The Creative Identity

Orphaned

Image by Galia Alena My mentor says that we cannot do more than a couple of things at once if we strive for quality. I've always agreed with him, especially when I was down in the dumps at work because I was staying up so late to write. Then I was re-reading my writing and it wasn't that great either. There are lots of sites and books that tell us that if we want to write, then we make time for it, and to some extent I've said so myself. But there is a difference between swapping mindless occupations (browsing aimlessly for example) for writing and adding writing to a schedule that, quite simply, does not allow for it. A friend of mine (mother of two, has a job, runs the house, the usual jazz), started getting up at 5 am in order to get some journal-time. She did it for a few times and then stopped. I am even impressed that she attempted it! If someone asked me to get up to write at 5 am I'd ask myself what stuff they've been smoking. I am immensely lucky in many respects. Whether I write right now, later, in the evening, before or after the exercise DVD, really doesn't make a difference. But then sometimes I too go through moments of displacement; I hit those when an important writing project has come to its end. Such was life at my digs yesterday, when I sent the precious piece off for... Read more →

How to Read and Why

If you're not from within the academic world, you may not enjoy intimate knowledge of Harold Bloom's works. But if you have spent any time at all at postgraduate level, then you'll know that the relevance of his contribution to literary knowledge is as polarising an issue as IKEA or Marmite. Bloom is a superstar of the critical world and in the environment he inhabits, it's quite difficult to find a colleague whose ego is smaller than Tom Cruise's. [Allow me to digress at this point: unless you've never sat in an academic conference, you haven't witnessed the lowest depths of classless intellectual misery. It is not unusual to listen to an absolutely brilliant paper delivered by some great speaker (say, Caryl Phillips), only for a member of the audience to suck all air out of the room with, 'Thank you Doctor. That is all fine and fair in some ways, but I wonder whether you've seen my research on...'. Ahem... spare me.] I've been in the company of some brilliant academics who consider Bloom too simplistic in his arguments (much could be said about this too, as in certain intellectual circles, only Lacanian gibberish seems to be worthy of intellectual accolades). However, everyone I know, academic or otherwise, agrees on his seminal article for The Wall Street Journal ('Can 35 Million Buyers Be Wrong? Yes', July 2000) where he trashed Harry Potter as a book 'for readers non-readers'. Make of my circle of trust what you will. Whether you... Read more →

Try This

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. –Anne Frank– I've got a little journal that I bought years ago. It's for children, The Aspiring Author's Journal, but despite its target market, I have to say that it's very, very good for adults too. It provides countless prompts (366 to be precise, so not, technically, 'countless' but you know what I mean...) of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Today's exercise is lifted from the journal. What do you think you would have written at six in reply to the prompt's question? What about now? What will you write when you're eighty? Do you think that human nature is basically good? Read more →

The Tractable Apostrophe

Yesterday I was talking about recurrent mistakes with a fellow editor. I immediately reeled out the since vs. as problem, affect/effect, compliment/complement, lie and lay (as we said on Monday), whose and who's and so on. For some inexplicable reason I forgot to mention the Saxon Genitive (which I ranted about here) and also the classic and extremely annoying its vs. it's. Therefore I thought I would continue on the theme of uses and misuses this week with a few words from Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves on apostrophes that denote possession. Before I do so, and in the interest of fairness which, at least on occasion, cannot hurt, the entire first chapter of this book is right here, courtesy of The New York Times, while a really good swipe at it is right here, from The New Yorker. And regardless of the latter, what Lynne Truss has to say in this section does hold true. Enjoy. 'It is time to confess that I have for many years struggled with one of the lesser rules of the apostrophe. I refer to the "double possessive", which is evidently a perfectly respectable grammatical construction, but simply jars with me, and perhaps always will. We see it all the time in newspapers: "Elton John, a friend of the footballer's, said last night..." "Elton John, a friend of the couple's, said last night..." "Elton John, a friend of the Beckhams', said last night..." Well, pass me the oxygen, Elton, and for heaven's sake,... Read more →

Correcting Your English: Lie and Lay

I am so glad I had already thought of this post dear reader because this morning I am running behind schedule. Not just writing schedule but any schedule I've got. I'm behind the laundry schedule, the ironing schedule, the cooking schedule, the vacuuming schedule, the reading schedule and the brushing dogs schedule. And the call insurance broker schedule as well. Try as I may to keep the domestic and the mundane off the weekend, they do come back to bite me every single Monday morning. But luckily, I had thought of 'lie' and 'lay' for quite some time, as a few weeks back I was flicking through Correcting Your English, which I already mentioned right here, and figured that it would make a great little post, especially as I've certainly gone off the rails of grammar and style in favour of unrelated yapping over the past few months. If you think that cats and dogs know this stuff backwards, please think again! I often read plenty of copy that demonstrates that humans certainly do not. Enjoy the examples and corrections courtesy of Professor Blamires: 'The verb 'to lie' is intransitive. Its past tense is 'lay' and its past participle is 'lain'. (Only the verb 'to lie', meaning to speak untruthfully, has the form 'lied'). The verb 'to lay' is transitive. Its past tense is 'laid' and its past participle is also 'laid'. Perhaps some difficulties arise from the fact that the past tense of 'lie' ('lay') matches the present tense... Read more →