WRITERS ARE SPECIAL

I read an article on a blog recently, about how writers are special. Here’s a response;

Writers are thought of as different. Seeing the world differently. Seeing the drama and the possibilities. Seeing specially. Seeing what only they see. They are a breed apart, observing the world about them and translating these observations into the magic of story and through story illustrating the finer nuances of what it is to be human, nuances that might be missed by the rest. Writers even think of themselves as different, maybe sometimes special and unique.

What a crock!

Have just read a book called ‘The Storytelling Animal’ by Jonathan Gottschall. It is quite an interesting read, full of plain-spoken sense. We are all of us examples of the ‘storytelling animal’. We are hotwired to be storytellers and story-consumers. It is a part of our make-up. In childhood it is evident through the games of pretend that children play, spinning narratives out of their smallest observance of life, creating whole worlds of possibility out of almost nothing. And this continues into the grown up life. We retell stories of our own experiences, but they are almost always a distance from truth, fashioned into something closer to fiction and having all the shape of story rather than experience. We also dream, and in our dreams the imagination plays, shaping fragments of experience into narrative. We all do this.

So what makes a writer so different?

Sometimes writers are individuals who have experienced being on the outside, spending time on their own and in their own heads. That’s being different. They read a lot. They learn words and story traditions and genres. And then, for sometimes no reason at all, they put pen to paper and a writer is born – or is it made? WE don’t all write our stories down and so this makes a writer different. But we can all do it, because at heart we are all disposed to be storytellers. You need to add other ingredients to make the writer, like perseverance and work ethic and the encouragement to continue and all manner of things.

But at the end of the day, a writer is not so special, not so different. Each of our perspectives on the world will be our own and quirky and different, the same for writers and non-writers. Writers are not blessed with greater insight, or greater intellect, or greater knowledge. They just put down in words what the rest of the world speaks or thinks or puts into pictures or performance or whatever.

Once, before I was a writer, I was talking to a class about mobile phones. This was back when mobile phones were as big as house bricks. We were studying Ray Bradbury and looking at his ‘predictions’ in his fictional vision of the future. I was illustrating how Bradbury looked around him (in the 1950’s) and, noting developments in his own world, technological developments, he ‘guessed’ where they might go and this gave him his ‘vision’ of the future. I told my class that anyone could do the same and I held up the mobile phone for them to see (I needed two hands it was so heavy!). I ‘predicted’ then and there (and I am no scientist) that technology would one day make mobile phones so small that they could be fitted into a person’s tooth and that they would then be voice activated and heard through the vibrations sent to the ear through the jawbone. Three weeks after this lesson there was an article in ‘The Scotsman’ newspaper covering a science fair in Edinburgh. In the article there was a photograph of a giant perspex model of a human tooth with all the gubbings for a mobile phone fitted into the tooth like an old fashioned filling. You don’t have to be a writer to have insight and vision… we all have it… it’s creative intelligence you need and writers do not have the monopoly on this. Indeed, we are blessed with it because it is part of what it is to be human.

Go read Gottschall’s book by the way… especially if you are worried about the demise of the novel and books and story… he will offer sensible reassurance to you as a writer.

(PS Of course what I really think is that writers ARE special, just no more special than people who are not writers.)

COMPASSION FROM READING BOOKS

(Just a wee flash. I do harbour the hope that books serve a greater purpose... and maybe it is to make people more understanding of their neighbours. I do hope for that... even when I see writers being like Morag, and readers, too.)

COMPASSION FROM READING BOOKS

She cried. O’er somethin in a book. I watched her, watched the tears creep up on her and one hand raised o’er her mooth in a pantomime o’ shock and then cryin. I dinnae ken what Morag was readin, except it was fiction. A death maybe, or a loss, or a comin together, and Morag was cryin. I was moved to see her like this.

But the thing is, she could be a heartless bitch when her nose was not in a book. Really heartless. Her words all sharp and heavy and thrown, weighted like a stone in the hand afore the violence o’ the raised arm and the jerk o’ throwin.

‘Sticks and stanes may break ma banes, but words…’

I ken the lie in that children’s rhyme. I hae seen the small she could make o’ men and women by the wicked in her mooth. And men big as doors, and she knocks and knocks with her fisted words, till the door cracks and flees open to all the howl and laughter of her wind.

