Category: Uncategorized

I’ve run into a familiar principle from theatre school in my novel-writing and my copywriting work: I was taught that the best way for an actor to tell a story is from “a point of innocence”. That is, you don’t want to ‘telegraph’ the ending of the story, but reveal it as a surprise at the end for the maximum impact.

A few months back, my editor pointed out that I kept doing this in our Strategic Coach articles. Most of our articles are about one of the concepts, strategies, or tools we teach entrepreneurs in our program, so my approach to this was to sneak up on it — present a threatening problem then wallop it on the head with a solution I had hidden behind my back. (Well, ‘I’ — I’m a ghostwriter, so it’s whatever disembodied official voice speaks for the company.)

The way that Dan, owner of the company, speaks in person, though, is much more like an ad-man (because this is his background): “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” I suppose he’s simply confident enough from seeing his ideas work for thirty years or so that he keeps his hat on and just hands people the rabbit. The magic, for him, isn’t in the trick, but in the way the idea works in practical application for the entrepreneurs.

But I still like telling stories. And it’s fun to surprise people.

I woke up with a head full of ideas about the year 2050. All this stuff I’ve been reading about, that’s being talked about in the news — it’s already happened then. So I’m figuring out how that world works.

And pretty soon I’ve got to stop talking about this, because talking about writing isn’t writing.

~

Oh, okay, just one more thing before I shut up and get to work: suffering. Suffering is boring.

Last night, I watched a bit of Battlestar Galactica with Patrick and Anita over dinner (a wonderful lasagne that ‘Nite mate). The program is just so many orders of magnitude greater a thing than the crap 1970s show. Still, though, we’re into the third season and the characters have been hunted down for years, lived through a prison camp, and now they’re all suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — or something — because they’re all acting horribly toward each other. I watch the show, and I’m tired.

Payoffs are very big for me. If I’m going to watch something or read something — and this goes for when I write something, too — I want the people in the story to experience some big payoffs to justify why I’ve spent this time with them. I want them to be transformed by the experience. I want there to be movement. I feel that if I’m going to ask people to follow me through the woods of my imagination, the crumbs I leave for them had better taste good. In fact, I should leave some loaves for them from time to time (like at the end of every chapter). Likewise for the characters: yes, the job of the author is to keep applying pressure, to make things worse and worse for this person, but still, they have to get a few moments of fun in the story, some respites of joy. Or else it’s just a story about someone suffering, and who wants to give over their free time to that? I think we romanticise suffering far too much. Who cultivates that but a dedicated loser?

Last night in bed, I sat with a little fluorescent book-light thing (reminiscent of the old “flashlight-in-bed” trick) and tucked into a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s early short stories called Bagombo Snuff Box. Vonnegut is one of those writers I’d like to be when I grow up — and I took great comfort reading in that he was 47 before he had commercial success. I didn’t get past his introduction, because I found eight rules for writing fiction there that I loved. They validated a number of things I’ve come to feel are very important. I just wanted to roll in them like a dog rolls in something dead. Here they are:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), pp 9-10.

<

p>

EEK! Today I reached an exciting and a frightening stage in working on my novel: it’s coming together into a story.

Ideas have been forming in my mind like bubbles in champagne, but now they’re bumping into each other, joining, forming something larger — which is the story. This afternoon I used my writing session to commit to mapping out these half-ideas and asking myself just what sort of story this is. I haven’t got the plot yet, but I’m getting a real sense of the arc of it, who’s in it, and the overall tone.

Stephen King said that “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” This feels true: you find the story inside yourself (or out in the world). But there’s another component to it, which is commitment: there’s a point in the process where you have to commit to what’s emerging, make choices about it. ‘This’ not ‘that’. What’s uncomfortable is that, in committing, the story goes from being all possible books to being one book.

My “to read” pile has gone from two feet high to just three little books. (Though one of them is another dense, overwrought read.) I’ve got one more that should be arriving in a few days, but, really, the period of “stocking the pond” is coming to a visible end.

I’ve finished my background reading on climate chaos, and have been delving into squooshy books about the stuff that can get in the way of creativity. It’s been a number of years since I’ve gone through the novel-writing process, and between then and now, before I started the micropress, was been another round of manuscript submissions that lasted about two years. That’s a personally costly activity, so before starting this next book, I want to erase as much of the emotional plaque that accrues when interacting with the market that way.

