I may be just a little obsessed with The Beatles at the moment, but I was struggling for a title for this post and watching Get Back again, and this one works…
Everybody had a hard year
Everybody had a good time
Everybody had a wet dream
Everybody saw the sunshine
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Everybody had a good year
Everybody let their hair down
Everybody pulled their socks up
Everybody put their foot down
Oh yeah, oh yeahJohn Lennon/Paul McCartney
Thinking and Feeling
I know the whole left brain, right brain concept has been thoroughly debunked - at least as far as the hemispheres of the brain are concerned - but there’s something important in the concept of different modes of thinking, especially when it comes to making art of any kind.
We can learn the craft and we can read and analyse and use all of our rational, analytical potential and try to consciously apply all that as we write, and it’s simply not enough.
Somehow, those of us who are very linear and logical, have to learn to let go.
"Fay Weldon says that ‘there have to be two personalities in every writer’:
A, who produces the first drafts, has to be ‘creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy’; B, who works on them, has to be ‘argumentative, self-righteous, cautious, rational, effective’"
Persuading those two personalities to work together is challenging. I have always found that B - the editor - comes more naturally to me.
It's not that I don't have loads of impetuous, emotional, wilful, creative A in me... it's just that I mostly keep her locked up. I think I've always been a little bit afraid of what she might do, should I let her escape.
I am, gradually, getting better at A - the playful side. (Yes, I am still writing the piece about playfulness that I promised in Story Alchemy. Turns out thinking about playing is surprisingly hard work. )
Learning creative escapology
What changed for me was taking up textile arts. I saw an online exhibition, featuring The Worst Quilts in the World, and the winner was a misshapen kind of squarish quilt featuring different fabrics printed with cows. It was technically imperfect in every way imaginable - from design to execution - but still there was something joyful about it.
The kind of joyful that makes you think not only I can do that! but also I want to do that!
As a child I had been taught to sew and embroider by my stepmother and her mother. Monograms on handkerchiefs for the men in the family at Christmas. Crinoline ladies on antimacassars. I made some dolls clothes - my Sindy had a skirt suit made out of my Dad’s discarded grey socks.
My work was untidy and slapdash - and never reached anything close to the exacting standards set by my mum - but I loved doing it.
When I was diagnosed with lupus, I signed up for an Open College of the Arts course and was assigned a brilliant tutor, who was on the verge of retirement after teaching art all her life. At the end of the course she took me aside and apologised that she had only been able to award me a bare pass. “But I must say,” she added, “in all my years of teaching, you have made the most progress of any student.” I laughed, and said, “That’s because I started so far back, isn’t it?” She agreed.
She wasn’t in any way wrong, and she certainly wasn’t being unkind. She was a good teacher, and encouraged me to continue - and I have! She was just honest. I had never studied art before. Every single exercise in colour theory was new to me. I had no idea what a colour wheel was, even.
But there was something freeing in that. I had no expectations of excellence and so I just played - there’s that word again. By playing and not fretting about results, I kept on getting better.
I’m still not by any means a competent textile artist - but the main character in my first novel, A Savage Art, is.
And I have made some pieces I’m proud of - including this quilt, a few years ago, as a wedding present for good friends.
Is this relevant to writing?
I think it is. Discovering that allowing myself to be really bad at something, but carrying on anyway, helped me become a better writer. It was possible to learn! And yes, some of that comes through the analytical - through reading books about craft, doing the exercises, practising different techniques.
But it’s not the analytical stuff that helps us get better.
I am fumbling to explain this, but it’s more about feeling and risking and doing, than about applying rules.
On Beginners
Ira Glass is the producer of a popular show on American radio, called This American Life, and he describes very well how we can understand what we want to achieve and yet somehow miss our target so badly.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
—Ira Glass
All I can say, is Ira Glass never met me…
You have to put in the work, and that means you need to be prepared to be bad at it. Only by allowing yourself to produce rubbish work, can you get better.
Even when you do become a better writer, you still have to be prepared to write rubbish. This is something we confront every time we start on a first draft. There’s a reason why we say all writing is rewriting. We are always, eternally, beginners.
Revising, editing - that’s what turns crap first draft into good stories and novels. But before you can do that, you need to let yourself write the crap first draft. And for that you have to get the rational editor out of the way.
Studying literature can be a roadblock
There’s another aspect to this which is key, I think.
