Hug a Politician

In 2006, a teenage boy walked up to Australian Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, and gave him a hug. Howard was strolling along the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River when this happened.

There were a couple of remarkable things about this incident. First, John Howard was surrounded by members of the Secret Service who should have prevented this hug from happening. Second, photos revealed that the boy, who, despite his young age, was considerably taller than Howard, was holding a sharp screwdriver at the time.

But it was okay. The boy just happened to have the screwdriver in his hand when he saw the very huggable Mr Howard taking his morning walk. No one was hurt. In fact people laughed. Australians congratulated themselves for living in a country in which a young man has the freedom to walk up to the Prime Minister and give him (or her) a hug.

Recently, a relation of mine, exercising his right to speak freely on political matters, told me this joke:

Prime Minister Gillard and opposition leader Abbott were seated next to each other on an aeroplane.

Abbott said, “I could throw a cheque for $1000 out the window and make one person happy.”

To which Gillard replied, “I could throw 10 $100 notes out the window and make 10 people happy.”

Another passenger overheard this exchange and added “I could throw the two of you out the window and make everyone happy.”

Sometimes a joke, like a hug, can show one the truth. By these two things – the joke and the hug – I was reminded that, for all their spin, politicians are just people.

Politicians are people but, even though we can hug the Prime Minister or make a joke at her expense, we still treat them as if they are superhuman. We let politicians make our decisions for us, even when we don’t believe those decisions are in the best interests of the majority.

You don’t have to wave a placard or hug the Prime Minister to make a difference. You can tell a joke or write a letter to your local MP. You can have your say from the comfort of your own home.

Now that’s freedom.

Language Barricade

It is not money that makes the world go around: it is language. Without language, without the ability to communicate ideas, who would know that a piece of paper could hold enormous value?

For those who have learnt that a piece of paper can hold enormous value, money is language. Money, as they say, talks.

And like money, language, or at least your knowledge of language, can either help you or hinder you, as you travel through life.

Your language may be a barrier to getting what you want, or it may help you open doors.

Biologist, Mark Pagel, points out that language barriers have their uses. For example, if I’m talking to my buddies about a spear technology that I’ve invented, I don’t want some sneaky – ah – person from another village listening in and stealing my idea.

This example may seem unusual in the modern world. We don’t think about people stealing ideas: we live in a world that has elaborate systems that ensure the creator of an idea gets the credit they deserve. Well, most of the time anyway.

So, in the past, the language barrier may have helped us protect our technology without the need for lawyers.

But even today, and even amongst those who speak the same language, there can be barriers. Language can be a kind of code spoken amongst an elite few.

Jargon, legal terms, religious language, class and regional accents, separate those in the know (those in the group) from those who belong outside (those who should be treated with suspicion and, perhaps, derision).

Anyway, once you know there is a barrier in front of you, you can work out how to: remove it, get around it, or ignore it.

Just don’t expect me to share my Brachion 5000 spear technology with you willingly.

Not Novel

I am trying to write a novel.

I am bending over my keyboard trying to turn an abstract idea into words: lots of words.

I am typing. I am sweating.

I am not meeting my word target.

I am experiencing the same feelings I used to have as a child: I have not finished my homework. I am incapable of finishing my homework.

I am incapable.

I am battling against the feeling of being incapable. I am trying to turn off my inner critic. I am trying to be cool – Clint Eastwood cool.

I am not succeeding.

I am coming to the realisation that the reason I have put off trying to write a novel for so long is that I am terrified of letting go of my dream: my dream of writing a really great novel.

I am coming to the realisation that I may never write a really great novel.

I am not Isaac Asimov, whose writings are archived in some fancy place and take up seventy-one meters of shelf space.

I am not that young person - that author ten years younger than me - who recently received an award for her novel. I am sure her novel is actually quite awful.

I am full of jealousy.

I am full of jealousy: how mediocre.

I am a mediocre person pushing against my own mediocrity. I am a mediocre person clinging to mediocre dreams.

I am trying to write a novel.

In the Beginning

The book of John, which forms part of the Christian New Testament, begins like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The author of this text, John, is saying that Jesus is the Word of God.

You see, the early Christians had a bit of a problem: if Jesus and God were one and the same, who was running the shop while Jesus was on Earth? John starts his book - his Gospel - by answering that question. He compares the relationship between Jesus and God to the relationship between a speaker and her words.

