Two Schools of Thought on Writing

To lay some foundation for further exploration of the craft of writing, I need to distinguish between two schools of thought that inform and lead to two different approaches to writing. I will call these two schools the Expressive/Inspirational School (here after  the Expressive School) and the Technical/Teleological School (here after the Technical School). I should mention that I just made up these two names to explain something about writing. Other people may have any number of dichotomies or ontologies of writing practice. I find mine to be useful for what I have to say. [Note: There are two kinds of people in the world - those who like dichotomies and those who don't 😎]

The Expressive School focuses on connecting with your muse, finding your voice or waking up your creative spirit.  You need to find something that inspires you and the words will flow. The word 'inspire' literally means to breathe into. ( You can see the connection between inspiration and respiration) And in this case, a supernatural being, such as a muse, was breathing into you (or so they believed in days gone by).

For most people, their muse is asleep, possibly in a coma. So, in order to wake it they will do exercises such as describe a time when you were really angry or describe a transcendental experience such as standing on the edge of the grand canyon. Expressive writers will often work in writer's groups so that they can get feedback from other writers on how well they expressed themselves. I should point out that for some people their muse is in a persistent vegetative state. In this case they will reject the very idea of a muse. It would be like acknowledging that a dead carrot is lodged somewhere in the creative part of their brain.

If you want to hear a little more about nurturing your expressiveness you may find inspiration in Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within . There are actually many books available for expressive writers. But, I thought I would mention this one as it helped me see the difference between these two approaches more clearly. 

Elizabeth Gilbert (better known for Eat Pray Love) wrote an excellent book on creativity entitled Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear in which she talked about the need to feed your muses. She said something to the effect that if you don't nurture your creativity it will leave you and find somebody else to inhabit. That is so true even if I don't fully agree with the metaphor. This is one of the reasons why I so strongly encourage people to write every day. And, although I am not in the Expressive camp, I thought her book and its perspectives on creativity were excellent.

The Technical School focuses on how to use the techniques of writing to achieve an end. The word 'Teleological' in Technical/Teleological title recognizes the need for having a purpose in mind. The Ancient Greeks recognized this dichotomy in the words "Telos vs Techne". Telos is the purpose or desired end state, while techne is the means by which it is achieved. In simple English one might say that it is one thing to know what you want, it is something else to know how to achieve it. Or, similarly, it is one thing to know how to do something but you still need to know what to do. We see this in a lot of creative activities. You might know how to cook but cannot develop a new recipe. Or you might have an idea for a recipe, but have no idea how to achieve it. Similarly, you may know how to use your camera, but are frustrated trying to find the perfect shot. And so on.

For most people, their desire to write is frustrated by a lack of technique. Should you use big words or small words, long sentences or short ones? Should you spell it out for the reader or leave more to their imagination? Should you write in correct English or allow an accent? Should your writing be lofty or accessible? The problem I have with the Expressive School is that when you find your voice it may be like the voice you use when you sing in the shower. It's OK when no one is around but needs a lot of work if others are going to hear or read it. This, again, is why daily practice is a good idea. You can experiment with difference techniques so  that you are familiar with them when the need arises.

I would also recommend reading the works of the masters. You may have gone into an art gallery at some point and seen an aspiring painter copying someone's master piece. They do this to learn the techniques of the masters. Writing is no different. (For that matter neither is cooking, acting, photography or any other creative endeavor). By reading classics of literature, you can learn techniques that will enrich your writing. And, if you get really, really, really ambitious, you can take one of your daily essays and rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Erskine Caldwell or (god forbid) William Falkner.

I am very much in the Technical camp although I would never dismiss the importance of the Expressive camp. The Expressive camp focuses on Telos at the expense of Techne while the Technical camp focuses on Techne at the expense of Telos. If you just want to write because it feels good, you are a good candidate for the Expressive camp. If you want to write to achieve a clear and specific purpose, then you are a good candidate for the Technical camp.

If you want to hear a little more about the importance of developing your technical chops in writing you may want to look at The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner which helped me clarify my thoughts about writing. I should also mention that I belong to both camps depending on the situation. In my private writing activity I rely heavily on the Expressive view. But, when talking about writing publicly, I rely heavily on the Technical view as it is much easier to explain and teach.

Another question one might ask is whether you prefer to be a solitary writer or if you prefer to be part of a writing group. Generally, although not always, people in the Expressive camp will prefer to be a part of a writing group. People in the Technical camp will prefer to work alone. Personally, I am solitary and prefer not to bother with the opinions of others. So, I found great inspiration in Stephen King's On Writing which I read and later listened to a recorded version of twice. I will probably read it again at some point. If you find yourself drifting in that direction, you may want to check it out. To get back to the point about writing groups, King points out in his book that he is not a fan of writing groups. Neither am I.

