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.