AWIT - 'Articulating What I Thought'

'Portrait de poètes' (1942) by Serge Ivanoff: Yanette Delétang-Tardif, Maurice Alphonse Jacques Fombeure, Jean Follain, Rémi Masset, Eugène Guillevic

When I read Orwell, I am reading someone who has written what I'm thinking. I read:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is war minus the shooting."

And thought, 'finally someone has expressed and articulated exactly what I felt about sport and the culture around it!' Seamus Heaney wrote:

"One perceptible function of poetry is to write a place into existence." 

That is the role of the writer and poet: to put reality and the everyday experience into words. Jean Follain, friend of Francis Ponge, who Ciaran Carson introduced me to, said:

"Le mot fait corps avec la chose." (The word makes body with the thing)

Roddy Doyle, deviating a little, said:

"Like a lot of writers, I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. When I wrote The Commitments, it clicked. I felt this was the world that was familiar and I could make it a bit unfamiliar and sparkling."

But the point remains. The role of the writer is to articulate what everyone thinks; doing it in a way that adds spice and energy. They make it everyday but with excitement. They make the mundane profoundly readable.

Except the funny thing was that while I recognised this phenomenon I didn't have the words or terms to express this phenomenon.

That represents a great irony. So I propose 'AWIT' - Articulating What I Thought.

The greatest writers work with the same 26 letters, good writing is just putting one word after another

Philip Roth by Zach Trenholm

Writing is putting one letter after another letter; one word after another; one sentence after another. As Margaret Atwood said:

"A word after a word after a word is power."

Christopher Hitchens' regret - Not writing more to people

Christopher Hitchens by Martin Rowson

The combative and confrontational Christopher Hitchens died of cancer in 2011. In 2010 he spoke with Jeremy Paxman, reflecting on his past and politics. At the end he shared a regret: 

"In case you are watching this anybody, and you ever wonder whether to write to any one, always do, because you’d be surprised by much of difference it can make. Here’s a regret: I regret not doing it more often myself." 

George Orwell on Ireland

Cartoon of George Orwell by famous American political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant

George Orwell wrote that the execution of the Easter Rising leaders was "a crime and mistake". He believed that the dispute over Ulster was caused by "the expansionist racist nature of modern republicanism." In a review of Sean O'Casey's autobiography by George Orwell in the Observer, Orwell wrote in 1945:

"Why is it that the worst extremes of jingoism and racialism have to be tolerated when they come from an Irishman?"

Zadie Smith - Typing out the work of other writers



Zadie Smith said in a conversation with US cartoonist Chris Ware:

"I had the same feeling when I’m talking with other artists or writers who wrote a lot when they were teenagers and some how I didn’t do that at all. I maybe wrote about four stories throughout the whole of my adolescence and they were perfect copies, that’s what I did, I copied an Agatha Christie story or a PG Wodehouse story, sometimes to the extent of typing out the story itself and sometimes changing it one way or another but for some reason that was my main instinct… it’s reading that is the practice, it’s not writing. I was reading obsessively, all the time, forever, every day. And that’s where I think you learn to write. Not in the actual writing. The writing was an explosion of 18 years worth of reading all the time."


Artists are labourers to their unconscious



Scottish artist John Byrne with a self-portrait. More John Byrne self-portraits here.

[UPDATE - Zadie Smith said: "[My] writing was an explosion of 18 years worth of reading all the time."
Graham Linehan talked about "practical procrastination" and said: "Your subconscious is this huge glacial thing under water that’s just doing a lot of work when you don’t realise it."]

Agnes B said on Radio 4:

"When you are designer you are like a sponge you don’t know where ideas come from."

John Byrne said:

"I am the labourer to my unconscious."

Michael Longley said:

"The raw material of experience… needs to settle to an imaginative depth where it can be transformed and emerge as art."

Francis bacon said:

"There’s this deep sea which we call the unconscious which we know nothing about. I always hope the most wonderful images will emerge from it."

John Banville - Most artists live with other artists, whether physically or in their minds

Cartoon of John Banville, more here.

John Banville said:

"Most artists live with other artists, whether physically or in their minds."

Martin Amis said the same thing of writers. Speaking in 2000, he said that reading and writing is about communion, not communication:

"It was Christopher Hitchens that introduced me to Saul Bellow as a reader. Look at Homboldt’s Gift he told me with a serious inclination of the head on the staircase of the New Statesman in 1977. I looked instead at the victim and after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me whose form of words, more solemn than exhilarated, went approximately as follows: Here is a writer I will have to read all of. Everything else followed from this and it remains the basis of the connection. I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call and we write, but that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk, that’s what writing is: not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers that swirl around you like friends, patient and intimate, sleeplessly accessible over centuries. This is the definition of literature."

