On not writing

‘All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal . . . It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years.’

Thus, Fran Lebowitz. I sort of know how she feels. Not that I think that not writing is in any sense illegal or even immoral. But I do feel very frustrated and upset with myself all the time I am avoiding keyboard or pen.

I have a year’s worth of research notes for a historical fantasy set in sixth-century Constantinople. I have a couple of dozen ideas for theological papers. But I struggle to pick up a fountain pen and just write or to mindmap those ideas.

Photography is a very satisfying alternative outlet for my creativity. But it doesn’t feel enough. I am convinced that photography and writing are complementary activities.

I have no problems with photography. There is always something new to see even in the places I am most familiar with. But how to get back into writing? I no longer have the energy to sit down and write for hours on end. Perhaps it is time to go back to basics and work through Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (again!).

Worldcon 2024

The 82nd World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) is taking place at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow later this week (its third visit to the city). There will lots going for anyone interested in science fiction and fantasy. In addition to the annual Hugo Awards ceremony, there will be the usual big setpiece events (this year including the premiere of an opera based on a libretto by Ken MacLeod), book signings, readings, and literally hundreds of panels and workshops (the online schedule lists no fewer than 961 items!).

I plan to be there, of course, and (if I have the energy) may manage 16 of those items. Top of my list will be the launch party for Gallus (a new collection of short stories by members of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle). But I am also particularly looking forward to a couple of panel discussions about the place of faith and religion in science fiction and fantasy.

If you are in or around Glasgow and have an interest in SF or fantasy, it’s not too late to register (or you can just turn up and register as a day visitor). Come to think of it, you don’t even have to be in Glasgow – there will also be an extensive programme of online events.

Roland Barthes on pens

I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens—I don’t know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them. . . . In the end, I always return to fine fountain pens. The essential thing is that they can produce that soft, smooth writing I absolutely require. (Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, p. 178)

I can definitely identify with this (to the point where I have to ration my visits to websites like Cult Pens). The smoothness of a good fountain pen is an important factor in making writing effortless.

On perfection and simplicity

I found the following quote in an interview with the landscape photographer Andris Apse:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, chapter 3)

I like that. It seems to have all sorts of applications. Apse quotes it in relation to his search for perfection in photography, but it could equally well apply to writing. I can certainly think of any number of books that would have been improved by judicious use of the red pen.

Beyond the realm of the creative arts, it reminds me of the process of abstraction that is necessary in solving most physics problems. Back in the dim and distant past when I taught physics, it struck me that students most often got into difficulties because they didn’t simplify enough.

And, come to think of it, it could also be an expression of simplicity as a Christian discipline – that radical process of self-emptying which cuts away all the clutter, internal as well as external, until all that is left is the image of God.

Calligraphy is handwriting

The author of one of the pen blogs that I follow posted a piece the other day on calligraphy and ordinary handwriting. In the course of explaining why she prefers the latter, she said:

Calligraphy is a peculiar thing. It doesn’t carry anything of the writer’s personality. Maybe it carries something of the person who created the style. I’m not sure what I could compare it to. It’s certainly artistic but it bears no originality. It has to be an exact copy of a style created long ago.

I disagree. Certainly when you begin to learn calligraphy you try to copy the forms your teacher shows you as closely as possible – just like learning ordinary handwriting at school. But once you begin to master those forms, you make them your own – just like ordinary handwriting. In fact, the basic roundhand script that most calligraphy tutors begin with is simply a formal version of the ordinary handwriting you learn at school.

So, a good piece of calligraphy conveys the writer’s personality just as much as a piece of ‘ordinary handwriting’. And master calligraphers are quite capable of bringing originality to their art.

On splitting infinitives

From a letter from Raymond Chandler to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly:

By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.

Copy-editors (which is what Chandler meant when he said ‘proofreader’) really do need to develop a sensitivity to their author’s prose style. Their job (or, at least, an important part of it) is to polish the manuscript so that the author is shown at their best not reduce the text to some imagined standard English.

NaNoWriMo?

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) began on Wednesday. It would be the perfect way to restart my fiction writing. Unfortunately, I have a paper to write for a conference at the beginning of next month. The thought of trying to write 1500–1600 words a day on top of that is just too daunting. Besides, if past attempts at novel writing are anything to go by, the 50,000 words that NaNoWriMo reckon constitute a novel would amount to less than half of what I’d be likely to write.

