A Can of Worms

The Writer at Work
The Writer at Work

This is yet another post about the writing process. OK, it fascinates me, as I consider what happens in my brain/mind as I write something, but I risk the possibility of it not being interesting to anyone else. It’s around 1500 words long, which is a bit longer than my usual posts.

So, the conventional view of the writing process is that it is a linear process. The writer sits down at his or her desk, starts furiously writing, casting off page after page, until with a final flourish he types or writes “The End” and the deed is done.

The real process is much more dynamic than that, at least for me. The following is a brief description of what happened when I wrote a story that I have written about in previous posts. I haven’t included any elements of the story because I want to concentrate on the process.

The End
The End

In a previous post, I wrote about a story that, as I wrote it, became too long for the competition in which I wanted to enter it. When I had completed it, I modified it and shortened it. However I wasn’t happy with the result, so I abandoned it, and started again from scratch, cutting and pasting bits from the original now and then.

This worked fine and I submitted the story into the competition. However, I now had three versions of the same story, and one of them, the original short one, was significantly different from the other two. A core topic in the story had changed, and the motivation of the main character was consequently different. There were other things about that version that I didn’t like so I considered consigning it to the bit bucket. However (fortunately) I didn’t do that right away.

I was happy with the version that I submitted for the competition, but I felt that the longer version could be improved. With no limit on the length, I could be more descriptive, go into the characters a bit more and draw out their motivations and fill in their back stories. I could also pull in bits from the short version which did work, and also ideas from the competition version that weren’t in the longer version.

Merging three stories into one
Merging three stories into one

I hope that I’ve given some idea of how complex this was. I was effectively merging three versions into one, and some bits didn’t fit together too well. I was constantly revising the longer one so that the timeline and the events fitted together properly with the bits I was getting from the other two versions. Normally things don’t get as complex as this for me!

After I got a consistent story, I developed it further. I’d add a paragraph or two to bring out the motivation of some character or other, and as a result one or two of the minor characters blossomed into being more than minor characters.

Initially the main character and his wife were a bit aloof, but I decided to make them more sociable, more friendly. The wife mostly dropped out of the main story, but returns for a major cameo. Another major character developed to become almost the equal of the protagonist, and a minor character emerged from the shadows to become a more rounded character.

The Protagonist
The Protagonist, but not of my story! It’s actually the goddess, Nike.

By this stage my story was complete in the longer version, and, because I had effectively gutted and abandoned the original shortened version I deleted it, as mentioned above. So now I had two versions, the shorter competition version and the longer version.

Now, when I’ve written a story, and although it is in a sense complete, I don’t leave it there. I read it through, again and again, constantly revising and modifying it. I don’t usually change the story that much, but I go after spelling errors, grammatical errors, continuity errors, and so on. In every run through I change something. Maybe just the way that I said something. The position of a word in a sentence. Maybe a name, a location, a motivation. I could keep editing probably for ever. I never write “The End”.

My main point here is that, using modern technology, I have been able to, basically, rewrite the story twice and extend and revise the original story dramatically.

Juliet's Balcony
A balcony in Verona which has nothing to do with Romeo and Juliet, but still gets visited and photographed by tourists who think it has.

I wonder how ancient writers did it. I can’t imagine Shakespeare turning out multiple drafts of his plays. For one thing, he did it by hand. To create a new draft, he would have to write out the whole thing again with the changes. The decision to change the name of a character from “Fred” to “Mercutio” wouldn’t be taken lightly. For another thing, paper was, relatively speaking, expensive in those days. Printing was expensive.

Once he had written the play, it would be printed, but only a few copies would be produced. The printed copies were not intended for general reading, but were intended as “prompt books” for use in a theatre. This means, of course, that each printing might be different.

Old Books
Old books. I imagine that Shakespeare’s plays would have been printed in books like this.

I’ve not heard of Shakespeare making notes or outlines of his plays, but maybe he did. Maybe somewhere there is Shakespeare’s hand a scrap of paper that says something like “R sees J on blcny. J doesn’t see R. R calls J, J calls guards. R thrown out.” But we know that the final version doesn’t run that way!

I conclude that Shakespeare probably had the whole play mapped out in his mind, or at least great parts of it, including the words that he invented, the sentence construction, the characters and the plot. It’s an awesome feat if he did do it that way. The idea of juggling all those characters and scenes in his head, developing the story, and finally getting it down on paper in an almost final version is amazing.

