Trying a new memory technique

In my last post I talked about a nonfiction book idea that I'm now pursuing instead of the children's fantasy I'd been writing. It's going to be focused around how we memorize text, such as poetry, chapters of the Bible, playscripts and more. In this post, and future ones, I'll be exploring some of the ideas that will go into the book. 

I’ve been memorizing poetry and Scripture for several decades now, and am always interested in hearing about alternative methods of memorizing.

Recently I came across an idea for the first time which was touted as being a great way of learning text really quickly. The idea isn’t new; in fact I’ve just found in a Facebook discussion on memorization that an acting friend told me he'd been using it for years.

This is how it goes:

You read through a particular speech a few times, getting to know something of the words, but not memorizing it.. Then you sit and write down the initial letters of each word, along with any punctuation. With poetry, it’s good to stick to the layout of the poem as well.

These initial letters become a kind of code. It's surprising how quickly you can read through these letters and remember the text you’re learning.

That’s good, and seemingly some people with better memories than me can be word perfect the next day when they have to deliver a speech, using this method alone. 

Or so it appears.

I tried it for the first time on Psalm 63, which happened to be the next item I wanted to learn.

I broke the text down into four sections and only worked on one section each day, over four days. The first day it all seemed very easy, and I could recite back the words with relative ease. But before the day was out, I’d pretty much forgotten what I’d learned. Away from the code, I had smatterings of it, but there were gaps and I wasn’t sure exactly what some words were or how they fitted together. 

A little discouraged, I came back to the first section the next morning, and, using the initial letters I’d written out again, found I could quickly remember the lines. So I carried on with the second section.

Next morning, the first section – without using the initial letters – was kind of there, but not really learned. The second was mostly missing. And so it went on, until I’d worked through all four sections.

By the time I'd got through all four sections I found I had to start working on the lines in my usual way: checking for similar letters in a phrase, for words that rhymed with each other (wings, sings and clings all turned up within two lines), for connections to other pieces I’d learned (my Auntie Joyce is a usual reminder of rejoice and has been used when learning another Psalm), for words that remind me of something else, and so on. All long-established techniques.

The thing was still not really sticking…

Lying in bed on the sixth day (or thereabouts) I decided to use the technique known variously as the Memory Palace or the Mind Palace or the Place of Loci. All of them basically mean using real places that you know well in real life and letting them be the link to getting you from A to B in the piece.

I chose the road outside our house, leading to my neighbour’s fence (where my generous neighbours, in imagination, were standing), upstairs in my house where I was lying in a bed, and then to my other neighbour’s place, where relationships between us aren’t so good. 

These were starting points, but I needed to add in other things: the motor scooter shed in our drive, a hand mower being lifted over the fence, eating a marrow without cutting it, someone wielding a

A substantial marrow

sword, and a King and Auntie Joyce holding hands.

Now the thing started to be more fluent. And now, a few days later, it’s at the point where I’m much more likely to remember it than I was using the initial letter code on its own.

So the point is, I think, that if you want to learn something and retain it, you have to use a variety of means to keep it alive in your head.

I’ll talk about something called retrieval in my next post. This is another essential element to retaining things that have been learned.

Disciplined writing

I don't appear to have mentioned on this blog that Anthony Trollope's approach to writing always impressed me - though I've never been able to emulate it. From memory, he would rise at some extremely early hour (the kind of hour usually reserved these days for those who are aiming to be Olympic swimming champions) and write until he went to work at 8.00. When he finished one book he would immediately start the next. When he planned his books I'm not sure. Perhaps while he was working at his 'proper' job. He even continued this regime while he was travelling.

It helped him that his servant had to rise even earlier, to get the fire going.

I came across a couple of paragraphs today about Stephen King that I'd put on Evernote in 2013, and I think they're also worth noting. Okay, not everyone is Trollope or King, and not everyone's day can be so ordered as to rise at a certain time and just write. Nevertheless, both Trollope and King show that if we want to be a writer, it requires discipline.

This paragraph originally appeared in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac pages on King.

Stephen King has published 50 novels, five nonfiction books, and 200 short stories. To keep up this rate, he writes 2,000 words — about 10 pages — every single day. He said: "On some days, those 10 pages come easily; I'm up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day's work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I'm still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words."

