Never a wrong time to do the right thing. Free Speech.

There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.  If you think you’ve made the wrong decision, but you are very much in the public eye then reversing it can be a hard thing to do.  The Royal Court led by Vicky Featherstone have reversed such a decision.  Regardless of one's own opinion, listening and responding is a mark of a considered leadership and should be congratulated.

 

“Written when Andrea Dunbar was just eighteen, Rita, Sue and Bob Too was presented as part of the Young Writers Festival 1982, in a double bill with Bows and Arrows by Lenka Janiurek. The play caused a sensation with its frank look at teenage sexuality and became notorious for its opening scene where two schoolgirl babysitters take it in turns to have sex with their employer in the back of his car. In 1986, the play was adapted into a film of the same name, and attracted a cult following.”

 

The RC at first thought it was too difficult to stage the play at the RC putting more weight on keeping the RC a safe space and the conflictual overtones of having  a director (accused of multiple harassment incidents) previously involved with the production.  

 

Yet the RC puts the writer’s voice at the heart of its work. Not directors not actors.  So, as writers might say, silencing a working class female voice because of who the original director was, would be untrue to the RC mission.

 

A wider ranging examination of the difficulties of separating art from artist is looked at here by  Claire Dederer in The Paris Review.   Can we look at Ezra Pound’s work as separate from his poetry or even harder can we take out what we know of Woody Allen from his masterwork that is Manhattan as discussed in the article.

 

“....They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them….Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop….”

 

Those of a libertarian angle or fierce defenders of speech freedom will mostly conclude that primacy of voice and freedom of speech comes first and anything else would be censorship and censorship is mostly or even always unwelcome.

 

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.