I have this bright red pen drive containing my novel. It’s on a cord so I can hang it around my neck and update the story, write extra chapters and generally go nuts on it whenever I am struck with a creative lightning bolt.
You may think this is a good idea.
I have lost the bloody thing.
Wherever you look on the internet there seems to be much hand-wringing and head-banging about drafts. Such-and-such an author did a gazillion drafts and he still wasn’t happy or so-and-so re-wrote her novel from scratch 78 times until she perfected the characterisation.
Then you pick up a Dan Brown book and it reads like he wrote it in his dinner hour whilst he was paying more attention to Loose Women than actually writing a readable piece of work.
I’ve already spoken about the crazy, creativity-stifling art teacher who bollocked me for drawing “New Life” (her brief) in the shape of a plant metamorphosing into a man, well, she wasn’t the only one as I was growing up.
When I was about 11 we all created “Charlie” stories. We each picked an inanimate object, called it Charlie, and wrote about its adventures. So my classmates invented, Charlie the Spoon, Charlie the Bucket, Charlie the Pair of Curtains etc.
When I was 12 our art teacher gave us a homework brief of “New Life”. That was all she said: “New Life”.
I went home, my head fizzing with ideas and finally settled upon a black and white line drawing of an agonised man growing out of a tree, his limbs merging with the branches as he sprang forth.
I was pretty proud of it.
The teacher gave me a bollocking for “drawing something stupid”.
I write to get things out, be they good or bad. Not as a diary, my life isn’t that interesting, but when I’m faced with something so incredibly dumb it offends my sensibilities (such as a poor boardgame or crappy soccer performance) or something so wonderfully profound that it lifts me (such as a well crafted novel or my wedding anniversary), I am compelled to write.
It’s generally regarded that the process of reading will improve the quality of one’s writing and feed the creative process through the absorption original ideas that will be reprocessed by the mind into something original*.
I am in the middle of a creative slump.
I also have over thirty unread novels.
So I have challenged myself to read fifty books in the next twelve months.
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes
Sometimes I’m self deprecating about my own writing.
I say stuff like ‘this is bloody awful, it’s like J.K. Rowling has written it.” This is spoken for comedy effect as some sections of the literary world have criticised her methods of telling rather than showing (for example) and I thought that she was, as an author who had the brass neck to put her stuff out into the world, fair game for the slings and arrows.
It’s difficult to put into words my feelings after 24 hours spent ruminating over the death of Iain Banks.
The following trailer is epic. So much so that I watched it three times with my stomach churning in a most unpleasant manner. Although it doesn’t give much away in the sense of plot, it is obviously a work of high psychological drama, and like most of the best science fiction, examines how ordinary people react in extraordinary situations. Or at least, I hope it will do.
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, Gravity looks terrifying and chilling in equal measure, and is due out on October 4th 2013.
Nothing to see here 
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