Several of my readers have asked, ‘What are you really doing, Johnathan?’ They’ve rightly guessed that posting a poem here and a short story there on this little website I’ve created will not occupy my every waking hour. I mean, it could, but that wouldn’t be why I gave up a well-paid job almost twenty months ago to the day. So this post isn’t offering a packaged product of my imagination with its associated preamble (aka ‘wittering on’). So my apologies if this is what you were expecting, particularly as a new subscriber. But please be assured there are still plenty more of those titbits in the pipeline! This is instead the first - but I hope not the last - post about some random facet of my writing journey to date. It’s a new world to me, but so it was to the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes, and just look at what those innocent eyes revealed…
So I hope you enjoy this as much as anything else I’ve creatively written and presented to you so far. As always, my intention is to make the day more pleasurable and thought provoking for all of us.
My personal attributes put me firmly in many people’s ‘male, pale and stale’ bucket - but hopefully not a literary agent’s slush pile (… another post, another day…). I can’t - or won’t - do much to change most of them, but the ‘stale’ attribution is one I refuse to allow any self-anointed wielder of ‘OK, boomer’ to hit me over the head with.
Since we are now living in an age where righteous self-opinion is an entirely adequate justification for validating self-evident truths - at least to the person expressing them - I’ve adopted the reasonable approach of beating the connotation of ‘stale’ to death with a verbal cudgel. Here we go…
I have a rather alarming habit of changing the direction of my life when the restlessness in my head becomes too powerful to resist. If I’m being honest, this might also be caused by a mountain becoming too high to climb, or the prize at its peak losing its appeal. It’s made for an interesting, almost unique, passage through life. But isn’t that so for everyone?
A seed of a novel had been germinating in my head for almost two years, prior to my voluntary exit from a room full of grey-haired colleagues. Final salary pensions being the ultimate golden shackle on middle-manager mobility (and consequently any youthful prospects below them), most were aghast at this obvious sign of insanity.
But, in private, when not dealing with yet another enterprise-wide, change-is-good (for my prospects), must-be-finished-at-all-costs, man-the-pumps scenario, I had been creating a story to write. A story that wouldn’t be pointlessly snuffed out, or suffer an agonising resource-culling death, a slow-motion train crash on my computer screen, all for the price of a pay cheque.
Please note: I hadn’t been actually writing during this covert period. I didn’t have the temerity or devil-may-care attitude to think you can be a successful writer/author without first knowing what you want to write, learning the craft and adopting the right tools. No diving in with just a pantser costume on for me. I also had to understand the antediluvian processes and practices for telepathically generating in my reader’s head the hallucinated scenes I’d created in my own (but highly unlikely to be identical). The pre-agreed symbols used for transmitting my novel had to be filtered up through layers of people with a plethora of skills in the apparently arcane arts of information cleansing, collaboration and communication. You couldn’t just use some fancy new tool and call yourself a proper author. No. It’s email and Word, if you please. None of the profanity of modern EDMS workflows, of XML brokerages and PDF exchanges that will obscure real talent, make transparent an agent's cut and merely perform ‘garbage in, garbage out’. All this was clearly going to take time to work out. So that’s what I gave myself. Unlike my main protagonist…
When asked, I can’t say where the seed for my novel's central idea came from. Current practice is at the trivial end of what I’m envisaging. So it was a theme I understood, my meandering career choices providing solid foundations; but, more importantly, it was a story I loved. It lodged itself in my head like a favourite movie, one I could play back when lying in bed or sat on a train. One I could nurture, a bonsai of a book to trim and shape, until its flowering occupied a good deal of my thinking time (and my virtual-cum-physical study).
Those of you who know me might appreciate how much time this nurturing consumed, as infuriating procrastination before any eventual execution has been a key skill throughout my life. From exam revision to DIY, from tedious, candle-burning reports to last-minute tax returns. I pity any writer who needs to learn how to do this properly, as it must be hellish, at the start of each day, to just sit down at a keyboard and start typing, without nary a stray thought as to why not. In contrast, I find research a delight, particularly the ‘take a packed lunch, explore a new forest, be back later’ kind. My brain appears to be a CERN-grade magnet for attracting and arranging the iron filings of facts and ideas from almost any discipline into interconnected loops and whirls. A spell as a university library cataloguer and later certification as a database administrator (a minor leap, believe me) has been an unwitting boon to the organisation of my Gradgrindian hoards of raw materials, feeding the voracious hallucination machine we call a brain.
But, in case you think I’ve already disappeared down a cul-de-sac (or up my own folly), I knew that a jar full of clippings wasn’t the essential essence that needed adding to my bubbling word brew. As much as flowering seeds need basic nutrition, facts and figures do not a novel make. For that you need another key ingredient: imagination. This is a word that needs to be afforded a much better standing in the world. Just ask any child. Or Danish plastic brick makers - when they were simply about bricks. You see and hear a great deal - indeed, far too much - about its dodgy younger brother: ‘innovation’. This latter-day, malleable profit-seeker is apparently a powerhouse of change, a bringer of paradigm shifts, a revolutionary wealth driver. Blah, blah blah… If only everyone would understand that and just ‘onboard with the program [sic]’.
