Clinton. Blair. Transcript on Diana's Death.

On hearing about Princess Diana’s death. President = Bill Clinton. Prime Minister = Tony Blair. September 1, 1997, 11:29 -11:54 am (US ET) Confidential words redacted.  Papers can be seen from Clinton Foundation here. Clinton is calling from Martha's Vineyard.

The President: Tony?

Prime Minister Blair: Hi, Bill. It's a grim business, a very grim business.  

The President: It's awful, it's really awful. We're up here on Martha's Vineyard vacationing, and we're with a lot of people who knew her.

Prime Minister Blair: We saw her again just weeks ago when we hosted her for lunch with Prince William, he's a great kid. ~

The President: Yeah, I worry a lot about those kids now.

Prime Minister Blair: She was such a rock of stability in the sense she connected them with the outside world. The eldest boy, William, is quite like her in a way, he is very "feet on the ground," he does things kids his age do.

The President: Well, I just feel so bad for her. She was just basically getting a hold of her life. ~

Prime Minister Blair: Thanks for your telegram yesterday and your kind words. The problem was the way she lived, in a press frenzy. It's impossible to contemplate how intrusive it was, into every single aspect of her life. The last time I spoke with her, she said that were it not for the boys, she'd be off the board. The country is stunned.

The President: They liked her a lot, didn't they. ~

Prime Minister Blair: She was not the royal family but she was liked by ordinary people, it gave her problems with the royal establishment.

The President: Well, I know it's a difficult time for you. just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you.

Blair: I will personally miss her, it's like star falling. She was a star for them.

The President: What do they know? Is the British security guard who was with her still alive?

Prime Minister Blair: Yes, he is. And he may be able to offer some more information. There has been some talk this afternoon. They went to the hotel and thought they would be left alone. The Embassy and the French government did not know they were there. The media turned up, they decided to go to dinner then on to one of al-Fayed's houses. When they got to their car, it did not start. They called someone from the hotel and the hotel provided a car and driver. Apparently he'd been drinking.

President: That's what I was afraid of. Those guys were chasing them?

Prime Minister Blair: Jumped on them as they left the hotel, yet I can't believe some of the reports of how fast they were going though. It's just not possible they were going 100 mph I mean, I know Paris. They wouldn't have to be going that fast in those tunnels, though. They must have hit a rim in the road and turned over and smashed into a wall.

The President: It's a sad thing, I tell you. ~

Prime Minister Blair: Yes, someone we knew and liked. She had a remarkable gift. She was beginning to get her life together.

The President: Yes, Hillary had a nice visit with her a few weeks ago when she was here.  We liked her a lot. ... anything you can do for I just think those boys, I don't know how ...in a situation like this, about the challenges they will face. ~

Prime Minister Blair: I'll try to keep in touch and have them over.

The President: What about her sisters? What are they like?[ Redacted]

Hillary and I just wanted to tell you all we were thinking of you.

Prime Minister Blair: Your words yesterday were greatly appreciated. Thank you. So you are on holiday now?

The President: I'm having a good holiday. It's the longest vacation we have had in ten years. We're getting ready to send Chelsea: off to university.

Prime Minister Blair: Are you looking forward to that?

The President: She is, but that's all part of it, it's what you raise them for...

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

To everything - A time

I rediscovered (for the second time) a poem from Ecclesiastes, which I last looked up in 2008. The cycle is almost 10 years later.  In some ways we are at a peak (eg stock market prices) and in other ways we are at a trough.

To everything – a season, and a time to every delight under the heavens:

A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck the planted.

A time to slay, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up.

A time to cry, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

A time to scatter away stones, and a time to pile up stones. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embracing.

A time to seek, and a time to destroy. A time to keep, and a time to throw away.

A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to be silent, and a time to speak.

A time to love, and a time to hate. A time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3. [Young’s literal / King James / Yeoh translation]

Zadie Smith. Writing Tips.

In 2010, The Guardian made a series asking for writing tips. Here are Zadie Smith’s:

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3. Don’t romanticize your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides (New Yorker bios) sat down in then October 2016 New Yorker Festival discuss writing habits. The two agreed that eight hundred words made for a good day (though Zadie as a child could write more). Eugenides spends six to eight hours at his desk in a sitting, while Smith believes that her work goes bad after four.  More in the conversation below.

More writing tips on style here (writing style tips ); from Philip Pullman.here.

