Several decades ago when I finally finished my dissertation and completed my PhD, I found that the process of writing my dissertation had severely and negatively impacted my imagination. When writing scholarly work you must insure that each small step in your reasoning rests solidly on previous steps and that any claims made are supported by references to other scholarly work. If someone on your dissertation committee says "I think you have gotten a little creative on a few points", it is not a compliment. It means you have to fix something. Since I have always been imaginative and creative, I actually felt the loss of these abilities after the rigors of my dissertation. It was as though the bright colors of life had dimmed to a barely tinted black and white. I didn't like it and pondered ways in which I might fix it and return to being imaginative again.
I was reading a lot of Stephen King at the time and decided that I would try to convince myself that one of his books (I don't recall which one, at the moment) was actually non-fiction and that the government didn't want the truth to come out so they covered it up and allowed the book to be published as fiction. Yes, I know, this sounds preposterous! But, what is even more preposterous is that I managed to do it. I managed to convince myself that the book was true. This is not as remarkable as it first seems. You can convince yourself of almost anything and people often do.
But, the experience of thinking something is true when you know it is not was very enlightening. I realized how people who believe in conspiracy theories can be so confident about things which otherwise seem ridiculous. It also helps explain why people with polar political views can be so intractable. And, it also made me wonder how many other things that I believe are true might just be things that I have convinced myself of. I actually went through several of King's books and found that it became easier to convinced myself the more I worked at it. And, I found that the exercise restored my imagination and creativity along with some humility about the truth. Shortly after embarking on this exercise, I started writing fiction.
I talk about imagination more extensively in my upcoming book on Predicting the Future as this is a quintessential exercise of the imagination. The construction of reality is also a product of the imagination. In Yuval Noah Harari's wonderful books Sapiens and Homo Deus he observes that humans are the only species who's reality is a product of their imaginations and attributes this in large part, although not exclusively, to our dominance of the planet. This takes some explaining and I would encourage you to read these well written and fascinating books in which Harari attempts to explain how we got to where we are and where we might be going.
How healthy is your imagination? Are your creative muscles flabby and useless or pumped and ready to take on challenges. Here is a way to tell. If you think there is an objective reality and an absolute truth you are probably suffering from a calcified imagination. You might be OK with this and it is not up to me to judge whether or not this is OK. However, if you want to write some interesting fiction or even creative non-fiction, you may want to exercise your imagination a bit more so you will be up to the task.
I would also point out that an under explored benefit of the imagination is that it can help you deal with chaos and change. If you can anticipate something (which is an act of imagination) you can brace yourself. Alvin Toffler gave a name to the psychological stress that occurs when the future comes at you too fast. He called it Future Shock. A healthy imagination can be something of an immunity to Future Shock.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Your Mystical Muse
I am well underway with my second book which will be entitled Predicting the Future. Yes, I am really writing a book about predicting the future. And, as with The Meaning of Life, I intend to deliver on the promise. So far I have about 10,000 words in rough draft. When finished it will be about three or four times that long and I hope to get it out as a Kindle book in the Fall. I mention this, not only to plug an upcoming book, but because there is a tie in between writing and predicting the future. Both require a developed imagination.
Where is the future? Movies like Back to the Future would lead one to believe that the future is a place that you can visit and return from, in a souped up flying DeLorean no less. While this premise makes really entertaining movies, it can be a serious problem when predicting the future. To cut to the chase, the future is entirely in your imagination. And, getting better at predicting the future requires that you develop your imagination. If you want to know more about the future, you can read the book when it comes out.
The tie in with the topic of this article is that your imagination plays a large role in writing as well. To cut to the chase your ideas, arguments, characters, plots and even your words come from your imagination. Your muse does not exist in some mystical or occult realm where it feeds ideas and inspiration to you. It resides entirely in your imagination. But, before I get too far ahead of myself. Let me back up and lay a little groundwork.
