I find a suitable grandchild helps. I last wrote a software program, in Fortran, in 1979. Yesterday I bought a Raspberry Pi kit, and the appropriate ‘for Dummies’ book, and intend to tackle Python. To stay curious one needs curious pals - mine is 64 years younger than me and CURIOUS. I blame the teachers. Bless them.
Ian, this is delightful and cracked me up. I think I am going to take myself off after a life time of employment, find a tree and sit within the branches, and write down my experiences. I am not going to care about the words. I may even draw pictures too. Keep writing. Loved this.
I love this idea If it interests you, you'll find a way to interest others - if it bores you, it will bore others. Probably useful advice for any art form.
Reminds me in some way of Keith Jarrett, who realised at some point that it wasn't what he played that connected him to the audience, but how he felt while he was playing.
If he got excited by an idea, no matter how simple or technical, the audience would too - and the opposite was also true - if he played a beautiful or virtuosic passage but felt nothing, the audience would feel nothing also.
It’s such a weird coincidence you should mention Keith Jarett. Yesterday, after a really stressful day, I decided I needed to get out of my head so I plonked the kids electric piano down on the dining table and watched a beginners piano tutorial on YouTube. Today, I’ve (not quite) mastered the intro to John Lennons imagine, while trying to channel Keith Jarrett and remembering a night out at a friends house, small group of us lying on the sofa, in the dark, after an evening at the pub, listening to Keith’s Koln concert. It was an especially happy time of my life. Listened to him loads in my mid to late teens. I’ve always wanted to play like him but hadn’t listened or thought about him in years. (And funnily enough a really close friend who was also there that night was called James - really weird!)
I set aside all of today to work on a commissioned script and have so far spent more time doing literally anything else but writing. Sitting my arse down and dragging a few words out of the deepest recesses of my brain is turning out to be a bit of a challenge – I'd actually rather clean the bathroom. So this was a timely reminder of why I put myself through this shit.
I loved this! It also sounded incredibly familiar to me. I'm an illustrator and although the medium is very different the process sounds exactly the same. Some days the drawings are just there waiting to be drawn and others... they've gone...somewhere.
Loved this, Ian. Have always appreciated your ability to make intelligible the arcane aspects of how we are governed. Grateful for the boredom you go through on our behalf!
Thought you'd appreciate these two thoughts from great writers - which chime with your piece. (Warning: there are semi-colons in the second one.)
Clive James: "Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience. Never overestimate how much they know."
Don Paterson: "What kills the writer, in the end, is the absence of a direct relationship between effort and accomplishment. Thus it is rarely true *work*, in any way our bodies can understand. A free day, all the kids off to their grandmother's, the house deathly quiet; half an hour's meditation; a cafetière of Java in the study; no sound but the rain dripping from the trees in the back garden through the open window ... And I cannot introduce one word to another without them both falling out immediately. Today – exhausted, ill, overweight, the house full of yelling, my mind a roiling broth of fear and resentment and professional jealousy – a dozen problems I have pored over for weeks have been solved in twenty minutes flat. I end the day feeling worse than ever, as if I had accomplished nothing at all."
Both these quotes are spot on. In political journalism you also really have to get over the absence of a research-to-popularity link. You can spend weeks researching and get little attention, then write a quick angry instant response in an hour that gets loads of traffic. It;s depressing at the time, but you get over it.
That’s basically all writing, though, right? And then you add in the Paterson aspect of work. I mean, I sometimes feel guilty when I (vanishingly rarely) bang out a column in about 15 minutes, and it’s just perfect first time. But I shouldn’t because that just balances when I spend an entire day on one of the sodding things, bashing it into shape with a massive hammer, until the pieces more or less look like something readable, or at least beyond the point where an editor will hunt me down and glare at me.
"You're there so they don't have to go through what you went through"--did I mention how profoundly fucking grateful I am to you and Dorian for doing this on every single episode of Origin Story?
