Writing without irony

As I sat listening to my colleague today fairly hammering the keys of his keyboard, it occurred to me that he had probably learned to type on a typewriter decades ago, and had simply never realised that a keyboard is not a system of levers; that there are no letter heads that have to be whammed against the screen. It's amazing how unadaptable human beings are. Once we learn to write with one hand, we could never conceive of writing with the other. I grew up writing stories in a certain style which is probably wearily familar to those who know my work, and it's not so easy to bust out of it.

Dickens Is Dead (But Still Prolific)

A quick (and late) shout for Are You Sitting Comfortably, Thursday 23rd Feb, at Jacksons Lane Theatre:

White Rabbit invites you in, away from the swirling London fog and the clutches of Jack Frost’s icy fingers. Cosy down and enjoy original short stories for adults in a magical atmosphere, read aloud by Bernadette Russell, Gareth Brierley and special guest readers.

...including one of my own, inevitably, and I'm told one by Zoe of the Mind and Language blog, which I recommend an excursion to. Also, to a particular friend who is peculiarly allergic to descriptions of fog, I can only say that the fog in my own story is simulated and harmless.

Am I a writer if a tree falls in the forest and...

Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:

The objective correlative

So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:

The art of apple eating to illustrate the passage of time

In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next. I've never quite got past the suspicion that the world is running more slowly now that it has nearly seven billion people on it. No wonder the lunchtime queue in Tescos is so long.
Tweet

Lit crit of the week, #3

"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

Tweet

Biogging

I return to a theme I recall pushing about a year ago - sometimes there's more to storytelling than mere story. I'm beginning to think a narrow purist obsession with the perfect re-re-revised manuscript might just be letting me down.
It kinda helps if the storyteller is coming from somewhere. If I remember rightly, the word hinterland popped up in a new context one day in the 1980s when some politician or other (probably conservative?) bemoaned an absence of it, to describe the gap in life experience and personality of one of his colleagues. It has got me thinking - what, for writing purposes, might be my hinterland? I do not have an exciting job, or a colourful lineage, or even a delightfully eccentric obsession (that I'm aware of, at any rate). After much musing, the best I've come up with yet is this:

The Myth of The Basement Office

Ten Openings That Never Went Anywhere - #4

They stared at the screen together.

Across a vast, snow-covered square so large that the ends were lost in the sky, innumerable ranks of grey-green figures stood in tight rows, from the cameraman seemingly all the way to the blanket white clouds. In the distance, along one side of the square, a square black limousine struggled like a beetle, almost broken by the weight of the enormous portrait of the Dear Leader it sustained. It was only the sheer scale of the scene that revealed any sign of humanity. Rows of mourners that in any smaller number would have appeared drilled with laser-like precision revealed the subtlest kinks in the foreshortened middle distance. Perspective could be harsh.

Notes On A Lack of Scandal

I'm comfortably listening to Radio 4. Suddenly I hear a demented but tooth-grindingly familiar melody. I drop my mug of coffee on the workstop where it will bounce a couple of times, and launch myself headlong at the radio, one arm stretched out ahead, to connect to the off button on the radio. All in slow motion of course - I sail through the air, a look of pain on my suddenly pale face, splashes of coffee gracefully ascending from the worktop, and there is a slowed-down shout of

Nooooo!

It's The Archers, of course, and if anyone else in Britain is anything like me then I'd imagine there must be a sudden drop in power usage on the national grid at that moment.