Finding the Father

While reminding myself of this poem by Robert Bly this morning, I came across the notes I'd made below it. I thought they might be enough of interest to add to this blog. 

 FINDING THE FATHER by Robert Bly

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing ˗ as the ocean carries logs.
So on some days the body wails with its great energy;
it smashes up the boulders,
lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.
We do not have time to dress.
He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,
to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,
and there find the father whom we have never met,
who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,
and who then lost his memory,
and has lived since longing for his child,
whom he saw only once...
while he worked as a shoemaker,
as a cattle herder in Australia,
as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.
he sits there behind the door....
the eyebrows so heavy,
the forehead so light....
lonely in his whole body,
waiting for you.


Some reflections on this intriguing poem.

Being someone who grew up without a father (after the first three years of my life) this poem has always resonated with me, though it’s hard to put my finger on quite why.

The poem, at first sight, appears to be about two different things: the body and the father. Not only
that, it’s unusual to have the sense that it’s the body carrying the soul/spirit, and even making a major decision: we will go there, the body says. Many philosophers would claim that it’s the soul or spirit that animates the otherwise lumpish body.

It’s as if the body is being proactive (the anonymous knocker at the door only suggests going; it’s the body that says ‘we will.’ And there’s a final reference to the body ˗ not that of the main ‘body’ but that of the father. It’s like there’s some final connection made, though plainly there’s some way to go after all these years!

So what is the first stanza about? Is the body’s wailing and smashing indicative of some crisis in the spirit, or is it the body itself trying to arouse the spirit to action, to reconnect with the lost father?

Then there is the anonymous knocker. This could be interpreted in a variety of ways: some might see it as the voice of the Holy Spirit, arousing the writer into action, an action that he doesn’t appear to have considered before. There’s perhaps even a link with the picture of Jesus knocking at the door in the Book of Revelation: behold, I stand and knock. There may be other explanations. Whoever it is that’s knocking, he’s insistent: he doesn’t let the writer even have time to dress. This call for action is absolute: do it now, or perhaps this chance will be lost.

And the journey will take the writer through the blowing and rainy streets ˗ this isn’t a daytime journey (at least in my understanding); this is a journey taken in the dark, in inclement weather, for a dark destination. It’s a journey down into the psyche to find something that’s been lost and can only be restored by the writer taking a step. As we see, the father has never managed to do this for himself.

So the writer goes, and is told about the father ˗ whether it’s by the body or the anonymous other doesn’t matter. The writer is given understanding about why his father hasn’t been present, and what happened to him and where he’s been.

Except that things in the poem are unlikely to be as literal as they might appear. On the surface this could be the literal truth; in reality it’s more likely to be a picture of the father’s spiritual/psychological state. What do we learn, or what can we discern.

This father may have always been physically present (even in spite of the various ‘jobs’). But he’s never been present as himself, he’s never given himself to his son. I write son because Bly is a male poet; I guess it could just as easily apply to a daughter.

We’re told several things about this father: we have never met him. He’s never shown his true self to his child. (Note that Bly uses the first person plural throughout; he may be talking about the body and the spirit, or it may be an inclusive ‘we’.) The father wandered out into a snowstorm the night we were born. The writer has just journeyed through a blowing and rainy night, but the father went into something much more severe. Where the writer has to run out dressed in his nightclothes, perhaps, and might catch a cold at the worst (!), the father wandered into something that could have killed him. The snowstorm seems to me to signify a blanking out in his mind of what’s just happened: the birth of his child. This father has allowed his selfishness to overtake the new person he has given life to, and he has cut him out of his mind.

No wonder the next line is about the father losing his memory. In a sense he’s not just lost his memory, he’s lost his mind. He’s done something that is un-fatherly, he’s effectively rejected his child. This is a heightened picture of the ‘absent father’, the one who puts the bread and butter on the table but never puts his arms around his child, the one who pays the bills, but never pays his dues.

But maybe the father isn’t all bad: he has lived since longing for his child whom he saw only once. But what’s stopped him coming back? What’s stopped him being present? Plainly the longing was never enough to change his attitude ˗ or at least not until now.