She has said: "It might not always feel meditative, but when the book is very good you'll notice it is because time passes in a strange way in a book you love… four hours you didn't even notice, you haven't even moved from the sofa. To me that's kind of the ideal writing mind."

(as an aside, to my mind she is describing what positive psychology calls Flow studied by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi)

She doesn’t glamourise being a writer, but she has written some good perspective as well:  “Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.”

I think you follow your contemporaries from afar.  At least, I do.

She was at my university, we only overlapped a year. We never met, just crossed paths in passing. I was a science specialist with a theatre and writing interest; she was in the Arts.  She did edit the May Anthologies (as did Nick Laird), which I did a few years after along with a friend. (I also in a different year had a poem published in them, as did Laird)

I knew her work. I knew she was with Nick Laird who qualified into law and was a practising solicitor for several years while also a poet before moving into full time writing.

Working in the city and writing I could connect with.  

Her voice reminds me of my West London.  

While she is not my yellow brown banana colour, she’s not the causcasian pink white of the UK’s last 20 or 30 prime ministers and kings and queens

So she looks like me in that she bears no resemblence to our ruling elite - difference plus difference equals something similar?  But, she is who she is - the multi-cultural poster child thing plastered on to her, probably unfairly.

I mention Nick Laird, as I gather they were friends a long time before marrying, and friendship presumably came before love.  They also edit each other’s work.

Anoushka somewhat edits mine of late, and she does see an early draft before almost anyone else. I’d give it to someone like my playwright mentor friend, Jane Bodie, but am too embarrassed about the state of an early draft.  

“Do you want to make a fool of yourself in front of me, or in front of x amount of people?” (Smith/Laird)

I recall reading she was cautious about having children (who would bring children into this world…) and then learning she had a child (then another) about the same time as me.

Most is written about her novels. But, I love her essays. I trace Susan Sonntag, John Berger, David Foster Wallace all in her essay writing.

Her sentences are great in either form, but her angle of opinion always seems to provoke a thought in me from her non-fiction.  The conversations you can see of her on youtube are erudite and thoughtful. Maybe one day I’ll bump into her in NW6/10 or NYC.

Read more tips here - top writing style tips - some thoughts from Ursula K Le Guin - Philip Pullman.

Lastly, another in conversation with youtube of her chat at nypl.org around 2013
 

Philip Pullman. Writing tips.

In honour of Philip Pullman’s new book (The Book of Dust  La Bell Sauvage) here’s a collection of his writing tips, (some of them are off-beat).

My main rule is to say no to things [like being asked for writing tips], which tempt me away from my proper work.(from a 2010 guardian article)

Which he then breaks in this bbc article:

1. Ignore the market and write what you want

2. Stay at your desk

3. Find the way of writing that works for you

4. Let the protagonist propel events

(There are just as many ways to structure a novel as there are to write one. A good steer, however, is to let the actions of the main character drive the plot. It's useful emotional shorthand for getting your readers invested with your lead. Even if the story begins with them committing a murder, by having the protagonist be the instigator, your audience will care about them regardless of their terrible actions.)

5. Explore different formats and genres

And then breaks again in this second bbc article:

1. Let characters show themselves

2. There are always more stories

3. It's normal not to be confident - but don't listen to music

(I never think it (my writing) is good. The most I think is, "Well, that will do".

When I'm writing, I'm more conscious of the sound, actually, than the meaning. I know what the rhythm of the sentence is going to be before I know what the words are going to be in it.

That's a very important factor in the way I write. That's why I can't write with music playing.

Some writers do, but I couldn't begin to do that.

Silence? Yes. Pneumatic drills? Fine. Traffic noise? No problem. But music is an absolute killer. So I have to have silence, so I can hear the rhythm.)

4. Tone is more important than structure

I sort of know where things are going - but I don't know the way to get there.

As for not structuring - well, I do. But structure comes later. Structure is sometimes seen as being a fundamental thing. It isn't.

Structure is a superficial thing. What is fundamental in a book is tone, the tone of voice, and to change that is to change every single sentence.

But you can change the structure at the last minute. You can say: "I'll start in the middle", or whatever. The structure is there, but it comes later.

5. Choose a favourite pen

6. Write for yourself

When you're writing, you have to please yourself because there's no-one else there initially.

When you're writing, you have to please yourself because there's no-one else there initially.

But the book doesn't fully exist until it's been read. The reader is a very important part of the transaction - and people have to read things they want to read.

I'm writing for me - I write for all the "me's" that have been.