Enter the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. They have set up an informal NaNoWriMo Discord channel so that folk can share their progress. So I have announced my intention to attempt a MinNoWriMo (a minimal novel writing month). I can’t hope to manage 1500 words, but I do plan to write something (even it is only a paragraph or two) every day. The point is to regain my daily writing rhythm. In time, I hope to get back to at least 500 words a day (that’s a good-sized fantasy novel in a year).

Writing is not a spare-time activity

The theologian Scot McKnight offers some wise words about writing on his blog (here). In brief, he explains why it is impossible to treat writing as something that can be done ‘on the side’. Of course, he is writing as an academic theologian for other theologians and academics, but I think his comments hold true for other kinds of writing. As he says,

writing is a lifestyle, a way of life, a way of being, a modus operandi, a way of breathing and eating and drinking. Better yet, writing is a way of learning, a way of coming to know what someone wants to know, a way of discovering.

Writing is not something to do when everything else is cleared off the desk; no, it is something that makes order of the desk. I don’t get up wondering what I will write about, but I write about what I’m wondering. … In other words, as Augustine spoke of ‘faith seeking understanding,’ so writing is a pen seeking understanding.

This reminds me of Rowan Williams’s comments on writing as self-discovery, which I blogged about here.

Read well to write well

Some advice on writing from an unexpected source:

Given a sharp and eager mind, eloquence is picked up more readily by those who read and listen to the words of the eloquent than by those who follow the rules of eloquence. (Augustine, doc. Chr. IV.3.4)

Of course, he was referring to preaching and rhetoric (Augustine was one of the great rhetors of his day), but the advice applies equally to the written word.

Actually, the advice is probably redundant for any decent writer. Certainly, all the professional writers (of fiction) I know became what they are because of their love of books. They could no more stop reading than they could stop breathing. By the same token, anyone who has to be told to get their nose out of the guides to writing a bestseller and read some good books instead will probably never be a good writer (successful, perhaps, but never really good because they write for the wrong reasons).

Writing as self-discovery

Some interesting words from Rowan Williams speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge back in 2008 (you can find a transcript of the entire talk here):

you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straightforward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. . . . Writing isn’t translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. . . . it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being . . .

That certainly resonates with me. In my experience, no matter how carefully I try to outline a story or an article or a lecture, there is something about the process of turning the outline into polished English that surprises. Only when the words stare back at me from the page (or the computer screen) do I really know what I think.

And even then it is not always clear. There have been occasions when I have given a talk and, during the question and answer session, someone has asked me something like ‘You said X, does this mean that you believe Y?’ And I have thought, ‘Gosh! I hadn’t realized that I believe that, but she is right! And that means . . .’

Collingwood on being a slow thinker

The philosopher R. G. Collingwood makes the following revealing comment about his thought processes:

I know that I have always been a slow and painful thinker, in whom thought in its formative stages will not be hurried by effort, nor clarified by argument, that most dangerous enemy to immature thoughts, but grows obscurely through a long and oppressive period of gestation, and only after birth can be licked by its parent into presentable shape. (Autobiography, p. 107)

I can certainly identify with this description of the struggle to formulate one’s thoughts. And gestation is a very good metaphor for a process that can take months or even years.

On creative borrowing

Here’s an interesting passage on borrowing and creativity from an interview with the American artist Joy Garnett in the journal Cultural Politics:

[V]isual art functions according to the principles of open source, and it always has been open source – art can’t be made otherwise. In other words, borrowing and direct referencing – various forms of ‘copying’ – are the basis of creativity. You would think we might understand that by now, that our understanding of art history would take us well beyond the cliché of artist as lone inspired genius conduit. In truth, all creativity is collaboration, whether one is conscious of it or not. What we call ‘influence’ is nothing if not quotation and allusion. Our culture is generated and driven collectively, and the whole point is to dip in and take parts and change them, to make them ‘new’. To make art is to copy on some profound level, and to copy is of course to communicate: to act as receiver, transformer and transmitter.