Paper versus digital reading

On the left is Barton Creeth reading a book. On the right, Jason Ashford is reading his phone. In the middle is me drawing. On the weekend of Setpember 26-28 I and a few friends took a trip to Bushmills and some took the chance for a digital detox - to "deassimilate from the cyber hive", as Ray Mears put it.

Charles Bremner (@CharlesBremner) wrote in the Times that "Permanent digital connection is bane of modern life". The Guardian reported that "Germany ponders ground-breaking law to combat work-related stress". The Spectator wrote:

George Orwell - Writing is hard, Ctd

George Orwell's1984 is the classic of classics. One of the most celebrated book in the English canon that speaks and sells powerfully to this day. Yes 1984 is a classic. Yet for Orwell, the writing of it was most testing. Early drafts were seen by Orwell as "ghastly" and "dreadful" messes. While writing 1984 in May 1947, Orwell wrote to his publisher Fred Warburg: 

"Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job."

Sean O'Casey - Writing gets harder the more you do it

Irish writer Sean O'Casey and his wife Eileen Reynolds

Sean O'Casey, playwright born in the tenement slums of Dublin, said:

"When I write a new play. When I sit down to try to write a new play, I’ve had the experience of many plays before. Yet that new play that I am going to try to write gives me the same agony, the same trouble, the, same effort, the same Herculean work as the very first play I ever wrote gave to me."

Christopher Hitchens said the same thing:

"I hate to agree with George Will about this… The truth is, yes there is nothing like not writing for making you unhappy and if you have the compulsion then the only problem that you’ll have is, you surrender to this compulsion more and more and, you’ll find [writing] gets harder the more you do it. That seems a shame. It should get easier, it should become more like a facility for example. It becomes more difficult and it becomes more difficult because you are reading more and more work by better and better people and you’ve lost the sheer nerve and the blind solipsism that allowed you to think you could try it when you were young before you had made any proper comparisons. So it gets much more nerve wracking and much more difficult in every way costly for you and no doubt for your readers."

Samuel Beckett on writing more generally said in 1954:

"It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation."

Beckett also wrote:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."

George Packer - Emulation and imitation is a good way to learn how to write

George Packer - New Yorker

New Yorker staff writer George Parker spoke with Christopher Hitchens in 2009 and explained how he modelled himself and his writing on the work of George Orwell:

"I needed to know how does one become a writer, and so I just read straight through what was then the only collection of George Orwell’s essays and journalism and letters… I became a slavish emulator and imitator for a while in my 20s. I think it’s a good way to learn how to write - To find a writer you feel some affinity for, and just master their prose style, their rhythms, get the cadences into your own nerve system and then try to find your own way into it." 

As I noted in an earlier post, Hunter S. Thompson did the same thing, modelled himself on great writers, and he explained how he did this on Charlie Rose:

"If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."

Poetry and literature, the new scripture

Anyone who knows me by my social media presence knows that I love quotes. Yes it can be a meaningless act - Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that "I hate quotations, tell me what you know" - but if exercised correctly, quotations have huge instructional value. They inform us around the challenges and happenings of every day life. Like the words of Samuel Beckett - "never matter, try again, fail again, fail better" - these sooth and guide my conscience as I navigate the many obstacles and labour against the many rejections. Douglas Murray wrote in his article 'Have It By Heart' in the Spectator Magazine:

"It is worth filling your head with the best words in their best order because it gives you the greatest company as well as guidance throughout your life."

Yet as Sean O'Casey said:

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."

Hunter S. Thompson - Typing out the work of the best writers

Airman (2nd class) Hunter S. Thompson before his (honourable) discharge from the USAF in 1958.

Porter Bibb, a childhood friend of Hunter S. Thompson explained (8m) how the famous writer immersed and smothered himself in the work of many of the most famous writers of all time. He said:

"He chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, "I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll."

Speaking with Charlie Rose in 1997, Hunter explained (9m) how this worked:

"If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."

David Remnick - Writing is hard, Ctd

The editor of the New Yorker Magazine David Remnick was speaking with David Carr (@Carr2n) of the New York Times and explained how writers find writing hard but that he finds writing comes easy for him. He said at 6 minutes:

"I'm very different from a lot of other writers I know and I also think this has been a problem for me, learning how to be an editor. I find the act of writing immensely pleasurable, and most of the writers I know spend an enormous amount of time talking about how much they hate to write, the suffering of writing and there's almost this competitive thing among writers, how much fetching they can do about how [writing is hard] - and I don't doubt that writing is hard, in fact maybe if I found it a lot harder and suffered more I'd be better at it. I don't know. But I found it and find it enormously pleasurable to be in a room by myself doing that with notes."