From the first me I can remember, the me who first got interested in stories and loved listening to them; to the me who was here at Oxford 50 years ago; to the me who was a school teacher, telling stories to the class.

All of these. I'm writing for me. And I am lucky to have found such a wide audience - and an audience which contains both adults and children is the best of all.

Me:  This tip comes up a lot from writers I read and speak too.  Pullman has written on this before (from a 2009 Q&A)

Don’t listen to any advice, that’s what I’d say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. YOU are the genius, they’re not. Especially don’t listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want.

Readers don’t always know what they want. I don’t know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself.

So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone. That way, you’ll have a chance of writing something that other people WILL want to read, because it’ll take them by surprise.

It’s also much more fun writing to please yourself.  

Adrienne Kennedy. Thank you.

Without Adrienne Kennedy, I’m unsure if I would have written plays. While Gideon Lester opened my mind to dramatic structure, Adrienne freed my imagination.

This African-American lady slight of stature but with an eloquence and gravitas that belied her physical size.

We read. We practised writing.

With the passage of time, I forget the specifics but the impressions remain powerfully.

She could speak of Edward Albee, the revered and the famous of 1960s Britain (Beatles, Tynan, James Earl Jones), and suggest that we should write what we want to write.

Reading her work - noting its power - I was challenged to consider: can plays be almost  plotless? Why can’t a character be a negro-Sarah one scene, and a white Queen Victoria the next scene? How far can you bend and break structure?  Symbols, poetry, history - an imagination almost hard to grasp.

Seeing race through the lens of a black american lady writing through absurdism (not wearing reality on its sleeve), sitting there telling me - write!

Suzann Lori-Parks in this wonderful conversation with Adrienne Kennedy says:

“A person who’s new to theater can read your work and think: I can do anything I want. That’s what your plays did for me. I can do with theater what I think needs to be done—it’s liberating. It’s a profound experience.”

I felt that. It certainly impacted my writing (along with the word-love Forrest Gander was nurturing in me at the time; the structure from Gideon). I’ve never particularly written that well made realist play or tv script (my radio plays perhaps being closest to that mould) and for better or for worse, Adrienne was a spark that started that path.

Adrienne has not had particular wide-spread popular audience success. She is taught in academic circles in the US. There has been a more recent rival of her work, but when I studied with her, she was not (and remains not) famous.

That also taught me something about the nature of artistic success and what it should or could mean (Chris Killip teaching me photography across the Yard echoed some of those thoughts) and that fame was not going to be the measure of my success.

Here is a short Youtube from Zakiyyah Alexander that gives a 2 min snap shot on Adrienne.

“She broke all the rules in a time period where women were writing very specifically well-made naturalistic plays; Adrienne Kennedy did something else… She was too black and female for the white male avant-garde theatre and yet she was too avant-garde for black theatre so she had no place to fit in”

Below a Youtube (2015) interview with her (listen to her speak about John Lennon trying to keep her involved in his play in the 1960s) and Canaan Kennedy.

Here is Youtube of Funny House of a Negro, perhaps still her most famous play from 1964 (some people still tell me it is my best, though that’s disappointinng given how long ago I wrote it)

(From Funnyhouse of a Negro.)

When they first married they lived in New York. Then they went to Africa where my mother fell out of love with my father. She didn’t want him to save the black race and spent her days combing her hair. She would not let him touch her in their wedding bed and called him black. He is black of skin with dark eyes and a great dark square brow. Then in Africa he started to drink and came home drunk one night and raped my mother. I clung to my mother. Long after she went to the asylum I wove long dreams of her beauty, her straight hair and fair skin and grey eyes, so identical to mine. How it anguished him. I turned from him, nailing him on the cross, he said, dragging him through grass and nailing him on a cross until he bled. He pleaded with me to help him find Genesis, search for Genesis in the midst of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees and white stallions roaming under a blue sky, help him search for the white doves, he wanted the black man to make a pure statement, he wanted the black man to rise from colonialism. But I sat in the room with my mother, sat by her bedside and helped her comb her straight black hair and wove long dreams of her beauty. She had long since begun to curse the place and spoke of herself trapped in blackness. She preferred the company of night owls. Only at night did she rise, walking in the garden among the trees with the owls. When I spoke to her she saw I was a black man’s child and she preferred speaking to owls. Nights my father came home from his school in the village struggling to embrace me. But I fled and hid under my mother’s bed while she screamed of remorse.
 

Read my thanks to Gideon Lester and his influence on me. 

