It’s odd: I enjoy writing these blog posts, but to be quite frank I have very little to say and certainly nothing at all to say of import. But then I do enjoy writing them. Sometimes, though - sometimes - I feel guilty that ‘I haven’t written a post for a while’ and an urge comes over me to post something. I like to think that I always manage to resist the temptation to drone on about nothing on particular, but perhaps that is just what I like to think. Certainly pretty much every day something occurs to me that I feel I should like to write about, and there are several things I often repeatedly feel I should like to write about, but being conscious that the role of barroom bore might fit me far better than I would be comfortable with, I keep schtum.
. . .
One thing which has been on my mind is ‘advice’, giving it and listening to it. The usual crack about ‘advice’ is to ‘listen to it, then ignore it’. Well, do what you think is best. I’ve found that some advice is very good, although all too often by the time I realise that a piece of advice I was given was invaluable, it is far too late to act on it.
A while ago I did, in hindsight rather pompously and presumptuously, offer the suggestion that there are only two worthwhile pieces of advice which could be passed on to a would-be writer - a would-be writer like me, of course, though I’m sure there are many others - but (a great example of Sod’s Law) I am finding it more than a just little difficult to listen and act on my own advice.
Those pieces of advice were simple:
1) Get it done.
2) It doesn’t have to be perfect from the off - you have all the time in the world to re-write and re-write and re-write again to get it into the shape you want it to be when you finally present ‘it’ to the world.
That first piece of advice stands proud and tall, and will be forever true. The songwriter Randy Newman says the same thing, though puts it rather differently: ‘Turn up.’
As for the second piece of advice (there is no deadline on knocking into the shape you want before presenting ‘it’ to the world), the irony is that 99.99 per cent of the world are not in the slightest bit interested in ‘it’, however much you think they should - or hope they might - be. When it comes to ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’, those 99.99 per cent are, whatever they might say, wholly and exclusively interested in their own ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ and not in the slightest bit in your ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’. That’s what I tell myself, at least, and I do believe I am happier for finally having realised it, though at 68 - 69 on November 21, 2018 - it is still a comparatively recent insight.
I mention this for a very good reason.
When I retired on April 4 - five months and ten days ago - I was genuinely looking forward to finally proving to myself - ‘myself’ being the only judge whose judgment I could ever respect on the matter - that I was not just another of life’s bullshitters, all talk and no walk, and that I would get on with doing what I have planned and intended to do since I was 16. I shan’t spell it out here, but I have spelled it out previously, and that should suffice.
Well, I have not been lazy, but I have been less productive than I am happy with, although I am not quite as culpable as I might be implying.
. . .
At the end of June I began reading a novel by Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises - and really wasn’t much impressed. Yet that novel, called Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises in Britain, was and is regarded as ‘a masterpiece’. So where did that leave my judgment that it was nothing of the kind? Was I really that far off-beam? Puzzled and not a little intrigued as to what I might have been missing, I turned to page one of the novel as soon as I had finished it and read it again, yet still my judgment was the same: it is by no means a bad novel, but a masterpiece? Really?
I decided I would write a blog post about the novel and my apostasy, and work began. I searched the internet for reviews, for the views of others on the novel and the like, hoping that somewhere someone might agree with me. That search quickly dredged up a book published two years ago by a Vanity Fair journalist called Lesley M M Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. My
Within days I began writing, then re-writing, then searching the internet again and dredging up more information about the young Hemingway, his time on the Kansas City Star and a little later on the Toronto Star, then his sojourn in Paris, his marriage to his first wife and a lot more. But the more additional information I dredged up, the more I felt that what I had written so far needed to be refined a little, then a little more. So far I have written more than 11,000 words of that piece, and still I am conscious that it needs further refinement and further thought, and the process is going on. But back to my ‘advice’.
Am I getting it ‘done’? Yes, but slowly and a lot slower than I am happy with. But I am getting it done. As for the second piece of my advice - that it doesn’t have to be perfect from the off - to that I am, sad to say, tone deaf. Yet because I am conscious of my shortcoming in that respect - well, I wouldn’t be writing this post if I weren’t - I have not abandoned hope. I am just conscious that I must work harder, as in a lot harder.
. . .
What I have written so far falls into three distinct categories - Hemingway’s writing, the claim made that somehow his novel chronicles a ‘lost generation’, and the man himself, his ambition and ruthless drive to make it in the literary world. But when I re-read what I have written, I realise that the whole piece needs a better shape. My other problem is that I am an inveterate tinkerer and that when I sit down to read what I have written so far with a view to gaining some kind of overall perspective to enable me to shape it properly, I already get bogged down with re-writing this phrase, that sentence, cutting and pasting elsewhere this paragraph. So progress is still slow.