Well, I wrote that before actually wondering if there was anything on the Internet about how Shakespeare wrote his plays. The answer is fascinating, at least to me! It seems that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights of the era cooperated extensively with each other, adding bits to each other’s plays. So Shakespeare’s plays were, in part, written by others! Interestingly, that’s very similar to the way that TV shows are written today, I understand.

An author at work
An author at work

We have the luxury, these days to dash off a story (or a play or whatever) and not worry too much about the details. We can fix those on the second go through! Electrons are as cheap as chips. I could have edited the bit about Shakespeare above, but I wanted to demonstrate how I was thinking, since this is post is about my thought processes when I write things.

So, I’d say the my writing style is like opening a can of worms. Who knows in what direction they are going to wriggle? Who knows where they are going to take us? I have a strong feeling that when I write a story, I’m only nominally in charge. The characters seem to have a life of their own, and they have their own needs and desires. They interact in way that I would not have predicted when I started writing their story and often the story changes as I write it. I’m often interested in how it is going to turn out.

That’s how I write. But others do it differently. Some, even in this electronic era write things out by hand. Others use mechanical typewriters and a few swear by old, really old, versions of software.

Mechanical typewriter
Mechanical typewriter

Things are different from Shakespeare’s day in many ways. It is more usual to write novels, rather than plays, and books are cheap and widely available. Writers do not, as a general rule, cooperate, as in Shakespeare’s day. A book will perused by an editor and checked by a proof reader many times before it is printed, and may be revised many times.

Even for those who write things by hand have the advantage of paper being cheap and readily available. They, and those who use mechanical typewriters, can easily rewrite a page and slot it into the manuscript fairly easily.

If you read the advice out there on how to write, you would sometimes think that the bare essentials are a well developed plot and well defined characters. I’ve read advice to that effect many times, but there are people who advocate the “just start writing” approach, and that is, as you can see above, my preference. I would not like to be straitjacketed by a rigid plot and static characters.

Inspiration?
Inspiration?

But some people prefer that approach and good luck to them! And there are those in the middle. Those who might have plot in mind or a set of characters, but aren’t about to spend time in developing the plot or the characters in detail. That’s maybe most writers.

Whatever approach you prefer, it is a good idea to research how to write. How to structure a story, how to develop characters and so on. It’s silly to think that all you need to do is pick up a pen and write, and you will produce a best seller. Even the best writers didn’t do that. They wrote at home and at school as kids, and they will have read voraciously, in all sorts of genres, and they may have actually formally studied literature. They will have practised extensively. And that’s what I am doing, and continue to do. Studying and practising. It’s one of the reasons for this blog!

Editing the first draft
Editing the first draft. That’s not me. I would be doing it directly on the computer!

Is “schooling” an education?

School
School (Photo credit: Krzysztof Pacholak)

Well, schooling should be an education. It should prepare the pupil for life. Dictionary.com has this as a prime definition of education:

The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgement, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for life.

Schooling doesn’t always do this – Greek history is probably of little use to a car mechanic and scientists are only interested in Greek history in so far as it has cool cast list of names and an alphabet from which they can plunder names for obscure fundamental particles or asteroids.

View from one end of Eros across the gouge on ...
View from one end of Eros across the gouge on its side towards the opposite end.(greyscale) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Arguably, though, Greek history is a fascinating window into an early culture, and studying events in Greek history can provide insights into contemporary society and while it may not be of obvious direct benefit to the mechanic and the scientist, such studies can inform sociologists, political studies specialists and many others, and it is worth remembering that mathematics, science, logic, philosophy, politics and many other fields of human endeavour have their roots in ancient Greece.

Temple Statue of Poseidon
Temple Statue of Poseidon (Photo credit: greekgeek)

But back to schooling. Everyone has been bored at school, for a number of reasons. The subject could be more than the student can handle, or it could be too simple, or it may not be a subject in which the student has no interest.

One of the issues with schooling is that we are taught, well, “subjects”. Well, we are taught “maths” or “biology” or “French”, or “Woodworking” or whatever. We are taught “English”, which is about how sentences are formed and we are drilled in verbs, nouns, adjectives and more esoteric beasts of the English language. Then there is “English Literature”, which largely consists of forcing pupils to read and “study” relatively old English language texts ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens. Rarely anything more modern.