The words jumped out at me because I have often thought the same about writing fantasy, and even more so about doing theology! Certainly, this is the case with Christian theology – novelty is not a theological virtue; theologians should only express themselves in new ways if the novelty is necessary for them to remain faithful to the gospel in the face of a changing culture and language.

Some advice on reviewing books

About a decade ago in response to some frankly vicious responses to an honest review of a bad book, the SF writer Ian Sales blogged some helpful advice on how to write a good book review:

1. A dishonest review is a bad review.
2. Not all books are good.
3. It’s not just good books that deserve reviews.
4. If a book is a bad book, it’s dishonest not to say so.
5. If a book is not a good book, it’s dishonest to refuse to review it.
6. Books can be bad for a number of reasons; most of those reasons are a result of failure of craft.
7. Reviews are not written for the author of the book being reviewed; their audience is potential readers of the book being reviewed.
8. A good review is not opinion because it will contain evidence supporting its assertions.
9. Whether or not a reviewer enjoyed a book is completely meaningless, since enjoyment is unrelated to quality and is entirely subjective.

Just one or two quibbles.

On 5: I have occasionally refused to review a book. I don’t think this is dishonest. When I review I try to find something positive to say even about books that are mostly bad. If a book is so bad that I can’t find a single redeeming feature, I then have to decide whether I need to write a review warning potential readers off or whether it would be better to starve the book of undeserved publicity by simply not reviewing it at all. (But perhaps that is a hangover from the days when I was reviews editor of an academic journal and had to make decisions about which reviews to include in the limited space available to me.)

On 6: Ian is writing about reviews of fiction. Obviously with non-fiction there are additional criteria for what makes a book bad (e.g. factual accuracy).

On 9: I don’t think enjoyment can simply be dismissed like this. For me, enjoyment is an important indication of a good book. Of course, an enjoyable read isn’t necessarily a pleasurable read. Rather I am looking for something that draws me in and compels me to read on (or, in the case of non-fiction, is thought-provoking).

Ian’s original list also included three points which were aimed at readers of reviews rather than reviewers:

• A review does not have to meet the expectations of people who have read the book being reviewed.
• A review is based on a critical reading of a book; this means the reviewer has probably put a lot more thought into their reading of it than you have.
• If you come across a negative review of a book you thought was good but you did not read the book in question critically, then you are not qualified to comment on the review’s findings.

Augustine on the importance of note-taking

I don’t know about you, but I find that if I want to remember anything I have to write it down. As you can imagine, that has made note-taking a big part of my life. I am pleased to find that I am in good company. Near the beginning of one of his most important works, St Augustine makes the following admission:

Lest my meditations escape from me through forgetfulness, I hold on to them by my pen. (De Trinitate 1.3.5)

Kurt Vonnegut on writing

Kurt Vonnegut certainly knew how to write, so any advice from him is certainly worth taking seriously. Here are some tips from him, which were originally published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. PC-24, no. 2 (1980), pp. 66–67 (you can find a pdf of the original here):

• Find a subject you care about
• Do not ramble, though
• Keep it simple
• Have guts to cut
• Sound like yourself
• Say what you mean
• Pity the readers

One thing I disagree with is the closing section of his article in which he advises people to go to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for more detailed advice. To understand why this is really bad advice, one need look no further than Geoff Pullum</a>’s excellent article ‘The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style’. His conclusion is worth quoting:

The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm. It encourages the waste of precious resources – time spent by teachers, students, and copy editors; money spent by English departments and publishers. Genuine faults in writing go neglected because time is spent on nonsense like which-hunting. And worse than that, sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people’s self-confidence in this way.

Blackwell Idealist

I have lost count of the number of computers I have used over the years. But there has been one constant factor: I have installed Idealist on every computer I have used since the mid 1990s.

Originally developed by Blackwell Scientific in the early 1990s, it was originally marketed as ‘the Information Manager’. According to the manual, ‘It is designed mainly to manage textual information, and is particularly suited to information that cannot be organized into a strict and regular structure.’ It is a simple and very flexible textual database, which uses an index card metaphor. Essentially, it is a computerized card index system. And because each entry looks like an index card, it presents a familiar, friendly face to old-fashioned academics like me.