The last three lines of this stanza also imply that this man has provided. We could assume that he’s lived on his own, far away from his family (we hear nothing of the mother), or we could assume that he’s faithfully worked at whatever he could put his hand to. But something was always missing.

And so we come back to the writer: when you light the lamp you will see him. This is no literal lamp; this is illumination that has to happen for things to change. The writer himself has to make a breakthrough, because without it, there will be no reconnection. But at least once the lamp is lit, the writer will see the father, in every sense.

The father still remains in hiding: he sits there behind the door, and has obviously been sitting in the dark as well, if a lamp needs to be lit. The lamp lightens the room, and Bly gives a wonderful couple of lines that sharply show what the writer might see by the lamplight: the heavy eyebrows, the bright forehead.

And then the man himself, lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.

There has to be forgiveness here, I think. The father has spent his life being absent, not giving of himself except in the most material sense. And this is an altogether different body to the one we met at the beginning with its energy and smashing. This is a pitiful body that’s wrecked itself by its refusal to connect. Though the poem ends at this point, it ends in hope in my eyes. The writer has made the decision to follow his instincts, to change things, to bring something vitally important to pass.

Abandoning the book

 I haven’t written anything here for a just under a month. For those who are still interested, that may seem like a long time between posts. You may be wondering what the hold up is in regard to the book I’ve been writing.

Well, I did continue to do a lot of work on it. Wrote a long chapter – nearly 3000 words - which explained things that had happened before the book opened. This was a chapter, however, that I didn’t intend to include in the book. It was for my own understanding of the background of the story.

And I continued to work out how events happened prior to the story, and during the first chapters. I made a kind of timeline in order to get my head clear of wondering when this or that happened.

And then I came to a stop. Not because of procrastination, but because something was disturbing me about the story. It may have been that the villain arranged for someone to die very early on in a nasty way. And that later there would be the attempted murder of probably three, maybe four, of the characters, all in the same scene.

I felt I was heading towards a much darker story than any I’d written before, even though there were deaths in the other stories too. Something in me felt wrong about this book, however. As a Christian I see it as the Holy Spirit warning me against going down the path of this particular book. Others might just consider it an intuition.

I haven’t had this feeling about any of the other books, and I got the sense that I was being warned off going along the track I was headed. It’s worth paying attention at such times. I’ve enjoyed writing the other books even though there were dark moments in them. Somehow these didn’t go against the grain. Whatever it was that I was being ‘warned’ about, I felt that I definitely had to take hold of that warning.

It may even be that I have something more important to do in the near future, and the book will have too much of a hold on my time. At this point I don’t know what that 'more important' thing might be, but I’m waiting.

So there’s no new book in the Grimhilderness series on the horizon.

When I told my wife about abandoning the book, she said, ‘Why don’t you write something completely different?’ I said, ‘I’ve tried other books in the past, but they always come out with me as the main character - and I’m always perfect.’ (I meant that the character who narrated the story, or who was the lead, always seemed to be too good to be true.) With a grin, she said, ‘Well, isn’t that the case?’

Abandoned house - similar to an abandoned book...
Photo: V.B.Speranza

 

Do I ever stop writing about Procrastination?

Procrastination takes all sorts of forms.

I’ve written about some of these before, and about we can do about them, but I want to mention a heavyweight one that arises.

This is where you find yourself saying that the story just doesn’t have the wings to fly, that it’s too much like everything else you’ve written, that the complexity of it will never make sense. Might as well abandon it.

That there are better things in life to be doing.

This is a tough one to deal with, because there are always ‘better’ things to be doing. If you’re of a hedonist mode, this can mean spending more time enjoying yourself, not struggling with some half-baked story.

Or more altruistically, you know you should be helping other people, you should be making the world a better place. This doesn’t need to be on some big scale: it can be as simple as getting a housebound person from A to B.

Or, for a Christian who writes, you can find yourself saying you don’t think this is really what God wants you to do with your time. Check out this essay by James Sinclair for some good thinking on that.

