A Fresh Look and a Fresh Listen
Writing this from our new flat, after a full day of packing, cleaning, jumbling last minute stuff into last minute plastic bags; hefting, entrusting our entire possessions to the locally recommended man in a van plus team; transporting, dumping box after box into room after room, unpacking in an effort to get the basics accessible and clear some space, hunting for the kettle, drinking tea in unfamiliar surroundings out of oddly familiar mugs, body aching beyond reasonable expectation even for someone beyond the usual age for frequent removal from tenancy to tenancy...I'm exhausted, and I'm still on my first sentence. But we have done it; shifted not so much location - the new flat is not that far from the old house - but out of the chronic and increasing discomfort of living somewhere where we just weren't sure who actually owned the place and how long we could rely on their landlordly grace before they chucked us out anyway.
It's been such a long day. I couldn't sleep well anyway and ended up getting up at about 3.30am to finish the last post on Donne. Not that this is a timetabling practice I really want to continue, although there's only so much time one can hope to go back to sleep during those small hours, one ends up thinking: might as well get up as lie here restless getting increasingly tired anyway. We were both up properly before 7.00 to carry on with all the packing. I snatched a few minutes to dip into a classic book which I'm frequently really pleased to own, and which comes in handy both for teaching and for (theoretical at any rate) self-improvement: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande - first published in 1934! Strangely - but I love the dipping-in method, the 'Sortes Virgilantes', as it was known in the middle ages when one dipped randomly into a copy of the Aeniad in hope of supernatural guidance - it opened on an enquiry as to how one can best achieve excellence as a beginning writer, by considering, first of all, both the time of day and the immediately preceding circumstances under which one writes. It's actually extremely practical and useful, as is the rest of the book, so I'll quote it here:
'The Conditions of Excellence
Next set yourself to discover if you can see any connection between a good morning's work and the conditions of the evening before. Can you tell whether or not the good writing came after you had spent an active day, or a quiet one? Did you write more easily after going to bed early, or after a short sleep? Is there any observable connection between seeing certain friends and the vividness or dullness of the next morning's work? How did you write on the morning after you had been to the theatre, or to an exhibition of pictures, or to a dance? Notice such things, and try to arrange for the type of activity which results in good work. '
Such sensible advice, and yet it's beneficial to see it in print. Brande's advice here is quite timeless. She is a personable, encouraging guide to creative writing, particularly to beginning creative writing of any sort. Her two commands ( I don't think it would be stretching it to nominate them as commands) are for early morning freewriting (she calls them morning pages, and is quite adamant that they must be done with absolute regularity, and absolute priority upon waking each day) and on appointment based writing: i.e., you designate a time, however short, for writing during your busy day, and you stick to it, regardless or social or other last minute commitments or imaginative cold feet that show up.
Brande is quite strict about the importance of commiting to these practices. Unless you can do this - overcome your misgivings and the gamut of 'events, dear writer, events' that throw themselves across your path as you try to carve out some time with your notebook - then your resistance is stronger than your will to write, and you might as well give up now as waste your time for months and/ or years and still have nothing to show for it at the end.
Well, I suppose 3.30 am is as good a time as any in a way, though I'd far rather get back to my previous routine of a last hour of the evening mug of tea, or glass of wine, and a post for the blog.
Brande was writing well before the invention of web logs though. Her text in some ways seems quite modern, accessible in voice and contemporary in subject matter (believe me, the number of volumes on creative writing continue to proliferate at alarming speed) that it's with a mixture of surprise and amusement and an odd sense of disquiet - (how can she possibly be so quaint, so archaic?) that you can suddenly find her talking about the dubious modern invention of the typewriter:
'The typewriter has made the author's way more rocky than it was in the old days of quill and pen. However convenient the machine may be, there is no doubt about the muscular strain involved in typewriting; let any author tell you of rising stiff and aching from a long session. Moreover, there is the distraction set up by the little clatter of keys, and there is the strain of seeing the shafts continually dancing against the platen. But it is possible to make either typing or writing by hand second nature, so that muscular strain will not slow you down or keep you from writing.'
So there you have it: don't let new fangled technology be any sort of excuse not to write. So what would she have made of the internet, of lightweight portable laptops, of wireless connections, of web 2.0? I think she would have loved it, with a possible reserve about the immediate 'publication' of a daily post - there is a caring caution in her advising an aspiring writer not to feel obliged to show their work too early, too immediately, lest premature exposure and any concomitant criticism halt or destroy the production of writing. Unlike our current college-based insistence on the weekly workshopping - perhaps this is something that needs to be revised; this idea of classtime critique before students have the confidence, the critical skills, or the completed text? Brande seemed to be able to manage the teaching of writing without these strictures so perhaps it's not enough just to protest by saying 'what else could we do in class time?'.
I'll keep thinking about this. However there is one immediate caveat I feel about writing kept close to the chest for long periods and that's simply that one ends up getting a bit lazy - the return of that old resistance to writing. If one is writing for a semi-public medium like a blog then there is an added sense of obligation - both to post regularly, and to present thoughts and narrative fragments in a reasonably coherent form. So although a blog post is neither the utterly freewheeling freewrite of Brande's 'morning pages'; nor the polished text of an essay or paper or newpaper column (less of a differentiation with the last genre), it serves Brande's primary injunctions of writing regularly and gaining a sense of momentum, well.
Do you know I haven't even got around to the subject matter which informs this post's title. The quote is from Robert Frost, that poetry inspires 'A Fresh Look and a Fresh Listen' and ties in with another piece of advice from Brande: that as a writer, one should learn to cultivate, or indeed rediscover, the art of looking at daily life with a sense of wonder, as though one is still a child, and everything is fresh, new and worthy of beholding. I've been trying to do this intermittently, as our home is dismantled and transported and in the early stages of reassemblement in a new dwelling place. There's a pleasure in rediscovering our stuff in this fresh context, which I think will increase as the tiredness and sense of blur recedes. I suppose that on some level our fundamental experience of living will alter subtly, seem fresher and more lucid too. That's the grace, the moving-in gift, hiding underneath all the scrunched-up newspaper; and one I'm sure I'll be grateful for.