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting.

Serendipity Gods

Funky glamourous off-amber-red glasses. Should I tell her they look great? Nah. After 8 hours stuck in a cabin, everyone is weary and no one likes small talk.

Waiting. The transit skyway is having a slow molasses day.

She brings out a book to read. “The Empty Space”

Serious? These are the serendipity gods directing me to say something. In short:

-Peter Brook was just in London, speaking about his new book.

-Seems like it was written yesterday.

-You direct?

-Yes. I will be rehearsing in London at the end of the year. A Tina Turner show.

-I write plays. I chaired Talawa, now Coney,

-What’s your name?

-Ben Yeoh. You won’t have heard of me. And you?

-Phyllida Lloyd.

Wow! I wrote to you about 10 years ago and we had a short correspondence about my play at the Gate Theatre.

I’ve seen her work, and she is an impressive director.

I think those gods are telling me something, am I listening?

(Are they telling me to put those skates and write plays again)

Lloyd is known for her work on Mama Mia, and I’ve known her Royal Court work and some opera work. I had the sense that her all female Shakespeare work is forefront in her oeuvre at the moment. Her wiki here. I will be looking forward to more of that.

Peter Brook’s Empty Space considered seminal theatre book. Amazon link here http://amzn.to/2fJJczh  and his latest book Tip of the Tongue here http://amzn.to/2fKOeLI  Anyone interested in theatre should read Brook's book.

Fancy thinking about writing craft - see writing tool tips post here. Or  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes.

Life lessons. Anne Lamott.

These are 12 life lessons from Anne Lamott (wiki).  “People are very frightened and feel really doomed in America these days, and I just wanted to help people get their sense of humor about it and to realize how much isn't a problem. If you take an action, take a really healthy or loving or friendly action, you'll have loving and friendly feelings.” 

Watch the whole Ted below or click here for the complete transcript and source link.  Excerpts below.

Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.

Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes – including you.

Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind….

Number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together…

Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food.

Number six: writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it.  They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little. When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads -- for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads -- and he said to my brother,"Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese."

So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts.

Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not.

Number eight: families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be.

Nine: food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.

10: grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings.

11: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary.

And finally: death. Number 12. Wow and yikes. It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to.

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address;  Charlie Munger on always inverting;          JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. 

Thank you, Gideon.

I’d like to thank Gideon Lester. Gideon was my first dramaturgy teacher. While I have failed to stay in close touch over the years, his influence has been profound and lingering. Many teachers fail to discover the impact they have on their students. We, pupils, seldom have the chance to tell our mentors with enough space, time and experience to acknowledge our teachers’ significance. Perhaps, we fall shy as I have done. I have 20 letters or fragments of letters I started to pen to John Berger. I failed to send any. Now John Berger can not read any of them. That realisation, along with my re-emergence into arts, has tipped me over into writing a note on this.

A 20 year old boy steeped in science but with a fascination with theatre arrives at Harvard. The boy knows few to no people. He has directed a few plays, at the level of a student. He has read a fair amount of drama and poetry, considering his academic science studies. The boy knows enough to know he really doesn’t know an awful lot. About anything. Anything at all.

There’s an energy. There’s an hole. There’s an hunger. A father recently died. A restlessness needed to fill a grief.

The boy sits with Gideon. On Brattle Street, a hot chocolate is sipped, they talk theatre. And talk. Their lives have a loosely entangled tapestry from a shared London teenage experience, although a small generation apart. Large enough for the boy to consider Gideon an elder and mentor.

The boy takes Gideon’s dramaturgy course. It starts with Aristotle's Poetics.

Galaxies explode into life.

Casting back over 2000 years, we have a treatise on dramatic structure. Still relevant today, it catapults the boy’s understanding into another plane. The work provides an outline of rules to be followed, to be bent and to be broken. All the while with Gideon’s guiding light.

Gideon saunters us through plays, playwrights and thinkers. It is brilliant.

A steady Arts drum beat is sounding from various Harvard teachers, hopefully some future posts on this (Marcus Stern on directing - find the character’s intention - Adrienne Kennedy on play writing, Chris Kilip on photography - ways of seeing, Patrick Strzelec on sculpture - the visceral and seeing truth abstractly, and Forrest Gander on poetry - life, language and so much more).

