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Monthly Archives: April 2014

A Writer’s Voice : Some Thoughts and a Personal Discovery

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin J Frankson in All Things Writing

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Frankson, Irish, voice, writing


Right now, I’m taking a break from redrafting/editing my latest novel to work on a short story. This is something I often do to keep things fresh. When you stare at something for a long time, you may feel your eyes starting to blur. To refocus, you avert your gaze to a completely different object and hey presto, your sight is 20:20 again. For me, writing is a little like that especially when it comes to a novel. Working with a novel is little a like a deep-sea dive, every so often you need to come up for air and today, is one of days when I need to freshen my writing and style by focussing on a completely different project albeit for a few hours.

The short-story I am writing is a little absurdist, a genre I have a particular liking for especially when it has grounding and parallels with the real world otherwise absurdism can just become plainly absurd and abstract for its own sake – easy to do but with little literary benefit for both writer and especially reader. Someday I may even gain a second reader 🙂 but I digress.

The story is about an Irishman who finds him reincarnated as a rose in flowerbed in a local municipal park. He wonders how he got there, reminisces about his life, offers insights into how he comes to terms with his new manifestation of being. Of course, being an Irishman myself, I am obliged to throw in a bit of religion and politics and muck about with it in a way that would drive my dead granny to reach for her rosary beads whilst spinning in her grave but without taboo, art loses a stone to whet it’s blades upon and goodness knows, Ireland north and south has many such stones. His new life, such as it is, crosses with an aspect of his old towards the end of the story but that’s all I’ll say for now but I will post it here when completed in the next day or three.

One thing struck me when writing it, this is the first story I’ve written with what I believe is an authentic Irish voice. I dare to state this as the voice is actually my own. Why haven’t I done this before? Of course, a writer is not obliged by law to write in the voice of his/her own country or even his/herself. Many fine writers have built great careers setting books in foreign lands peopled with characters totally unlike themselves but today, I found it greatly refreshing to write in my own personal voice for the first time. I found the authenticity gave the ink a better flow (ok, it was on my computer but ink is a much nicer word than keyboard) and I genuinely felt the story came from a truer soil.

Those familiar with my blog will know I’m lover of Americana and America literature and this is probably the style my future novels will follow but perhaps in the near future, I may create an Irish protagonist at the heart of my American settings and have the best of both worlds.

The Artist’s Way – Advice on Creativity : Part of 1 of Many. Based on Book by Julia Cameron

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin J Frankson in All Things Writing, The Arts in General

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artist's way, arts, block, creativity, Frankson, Julia Cameron, overcoming block, success, writer's block, writing


I am sure many of us have read many articles, books and social media postings that give advice on how to write. All of them differ in the detail but the common thread of all is ‘Just Write!’ which makes sense. Many writers, including myself, can get hung up on the fear that our next paragraph or page may not set the literary world alight. When such fear strikes, we end up staring at a blank screen or holding a pen like a human statue.

Then we may leave our desks and fix a sandwich or a bicycle and not return to our desks. We excuse ourselves by claiming writer’s block. I used to believe in writer’s block but only speaking for myself, it was not writer’s block that ever stopped me from writing but my own fears and lack of ability to marry my personal/working life to my creative life. Having spend the past week thinking about my own creative processes, I’ve come to the conclusion that there maybe no such thing as writer’s block.

What I believe to have been writer’s block was really my perceived inability to write blistering prose from the get-go. I sat down many times and typed a sentence or two only to end them not with a period/full-stop but my forefinger pinning down the backspace key until I had a nice pristine but blank screen looking back at me.

A blank screen is like a mirror to the writer’s soul. It reflects back at us what we fill it with. However, better for any image to appear that no image at all. Often, I preferred no image than poor writing. This is what held me back and now I recognise it.

I was hamstrung by perfectionism. I thought no sentence was better than no sentence at all.

