On Not Writing

So it's about four hours since I posted that last blog entry. You know - the one where I swore I'd write 1000 words a day. So far I've looked at a couple of 'finished' stories I had - they're both over a year old. At the time I thought they were pretty good and even now I can see some value in them. But the thing is that neither story has any real purpose. A story should have a beginning, middle and an end. It should be about something. It should have a story! Both pieces of writing are incomplete. They are small sketches. Short set pieces about nothing. Perhaps this has been my failing all along - maybe I simply write things and miss the entire point.

I need to draw myself away from the abyss of self-pity here, it can be found alongside the sea of pretentiousness - a place I know well.

Maybe I would be better served by my old Question of the Week answers - perhaps some of them could simply be shaken up a little and turned into pieces of fiction....

And then again, I'm sitting here, in someone's flat, I'm looking at their trainers on the floor in front of me. Shoes conjure up the spirit of someone so much better than their clothes for some reason. Why are shoes thrown out of cars? How often do you see a single, solitary shoe lying by the side of a dual carriageway. There's a story in that.

On Writing

How is it that I can see in other's writing where they have gone wrong? Yet in my own I am entirely blind? This isn't particularly the case for writing prose - that's a little simpler for me to see, but poetry…poetry is almost impossible. I can happily teach my students to magnify one moment, one important fact, keep it tight, tell the audience in detail about that one precious thing. Don't distill your ideas by having too many of them in one poem. All these little nuggets of advice, yet can I apply them for myself? No. I suspect I'm still too close to the poems I have written - I need to let them wallow for a little longer - to ripen off. But I want to start to submit poetry to various places, I need to get stuff out there…but I feel as if I have nothing right now, nothing at all.

The simple answer to that is to write more. Write anything. Just write. And perhaps it would be a good idea to go back through the things I have sitting in my virtual drawers - folders and documents within my laptop where old stories sit mouldering away. Revise, redraft, rewrite. Resubmit.

Work.

I could quite happily spend many, many hours reading advice on how to write, how to redraft, where to submit things. But how will this get me to write any more? Truly I am the queen of procrastination.

I think maybe I have to set myself a target of writing at least 1000 words a day. Every day. 1000 words of anything. Anything at all. Just write.

I'll see how that goes…expect regular updates as I shall count writing in my blog as part of that 1000 words.

Body ideals

Removed these two images - one of an extremely underweight woman, the other overweight as the blog was getting labelled as Pornography - yes, the naked female form without any genitalia or breasts in view is still pornographic - who knows how Botticelli paintings online get labelled....

For the first time ever in my life I've finally reached a feeling of equilibrium with my body - most women fight against their desire to consume vast quantities of chocolate and pies as it will make them horribly fat and therefore unattractive - of course. I'm not even going to get into the arguments about female body image, fashion, size zero, blah, blah, blah. We all know, we've all read it and quite frankly I'm sick of it. The fact of the matter is I'm happier when I'm slim, fit and healthy because my clothes fit better, look better and I feel better and look better. Right now I've got a good balance between eating and exercising - in the last week I've done around 20 miles (mainly off road) on my bike, about half a kilometre swimming and climbed around 120m. None of these are particularly impressive but they mean that I don't have to worry too much about what I'm eating. If I want to have that bar of chocolate I can. I'm a great believer in all things in moderation and eating what I chose to eat, when I want to, is all part of it.

For my part I believe that being healthy is far, far more important than being skinny. I don't want to be skinny. I want to be fit. I like having enough muscle to be able to pull myself up a wall or cycle hard up a hill. If during the process of all that exercise I lose some flab then that's terrific. I don't want bits that wobble, but equally I don't want my bones showing. Women, and men for that matter, all look better when their skeletons are not visible but their musculature is visible a little. I'm not keen on over muscled bodies, male or female, but both climbers and cyclists tend to have little fat and great lean muscles. That's the look I'm after - lean but most importantly, functional. No point at all, to my mind, in having either skin and bone or bulked up pecs. I want to see people who look as though they could work outside all day lugging around things or throwing themselves up or off things. I believe that's the idea for the human frame. In fact so did the Greeks and Romans...when I was doing my A levels I spent many happy hours looking at ancient sculptures....

There is of course a huge pressure on us all to look a certain way. The pressure isn't entirely fuelled by the Media as I believe a good deal of the pressure is from within - because I like the athletic look I want to emulate that. Likewise if I thought that the likes of Jordan or other glamour models were beautiful - which in many ways they are - and more importantly, ideally achievable, then I'd be working towards looking like an Essex Babe. But that doesn't do it for me. Added to which the day to day pressures of just what's going on in our lives does have a bearing. I'm not afflicted by fame - despite my magazine column with accompanying photograph - so I don't know how I'd deal with the constant hounding that some stars seem to attract. Stress always has an adverse effect on some personality types leading to either the gaining or losing of large amounts of weight. Drug or drink habits don't help. I can't stop being reminded of a picture I saw the other day of Amy Winehouse - not the terrible spotty one, but the photos showing the change she's undergone in the last few years from beautiful young woman to a bag of bones. It would seem that there isn't much hope for her as she appears to be self-destructing right before our eyes.

I want to Google my memory!

