Making sentences

This blog is about words, how putting them carefully in the right order can be incredibly effective, it's an entry I've been thinking about for a long time*. In fact this is a subject I will likely return to many times over the coming years. Generally when I give myself space to think about writing I tend to focus first on how to create good characters, following that comes the story. It is only once I feel those things are squared away that I give myself time to think about the craft of making sentences. There are various reasons for this. Partially I feel that putting too much thought into words can lead to an overactive pretentiousness. Probably I also feel that this is an area where I already have a certain level of competency. However when I do spare it a thought it is clear to me that I care about it an awful lot and that I should try to explain why.

I think when a lot of people think about the importance of words, the thing which comes to mind for them is flowery verbose language (Oscar Wilde describing a garden for instance). There are good reasons for using that form (though I'm personally not a fan) but honestly to me the importance of language is that with careful thought it can penetrate our defences. We have a tendency in our writing and our general speech to fall back on specific terms which are known and understood. A good example is ''From that height the people looked like ants', it is clear what this means, it is a little too clear though. What I mean is that due to repetition this phrase is already known to our brains it has a lot less impact and as a result we don't fully register the meaning. I think a good analogy is the landmarks on your journey to work. After a few years of travelling you hardly notice them (and this is nice, it can make the trip feel shorter in my experience), but if someone were to come along at your side the red brick building might jump out at them. To return to the writing example, if I were instead to say 'From that height the people were a lonely shifting sea' then that is very different. In fact as a result of breaking the phrase it also may say something about the story or the character whose perspective this is from**. The important fact though is that it forces our brains to think and process.

The result of writing like this is that it can be much more impactful and that allows a writer to better get the reader where they want them (I've talked before about how showing people unseen parts of their brain is valuable). There are many examples of this type of writing, in fact I believe I will talk about three of my favourites in next week's blog. However one of the things which I would like to finish by talking again about simplicity. A long time ago I wrote a story from the perspective of a very poorly educated woman in the 1500s. As a result I forced myself to use very simple language to express her thoughts and feelings. I was surprised to find that in describing the meaning of complex words through that lens I rediscovered a lot of the meat of what they really implied. I say this to re-emphasise the fact that saying things in a new way does not mean saying them in a fancier way. Using more unusual words can be valuable, but using only the simplest of words there are still a huge number of undiscovered and important sentences waiting out there and I want to find some of them first.

*(I suspect I have struggled because, given the subject matter I feel an extra responsibility to craft it carefully.)

**(Admittedly it does this at the cost of being somewhat more verbose. The most well known and used phrases tend to get to that position precisely because they work well on the initial reading. Honestly this paragraph went through several iterations where I set myself challenges of phrases to replace (like 'I'm sorry for your loss') and came up empty. This is an incredibly difficult job and one which many writers struggle with every day (many others simply don't bother).)

Who needs fresh air!

This weekend I didn't leave the flat at all. I didn't get any fresh air and honestly, I liked it. However it got me thinking about all of the times when I was told when I was younger to go and play outside. I always disliked this, it seemed to me as though the arguments in favour of it were rather strange and inconsistent. I am not sure that the air outside was actually any fresher, in fact considering the area of London I grew up in it may have been less so.

I looked back upon this argument, still sitting untouched and unuttered in my brain, and I had a realisation. I think my young self was right. There are more genuine arguments for being outside, getting vitamin D or getting some exercise, but those are both things I can get if I walk on a treadmill next to a window. The problem is that I could poke holes in all of these arguments and make perfectly good ones of my own about why I shouldn't go outside. Once that is done, as far as I am concerned, I win and even if (as I child) I am forced to comply, I still know that I was in the right. This then is my realisation, that I think there is an impulse which many people have, to argue against what they are told and to try to prove the teller wrong. I am built in this way certainly. Now though, I think that it may be the case that this impulse is flawed.

Going back to the argument about going outside. Perhaps every reason I was given was wrong, but that doesn't mean that it is wrong. Perhaps there is a kind of aerie freedom which being outside offers us which being inside does not, a way that having no ceiling above me might lift certain thoughts from my mind. In a less poetic direction, there is the beginnings of another argument in the fact that there are agoraphobics, but there is no equivalent (that I am aware of) who fears the inside. This suggests that the outside is fearful and in turn this implicates the outside as a place of possibility and uncertainty. We all need those things, even those of us who fear them. At this point I am throwing arguments around just for the sake of making them, a lazy exercise in proving my own 13 year old self wrong, but there's a larger point here.

