I’d love to say that I’ve done lots of writing this summer, after all my ‘I must write’ blog posts, but I have made a little start.
I now have a notebook for writing. Some of it is just funny things that I see or come across, in the hope that they may form the basis for writing. I’m finding myself thinking a lot about the mechanics of writing, what beginnings look like, what endings look like, and examples of what seems to work, from film and TV as well as fiction, to work out how good stories are put together.
I’m also working out what I enjoy reading/viewing, in terms of stories, and hopefully that may give me an idea of what I want to write about.
I should probably take my notebook on the bus, as my best option for observing people, one-off stories in newspapers, signs misread that suggest a different meaning, that kind of thing. While my journeys to and from work have usually been about pacing myself into, and out of, work, perhaps now I can use that ‘not required to do anything’ time to take my imagination for a walk.
I also find I’m reading the literary sections of newspapers more, seeing what critics think of books, though not so that I can only write in a way that ‘sells’. There are times when critics express that happy amazement you get with books that do take you somewhere new, or when they write about what and why they write.
Jeanette Winterston has some amazing pieces fortnightly in the Times Book Review where you can feel yes, I really am doing society a favour if I write. All of this is good for enthusiasm that books and writing are about pleasure as well as about ideas, both of which I want to hang on to in the process of trying out some writing.
Just after coming back from holiday, Dan and I met with a Polish couple living in England but visiting Edinburgh for the festival. The lady was a former pupil of mine when I last taught in Poland, and has gone from strength to strength, say I with pride though not much responsibility. The man is a lecturer in marketing, but went on to tell us the kind of societal trends behind products that he actually researches.
Probably no big surprise that it’s more and more about story telling in marketing, so that a product is based in the context of a story that you can be in too. I’d read a few months back about society shifting away from acquiring things to acquiring experiences, and he agreed that the story telling comes into this too.
In some ways that’s good. It doesn’t take much looking around to see that with the web, everyone has the chance to tell their stories more. In other ways, it can be a pressure – there are yet more stories out there, what space is there for mine?
But I have to remind myself that my criteria for writing when starting in this direction were not of marketability, but of doing something that I love, for my own ends rather than anyone else’s.
It’s tricky to keep this focus as I start out, not to interrogate what I do too much. Thinking about writing while on holiday, I distinguished between writing as art and writing as craft. Sometimes with crafts, the fun is more in the process than in the end product. I’d like a nice end product too, some day, but for now, there’s no substitute for hard craft.