HEAD BLOG

Everything in life can be boiled down to a scene within a movie. Worse still, everything can be gently steered towards a scene within a movie.

This simple, but invasive truth is colouring every move I make.

When a friend tells me about teaching English as a foreign language I immediately think of the scene in Good Morning Vietnam where – well, if you don’t know it then chances are you should probably leave this blog for now.

Similarly when I’m mid-flow in an argument I might say something straight from a film. I do. I can’t help it. If the time is right then it just has to play out that way because it felt so good when I saw it played out by Pacino or, ummm… Cage.

It doesn’t stop there.

I’ve even steered an argument towards being able to deliver a line. I haven’t yet managed the “sell crazy someplace else” line but I know exactly how I could push someone towards it.

Clearly, there’s a problem.

The thing is, life and relationships are one thing. It’s easy to start arguments just to be able to deliver a killer line. Life and relationships aren’t serious enough to take steps to prevent myself from doing it.

But creativity, dear god creativity, is.

Imagine my horror, yes, the horror, the horror, as I stare at a piece of copy I’d spent five WHOLE minutes on writing only to realise that somebody else had written it before me.

It’s embarrassing is what it is.

It’s also an area to be keenly aware of throughout the creative process. Sometimes an idea can feel so good, so reassuringly familiar, that it must have been done before. And often it has.

Death is not the end of course and our culture is filled with talented people who make use of this creative saturation and make it their own. Look at Spaced – filled with snippets of other works it remains decidedly its own creature throughout. Self-awareness, keenly expressed, is its hallmark and its creative territory.

Then there is the love-him-or-hate-him Tarantino whose oeuvre is built upon references to popular (and not so popular) culture. Again though, it’s his own spin on these things. His own experience which is brought to bear upon the subject matter that makes the difference.

And that, in the end, is key. It is experience which guides our hand in all these matters. Personal experience. And that’s something that turns a mediocre argument into a divorce settlement.

There’s an element to creativity I don’t like: opinion. Specifically other people’s opinions. Idea killers the lot of them. Toil and polish falls away at a handful of words and that, I don’t like.

Of course opinion is also vital to creativity. All that toil and all that polish can get you lost in a dark place, namely up your own arse and that’s somewhere nobody should be lost.

Experience lessens the importance of the opinions of others. Over time a writer or artist learns the impact of their work and how it is interpreted by others. That wonderful, frightening word, “interpret” is certainly one to watch out for as readers bring their own approach to bear upon carefully crafted work. Yet, as I say, experience tempers this element and folds it into the substance of the work. Ambiguity is employed as a tool rather than left dangling, ready to unravel meaning, and technique becomes adept at preempting any dissent in the ranks.

Years ago, way before I’d learned any formal writing technique, a friend read over a poem of mine and said he didn’t much care for it. My work, he offered, was becoming too practised, too glib. I agonised over the comment (and still do) undecided whether it was a good thing. In part he meant the technique I was learning to apply, the structures I was reaching for that would enable me to direct ideas rather than just have them. But he also meant that he missed the roughness and energy a wider understanding of technique often smooths out.

I remember being captivated by The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It was a short novel filled with ideas and surprises. Little of his later work has ever matched that power; growing less with each novel. Many writers lose that edge as their technical ability to structure, to wordplay, increases. Ultimately, it is about how to balance the two and where and when to bring in opinion. After all, it is easy to spot a writer who has studied at UEA.

This is an extract from Digging by Seamus Heaney.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

The poem is a lovely one. It addresses the relationship between Heaney and his ancestors and the way in which Heaney has to find his own craft, knowing, as he does, that he has “no spade to follow men like them”.

Heaney’s skill is in words and he uses this poem to explore that skill and show respect for men like his father who bring food from the earth.

In 2010, I explained to a client, I want to do two things. Just two things.

I want to improve my writing and I want to grow potatoes.

That made me think of the poem which, in turn, made me think about finding your own path in life; digging your potato drills.

That way you end up producing the kind of work you’d want to eat.

No surprise when the Twitter stream was flooded with reactions from Flash Forward, the hot new show from David (Batman) Goyer and a show which was somehow bagged by Channel 5. And it was a solid start too. Similar enough to shows such as Lost, Heroes, Fringe and The 4400 for it to quickly nestle down in the arse-groove of our sofas. There were mysteries and clues, portentious looks and expositional dialogue a-plenty. Read more…

At just after 6:30 this morning I logged on to Twitter and saw a post by @JSCarroll recommending a story. I’ll flick through these sort of recommendations quickly and easily, slipping them between the pages of my journey to and from work but leaving them in the background, often not caring if they stay or get lost. This one, however, stuck. I started reading before I caught my train, I continued it during and then I re-read a couple of times afterwards. Have a read of it, you’ll see why it was recommended. Read more…