Any one of these seems like a valid excuse, but the result is that even if you put your story metaphorically in the bottom drawer, and cover it with a heap of other things so you don’t see it, it will still nag away at you.

Be brave and tell yourself the truth. You’ve mostly stopped because planning the story, even at a moderate level of planning, is extremely hard work. Your brain doesn’t like hard work, therefore it would prefer you to make seemingly valid excuses to stop.

So what to do?

The answer is simple, but needs courage. Tell your brain that nothing is ever achieved without hard work, and remind it that you’ve been through this before, and you may have to go through it again. But abandoning the story is not the answer to your problem.

The answer to the problem is…hard brain work.

Get on with it.

Mike Crowl's latest book, published late 2023, took five years to write. A good deal of that time was spent in overcoming procrastination. 

The one ton cartoon courtesy of Re-artur

Play and fail

I've been reading the book, Shakespeare - the man who pays the rent over the last several days. In it Brendan O'Hea interviews Judi Dench on the Shakespearian roles she's played over her career. It's full of insights into character, acting, rehearsing, understanding how people behave and much more, along with a few sniffy moments from Dench when O'Hea asks a difficult question or makes what seems to her to be a squishy statement. 

I've made a  note of two particular comments I appreciated, though I could have copied dozens more. 

On page 216 she responds to a comment from O'Hea, who says, 

Sinead Cusack once said: ‘Acting is the shy person’s revenge on the world.’  

Dench responds: ‘Absolutely true. I couldn’t agree more. What a brilliant thing to say. Much easier for a shy person to walk out onstage pretending to be someone else than to enter a room full of people at a party as themselves.’

The last sentence was what most struck a chord with me. When I did some acting over a period of ten years or so I found it interesting that I could get up on stage and perform with ease when I was playing a different person. If asked to get up and make a speech, or present something as myself, or walk into a room full of people and be the centre of attention, I became nervous and stammery. In other words the real me doesn't like to show off. Once I'm hidden behind a character, I'm happy to be as big a show off as the next man. 

The other comment relates to all manner of creative tasks, including the writing of books. On page 226 Dench talks about the director Trevor Nunn, after a general discussion of how it was to work with different directors:

'No, give me Trevor Nunn any day. I’ve seen Trevor speechless with laughter in the rehearsal room, and it only makes you dare to do more. Dare to do things that may be outrageously wrong. But at least try them. Get them out of your system. And also that kind of relationship engenders playfulness and invention. Because you can’t be creative if you’re frightened and anxious. You have to be allowed to laugh and play and fail.'

You have to be allowed to laugh and play and fail. As a writer you have to allow yourself to laugh at your work, to play with it, and to fail - and start again. No writer worth his or her salt can afford to take their own writing too seriously. 

Photo courtesy of imdb.com

Progress again!

 Finally I’m making better progress on my current book, and it’s very satisfying to be doing so.

I had to go back to the beginning and start again. This didn’t mean I dumped everything I’d previously written, it meant that I got the focus right: now the main character isn’t just narrating the story, as he was before, but the story is focused on him as well.

He doesn’t just do ‘stuff’ in the story – the story doesn’t exist without his actions, and in fact we’ve learned that he’s the cause of something in the plot he wasn’t even aware of in the previous two drafts.

Is all the material I wrote previously thrown out the window? Nope. I’ve just spent the last couple of days revising a chunk of the previous material because I’ve reached the point where it’s being sewn back in. It’s not being sewn in as it was, but with the new or different earlier chapters taken into account.

With some regret the major opening incident in the two earlier drafts has been removed. But with it in place there was too much collapsing of ‘buildings’ going on, and in the first instance, without any point. It was an exciting way to start, but it didn’t connect with the rest of the story.

It’s important to remember, as you read this, that I’m still no more than a few chapters into the book. The most chapters I’ve written in any draft has been seven. Many of the ideas and characters that arose out of the writing have survived and will be used as I move forward.

I opened my file the other morning to find a letter from some of the characters saying they’re grateful that the author has taken the time to consider their concerns, and that he’s attempting to wind a stronger story around them.

Just kidding…

Children making a sandcastle, Brighton Beach, South Australia. 