Before I close, I would like to use King to make another point. There is another dichotomy that writers fall into. Some writers, such as King, prefer not to plot. They prefer to put the characters into an interesting situation and let them drive the outcome. Other writers prefer to have the entire book plotted out before they begin writing. Which is the correct way? The answer is that the correct way is the one that the writer is most comfortable with. I happen to agree with King on this point. I am much more of a character driven writer.

We are almost done. The two things I just mentions are points where I strongly agree with King. There are points on which I do not agree. So, if I agree, my views are reinforced. If I disagree on certain points, I just ignore them. You should do the same with my advice. If you agree and find what I say useful, then I am happy. If you disagree, feel free to to ignore it.

Reflecting on Essay Style for The Meaning of Life

To start out, I would like to point out that even if a person is a full time writer they are not actually writing full time. They might be working full time on things related to getting the writing done. But, writing is, sadly, a much smaller part of getting the piece done than most people realize. On a good day, a writer might get an hour of actual writing done. On a really good day, two hours. There are rare days when you get three good hours of writing done. But, then you are spent and worthless for anything else.

Two obvious competitors for your writing time are rewriting and editing. I don't think there are any canonical definitions to explain the difference between these two. But, in my mind, rewriting involves substantive changes while editing focuses more style and grammar. Personally, I find it difficult to switch between these three modes (writing, rewriting, editing). So, I usually focus on one for any given day at the expense of the others.

Unless you write by hand and then hand it off to somebody, there are endless technical problems, some of which I have grumbled about before such as converting a document to Kindle format, or dictating hand written notes into a MS Word document. This blog entry is an example of the kinds of technical problems that crop up. I have drafts of several months worth of blog posts which I finish up when I need to post something. I do this so I don't have to start from scratch each month and come up with an idea. Something happened to this draft. I am not sure what. I know that Google changed the interface, although I don't see how that would affect it. But, somehow it got garbled. Perhaps, I was possessed by a demon one day and garbled it myself. Maybe I did a poor job of dictating. Whatever happened, some chunks were missing.

Some tasks associated with writing are even more difficult for people who do not write to understand. For example, if I am trying to figure out something like a plot turn, or a character element, or the best way to explain something, I will need some time to think about it. But, this isn't the same kind of thinking you might apply to selecting a stock to buy or how to balance your budget. It is almost nonthinking. I will usually stop and do something entirely unrelated to what I am writing until an inspiration occurs to me. (Surprisingly, it always does although the amount of time required varies greatly)  Let's say I decide to vacuum the living room while I ruminate on a style issue, which brings us neatly back to the point of this post. If someone were to call me on the phone and ask what I was doing at the moment, what should I say. Should I say I am vacuuming (a task which can easily be interrupted) or should I say I am writing (a task that can be ruined by stopping at the wrong time).

Moving on from the grumbling and refocusing on style, it took me a while to find my style for The Meaning of Life. Ultimately, after agonizing over it for longer than I wanted to, I came up with the following. 

I decided to keep my essays short, roughly 300 to 700 words, with an average word count of about 400. I think this worked well for that book, but did not work at all well for Predicting the Future. But, nothing is wasted. I have several hundred short essays which I wrote over several years for writing practice. I will select some of the best, punch them up a bit and release a collection of 100 or so in a volume entitled Things that Passed Through My Mind, or something like that. That won't be for a couple of years as I have several things in the pipeline. But, that is how I work. I always plan way ahead. 

I also decided that I want the essays to be accessible and never pretentious although if I have to use a big word or a complex sentence to represent a complex idea I will do so. I am going to stick with this idea in other books as well as some fiction I am working on. I am not writing for scholars. I had enough of that as an academic. Having said that, I try to write for people who have different levels of interest. So, most of my essays and hopefully my upcoming stories will be interesting to people who want to enjoy more than think. But, I don't want to turn off people looking for something deeper, so I try to have things for them too. In the essays, there are comments along the way which most readers will just ignore. But, some will see them as pointers to something more. In the fiction, there should be a good story for those that only care about entertainment. But, there should also be deeper levels such as symbolism, metaphor and meaning for those who are looking for more.

I like to begin with a strong, often provocative, opening sentence that will make the reader want to read more. I try to end each essay with a sentence that will give you the reader something to think about which hopefully is what the reader will do before reading the next. If the essays are related the last line in one should link in to or create interest in the next.

 I have finished the first draft of Predicting the Future and it resembles this style with the exception that it is chapters of about 2000 words each and hence a longer volume. But, I am still not writing for experts. Currently, I have several book ideas that will be more like Predicting the Future. However, this 300-700 word model will still be useful. I have about 300-400 more essays written in the same style as The Meaning of Life. When the mood strikes me, I will start to package the better ones into short topical volumes of about 50-100 essays each which will sell for 99 cents as a Kindle book. Although I do like long books (Stephen King's The Stand and James Michner's Hawaii come to mind)  it think short books for a buck are the way of the future, sort of back to the days of Penny Dreadful.

More on Imagination

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.

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. 😎

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.