English: Literature
English: Literature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a syllabus, specifying what we are to be taught. This is used to constrain the teachers and students, so that they can be set examinations to see, basically, how much the teachers have been able to force into usually unwilling minds.

writing/editing my environmental sustainabilit...
writing/editing my environmental sustainability cornerstone seminar syllabus at nabolom bakery in berkeley (Photo credit: davidsilver)

This all seems mechanical and soulless, but a good teacher will try to insert into the gaps and voids of the subject and the syllabus a little education. He or she will try to convey the beauty of the English language as used by Shakespeare and the other authors, he or she will try to make Romeo and Juliet into real people for the students, he or she will explain the societal background of the Dickens tales.

English: Title page of the second quarto editi...
English: Title page of the second quarto edition (Q2) of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet printed by Thomas Creede in 1599. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The good teacher will teach something more – how to look beyond the surface story to the people and the societal background, not just in the set books or any books, but in all the situations that life may throw at the student over the years.

"Good Teacher"
“Good Teacher” (Photo credit: MightyBoyBrian)

A study of literature can not only give the student the knowledge of what is in the books, and maybe an appreciation of the era in which the books are set but may also provide the student with the ability to look critically at the era in which they are living. For some, maybe more than a few of the students, this will provide them with the tools to examine sources like the media and consider such things as bias and veracity.

A book pile illustrating the theme of the fest...
A book pile illustrating the theme of the festival of 2005 “Education, why?”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A teacher of maths will try to not only enable the students to pass their maths exams but also to prepare them, a little, for life. The simple techniques of addition and subtraction may be all that they need, but sometimes they may need a bit more. Some of the students may go on to be mathematicians, to study the subject in its own right. But many more may acquire the tools to understand some of the numbers that surround us all in our daily lives.

Day 304: Problem Solving Strategies for Math
Day 304: Problem Solving Strategies for Math (Photo credit: Old Shoe Woman)

For instance, when a poll result is given on television, often they also quote a ‘margin of error’. A small but significant number of people will have some idea of what that actually means from some long ago statistics class. The vast majority doesn’t have a clue as to what it means, but the brightest might gather that it relates to how accurately the poll represents the wider population.

Margin of error-visual
Margin of error-visual (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another example of a mathematical tool that could be useful is contained in an episode of the British sitcom, “Please Sir!”. This is a comedy about an inspirational teacher and a class of pupils who are rejects from other classes. The teacher follows an informal teaching agenda as it is evident that his class is not going to pass any exams.

English: Statue of Sir Hugh Owen , A Pioneer o...
English: Statue of Sir Hugh Owen , A Pioneer of Welsh Education Sir Hugh Owen was a pioneer of secondary and tertiary education in Wales. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He tries to instil some mathematics into his students, using as an example a bet on a horse race. He calculates the odds only for one of his students, the son of a bookie, to correct him. The teacher is astounded that the student can calculate the odds so accurately in his head, saying to the student that he didn’t know that the student was good with maths. The student replies that this wasn’t maths, it was “odds”.

At the bookies
At the bookies (Photo credit: Phil Burns)

Science, likewise, has ramifications beyond the bland and often boring stuff a student learns at school. While he or she may come close to disaster in a lab, he or she may take away the concept of analysis and the scientific method that may help him or her in later life. At least when one of the TV detectives grabs a scrap of clothing or a sample of blood or something and sends it for analysis, he or she may have an inkling of what is happening. Though these shows are an education of a sort in themselves.

Day 53 - West Midlands Police Forensic Scene I...
Day 53 – West Midlands Police Forensic Scene Investigators Lab (Photo credit: West Midlands Police)

So why is the educational system focussed on schooling rather than educating? Well, for one thing it is easier to measure schooling rather than education. Facts trotted out for an exam yield a measurable yardstick to judge both student and teacher. It’s altogether more difficult to measure education.

Seal of the United States Department of Education
Seal of the United States Department of Education (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That’s because an education is not about facts learned. It’s about facts learned and a deeper understanding of how the facts interrelate within the system, be it Greek history, English literature, maths or science. Nevertheless, the best teachers provide an education as well as schooling. They should be applauded for it.

English: Primary School in "open air"...
English: Primary School in “open air”, in Bucharest, around 1842. Wood engraving, 11x22cm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)