On writing: Exercising your writing muscles

In January, 1990, I began keeping a diary on my computer. I'd often kept handwritten diaries before, spasmodically, but this one was much more regular, and more detailed. It was written on my old computer and then printed off regularly, finally amounting to some 700 pages. It was good that I printed it off, because the disks that the diary was saved to are long gone, not being compatible with later models.

Much of the stuff, of course, is private family material, but in 1989 I'd been unemployed for six months, and had started doing a writing course by correspondence. (My father, Frank Crowl, used to play chess by correspondence.)

By 1990 I was well through the writing course and between being father of a family with five children and working as a manager of a bookshop, I found time to write articles and the occasional short story. Most of the articles got published, because I'd been advised to aim not only for the major New Zealand magazines but for the small ones: trade mags and special interest magazines. The latter proved to be the place that was happy to publish my work. More on that in later posts.

Anyway, scattered with varying degrees of frequency throughout the diary are references to my writing joys and woes. I thought these would be of interest on this blog, and have decided to include posts with extracts from the diary as and when I can. I'll keep an index of these on the blog for reference.

Here's a brief opener from the 6th of January, 1990.

In doing the index for my filing system I came across a quote again by a poet who talks about the need for exercises, even in writing poetry. He compares it to the concert pianist who must exercise each day in order to play the pieces well. I think it's something I've avoided because it appears to take away too much time from 'real writing,' but in fact it's out of that exercising that the ideas often flow, and the work of writing is limbered up. I've been reading two books in the last few weeks, one on writing plays, and the other on writing in general. The latter has some excellent ideas for working out as exercises and the other, though it sometimes seems simplistic in its exercise approach, is probably what I need to really write plays well. I don't want 'just' to be a playwright, but an all-rounder. However, I want to be able to write plays as well as I can when I do.

I'm not sure that I took my advice about doing writing exercises as seriously as I should have, subsequently, but I do recommend this all the same. There are other ways to do exercises, of course. Blog posts are a great writing exercise, as are typing notes galore for the children's book I'm currently writing. In fact, anything that gets you putting down words on the page/computer is worth doing, even if those particular words aren't ever used as part of something publishable.

I have an interesting book called The Exercise Book which lays out dozens of ideas for exercises, some of which various people have turned into poems, stories, books. The book is by Bill Manhire and others. Manhire is one of New Zealand's literati, and a creative writing teacher. Don't let that put you off. The exercises are the thing, along with the stimulation of approaching writing in a different way.

See also an earlier blog post from 2014, in which I mention Peter Elbow and Anne Lamott, both of whom saw first drafts and writing even without any aim in mind as of great value.

Two Maori movies

We watched two recent New Zealand movies over the last few days, firstly The Dark Horse (2014), with Cliff Curtis and James Rolleston, and Fantail (2013), with Sophie Henderson - who also takes the lead role.

Fantail, for my taste, is rather too slow in its set-up. There's a kind of dreamy quality about the first half hour or so, and you begin to wonder when the story is going to appear. Henderson is terrific in her role of a young girl working all night in a petrol station while caring for her invalid mother in the daytime. Her younger brother (Jahalis Ngamotu), who's plainly Maori - while she's plainly white - is likely to go off the rails, and does. The daytime worker, played by Stephen Lovatt, is a fatherly figure who cares a lot about Sophie's wellbeing. It's possible he is her actual father, though we never find out. And then there's the 'regional manager' a loser trying to impress. This is a comedy role, played nicely enough by Jarod Rawiri, but it's sometimes at odds with the rest of the movie, which heads deep into drama territory.

The film's basic story is strong enough, except there's just not enough of it. Too much of the movie's weight is loaded onto Henderson's shoulders; we certainly get to know her, but the three supporting roles seem a bit underwritten. The small budget means there are few other characters, mostly seen only briefly. It's a bit of a puzzle why this petrol station needs someone working there all night when there are hardly any customers, and when the customers appear to prepay to get the petrol (a couple don't, which is one of the inconsistencies). It seems highly uneconomical. There are other inconsistencies too; none of them are major, but they film loses credibility as a result of them. And the ending, which is certainly dramatic enough, isn't quite believable. I won't say what happens, because the movie is worth seeing; it just felt that a bit more tension might have been useful.

The other film has a bigger budget, a top-notch star in the main role, and a bunch of strong actors around him. Cliff Curtis eschews his normal good looks, and appears here padded with a pot belly; he walks oddly, and is missing some teeth and hair. Rolleston, who is excellent, has a smaller role, but some vital scenes. This young man seems born to the screen.