It's been such a long day. I couldn't sleep well anyway and ended up getting up at about 3.30am to finish the last post on Donne. Not that this is a timetabling practice I really want to continue, although there's only so much time one can hope to go back to sleep during those small hours, one ends up thinking: might as well get up as lie here restless getting increasingly tired anyway. We were both up properly before 7.00 to carry on with all the packing. I snatched a few minutes to dip into a classic book which I'm frequently really pleased to own, and which comes in handy both for teaching and for (theoretical at any rate) self-improvement: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande - first published in 1934! Strangely - but I love the dipping-in method, the 'Sortes Virgilantes', as it was known in the middle ages when one dipped randomly into a copy of the Aeniad in hope of supernatural guidance - it opened on an enquiry as to how one can best achieve excellence as a beginning writer, by considering, first of all, both the time of day and the immediately preceding circumstances under which one writes. It's actually extremely practical and useful, as is the rest of the book, so I'll quote it here:
'The Conditions of Excellence
Next set yourself to discover if you can see any connection between a good morning's work and the conditions of the evening before. Can you tell whether or not the good writing came after you had spent an active day, or a quiet one? Did you write more easily after going to bed early, or after a short sleep? Is there any observable connection between seeing certain friends and the vividness or dullness of the next morning's work? How did you write on the morning after you had been to the theatre, or to an exhibition of pictures, or to a dance? Notice such things, and try to arrange for the type of activity which results in good work. '
Such sensible advice, and yet it's beneficial to see it in print. Brande's advice here is quite timeless. She is a personable, encouraging guide to creative writing, particularly to beginning creative writing of any sort. Her two commands ( I don't think it would be stretching it to nominate them as commands) are for early morning freewriting (she calls them morning pages, and is quite adamant that they must be done with absolute regularity, and absolute priority upon waking each day) and on appointment based writing: i.e., you designate a time, however short, for writing during your busy day, and you stick to it, regardless or social or other last minute commitments or imaginative cold feet that show up.
Brande is quite strict about the importance of commiting to these practices. Unless you can do this - overcome your misgivings and the gamut of 'events, dear writer, events' that throw themselves across your path as you try to carve out some time with your notebook - then your resistance is stronger than your will to write, and you might as well give up now as waste your time for months and/ or years and still have nothing to show for it at the end.
Well, I suppose 3.30 am is as good a time as any in a way, though I'd far rather get back to my previous routine of a last hour of the evening mug of tea, or glass of wine, and a post for the blog.
Brande was writing well before the invention of web logs though. Her text in some ways seems quite modern, accessible in voice and contemporary in subject matter (believe me, the number of volumes on creative writing continue to proliferate at alarming speed) that it's with a mixture of surprise and amusement and an odd sense of disquiet - (how can she possibly be so quaint, so archaic?) that you can suddenly find her talking about the dubious modern invention of the typewriter:
'The typewriter has made the author's way more rocky than it was in the old days of quill and pen. However convenient the machine may be, there is no doubt about the muscular strain involved in typewriting; let any author tell you of rising stiff and aching from a long session. Moreover, there is the distraction set up by the little clatter of keys, and there is the strain of seeing the shafts continually dancing against the platen. But it is possible to make either typing or writing by hand second nature, so that muscular strain will not slow you down or keep you from writing.'
So there you have it: don't let new fangled technology be any sort of excuse not to write. So what would she have made of the internet, of lightweight portable laptops, of wireless connections, of web 2.0? I think she would have loved it, with a possible reserve about the immediate 'publication' of a daily post - there is a caring caution in her advising an aspiring writer not to feel obliged to show their work too early, too immediately, lest premature exposure and any concomitant criticism halt or destroy the production of writing. Unlike our current college-based insistence on the weekly workshopping - perhaps this is something that needs to be revised; this idea of classtime critique before students have the confidence, the critical skills, or the completed text? Brande seemed to be able to manage the teaching of writing without these strictures so perhaps it's not enough just to protest by saying 'what else could we do in class time?'.
I'll keep thinking about this. However there is one immediate caveat I feel about writing kept close to the chest for long periods and that's simply that one ends up getting a bit lazy - the return of that old resistance to writing. If one is writing for a semi-public medium like a blog then there is an added sense of obligation - both to post regularly, and to present thoughts and narrative fragments in a reasonably coherent form. So although a blog post is neither the utterly freewheeling freewrite of Brande's 'morning pages'; nor the polished text of an essay or paper or newpaper column (less of a differentiation with the last genre), it serves Brande's primary injunctions of writing regularly and gaining a sense of momentum, well.
Do you know I haven't even got around to the subject matter which informs this post's title. The quote is from Robert Frost, that poetry inspires 'A Fresh Look and a Fresh Listen' and ties in with another piece of advice from Brande: that as a writer, one should learn to cultivate, or indeed rediscover, the art of looking at daily life with a sense of wonder, as though one is still a child, and everything is fresh, new and worthy of beholding. I've been trying to do this intermittently, as our home is dismantled and transported and in the early stages of reassemblement in a new dwelling place. There's a pleasure in rediscovering our stuff in this fresh context, which I think will increase as the tiredness and sense of blur recedes. I suppose that on some level our fundamental experience of living will alter subtly, seem fresher and more lucid too. That's the grace, the moving-in gift, hiding underneath all the scrunched-up newspaper; and one I'm sure I'll be grateful for.
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