Frydmania

A month of ‘learning from books’ comes to a close.  I think I learned further things in the process of choosing what to write about.  An unexpected bonus.

I normally write a ‘content post’ right up to the end of the month – but I’m sneaking in a bit of reflection on the month instead.

The surprise is not that we learn from what we read – the surprise is just how many different things we can read, and learn from.  And why I chose to contemplate what I haven’t covered, as well as what I have.

Nearly 30 posts, and I haven’t gone near a lot of the writing that surrounds us everyday: newspapers, telephone directories, cereal packets, advertising on buses/bus shelters/taxis, personal letters, and much else.

I realise you may have been waiting for my insights on Bran Flakes packet advertising of the 1980s.  But despite it being in front of me pretty much every day at that time, I couldn’t tell you.  Sorry about that.

What has been fun has been amassing a set of topics – and then discovering how life situations, day to day, meant that I could pick up those topics and connect the past learning with current scenarios.

Because, as writers, there sure are days when it flows – and days when those topics just remain on the ‘to do’ lists.  We may have a great piece to write, but that added kick from where we find ourselves mentally, day to day, can mean the post starts to sing.

I had a couple of ideas ready – and they may come to fruition another time.  But I also drew on what was happening right then – as well as noticing the process of reading over my own writing, and working out what to think about it.

I noticed more ‘reader reaction’ when the titles were about well-known books: The Hobbit, Little Women.  Makes sense.

But I also enjoyed those times when a post connected with someone, through what they’d lived or experienced themselves.  I love finding posts on others’ blogs where I have a ‘me too!’ reaction – delighted if I can offer a little of the same.

One of the trickier bits has been deciding how to term what I was finding, and enjoying, in what I read.  I decided on separating ‘things’ – moments of feeling understood, bits of information – from style: techniques authors used that I really loved.

So you won’t be surprised that there’s another list building with writing techniques that impressed me.  But I’ll leave that for a little while.

When we think about writing that has impacted us, it’s often come at a time of life when we needed the encouragement, the sense of greater perspective.  It’s not surprising that what we read in our teens, at that time of forming ourselves, and our opinions, can stay with us.

Still, I seem to have written about my teens more than I thought I would.  I don’t think I’m off to pull out the diaries just yet.  But I have a plan afoot to have a little more dialogue with that younger self – and how my teenage environmentalist self would view me now, and the world we live in.

I have noticed a bit of a tendency when I write blog post titles.  They often seem to be in two halves.  My inner academic of old is not satisfied unless titles have that combination of word play and explanation.

If I am to complete this month of writing about reading, and what I’ve learned, it surely has to include reading academic works.  After all, you would hope you gained something from academic insights…

And I did.  I had the benefit of that great flexibility of the Scottish university system: two years to explore a range of subjects, two more years to focus down and complete a degree.  That means you can read a whole range of different things in that time.

Literature.  Ethnology.  Vocabulary.  Diagrams for cutting up sentences into useful bits.  Some stuff about how the brain processes things.  How to interpret dirt.  The physics of what frequency different sounds are at. A little bit of formal logic. I’m sure there was lots more.

At a distance now, with almost two decades gone since I began my undergraduate degree (no! already?), it can be harder to tell what I have retained from those studies.  As with school learning too, it seems to be less about individual facts or techniques, and more about attitudes, perspectives, and perhaps a few new skills along the way.

I learned the usefulness of reading a precis at the start of an article, to see if it would cover what I needed.  I learned how to reference things properly.  I learned (via Dan, actually) how useful subheadings are, to help you thread your way through a text, and to signpost where you’re up to.

But I did also learn the importance of those two parts to a title.  I don’t know where the convention started – but it is certainly well established in the arts and social sciences.

I wonder if it is a way of slightly apologising for one’s subject matter – or certainly, trying to make it more exciting by linking it to a more mainstream phrase.

It could also be about offering a new perspective on something familiar – which is hopefully a lot of what academic has to offer.  We start with what feels familiar, in the first half of the title, and we sketch out our approach in the second half.

In fact, with the title above, I’ve broken that rule – the word play is in the second half.  But then I’ve been applying academic title writing to blog posts, and only recently discovering that you need to reverse the process.

Blog posts titles need to start with the concrete, so that what you write has a greater chance of being found (out in the wilds of the interweb).  It does help if you have an interesting title too – people are more likely to click on it to read it.

So if I had called it 10 Top Tips for Writing Better Titles, that might have helped even further.  But I’m also writing what I like to write.  And read.  And I like a bit of wordplay, a bit of balance and rhythm, in my titles.

Those two halves have been needed this month, as I both name what is already out there (the book, the type of reading experience), and my take on it (the second half).  But next month? Who knows.  It may well be we’re back to something more like a conventional title.