I am also conscious that unless the whole bloody piece is interesting, the 11,00o words I have so far written (though despite repetition which I must deal with, it will probably become even more) are unlikely to hold the interest of many people. And if truth be told whatever you are producing - whether it is a blog post, a poem, a short story, a novel, an opera, a sculpture, a sonata, a painting, a play or whatever onanistic enterprise of yours you have persuaded yourself the world lacks - must achieve but one thing: it must hold the interest and attention of the reader/listener/viewer.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the great and good, those folk who make it their business to decide what is ‘good art’ or ‘bad art’ (and very often make a very good living from their pontifications) praise or condemn your ‘work’: if it holds the interest and keeps the attention of the reader/listener/viewer, you have succeeded. If it doesn’t, you have failed. It’s all very straightforward and rather simple (although the great and good - with both eyes on their income and bank balance - might be inclined to add that my claim is not simple, just simplistic. But who cares?
NB In past posts I think I have hinted at my view that ‘art’ is not ‘a thing’ or ‘an entity’ of some kind, but ‘a process’ (as in ‘art’ is what people - ordinary people like you and I - do). Furthermore it is essentially a lot more straightforward and accessible than the great and good who decide what is ‘art’ and what isn’t ‘art’ are prepared to allow. I often think that my view can be explained quite simply: on the one hand there might be a discussion on whether a work ‘is art’ or ‘is not art’.
On the other hand there is often heard the claim that ‘this is art’ but that ‘this isn’t art’. I contend that the distinctions between ‘art/not art’ and ‘good art/bad art’ are mutually exclusive: both cannot exist in the same universe. If they could, we would find ourself faced with the silliness that ‘bad art’, however ‘bad’, is still ‘better’ than a piece which ‘isn’t art’. Does that make any sense? Discuss. (Hint: no it doesn’t.)
While writing my long blog entry on Hemingway’s ‘masterpiece’ and why I think it is nothing of the kind, I am doing more than just writing another blog post. I am also trying to learn how to write. I don’t find putting down words on paper (so to speak) at all difficult, but I have long realised that there is far, far more to ‘writing’ than merely choosing words and then shuffling them in a certain order: there is also the absolute necessity of thought, and clear thought at that. (The writer Truman Capote remarked - and used the witticism several times about other works by other authors, being the sort who knew when he was onto winner - that Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road ‘is not writing but typing’) . In a sense writing is pretty much 90 per cent ‘thought’ and just 10 per cent ‘getting it down on paper’, and it is the ‘thinking’ which I don’t find very easy.
I am also trying, and so far not succeeding very well, to learn a little more discipline. I can be, and have on the past been disciplined, but it does not come easy to me, and I have still some way to go. Part of that discipline is finishing something, in this case my long post on Hemingway’s first novel, and so I have resolved not to begin my next project until this one is done and dusted and completed (and I do have my next project in line up).
. . .
Something else I realised quite some time ago was that I sharpen my thought and views best in conversation. Discussing this or that with someone, preferably someone who disagrees with me, I am far more able to hone my thoughts, to spot the flaws in my arguments, to realise how best to ensure my contentions lead on one to the next, than when I am pondering something on my own. Something akin to that happens when I write these posts: I clear my head a little.
Along those lines, though the the connection might not be obvious, I find I think ‘better’ and my imagination is ‘freer’ when I am away from home, preferably abroad and on my own. In fact, I like it quite a bit. Two days ago, I drove down to Truro - only 32 miles away - simply to visit a branch of Nationwide to withdraw some money, but also to treat myself to a pleasant meal, but oddly, ‘freed’ from being here at Lanke Cottage, St Breward, I breathed a little easier. I really don’t know why, but I do know that when I travel - alone - I love it. And it is true, my imagination is sparked a little more.
So perhaps, 2,200-odd words further down the line, you might understand why I quite often feel that itch to write. But here’s the thing: usually I write these posts and publish them, returning a day or two later to read them again and correct this or that literal and rephrase this or that piece of obvious gobbledegook. This time around the new, improved ‘learning to write’ me has already been through what I have written so far - twice - to make sure those silly glitches are sorted out beforehand. My mate Pete would be proud of me (eh, Pete?) though I don’t doubt he has already spotted more than one infelicity of some kind or another. Can a leopard change his spots? Probably not, but at least he can try.
PS Once I have complete the piece, I shall post it here, but as it might well be long, I shall split it into three or four and post them on my alternate blog where it might be read in greater comfort.
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