The story is (loosely) based on the true story of Genesis Potini, a brilliant chess player who had mental health issues most of his life. He was in an out of institutions much of his adult life. In the movie, his older brother, Noble, (Kirk Torrance) who taught him to play chess as a child, is officially in charge of him now that he's out of the hospital, Noble isn't interested in looking after him (Potini winds up sleeping rough); he's even less interested in seeing his son yearning for the kindness and gentleness that Potini exudes. Noble is also a longstanding gang member, and wants to initiate his son (Rolleston) into the gang. Meanwhile, Potini has seen potential in a bunch of kids from poor backgrounds who are part of a chess club formed by an old friend, and decides he can help. It's also a way of his staying sane, though whether the idea of taking them to Auckland for a Chess Championship is sane is another matter.

The format of the story is by no means new, but it's given plenty of energy and life by the actors. The gang scene is portrayed as a vicious dog eats dog world where the only way to keep alive is to be as bad as everyone else. Drugs, alcohol, loud music abound (as they do in a sequence in Fantail), and violence is common. This is possibly a world many pakeha (white New Zealanders) don't know a lot about, particularly at my end of the country.

Dark Horse is a two-hour movie that might have done with a bit of trimming. Nevertheless, Curtis and Rolleston keep the screen alive throughout.

Chess online

I've been playing chess online with one of my sons, and with a young fellow in India, via Chess.com. The games we've been playing have been spread out over days, because I'm not always ready to commit to spending a half an hour playing someone in real time. I've done this once or twice and find the pressure rather high!

But the long slow games, rather like the old correspondence chess, which my father used to play in his heyday, are difficult to keep track of, for me. I don't have the greatest of chess brains, and can't come back to a board and remember how I got to where I am and what I planned to do next. Chess.com allows you to play back through your moves, which is helpful, but I still make more mistakes than I would in a face-to-face game. (Although my face-to-face games seem to have got worse since I started playing online.)

I need the concentrated focus that comes with a game where you're playing a real live opponent and can see what they're doing with their body language. That shouldn't make a difference, but it does. I guess it's a bit like poker, where you're trying to read what's going on in the mind why the way the other player's body moves.

Years ago I used to be involved in a chess club here in Dunedin, but only in their round robin games that various four-men groups would play around the city. This part of the club was called Chess for Fun. I had one opponent who could spend long minutes at a time sweating over the right move, breathing heavily, and oblivious to the rest of the world. It wasn't fun to play with someone going so slow, but on the other hand I did win one or two games against him, as I recall. Much to my surprise and his, since he was a much more experienced player.

This is scary...

I think we first had some sort of Internet access in 1989. And for a good deal of the time since then I've been playing various games on the Net: chess, Scrabble and some few others. These aren't 'real time' games; the chess, for instance, was more like the old system of correspondence chess that my father used to play back in the 30s and 40s. It could take days then for each move while they waited for a letter to come by return post. It was similar with the online chess: occasionally someone would respond to your move straight away; most of the time it was at least a day before you'd see a response.

I used to play chess regularly, and occasionally won, but for some reason gave it up. But I've played Scrabble on various sites over the years pretty much continually ever since I first discovered you could play it online.

And this was the case up until a couple of months ago. At that point I must have had some complete mental blank in regard to Scrabble, or else got so tied up with something else that lesser things went out of my head. Anyway, last week, out of the blue, it suddenly struck me that I hadn't played Scrabble for a little while. It turned out that I hadn't actually played it since May. When I went back into the games (there were three unfinished ones) one of the players thought something must have happened to me - we tend to let each other know if we're going to be away for a few days. Another player who has shared quite a bit of 'conversation' with me in the course of the games, has obviously thought something similar, as she hasn't started up the game again since I wrote to apologise the other day.

The scary part is that I didn't miss the playing. Not that I'm some Scrabble addict, but it's been one of the things I do regularly online.

How can part of your brain just ignore something you've done for so long?

On another tack completely. I'm not a person who needs to be in the start-up stage of any innovation, especially in the technological area (although we were amongst the first people to get email in Dunedin when it was available). Consequently, when I ran the shop it was quite some time before we went over to a Point of Sale system. By the time we'd got the Board to agree to the idea, and had got the money together, POS systems had been around for years.