So I justified by torpor by the respectability of the term ‘writer’s block’. If you think about it, in what other profession could one get away with days or weeks of non-productivity? The long the muscle rests, the weaker it gets and the longer a writer doesn’t write, the harder it becomes even to the point when the writer him/herself has to ask the question ‘Am I a writer at all?’

So I picked myself up and sat down and wrote. I had no structure in mind, not even a story or a plot, just a general essay on my forthcoming visit to Seattle and why I chose America over Britain. I let my fingers be the medium for my many thoughts and the words flowed from my fingers. Much of what I wrote in the first draft was badly spelt and unstructured but I was back on the saddle, holding onto the reins and not letting myself be thrown off by that bucking bronco of self-doubt and negative self-thought.

‘No, don’t write that!’

‘That’s a rubbish sentence’

‘You’re using the passive tense you verbal weakling’

‘Man, you are cliché city’

These were the demons that sat inside my eardrums during my essay and I told them where to go.

And you know something? Demons are very obedient. All you have to do is tell them to go away and they will vanish like a midday ice cube in the Kalahari. The corollary of this is that such demons are very willing to take up residence if you let the door’s of doubt lie open.

I finished my draft and the feeling of achievement and release was heady. I didn’t care how raw or unpolished the draft was. It was not carved on a marble tablet, impervious to edit. Within half an hour, I revised and rewrote my first draft, cutting unnecessary words out, replacing clichés with more original material without resorting to the ridiculous. I swapped sentences around and removed the passive voice and replaced unnecessarily complex words with simpler ones that conveyed the same meaning. When a writer uses unusual words, his/her readers may reach for the dictionary but this immediately puts an extra step between the reader and writer. In fact, the reader may find the dictionary more entertaining and rewarding than the book as the dictionary has the forethought to explain what everything means.

The key objective of any form of writing be it literary, factual, technical or genre is to be understood by the reader.

How many pans of dirt did the prospectors of the Klondike need to dig before they found a nugget of gold? They kept panning and panning until they hit pay-dirt, literally! Same goes for writing. So you wrote pages of turgid unreadable material that everyone would laugh at? Who cares. The fact that you wrote something is an achievement in itself. Just repeat the process. Revise what you wrote, study what didn’t work and fix it. Do this as often as you like until you are happier. This is the craft of editing. What sculptor knocked off a bronze statue of perfection in one go. The first chips of the chisel give overall shape to the final form. The angel only appears after many many deft and careful hammerings of the chisel.

Same goes for writing.

When I was pleased with my revisions, I posted it and here I am again, writing another blog post and this leads to me the book I mentioned at the start of this article.

Creativity be it writing, sculpture, painting or even baking a cake cannot take place without the right environment or the right attitude. We are all individuals and most creatives need routines. Some are lucky to jump out of bed in the morning and start work right away and this is great. However most of us need a routine before we start writing. I see this as pulling the boat to the river. You can’t sail when your boat is tethered to the top of your car or in your shed.

My routine is breakfast, a cup of tea, listening to a podcast, a shower and writing my morning pages

Morning pages?

Yes, these are like a diary but it can contain any thing you wish to write about and is purely private. The important thing about them is that they must be hand-written on actual paper. Yes, I know, I too thought I had forgotten how to write by hand but you will be surprised how those spidery scrawls can give way to legible words.

The reason why you must hand-write is to give you a physical and visceral connection between you and your art. The subject matter is immaterial but its important that it contains your thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears amongst it all. I consider this the act of taking the boat from my shed to the lake. It gives me the discipline of writing, writing something at the start of every day no matter what it contains. It also gives me insight and can even kick-start new thought processes and ideas that can feed into your creative writing later in the day.

After a couple of days,, the act of writing morning pages becomes part of your daily morning routine. In doing so, not a day goes past without you, the writer, being a writer. Only 2-3 pages is sufficient. The only other stipulations is that you right them in the same journal and don’t read or revise previous entries. Perhaps every several months one can read past entries and see how one has grown, changed even.

