Jack Strange's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Zen revelation no. 1
I have a few thoughts about writing I’d like to share.
You might call them zen revelations for the aspiring writer.
Zen revelation 1: Writing is as natural as breathing and you knew that a long time ago, but you’ve probably forgotten it
When you were at school, and maybe aged about ten years old, there must have been at least one day when your teacher said ‘write a story’.
What did you do?
Chances are that you sat down at your desk and wrote one.
You didn’t think about it. You didn’t make a pile of notes. You just came up with a story. You may have thought of a title and written your story around that; or used an incident as the starting point, and added the title later.
You wrote your story with a pen, and you made hardly any corrections as you went along. The words just flowed out of you naturally.
You’d read lots of comics, and novels aimed at kids, and watched a few movies. Because of this, you had an instinctive grasp of what a story is, and that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Why can’t you do that now? Why can’t you just sit down and write a story the way you did when you were ten?
The answer is that when you were young, you had no fear of failure or of bad writing, and consequently you were able to tap into your subconscious mind.
You didn’t worry that when you began the story you didn’t know how it was going to end; you trusted your inventive mind to come up with an ending when you got there, or as you went along.
You probably didn’t even know the middle of the story when you wrote the first few paragraphs. The middle probably developed from the opening.
Writing is like speaking. When you speak to me, I don’t make notes and come up with an answer. I just answer, and the response comes to me without thinking about it at a conscious level.
Writing should be the same. You should get into a flow and just write. That’s all there is to it. Just remind yourself how you used to do it when you were ten years old, and do the same thing.
You’re rusty now, as you haven’t done that for a while, so it’ll take your mind a while to get used to that way of working again. But it will adapt. You just have to keep forcing it to make things up for you.
People make sense of the world through stories. That’s why stories exist. They really are as natural as breathing to our species.
Make things up. I can’t stress that enough.
You might call them zen revelations for the aspiring writer.
Zen revelation 1: Writing is as natural as breathing and you knew that a long time ago, but you’ve probably forgotten it
When you were at school, and maybe aged about ten years old, there must have been at least one day when your teacher said ‘write a story’.
What did you do?
Chances are that you sat down at your desk and wrote one.
You didn’t think about it. You didn’t make a pile of notes. You just came up with a story. You may have thought of a title and written your story around that; or used an incident as the starting point, and added the title later.
You wrote your story with a pen, and you made hardly any corrections as you went along. The words just flowed out of you naturally.
You’d read lots of comics, and novels aimed at kids, and watched a few movies. Because of this, you had an instinctive grasp of what a story is, and that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Why can’t you do that now? Why can’t you just sit down and write a story the way you did when you were ten?
The answer is that when you were young, you had no fear of failure or of bad writing, and consequently you were able to tap into your subconscious mind.
You didn’t worry that when you began the story you didn’t know how it was going to end; you trusted your inventive mind to come up with an ending when you got there, or as you went along.
You probably didn’t even know the middle of the story when you wrote the first few paragraphs. The middle probably developed from the opening.
Writing is like speaking. When you speak to me, I don’t make notes and come up with an answer. I just answer, and the response comes to me without thinking about it at a conscious level.
Writing should be the same. You should get into a flow and just write. That’s all there is to it. Just remind yourself how you used to do it when you were ten years old, and do the same thing.
You’re rusty now, as you haven’t done that for a while, so it’ll take your mind a while to get used to that way of working again. But it will adapt. You just have to keep forcing it to make things up for you.
People make sense of the world through stories. That’s why stories exist. They really are as natural as breathing to our species.
Make things up. I can’t stress that enough.
Acid, weed, speed and me
I’d like to make it clear that I don’t approve of drugs and I’m not encouraging anyone to take them.
Other than for tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages, I haven’t had any mind-altering drugs in decades, and it’s going to stay that way.
But in my youth I felt rather differently.
I didn’t encourage people to take drugs, but I took them myself. They had a sort of respectability as far as I was concerned, probably because I’d read books by Thomas De Quincey, Aldous Huxley, Hunter S Thompson, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and the like. This made me feel as if I was doing something that writers do; as if it was a necessary part of the apprenticeship you needed to serve before you could write. And as someone who always thought that one day he’d become a writer, I had to follow in their no-doubt rather unsteady footsteps.
It led to some pretty interesting experiences.
It brought me into contact with a number of individuals who were living on the edge of a precipice and about to drop off; and it acquainted me with some scary types, too. I’d never have met them if I hadn't got involved with drugs. Characters based on those people now populate my novels.