And even her ain mother and her ain father, and she could make ‘em tremble with just the hiss and spit o’ her tongue. And no one was safe. And a man she loved yince, a fine man and upstandin, and yince he put his hand ‘neath her skirt, as a man will do, and he was not ungentle or coarse, but she slapped his face with her words and slapped it soond, and her love and his took frighted flight and awa’, high as eagles until it could no more be seen.

And here she was cryin o’er somethin in a wee book, and I smiled… couldnae help it. I smiled… not to see that there was a feelin heart in Morag, but because she hurt. And I wanted to know the words she had read, the words that could hurt a Morag so, for they words surely had an uncommon power.

A true and made up story all about 2012

(Wrote this before Christmas but am a bit late in getting it up here. Still, it will stand as a review of 2012 and none of the obligatory resolutions for the next year.)

A TRUE AND MADE-UP STORY

January was cold. As cold as iceboxes. So cold it stung his fingers and his cheeks. And he didn’t know if his car would make it to the end of the road and a part of him hoped it would not. But the house was cold, too, and empty ‘cept for a cat that cried like a baby and his wife said that was just talking and he said he wished it would shut the fuck up!

February and it was still cold and he remembered a break he had once, in the middle of the month, years back, and he flew to Venice and slept in a grand hotel that was not as near water as he would have liked. And it was cold there, too, but warm in the churches, as warm as prayers answered. And he wished he could go there again but the coffers were empty this year.

March roared in like a lion and should have rolled out like a lamb but all just lions. At least the nights began to shrink and the days yawned and stretched and stood taller and taller. He smiled more than before and there was a lightness in his step and when no one was by he was singing.

April and there was a holiday then and it was called Easter. He sat at home in front of his computer and wrote a whole book, and it was quirky, about a man who lived his life scientifically and his name was Jude, like in the song, and he was made to go out and get her, but he wasn’t at first sure who ‘she’ was. A whole book and it just spilled out and was a wonder to him when it did, like giving birth to the most beautiful baby without ever knowing there was a baby growing there inside till it kicked its way out.

And then May and a little sun and blue sky, and he remembered the Meadows and how it was once with a girl teaching him German irregular verbs and ‘ist, war, gewesen’: is was and shall be. And he walked by the Meadows and it was warm enough he could sit on the grass and with his eyes closed he could be back with that girl. Close your eyes and imagine.

June busted out all over, and thank goodness it did. A little wetter than June should be but sunny too, and though he was tired from so much work, it was good to go home and it was still light. He thought of drawing again and he walked abroad in the world with his eyes open and it was a little blurred without his glasses, so that he walked everywhere in a Monet painting.

They went camping in July. On the west coast. Galloway it is called and he’d heard there’d be midges big as spitfires and the rain so heavy and so full they’d swim in their sleep and maybe drown there, too. But the days were kind and he ate ice-cream from a cone and watched the sea coming and going and the Galloway midges are a myth and there were few cows wearing belts, too.

August took him back to work and really he didn’t mind. He loves his work. Ask him and he’ll tell you he does and you might think he protests too much, but you’re wrong. He really does love his work. Not the marking or the dress code he has to insist on or the endless meetings for this and for that. But the kids and they need his help and he holds their attention in his hand and he puts on a magic show and they laugh and think him clever and entertaining and they learn. Why wouldn’t he love work like that.

September flew by in a whirl. Looking back he thinks he must have had fun then for it flew by so fast and isn’t that what they say: time flies when you’re… And he remembered his mother’s birthday in time, the fifth year in a row he had done that, and he sent her flowers and chocolates, and she did not answer the door when they were delivered so she still got them a week late.

He visited his boys in October. In Dundee they are and he got to see the Discovery, an old ship of some reknown, and he bought a piece of the deck, a two inch strip of wood  that was left over after they had refurbished the deck. And Scott of the Antarctic was a hero of his father’s and that piece of wood would have meant something to him so he was a little sad that his father was no longer in the world.

A bonfire in the village so it must be November and he stood on the green and he drank firework fizzy wine out of a plastic cup and he watched small children all sparkler bright and running everywhere in circles and figures of eight, and music was playing, and it was cold again and ice on the windscreen and the grass crunchy under foot and each breath like dragon’s breath.

And so it creeps and creeps towards December again and the nights are so long they stretch into day. It will be Christmas soon, he thinks, and the boys will all be home, only they are men now, and they will fill the house with noise and laughter and he doesn’t mind the talking of the cat so much then. He has almost finished his Christmas shopping and a story arrives in his in-box and it is funny and about people he knows and so he decides he’ll return the gift and write a story of his year. But he makes things up too, just to keep it interesting.