Asking Questions, Maintaining Perspective

I've been chugging along at this creative adventure for quite a while now, chugging along through various experiences, including a couple of films (here) and a number of creative writing programmes.

In 2006, some two and a bit years after graduating with a BA in Independent Studies,  I just about scraped a Pass on my MA in Creative Writing: the pass mark was 50, I received a 53.

My confidence took a huge hit, I felt incredibly humiliated.  For a time, the desire to keep writing was eclipsed by anxiety that I was merely deluding myself.  Embarrassment about my 'failure' prevented me from really believing I could succeed.  In short, I was focused on the wrong catalysts.  Embarrassment, however human, showed immaturity: my focus was me, when it needed to become more deeply concerned with serving the reader.  And in more truly patient with the time that takes.  

My wife (who is a very talented fine artist) once said, in essence, all art is valuable because it reveals where the artist has come to at any given point; in other words, the question of "how good it is" is in many ways an irrelevance and an unhelpful distraction.  Which is not the same as saying all art is equal (i.e. ready for publicly sharing) but an invitation to be patient with myself in producing the work, patient with the process of making it ready for others.  

How long to write a book?  How long before I get published?  Will my work secure positive reviews?  Will the novel sell?  How well will it sell?

For me, these are big questions.  And questions I have asked.  But whenever they become urgent, they are clues that I am walking onto the ice, thin ice.    

The distracted question of how long it takes to become published (a question I have asked if different ways many times) is potentially a revelation of troubled subtexts.  The unspoken doubts are 'how long should it take, may it take, will it take'?

What I am really asking is: 'do I have what it takes to see a project through to the "end"?'  Whatever "end" means.  Maybe what it means is another subtext of self doubt: 'how will I know when I am done?'  Which is to say 'how will I know when I have done enough for someone else to like it?'  Ah... Will my work be popular, or will I get overlooked?  Will all my effort come to nothing? Will I be more liked, or less liked? 

There is the ice: these most dangerous of questions, dangerous because they take my eye off the proverbial ball. 

Stanislavski might have asked me: 'Do you love the art in yourself, or yourself in the art?'

As E.M. Forster said: 'Only connect.'



   

The First Review!

Hope has now gone to press! And the journey to publication has entered the review stage.  I received the following this evening (8 March) and wanted to share... 

 

The story of the earliest Mormon missionaries in Great Britain, arriving as they did just at the tipping point when a nation of independent craftsmen and weavers and creators of hand-made lace was already becoming the first modern industrialized state, inventing in the process both smog and mass production and the middle class,  is an oft-told tale of spiritual power and sacrifice and miracles and of an immigration to their promised Zion of the faithful on such a grand scale that it literally saved the new Church from its enemies in the United States and in the process changed the history of nations on both sides of the Atlantic.  A tale oft told but probably still not as familiar as it deserves to be among Latter-day Saints today.  But Seth Wilkins's novel Hope, with that history as its background, is quite a different tale, the story of those who stayed behind, who did not join the Church and the exodus to America in those earliest years because they were unaware of what was being welcomed by others around them, or perhaps because of their fear of sacrifice or of persecution, or sometimes because they became victims to that persecution before final choices were even possible.  What became of them, and their descendants?  How was the foundation laid for the United Kingdom to become the first nation in the modern Church to be organized entirely into stakes?

 

But to dwell on the background history here is to miss too much, for Hope is a very human story of faith and love; of betrayal and fury; of kidnapping and murder, fraud and vengeance and, sometimes, forgiveness; families divided and ruined, or united and made eternal; families built by individual struggle and decisions of lasting consequences.  Wilkins's novel is set in the Lancastrian moorland, stark, and chilling, and beautiful to those with eyes to behold, where great darkness can seem sometimes to cover the land by day as well as by night.  It is also a setting in which "a fragile shaft of sunlight" can reach down "through the cloud and spread over the village" and indeed over all the landscape beyond the villages, woods and tarns and rocky outcrops, and into the hearts of some of the characters, those alert to receive light.  For human hearts, we see here, are as variable and as variously receptive as this landscape.  It is a story, in some ways an extended parable, in every way beautifully crafted and powerfully told, set firmly in its historical present but also reaching back into "another time when there was only order and peace" and also forward with its "sense of future things and a gradually rising sense of elation."  And if its cast of characters includes, as all our lives do, "a sea of beings--the presence of angels," it is nevertheless at every moment a very human story of human relationships and human choices, corrupt or enlightened, stumbling or everlasting, as bad as can be or as good as human capacity is able to extend itself.

 

It is a novel no one should miss!

 

 

Gordon K. Thomas, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Brigham Young University

Order it here...

Announcing Hope...