Those of us who studied English Literature -who learned the skills of close reading, who have analysed great writers from Chaucer, through Shakespeare, to Austen and beyond - we often develop a problem when it comes to writing.
We know what good literature looks like. We can write an essay discussing the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, word by word. We can wax lyrical about sprung rhythm. We can discuss voice and narrative arc in Chaucer, Austen, Virginia Woolf. We can analyse all aspects of fiction from the well constructed sentence to the shape of a story.
All of that is intellectual. We have our favourites, and that’s often based on a more emotional and instinctive connection with the work of a writer. We know better than to mention that -in fact, it’s trained out of us.
This training gets in the way when it comes to writing our own words. Not only are we paralysed by the knowledge that our work could never match up to that of the greats. We are paralysed by the intellectual nature of our approach to understanding writing.
We are stuck in our heads, alienated from our hearts.
What makes stories work?
George Saunders book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is described as a master class on what makes stories work. This is what he has to say -
“We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs - or doesn’t - in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment - when we ‘know’ something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the 'knowing’ at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.”
George Saunders
I think he’s right. This is what art, fiction, is all about. It’s purpose is to remind us that the purely rational way of knowing which we prize so much, is actually not that great when it comes to understanding ourselves, understanding the human condition, to finding meaning.
What is fiction for?
“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted”
E M Forster in Howards End
Fiction is ultimately about connection, and that’s why it has far more to do with feeling than with intellect.
When we read a novel, it’s (almost) the closest we get to really seeing into another person’s mind.
I suspect that’s why, even though we understand that fiction is made- up, we kind of know that a novelist will have told us something about themselves, even if unconsciously. We can’t help but be curious about the psychology of the writer. What a writer chooses to show us about how people behave with each other tells us so much about how they understand and experience the world.
I suspect that’s a large part of why writers get blocked, because they fear making themselves vulnerable in that way. To write fiction, we have to take the risk to be radically open and honest.
Fiction is about connection. Not just with the writer, but with each other. There’s a special kind of joy, for example, in finding someone who shares our taste in fiction - because we know we’ve found someone who understands the world in the same kind of way we do - at least in part.
That’s all very high-minded and theoretical, but what does it mean in practice?
I know that it gets very repetitive, but it really is at the heart of all writing. Go back to your compost heap. What are the the novels, plays, TV series, works of art, people, that you love? That’s a good place to start. Why do you love them? For me, it’s often because they give me a new insight into the world or the way people work.
It may be a character I identify with, who helps me to understand myself better. Or it could be the opposite - a character or a situation that helps me to understand why I am hurt or upset with someone.
I wrote A Savage Art in part because I had a vehement disagreement with a friend about the Jane Campion erotic thriller In The Cut. Yes, I wrote a novel to prove someone wrong. It’s not as if I’m even the slightest bit argumentative.
Orwell’s novels and non fiction were a response to social injustice, as was the under-rated science fiction of John Brunner. This last year Russell T Davies broke our hearts while reminding us of uncomfortable truths about our recent history with the brilliant TV drama about Aids, It’s a Sin.
Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, and Alan Garner’s novel The Owl Service both examine issues around class and belonging. They’re also both on my creative compost heap, and maybe, just maybe, this has sparked an idea for a new project I’ve started working on.
It’s all about your feelings - not what you think you ought to feel, but what you really feel.
What really matters to you?
Ann
I hope you all have the best Christmas possible, however weird it’s going to be again. I know Christmas can also be difficult for all kinds of different reasons, so wishing you all the love and courage and patience and whatever else you may need, and a bit more for wiggle room xxx
The Accomplice Newsletter will be back after Christmas.
Let the dog see the rabbit
Links for further exploration - a resource for useful procrastination -
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall - an interesting exploration of storytelling and what it’s for - basically he claims it’s a kind of about learning how to be human and also learning how to survive. As with everything there’s a dark side (we are vulnerable to conspiracy theories) and a brighter one (stories often have a moral aspect, and can be a source of shared values)
There’s a fascinating interview here with Gottschall in Scientific American
George Saunders Substack Story Club looks like it’s going to be invaluable for writers.
I particularly found this one helpful, in which he describes the process of writing a story - The Falls
Five things you can learn about storytelling from Ira Glass
Theory of Mind - this is an introduction to the psychological theories about how we understand ourselves and other people.
I always think music is cheating a bit, as it really does conjure emotion. But here’s Joan Armatrading with good advice for writers and humans… (Maybe there’s a Venn diagram possibility here)