My former life as a near-junkie feeds through into my work in other ways.
I was, during that period, using various toxic substances and alcohol in sufficient quantities to propel me towards an early grave. And I was doing it “with a fierce joy”, to use Norman Mailer’s memorable phrase.
Okay, I wasn’t taking heroin, but when I recently wrote about a heroin addict, I was able to draw on my own experience as an addict to make her life believable. (Don’t bother looking for the book; it’s not out yet. It’s called ‘Keeping Me’, and it might be next year before it sees the light of day).
I used all of the classic drugs of that era except for H (back then, the mainstream choices were pretty much limited to weed, speed, acid, and heroin). I also took a number of last-resort drugs.
My favourite last-resort drug was Bronchipax.
It was a medication for clearing the lungs if you were chesty. It was the poor man’s speed, and if you took more than the manufacturer’s recommended dose, it kept you going all night. (Please, whatever else you do, don’t try this stupid trick at home. It might fry your brains then you'd end up in the same dreadful state I'm in!)
I used to take the stuff on sunny afternoons in Greenhead Park and knock back half a bottle of Whiskeymac with it. (A friend of mine knocked back the other half). We must have looked like a right pair of dossers! After that, we’d stagger down the hill into town and try to get drunk. God knows why we did that. Getting drunk didn’t seem to be an option when you had that much Bronchipax inside you.
We’d hit Charlie’s late on, and stagger home, still speeding, in the medium hours (not the small hours).
I wonder if the likes of Julian Barnes and Haruki Murakami have ever done anything like that?
Note: Whiskeymac is "a cocktail made up of whiskey and ginger wine" according to Wikipedia
PS Huddersfield readers, do you remember Charlie's?
PPS I forgot to mention Poppers. I'll save those stories for another post.
I'll also tell you what the dreaded speed comedown feels like.
Other than for tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages, I haven’t had any mind-altering drugs in decades, and it’s going to stay that way.
But in my youth I felt rather differently.
I didn’t encourage people to take drugs, but I took them myself. They had a sort of respectability as far as I was concerned, probably because I’d read books by Thomas De Quincey, Aldous Huxley, Hunter S Thompson, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and the like. This made me feel as if I was doing something that writers do; as if it was a necessary part of the apprenticeship you needed to serve before you could write. And as someone who always thought that one day he’d become a writer, I had to follow in their no-doubt rather unsteady footsteps.
It led to some pretty interesting experiences.
It brought me into contact with a number of individuals who were living on the edge of a precipice and about to drop off; and it acquainted me with some scary types, too. I’d never have met them if I hadn't got involved with drugs. Characters based on those people now populate my novels.
My former life as a near-junkie feeds through into my work in other ways.
I was, during that period, using various toxic substances and alcohol in sufficient quantities to propel me towards an early grave. And I was doing it “with a fierce joy”, to use Norman Mailer’s memorable phrase.
Okay, I wasn’t taking heroin, but when I recently wrote about a heroin addict, I was able to draw on my own experience as an addict to make her life believable. (Don’t bother looking for the book; it’s not out yet. It’s called ‘Keeping Me’, and it might be next year before it sees the light of day).
I used all of the classic drugs of that era except for H (back then, the mainstream choices were pretty much limited to weed, speed, acid, and heroin). I also took a number of last-resort drugs.
My favourite last-resort drug was Bronchipax.
It was a medication for clearing the lungs if you were chesty. It was the poor man’s speed, and if you took more than the manufacturer’s recommended dose, it kept you going all night. (Please, whatever else you do, don’t try this stupid trick at home. It might fry your brains then you'd end up in the same dreadful state I'm in!)
I used to take the stuff on sunny afternoons in Greenhead Park and knock back half a bottle of Whiskeymac with it. (A friend of mine knocked back the other half). We must have looked like a right pair of dossers! After that, we’d stagger down the hill into town and try to get drunk. God knows why we did that. Getting drunk didn’t seem to be an option when you had that much Bronchipax inside you.
We’d hit Charlie’s late on, and stagger home, still speeding, in the medium hours (not the small hours).
I wonder if the likes of Julian Barnes and Haruki Murakami have ever done anything like that?
Note: Whiskeymac is "a cocktail made up of whiskey and ginger wine" according to Wikipedia
PS Huddersfield readers, do you remember Charlie's?
PPS I forgot to mention Poppers. I'll save those stories for another post.
I'll also tell you what the dreaded speed comedown feels like.