King doesn't mention how or when he plans his novels. Though I seem to remember reading in his book On Writing, that he basically sits down and begins writing and lets the book find itself. And the only revising he does once the first draft is finished is to reduce the adjectives and adverbs. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, I suspect, and it's more likely he's the sort of writer who edits as he goes. And plans, in his own fashion, when he's out and about doing the errands.

However he does his planning and his editing, the key thing here is that he writes in a disciplined manner. Yes, he's obviously capable of taking a whole day to finish the 2000 words, if necessary, and many other writers may not have that luxury. But we all have more time than we think. Too many of us use it for procrastination rather than writing...

RRBC and The Computer Heist

As part of marketing my latest book, I've got involved in an online reviewing and support group, Rave Reviews Book Club, (or RRBC for short) in the last two or three weeks. Certainly it's a busy and energetic group, with plenty going on. At the moment I'm keeping up with the pace!

They select three books from their members for review each month and you can choose which book you'd like to review. You're only required to do four reviews a year - no biggie - and these can be from other books as well as the chosen few.

Anyway, my first review, which also appears on Amazon and Goodreads, is of Michael P King's The Computer Heist. 

This book whips along at a great pace, with multiple viewpoints and innumerable twists and turns. There doesn't seem to be a character in sight who's not out to do all the others down, and money is a considerable motive for everything that happens here. There are one or two improbable things: the idea that there would be no backup to a new computer program - as at first appears to be the case - seems unlikely. And Joe and Tess, the husband and wife team who are the mainstays of this series of books, have a knack of not only being right 99% of the time, but also always capable of coming up with a new idea when caught in a corner. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable and not overly violent noir novel.

Not The Disenchanted Wizard

Back in November I got myself involved in the NaNoWriMo competition which requires you to write a 50,000 novel in a month. I wrote about doing this at the time, when I was still only some 38345 words ahead. I finished the 50,000 words, but some of them were the scruffiest words you can imagine...which is not surprising if you're trying to write a novel almost from scratch in a month.

I know some people can write quickly and confidently. Some claim that their first draft is the only draft, and usually only needs tidying up. (Stephen King claims this is the way he works: comes back to it after a couple of months and removes all the excess adjectives and adverbs.) Some have a gift for storytelling that just seems to pour out of them, and though those works may have some flaws, they carry the reader along all the same.

My certificate, though the
book's title has now changed

There were some good things in my story, some interesting and fantastical events, and I knew where I wanted to finish up...roughly. But when I'd finished the 50,000 words (which included a lot of notes about what I was writing, which is how I write anyway) I had a big hole between the first two-thirds and the last couple of chapters. In fact, though I tried to write those last chapters, they were awful, because I wasn't sure how the characters had actually got to that point.

So over the last month or so I've been working at the story again, first by going through it and making lots of notes (yup, that's how I work), and then trying to work out some of the problems, and then trying to figure out a structure and then discovering, over and over, that if I did such and such then I'd have to answer the question as to why such and such...if you get my drift.

A few days ago I tried working backwards from those last chapters to try and figure out how things got to that point. Copious notes ensued. Copious notes, and oodles of questions. I'm getting sick of my inner editor asking, But why...? like a nauseating two-year-old that someone's left on your doorstep and you have to look after for the afternoon. (Having been through the two-year-old questioning stage at least five times, it's not a period of life that I find quite so endearing as I once did...)

Anyway, today I feel as though I'm making progress. I'm now in the position of being able to go back to the beginning to sort out the structure again, this time with a lot of the reasons for things happening already in place, instead of being guessed at. Of course there are still questions (Be quiet you nauseating child!) but we're managing to work things out.

As I said in my last post this is a prequel to Grimhilda! the first book in this series of children's stories, and explains, amongst other things, how the Maps came to be the Maps, and who they are (something I thought I knew back in November - I was proved wrong and had to give the original couple their dismissal notices).

The big climax was to have taken place in a different country altogether to the rest of the story. I finally realised late last night that this was just adding to my burdens, and ditched the whole idea, along with copious notes and things copied off the Net. Much more straightforward for the storytelling to keep the thing in one city; it's the third city to appear in these books. The first two were unnamed, but this one has a name, though whether it'll actually appear in the book is another question.