People often ask writers where their ideas come from. This is a stock question for book interviews. They know the audience, which includes numerous writers and wanna be writers, are dying for an answer. Instead, the writer fumbles around, sputters out a few statements of far less quality than the writing, about which they are being interviewed, and dodges the question. The answer is that they come from their imagination. If the interviewer presses a bit and asks how they get into the writers imagination the answers become a little more standard. You have to read a lot. You have to write a lot. You have to play with ideas.
When you are reading or writing you are creating bits of raw material in your head. They even have a name for it. They call it fabula and fabula is the stuff out of which stories are made. I was watching an interview a few days ago with Donna Tartt the author of The Secret History who said that she always carries a notebook with her to jot down ideas. She said her notebook is like an artists sketch book. That is a great description. Rather than relying on her memory to house her fabula, she writes it down in her notebook. Not a bad idea at all. I personally have dozens of notebooks where I jot down ideas. But, I don't carry one around with me like Donna Tartt. Still, she is one of the most revered writers working today and I am just cranking out a blog page. Maybe there is a connection there. Maybe I should carry around a notebook.
Let us try, for the sake of this discussion, to think of the imagination as a real thing. We do this all the time. We think of intelligence (as measured by IQ), body mass index, and charisma as real things, even though they are not. We might say somebody has the gift of gab and nobody says "Wait! Is that real?" Treating concepts as though they are real is just a convenience, a legal fiction so to speak.
The imagination is a place where you can put ideas, perhaps even picture them, modify them and evaluate the modifications. Imagine a horse. Now make it blue. Next make it fly. Perhaps you want to push it and make it talk. Let's say you can ride this flying horse. Will it talk to you while you are riding it? Does that make you nervous? What if the horse can talk but not speak English? What if it can speak English but is always correcting your grammar and does that horse snorting thing when you use too much slang? See how it works? We have an idea for a story, not a great one, but an idea nonetheless.
How can you improve your imagination? Well, how do you improve anything? You use it. You exercise it. By reading and writing you already exercise your imagination. Take something you've read and start tinkering with it. Stephen King wrote an excellent book called The Stand in which a flu virus that was being worked on in a military lab escaped and started killing everyone. (Hmm... sounds familiar) Anyway, what if the virus, instead of killing people, turned some people red and some people blue. Would the blues and reds go after each other? What if it turned some blue, some red and some yellow. Would coalitions form? We could go on with this or go in different directions or use a different book.
You can develop your imagination doing exercises like this. You can add to your fabula by reading and exercise your imagination by writing. You could take five minutes out each day, take a news story, turn it into something utterly ridiculous, and then see if you can convince yourself that it is still true. I think this is what we call journalism today. Perhaps, I'd better not go down that path. 😎
Where is the future? Movies like Back to the Future would lead one to believe that the future is a place that you can visit and return from, in a souped up flying DeLorean no less. While this premise makes really entertaining movies, it can be a serious problem when predicting the future. To cut to the chase, the future is entirely in your imagination. And, getting better at predicting the future requires that you develop your imagination. If you want to know more about the future, you can read the book when it comes out.
The tie in with the topic of this article is that your imagination plays a large role in writing as well. To cut to the chase your ideas, arguments, characters, plots and even your words come from your imagination. Your muse does not exist in some mystical or occult realm where it feeds ideas and inspiration to you. It resides entirely in your imagination. But, before I get too far ahead of myself. Let me back up and lay a little groundwork.
People often ask writers where their ideas come from. This is a stock question for book interviews. They know the audience, which includes numerous writers and wanna be writers, are dying for an answer. Instead, the writer fumbles around, sputters out a few statements of far less quality than the writing, about which they are being interviewed, and dodges the question. The answer is that they come from their imagination. If the interviewer presses a bit and asks how they get into the writers imagination the answers become a little more standard. You have to read a lot. You have to write a lot. You have to play with ideas.