Perhaps what I have retained – from all that reading at university – is the sense of creating a narrative to what you write.  Your Big Idea, your New Critique, will be easier to pick up if it has elements of writing that are already familiar to readers.

We want a shape to what we read.  A journey, a path, a sense of knowing where we’re heading.  We want to find ourselves somewhere which is new, and different.  We want to pat ourselves on the back, a bit, at recognising markers on the way – realising that someone else has been thinking about the same subject matter.

Those titles: they are part of the promise of the article.  The familiar, and the new.  And anchoring this new thing, this new writing, in parts of the world that are already known.  Giving permission to our insights, and hopefully adding them to this greater whole.

These titles can be a bold statement.  An enticement.  An opportunity for puns.  But they also signal a beginning – and one where we hope the road will be worth negotiating.

I’m wading into the backwaters of the blog – the posts I haven’t visited in a while.  The notion is to make the categories simpler – essentially, to pull together the blogthatwas and what I’m doing now.  But I’m feeling a little like a history rewriter, something out of 1984.

I had a grand plan, you see.  I was going to read 1984 in…1984! That would have been good.  But it didn’t happen.

I overlooked the fact that a) I was 10 in 1984, and the book was better for later and b) there would be school work.  And meals.  And a few other things to take up my time.

Part of the connection was that Orwell wrote 1984 on the Isle of Jura, where I go on holiday reasonably regularly.  He based himself up at the far north of the island, in a place called Barnhill, and wrote his novel there.

There’s been plenty said – in print, on screen – about why he chose Jura, whether or not he drew on the nature of the island, and islanders, in writing his book.  Which is part of what brings people to visit the island – though not the only reason.

I am not here to analyse that side of things – only to say that Jura is a place of beauty, and wonder.  And that it is also a challenging place to live, as many islands can be, especially those on the edge of the Atlantic.

And that, whatever your reason for going there, you should just go – because it works a place in your heart, and remains there, however long the gaps between visits.

Myself, I think that what Orwell was looking for was the equivalent of Having the House to Himself to write.  (I can relate to that.)

It is much easier to write when there is space to let your thoughts circle a little in the air, when you don’t have to have onlookers for your reactions – whether the words are flowing, or not.

But I have been thinking about 1984, mainly the aspects of writing, and rewriting, the news.  Each day, Winston Smith, the central character, is involved in this activity.  What happened yesterday, last week, is revised in favour of the standpoint the state has on it right now.

I think that sometimes, it can help to read a book purely for itself – rather than to see what else it draws on.  I didn’t know enough about the Soviet state propaganda at the time I read it to make all the connections – certainly, when I read Orwell’s other key read, Animal Farm, I didn’t know about how the characters resembled Soviet political figures.

Sometimes, it’s good to let the story ‘speak’ in its own right.  The message can still impact us.  And I could tell that continually altering history, and calling the new version ‘true’, was problematic to say the least.

By comparison, in the last couple of years, as information in archives goes beyond the restrictions of the Secrets Act (in the UK), a lot more has come out about the Allies’ work in the Second World War.

How certain things that we take for granted – America entering the war – were not as automatic as we presume.  (This relates to propaganda work going on to encourage America to join the Allies – though the experience of Pearl Harbour clearly had the greatest impact on that decision.)  So in my own lifetime, I’ve come to see ‘familiar’ history adjust a little.

But where I relate to Winston Smith just now is the impact of adjusting truth, and knowing what came before.  In some ways, Smith remains the repository for earlier truth – though in the world of 1984, he is unable to express that.

My own historical revisionism is much more limited.  I’m looking at some of what I wrote on a few occasions that I was tired, possibly unhappy.  I’m looking at whether it reads well.  Whether it’s worth reading again.  And whether I feel happy for someone else to read it (should they choose to go through the back catalogue, as it were).

A few posts have gone – because they felt more like a diary entry than a blog entry, if you see what I mean.  There are times when the solace of writing helps us, in the moment, but it is more like a mark on a wall: that day done.

We don’t necessarily go and look at all those marks on the wall – sometimes we know they’re there, but we choose to move beyond them.

There are plenty of authors who get rid of earlier works.  (There are equally plenty of friends, family, companions, who sneak those writings back, even after strict instructions.)  But those writings are drafts, private words, generally unpublished.

In the world of the internet, where everything is published, and available, we can also choose which of our words we want to stick around – and what can be acknowledged, privately, as another mark on the wall.

I’m grateful I don’t have to write with a fear of Big Brother looking over my shoulder, checking.  Part of stretching your wings as a writer is testing yourself as you write, doing things you don’t yet quite know how to do.

Some of them may work – and some may not.  That is OK.  Some situations we may choose to leave as private, only written down inside us.  That too is OK.

And other situations, other stories, remain ready inside – knowing that they will take flight some day.  And that, when you are trying out the title of writer, is very much OK.