I'd been thinking about the possibility for some time before that, of course, and saw the advantages. Mostly it was the lack of finance (a perennial problem in that shop) that left us way behind. And even when we did get into it, we went for a system which proved to be somewhat limited as the years rolled on. It worked in terms of recording stock and keeping track of sales and all the usual stuff; it just wasn't very sophisticated, and it was built for a different kind of retail system to bookselling.

Some years later one of the other Christian bookshops in the country (they're few enough for us all to have known each other, pretty much) did get innovative, and they brought someone in to build a POS system from scratch. When we shifted over to it, it turned out to be pretty amazing - certainly as compared to the system we'd been on. But the curious thing about it, I found, was that the people who'd built it never used it to its full capacity. In fact, we used it far more extensively than they did.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make here. It's just a bit of anecdotal history, I guess! I've always been intrigued by cataloguing things - used to try and do it with pen and paper when I was a child (all my books had 'codes' inside their covers) and in a way, I think humans have this kind of inbuilt desire to bring a sort of order to what seems to be a rather chaotic world. Some of us are more prone to cataloguing than others, perhaps. I know the rest of my family doesn't seem interested in the idea very much.

I have a feeling I'm trying to add some focus here, but it's eluding me. Maybe it connects up with my seeming mental block in regard to Scrabble. If we don't order things, we lose them. Not sure if this is the point I'm trying to make. Maybe I'll come back to it later!

Family history

Just posted a couple of items on the Hannagan family blog. Photos of my great grandfather on my grandmother's side; my grandfather (her husband); my father - or possibly my uncle - there seems to be a bit of dispute; and my father amidst a bunch of colleagues at the Australian Chess Championships in Adelaide, in 1960.

The photo of the chess players is probably historic, and would be more so if I could read my father's writing on the back successfully. It doesn't help that he uses lots of abbreviations, and many of the names aren't familiar to me. Nevertheless, I'm made an attempt to 'translate' it.

The blog doesn't get used a great deal - it relies on me to keep my relatives providing material for it, which they're mostly only keen to do when some new baby arrives on the scene, or when someone changes the pond filters on their pond - which happens fairly irregularly too. Actually I was in England when my brother-in-law changed the pond filters. Not a pleasant job. And his older brother has a complex system of pipes and drainage and filters and who knows what around his pond. He's the sort of person who'd invent something just for the sake of it.

Anyway, the reason I've posted those photos on the other site is that after all our renovations, we have several piles of papers waiting to be sorted - papers meaning anything from stuff that's really valuable, like the pack of photos I'm talking about, to newspaper clippings that no longer tell me why I kept them; from dot matrix print-outs of emails from the first year I was on the Net to reviews of books I've done.

Frank Crowl

Being an inveterate looker-upperer of my own name on the Web, I thought I'd have a change and do another check to see what there was on my father, Frank Crowl.
Since I last looked he's come up in the Google world. Instead of there only being one or two references to him, and those mostly only in relation to Cecil Purdy, the great Australian chess player, he's now appearing on several sites. And there's a photo of him on this site. It's not the clearest, but it will suffice for the time being. (I have some photos in albums somewhere, which I might dig out.)
The cigarette holder is plainly visible - apparently it was almost a fixture.
The other day, on a blog called Bloggercises, I had a brief correspondence with someone who was impressed to meet Frank Crowl's son (via the Net). Felt quite famous for a moment. [Check down in the comments on this link.]

My father is now referenced on ChessGames.com, on Amazon.com (in relation to Purdy's book: How Purdy Won), in some discussion of The Kibitzer, on the MasterChessGames site, where all the games are ones he won, on a blog where a game he played with Bob Wade is analysed, in the Google books online 'copy' of the Batsford Chess Puzzle Book, and on a page called The Mad Aussie's Chess Trivia. I'm sure there are more, but that's all I've picked up recently.

Narnia and some more bruises

Found it hard getting back into Narnia again after a two-day break. I already felt a bit under par, and by the time I'd had my tail caught in the poop deck's back doors, had it stood on later in the second act (undoing the seam again), and fallen over, flat on my face, in the storm scene (scattering chess pieces across the stage in the process) I was beginning to feel it wasn't quite my day. In the fall I came down with a clump on my left knee, which is of course would be the one that's not feeling the liveliest, and though I don't seem to have done any major damage, it's quite unhappy at the moment. I don't think I'll be adding that particular stunt to the play from here on in.