Well chware teg you are bloody good at it! I can only write if I have a set deadline otherwise it's not happening, saying that I'm doing my diploma and my Thesis at the moment with a deadline and the struggle is real!
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Such an interesting dimension to writing with consideration given to the feeling aspect, which I do believe has a profound impact. Thanks for this amazing article which gives a lot of food for thought.
I think that one your strengths, Ian, and one that is greatly appreciated, is precisely that: how you consider the hoary, recondite details and present them in such a way as to make them accessible to the lay person - turning pearls into …um… whatever it is we swine eat. (I like swine btw))
I can't abide people who glory in their own ignorance. The world is amazing, and complicated, and we should strive to understand it. Not surprising that my best friends are also insanely curious people.
1. With features, making no assumptions on the reader can be useful. It doesn’t hurt to add in brief notes of explanation (or outward links), and you can usually get someone up to speed quickly. By contrast, leave out just a few sentences and your word soup might be impenetrable.
2. Find the thing you love and try to do as much of that as you can. And if that chimes with an audience, fucking great. For me, it’s storytelling. If I could, I would spend my life chronicling old video games, making sure those stories are not lost. Alas, few will pay for that. But when they do, I’m very happy.
3. Don’t allow anyone to tell you how to write and what is the correct way to write. I once had someone argue that you should always write a piece from start to finish, as if tools had never moved beyond the typewriter. Their argument is that would stop distraction. Yeah, great. If that works for you, go for it. It doesn’t work for me. My writing is more akin to sculpture – messy sculpture at that. I usually start with a big mess of words and ideas that I hack into shape in whatever app I’m using, carving off big chunks and hopefully ending up with something suitable for an art gallery. Or at least not a skip.
I find a suitable grandchild helps. I last wrote a software program, in Fortran, in 1979. Yesterday I bought a Raspberry Pi kit, and the appropriate ‘for Dummies’ book, and intend to tackle Python. To stay curious one needs curious pals - mine is 64 years younger than me and CURIOUS. I blame the teachers. Bless them.
Ian, this is delightful and cracked me up. I think I am going to take myself off after a life time of employment, find a tree and sit within the branches, and write down my experiences. I am not going to care about the words. I may even draw pictures too. Keep writing. Loved this.
I love this idea If it interests you, you'll find a way to interest others - if it bores you, it will bore others. Probably useful advice for any art form.
Reminds me in some way of Keith Jarrett, who realised at some point that it wasn't what he played that connected him to the audience, but how he felt while he was playing.
If he got excited by an idea, no matter how simple or technical, the audience would too - and the opposite was also true - if he played a beautiful or virtuosic passage but felt nothing, the audience would feel nothing also.
It’s such a weird coincidence you should mention Keith Jarett. Yesterday, after a really stressful day, I decided I needed to get out of my head so I plonked the kids electric piano down on the dining table and watched a beginners piano tutorial on YouTube. Today, I’ve (not quite) mastered the intro to John Lennons imagine, while trying to channel Keith Jarrett and remembering a night out at a friends house, small group of us lying on the sofa, in the dark, after an evening at the pub, listening to Keith’s Koln concert. It was an especially happy time of my life. Listened to him loads in my mid to late teens. I’ve always wanted to play like him but hadn’t listened or thought about him in years. (And funnily enough a really close friend who was also there that night was called James - really weird!)
That is a coincidence! :) Best way to unwind. The Koln Concert is a truly wonderful recording!
I set aside all of today to work on a commissioned script and have so far spent more time doing literally anything else but writing. Sitting my arse down and dragging a few words out of the deepest recesses of my brain is turning out to be a bit of a challenge – I'd actually rather clean the bathroom. So this was a timely reminder of why I put myself through this shit.
I loved this! It also sounded incredibly familiar to me. I'm an illustrator and although the medium is very different the process sounds exactly the same. Some days the drawings are just there waiting to be drawn and others... they've gone...somewhere.
Loved this, Ian. Have always appreciated your ability to make intelligible the arcane aspects of how we are governed. Grateful for the boredom you go through on our behalf!
