Retreating

So, for the first time for 7 years, I'm taking a Twitter break, you won't find me over there right now. (There is some fake account, @boyletania, which looks like me but isn't me!). I have just been on a blissful three-day meditation retreat, and it spurred me on to strip away some of my self-created mind-chatter. If I could only tweet once a day, that would be fine, but Twitter has become such a big part of my life, and a mostly joyous one, that I don't seem - or didn't seem - to be able to do that. So I'm having a break. I may be back in a month, in a new way. I am watching myself to see if I feel the urge. I suspect I want to try more one-on-one conversations rather than one-on-5000 - but I will miss you all! I will see if write more, write differently, write about loss & sadness... :)

I am half way through my PhD and really want to experience every moment of it, allow myself the gift of total attention to it and to the book I am working on. It's all going so fast, I don't want to miss it. 

In other news, I have two new poems in the brand new issue of Shearsman magazine, available here, and my poem, Lessons in Flanders Agriculture, which won 3rd prize in the Ruskin Poetry Prize, will be published in POEM magazine. Not sure exactly when, but - yippee!And I have a new - and LONG - short story coming out in the Summer issue of Ambit magazine. I'm all print right now, which is delightful. There may be some radio news coming up, as well as a collaboration with the wonderful Jo Bell - whose new poetry collection, Kith, comes out this month! Will keep you posted!

My writing process: what I'm learning

• I just looked at a story I hadn't looked at for 5 months - the editor of the anthology it was commissioned for made excellent suggestions - and tweaking it was so much easier than when I'd just wrote it. I could see where I'd overwritten, where I had put in "pretty" language just for show and not for the story. I was not attached to it anymore, it wasn't my latest "baby",  so I could strip all that away without regret. Let it lie, put it away, for at least a week
• I shouldn't show a first draft to anyone, I need to make sure I am happy with it, I'm not trying to please a group, or even any one other person. Write what I want to write
• I am not going to submit so many stories for publication, will hold stories back for my new collection. Don't worry about being published.
•  I wrote a new story yesterday in one sitting, while playing online scrabble, alternating between writing and playing my turn (see recent New Yorker article about possible benefits of distraction). Distraction helps me stay in the zone, don't feel guilty about needing that
• I am reading so much and it all inspires me to try new things, things that may not be what the market "wants", but which I love to write Don't worry about the market
• I am reading Collected Stories by a 90-year-old author and seeing how what she wrote changed over nearly 60 years. Give myself time and space to evolve 

New Yorker and Janet Frame on creativity

I am always on the lookout for different ways to approach creativity and especially writing, this odd thing that we do, and this weekend I found some excellent quotes in the New Yorker and in Janet Frame's astonishing and often sublime The Daylight and the Dust: Collected Stories.

The New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear is about Barry Michels, a kind of therapist to the Hollywood entertainment industry, but about work, not about their fraught love lives, etc... So much of Michels' counselling techniques made sense to me, got me thinking. For example, when dealing with a screenwriter who couldn't write, "Michels ...told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels' instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence every written". The writer thought this was stupid and pointless. But,  what do you know? It worked... "six weeks later, he had a 165 page script... when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award". There surely can't be a more compelling way to start an article!

Michels and his colleague are working on a self-help book that basically involves "patients [being] told to visualize things going horribly wrong". Not sure about that, but this spoke to me:

"By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels' practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung's Father archetype. 'They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,' he says [Ah, does this ring a bell? Sure does! T] 'Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he's answerable to, but it's not human. It's Time itself that is passing inexorably...Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you're defying this authority figure.' Procrastination, he says, is 'a spurious form of immortality,' the ego's way of claiming that it has all the time in the world. Writing, by extension, is a kind of death."

What Michels' makes his client do, in the face of this, is sit in front of their computer for a fixed time each day and say "I am surrendering myselt to the archetypal Father, Chronos. I am surrendering myself to him because he has hegemony over me." An interesting suggestion, I may well try that. You can read the whole article here.

Talking about procrastination and time wasting, I was very struck by a story in the Janet Frame collection, the daylight and the dust. I  had never read anything by her, I got this collection out of the library, read the first story and though, This isn't for me. Yet, I kept renewing it, something telling me not to give it back yet. And whatever that something was (Father Time??), it was right. I read a story from the middle of the book and was absolutely blown away. Her writing is stunning, poetic, rhythmic, hard-hitting, moving, shocking. It really really spoke to me, I loved what she did with language, I could hear it singing to me in my head and for the first time ever I was compelled to read a story out loud

One of the stories that I wanted to mention here is the Pleasures of Arithmetic. Basically a two-page flash story about the mind-numbing effects of television:

"Each night in each of these ten living rooms there are ten times how many people watching the same programme, receiving news bulletins (the diminutive of bullets, listening to the same music, and in the end thinking the same thoughts, in the end hosts only at the point of a gun to thoughts donated to them by courtesy of the television company... Thoughts in identical clothes... dull suspicion, criticism, my house is yours....