One book I just finished was all about that inner voice of self-judgment. The book was overly long, and by the end of it I wanted to yell at the sample-people Roger and Mary, “Oh, would you just shut the f* up already!” I was tired of their constant whingeing and narcissistic preoccupation with their precious inner states.

On the one hand, I think this reflects the fact that I live in Britain. True, the country’s bureaucracies and individuals are starting to take on this work and enjoying its inherent lingo, drama, and permission to be self-absorbed. But there’s still a pervasive sense of “Ach, why don’t ye just go tae they pub an’ huv a pint?” I’ve absorbed some of that latter quality, and I think that’s been good for me.

On t’other, this impatience kinda feels like something I picked up in my childhood from my parents. They were caring and sensitive, but didn’t have a lot of time for snivelling. They made me angry on many occasions by tricking me into laughing when I really wanted to be upset.

I suppose I have a beef with these books, and psychology in general, for their preoccupation with the past, and blaming your parents for everything. From the perspective of the present, it’s pretty irrelevant who did or didn’t do what. Though, having read this book, I also recognise that my upbringing had a hint of the martial to it, with rules for everything, and I see that I can be heavy-handed with myself when it comes to getting my work done. And there’s a lot of strength and energy in me that I haven’t used because it’s been tied up in this constant self-regulatory chatter.

“Yes, but isn’t that a good thing, because your work gets done?” To a degree, definitely. I’m happy that I learned how to order and structure my world. But work that’s produced out of bloodyminded determination has a particular quality to it, and it’s not a fun one. Also, egregious self-discipline doesn’t really work, since that monkey part of myself will do everything it can to sneak around it and cheat.

What really gets the work done is just… sitting down and doing the work. Which is work, but it’s fun work. This may not make sense, but in being a writer, there must also be periods of doing being a writer. Inventing people, exploring imaginary places, and discovering the intricate threads of a plot — that’s a joy.

This evening I read a book about what gets in the way of that (namely resistance) called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I enjoyed it as a good reminder of how resistance shows up, though it could only go so far in talking about how to step around it and sit down to do the work. Well, that’s not entirely true: I have very distinct activities (how I schedule a writing session, how I prepare for it, how I start) that get me to that working place.

So, again, I’m reading things which remind me that I already know what to do. Still, it feels helpful — and encouraging — to have that reassurance.

One odd side-effect of all this mental decluttering is that I feel very close to a younger version of myself. I was a creative kid, and I got so much pleasure out of doing things — cartooning, playing, making things — purely for their own sake. While I’ve had lots of formal tuition since then, taught myself a lot more, and had lots of experience, it’s really clear to me that this work is going to come from exactly that place I was in when I was in my single digits, playing away.

I keep thinking of playing for hours in that crawlspace, drawing cartoons endlessly with my friend Karl, camping trips in which I’d fill a whole spiral-bound scribbler with doodles and make painted rock ladybugs and monsters with glued-on googly-eyes, writing stories in grade school, and getting to design the bulletin boards in my classroom. I had a lot of reinforcement from my mom, my dad, my teachers, and my classmates for the idea that I was “creative”. My parents never pushed my brother or I in any particular direction, just made sure we knew the rules and let us do our own thing, become our own people.

Okay, blah blah blah, Hamish. That’s very nice. (See, there’s that inner judge: “Get to the point. Don’t bore people. Don’t be vulnerable, it looks bad.” But I know we actually like other people’s messes.)

Anyway, the point of all this is…

***I need readers!***

In about two months, I should be starting to write chapters for Finity. As I did with the other three novels, I want to serialise this story as I write it. As a reader of my blog, you’re invited to read my next book as I write it.

With the other books, I sent out Word files as I went, but since then the technology has jumped forward, and I’m wondering about posting it online. (Though I do tend to edit and re-edit as I go, and am not sure I want to keep the website updated with those constant changes, too.)

So, a question (which you can answer in a comment): If you were to participate in this exercise, how would you prefer to receive each new chapter in the story?

The feedback I’m looking for isn’t about literary criticism (“Maybe you should rewrite it in the first person from the perspective of the cat”, “I liked The Willies more”, or “This won’t sell”) but your reaction as a reader, as if you were reading a paperback you bought from the bookshop. I’d want to know if anything didn’t make sense or felt inconsistent, things like “But in the last chapter his name was ‘Foreman’ and now he’s called ‘Tamara’” or “How did we get from the Hoover Dam to the New York Public Library?” or even “Francoise would never do that!”

And, of course, if you’re simply inspired to say “I’m loving it! What happens next? Send me the next chapter, you bastard!”, that’s also more than fine. Knowing people are out there expecting the next installment is a great way for me to keep the momentum of the project going.