But what the expensive bearers of your own watch really mean by ‘innovation’ - but can’t yet work out how to bill you for it - is how your own brain’s mysterious machinations come up with the goods. The quality of innovation does not gain by the numbers or colours of sticky notes you use, or how many taciturn colleagues you engage. What they want to capture in a jar and sell to others is your own creative essence, your imagination. Its mystical bumps and flows can be a gigawatt bulb inside your skull, a glimpse of genius, a ‘violent delight’. It’s an essential component of humankind’s seeking and conquering of universal knowledge. (Although I wish we weren’t quite so good at accelerating ourselves onwards and upwards towards the edge of a cliff with it.)
I am, and need to be, passionate about imagination as a driving force, because it’s essential for the style and focus I’ve adopted for my first novel. I don’t believe you can truly be speculative without imagination, it’s the essence of the genre. Your novel’s unique hook? Imagination. Characterisation? Imagination. Your tricky second act’s pinch points? Imagination. Yet authors are told at every turn ‘there are no new ideas under the sun’ and ‘in order to write, first you must read’ (but also the similarly apposite advice 'If you want to be a writer , then write' - yes, it's a confusing business). I see learning to read and write as a better way to say it. Instead, from my ever-lurking cynic’s POV, I see the mantra being twisted into a meme-worthy ‘imbibe, modulate and regurgitate, then FFS, please buy my book, or any book’; or, stretching the analogy to its biological limit [yes, my blog = my rules], we could passively accept: ‘Ingestion -> Metabolism -> Excretion’, which then puts us on a par with a simple amoeba.
As a stultifying side-effect, this last seems to have generated a legion of Fakebook groups, with their followers indulging in turgid groupthink rituals to fill the ‘imagination gap’ in their deadwood driven Fame&Fortune fantasy: ‘I need my X to do Y. Waddya think would work best?’ I’m delighted to confess that replying ‘Er, maybe writing your own novel, not that of your equally clueless echo chamber?’ gets you promptly ejected from their sacred bubble by the local gods of monetisation. Clearly, imagination is in short supply (or time - maybe the 10pulps2heaven sheeple do just want to read more…).
But isn’t the above mini-rant just me being naïve? Or a smart-arse? Or a hypocrite? (try to pick just one.) It’s a question the comments box below is just dying to be used to help unleash your own imaginations (and open up another tiny hole into internet hell). Of course, everyone builds on another’s work. And science progresses in a smooth, uphill fashion. Civilisations continually evolve. Species co-exist. Springs deform according to Hooke’s Law.
Stop! This mono-narrative is absolute twaddle. It’s like thinking the physics you learnt in school, until you could take no more, describes how the world really works. But have you seen what split photons get up to? Humanity students’ brains can explode when exposed to their antics. So, let’s get real here: there’s saltatory leaping and professors weeping; crumbling edifices and lost tribes; Betamax and Walkman; dinosaurs and Cambrian shale; Japanese knotweed and grey squirrels; stretching your Slinky until it’s only fit for the tip (titter not!). These are all examples of reality being quite - no, very - different, and delightfully, thankfully chaotic, in every sense. For us humans, with our ape brains fresh from the savannah, the world is still just plain messy. But our writing would be dreadfully dull if it wasn’t.
I say all this with ease now, but re-discovering a child’s way of thinking enclosed by decades old Russian dolls of didactic education, corporate conformance and societal expectation took some doing. But the doubts I’d incurred from ejecting myself from the unwaking womb of work were swept away when, sat in a room of like-minded people on the first day of a creative writing course, I was asked to write down ‘whatever comes to mind’ about a cactus pot that the tutor had unceremoniously plucked out of her handbag and plonked onto the table. From such an eccentric epiphany I felt the shackles binding my boyhood imagination being bent and broken, accelerating my writer’s journey. I was The Prisoner no more (or at least until any of my words get monetised into duller data).
To conclude this little ramble (which, at almost 2000 words and starting life supposedly as a mere morning warm-up exercise, is procrastination in action!) :
Staleness is your primary antagonist, your mortal enemy. Smite it down wherever you see it. Hearing ‘it’s a good idea, but it’s just not how we do things’ should be like a red rag to a bull to anyone, like myself, who is still asking ‘Why?’ after a five decade - mostly self-taught and sought - hunt for answers. My bookshelves are full of that journey. So when you hear ‘there are no new ideas under the sun’, you are welcome to join me in thinking: ‘but whose sun, my stale purveyor of publishing myths?’.