Reading and Writing

Reading: Digital suspense

Digital Fortress is the book I’m currently reading. It’s challenging: sometimes I just can’t stop before reading the next chapter. There are many people and many plots happening at the same time, all of them connected to the main plot, although the reader does not know what kind of involvement each character truly has. So each chapter talks about one of these characters, and if we want to find out the next step, we have to wait (read) until that character’s plot is mentioned again. Besides, for lovers of the computers’ world like me, everything seems to make sense and stimulate our imagination. Stimulating our imagination, according to readers, is one of the things that makes a good book.

Writing: Stubbornness

On the other hand, what makes a writer a good writer, so as to write a good book? Patrick Neate ’s testimonial, that I’ve randomly found at Google, contains an answer:

I think lots of people tell me they want to write novels, but they don’t actually have the stubbornness, you know bloody-mindedness to actually make it happen. Sometimes it’s very difficult to be creative. I have days, weeks of really, really struggling and just sort of sitting in front of a computer, drinking far too much coffee, buying things on eBay, but it comes back in the end and if you keep pushing it I think it will come. And the more you practise the easier it gets. So I think there’s an idea about the creative process that it’s somehow freeform, whereas I think you only get that freedom by being very disciplined. So I work very hard. I have rules for myself – I make sure I’m at my desk at nine, I work through to lunch, I do my eight-hour day like I would if I was in an office. The truth is there’s no right or wrong way to do it, so you need to practice until you’ve found a voice or sound with which you’re totally confident.

Creativity and life samples

Since I finished reading Cameron’s Floor Sample a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got a dunno what feeling when I think of that book. Since I myself couldn’t understand, explain or even name the feeling, I decided it wasn’t worth mentioning it.

It turns out that I’ve just run into this book again while searching something else on Amazon, and I couldn’t help reading some reviews. “Let’s see what feelings other readers experienced,” I obviously thought. I had no idea whether people liked the book or not. I myself had never heard of J. Cameron, but after I found out she seemed to be a famous creativity guru who sold books like The artist’s way marvelously well, I was curious to know what kind of writer she was beyond the lines in her autobiography. Her autobiography is worth reading, I thought. By the middle it gets a little boring and I was almost giving up, when many things started to change in her life and uncomfortable feelings about her started to bother me.

No wonder she’s captivating – and I guess that’s why I might’ve suffered a little bit with her as her mental illness became undeniable. I had already found it strange that her characters actually spoke to her when she was writing fiction and she had the urge to write. Actually, for someone who studies psychology, there were many weirdnesses about her, but I tried to ignore them. She was a great writer and she seemed to hold the secret of creativity. Captivating as I said, she convinced me of that. And I was shocked to learn that, sooner or later, serious psychotic episodes did hit her. “Should I keep believing her?,” I wondered with a naive deal of prejudice and fear. “Is the writing process really the way she describes it?”

Well, does it really matter? “We all experience things differently,” I tell myself (and others who are reading this post). After reading Floor Sample and putting some thought on it, I guess I got to extract some lessons for myself from the book, namely dunno feelings. It was by no means an useless book; it had the power of touching me somehow. Cameron’s far from being a bad writer, and even if she was lucky to be married to Scorsese and had many doors open because of that, she has also been a strong person who could be a good mother to her daughter, who fought drugs and alcohol abuse successfully and who could lead a responsive life, no matter what she had to face.

Why read?

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading books. I remember buying them. Just like every child, I remember choosing the one that had the prettiest illustrations – to disappointedly learn, afterwards, that the story itself didn’t add much. By that time, I did not realize that a story could be told by images, even only by images. Probably, I had not a clue of the amount of knowledge that had been acquired only by those images, even when they were accompanied by a poorly written story.

Reading is, in fact, invoking a bunch of images in our minds and connecting them to one another and to information we have already gathered during our lifetime. We read about an environment, we create an image of that environment; we read about a person, we picture that person in our minds. We read about a character’s feelings and, all of a sudden, we feel incredibly close to that character. That’s why books can be excellent friends. We’re friends with the characters or with the author of the book – someone who shared all those moments and words with us. Consequently, reading isn’t as lonely an exercice as it seems. Reading always includes a fair deal of cumplicity.

But, besides invoking images, reading instigates. It, at the same time, instigates our rationality and lets our emotions flourish. It’s good for our intelligence, helps us concentrate and calms us down. Reading challenges us; it puts our capacity of linking ideas into work and forces us to take positions, to think about our preferences and beliefs. By reading, we think more loosely and find a growing number of points of view to ponder. Reading leads us to look for and find solutions. People who don’t read are missing as much as the ones who don’t write. Living becomes a lot better when we find the right words to describe it.

What we are

He wrote long letters to his son, Scott, letters that were never answered. “That’s not the point,” Mark would say. “This isn’t about what kind of son Scott is, it’s about what kind of father I am.”

(Julia Cameron, Floor Sample, p. 180)

Living down to others’ expectations and wills won’t make a better person out of anyone.

From Whitman

The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?