So:

1. Let me know if you would be interested in being an advance reader, and
2. If so, tell me how you’d like to read the serialised version of the story.

<

p>

Today’s doodle is a cheat: I drew something for our grammar goddess at work, Myrna, who asked me for suggestions about her next instructional message to the general e-mail conference. This one is about proper use of exclamation points, so I suggested calling it “WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY?!!!!!” because whenever people use a lot of them in a row, I picture them looking something like this:

Okay, and what am I grateful for today? (When will this end?! Oh, in two days.)

1. Parsley. I love it so. Am about to have some in my evening goop.
2. Ideas. I’ve got lots of books on the go, and there’s something irresistable for me about the idea of collecting new ideas, getting better and better at thinking about life. More on this in a second.
3. Unplanned time. I’ve nothing planned tonight. Okay, it’s 7PM and I’m just finished working, and I haven’t made dinner yet, but still — it’s open before me like a promise. I am my word, and will always follow through on what I say I’ll do (like this stupid list!), so when I find ‘unspoken’ bits, I enjoy them.

Further to the ideas thing: One of the books in my pile that I was really looking forward to reading was one called The Enchantment of Modernity, by Jane Bennett. I’d read the introduction, which put forward an idea I would paraphrase like this:

People often speak about the world as if there was once a time in which it was enchanted, and now, in the modern era, enchantment has gone out of the world. Some look back on the old world as a place of tribes and superstition and consider this a good thing. Others lament the loss of meaning in a mechanised age of isolation. There’s a third path available, though, an “alter-tale”, which considers the modern world as still having the power to enchant — to arrest us in a moment of wonder — without needing that enchantment to be tied into any “divine” purpose.

Why is this enchantment necessary? As Bennett says so beautifully, “I tell my alter-tale because it seems to me that presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world.”

As I’m working on a book about climate crisis, you can see how this would relate. Also, I’m one of those human beings who prefers to see the world as more than mere mechanism. But that goes beyond what Bennett is asking, or would likely approve of.

My problem is the rest of the book after the introduction. The whole thing becomes this laborious exercise in adademia-speak, where plain English is completely lost, and every other clause contains a reference to some dead white guy and a neologism I have to read three times. For instance:

Kant began with the idea that the ground of thought is the categories of the mind and then, when he inquired into the ground of that ground, he referred to the infinite, the inscrutable, the noumena, the supersensible realm. Deleuze begins with the idea that the force behind thinking is sense and then, when he inquires into the force behind that force, he refers to an indeterminate immanent field of differences-in-intensity. (p54)

Blargh! It reminds me of my attempts to read Heidegger — but at least, in his defense, he was being translated from German!

As I flip through the book, her ideas pop out one by one like little goldfish. I get them. It’s just the whole that’s mystifying, convoluted, like that same fish worked into an Escher drawing. As someone who works hard each day to write business copy that’s free of business bullsh*t, I’m not happy wading through academic bullsh*t. If your idea is a good one, you can say it plainly. Instead, the worthy ideas in this book are spun off into abstractions.

I’ll probably go back and dip into it from time to time, but reading it all at once is like trying to make a meal of hors d’oeuvres.

<

p>But why did I need to read this book in the first place? I had the idea as soon as I read the introduction. Or even before — that’s what led me to seek out this book. Did I really need the book to validate my thinking? I need to have faith in my own mind — particularly for the task ahead.

1. I live now, not in the uninhabitable hell that was described in one of the climate scenarios I read about when doing my research this afternoon for the book.
2. My folks. Have I mentioned them yet? I spoke to them yesterday on Skype. I really like my parents. They get me (and vice versa) in a way that only people whose parts I’m made from could. I’m really looking forward to going to Barcelona with them.
3. I’m never bored. I went to a little local cafe this afternoon to do my reading. Eventually, I’ll be tapping out chapters in these sessions, and that’ll be fun. It’s also really encouraging to hear from friends who are reading or just finished one of my books, and have them curse me for keeping them up late or making them steal time to get back to the story. (My friend Kirsten’s doing that to me now with a young adult book she wrote about Easter Island.) No, the world isn’t asking for any of this output, but it feels great to be engaged with it, and to know I’ll never run out of things I want to do. When I’m bimbling through chatrooms online, I’m stunned by how many people declare to the room “I’m bored”. What a horrible approach to getting people to talk to you. And what a waste of potential.