I think there is a phenomena not often talked about whereby smart (or even not smart) people talk themselves into certain ways of thinking. I have talked before about how I like to force myself to take upon the beliefs of people I disagree with, to see what things would look like from their perspective. However I think that this is a problem which tends to hit closer to home. If disagreeing with a Christian is looking at a different landmass and saying it is wrong. I think this type of internal argument is looking down at your intellectual feet and saying “wherever I'm standing is correct” and only then finding justification.

This is a tough area to think about. It is thinking about thinking (and perhaps even strays into thinking about thinking about thinking) and applying this from day to day requires a strange introspection which isn't always useful. However what I will say is that, although I'm not sure I will go outside next weekend, I will certainly not look down on those who do. Even when the reason they give is that they need the fresh air, perhaps their real reason is something much deeper and more profound.

Tricking my brain to think long term

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how to start to force myself to act more concretely towards the long term. I have long felt that given a series of choices about what to do on a given Sunday afternoon, there are some things which will be nice in the short term (like eating icecream and watching a bad tv show) and there are some which will be less nice or even nasty in the short term, but very nice in the long term (like getting in shape or, in my case, practicing my writing).

Clearly this is a spectrum of benefits. For instance by my standards watching a bad tv show is much worse than watching something good which I can learn from and which might even teach me something. In some ways this is a choice, a decision which we all need to make about what is important to our long term growth. Having the desire to be a great chef will prioritise a completely different set of activities than that to be great dancer*. The important thing is that there is a choice to be made and a part of that choice is about deciding where you would like to be in some number of years.

The problem then, as far as I see it, is that making this choice is only the first step. I have said for many years that I want to be a great writer. I knew that was what I wanted to do, but for years I just wrote maybe one short story a year. That was the equivalent of someone saying they wanted to be an Olympic runner and then only training one day a year. To get to long term goals you need to make plans and then you also need to be able to act upon those plans. In some ways I think how to find the drive to act is pretty much the defining question of the 21^st century**. I know that I personally have struggled with this a lot. I thought then that it might be interesting (for you and for me) to talk a little bit about what I do to motivate myself to do things.

The first one is that I get numbers involved. I have written hundreds of thousands of words every year ever since I set myself yearly targets and started tracking how much I was doing on a spreadsheet from day to day. I think that this did two things. The first was that it gave me a target to aim for, but not a target which I could fail at. What I mean by that is that it wasn't as though I said 'I will write a thousand words a day' (which my yearly target often amounted to). A target like that could be failed and then I would most likely give up. By making it a yearly target I could do nothing for an entire month and still have the potential to catch up (in fact one of the biggest numbers I track in my spreadsheet is how many words per day I need to do now to reach my target). The second big thing which this spreadsheet does is that it gives me a sense of achievement. Partially I can achieve by beating my target for the day and feeling good about that, but also I can look back on what I did manage to do in the past year and see undeniably just how many words I wrote.

The second big thing I did was that I made a concerted effort to think through my long term goals as though I was planning them for someone else. This is a process I return to every now and again and it is useful for a number of reasons. One is that it allowed me to look at my list of things I wanted to improve at and see that it was far too big and needed to be pared down. Another is that it allows me to see where I am going wrong and where I'm falling back a bit and I can re-plan to account for that. Finally it lets me find new targets and re-plan my approach based on both what works for me, but also what I have read about as good ways to learn the skills I want to acquire.

The final tactic which I have begun following a lot recently is what I do in the local time when I have that brief choice of fun thing or hard thing. I really like the approach that says you do the hard thing for just two minutes, no more, and then you make the decision. Normally what happens in that situation (as it did with this blog entry) is that I find there is no longer a choice to make, I did the hard thing for as long as I wanted anyway***.

I want to finish by saying that this is, I think, not advice you should necessarily follow. Rather I believe that this is an area where every person has to find there own way of doing what they want to do. Each brain is different and if you want to trick your brain to work in the long term then you need to find smoke and mirrors which will work on you specifically.

* (Though I am generally of the opinion that picking up a broad range of more general skills and knowledge is a good thing for you as a person. I've known too many scientists who didn't read or know anything about politics. Having said that, I think that is also a choice to be made).

** (For the first time we have access to a huge amount of education for free. If I wanted to learn chemical engineering I could probably get a very large percentage of the way there without spending a cent more than the cost of my internet subscription. That's amazing, but it's also tough, we can't hide behind barriers anymore, we just have to accept that we don't have the willpower to do things).