The exact learnings from Gideon’s teaching, I am unable to pinpoint today. Nevertheless, the profound sense I had at the time lingers with me. The ideas of structure, what to follow, what to bend and possibly what to break have deeply embedded into my theatre writing. How to read dramatic works, how to think about theatre, and even how to enjoy plays, all of that enhanced by Gideon over the years.  Nothing specific but without Gideon I doubt I would have created the handful of works that I have to my name, several performed and of moderate success. I’ve taught, helped and dramaturged others; and as a pebble thrown in a pond, the waves rippling, the influence echoes on.

I’ve mainly been helping others for the last eight years. Crafting little of my own writing. Family, autism and other life priorities have absorbed me. But I am emerging. I believe I will write again.

If I do and how I write will surely still be marked by that hot chocolate on Brattle Street and the ensuing Poetics.  Thank you, Gideon.

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting.

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I hope to make a series thanking many of the influential mentors and teachers I have had over the years. The Gideon post is the first. I’d like to one day thank Miss Bradley (now Mrs James) for my introduction to clay amongst other things when I was 7. Many of my teachers from that time do resonate, but Miss Bradley echoed first and perhaps loudest. There are a whole host from high school but Mr Davies (maths and more), Dr Bevan (chemistry, learn to learn and the rubiayat of Omar Khayyam), Dr Katz (life), Mr Bateman (art practice and seeing) ring loud but most of my teachers at Westminster provoked lasting and memorable thoughts and experiences on a regular basis.  At  Cambridge University, Dr McLaren influenced me greatly and there is a part of me which still thinks I ought to have developed in acedemia as a neuroscientist or experimental psychologist.    At Harvard University, perhaps partly driven by being on a scholarship and partly by my father’s recent death, I went into learning overdrive and had several mentors of note.  Gideon Lester, as mentioned in this post, Marcus Stern (directing), Adrienne Kennedy (play writing), Chris Kilip (photography), Patrick Strzelec (sculpture) and Forrest Gander in poetry. That so many of my Harvard teachers were in the arts was perhaps telling on why I left academia to pursue multiple interests across arts, business and investing.  Post institutional teaching, I count Jane Bodie (via Royal Court)  on writing and dramatic structure as most influential (and still to this day) although I think I did learn from Lisa Goldman on dramaturgy too in my early twenties.

Writing Craft Tools

The most influential writing books of all time? The winner, no doubt, would be The Elements of Style by the teacher/ student team of William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, Roy Peter Clark writes.

Next on the list would be On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which has sold more than one million copies over the last thirty years. If I had to summarize Zinsser’s advice in three words, it would be “Dump the clutter.”

Not far below [on popular lists] Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg; Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott; On Writing, by Stephen King; [I would add Steering the Craft, by Ursula Le Guin, post here on the Le Guin book.]

These are noble and practical writing guides that deserve their place on your bookshelf, within arm’s reach of your computer. What I like best about them is that they combine narratives of the writer’s life with elements of the writer’s craft. Over the last ten years there has been one [...] that has elbowed its way into the company of these classics: Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer By Roy Peter Clark.

Selection of Tool headings from Clark's book

I was unaware of Clark's book when starting out as a writer. Recently, I picked it up and it has given me good food for thought.

It is strong for non-fiction narrative and journalism. Business communicators and press release writers would greatly benefit. There are ideas for fiction narrative and script writers, but to my mind not quite as strong for them - still worth buying.

The book is light on dramatic structure compared to Story, by Robert McKee (and other dramatic structure books, to be a post another time) but excellent on clarity, sentence and style.

Dwell on Clark's first tip, after this excerpt from his introduction (below video). Listen to Clark on his Let Words Collide concept, via TedX, Youtube).

"...this book invites you to imagine the act of writing less as a special talent and more as a purposeful craft. Think of writing as carpentry, and consider this book your toolbox. You can borrow a writing tool at any time, and here’s another secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed along."

TOOL 1 . Begin sentences with subjects and verbs. Make meaning early, then let weaker elements branch to the right.

Imagine each sentence you write printed on the world’s widest piece of paper. In English, a sentence stretches from left to right. Now imagine this. A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements, creating what scholars call a right-branching sentence. I just created one. Subject and verb of the main clause join on the left (“ a writer composes”) while all other elements branch to the right. Here’s another right-branching sentence, written by Lydia Polgreen as the lead of a news story in the New York Times:

Rebels seized control of Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, on Sunday, meeting little resistance as hundreds of residents cheered, burned the police station, plundered food from port warehouses and looted the airport, which was quickly closed. Police officers and armed supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled.