Doodle:

<

p>

I was in the post office today, mailing off something I’d sold on eBay, and overheard the conversation between the clerk and the customer in front of me.

Customer: “I’d like to send this to Australia.”

Clerk: “What’s in the package?”

Customer: “A glass eye.”

Clerk: “Oh.”

I just wrote to a friend of mine, who’d e-mailed me this week, wondering aloud at why she was spending so much time on the couch, not working on her “stuff”. The previous blog post was my answer to her, but today while sitting on my bed doing my novel homework, something else came to mind. So I wrote her the following, though it’s really aimed at me.

======

A second thought occurred to me, about the question of “Why am I not doing my work?” It could be a matter of judgment.

I’m reading a book my editor recommended to me called Soul without Shame. It sounds very squooshy, but it makes some excellent points. This afternoon while reading this and some other material as background work for my book, I felt the overwhelming urge to have a nap. I just had to. So I gave myself twenty minutes to have a nap. Even on waking up, though, I was dogged by this sucking away of energy.

I’m scared to start a new book because part of me judges the whole effort and says “Why bother? None of your other books did much for you, and barely anyone noticed that you wrote them. Most editors didn’t like them, so maybe they’re just crap.” At a doctor’s office a few weeks ago, the attendant saw my occupation on the form and started asking me the usual questions — “Are you published? Would I have heard of you? Have you sold many copies?” etc, and it reawakened this sense of futility, and I’m still trying to shake it. (I hate that people like this with nothing to do with publishing ask these industry questions, which are roughly equivalent to my asking her what she makes in a year and whether she thought that was enough.)

I don’t actually feel that what these doubts say is true, or are the basis on which to judge the activity, but some part of myself worries that it’s true. Were in not for my own bloody-minded determination, this could scuttle the whole project. Or maybe it isn’t determination, but the fear of looking even worse to myself if I didn’t do what I said I could do.

I look at what you’ve done, and I can see how you might feel the same about your work: you’re not rich, you’re not famous, you still have to work hard to get any momentum or results. But to judge the worth or the meaning of your work by these standards would be to get it completely wrong. Your show was one of the best, most authentic and relevant pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. When you sing with your group, the performance is powerful, good, and just plain fun. I know that what you do is developing your soul; I’ve witnessed that. You’re coming into your power more and more. You can’t stop. I can’t stop. We just can’t.

I’m not sure how to address the judgment or what to do about it. I’m looking forward getting ideas from this book. Also, my huge pile’o’books is dwindling, and soon it’ll be time for me to sit down and ask myself lots of questions. Many of them will be aimed at ironing out a story, but many will be for getting myself out of this pointless, undermining thinking that devalues the thing that’s most important to me in life, which is developing what I call a “culture of one“.

The antidote, I know from experience, is to reconnect with the work and what it’s like when it’s most fun, when you’re really in it. This other thing, thinking it should save you or justify you, just doesn’t have any joy in it. And people are moved by joy.

<

p>

It’s March, and it feels like it. Even though there are flowers bursting out of our front garden, it’s sunny, and the weather has been mild, it’s still winter.

I’m researching the book like mad, which is good, and I’ve done lots of difficult homework (reading about carbon sequestration, the troposphere, algae blooms, hydrogen storage, etc.). So far, I’ve read:

• Field Notes from a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Weather Makes, by Tim Flannery
• The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock
• Heat, by George Monbiot

They’ve all been excellent books — some more approachable than others. But the story idea remains just outside my grasp. I haven’t committed yet to moving forward with one specific plot.

Part of this is this apprehension is about whether I deserve to talk about any given topic. I’m not an activist, and I’m certainly no expert. My opinions are always borrowed, like a chameleon’s colours. So this period of “stocking the pond”, ingesting, digesting, is important to my process — soaking in a topic and getting comfortable with my own mind and figuring out what I have to say about a thing. And I don’t feel confident asserting that until I’ve done my homework.

But it’s so damned easy to just poke at the computer, watch movies, and eat instead.

The trick, I think, is to get that there are seasons, and to have compassion for myself as being part of that cycle. It’s appropriate and good to lie fallow sometimes, to be dormant. Much potential energy is created when things decompose in the ground.

Our work is inside us already. Sure, there are actions we have to take for it to manifest externally, but being a slave driver with a whip at our own backs never gets out the really good, deep stuff.