*** ('Do the hard thing' is actually one of my main... I suppose the word would be mottos. It is just so significant now that we have so much leisure time and entertainment at our fingertips)

But he's a poop head!

I have a few reasons for that childish title, but among them is the inspiration of having recently had a conversation about famous children's author Roald Dahl. We discussed his merits as a writer (many in my opinion), his less known raunchy works (originally published in playboy), but the conversation turned to the controversies about him. Even long term Roald Dahl fans have to acknowledge that he had some problematic anti-semitic,racist and sexist views  (for a really great explanation of the problematic nature of the sexism inherent in one of his works see here). Honestly I think for the most part these views don't permeate his writing too badly. However what I really wanted to write about was the fact that this discussion happened at all and that I found myself leaping to his defence so readily.

I like a few writers who I know to have held problematic views, Orson Scott Card, or downright reprehensible ones, H.P. Lovecraft (see here in particular ). I think there is an interesting word present in the previous sentence however, the 'like' I used, specifically applying it to the author's not the work. I think this speaks to why this is interesting to me. After all I don't think I would be even the least bit shaken if somebody told me that the inventor of the ballpoint pen used to beat up puppies (at least, I'd be annoyed for the dogs, but I'd still keep using his pens all the same). There is something in the personal connection we feel with writing that makes us care what these people believed.

Form me certainly a part of this is that books are rich ground for ideas, and if I enjoy treading that ground then it is because it is filled with good ideas. This is honestly one of the reasons why I like Terry Pratchett so much. I think he writes well and he amuses me, but I haven't found his books laugh out loud funny for a long time. The ingredient which keeps bringing me back to them, is that I think he is such an interesting thinker and I love his musings on human psychology and thought processes. If I found out that he also held some similarly dumb and acidic views to the above authors then I would find it deeply upsetting. It would suggest that I could not trust him as I once believed, that rather than absorbing and assimilating his musings in a more relaxed way, I had to be on watch, judging each thought for its validity. I have experienced this in part when seeing the long standing

feud between two of my favourite comics writers, both of whom end up seeming rather more juvenile as a result of their participation.

Having said that, I think the main reason why I care about a writer's belief is that writing and reading is such a close collaboration. What I mean by this, is that reading a book creates something rather akin to a conversation in your head between you and an author. This is true for many mediums of course, however I think writing is peculiar in that it is more creator controlled than many. In films for instance, many people talk about the director as being the creative vision behind a movie, but there are hundreds of other people involved in any production. This means that what you read from the page is much closer to the author's original thoughts when they put them there. Leading to people feeling that they are much closer to and have a greater understanding of their favourite author's thoughts and feelings. As a result finding out that they are somehow dumb or hateful as people feels like much more of a betrayal. This is probably the root of my defensiveness over Roald Dahl.

This discussion emphasises why I think writing is hard but fun, that it represents such a close connection between creator and receiver. However it also highlights one of the reasons why I think that this blog is important. If I'm to be a writer that people want to read then I want to have interesting ideas to tell them about through my writing. In order to have those then I need to cultivate and chase after them (culling the bad or dull ones as I go). This blog represents a mental effort to push myself in that direction.

President Trump

President Trump has my vote. He represents the highest ideal of modern politics. A champion, a saviour, a fighter. I would like to beg a minute or two of your time to explain why you too should put in your lot with President Trump.

It doesn't matter what your views are these days. What matters is that the other side are wrong, utterly and completely. They have held on to these stupid views despite constant evidence to the contrary. Annoyingly though, against all reason, the people who agree with you keep compromising and working with these obvious dullards. President Trump understands that, he's never going to work with the other side, he is going to fight and shout and scream until he gets his way, your way.

Perhaps you care about foreign policy, in fact certainly you do. Here again all of the so called “politicians” we are currently saddled with waste all of their time thinking about strategy and planning. It's clear though, that what really matters is what they say. American is only strong on the world stage as long as it has the loudest voice. Again, I cannot imagine a more qualified voice than that of President Trump, he does not speak, he bellows and when he does the world sits up and notices.

