On Writing 2: Ideas

On the 21st of January, 1990, I had some exciting news. I wrote at the time that it was 'quite exciting.' I'm sure I meant it was really exciting, and it was: a children's story I'd written had been accepted for a very popular New Zealand children's radio programme called Ears, which ran from 1988 to 1996. (Ears was the name of the programme; the story was called When Dad Went Fishing. You can read it here.)

Instead of encouraging me to go on and write more children's stories, I did one of those things writers do and got despondent. I'll never have another idea!we cry. I don't know why this happens; maybe it's a kind of let-down after something good has occurred. Here was what I wrote at the time: 

In regard to children's stories, I need piles of ideas to draw from so that I've got something to work on, and don't feel I have to dredge up something to make it work because I have nothing to back that one idea up. At present I feel really dry when it comes to trying to write something for the kids. I've tried lying in bed at night thinking of something: doesn't seem necessarily to be the most productive place. Last night, I had an idea about a house shift, and the little kid getting lost continually in the middle of it all, and lists of the things that the family were packing as the hours went by, and increasing numbers of people coming to help. But developing something like this is the problem: having the energy to do it. 

Of course it isn't having the 'energy' to do it, it's the getting on and doing it. Procrastination, which I've talked about a number of times on this blog and which I'm sure I'll talk about again more than once in future posts, is the thing that gets writers into such trouble. 

But let's not give procrastination more house room for the moment. Let's talk about ideas. We don't have to 'dredge up' ideas. We have to be aware of ideas that come unbidden, and note them down, even if at that stage they're barely formed. They will often lead to something later. 

Yesterday I came across one of my old music manuscript books in which there are scribblings galore, the beginnings of a number of songs and piano pieces. Some of these sketches (often no more than a couple of bars) sat in their poor naked state for some time before getting their moment of glory, and becoming the start of something big. Often the ideas had started out as nothing more than a bit of twiddling on the piano, or even flightier, a bit of a tune in my head. Seldom do these things stay in that twiddling or flighty stage, or course. They vanish if we don't seize them. 

We should never feel 'dry' about ideas. Trying to 'think up' ideas is a waste of time, especially in bed at night, where, if you actually did have an idea, you'd have to race out of bed, grab a pen and jot it down. In the dark. 

Courtesy of Danny Steaven

What is curious about the extract from my diary above is that in spite of my complaints I then go on to jot down an idea, one that even now I can see the possibilities of. Why didn't I pick up on that at the time? Who knows? 

The basic point is that ideas are everywhere, if we're prepared to keep our eyes and ears open. We

have to be aware that they won't come in a final state: they'll be like a moth or butterfly, barely able to be caught before they're gone. It's good to have a pen handy, or to jot down something on your mobile phone.

The thing not to do is say, Nah, that 'idea' isn't worth pursuing. Ideas are gifts from God - He leaves it up to us to develop them. 

Costa this and Costa that

I'd thought the name Costa del Mar referred to place.  I think I was confusing it was with Costa del Sol, which I presume means the Sun Coast.   Costa del Mar means Sea Coast, which, when you think about it, is a bit of a tautology: surely a coast is usually only on the sea?  The first dictionary definition I found on the Net certainly defines it that way: Land next to the sea; the seashore.  Although it does mention that once upon a time the word was used for a border or frontier.  I doubt that anyone in English uses it that way anymore. 

Costa del Mar, which has its own Wikipedia page (and a comment from Wikipedia saying that the entry looks suspiciously like advertising...!) is actually a brand name.  I guess it's well known in the States - its headquarters are in Daytona Beach - but I've never heard of it.  Of course, I don't buy brand name sunglasses either, so that could be another reason.   Oh, the perils of not being brand-name-focused! There's so much you miss out on...