Then when you are done, later on that day when you sit down at your laptop, your blank screen no longer resembles a mountain to be climbed but a rose garden to be watered.

I can only speak for myself but my initial scepticism was blown away completely only after 4 days of putting this into practice. I’ve never had a better week than this for a long time and I feel very empowered.

I can only suggest that you try it for yourself and see how it works.

 

 

 

 

I am reading a book at the moment The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Frankson Says Seattle : Essay on Writing Full-Time in the US and Why America..

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin J Frankson in All Things Writing, Travelogue

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america, americana, Frankson, seattle, writing


It’s been a while since I last wrote a blog entry and I often wondered when I would get around to writing the next one but here I am.

At long last, after many years of planning and talking about it, my 6 month sabbatical (or ‘furlough’ as it’s more known as in North America) is upon me. I plan to write my next novel and market as best I can, the stories and novels I have written to date, within the world of social media. If costs allow, I may even pay for several copies to be printed to send off for review and even impromptu yard-sales/car-boot sales to set a foundation stone in the real world.

For many months, even years, I have been so busy at work that my creative juices evaporated in the searing heat of pressure and fatigue. This concerned me as writing is a passion of mine but I have to earn a crust in my day job. I saw no end to the maelstrom if I kept on the way I was and I knew something had to give but in a controlled responsible manner.

So I switched off the engine and let myself glide to the ground and this week, my first week of my freedom, I watch the propellers slowly whirr to a silent standstill while I decompress , step from the cockpit and fill my lungs with new air.

During my time, I plan an extended stay in Seattle or Vancouver and right now, a number of options are on the table and my dousing pendulum swings towards Seattle. I can’t say much at this moment about the possible house I may end up in but serendipity is a wonderful thing. I let this be my guide.

Initially, I thought I would spend my time in London, UK. I visit London more often than the ravens at the Tower. I am forever smitten by London’s surprises, incongruities, its people, its eccentricities, its avant garde theatre (where else but the wonderful Horse Hospital (behind Russell Square Tube Station) where one can spend an evening attending a film, lecture and Q&A hosted by the British Psychical Research Society about the purported case of a talking mongoose in 1930’s Isle of Man but I digress)

So why not London?

Firstly, one can become overly familiar with a city to the point where the fascinating becomes mundane and the incongruous can just become just another tree in heavily thicketed forest. Secondly, my writing and love of literature is heavily rooted in Americana. To paraphrase and to extend  Orwell (daring and forward of me I know), when one is on a sinking ship, all one can think about is a sinking ship and therefore sinking ships soak into every nook and cranny of one’s writing.

Not that London is a sinking ship but it’s the metaphor Orwell used and I completely see his point.

I have visited Chicago many times on business and have had ample free time to explore it and enjoy road trips upstate and into Wisconsin. I feasted on the flora of the small towns, the expansiveness of the landscape, the long endless lonely roads, horizons kissed by cornfields, random homesteads, motels, abandoned buildings, and last but not least, hospitable and individualistic people.

Geographically, America is a very large country that ironically, resembles the properties of the tiny atom. Several specks of very busy protons such as New York, San Francisco, LA, Miami  and Chicago that whizz and whirr with their millions of busy people but the space between them is vast, empty.

It’s within this space, between the cities that the romance, mysteries and awe of America exist. The ghosts of its history, legend haunt its blue highways and fill travellers with a sense of solitude and immense possibilities. It’s not for nothing that the genre of the road-movie is largely quintessential to the US ( the only British road movie worth watching in my opinion is ‘Radio On’ but even this movie artificially warps the British landscape into the shape of an American one but it works all the same without ever feeling contrived)

The spirit of the road movie is freedom. There are different categories (fleeing a bad situation to find a better life, fleeing from the law or the underworld) but what makes these movies plausible in a way that is difficult to do elsewhere is that America is a country where you can simply disappear and pop-up somewhere else and reinvent yourself. Whether or not this reflects the modern day of cellular and internet connectivity is another story but today, these stories occupy the domain of the realistic. In a highly populated country such as England, it is very hard to imagine disappearing from Cornwall and starting all over again in Newcastle with an adventure up the M1 in between without a significant possibility of running into someone who may know you or at least has heard of you.