Video in full here. Previous articles in the series with Charles M. Blow here, with David Baddiel and Edna O'Brien here. Jason Alan Murdock here, with Alex Massie here, with Gideon Lichfield here, with Tim Kreider here, with Christopher Hitchens here, with American author Stanley Karnow here, with Ernest Hemingway here, with Neil Gaiman here, with James Joyce here, with Dan Brown here. My piece that looks at George Orwell's 6 rules to good writing is here. I also wrote a piece on The Huffington Post here.

I've also posted here about the propensity for law school to teach law students to write badly here. I made The Case For Plain English here. I've also written a few pieces, including here, on Writing on Paper as a way of making the writing process easier. Apparently blogging is an art form, seehere.

The writer can never really stop, Ctd

Edna O'Brien said:

"I think that all writers are like that – your mind is always galloping, trying to write the thing you cannot write. That is one of the characteristics, one of the norms of writing."

Northern Irish poet and writer Nick Laird said in 2005:

"When I was a lawyer… I never stopped writing reviews and poems and articles. I’d do it in my lunch hour or after work. It didn’t matter how tired I was.

In January 2014 Nick said:

"I’m working on poems all the time. I was writing a poem this afternoon, before I came here. I’ve got other work—teaching at Princeton, writing articles and so on—but I’m pretty much always working on a poem." 

Precious post with Christopher Hitchens here.

David Baddiel - Writing is hard, Ctd

In May 2014 David Baddiel (@Baddiel) spoke on Radio 4, Open Book with Mariella Frostrup and said:

"I am very distractable. I could get empires built in literary terms if I didn’t constantly get distracted. Constantly look at the Internet."

He wrote in 2010:

"I make sure I write something every day but it comes after hours of p***ing about, making tea, reading stuff on the internet and taking the children to school. A lot of the time I just look out the window. I listen to music on Spotify a lot, which takes 25 minutes to choose what to listen to then another 25 minutes of listening to Spotify's suggestions. Dave Gorman said the problem with writing now is the internet is there, it's a window on the world and you want to look through it especially when there are a lot of naked women through that window. It's incredible anyone gets anything done any more."

Edna O’Brien said:

"[The book] was hell to do. They’re all hell to do." - 

@Jason_A_Murdock - Writing is hard, Ctd

Editor of Northern Ireland's digital journal Off The Record, Jason Alan Murdock (@Jason_A_Murdock) guest writes on The Ideas Workshop. He joins the 'Writing is Hard' series and shares his thoughts.

Writing Is Hard

​Starting off a 'writing is hard' segment with the proclamation that the literal process itself isn't actually that difficult seems like a bit of a cop out. But bear with me. Writing is a process many learn at a young age. At its most basic it is letter after letter, word after word. But before I start to sound like the world's worst substitute teacher I will say that using these familiar words and letters in a constructive, meaningful and emotive way can be a very difficult task indeed. Many have grappled with turning words into 'art' or something resembling a legacy. Orwell, Hitchens, Salinger, Yeats, Frost – men all recognised by their surnames alone – live beyond the ashes because of their ability to craft powerful sentences. The human body can rot, but the written word lives on. It must be said however, that whether you find writing hard or not will depend on your intentions. After all, there exist many crafts that use words as a tool and some will be harder to master than others. It could be journalism, poetry, short stories, blogging, comic sketches or writing a book or novel – all demand different skills, techniques and various blood/alcohol levels.

Books should be articles

"Most books shld be articles, most articles shld be blog posts, most blog posts shld be tweets, most tweets shld be retweets." -@thestalwart
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) November 27, 2013

Writing is hard, Ctd Alex Massie

Do the Germans have a word for the period of anxiety between filing a column and discovering whether your editor thinks it is any good?
— alexmassie (@alexmassie) November 13, 2013

Writing on paper, Ctd Will Self and writing on a typewriter

In an interview with The White Review, Will Self explained how he writes:

"I’d write on screen, print it out, correct the type, rekey it, and then do it again after that. I was primarily writing on a word processor but then bigger, faster computers came in, the internet arrived in about 1995-96, and I began to get slightly technophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the technology much having been quite enthusiastic when I was running this business and adopting all of these machines. I didn’t go completely luddite for a while though. Dr Mukti was the first book I wrote on a typewriter in around 2003. I’ve written all of my books since on a manual typewriter."

In November 2012 the Times of London did a feature with Will Self that followed the closure of Britain's last ever typewriter retailer, Brother. Will Self said:

"I switched to working on a manual typewriter in 2004 (all my previous books had been composed either on an Amstrad word processor or more sophisticated computers), because I could see which way the electronic wind was blowing: dial-up internet connections were being replaced by wireless broadband, and it was becoming possible to find yourself seriously distracted by the to and fro between e-mail, web surfing, buying reindeer-hide oven gloves you really didn’t need — or possibly even looking at films of people doing obscene things with reindeer-hide oven gloves. The polymorphous perversity of the burgeoning web world, as a creator of fictions, seriously worried me — I could see it becoming the most monstrous displacement activity of all time.