The version I am currently using is the January 1999 build of Idealist 3, which was issued just after Blackwell sold the program to Bekon. Unfortunately, the new owners’ ambitions rather outstripped their technical abilities. Version 4 was dangerously unstable (the only program I have ever known that completely trashed Windows when I tried to install it!). They did eventually bring out a version 5, which ironed out most of the bugs in version 4 and introduced rich text formatting, but it failed to catch on and the program disappeared from sale in the early 2000s.

Strengths

• Simple and rapid. Each index card is an individual record in the system, and everything is indexed automatically unless it is defined as non-indexable (which can be done by creating a ‘stopword’ list or by excluding particular fields from the search). As a result, searches are virtually instantaneous even with very large databases.
• Extremely flexible. One of the strengths of Idealist is that you can have different record types in the same database. So record types for articles can be stored, sorted and searched alongside those for books, chapters, quotes, manuscripts, maps, computer programs, and so on. This means that you can store your data in records designed for the data rather than trying to fit your data to a rigid record structure.
• Utterly reliable. To give you some idea of what I mean, I have used it on every version of Windows from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups through to the 64-bit version of Windows 11 Professional (and for several months I also used it on Linux Mint with the help of Wine) and, unlike some well-known programs I could mention, it has never crashed and has never lost any data.
• Effectively has no limits regarding size of database. Originally the size of the database was limited by the amount of RAM available on the computer, which could be an issue in the days when the size of RAM was measured in megabytes. But it is a very small program and the 32Gb of RAM on my laptop would have no difficulty in handling an Idealist database far larger than the largest one I currently have (which contains about 25,000 records). Each database can hold up to a million records and each record can be up to 8Mb (though there is a 64K or 10,000 word limit on the length of an individual field and a maximum of 160 fields per record).
• Easily manipulable. For example, unlike most databases you can create new fields within a record or redefine record or field types on the fly. Users can define their own record structures, alter the ‘stopword’ list, or define search synonyms.
• Powerful search facilities. Its search ability is very well thought out, enabling you to drill down quickly to precisely the records you need. In addition, simply highlighting a word or phrase in a record and pressing the ‘Stack’ button will take you to a new hit list containing all the records in which that word or phrase appears.

Weaknesses

• Plain text only. Sadly, Idealist works exclusively with ANSI plain text files. If you want to use rich text, or foreign characters, or store other kinds of data (e.g. images), you have to look elsewhere. In an ideal world, I would like a database that allows me to store Unicode text files and equations in LaTeX.
• Poor linkage between records or to other files. It is not straightforward to create such links and they have to be updated manually if any changes are made to those records or files.
• Limited export capabilities. You can export from Idealist, but it is not straightforward and the options are fairly limited. Personally, I tend to limit exports to Idealist natural files, which are essentially structured plain text files that can be edited in Word.
• Loss of functionality on 64-bit systems. Idealist was one of the first 32-bit programs available on the market. Unfortunately, it comes wrapped up in a 16-bit set-up program, which, of course, will not work on 64-bit systems. There is a simple workaround, which is why I am still able to use it. (And one of the members of the Idealist users’ group has recently created a 32-bit set-up program for it. See discussion here.) In addition, some commands no longer work properly (I’m not sure why this is, but again I found that you can work around the problem by direct editing of some of the program files).

Idealist and my workflow

The main reason I like it so much (apart from its utter reliability over nearly a quarter of a century of use) is that the card index interface fits perfectly into my workflow. My approach to research is a fairly simple-minded process of analysis followed by synthesis, and Idealist is the cornerstone of the analytical stage of the process.

As I read, I capture individual ideas, quotes, etc. that seem relevant to what I am researching. Each gets its own entry (with title, reference and associated notes/comments) in my Idealist Notes database and full bibliographical details go into the associated References database. The result is a vast soup of ideas, which I can search almost instantly.

The synthetic stage is usually a process of mind map construction during which I draw on repeated searches of Idealist. Sometimes I prepare the mind maps on paper, but more often these days (and certainly with more complex projects) I use XMind.

The end result of the mind mapping is an outline that I can work up into an article or book. In the past, I have usually done this in a general purpose word processor (originally WordPerfect but more recently Word, not because I think it’s better but merely because most of my editorial clients required me to use it). However, I am currently experimenting with Scrivener for Windows for the final writing stage. And, of course, Idealist is still essential at this stage as I keep referring back to it for quotes, snippets of text and references.