While checking out Costa del Sol, I came across this strange headline: Costa del Sol fire victims still left out in the cold after half a year of waiting.  Doesn't this have an air of the paronomasiac about it? (A pun, in other words).  Perhaps it was intentional; perhaps, on the other hand, the sub-editor had one of the flashes of language in which words just come together in a slightly surreal way, and he or she never noticed.  

And to hive of the subject we started with, talking of interesting words, yesterday I came across one and then was introduced to another this morning.  Yesterday's was Tchotchkes, which refers to those gifts you give people which aren't of any real value but you have to give them something.  There's a whole industry out there producing this kind of stuff.  When I worked in the book shop, my boss used to call these sorts of things, 'tinky-tonk' which is another delightful name.  Curiously, I'd thought this was original to her, but I should have known better.  Check out tinky-tonk on Google and you'll find it everywhere.  

The other word, which a friend introduced me to this morning, is febrifugal, which means mitigating or curing a fever. Or to put it another way, a way that doesn't explain anything: febrifugal is something that acts as a febrifuge.  Oh, the words just get more delightful as we go!

It's quite difficult to find febrifugal used in a sentence, but here's one: The common camomile, A. nobilis, is used as a popular remedy. Its flowers have a strong and fragrant and a bitter, aromatic taste. They are tonic, febrifugal, and in large doses emetic, and the volatile oil is carminative. Hmm.  A sentence that also expects you know 'emetic' and 'carminative'.  

Well, we've strayed a bit from Costa del anything...never mind, the fun of writing blog posts is that there are no restrictions on how far you can stray.  

Remembering and forgetting

I'm working my way slowly through Charles Spurgeon's excellent commentary on the Psalms, a book he wrote while he was ill, and needed something to occupy his mind.  (There are three large volumes of it in the original version.) Not only does he comment on every Psalm but he also includes comments from contemporary, and earlier, writers.  Some of these exceed Spurgeon's own comments in wisdom and insight.   But it's not a book you can skim through.  Its value is in taking time to discover the Psalms afresh through the eyes of men who were Godly and experience in the ways of God.  I've given myself approximately a week for each Psalm, because there's plenty to chew over.  Obviously some of the shorter Psalms may take a little less time, but they'll be compensated for by ones like Psalm 119 and its ilk.

I'm including a number of the comments over on my other blog, The Daily Writer, but this particularly paragraph struck me as being apt to mention in this blog, because of its application to life in general.

Verse 18. This shall be written. Nothing is more tenacious than man's memory when he suffers an injury; nothing more lax if a benefit is conferred. For this reason God desires lest his gifts should fall out of mind, to have them committed to writing. Le Blanc.

(Spurgeon doesn't tell us who Le Blanc was, but I suspect it was Thomas le Blanc, S. J., (sometimes written LeBlanc) Professor of Divinity at Rheims and Dijon, author of a Commentary on the Latin Vulgate (the longstanding Roman Catholic translation of the Bible). I could be wrong.  This Le Blanc lived in the 1700s.)

The comment by Le Blanc is interesting because it reminds us that we have an extreme ability to remember wrongs done to us, but little ability to remember things that have been done rightly for us.  I barely need to reflect for a moment on this without a welter of wrongdoings coming to mind, wrongdoings that other people have done to me over the years, or even single sentence statements that hurt me at the time.  I try to forgive and forget these but it's a major task.  The brain doesn't like leaving rubbish behind, yet it's happy to forget about good things.  

Think about any incident you've had in a restaurant or a shop where you've felt hard done by, even to a small extent.  We chew these things over, tell our family and friends, build them up into a long-winded story that gets more and more detailed as time goes on.   It's a well-known fact in business that if someone has a complaint about your service you'd better get onto it quickly, because that complaint will have turned into a full-scale onslaught against your company before nightfall.  The only way you can nip such a problem in the bud is by outdoing yourself with something that says to the customer that you really do care about them.  And it has to be genuine.  Anything else will only leave a worse taste in their mouth.  