Have you ever had that? Somewhere in the filing cabinets and dusty boxes of your brain there is a name, the name of an artist, one artist in particular. I know he's a Russian artist - well, at least born in Russia, but living in exile. I think he's Russian…Anyway, I can remember one piece of his in particular - it was a series of photographs hung in frames along a corridor - the corridor was badly lit and the wallpaper reminded me of something you might find in the home of a serial killer, or at least an aging uncle - bad taste circa 1975. Under each photograph was a small write up which seemed to be a story explaining the photos - the people in the pictures, where they were taken, how their lives were unfolding at the point in which the image was captured. As you went along the corridor however, you began to have the slow realisation that the story was not a simple linear narrative - in fact it wasn't one story at all. The entire thing was just growing and growing and with each new piece of writing your mind was desperately trying to fit it in with what had gone before, until, in my case, I gave up and stopped reading.

Now I want to remember or at least find out, who that artist was, is. I know I've seen more of his work - in fact I've been a fan of his work for a number of years - and each time I try to recall his name down come the metaphorical shutters and I'm left grasping helplessly at the ether. I'm pretty sure it's not Christian Boltanski - although I am a fan of his work too, but when I think of him large rooms of woollen coats come to mind and not photographs.

I found it!

It occurred to me that the artist for whom I searched is an installation artist - so I searched that term on Google - as an aside, wouldn't it be good if we could google our own memories? Up came the Wikipedia page and on it a name was mentioned - not the one I wanted, but beginning with the same letter - K. And at that moment my brain fired up and the name KABAKOV suddenly lit up in neon.

If only it were so easy to access other bits of information.

Procrastination and other stories

This evening I'm off with my friend Jo to see Madame Butterfly at the local theatre. We went to the opera for the first time together in Berlin - I think I may even have posted about our trip. So this is by way of keeping up some sort of cultural life for us both.

I'm not sure what I should wear...should I go in full evening garb? Velvet, lace and satin and add the pearls! Or (more likely) should I simply go smart casual? Hmm....I shall have to ponder this one alongside all the other stuff that is currently floating around my head.

Today I should have been working on my short story, working on an article (due for submission on Thursday) and possibly having a crack at getting ideas for some poetry down too. Oh, and putting my seminar notes up online for my students.

What have I done today?

Erm....

I've looked at YouTube. I've read parts of the BBC website. I've read most of the Metro website and added comments to some stories. I've also spent far, far too much time reading B3ta.com and looking at Facebook and adding photographs.

I know, I know - lazy and the queen of procrastination. I hang my head with shame.

I've also eaten the last chocolate chip cookie - you know the giant ones that supermarkets sell in bakers' paper bags? Five in a bag - I've eaten two of them this week. It's only Tuesday.

High Culture!

I'm currently working on a new short story and thinking about how it could relate to or indeed actually become an exhibition piece - Art. I don't mean that my writing is so sublime that it has become elevated to Art (ha! ) but rather that the ideas I have would work well if placed in a gallery space.

Now I could go on about intertextuality , juxtapositions, and other such poncy terms….which I have to admit to loving just because they sound so elitist. However, it would be truer to say that I'm really drawn to the idea of telling a story to people with pictures - both created in their heads and also accompanying - possibly photographs, but not illustrations.

I'm rambling now about Work…

I do find myself so often in two camps - that of Artist and Academic - with all the juxtapositions and other such high falutin language. And also that of the ordinary 'punter' - despite having studied Fine Art for a number of years I can honestly say that sometimes I'll go into a museum or gallery and be totally at a loss, not able to understand or even grasp what it was the artist intended to communicate. Sometimes it does appear that contemporary art is the Emperor's New Clothes.

But….

I guess we could say that about poetry too - sometimes poems can be impenetrable until we return to them again and again and their meaning trickles through. In the same way some art work can be like that - one glance doesn't give the viewer the whole story.

On the subject of poetry…at the moment my favourite is a Ted Hughes poem - The Full Moon and Little Frieda - simply because it makes me think of cryptic crossword puzzles. I'm utterly useless at cryptic clues, but this poem seems to work in the same way - the hints are all there…it's devilishly clever.

Ted Hughes

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket --

And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming -- mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath --
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

-- Ted Hughes

Pasted from <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/723.html>

Can also be found in Staying Alive p.231

Reading and Writing

At the moment I'm reading a Bukowski short story collection (The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and other stories). The writing reminds me very much of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer - it's vigorous, bawdy, honest and funny. But as both books are memoirs (of sorts) and therefore about writing as much as what happens in their day to day lives, it's making me think about how much (or how little) I write. And read.
There are simply not enough hours in the day for me to plough through my waiting list of books to read. So much information and tales that I want to gorge myself on yet time slips through my hands like sand.

I need to work out some sort of system for myself whereby I read a book that I class as Literature and then something purely for pleasure. Sometimes these might overlap, but generally the Literature requires me to engage my brain whereas the stuff I look at purely for pleasure doesn't. I suppose it's a bit like food - Literature is a good meal at a top restaurant, pleasure books are the literary equivalent of MacDonalds and Burger King. That said, there are the rare occasions when I pick up what I consider to be a MacBook and it turns out to be a real feast.

Stephen King said somewhere that anyone wishing to pursue writing as a career should read for at least four hours every day. Some days I can probably do that - although most of that will be made up of reading on a pc screen - not what I think he meant at all. I certainly used to read for a good four hours each day and in all honesty it's not a huge amount out of 24 hours. But in our busy 21st century lives it's a massive hole. Audio books I suppose could help - at least for those of us for whom driving is unavoidable.

Hmm…I should be reading now and not writing aimless musings to myself.