John’s analogy was clever: you don’t need to believe in God – or in Jesus for that matter – to understand it. You use words, and by using words, you have experienced the power of the unseen to perform action at a distance.

Today, almost two thousand years after John wrote his Gospel, many of us take our own words for granted. And so John’s explanation of the relationship between God and Jesus, now works in reverse to remind us of the relationship we have with our words.

During his TED.com talk, biologist Mark Pagel, encouraged his audience to think about all the man-made objects that surround them. Each object, Pagel said, started as an idea in someone’s head. That idea was transferred to other people through language. It was in this way that the object took form.

Words are a kind of everyday magic; the kind that is easily explained - easily dismissed. Nevertheless, words are magic; how they are used is up to you.

The End is Just the Beginning

You are ready to write. You have a rock solid story idea. You have your characters defined. You’ve got one or two punchy sentences lined up. You’ve even - and this is the big one – you’ve even got the ending planned out.

You’re happy because you know that having an ending in mind can make the writing process a breeze.

You sit down to write. You spend ten minutes writing. You spend an hour writing. You spend two hours writing. You begin to realise it’s not working. For some reason you just can’t get your story to move towards your ending.

What are you going to do? You could bump up your word count: add a pile of extra words to get your protagonist to their destination. Or you could introduce a new character, one that explains all the story holes to your reader.

But that’s not what you’re about. You want to tell the story as clearly and as cleanly as possible.

Before you give up hope, here is something you could consider trying. I’m loath to suggest it - I know how much you liked your ending – but here goes.

Move your ending to the beginning.

Your ending is now the opening for your story. Your protagonist is not falling from grace: she has fallen: you just have to describe how she fell. Your protagonist is not going on a journey: he has arrived at the final destination and is reliving the highlights.

But you know this: of course you do.

You are ready to write.

Sinistra

As a child my left hand turned my wonderful thoughts into illegible smudges. I would look down at the page and feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction with what I had created.

My heart would sink whenever my teacher praised a classmate for the quality of their penmanship. That will never be me, I thought.

I couldn’t get homework in on time; I spent too much time on my printing and not enough on the content. I wanted my work to be perfect, but my ability didn’t match my desire.

In the end I gave up. I would lie on my bed reading novels when I should have been doing my homework. My school grades suffered as a result.

The advent of word-processing software should have been a godsend for me. Here was a tool that, in one fell swoop, fixed my spelling and presented my words in perfect print. But it was too late. My bad habits were too deeply entrenched. Despite my love of computers my homework continued to pile up and my grades continued to go down.

It was many years later; I was sitting at my desk, my pen poised over a sheet of snow-white paper, and I thought, I’m going to teach myself to write without smudges. I moved the pen slowly across the page. It was hard at first, frustrating even. But as my handwriting improved I began to understand, nay, to feel, the joy of forming words on paper.

There was a connection between my words and my thoughts, I realised. It was a connection I hadn’t been told about as I learnt to write. I understood the art of handwriting, not just the practicality of it.

Perhaps things were just a bit rushed in school. Perhaps if I’d taken a bit more time I would have understood the art of hand-writing much earlier in my life.

So now, if a child tells me they have bad handwriting, I tell them about the art of writing. Invariably they will look at me blankly and tell me about the word-processor. But I know: if they love words, one day they will learn to love the pen too.

Writer's Block

I’m going to start today’s blog with a rather lengthy quote from American author, Ray Bradbury:

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You’re there now doing the thing on paper. You’re not killing the goose; you’re just producing an egg. So I don’t worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It’s a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I’ve heard about it. I’ve felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I’d much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time and now I’ll write.” There’s no difference on paper between the two.

On first reading this quote may appear to contain a number of quite different ideas: but it does not. Bradbury is talking about inspiration. He’s saying that sitting down and writing is a fundamental part of the writing process. Writers cannot expect to be inspired if they are not actively trying to write.

Bradbury is saying that there is no golden goose. There is no magic that drops awesome story ideas into your mind. Writing begets writing.

I’ve heard other authors say what Bradbury says here: that they cannot detect in their own writing a difference between those bits where the ideas flowed like a flood, and those were the ideas did not flow at all.

In my experience, keeping notes of your ideas as they come to you - noting them down before they evaporate from your mind - will help you when you are sitting at your desk chewing your pencil, trying to decide what to write.

Let your words be the wick for more words.