But Le Blanc, of course, isn't talking about retail, or dining out.   He has more important things in mind: he wants us not only to forget injuries, as God does (as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us, as it says in one of the Psalms, ) he wants us to remember the good things that God does (and even the good things that other people do).  It seems the only way we'll do this is by writing them down.  Injuries cause longstanding wounds; gifts and benefits somehow seem to slide over us like water over a rock.   But it's far more important to remember the gifts and benefits than the injuries.  And far healthier.  

PS. There's also a comment about this from Spurgeon himself in his notes on Psalm 103.

Too early for Christmas thinking!

It's only October, but of course, for retailers that means they'll already have Christmas stock on their shelves, from Christmas gift baskets to those dreadful toys that only seem to appear around this time of the year, cost a fortune, and fall apart on Boxing Day. 

I'm not even thinking about Christmas yet (no longer being a retailer, thank goodness); in fact the main thing on our minds at the moment is my son's engagement party, which takes place on Saturday.   Of course it the engagement party of my son and his fiancee, but I found that hard to work into the last sentence without the grammar falling into the same number of pieces as those dreadful toys I mentioned above are prone to do on the day after Christmas.   Phew.

And then once the engagement party is over, we have more of Grimhilda! on our plate...the auditions, for starters (plus having to get another application in for funding before the end of the month).   So it's all go round here and Christmas is barely on the calendar....as it were.   Certainly not on the radar.  

Actually thinking back to the poor old retailers: we used to have to start thinking about Christmas way before October, anyway, as we had to start ordering stuff somewhere round May/June.   Isn't it a tough life being a retailer?  You're working so far ahead of yourself all the time, and always hoping that all the money you've forked out in orders will be well and truly covered by purchases - six or seven months down the track. 

Thank goodness I'm out of it! 

Gifts

One of my daughters does a lot of sewing; it's just something she loves doing, especially cute clothes for little kids. Her own son gets a lot of well-made clothes, with interesting design features (though his mother was a bit dubious about him choosing a High School Musical design on his latest shirt. )

Recently she's been making clothes for the latest grandchild - he's very small because he arrived six weeks early, and so shop-bought clothes look like they belong on a giant. But my daughter really enjoys making clothes for girls, and so birthdays are a great opportunity for her to go a bit wild and produce skirts and tops and other girly delights.

I really admire people with gifts that just seem to come out of nowhere. They have an enthusiasm for a particular skill, and learning it comes easily, and keeping on learning is never a trouble. My wife is like that: she's picked up a bunch of skills during her lifetime, in each case because something got her enthused to give the thing a try. The skills I've got, on the other hand, I've had since I was a child, pretty much: playing the piano and writing, primarily. I suppose you could add learning how to use a computer to those, something that I only picked up in the 80s, but other skills that require eye-hand coordination don't come at all easily to me.

One of my sons taught himself programming in a matter of a few weeks, and each new programming language that he learns come even more easily than the last.

A colleague of mine went for an assessment for a further stage in her career recently, and part of the weekend she spent away (along with a bunch of other candidates) was being seen by a psychologist. One of the questions he asked was something I found interesting: what gifts did you get in your mother's womb? At first you think: nothing. Every gift I've got I've had to acquire. But in fact some of the gifts we have come with the package; they were there from the time we were. They're part of who we are, and we probably couldn't live without using them in some way. These aren't just skills, or talents; they cover the whole range of ways of relating to people and the like.

And sometimes you wonder if these gifts don't go unrealised. I heard last night about a young man who discovered that he had nose. Hardly unusual, you'd think, except that what perfumers mean by a 'nose' and what you and I mean by it are two different things. Without a 'nose' you could never work in the perfume industry. With one, you're an absolute find.

But would you come out of school thinking: I have a nose. I must find a job in a perfume factory? Nope, having a nose (just as having a palate for food or wine) is something you either discover or don't. Sadly, there are probably a lot of people who never discover what they've brought into this world.