Truly what this comes down to is that I want to win. I realise now that I don't even care what position he takes, I just want the candidate who I am backing to beat the other side. President Trump could come out in favour of eating babies, but if he wins the argument (and he will) then all that will matter is that through him I am victorious. How will he win then? Why is he the best? Because when they all convene in a big conference room, all of the other political types will be hemming and hawing. They will talk about compromise and about middle grounds, wasting time on making “good arguments”. The American public doesn't care about middle ground or arguments and neither will President Trump. He will enter the room with one aim, to make more noise than anyone else. His ideas will be followed because they will be the only ones which are heard and that's simply how business is done these days.

This is why you too should vote for President Trump. The game of politics has changed, it is no longer a genteel pursuit for elites and intellectuals. Modern Politics is about winning and making sure that the other side lose and Trump will do both of those things. No matter what your beliefs are, believe that Trump will win, we know he will, he says so louder than anyone else.

My travels through time

I'm going to start this week by re-explaining the part that fantasy plays in my life.  I've mentioned it before in this entry on how life ought to be magical.  However it's odd enough that I feel the need to reassert my position. 
I am quite sure that everyone has moments of whimsy in their life, where they imagine that everyone else is a robot or that they a really rather good friends with a tree.  It's just fun silliness and I think most people either disregard these thoughts entirely or enjoy them and move on.  My approach however is much more to cultivate them, to let them develop and play out until my walk to work is enriched by a whole row of tree friends. 
There's a tendency to (often correctly) think that entertaining such thoughts is akin to a kind of madness.  My point of view is that it is a lot more like play, as in the play of a child who gets totally enraptured in the world where their toys are having an important tea party without ever totally abandoning the world where Mum is making dinner downstairs.  I don't think we should be ashamed or worried about entertaining such fantasies as adults, there is a great joy to providing these fun little ideas with just enough belief to give them life.  Nevertheless, bringing up these ideas tends to garner me the type of odd looks which are reserved for the slightly insane.  Hopefully in this entry I can demonstrate why these thoughts are worthwhile and why letting a little bit of madness into your life for the purposes of play can be awesome.

Recently I have had the rather strange sense that I am moving backwards through time.  There are a large number of reasons for this.  In an unconnected series of events, I watched a few silent films, took up swing dance and saw a whole bunch of vintage cars and people dressed in vintage clothes.  The net effect was that my life was suddenly invoking the 1920s and, particularly because so many of these were totally random encounters out on the street, I began to feel as though that period was somehow sneaking up on me.  As though I might wake up one morning to find myself back then.
I was well aware, of course, of the scientific explanation for this.  That a number of events (the film watching and the swing dancing) had flagged those times as important in my head, causing me to much more easily notice these things as I walked the streets.  I say I was aware of this but I want to stress that I took this awareness and very quickly shoved it in a ditch for the simple reason that it was boring.  Instead I made a point of exploring this movement through time which was occurring to me.

I knew I was travelling back through time but I could also see that this wasn't at all like your standard science fiction time travel.  Rather than a sudden switch between two times I was experiencing a slow slosh, an intermingling of the two times until presumably one would completely take over.  This makes a certain amount of sense to me.  We all naturally travel forwards through time, but time is also divided (at least in humanities awareness of it) into fairly distinct periods.  Perhaps those periods had a certain separate existence and, by invoking them as I had, one could shift between them, moving from living a 2010s life into a 1920s one. 
I actually really love both the idea that time periods co-exist after a fashion* and that travelling between them would be a gradual shift, something which happened over the course of years rather than moments.  Both of those are ideas which if I'd simply dismissed my imaginings would never have occurred to me.  I also had a really fun few weeks as I imagined what life in 1920s Edinburgh might be like and what all my computing skills would translate to when I arrived.

Hopefully this has been convincing, but more than that I hope that it didn't come across as defensive.  There would be good reason for it to be, because I believe that the idea to write about this came from a situation where I repeated some of these ideas in company and was misunderstood completely.  However what I really want to do here is evangelise this approach to life.  It seems crazy to me that so many people have so little space in their lives for whimsy and play.  Maturity, whilst it is a perfectly good response in any number of life's situations, starts to stink a little like lack of imagination to me when it is overused.


*[There's actually a possible source for this idea.  Philip K Dick had a bizarre experience where he became aware that the Roman empire never went away, that it was just hidden behind the illusion of this modern life.  He spent many years and hundreds of thousands of words writing about this, through which he explored quite openly the possibilities both that this was all a delusion and that it was all true (and, I would expect, that both those answers could be true at once).]