The UK is still a highly centralized country in terms of its media. From the remote Scilly Isles to Edinburgh, everyone watches the same news channels, read the same newspapers. In the US, the national papers and TV channels do exist but they are weaker glue. What we in Europe often fail to realise is the sheer size of the US and even Canada too. America is not the size of France nor is its states equivalent to British counties.

Many European nations could fit comfortably inside a North Dakotan forest, often many times over. The physical scale of the country and the concentration of population within a few centres has given rise to a sense of isolation within many rural/small town communities that has transmogrified into the following values

Self-Reliance – unlike Europe, a town in the mid West could be 100 miles from the next one. Think about how this would have affected the townsfolk/famer mindset in the days before the telegraph and the telephone never mind before the advent of GPS, Google and smart-phones. You couldn’t have ridden to the nearest neighbouring village nor return within an hour in case of emergency. The early settlements resembled the lunar bases we often see in science fiction movies where everyone wears tinfoil suits and the men still wear bryl-cream on their head, except that they had breathable air. Its people had to fend for themselves often struggling to survive in lawless and inhospitable conditions. It was a land of immigrants who had escaped the tyrannies of poverty, war and persecution in the Old World.

The New World was a chance to form a society in the image of their dreams. It’s a matter of debate as to how well this turned out and is beyond the scope of this essay but such newly formed societies had to employ wanderlust, faith, hope and self-reliance, not just individually but within their communities too. A by-product of this was an unconscious sense of temporiness. Unlike the Old World with its solid stone castles and cathedrals that seem to have been around since the dawn of time itself, the American settlers faced a land with so such constructs. They were no longer in a land where they could use the scaffolding of history to lean against be it law or edifice.

Is it any wonder that many of these communities turned to their Gods in their many, sometimes perennial times of need. No matter how strong we think we are, we all need an anchor of some kind.

From these roots grew the modern day America we know either through first-hand experience or through the prism of movies and literature.

The hero of the road-movie is a lone pilgrim, leaving his/her old life behind to venture into unknown land and people  to build or find a new life with highs and lows, a trail of trials, tribulations and dawns and false dawns along the way until they either reach the promised land or die. The road movie is the subconscious re-enactment of the history of the American soul.

Localism – Some Europeans comment on how parochial American news report seem to them. Its news networks often ignore large swathes of the outside world.  Howevre,  it is wrong headed for an outsider to poke fun at this is and merely shows a lack of understanding of why this maybe. It’s easy for a European to be (or pretend to be in some cases) cosmopolitan when there are thirty or so nations within a 3 hour flight radius. In Belgium, one can reach no fewer than 4 nations within a radius of one hour’s drive. America occupies a land mass similar to that of the entirety of Western Europe. Driving from LA to Boson is equivalent to driving from Lisbon, Portugal to Vilnius, Lithuania. In the former trip you remain inside one nation state; within the latter, well I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count them but you get the picture.

The nation state of America as I mentioned earlier, is a much weaker construct than we Europeans are used to for reasons I’ve touched upon above. America was not founded all at once by one set of pilgrims or immigrants but by waves of very different groups who arrived at different times. Each moved across the continent at different speeds and in different directions during a time when long distance communications were very difficult or an impossibility. These groups eventually settled and those which survived, established permanent communities that formed proto-States that still spoke the settler’s European tongue. Minnesota was largely Swedish, Pennsylvania largely German. The Federal government did not have a long reach and even then,  was like a radio signal that was bedevilled with the static of the nation’s size, space and distance.