That first sentence contains thirty-seven words and ripples with action. The sentence is so full, in fact, that it threatens to fly apart like an overheated engine. But the writer guides the reader by capturing meaning in the first three words: “Rebels seized control.” Think of that main clause as the locomotive that pulls all the cars that follow.

Master writers can craft page after page of sentences written in this structure. Consider this passage by John Steinbeck from Cannery Row, describing the routine of a marine scientist named Doc (the emphasis is mine):

He didn’t need a clock. He had been working in a tidal pattern so long that he could feel a tide change in his sleep. In the dawn he awakened, looked out through the windshield and saw that the water was already retreating down the bouldery flat. He drank some hot coffee, ate three sandwiches, and had a quart of beer.

The tide goes out imperceptibly. The boulders show and seem to rise up and the ocean recedes leaving little pools, leaving wet weed and moss and sponge, iridescence and brown and blue and China red. On the bottoms lie the incredible refuse of the sea, shells broken and chipped and bits of skeleton, claws, the whole sea bottom a fantastic cemetery on which the living scamper and scramble.

Steinbeck places subject and verb at or near the beginning of each sentence. Clarity and narrative energy flow through the passage, as one sentence builds on another. He avoids monotony by including the occasional brief introductory phrase (“In the dawn”) and by varying the lengths of his sentences, a writing tool we will consider later.

Subject and verb are often separated in prose, usually because we want to tell the reader something about the subject before we get to the verb. This delay, even for good reasons, risks confusing the reader. With care, it can work:

The stories about my childhood, the ones that stuck, that got told and retold at dinner tables, to dates as I sat by red-faced, to my own children by my father later on, are stories of running away.

So begins Anna Quindlen’s memoir How Reading Changed My Life, a lead sentence with thirty-one words between subject and verb. When the topic is more technical, the typical effect of separation is confusion, exemplified by this clumsy effort:

A bill that would exclude tax income from the assessed value of new homes from the state education funding formula could mean a loss of revenue for Chesapeake County schools.

Eighteen words separate the subject, “bill,” from its weak verb, “could mean,” a fatal flaw that turns what could be an important civic story into gibberish.

If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later. As I just did.

Kelley Benham, a former student of mine, reached for this tool when called on to write the obituary of Terry Schiavo, the woman whose long illness and controversial death became the center of an international debate about the end of life:

Before the prayer warriors massed outside her window, before gavels pounded in six courts, before the Vatican issued a statement, before the president signed a midnight law and the Supreme Court turned its head, Terri Schiavo was just an ordinary girl, with two overweight cats, an unglamorous job and a typical American life.

By delaying the main subject and verb, the writer tightens the tension between a celebrated cause and an ordinary girl.

This variation works only when most sentences branch to the right, a pattern that creates meaning, momentum, and literary power. “The brilliant room collapses,” writes Carol Shields in The Stone Diaries,

leaving a solid block of darkness. Only her body survives, and the problem of what to do with it. It has not turned to dust. A bright, droll, clarifying knowledge comes over her at the thought of her limbs and organs transformed to biblical dust or even funereal ashes. Laughable.

And admirable.

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Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations.  Or Ray Dalio on populism and risk.

If you'd like to feel inspired by other addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting.

Incomplete and Random

The title itself is suggestive. It's on the longer side of titles, but "incomplete" hints at the short and splintered scenes to come.

The first scene is two lines, and two single words. It suggests a writer who knows what they are about.  You're going to be in for a supremely confident ride (or maybe a complete disaster). 

The second scene already seems to hint at sub text and potentially conflicting intentions. Again establishing a notion of "drama" / conflict as opposed to any (unnecessary) exposition.

Michael Billington review in the Guardian in 2005.  

"...Ten years ago, the Royal Court was the focus for what became known as "in-yer-face" theatre. Now it seems to be encouraging what I can only call "behind-your-back" drama: elliptical, oblique, non-linear plays that leave the audience to piece together narrative and meaning...."

David Eldridge has a new play coming to the National Theatre in October 2017.  It's called Beginning - "Tender and funny, it’s an intimate look at the first fragile moments of risking your heart and taking a chance." Eldridge is in conversation with director Polly Findlay  6pm 19 Oct.

Part of an intermittant series looking at the beginnings of plays. Click here to see a few more like dirty butterfly and Gertrude Stein's Mexico,

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations.  Or Ray Dalio on populism and risk.

If you'd like to feel inspired by other addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.