'What we need,' said the politician, 'is unity.'

'Our aim,' said the poet, 'is like-mindedness'."

A cautionary tale against abdicating our own thoughts in favour of mass mind control  - the remedy is to be found in another story, One Must Give Up, in which the narrator gives up the newspaper, the radio, the television:

"I am now a maker of my own news, a distributor of my own time. I receive news which no-one thought to broadcast on radio or film for television or report in the newspapers. I choose for myself again. it is long since I knew such freedom. Tight-lipped runners arrive bearing word from far countries - from friends two streets away. The cherry tree is in flower."

I love that line, that news has become something that comes from "friends two streets away". Frame hammers the message home beautifully at the end of the story:

"Fact or fancy. There comes a time when one must rely on one's own news, images, interpretations, when one must resist the pressure upon one's house of conforming, orthodox, shared seasons, and use the panel in the secret room, make one's escape to fluid, individual weather; stand alone in the dark listening to the worm knocking three times, the rose resisting, and the inhabited forest of the heart accomplishing its own private moments of growth."

Just typing that has made me shiver all over again. This was written in an age before Facebook which purports to bring its users "news" constantly, but in this ever-streaming babble, where is the sound of the "worm knocking" or our own heart's "private moments of growth"?

ADDENDUM
I couldn't find a Janet Frame story online, but here's a radio interview with her on YouTube.

A wonderful book on creativity; a present for everyone

I have never read a book about creativity by a non-writer, so renowned dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit was a real revelation to me. So refreshing to hear from someone who deals in something other than words - an artist in her 60s who has choreographed over 150 dances - and to see so clearly how I can learn from her in terms of setting myself up to be creative on a daily basis, something I sorely need. It has been years since I was last in that kind of routine - not since my MA in Creative Writing. I just haven't managed, as a writer of short and very short stories, to set myself up properly, and as a result I feel highly unproductive, uncreative, dissatisfied.

Something Julia said last week on her blog about her NaNoWriMo experience struck a chord: " I am calmer, more purposeful. This feels like a job now. I go to work and actually manufacture something." This is the feeling I want, the feeling that this is my job, that I am making something.

Twyla (if I may be so bold as to call her that) spoke to me from the very first page. She is talking about the blank page, the white canvas, the empty dance studio:

"Some people find this moment - the moment before creativity begins - so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away from the computer, the canvas, the keyboard; they take a nap or go shopping or fix lunch or do chores around the house. They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, this terror totally paralyses people.

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling the empty space constitutes my identity."

Yes. I hear that. All of it. When I read the above I thought, This person can teach me something. And I was right. With chapters entitled "Rituals of Preparation", "Your Creative DNA", "Before You Can Think Out of the Box, You Have to Start with A Box", and "Ruts and Grooves", I started learning, in just one day's reading, a whole host of new ways to set up the Creative Habit.

I especially love starting a new box for each new project and filling it with the things that inspire, so I have begun a box (an old shoe box) for my new fiction-writer-in-residence position at the University's Science Faculty and have in it the program from last week's showing of five films made by the Faculty interviewing mathematicians. Inspirational.

My first box!

Now that I have my box I feel like something will come of this, that it is in some way "official" in my head, regardless of the outside world. And I love the idea of being able to rummage through the box in search of new inspiring material. What a great idea!

There is a great deal more wisdom in here, never passed on in a preachy or insistent tone, but gently yet firmly. This is someone who knows what she does, how she does it best and why. An ideal present for anyone who wants to do anything with a passion. I am off to read it again. And again. So no, you can't borrow my copy. Get your own!

10 Reasons/Lame Excuses for Not Writing

1. I've just moved countries and am unsettled (can milk this one for months and months...)
2. The cats are in quarantine and I can't possibly write without them (another 5 months' shelf life for this excuse)
3. My new study is an unfamiliar place, I can't write here until I feel totally comfortable (Yes, right, I can write in any cafe but not my own workspace?)
   
