oh how much do I love to go off on multiple tangents when I am writing! You can see it happening even right here, where I feel that my own writing style, annoying as it will be to some, does not need restraining. Bad practice, of course, as the more I digress and the more I am likely to digress when I really should not. Cutting out the unnecessary though is not just about digressions; the road to writing hell is paved with adjectives and adverbs, those pretty little words scattered across the page like rose petals outside a church. If I remember correctly Stephen King (in On Writing) says that adjectives and adverbs are very much like dandelions: you spot one in your garden one day and it looks pretty; leave it there and in no time at all the garden will be littered with these nasty weeds. Despite my love for words, words, words, there is nothing I adore more than removing entire paragraphs, then adjectives, adverbs, repetitions, clichés and more. I just don't do it often enough. Today, try to be ruthless. Go back to one page you've written and cut it down by one third. Read more →

Licence To Write

'What's your favourite book?' is a regular question that bounces among friends, especially if your circle is a creative one. People usually respond with something like: 'Oh gosh, my favourite book! I couldn't possibly choose one!'. Then, after much coaxing and thinking, they come up with three, four, five titles. I've always wanted to be the person who can fire off an answer, and an exceedingly impressive one at that, without having to mull it over for one split second. I’ve always wished to raise above everyone else by zinging my interlocutor with a super-classic (say War and Peace), or with something that I couldn't put down (maybe Paradise Lost), or with one which has been read for centuries (The Bible), or with a far-fetched book that doesn't even exist, the one with the potential to make me sound either incredibly cultured or conceited depending on who was asking the question. Amidst all of this mental white noise though, I had discounted one type of book which does not belong to any given bookshop category and which is neither a classic nor enjoys worldwide acclaim. Yet, each one of us can immediately recognise it once we start reading: the book that was written for me. This is the book that, a few lines in, gives you reasons to pause as you double-check the cover. Maybe the author is your most intimate friend who is using an anagram nom de plume. When even the pic on the back cover elicits no... Read more →