Englishman Isaac Shaw is dead. For sixteen years, his family has struggled on in shame, believing he died a criminal—responsible, in 1837, for several deaths when he set fire to the village mill. When Isaac’s youngest son Manny runs away, straight into the path of a traveling Mormon elder, the meeting threatens the family’s future. Charged with care of a letter that challenges the village’s history, Manny must find a way to reveal the identity of a young woman called Hope. The quest is destined to change everything. This plot-driven mystery is a tale of humankind’s eternal search for peace.

Here it is.  My book.  After the best part of thirteen years--struggling, doubting, and, against the facts hoping--publication is finally at the doors.  By the end of March I should be able to call myself a published novelist.

I'm not sure I can fully believe it.  I'm not even quite sure what comes next.  I know I am enjoying the process; the novel is to be published by the Utah based Walnut Springs Press, via its Currawong Press imprint.  I am over the moon that Deseret Book Distributing are an official distributor and delighted Hope will feature in the Deseret Book summer catalogue (that goes out a huge mailing list.)  I almost feel like my writerly life is complete. 

There's a moment in a favourite film (Chariots of Fire) in which Harold Abrams finally takes gold in his event, the 100 yard dash, and soon afterwards is invited by his friend Aubrey to celebrate; instead, Harold leaves the changing area in a daze, without so much as a goodbye.  Lord Lindsay advises Aubrey to leave Harold be, explaining how hard it can be to comprehend and accept one's own success.  Ah.  Yes.  I have a little inkling about that now.    

There's a danger here, of course, that in getting so carried away with the fact that a bona fide publisher actually wants and enjoys my work, I begin to sound like a Megalomaniac.  Or worse, that I begin to think like one.  I hope I don't come across this way.  I apologise if I have or ever do.  That would be awful.  

But in a way, I do feel like I have just been given parole. 

For years I have felt imprisoned by falling short, occasionally and (more recently) increasingly in despair, wondering if I would ever achieve my goal, and I suppose a little afraid that it might just have been delusion.  It has been a choice to pursue creative ventures, but it has rarely if ever been easy on our family.  My wife has been unbelievably loyal, constantly.  So this achievement is sweet because I have wanted so much to be published for her sake, for her faith in me.  That's why after some thirteen years--and arguably longer, since I began a sustained approach to creative writing the year we married, 1997--this feels like parole.

I hope you won't misunderstand me: my feet are very much on the ground about the book's prospects.  I want it to do well.  And I'll be trying to make sure it does.  But, for nearly six years, I sold books for a living... I know what the realities are.  So this is not about getting rich quick (I've got thirteen years to remunerate!)  It's about honouring a feeling that creative talents are important.  It's about trying to stay true to a belief that the arts can make a difference.

Hang on to the idea that perseverance wins out. 

Hopefully you'll forgive this little bit of self-congratulation, and, if you are also doggedly slaving away at a secret--or not so secret--creative project, scratching your head at your defiance of the 'facts'... permit me to encourage you to keep going.  Just keep going.  It turns out 'they' were right all along: perseverance does pay off in the end.   

Hope is due for release April 2014, and will be available in both paperback and electronic forms.  Paperback: ISBN 978-1-59992-904-0; E-book: ISBN 978-1-59992-905-7. 

The paperback can now be ordered here...

Writing with Purpose

I suppose this post's title is an invitation to disaster.

What can I possibly mean by 'writing with purpose'? And shouldn't my blog post be a more or less perfect example of finish and poise?

Perhaps. But also perhaps not.

Surely the attempt to write something meaningful, something true, something really true, is connected not so much to what we say, nor the way we choose to say it, but rather is linked to our innate, deep-seated capacity for truly listening.

I believe we all have this capacity, this potential. It's just a question of learning to unearth it.

Listening is something we usually think of in relation to conversations with others, but in a writing and creative sense, listening is more about reaching into a deeper space, through the interference of our own superficial thoughts and quietly on, and then out, into the great ocean-like unseen, where the universe is not really perceived by sight at all, but by an inner sense (isn't there something amazing--it might even be called synchrony--that 'inner sense' echoes the word innocence? And innocence is a kind of tuning out the superficiality associated with emotional defensiveness. It seems to encourage openness, the readiness to receive.)

This kind of inner sense (or innocent) listening can, and in my experience has and will, bring us into gentle contact with what feels akin to a great reservoir of Being, sheer energy or creative force. And will on condition that we learn to trustingly surrender to its omniscience. I would suggest this experience can be one of the ways we learn a little more about God.

I think I should acknowledge the influence of two great Creatives as their work has helped me to more successfully apprehend this awareness. I think if you'll read their work, you'll see what I mean.