Anyway, at this point I don't have a deadline for finishing the story, but I think once I start writing the next draft, I'll get an idea of how from publishing it'll be. As long as characters don't keep wanting to change their motivations and backstories and refusing to do what they're told.

Reading All's Well That Ends Well, again.

I read Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well a number of years ago. At the time I was so impressed with one of the King's speeches that I memorised it.

I've just read the play again, along with the long introduction by Susan Snyder, in the Oxford World's Classics edition. A very good introduction, with lots of helpful insights into the play, the problems (it depends whether you think the play is a problem play or not) and the characters. Excellent notes as well, helpfully on the same page as the script.

But what an odd piece it is. It debunks romantic love almost entirely.Though the heroine, Helen, is madly in love with Count Bertram (he doesn't have any idea of this) she doesn't in any sense woo him (if that were possible in that age). Instead she wins him by earning the right to take the hand of one of the King's men in exchange for healing the King of something none of his physicians have managed to deal with.

Bertram is an adolescent emotionally and attitudinally, but he's quite right to feel offended about being given a wife without having any say in the matter. And to show his disapproval he doesn't even consummate the marriage but skips off to war with his sidekick, Paroles. Paroles is an odd character he's constantly shown to be disliked by other characters, and distrusted by them, yet it's only late in the play that he actually does anything that's really offensive. Perhaps on stage it works better, with an actor being able to fill out what's not in the script's words.

But most curious of all, to me, in the opening scene he and Helen (who's shown to be virtuous and honourable throughout the play) have a very strange and bawdy conversation about virginity - for a hundred lines! It's as if Shakespeare sets out from the beginning to get rid of the notion that sex in (or out of ) marriage is anything but a very earthy thing, and that for all our attempts to make it something more exalted, it's nothing more than a human physical need.

There's a great deal about sex in this play: the later part of the plot revolves around getting Bertram into a trap that's sexual in nature (the 'old bed trick' which Shakespeare used more than once). He winds up bedding his own wife and making her pregnant, even though by that time he thinks she's dead. There's a good deal of discussion of the sexual relationships between men and women, discussion that would prove much too frank for some later generations. Besides Paroles and his bawdiness there's another character (known only as the Clown) who adds to the bawdiness in an even more gross way, and does this in discussion with Bertram's mother, the Countess, a lady who would also be above this sort of discussion, you'd think.

The trick against poor old Bertram is revealed in front of the King and the Countess, and Bertram once again is trapped. After all the sorting out he winds up saying a couple of slightly ambiguous lines in which he says he'll go through with the marriage. But you wonder what sort of a marriage it would ever be.

Shakespeare turns the world on its head, in a sense, in this play. A woman pursues a man in order to marry him, and gets her way. Love barely comes into it, but sex certainly does. None of the grand wedding scene here. The original marriage takes place offstage, and is ordered by the King to take place with barely any preparation, on the same day that Bertram is 'won.'  When Bertram's behaviour towards another woman is revealed he's the one who gets castigated, not her. And at the end of the play, it's still the women who have the upper hand, although the King's authority counts for a good deal.

You wonder what the original audience thought of it. Even today audiences struggle with it. It's not produced as often as it might be, though there are a couple of clips from a Royal Shakespeare production on You Tube.

Violence and NonViolence

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I See the Promised Land" in A Testament of Hope