What has a sandcastle got to do with the story? Find out in due course. 

Photo: The History Trust of South Australia, Wikimedia Commons 

Goodbye, DailyQuordlePoem - I think!

Joshua Ryan

Around April 2022 a tweet suggesting writing a Daily Quordle Poem appeared on Twitter (or X, if you prefer the simpler title). Whether the idea came from Kyle Edwards or David Wright, I’m not sure, but the aim was to take the four words that were the solutions to the Quordle puzzle of the previous day and use them as the first words on each line in a four-line poem.

These are the original rules as set out on Twitter.

This form’s rules:

Write a poem, lines starting with yesterday’s Quordle words (don’t “spoil” today’s Quordle for others).

In one tweet!

Use the #DailyQuordlePoem hashtag.

Have fun playing quordle.com to get the words!

Initially a bunch of people were involved. Some dropped off quickly, some stayed longer before vanishing, and a few remained until late 2023 or early 2024.

The form appealed to me, and I could play around with it since there was no big gatekeeper saying I couldn’t. So sometimes I used the four words at the ends of the lines. Sometimes, if I got a day behind, I combined the words from the two days into one poem, some at the front, some at the back, mixing and matching as it suited. (Which usually broke the second rule above.)

Some poets had used the Quordle words as part of another word, or in different ways played around in their use of them. I adopted most of these techniques as well.

Somewhere along the line David Wright (@ohthatwright@mas.to) set up DailyQuordlePoem.com, and would give us yesterday’s words onsite so that we didn’t have to go and find them. (Or do the Quordle itself to find them, which I found a bit time-consuming.)

By 2024 David would sometimes get behind posting the words, and we might get four or five days’ worth altogether. So I wrote several ‘long form’ Quordle poems, using all the words from those days in four line stanzas.

To challenge myself more with the four-line poem, I’d put the words in alphabetical order. When the long form ones came along, I’d put all the words in alphabetical order, thus forcing myself to be as creative as possible with a restriction. And it worked.

But by this time there was hardly anyone else writing the poems, and David had pointed me to a website where I could pick up yesterday’s words on my own. Occasionally he’d catch up and post two or three poems at a time, but obviously life took over and he became too busy. I carried on, only taking a break when I went overseas in April of 2024.

Finally it became a bit lonely being the only person visible on the site, and a couple of days ago, after trying to write a Quordle poem or two and feeling quite dissatisfied with them, I decided it was perhaps time for me to call it a day as well. Previously the restrictions of the form had inspired creativity. Now it just wasn’t working.

The good things about the Quordle poem were its short form, its given words as starting points, its flexibility. Working at one of the poems for a quarter of an hour was a good way to stimulate the brain for other writing work.

I’m sorry to leave, but there’s not really anyone else to talk to anymore. And seeing others being challenged by the words was stimulating. Maybe there'll be a revival at some point...

Fast versus slow

 

I’m currently reading a biography of Terry Pratchett called Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes. It’s written by his former Personal Assistant, Rob Wilkins. The writing is excellent, all the more helped by Wilkins’ close association with him and his love of Pratchett’s writing.

I’ve been focusing a lot in these recent blog posts on slow writing. The only time Pratchett could have been considered slow in his writing was in his late teens/early twenties when he not only worked full-time (mostly as a journalist) but also, once married (quite early) he and his wife were into all manner of hobbies, particularly in the gardening line. During this period he only wrote three books, spread out over several years.

And then suddenly, when he decided to make writing into a career (although he didn’t quit full-time work for several years after that) his writing went from slow to super-fast. He could turn out two adult books a year, and often wrote kids’ books as well. In the end he produced forty-one Discworld novels, and at least thirty-five other books.

However, there were innumerable editions of many of these books, plus adaptations as plays, TV series, calendars, figurines – you name it. He kept an eye on almost everything that was produced.

He attended book-signings, sci-fi conferences and many other events. He wrote to set office hours, and though he and Wilkins had time to ‘play’ within those hours, he seldom took time off that wasn’t work related.

