New book review.

New review for Catherine Copper's The Golden Acorn up on The Ultimate Book Guide blog. Winner of the Brit Writers’ Awards 2010 for unpublished writers. A lovely little book that made me smile. Well worth the read.

Creative Process

I made a very spur of the moment decision last week to buy Imogen Heap's Everything In-Between The Story of Ellipse. It's a documentary that follows Imogen during the three years of creating and releasing Ellipse. I've just finished watching it and it may be one of the best purchases I've made in years.

I've been in love with her and her music for more years than I can remember. To get a glimpse into the creative process of arguably the most inventive musician working today was incredible. It's fair to say that I'm more in love with her now than ever, but more importantly she has given me a view of pure creativity and clues on how to get there myself.

It's been a few years since I left university, and my creativity has never been a prolific as it was during my studies. In the place of flow and imagination I've been possessed of inertia and claustrophobia. I used to sit and play at the computer. Write two thousand words of an idea just for fun. The last few years I have had to agonize over every word written. Sitting at my desk had become painful and melancholic.

After watching Imogen create her album I finally understand what is different between university and now; what it is that I've lost. Such a simple precious thing as to have been overlooked on previous self meditations. The answer is fun. I stopped having fun. At university I played and did pretty much anything that I felt like. In the years after leaving I stopped messing around and tried to be serious. Trying to figure out what my writing was and what it would do only allowed me to lose sight of why I did it in the first place. It was fun. I write because I like it.

Forget the big ideas. No social or philosophical agendas. Just create for the pure enjoyment of it. And not only words. Sing, draw, paint, carve, juggle, do anything that comes to mind. I was successful at university because I had an idea and followed it until nothing was left. I would spend ten hours playing with words just to get a sense of what I wanted. I would go further than most to get the exact piece that I wanted.

I need to let myself have fun again. Not this sanitised professional form of writing. It doesn't work. And more to the point, I need to let that sense of fun spread into the rest of my life again. Throw away the professional persona I've been using these last years. Let go. Forget everything and come back to myself. My new Job with Waterstones is allowing me to do some of this. I go to work and it's like playing in a big sandbox. I can be the over the top joking self and it works. Now I need to let that sense of fun and play get into my work.

In short, I plan to sing too much, jump around like an idiot, unpack my hats and juggling balls, and be a better more creative version of myself. Many thanks to Imogen Heap for reminding me to be silly. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

A change of tack

The dictionary will list one of the verb meanings of tack as to 'turn into the wind' and so it is that I am turning. Amending direction.

I've been musing over the point of electronic publishing since setting up this blog. As technology progresses our networks and connections seemingly broaden as our existence reduces; reduces to the pluralised reality of a parallel digital persona overlapping, imposing, and occasionally superseding our real selves. In the craze of self publishing espoused by Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and the very many social networking tools, I feel the need to stop and qualify exactly what my existence is. Where lie the boundaries between my real and digital selves? And to what degree is my day to day existence qualified by said digital self. It is a core existential dilemma that has plagued mankind from the genesis of creation. The modern equivalent of Plato's cave and his shadows. I sense the allusions to T.S. Eliot's Waste Land in the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and I fear that internet publishing is but another form of fending of man's fear of impermanence.

It seems to be a core human desire to leave something of themselves behind after they have passed on. The nature of the point can be argued from many differing aspects. It can be viewed as as the biological need to procreate being expressed in the subconscious of a thinking mammal. Perhaps an ego driven delusion fuelled by fear of the unknown, of death, and the grasping need to exist on afterwards. Whatever the cause, be it physiological, psychological, even spiritual, it seems to be a need that exists to a degree in all of us. As a writer I am possessed of my own fair share of this sentiment, although it presents itself in a more specific form. That of the quest for meaning.

What is the meaning of my life? What am I trying to say with my writing? What is my reason? A man far wiser than I once wrote that there are three constants in life; rules if you will, and they are as follows: Paradox, humour, and change.

Paradox: Life is a mystery. Don't waste time or energy trying to solve it.
Humour: Keep a sense of humour at all times, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond compare.
Change: Everything changes. It is a universal constant. Make peace with the fact and all will be easier.

Taking these to be true, at least in my own life, I have decided to try and stop searching for the meaning of my life, writing, existence. I am going to attempt a little faith. So with that resolution the content of this blog will change a little. It is still so early in the content of this blog as to mean there won't really be any form of transition. I intend to use this page as an exploration of my own art, and the process I take to create it, alongside the occasional academic contextual article. To frame it in terms most writers will be familiar with, this page will be a critical self reflective and academic monologue of my personal creative process. I hope that you find it enjoyable reading.

Illustrations

I have updated the illustrations page with the latest of my works; and have a couple more which are nearing completion. It won't be long until the main body of the new illustrations is finished, at which point I will need to invest in some Mayan resource materials to complete the illustrated portion of the project.

I find this type of illustrating interesting and time intensive. It is less a process of artistic creation, than it is a study in stillness. A capturing of a physical place in a metaphysical construct. This is the first time I have created an illustration with more concern to the context than the content.

They are, after all, representations of a memory discovered in an inner metaphysical landscape. That the content lends validity and momentum to the letter that they are included within is important, yet it is the monochromatic style and intense level of detail used to create them that ultimately empowers the narrative, both episodically and in its entirety.

I hope that the viewer comes away feeling the intense stillness and cold of the images. The memory they are formed from is past, and the world they are found in is dead and contradictory. With luck they will help to create a subtle tension in the reader's suspension of disbelief. Not a common narrative tool admittedly, but one which should, contradictorily, serve to draw the reader deeper into the overall narrative thematically.

The power of the strange and uncanny should never be underestimated in literature. Indeed the word uncanny holds a particular pertinence to this and all of my projects. To be specific the form of uncanny as seen in its German form 'unheimlich' and as described by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. Without exploring this in detail, it is enough to say that uncanny means the anxiety experienced in the indefiniteness of reality. The collapse of everyday familiarity as the existential mode of being-in-the-world conflicts with the mode of the not-at-home (Apologies to Heidegger fans for a bastardised form of his text).

So it is the brake down of the definiteness of the borders of reality that will hopefully pull the reader on. I can admit that the text as it is still needs more to get it to this point; and certainly there are authors who have achieved this affect with far greater haunting precision, but hopefully with more work I will get there.

I will look to put up more illustrations as they are completed; and I'm sure when I feel stuck with the words, I will pick up the pencil as succour.