When you are reading or writing you are creating bits of raw material in your head. They even have a name for it. They call it fabula and fabula is the stuff out of which stories are made. I was watching an interview a few days ago with Donna Tartt the author of The Secret History who said that she always carries a notebook with her to jot down ideas. She said her notebook is like an artists sketch book. That is a great description. Rather than relying on her memory to house her fabula, she writes it down in her notebook. Not a bad idea at all. I personally have dozens of notebooks where I jot down ideas. But, I don't carry one around with me like Donna Tartt. Still, she is one of the most revered writers working today and I am just cranking out a blog page. Maybe there is a connection there. Maybe I should carry around a notebook.
Let us try, for the sake of this discussion, to think of the imagination as a real thing. We do this all the time. We think of intelligence (as measured by IQ), body mass index, and charisma as real things, even though they are not. We might say somebody has the gift of gab and nobody says "Wait! Is that real?" Treating concepts as though they are real is just a convenience, a legal fiction so to speak.
The imagination is a place where you can put ideas, perhaps even picture them, modify them and evaluate the modifications. Imagine a horse. Now make it blue. Next make it fly. Perhaps you want to push it and make it talk. Let's say you can ride this flying horse. Will it talk to you while you are riding it? Does that make you nervous? What if the horse can talk but not speak English? What if it can speak English but is always correcting your grammar and does that horse snorting thing when you use too much slang? See how it works? We have an idea for a story, not a great one, but an idea nonetheless.
How can you improve your imagination? Well, how do you improve anything? You use it. You exercise it. By reading and writing you already exercise your imagination. Take something you've read and start tinkering with it. Stephen King wrote an excellent book called The Stand in which a flu virus that was being worked on in a military lab escaped and started killing everyone. (Hmm... sounds familiar) Anyway, what if the virus, instead of killing people, turned some people red and some people blue. Would the blues and reds go after each other? What if it turned some blue, some red and some yellow. Would coalitions form? We could go on with this or go in different directions or use a different book.
You can develop your imagination doing exercises like this. You can add to your fabula by reading and exercise your imagination by writing. You could take five minutes out each day, take a news story, turn it into something utterly ridiculous, and then see if you can convince yourself that it is still true. I think this is what we call journalism today. Perhaps, I'd better not go down that path. 😎
Sunday, May 10, 2020
The Meaning of Life
Finally! My first Kindle book The Meaning of Life is available on Amazon. It took a lot longer than I expected that it would (as I grumbled about in the last post). I hit some further snags, and still have a few to get past. None the less it is done and the next one will be easier. I still have to create a paperback version which is snagged at the moment. And I plan to read it myself (and edit the audio) for the Audible version. No doubt more snags are awaiting there. Grumbling aside, this is a lot of fun and will be more fun as I figure out what I am doing.
I should also point out that I did the cover art myself (in case that isn't obvious) for a reason. I plan to publish several books and thought the sketched cover art would allow me to express ideas that might be more difficult to express through a real graphics artist. Further, I thought the unprofessional looking sketch would be a signature element of all upcoming covers. And, I thought it would stand out on Amazon, which it does. We will see if that was a good idea or not.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Bumps Along the Way
When I made my plan for the year, I had originally expected to publish my first Kindle book in February 2020. After all, the first draft of the book was completed by the end of Summer 2019. All I needed to do was to edit the first draft, convert it to Kindle format, and - on with the show. Not so fast! Since this was my first one, there were things I hadn't anticipated.
First, the draft was handwritten which meant that I had to get it into electronic form to do anything with it. One could argue that I should have typed the first draft into a word processor. But, one would be arguing pointlessly if they did. I enjoy writing by hand. I also enjoy writing at the computer. And it would be too complicated to explain which I prefer for any given project. Nonetheless, I had to get some voice recognition software so I could read the essays into the computer.
