Unblocking the writer

Writer's block.

Sometimes we get it because we have no ideas. But lately I've been encountering it for a different reason altogether. Could it be that sometimes we are afraid of what we need to say? When we write fiction we must acknowledge the ugliest parts of ourselves... and we must acknowledge that they are ugly. The struggles of our characters are played out in miniature within ourselves.

Here, then, is the challenge:

Dare to set pen to paper. Dare to face what we are and always have been. Dare to express what flows out of yourself. Dare to devastate, to destroy. Dare to create the deeply flawed. Dare to give a face, a name- a beating heart- to cruelty. Dare to dream of danger. Dare to imagine that somewhere is an ordianry person with the passion and the fierceness to stand and say: this is wrong.

In the beginning...

I was lucky enough to receive The Doll's House, volume 2 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, for Christmas. Yippee!

Mr. G begins the volume with the following paragraphs:


"In the beginning...

"But of course we never see the beginning. We come in the middle, after the lights have gone down, and try to make sense of the story so far. Whisper to our neighbours 'Who's he? Who's she? Have they met each other before?'

"We get by."


What an insightful reflection on stories, fictitious and non-fictitious alike.

Fancy getting up at 04:30 to write?

It's nice to know that even established writers struggle with "the attention-sucking power of the internet."

The Wall Street Journal tells us the writing habits of several prominent writers here. (And by prominent, I mean actually prominent.)

It's definitely worth a look.

In which I attempt to explain one of the reasons I read

I am one of those empathetic types they call a bleeding heart, a softie. My conscience is permanently in hyper drive. Not that I always do the right thing. I know I should buy fair trade; I do. I also know I should be a vegetarian; I’m not.

I grew up being described (by parents, aunts, uncles, family friends, etc.) in terms which indicated that my good traits are of the ‘soft’ variety: gentle, sensitive, quiet, tender-hearted.

In some ways I’ve changed a lot in the last few years; in other ways I haven’t changed at all. My friends would say I’m tougher. I don’t really think that’s true. I think I was always tough, it just took a while for me to realize it and act accordingly. Some of the things I have wanted to believe have crumbled in my hands; some of the clichés I wanted to reject have persisted. I have surprised myself with my own toughness, my own ability to withstand.

I have retained my bleeding heart. And that, I think, is the toughest character trait I have. It’s not easy to keep beliefs when acting on them takes great effort. It’s much, much easier to stop caring and go with the flow. If you ask me, jaded cynics are the soft ones.

I buy fair trade because I’m tough enough; the reason I’m not a vegetarian is that I’m too soft.

What has this got to do with reading?

Fantasy and Philosophy

It happened when I was six. It was lunchtime at school, and we were acting out the narrative of a story we all knew (I can't remember what it was anymore), and this one boy just would not get his part right. I distinctly remember my frustration. I hit him over the head with the book (the one we were acting out), and thought 'I'd rather be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe anyway.'

After that, I spent a lot of lunchtimes reading the Narnia chronicles. I was too young to understand that this was social outcast behaviour; I just genuinely preferred to be reading them and that was that.

I was six when I fell in love with fantasy.

I did, however, fervently deny being a fantasy buff until I was twenty. I was at university, taking a unit about fantasy fiction when it eventually clicked: You know, fantasy is a lot like philosophy.

The wonderful, the amazing thing about philosophy is that it's about clarity. Pick a topic, the kind of topic that is hugely important but which most people are vague about (when pressed, they will mumble something about gut feelings and 'just knowing' or 'everybody knows'). There are philosophers who have wrestled with it, separating concepts which most people conflate, applying logic, exposing fallacies, pinning down what we mean by certain terms, laying bare what it is that we really think. Clarity.

Beautiful. Clear. Complex, but sensical.

When you apply philosophy properly, you address old, familiar, confusing issues with clean, crisp, ordered thoughts and the issues become as clear as if they were brand new. Philosophy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Then there's fantasy fiction. Any fiction, really, but especially fantasy fiction. Fantasy is always about the hugely-important-but-difficult-to-define things, but it deals with them through narrative. It presents them in all their muddled complexity, it acknowledges the human impossibility of understanding. It provides little paradigms, dancing around the real issues by presenting us with the points of view of flawed and limited characters. It involves messy and mistaken actions and prods at the big consequences of these.

But it does all of this in a way so unfamiliar, in a world so unlike ours, that in the confusion we see with clarity issues and ideas which, in our own lives, are obscured by their familiarity, their uncomfortable closeness to ourselves. Fantasy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Now, I am unashamed to call myself a fantasy buff.

It's not about gaining a level of great enlightenment. It's about always understanding just a little better. It can be as hard-won as a difficult philosophical proof, or as easy as getting carried away by a story.