We had a large audience of schoolchildren, which was good, even though they failed to laugh at any of the real jokes. Instead they laughed at an odd line of Eustace's: There's a strange look on his face. Don't ask me why that struck anyone as funny. Who can understand the nature of audiences? I'm sure someone's done research on it somewhere, as they have done on everything from Electrolux vacuums to how many days of the year the average person sneezes on, but I doubt that they were able to come to any decent conclusions.

Apropos of nothing above, I've just been listening to John Adams' violin concerto again (with the sound turned up - there's no one else home). It's hugely energetic in the two outer movements, though it's not always easy to feel a cohesion between the orchestra and the soloist (Adams says that'ss the way he's written it), and it must be a bit of a nightmare for the soloist to figure out where he is at any time - though admittedly he hardly ever stops playing anyway! The Chaconne is a strange piece, with the constant bass line moving at the 'pace of a glacier' (to quote Adams). The line, however, never moves consistently; as the piece progresses it gets more and more out of sync with itself, and the listener is forever thinking - whoops, they've forgotten to come in. That's part of its charm and design, no doubt, and it adds a curious edginess to the slow movement.

Claire Barton's final exam

Claire Barton performed for her final exam tonight at Marama Hall, accompanied by Terence Dennis.
Among her achievements the least important would be her four changes of costume. That certainly gave her a bit of time to breathe between songs.
But her major achievement was performing a challenging programme, with music by Monteverdi and Handel, Rossini, Saint-Saens, Gounod, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The Stravinsky was one of the rhythmic solos from Oedipus Rex, which I haven’t heard in a long time. I have the music on vinyl, but nothing to play the vinyl on, unfortunately.
Claire and I go back a fair way: I must have begun playing for her when she was still in her early teens (though don’t quote me on that), and played right through until she went to Varsity – a point at which all the good singers abandon us ‘lay accompanists’ and go on to use either fellow students or staff. Which I suppose means we have to go back and work through another bunch of newcomers…!
What I’ve always liked about Claire is her steadfastness, her reliability. She’ll know her music, she’ll perform it well, she’ll be rushing around doing fourteen other things, but she still get the job done on the day.
She was the backbone of Opera Alive for a while, and was always fun to have in the cast. I can remember one particular time when we had a very tall gent in the group – in one of the songs Claire was happy to contrast her small stature against his. Another memory of her is doing a wonderful job on a duet with a girl whose name escapes me at the moment (she was also a longstanding member of Opera Alive). They did, I know him so well, the duet from Chess, and it did it with tremendous feeling.

Ladder racks and chess

It’s not every day you’d find a blog that claims the lack of a ladder rack was what lost the writer his father.
It’s a bit of a confusing post, but somehow in it there’s something deep – as its sole commentator notes. Apparently the blogger had tracked down his long-lost father after some time only to discover that he carried all his work gear in the back of his red pickemup (an interesting word I haven’t come across before, although when you break it down into its component parts – pick em up – it makes perfect sense) and this caused scratching and damage to the truck bed.
Quite how he got from there to losing his father again, I’m not clear. But it seems it all hinges on the ladder rack.
My loss of my father hinged on the game called chess. (Bit of a far cry from ladder racks, but there you go; each to his own.) If chess hadn’t been his master, instead of him being its master, he and I might have had a number of good years together. But some obsessions take hold of you, and chess came before family, in my father’s case. I haven’t seen him for sixty years – admittedly he died back in the early sixties, so I wouldn’t have seen him for all those years anyway, but that’s not the point.
Ladder racks and chess. Life is always made up of little choices.

Alexander Alekhine

I play chess, but not wonderfully. My father played it wonderfully, though he wasn't a world class champion. The trouble was that it took over his life, and he could never make a real living out it. He was one of those non-entrepreneurial people who have a major talent, but not the means to market it. I know the feeling when it comes to me and writing, and composing and so on. I know I have the talent, but letting others know is another matter altogether. It's rare to see an artist who also has a talent for marketing: Lindsay Crooks was one of the few who did, and did well with it.

Meantime, here's an interesting quote from chapter one of the book: Why You Lose at Chess, by Fred Reinfield, who was a great player of the game, and an excellent writer about it.

Alexander Alekhine was undoubtedly the greatest Chess player in the history of the game, but what he really prided himself on was his....Bridge playing!

People in a position to judge have told me Alekhine was a miserable Bridge player. I can well believe it. Just as we misjudge our strong points, so we misjudge our weaknesses.