Should I, or you, emulate Pratchett’s output? I know I can’t (I’m too old, for one thing, and started too late) and I suspect few other people would work to the same high energy level, even if they were full-time writers.

Does it matter? Nope. We should work at the level where we produce good work. Forget these writing books that push us more and more into producing two or three books a year. Work to your own level, your own pace. If that includes times when work just doesn’t get done, that’s okay. Life interrupts everyone. Aim to get something done as often as you can, and be content. An unhappy writer doesn’t produce good work.

Taking a lesson from the past

 Still struggling to get moving after being overseas. It’s not the fault of ‘overseas’ but just a lethargy that seems to have taken over after I’d recovered from jet lag and general tiredness. Did I mention that on one part of the trip I was awake for something like forty hours straight, including the 17-hour trip from Dallas to Sydney?

Anyway, yesterday I read back through some notes I made on my previous book, the one that was published late last year. The file was entitled: Notes on The Counterfeit Queen - if I were to start from scratch.

That file was written in 2019, four years before the book got published. So, if you think you’re a slow writer, you can see that I can be a really slow writer.

Anyway, it turned out to be a more encouraging document than I’d have guessed. It showed me that even if my method is slow, it produces results.

In this document there’s a lot of discussion of what I’d already written as a draft, showing the so-called First Draft wasn’t really a draft at all but merely a framework for the real discussion with myself that took place once I’d got some material to work with.

This is where a lot of writing instruction books fall down, for me: they assume you can sit down and write up an idea and turn it into an outline, with character biographies and themes and a proper ending all set up and ready to go.

I don’t find this realistic at all. To produce a real draft I need much more than an outline produced ‘cold.’ I need a ‘draft’ in which things happen, in which characters appear that I didn’t know existed, in which all sorts of clues arise as to what might happen in the story (even though I don’t appreciate that at the time). This draft may wind up being seven or eight or ten chapters long. By that time I know I’ve got a sort of story, but it’s a story without its proper shape. Things may happen, but I don’t necessarily know why. And everything may change.

By the time I realise I need to stop and take stock in relation to this draft, I may have done a lot of work on it. It may still regard itself as the real First Draft.

But now that I do have something to work on I discuss it and discuss it with myself – driving myself crazy in the process. I attempt to iron out all sorts of plot problems that have become apparent, and in due course find myself writing an entirely new version. This may use elements from the original, but may not be anything like the original.

Sometimes this whole process may have to happen more than once, as it did with The Counterfeit Queen. Which is daunting to contemplate.

But what I realised, again, from that Notes on The Counterfeit Queen file, was that all sorts of new ideas came into the picture through the discussions, and weak and pathetic ones quietly retired. Many of these new ideas actually became part of the final book, even though in the discussion I still hadn’t necessarily got a handle on how they’d work - or whether they’d work.  

Last night my wife and I watched a new film on Netflix called Ticket to Paradise. In spite of the fact that it starred George Clooney and Julia Roberts, it was dull, and the characters these two played were initially ugly people without any endearing qualities. It never improved.

I wondered afterwards if the script wasn’t written in the way that many writing books suggest: get an idea, outline the characters, the storyline, the ending, etc. Get it all off the ground as quickly as possible.

The result is evident. Nothing shines in this movie. In spite of it being a comedy, almost nothing is funny apart from a couple of scenes with Lucas Bravo as an airline pilot, who after being bitten by a snake, gets some delightful off-the-wall lines as a result of his thinking being affected by his medication. The romantic reconciliation is hurriedly sorted out in the last section of the movie and doesn’t feel real. It proves yet again that even the best actors in the business do far better if they have a literate and intelligent script to work on. One that has been written and discussed and rewritten and discussed until it really works.

Like my book.

Coming back home

Coming into Manly Beach, Sydney, on the ferry. 

 An overseas trip is great, especially if you’re catching up with grandchildren you’ve never seen face to face before.

It’s not so good when it completely takes your attention away from a work in progress, and you come home feeling you have to start from scratch.

Which is what’s happened in my case. All my creative energy has gone into getting to know little people I’ve never met before, or ones who are now several years older than the last time I saw them. Or spending spurts of time in unfamiliar cities, finding my way around them. Or sitting long hours in airports surrounded by thousands of people I don’t know and will never know.