The voice recognition software I got was quite good and easy to use, but my handwriting was horrid. In my defense, I would point out that I was in dire need of cataract surgery so I couldn't see that well. And my limited vision was reflected in my handwriting. Still, I managed to read all the essays into a Word document, printed it out, and then had to face my next shock. You need to develop a new skill in order to read a document into voice recognition software. If you mumble, belch, speak incoherently, or make parenthetical remarks to yourself, it all shows up in the document. So, my first pass at editing the document was to make the transcribed version intelligible.
This was more difficult than it might seem. In some extreme cases, I had to look at the garbled words in the document, then at the unreadable handwritten scrawl and try to figure out what I was trying to say. It was like trying to Spackle the bark on a pine tree. It took persistence, patience and modest expectations. Persistence I am good at. They other two are not my strong suits. Nonetheless, I got a workable draft done by early February and thought I might still make the February deadline. But, sadly, it was not to be.
As I reread the intelligible draft, editing it for content, I realized that something was missing. I would read a line and realize that I could have used different words, or conveyed a slightly different sense, or even expressed the thought entirely differently. What was missing was that I had not yet fully developed my voice for writing essays. You develop your voice by writing, writing, writing until you fall into a comfortable pattern of how you express yourself.
For example, I have written over 150 book and article reviews. So, when I review something, I don't think about my voice. I just write, edit and rewrite. I have a review voice for reviewing books, a scholarly voice for academic articles and a blogger voice for blogging. All are fairly well developed. I have more than a half dozen other blogs I have created (and usually abandoned) over the years. If you are interested, check out Dr Artz Ranting and Reflecting for some grumbling about being an academic.This blog legocogitoscribo.blogspot.com/, which you are currently reading is written in that comfortable blogger voice. But, essays are different and although I have written hundreds so far, they are all first drafts and my voice has not yet emerged.
This last bump prompted me to think a little more deeply about the writing process and explore three almost mystic aspects of writing: voice, style, and muse. People often ask writers where their ideas come from and writers will hem and haw unable to answer that fairly straightforward question. But, an even more important question, which is never asked is "once you have an idea, where do the words come from?" And we can take that a step further and ask "once you have the words how do you organize and/or modify them to represent what you want to say most clearly". Those are the tough questions. Let me tip toe into this with a simple example.
Let's say that you go out to the end of your driveway one morning to pick up the paper. You see your neighbor doing the same thing so you ask how they are and then ask if they had heard about some event that was dominating the news. Asking how they are is a mere pleasantry. You probably don't really care. But, the question about the news is a little more novel. Where did that question come from? For purposes of this example, we are going to call that your muse. What they hear is your voice. If you sounded like somebody else, (like on that State Farm commercial) it would be really weird. But, your voice not only has a unique sound but a unique style. You may have an accent for example. Or a unique tone such as judgemental or reassuring. While you are talking to your neighbor, you do not pause to wonder how all that is happening. How do you turn thoughts into words? How do they turn sound waves into words and words back into thoughts again. If somebody were to ask you where your sentences come from you would be a loss and would probably think it was a silly question. This is how a writer feels when asked where his or her ideas come from.
For now, we will say that a writer's voice is how you sound to the reader. It is also that voice in your head that tells you when you have really nailed an idea or when you need to work on it some more. Your style is how you organize your voice to express an idea in terms pattern, tempo, emphasis, word choice, inflection and so on. And your muse is that mystical generative part of your brain that produces thoughts and words for you to express an idea. As you write more and more, the distinction between these three becomes less clear. But, for now, I am going to treat them as separate entities in the next few posts so we can understand each one better and consider ways in which you might develop them.
(n.b. As I post this blog entry, I am struggling to convert my final word document into a Kindle book using Kindle Create. It is another unanticipated hurdle to get over. Musings may produce interesting questions like "what is the difference between voice and style" but they do not produce final products. Back to work!)
First, the draft was handwritten which meant that I had to get it into electronic form to do anything with it. One could argue that I should have typed the first draft into a word processor. But, one would be arguing pointlessly if they did. I enjoy writing by hand. I also enjoy writing at the computer. And it would be too complicated to explain which I prefer for any given project. Nonetheless, I had to get some voice recognition software so I could read the essays into the computer.