Thought you'd appreciate these two thoughts from great writers - which chime with your piece. (Warning: there are semi-colons in the second one.)
Clive James: "Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience. Never overestimate how much they know."
Don Paterson: "What kills the writer, in the end, is the absence of a direct relationship between effort and accomplishment. Thus it is rarely true *work*, in any way our bodies can understand. A free day, all the kids off to their grandmother's, the house deathly quiet; half an hour's meditation; a cafetière of Java in the study; no sound but the rain dripping from the trees in the back garden through the open window ... And I cannot introduce one word to another without them both falling out immediately. Today – exhausted, ill, overweight, the house full of yelling, my mind a roiling broth of fear and resentment and professional jealousy – a dozen problems I have pored over for weeks have been solved in twenty minutes flat. I end the day feeling worse than ever, as if I had accomplished nothing at all."
Both these quotes are spot on. In political journalism you also really have to get over the absence of a research-to-popularity link. You can spend weeks researching and get little attention, then write a quick angry instant response in an hour that gets loads of traffic. It;s depressing at the time, but you get over it.
That’s basically all writing, though, right? And then you add in the Paterson aspect of work. I mean, I sometimes feel guilty when I (vanishingly rarely) bang out a column in about 15 minutes, and it’s just perfect first time. But I shouldn’t because that just balances when I spend an entire day on one of the sodding things, bashing it into shape with a massive hammer, until the pieces more or less look like something readable, or at least beyond the point where an editor will hunt me down and glare at me.
"You're there so they don't have to go through what you went through"--did I mention how profoundly fucking grateful I am to you and Dorian for doing this on every single episode of Origin Story?
Everything IS interesting and despite all the terible and stupid stuff going on, this is a golden age for curious people.
Well chware teg you are bloody good at it! I can only write if I have a set deadline otherwise it's not happening, saying that I'm doing my diploma and my Thesis at the moment with a deadline and the struggle is real!
Wish I had read this when I was in secondary school.
And don't be too hard on yourself Ian... but for you I wouldn't know who The Levellers were.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Such an interesting dimension to writing with consideration given to the feeling aspect, which I do believe has a profound impact. Thanks for this amazing article which gives a lot of food for thought.
I think that one your strengths, Ian, and one that is greatly appreciated, is precisely that: how you consider the hoary, recondite details and present them in such a way as to make them accessible to the lay person - turning pearls into …um… whatever it is we swine eat. (I like swine btw))
How to overcome writers block? Write about it.
Funny you should mention that... I have a whole newsletter about it!
I can't abide people who glory in their own ignorance. The world is amazing, and complicated, and we should strive to understand it. Not surprising that my best friends are also insanely curious people.
Yep to all that. Some more thoughts:
1. With features, making no assumptions on the reader can be useful. It doesn’t hurt to add in brief notes of explanation (or outward links), and you can usually get someone up to speed quickly. By contrast, leave out just a few sentences and your word soup might be impenetrable.
2. Find the thing you love and try to do as much of that as you can. And if that chimes with an audience, fucking great. For me, it’s storytelling. If I could, I would spend my life chronicling old video games, making sure those stories are not lost. Alas, few will pay for that. But when they do, I’m very happy.
3. Don’t allow anyone to tell you how to write and what is the correct way to write. I once had someone argue that you should always write a piece from start to finish, as if tools had never moved beyond the typewriter. Their argument is that would stop distraction. Yeah, great. If that works for you, go for it. It doesn’t work for me. My writing is more akin to sculpture – messy sculpture at that. I usually start with a big mess of words and ideas that I hack into shape in whatever app I’m using, carving off big chunks and hopefully ending up with something suitable for an art gallery. Or at least not a skip.
Sometimes, people even read it too.
This is so on the money. We lead our readers down the path of understanding that we’ve just been on.
All of this rang true for me. It’s a bloody curse, this writing lark - but a blessing too.