It’s a week since my wife and I returned home, and the creative brain is still saying I’m too tired, I’m jet-lagged, I can’t be bothered…let me sleep!

No doubt many travellers recover from long flights and unfamiliar places in a day or three. I’m not quite as young as I was – who is? – and for me and my wife, the recovery process has seemed much longer than we’d have expected.

So what to do? Submit to procrastination or work out a way to make some progress again? The lazy brain would be happy to go with the former. The soul that’s made of sterner stuff says something along the lines of ‘seize the day’ and makes me uncomfortable if I dare to lay my head down for a moment or two.

So…I can say to myself:

'One option is to read through the draft as it stands. Make notes. Say what you like, what you hate. Remind yourself that before you left for overseas you were already thinking that what you have in hand isn’t the way to go and that a rewrite of these early chapters is necessary.

Don’t berate yourself. Life always gets in the way of creativity.

Do say, as you sit down and scroll yet again through Twitter-cum-X that you didn’t miss the news while you were away, so why do you need to know so much about it now?

There’ll always be news. There won’t always be time to create.'

Don't press

 In my WIP I have at least two major issues I need to deal with before I can move forward. The temptation is to dig and dig at the problem in order to make the solution come out of where it’s hiding in the subconscious. If that’s what it’s doing.

I’ve worked on both issues, jotting notes down about them, thinking about them while walking and so on. No solution has yet appeared. Not a workable one anyway. I have to be willing to say to myself: ‘This isn’t the answer – yet.’

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Shadow of a Doubt again last night. This will be the third time I’ve seen it. Quieter in its menace than some of Hitchcock’s movies, it nevertheless has a very menacing character at its centrem played by Joseph Cotton. One of the other actors in the film is Hume Cronyn. This was his first movie, and he went on to make a second with Hitchcock, Lifeboat. He also contributed to the scripts of two others, Rope and Under Capricorn.

In the superb Hitchcock biography by Patrick McGilligan, Cronyn talks about working on the script of Rope with the director. What Hitchcock had to say to him is relevant to the subject I began this post with. 

Early on in the working relationship I discovered a curious trick of his,’ said Cronyn. ‘We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the travelling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humour involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty. They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.’

One day, Cronyn asked the director challengingly: ‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’ asked Hitchcock.

‘Stop to tell jokes at a crucial juncture.’

‘It’s not so critical – it’s only a film.’

‘But we were just about to find a solution to the problem…I can’t even remember what it was now.’

‘Good. We were pressing…You never get it when you press.’

Cronyn said later that he never forgot ‘that little piece of philosophy’ Hitchcock offered, ‘either as an actor or as a sometime writer.’

 What Hitchcock is saying is that making a big fuss about trying to find the solution, hammering away at it in frustration, doesn’t work. ‘Don’t press,’ he says.

It’s like trying to remember someone’s name – and at my time of life I can forget the names of my grandchildren, or very good friends, or relations I’ve known since childhood. Pressing on the matter and trying to grind yourself into remembering doesn’t work. Forget the name and talk about other things, read a book, or write on some other topic. The name will suddenly appear.

I was going over some of the Psalms of Ascent this morning. I memorised these a long time ago and they remain with me to this day. Occasionally, however, a word or phrase will go AWOL, or drop out of sight. The immediate reaction is to think ‘I’m forgetting this Psalm.’ No I’m not. It's only the fact that the brain hasn’t done any work on this Psalm for some time, and so it has to collect all the information together again, which may take a moment, or a minute, or five minutes.

That word that’s gone missing will suddenly appear, even if I’m already in the middle of the next Psalm.

Which is to say, that the solution to a writing problem will suddenly appear. However with something like writing, something that requires creativity, it may take not minutes, but days.

Be patient. Don’t press.

 The quotation from the book, Alfred Hitchcock – a lifein darkness and light – by Patrick McGilligan, comes from pages 402-3 of the 2003 Paperback edition by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The photograph of Hume Cronyn is courtesy of The Movie Database.