All the King's Men - so many stars they can barely all fit on the screen

How can a movie with an all-star cast fail? All the King's Men is a prime example of just how easy it is.
Part of the problem seems to be that the script can't decide who the story is about: is it Willie Stark, played by Sean Penn, or the equally significantly-named Jack Burden, played by Jude Law.
The Sean Penn scenes, the ones in which he's the focus, have an energy and aggressiveness, mostly due to the full-in-your-face Penn performance. When he's off-stage, the cast, including Law, all seem to be playing a movie that's going on underwater. Everything is taken at a slow, meaningful pace, full of glances and elusive dialogue. This isn't the cast's fault: everyone of these people has played intense roles before, and held our interest fully. But the Jack Burden side of the story, with all its psychological stuff (made even more heavy-handed by a voice over from Law, full of portentous hints and warnings) isn't that interesting, and the cast do their best with what are basically underwritten roles.
Penn himself comes most alive in his speechifying, but he's adopted an accent so thick that often the speeches loose comprehensibility. The rest of the cast are easy to understand: we just don't know why they're saying what they're saying!
The film takes a curious turn about fifteen to twenty minutes in. Stark is portrayed initially as a quiet do-gooder, a man of integrity who's unlike all the corrupt politicians and businessmen around him. Burden is seemingly amoral. And then, after a scene in which Stark downs a full glass of whisky (he's always drunk soft drink up till then) and collapses on the floor, the roles all seem to reverse. Stark is shown as increasingly corrupt; Burden is a man with a conscience; Patricia Clarkson, who is woefully underused in her role, turns from being a woman on the make in the political scene to a kind of mother-figure-cum-mistress who's being used herself, and James Gandolfini ceases to be the slimy, sly political force intent on getting Stark elected, and becomes a blithering idiot without another decent scene in the film.
And besides these actors we also have Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, two more Brits adopting various versions of Louisiana accents (they are playing upper-class Americans, of course), and Mark Ruffalo as Winslet's brother. He gets to play the most underwritten character of all. Seemingly he's a medical person of some sort, but he spends his time playing the piano - we think. And then he gets pulled into the arena to front a new hospital that Stark is building. A less-likely front man is hard to imagine, as Ruffalo is allowed no charisma, nothing to show that he might have any substance. And then finally he comes quietly out of the shadows and shoots Stark. Hmmm. And gets shot himself.
The build-up to this climax is almost entirely lacking in tension. We're really quite happy to see Stark gunned down, because he's such a snot; but because Ruffalo has been such an unassuming character we're puzzled why he also gets shot, as he seems to be performing a public service.
Winslet drifts in and out of the movie, and the scene that should be most significant, when seemingly Burden rejects making love to her, is confused (and made even more so by the voice-over), and so we have little idea what she's supposed be doing in the film. Hopkins is strong enough, but again he's more tied up with the Burden story than the Stark one, and that again confuses the role he plays.
The whole thing needs reshuffling to bring one side or the other into focus. Pity to waste such a cast on such twaddle.

Watch your health!

Just watched Irresistible, a film made in Australia with Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Emily Blunt. A neat piece of suspense, if a little unable to overcome its improbabilities. Neill comes across as the least believable of the three, even though he has the easiest part. It’s almost as if he isn’t really bothering too much. Sarandon as always is strong and detailed in her playing of someone who might need to up their health insurance, while Emily Blunt does her best with a role that seems odd from the outset. The great thing about Sarandon is that she can let you know depths in the character without uttering a word. It’s a pity she has to deal with some melodrama here, since she actually invests the character with considerable personality.

Also watched The Last King of Scotland a few days ago. Forest Whitaker is superb in the role of Idi Amin, and James McAvoy (miles away from the last time I saw him as Mr Tumnus) plays the fictional character of a doctor who becomes Amin’s right hand man – when it suits Amin. McAvoy’s Dr Garrigan is a young man who appears to have it all together when it comes to healing the sick, but who is quite amoral in his dealings with people outside of his doctoring. He appears to be wise, but the film is about him actually learning wisdom, at great cost to himself ultimately, and at the expense of several other people’s lives. It’s a film to watch more than once, if you can bear the brutality of the world Amin inhabits (although the brutality is kept to a minimum, visually, until the very end; otherwise it’s mostly hinted at in cutaway shots).

Shrek the Third

We bought a copy of Shrek the Third today. I found it a bit of a disappointment. The old characters don’t really go anywhere, and the new ones are a bit flat. There isn’t much real humour in it, though it’s amusing enough, and I felt it had too much dialogue to be of interest to smaller children. It’s a pity, because versions one and two were both excellent, full of interesting ideas and good fun. Perhaps it’s because this one settles a lot of its time on Prince Charming, who isn’t the most exciting character in the series (no disrespect to Rupert Everett, who does his darndest with the role) and because Artie, the heir to the throne, does little that’s unexpected. We know he’s going to become a ‘man’, we know he’ll save the day, we’ll know he’ll go off in a huff – twice. This is one of the big problems with the movie: there’s little surprise.
And just for once I’d love to see a Hollywood movie in which a man who’s just been told he’s going to be a father doesn’t have nightmares about the idea. Where are the fathers-to-be who rejoice in the situation?