So then…

the end might not be that near.

Due to the lack of time and motivation (both internal and external), I was about to close this blog. But why?

There may be a couple of reasons, but none of them is strong enough. Motivation to keep on is stronger, even when it’s not as strong as it should be.

You all see, English is not my native language. I sometimes feel like a baby writing stupid things to communicate, while I’d like to do more than that: communicating on a charming – or, at least, clever – style. I am able to do that in my first language.  But I can’t just write it and translate it afterwards. It’s not natural. Language affects our thoughts, and I’m sure that both my thoughts and my way of seeing the world are different in English. Not only because there are different words to be chosen, but because my story with these words is different. It’s a different story. Words were acquired on a different context and have different cognitive associations.

Actually, I feel lighter in English. I just hope that someday I will be able to write better. To write in a way that I can in fact translate this lightness into the right words and sentences in order to make it obvious and pleasant to the reader.

For the time being, all I can do is trust my heart and its ability to reach other hearts, no matter what language is used.

To be or not to be… back

So that’s it. Not that I know what to write here… I’ve already been more enthusiastic about this blog, certainly. Not that I moved to Twitter, either. I see no appeal there. I like to read and write, to exchange ideas and points of views, and Twitter’s so “pilly”. Information pills are too superficial, too chatty.

Anyways. I’m teaching a creative writing workshop right now. This is something to feel enthusiastic about, however I wonder what the future of professional writing will be. On this workshop, my aim is to motivate people. Writing is not forbidden and can be very useful to express ourselves and compose our identities. It’s good for making decisions, good to know whether we’re on the right path or we’d better make a change.

People start by being objective and shy, but after a couple of days and exercises, it’s easy to notice how released – and relieved – they feel.

What is the fiction of your life?

Let’s write a story about yourself.

What’s its introduction? Where does your story take place?

How can you, as a character, be revealed? How does one get to know you? By your physical appearance? By what you say, think, feel, dream, do and don’t do? Or by what others say about you? Describe it.

What kind of conflicts have you faced/are you facing? A struggle against external forces, or against your own self? A struggle against another person, against circumstances, ideas, or against your choices, against your feelings or limitations? Elaborate.

How will the turning point be? Will the conflict be resolved or not? What do you think? Do you want it to be resolved?

How do you expect the untangling of the events to be?

Ten to five

The phone rang at ten to five, stupid telephone. How she hated when the phone rang, especially at ten to five. At ten to five she was born, at ten to five she would always get up, from ten to five years of age. It was an useful insomnia which determined it was time to do her homework. As for grades, she would never get a 10/10, only a 5/10 at school, and she always understood why. What she never understood was why, after an outstanding kiss, her last boyfriend decided to leave her in the middle of a party, holding her purse. She was already going back home and stared at the clock. It couldn’t be different: it showed 10 to 5.

(non-autobiographical)

Everybody’s looking for something

Love. Friendship. Hate. Aggression. Guilt. Punishment. Hugs. Money. Sex. Home. Food. A house. A job. A blowjob. Social status. A car. A ship. A plane. Plans. Courage. Family. Drugs. Drinks. Self. Help. Self-help. A ride. Some understanding. A masterpiece. Knowledge. A cure.

But I, I would only like to find my glasses, left on the coffee table, right beside that apple. Has someone eaten them instead?

How bad can it be when you just don’t get it?

I can speak English (hi there!), French (salut, tout le monde !), Spanish (hola ¿qué tal?), Portuguese (oi, tudo bem?), some Italian (ciao, come stai?), some words in German (alles gut, nichts, nein, das ist kalt, wie heiß Du?) – and I used to think that was ok. No problems in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Actually, Germany was the toughest one: they seemed to be willing to speak only German to me, and I DON’T UNDERSTAND GERMAN. I know how to pray in German (ich bin klein, mein Herz is rein…), I know how to sing in German (kommt ein Vogel geflogen…), I know how to ask “How are you?” (Wie geht’s?) and say that I drink milk in German (ich trinke Milch), but I DON’T SPEAK GERMAN. Well, at least I could always have an idea of what they were saying – providing they included one of the 50 German words in my internal German vocabulary, obviously.