Wariness of Government: Mistrust is perhaps too strong a word. Perhaps it’s better to say that the most Americans have always stood their arms defensively folded, casting a healthily wry eye at Washington, sometimes with a gun tucked under the belt. European nations are much smaller, compact and homogenous and thus easier to manage. All modern European nations at one time or other had a King or Queen who was seen as the Father/Mother, grand protector of the nation. Many nations have since become democracies but the legacy of expecting central Government to help one out of a tricky situation has persisted to this day. Such a legacy never existed in America which goes a long way to explain why many Americans, including its poorest, are both suspicious of central Government and have an aversion towards receiving help from it.

Europeans are often bewildered at the abuse and bile levied at President Obama for his attempts to extend free access to medical care. In Europe, free medical care is seen as the 11th Commandment, an immutable aspect of nature itself but again, the roots of attitude, like a person, stem from its childhood and formative experiences. For an American to think like a European or vice versa, each would have had to have had the history of the other behind it.

These aspects of the American attitude towards Government often perplex the more communitarian minded European but it is good to remind one’s self that nations in many ways are like people; our personalities are formed through nature and nurture and it’s only a fool or a despot who expects one’s neighbour to be a carbon copy of him/herself.

So which is better, the American or the European way? I shall sit on the fence on this one as both have their advantages and disadvantages which are well documented. I am merely trying to attempt to explain the differences as best I can and I see them. When we explore the reasons behind the why, then we begin to nip the bitter buds of xenophobia, racism and jingoism. Only then we realise that no nation has the right to point the finger at the other and say ‘Don’t do it like that, let me in and I’ll show you how it’s done’ but I do believe that the exception should be in cases where people are being systemically and physically harmed by tin-pot dictators. In such cases, humanitarian intervention is justified but I am sure this is a matter of debate and again beyond the scope of this essay.

So back to my decision to move to North America to write.

I have a deep and long lasting appreciation of American writing both factual and fiction. Fitzgerald for his languid language and exposition of character and beautifully crafted and controlled narrative documenting the ascent, disillusionment and decline of one man’s wish to pursue the American Dream.

Hemingway  for his muscular, sinewy yet insightful prose.

Steinbeck for his exposition of the truth. My particular favourite is ‘Travels with Charley’, a travelogue about his camper-van road trip through rural America. Every sentence a pure joy of description and insight into the human condition.

Hunter S Thompson for his single handed invention of the literary style of Gonzo Journalism. His literary documentary ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’ is an acidic, accurate, warts and all depiction of both the minutiae and the broad strokes of the 1972 Democratic Party Presidential Candidate nomination process that reads like the political equivalent of watching sausages being made. Unpleasant but peculiarly intriguing.

Cornell Woolrich for his dark tales of how life can turn into roads of despair at the turn of seemingly innocuous events. Chilling in their realism and makes one do a double-take of the paths and decisions taken in one’s own life.

Michael Connolly for his Harry Bosch detective stories where LA is a character in its own right, weaving its anxious fabric through the fabric of narrative.

Frank Bill and his modern day classic ‘The Crimes of Southern Indiana’, a collection of connected short stories. A writhing, unsettling slab of beautifully and realistically written American Literary Gothic. No angels here and reader may fear to tread.

Willie Vlautin for his plain-style tales of everyday blue collar America. The humour and the struggle of the Everyman/Everywoman is sympathetically depicted without ever retreating into the easy burrows of pity and cliché. Each of the characters is a fighter. Whether or not they win is another story but it’s hard not to empathise with even the worst of them as Vlautin’s characterisation teaches us that we all have had a road to travel, some more rocky than others. Show me your nice polished shoes and I’ll show you the smooth, well tarmacced road you just walked down. Humanity runs through his narrative landscape at every turn.

I could continue but I think I’ve made my point.

It’s these authors and more who have whetted my literary appetite. I hope that living in the land they still roam, either in body or spirit, may help sculpt the shape of my own writing to come.

I will post regular missives to this blog during my time both before, during and after my Seattle extended stay and I hope all two of my followers and their dog keep in touch

 

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