4. I've got far too much to do with the Short Review (I have a great deputy editor, so really can't use this one)
5. I do lots of writing-related things (Hmm, this old one...)
6. I am in a fallow period and should be gentle with myself (ah, this is good, can use this one a lot)
7. I'm still working on promoting my book (Oh, come on, it's been 13 months, get over it...)
8. I write very very short stories so don't need very long to do it, I can always do one later (Yes, but I want to write longer stories, so I need to get down to it...)
9. I don't know what I want to write (If I wait for this, I'll never write again...)
10. Because it's the thing I most want to do and so, being contrary, I'm not going to do it. (I don't get this at all....but it's a strong one)

6 days to go...and I have found Wordscraper!

My most heartfelt gratitude and undying love to Sara, who introduced me to Wordscraper on Facebook, basically the Scrabulous' creators dodgy way to keep Scrabulous by another name, and slightly alter the rules. Yay! Distraction is back! Now I can write....I feel so relieved.

Just had an email from my lovely publisher, Jen, at Salt. The books arrive today, and she'll zip me over a copy so I can wake up with it on Sept 1st. Can't wait. It's real. It's really real. Ok, shut up.

I also sent her the list of 15 or so very wonderful people who have asked for/agreed to receive review copies in order for them to say something about my book, including the already-mentioned and always-fabulous Sara (Sara, today's blog post is all you you you). I am deeply thrilled at the prospect of reviews, but also curious and nervous to see what they might say. I don't expect all of them to like all of it, or even some of them to like all of it... I think I'd even be disappointed if the reviews weren't in some way less than positive. I encourage my Short Reviewers to be honest, fair, balanced, and several authors who have received these sorts of reviews have written to thank me, and the reviewer, for the honesty. I believe myself - pre-review - to be one of this kind of author, and would like the chance to find out. Bring it on!

Focus, Insight and Creativity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scrabulous

This is interesting. Very interesting, actually. Perhaps even a revelation. There I was the other day, sitting with my laptop in a nearby cafe. I had the beginnings of a flash story in my head and was determined to get it down. Now, I have been trying for months to wean myself of the highly addictive Scrabulous (online Scrabble for Facebook users), with little success. In fact, I am playing a game now as I write this blog post. So, on Wednesday, even though I had opened my word processor and was beginning my story, I couldn't stop myself from starting a new Scrabulous game, even though I felt very guilty about it and angry at myself that I had so little self control. But I did it anyway.

And here's the odd thing: I was in that writing "zone" and every few lines, when I was a little stuck I went to play a turn on Scrabulous - and I finished the whole flash story, 300 words. And more than that: I felt that playing Scrabulous actually helped me finish the story. As I wandered home, I pondered about how that could be: it seemed as though the game distracted those demons in my head that start niggling about how the story's not working, how bad it's going to be, how I might as well stop. They were so busy trying to win the Scrabble game, they left me alone to write my story.

Could this be? Well, a day later, yesterday, I opened my new copy of the New Yorker and lo and behold, a fascinating article entitled: The Annals of Science: The Eureka Hunt by Jonah Lehrer. This article is about scientific research attempting to uncover the mechanism behind that eureka moment of insight, where you have been trying and trying to solve something, and then, suddenly, after you've stopping thinking about it, you're doing something else - there it is!

While it is commonly assured that the best way to solve a problem is to focus, minimize distractions, and pay attention only to the relevant details, this clenched state of mind may inhibit the sort of creative connections that lead to sudden breakthroughs. We surpress the very type of brain activity we should be encouraging. (My italics)

This is all about left hemisphere of the brain versus right hemisphere - one side (left) focuses on individual details while the other side is the "big picture" side, the side which can make unusual and surprising connections. And it seems that when we are focussed on the problem at hand, it is our left brain which is working. What should we do instead? Relax, say the researchers:

Schooler's research has also led him to reconsider the bad reputation of letting one's mind wander. Although we often complain that the brain is too easily distracted, Schooler believes that letting the mind wander is essential. "Just look at the history of science," he says. "The big ideas seem to always come when people are side-tracked, when they're doing something that has nothing to do with their research." He cites the example of Henri Poincare, the 19th century mathematician, whose seminal insight into non-Euclidean geometry arrived while he was boarding a bus.

My assertion is that creative writing requires the same kind of insight process at each step of writing a story. You know that feeling that if you "make" the story continue, if you think about it with your "rational" mind, something feels forced, not right. And just was with scientific problems, I now believe that letting one's mind wander while in the writing zone might really prove to be helpful. I see it as looking at the "problem" (where does the story go from here?) from the side, out of the corner of your eye, while doing something else, instead of staring and staring at it.

Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. "There's a good reason why Google puts ping-pong tables in their headquarters," Kounios said. "If you want to encourage insight, they you've also got to encourage people to relax."