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literary blog - writer's blog |
by Hugh Cook |
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Section 145 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 May 14 Saturday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Someone drew my attention to the creative writing site www.writing.com which has a bunch of resources for writers and which boasts of "324,254 members and 868,214 literary items created since inception". Browsing the site casually, I was struck by the disparate nature of the group of links at the foot of the home page. The group is as follows:- Sites Of Interest: Unique Wedding Invitations, Fax Machines, Business Fax Machines, Baby Names, Hygienic Toilet Seats Covers, Piercing, Vampires Forum, Astronomy, Scrapbooking, Pets and Pet HealthThe list seems to me to be creatively suggestive in its own right. By fooling with it, you should be able to get at least the starting point for a poem or three. For example:-
It seems to me that one of the keys to writing creatively is to avoid the slide from the obvious to the obvious, from "moon", for example, to "silver" to "shadow" to "serene" ... and so on. If we start with "hospital", for example, then an obvious connection is a slide to "doctor". But something more suggestive, something with more creative potential, would be a disjunction to the unexpected. To "giraffe", for example.
I was thinking along these lines recently (thinking about how introducing disparate words to each other can be creatively productive) when I happened to read something that Allen Ginsberg says in his Paris Review interview, published in the Writers at Work series. He writes about the juxtaposition of colors in paintings by Cezanne and then about the juxtaposition of two items in a haiku by the Japanese poet Issa (Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827), the two items being an ant and Mount Fuji, then he says:- |
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So, I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions like "hydrogen jukebox." ... or ... "rubber dollar bills" - "skin of machinery"; see, and actually in the moment of composition I don't necessarily know what it means, but it comes to mean something later, after a year or two.
Writers at Work (Third Series) Secker & Warburg 1968, page 296. |
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I quite simply don't follow what Ginsberg says about Cezanne, but I like the boldness of "hydrogen jukebox" and, as for the recklessness of writing something down without knowing what it means, that seems preferable to being paralyzed by the necessities of meaning to the point of not being able to write.
As I was reading through the Third Series interviews, two other statements struck me. One was by Jean Cocteau, who, when asked about "artificial helps", such as drugs, says "Extreme fatigue can serve." This statement resonated with me because I've often found periods of sleep deprivation (the hours at the end of a very long session of wakefulness) to be creatively productive. The other statement was by a French writer I can't remember ever having heard of before, Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), who says that when preparing to write a book he first makes a list of words that he is going to use. For one book, he began by choosing the vocabulary and "had a list of three thousand words arranged in advance, and I used all of them." That was interesting because I've used lists of words myself. Never so systematically, though. Rather, while working on a writing project, I'll gather lists of words that might be handy to kickstart my mind if I get jammed up. Here's a selection, for example, of words and phrases (these ones, I think, never used, in the end) that I accumulated when working on the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series:- |
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lavishness •
unostentatiously •
meticulous •
paymaster •
an irresistible target •
conundrum •
overemphasis •
biomass •
superorganism •
unstylish •
brownness •
a distant roofline •
both mentally and physically •
lanky •
anthropocentric •
had outlasted his usefulness to the •
a bowl of turtle soup •
disbanded •
outgoing •
a kettle of fish •
sisterhood •
cost-effective •
not one iota •
he bridled at •
his well-wishers •
partaking of •
the wholesalers •
bookish •
vine-covered •
publicist •
misdeed •
troubling nobody •
solid profitability •
tough-guy stance •
scuppered •
head-splitting •
obliterative •
poaching •
pussyfooting •
her brood •
sequestered •
a shock of white hair •
impresario •
traitors •
overblown style •
miring •
guffawed •
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I have enormous amounts of this stuff on file, the theoretical materials of creativity which, given the constraints of time and energy, don't always translate into finished work.
Fresh from the vampire's forum, the doctors, Greasy with bodyparts, Conclave round the hygienic toilet. Chemotherapy is a crowbar, Rearranging angels With dynamic flamethrowers. Opposed to experiment, The wedding machine women Demand a halt. Right at the moment, creatively, I'm marking time. Spinning my wheels after a long session spent working on the BAMBOO HORSES novel. Overlong: I've been trying to live by the motto "Do less," but habit kicks in and I end up overdoing things. I have to learn to grind along in a lower gear. The BAMBOO HORSES novel is now pretty close to being finished, and I hope to wrap it up next month. On the medical front, I have my sixth and final chemotherapy cycle starting in two days, on Monday 16. And I've been given three appointments related to planned radiotherapy treatment. My first appointment will be at the mold room, where a mask or shell of my face will be made. The second appointment will be at the mold room again, to check the fitting of the mask. And the third appointment will be for a CT scan, which is needed to put marks on the mask. The function of the marked-up mask being, I think, to allow the zapping machines to be lined up for zapping in my absence. (If this explanation seems a bit vague, it's undoubtedly partly because my understanding of the procedure is a bit vague. I've had an explanation but I'll understand a lot better when I've actually seen the mask and the machines.) |
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