In addition to the climate-related books I’ve been reading, I’m also working through a number of different books about personal work, worldviews, etc.: Find Your Power, Soul Without Shame, The Enchantment of Modern Life, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I’m still waiting on Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, which sounds promising. Further down the queue, but I still want to get to, are Writing Open the Mind (which was one of those books you tack onto an Amazon order so you get free shipping) and Self-Promotion for the Creative Person. (That last one’s the scariest of all, and will possibly be the most useful.)

A theme that’s emerging out of this work is: “What are you afraid you’ll become if you don’t drive yourself with all this discipline?” If my work is something that I love — and I know in my heart it is — it will happen regardless. But it will happen in time, and maybe not a time-frame that satisfies my impatience or worry.

There are some other projects I’d like to get to, too, craftsy things like pop-ups and books. If only I could be productive 24 hours a day. In practice, I’ve got about five or six good hours of work, both for the Coach and my other projects, and then I need hanging out time. That’s just how it works.

<

p>

I signed up for Facebook at the suggestion of The Strategic Coach’s web programmer, who wanted me to check it out for a project we’re doing. It’s a “social networking” website — basically people chatting to groups of friends, based on a shared background. I’ve found ones for Dalhousie University’s theatre department, Charlottetown Rural High School, and even Forest Glade, my public school, which is still running and has a horrible circa-1997 website. Forest Glade, the subdivision (I really did grow up in “The Wonder Years”), also has a group of its own.

<

p>

Facebook started off as a college project, so the members tend to be young; I’ve not found anyone from Dal, the Rural, or Forest Glade of my generation yet. But in the subdivision’s group, someone posted pictures of the urban ruins of the old Easttown Plaza. This was where my family went grocery shopping at the N&D. The poster also included a picture of the abandoned Woolco.

<

p>

<

p>

I remember going to that Woolco, and Mom buying me a treat one day because I’d been a good boy while we were shopping. It was a pivotal moment, actually, which several friends will recognise, because this has become a story in my life called “The Puppy Puzzle”. It goes like this:

<

p>

When I was about four, Mom (“Mommy” in those days) and I went out shopping. We were out for a long time, but I was quiet and well-behaved. So as we passed a display piled high with boxes of puzzles, Mom stopped and told me I could have any puzzle I wanted. Wow!

<

p>

I agonised over the decision — which one? I finally narrowed it down to two: One box featured a oil-painting illustration of a cartoon puppy, grey, with huge loving eyes (very Seventies, likely also the era of the “crying clown” paintings). The other box, though, had three puzzles in it. They were solid colours — red, yellow, blue — making up a sailboat, a drum, and a soldier. I decided that it made more sense to get the one with more puzzles in it.

<

p>

When we got home, I ran with my box of puzzles down to the “crawlspace” in our basement (a weird storage area that grown-ups would bump their heads in, but made for a great play-area for my brother and I, and was a frighteningly dark place for sleepovers). I sat on the old green patterned rug that was laid over the bumpy concrete, and I took out my puzzles. I opened the box, looked inside, and I cried: I wanted the puppy puzzle.

<

p>

This stuck with me, and I trust you to infer the lesson I took from it. I’m pretty convinced this experience has informed a lot of my subsequent decisions in life.

I went to a music cabaret tonight which was supposed to start at 7, and no one was there. I sat in the pub, read my book — the first few chapters of George Monbiot’s Heat, which states that our carbon emissions actually need to be reduced by 90% for us to avert the catastrophe caused by the “positive feedback” loop that a rise of just two degrees will likely trigger.

I had a pint.

After a while, the bartender turned the volume up on the football, making reading impossible, so I necked the pint, packed up, and went downstairs, where a few people were straggling in, but nothing was really set up.

I went back home.

I wasn’t going to sit with three or four people I didn’t know trying to ingratiate myself while they assembled their instruments, or sit in a corner trying not to look like a killer.

This afternoon I had a test-call with the assistant of someone I’m going to interview for a Strategic Coach article. I used SkypeOut to call her and it was utter rubbish. Normal Skype is about 85% successful when I talk to my mum or my editor, but this was just awful. As I wrote to Skype’s support desk, “I felt like Alexander Graham Bell calling to Mr Watson, except Watson was being filtered through ‘The Matrix’.” It was embarrassing.

These two experiences underscored something odd about me: I’m comfortable standing up in front of a large audience and presenting to them, but I get shy about making phone calls or showing up alone at other people’s events (which I normally do because my friends here generally aren’t into the stuff I am).

~

Today I ordered a new OS for my [#$%ing] computer as well as office software. I now own a legal copy of almost everything I use. This has been important to me for a while, and I’m almost there.