I was determined to leave town today, go someplace unfamiliar, and work there. (Yesterday turned out to be a wash; I got nothing done and gave myself a hard time about it.) Instead, when I woke up this morning, I decided to save the money and stick around Edinburgh, but take it in as a visitor and find different places to go and work. Lord knows this place has enough nooks and crannies I’ve never seen yet.
I went to the fair trade cafe underneath St John’s Church at Princes Street and Lothian Road, where I had some lunch, wondering as I watched the other diners if the place we were eating in was once the church’s crypt. It had rough, vaulted stone ceilings, under which they’ve arranged cafe tables and a few couches.
I sat on a couch and ate my mushroom quiche (which was served with carrot salad and another salad made with that horrible, prickly lettuce with a flavour like bitter weeds; how has it become fashionable to eat something so bad-tasting?). Then I sat back and tucked into one of the books I intended to work through on this holiday. It’s about “archetypes for writers” — some sort of deep, psychological work to do with writing and one’s subconscious. I liked the idea of it, but as I read the author’s twisty Latinate terms for her exercises, I kept thinking “Yeah, I know that.” For instance:
Finding empathy for your characters — Yeah, “The Method”. I trained in theatre and was an actor for several years.
Describing characters factually, without opinion — Again, theatre school, where we had to ‘find our motivation’ and not just telegraph an effect or our commentary on what we thought about this person.
Also, the workshops I took with Landmark Education were largely about learning to take ownership of your internal storytelling and approach things without the added weight of prejudgement (as much as this is possible).
Further to this, I’ve also been reading Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger, his extremely gristly book of philosophy about the way language colours our experience.
Contradictions, character arcs — Much of the material in this book was like seeing a magician put a handkerchief over a glass of milk, lift it with a flourish, and — hey, presto! — a glass of milk. I learned so much about story structure and character from reading John Vorhaus’s books on the subject, particularly The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. Even though it’s (as you may have gathered) about writing comedy, that book is a lot more fun and contains all the magic a writer needs for creating stories about people who do things and are changed by the experience. I haven’t been able to watch movies the same way since reading it.
So I read faster and faster through this archetypes book until I found myself skimming, skipping chunks at a time. By the end, I had a real appreciation for the life I’ve lived, which has happened to lead me to all the things I need to know to do what I’m doing (or I led myself to them, or both). Talking to Patrick at home this evening, he said, “It’s sounds like the book was valuable because it gave you permission to do what you’re already doing.” And there is some value to that.
So I left the cafe, donated the book to the “Peace and Justice Centre” next door (perhaps it’s a bit esoteric for them, but they were grateful), and had some peanuts in a cemetary while looking at this headstone…
I sighed, finally stopping for a moment to relax. That book was a big part of the work I wanted to do on this break, and now it was done. My little Wizard of Oz moment was the point of it (“But you already have the brain, the heart, and the courage”). Though I think there’s some more to the topic to be explored.
My subconscious does half or more of my writing for me. If I’m stuck on a section, I’ll leave it for a bit, then invariably have conversations or dreams, or see movies, hear songs, and something will fall into place. Or I’ll just sit and start mind-mapping the chapter out, asking myself questions, and things will pop out.
Thinking is strange. When I try to think out a problem, I can set up the conditions for finding a solution, but inevitably there’s a moment when the thought just bubbles up out of nowhere. I don’t actually do the work that creates that thought. It just happens.
Along a similar vein, I have to remember with all these books that I’m reading (I’m in a voracious reading period again) that if I’m drawn to explore something, it already exists in me to some degree. So this woman’s program about working with characters to anchor them in archetypes (not limiting them to stereotypes, but seeing how they are moved by deeper human tendencies and patterns) ultimately didn’t fulfil on its promise. But what’s there for me to do is…
Well, I went ahead and did it later in the afternoon. I went to a little “bubble tea” and noodle place near my house, had a carrot-apple-ginger juice, and outlined Chapter Seven of Finitude. I sat and asked myself questions, from practical to structural to philosophical to comedic, and stuff just showed up.
Of course, all this backstage talk about the process is very wanky. There’s a point where one has to just throw out all his hifalutin ideas about “the work” and just tell a damned story. But, strangely, doing all this thinking really helps me find the story — not as an academic exercise, but as a kind of forensics, finding the bits of myself and observations about the world that move me or that I find fun so I can put them on the page. I make no claim to my work being serious or having any particular merit this way or that, but these principles make it matter to me.
Before I went to the noodle place, I had a break at The National Gallery of Scotland, where I went to see their exhibit of William Blake’s etchings. He’s someone whose name keeps coming up in things I’ve read, most notably because he, too, was a self-publisher.
The gallery had a collection of his etchings along with those of the people he inspired, but what struck me was how much better they all were than him. Yes, the pieces may have been “after William Blake”, but the craft in their line quality and the skill at rendering human subjects was far superior to Blake’s. But we remember Blake. Funny.
I had my dinner at the noodle shop, having a completed outline of Chapter Seven to start work on tomorrow. My work day was finished, and I was content. (And grateful, too, that I have the freedom to spend a day like this.) I ate a bowl of way-too-hot-and-spicy-noodles-in-broth while reading a beautifully-translated article about organic farming in Thailand. I paid and left, but stopped in at the grocery store for some juice. While I was there, I saw this:
What the holy hell is that?! Cat-milk? Okay, either there’s a farm with lots of maids with very dainty fingers, or else people have taken to snatching kittens away from their mothers too early.
They’re just making stuff up to sell us now. One of my contacts at work, who lives in the States, told me about a drug she saw advertised for “restless leg syndrome”. Please! The solution is simple: stop playing music with such a good beat.