The voice recognition software I got was quite good and easy to use, but my handwriting was horrid. In my defense, I would point out that I was in dire need of cataract surgery so I couldn't see that well. And my limited vision was reflected in my handwriting. Still, I managed to read all the essays into a Word document, printed it out, and then had to face my next shock. You need to develop a new skill in order to read a document into voice recognition software. If you mumble, belch, speak incoherently, or make parenthetical remarks to yourself, it all shows up in the document. So, my first pass at editing the document was to make the transcribed version intelligible.
This was more difficult than it might seem. In some extreme cases, I had to look at the garbled words in the document, then at the unreadable handwritten scrawl and try to figure out what I was trying to say. It was like trying to Spackle the bark on a pine tree. It took persistence, patience and modest expectations. Persistence I am good at. They other two are not my strong suits. Nonetheless, I got a workable draft done by early February and thought I might still make the February deadline. But, sadly, it was not to be.
As I reread the intelligible draft, editing it for content, I realized that something was missing. I would read a line and realize that I could have used different words, or conveyed a slightly different sense, or even expressed the thought entirely differently. What was missing was that I had not yet fully developed my voice for writing essays. You develop your voice by writing, writing, writing until you fall into a comfortable pattern of how you express yourself.
For example, I have written over 150 book and article reviews. So, when I review something, I don't think about my voice. I just write, edit and rewrite. I have a review voice for reviewing books, a scholarly voice for academic articles and a blogger voice for blogging. All are fairly well developed. I have more than a half dozen other blogs I have created (and usually abandoned) over the years. If you are interested, check out Dr Artz Ranting and Reflecting for some grumbling about being an academic.This blog legocogitoscribo.blogspot.com/, which you are currently reading is written in that comfortable blogger voice. But, essays are different and although I have written hundreds so far, they are all first drafts and my voice has not yet emerged.
This last bump prompted me to think a little more deeply about the writing process and explore three almost mystic aspects of writing: voice, style, and muse. People often ask writers where their ideas come from and writers will hem and haw unable to answer that fairly straightforward question. But, an even more important question, which is never asked is "once you have an idea, where do the words come from?" And we can take that a step further and ask "once you have the words how do you organize and/or modify them to represent what you want to say most clearly". Those are the tough questions. Let me tip toe into this with a simple example.
Let's say that you go out to the end of your driveway one morning to pick up the paper. You see your neighbor doing the same thing so you ask how they are and then ask if they had heard about some event that was dominating the news. Asking how they are is a mere pleasantry. You probably don't really care. But, the question about the news is a little more novel. Where did that question come from? For purposes of this example, we are going to call that your muse. What they hear is your voice. If you sounded like somebody else, (like on that State Farm commercial) it would be really weird. But, your voice not only has a unique sound but a unique style. You may have an accent for example. Or a unique tone such as judgemental or reassuring. While you are talking to your neighbor, you do not pause to wonder how all that is happening. How do you turn thoughts into words? How do they turn sound waves into words and words back into thoughts again. If somebody were to ask you where your sentences come from you would be a loss and would probably think it was a silly question. This is how a writer feels when asked where his or her ideas come from.
For now, we will say that a writer's voice is how you sound to the reader. It is also that voice in your head that tells you when you have really nailed an idea or when you need to work on it some more. Your style is how you organize your voice to express an idea in terms pattern, tempo, emphasis, word choice, inflection and so on. And your muse is that mystical generative part of your brain that produces thoughts and words for you to express an idea. As you write more and more, the distinction between these three becomes less clear. But, for now, I am going to treat them as separate entities in the next few posts so we can understand each one better and consider ways in which you might develop them.
(n.b. As I post this blog entry, I am struggling to convert my final word document into a Kindle book using Kindle Create. It is another unanticipated hurdle to get over. Musings may produce interesting questions like "what is the difference between voice and style" but they do not produce final products. Back to work!)
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