This morning I came across a new comment on this blog. Actually, a linkback. A linkback to another blog, written in some mysterious language. It wasn’t as mysterious as Japanese or Chinese, what would make quiet and resilient: I would never understand Japanese or Chinese or any of its variants. It would be totally useless to even try. But this language… what could it be? Danish? Norwegian? Croatian? Hindi? As Google seems to present a solution for anything, I tried their Language Tools, inserting a couple of sentences extracted from this unknown blog. Most of the times, it would return no results. It could get to translate two or three words into some of the languages available. To mess with me, completely different translations.

I felt lost and non-existent on that weblog. The link back was there, “printedwords” was there, I was there. But it made no sense. I made no sense there. Then I thought of aphasia, the inability to speak or to understand language. I thought of depression, Ginger feeling that this world was not for her. I thought of autism. And, of course, it made a lot of sense. To play the game, you have to understand the rules. If you’re not able to get it by yourself or by Google, someone’s got to help you. Then I even thought of psychoanalysis, Lacan insisting on the importance of naming: the mother has to name the world to her son or daughter. She has to teach them the rules. What if, after knowing the rules, we just can’t play the game? Can it happen? Or, once we understand the rules, we can always play, some better and some worse, improving with practice? And what if we don’t want to play the game, the only game we have? Why would it be? Can it be changed?

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.

How do I… write?

In my opinion, writing actually has no rules. Write when you want, what you want, the way you want. It’s personal and should feel natural. But, for a better communication, when I want a more structured text, I usually follow some steps.

Before writing, it’s useful to think about the subject. To think freely, putting all forms of censorship aside. What do we think about the subject we want to develop in our writing? What have we already heard, or read, about it? What do people say about it? What our own opinion is? We must really let the ideas flow, or else they will bother us all through the process. We can even write those thoughts (items or keywords, please, because we want to write only one text and it’s not ready to be written yet).

Second, we should think about the type of text, about the style and the tune. Will it be serious? Funny? Persuasive? Will it be addressed to adults? Children? Teenagers? Will it be aimed to close friends, or do we want a formal writing?

Now we should systematize what is to be said. From everything that we thought, what is really important or convenient for the type of text we have in mind? It’s really important to create, at this moment, a list of the topics and/or opinions that will remain.

Once we know what we want to cover, let’s think about the paragraphs: what will be in the first, in the second… wait! How many pararaphs will our text have? How long do we want our text to be? Time to review the items we intend to include: are they enough? Do we need more facts, more points of view, more examples?

The simplest formula will be to write a paragraph for each topic. Paragraphs, too, have their own rules, but let’s think globally and see how it turns out. What cannot be forgotten is that paragraphs must make sense altogether. One paragraph must lead to another: the next paragraph may widen or restrict the idea, it may add a point or a counterpoint. A good tip is to check the stream of the thoughts we wrote before starting the text: why has one idea led us to the other in the sequence? Our thoughts usually imply a certain logic.

At this point, we already have a skeleton of the text! Just let it come: if you didn’t believe in yourself as a writer, there’s no need to panic anymore. It’s almost ready, just feed your hungry pet. You have the paragraphs’ subjects and the order they will follow. Just make every paragraph grow. Develop them, but not too much. Try to be objective now; you already had a moment to think of what you wanted to cover. Focus on the style. What’s the clearest way to explain this or that paragraph? Can I play with the words a little bit? Make a joke? Don’t stop yourself to read the text now: just fill in the blanks.

When you’re done, re-read what you’ve just written. If you want, wait a few hours or even a day or two, and read again. Check spelling, grammar, contents. If it seems pleasant (never my case), go ahead; otherwise, make the necessary adjustments. Just try to stick to the purpose of the text, or you may get lost. Never mind if you don’t like it: it will be better next time, or to the next reader. Show it! Ask for opinions! Don’t be shy. The art of writing is like the art of learning a foreign language: it needs practice towards fluency.