The writers (and their superb books) are:

Dorothea Brande (author of Becoming a Writer)

Julia Cameron (author of The Artist's Way)

So... writing with purpose? It's all about learning to listen.

 

Creative Conduct...

In attempting the creative I acknowledge the spiritual.

I desire the company of good will and kindness to my fellow Creatives.  I desire a feeling of kindness towards them no matter where they may be in their journey.

In acknowledging the principles of effort and experience, I reject the impulse towards unkind and unhelpful contentiousness.  It will threaten my work.

I am able, in the silence of my heart, to observe the current state of things and gain wisdom and ability from this.

I reject the temptation to criticise for the sake of superiority.  The spirit of superiority is counter to the spirit of creativity.

I accept others and benefit from their efforts.  I applaud the efforts of others and assume integrity and childlike desire on the part of those engaged: I assume their desire to be like mine--to produce a lasting legacy of meaningful and worthwhile Art.

My desire is to produce beauty and emotionally strengthening material, to find and share my  viewpoint; my greater challenge is to reject the temptation to envy and to jealousy, and to other unhelpful distractions--all of these choke my creativity and diminish my Art.

I pray for the strength to give what I can give, and avoid the things that scar me.

I believe that the blessing of confidence is a great asset and worthy of pursuit.

I will take each day as my moment to think, create, and otherwise contribute.  Each day is an opportunity, each hour a chance to invigorate.

I will seek to contemplate, to concentrate, and to consecrate my compassion to the edifying and encouraging of all those around me.

I will let go of the things that discourage me, I will move on from the days that I don't quite make the aspirations outline above.

I am able to become the kind of man I hope to be, and to make the contribution I hope to make.   

Creativity equals vulnerability and energy...

After commiting to share musings on the creative process, I decided it might really help if I took a bit of time to organise myself first, or at least brainstorm a few things I felt able to get my teeth into.  I came up with a fairly eclectic list that ranges from discussing elements of narrative craft, such as plot and character, to contemplations on the Golden Mean, to confidence, synchronicity, and purpose in the face of death... Not sure at this stage how this grand plan will pan out.  But each of these ideas seemed important.  So I'll do my best to offer my two pennies on them.

Also, I don't really want this to become a Writers Only column; I really believe that principles of creativity are transferable.  And, again, this isn't limiting us to 'conventional' artistry: being human is to be creative. Every time we're kind to someone, we build something a little more beautiful.

Hopefully, you'll be able to substitute 'writing' for anything that happens to be more within your circle of interesting.

I want to begin with a pretty basic question:

What is writing?

This makes me think of an early line in one of my favourite films, Dead Poets Society, in which a stuffy handbook reduces poetry to potential passionless exercises in analysis.

Don't get me wrong.  There's a place for such approaches, and without a healthy interest in analysis so much understanding can be missed.  But writing, like living, demands our passion--our personal commitment--the courage to own an opinion, an energised view.

Creativity can be analysed and debated, but to really to enrich others, I have to live with my heart wide open.  Which of course is fraught with emotional danger.  But that's the deal if our creations are to really live.

And the price of life is vulnerability.  As Robert Frost is attributed with saying: 'No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.'

Writing--like any act of creation--means understanding that we are engaged in capturing and sharing energy. Our energy.  And that we are doing so for the sake of others.  Little wonder it both hurts and exhilarates...

Welcome

Welcome.

Kicking off a blog is hard.  Well, for me it is anyway.  There's something like a kind of stage fright, a fear of speaking on your own in a corner, about things no-one has time for.  Or worse, speaking in way that is just windy, boring, and irrelevant.

But I have been offered a book contract.  On a novel I currently call Hope.  And after ten years of submitting various versions to publishers, I am trying to find a way to create a chatting place, a place where we can talk all things Book.

I'm excited to get started.

What I think I am trying to do here is discuss and celebrate the creative process.  It's so important. So essential.  But it is not just about the obvious forms, such as art and literature or whatever else immediately springs to mind when someone says Creative.  The process reflects our human need for joy.  Which finds its way into every aspect of our lives.  I find it in my effort to write, but equally it manifests in striving to be a friend, a wise parent, a good spouse.

I guess I need to say from the outset that I believe in God.  I believe in the fact that I need to believe in God.  And I don't see this as a weakness.  For me, it has been the underpinning reason to keep with this creative intent.

Regardless of whether others agree with identifying God in the creative process (it's not my intention to ram faith down anyone's throat) I hope to focus on common ground: the wonder of humankinds' inherent capacity to 'make things' - it's a truly amazing gift.

Life is a wonder.

So I'll call this place The Sound of Musing.

The book can now be ordered here...