How art has failed

Last week was a week off from seriousness, but now that's over with it's time to put my pretentiousness cap back on and dive into the salty waters of Pretending-I-Know-What-The-Hell-I'm-Talking-About.  Today I want to talk about what art ought to be doing for society and why I feel that it is failing in that regard.
I expect that I will mainly be talking about literature here, but I want to make clear that when I say art I mean all of art, from paintings to plays to computer games to films all the way to the cruddiest reality tv show you can think of.  Anything created by people for other people to experience is, for the purposes this entry, art. 

What does it mean when I say 'what art ought to be doing for society?' well, that's a stupidly large question with a number of correct, and possibly conflicting, answers.  However what I mean by it is that art is a dialogue.  Art is a societies way of having a conversation to explain and explore it's problems.  In a crude example, people go to see a film about racism and that helps them to re-assess how they feel about the subject in light of how society (here played by the film) feels about it.  Obviously in more complex examples it can help people to process things like the death of a relative or the impending reality of their own death.  I don't want to give the impression that this is all about big questions however.  Reading a story about even simple life events allows people to live those out in their minds, it is a way of getting experience without any associated risks.  As such, when art represents the current status of society, it is a way for people to experience the full state of that society, with all of its associated complexities and depths, while still staying within their smaller corner of that society.

Within this definition, I think art is failing because the vast majority of it is extremely shallow.  The most populist fare, from reality television to blockbuster movies, tap into very basic emotions in a totally by the numbers way.  While completely shying away from providing any commentary on those emotions.  They simply aren't asking any questions which are of any use to people or, in many cases, aren't asking any questions at all.
Let me be clear, certainly there is art with incredible depth.  In almost every field there is a great wealth of material ready to be tapped, really important things being said in ways which have significance in all of our lives.  However I think the problem here is that there is a definite tendency that the more depth a piece of work has the further it is from being seen by most members of the public and this isn't the way that it has to be at all.  My counter example is clear, Shakespeare and Dickens.  Both of these artists had incredibly important things to say about human nature and the society they lived in.  Both of them also said these things in a way which was, at the time, incredibly popular.  For them their art was a balance between pandering to what the people would enjoy and saying things which would be important for those people to hear. 
This balance is something which, it seems to me, has fallen out of favour in more recent times.  Artists nowadays are often presented with a false choice between producing something trashy and popular or something deep and niche.  This is how I think that is how art has failed its responsibility to society.

So why has this happened?  Personally I feel that it is because we began analysing too deeply what makes art great.  This is fine by itself, but that analysis by necessity takes place in fairly segregated and often academic communities.  Once those communities are in place it's a small leap to see that the newer artists might be tempted to, for the sake of being recognised as great, write just for them.  That means writing using a language which is entirely based around that smaller community and using shorthand which is only understood within that circle. 
I think it is in these smaller communities that things have gone wrong.  I don't think it is impossible for there to be a modern Shakespeare or Dickens, I don't think there is anything about modern society which precludes that possibility (in fact, there are people we could point to and say that perhaps they are fulfilling that role).  However what I do think is happening is that there is now an assumed divide that something is deep or it is populist, never both.  This is a huge mistake.  For me it has always seemed that if an artist is expressing their message in a way which only a studied academic will understand then they are failing in their responsibility.  These smaller communities of commentary and understanding are stealing away the most creative types and best artists.
It is as though there is an assumption that if you aren't well educated or intelligent enough to understand certain points then you are not worthy of those points.  It may be that many people went to see Hamlet without any awareness of the deeper themes or issues which it contended with.  But to argue that they gained no benefit from those themes, that they were wasted on them, that seems to me to be an awful kind of intellectual superiority (not to mention untrue in my opinion).

I suppose this probably all comes from my definition of art as a dialogue.  By that definition it is reasonable to say that if hardly anybody is listening to you, then what you're saying wont be of any importance, whether it's a valuable thing to say or not. 
There are lots of ways to define art, it's intent and the values by which we judge its success and I'm sure there are arguments against what I'm saying here.  However I want to be clear, I'm not suggesting that anything be dumbed down, only that it be translated into a language which is accessible to everybody. 
Ultimately people will probably still be idiots.  The television executives will still commission the reality tv, the guy sat at home will still put it on because it's easy and he will still discuss it over the water cooler at work the next day, adding to its ubiquity.  However if we continually increase the divide towards a situation where products are entirely shallow and vacuous or entirely deep and impenetrable, then we're denying that guy his chance to even begin to dig him out of the hole he's found himself in, and that seems to me like a pity.