All of us worry, but some worry above and beyond the call of reality. If you’re a writer, storyteller or other spinner of tales and fantasies, you not only worry like the rest of them, but are able to take it to whole new levels of elaboration and absurdity. The average writer’s mind is a scenario engine, a sifter and collator of possibilities and combinations; It is how writing is done, not just on the level of plot, dialogue and character, but also on the level of syllables, words and sentences. Alternatives, and analysing their relative strengths and weaknesses, are at the very core of a writer’s craft. As an unfortunate side effect, worry can come only too easily to a wielder of words.

The human ability to imagine futures is what makes us creatures of invention and creation, because we can visualise objects, works of art and even ways of life that don’t yet exist. A writer does the same with stories, people, events and conversation. None of this exists except in the writer’s mind until put down on paper in the decided sequence of what is real, and what were mere alternative possibilities. This is how writers create worlds for us to inhabit with our minds, they are the architects of our collective imaginations.

If you’ve ever tried to write anything beyond academic essays, and managed to do it reasonably well, you will be familiar with the mental gymnastics that I’m referring too. When you’re thinking about plots and characters, you ask yourself broader questions. What if this character was tall, or short, or disgruntled, or brave? How would that change the flow of events in this story? Because the best writers are not so much random builders of event and circumstance, they are tinkerers in the vast laboratory of human storytelling, ever adding this element to that and seeing what combinations bring in the colour they are looking for, what pieces produce the explosive emotion they need, what tells the story exactly like they imagined it. This is what makes writing a craft and not merely an art.

Take that ability and mental dexterity into the personal realm, however, and the testing of future theories and the considering of scenarios, conversations and responses becomes an obsessive chess game, the thinker always guessing and second-guessing the next move, and the next million moves of the person or situation being considered, or all of existence itself, if they’re feeling ambitious. And since worry lends itself to pessimism, it’s only natural that even writers, the ones with new universes twirling around their fingertips, tend to concentrate on the scenarios they most fear, the ones that would cause them or their story the most pain, and delve on those, ever replaying the possibilities that lead there and those that lead beyond.

Worrying comes easy to writers, because a kind of controlled worrying is what makes the craft of writing a craft, and a complex one at that. Most of us with some level of literacy can write, stringing sentences together as pure communication, but few can call themselves writers and tell the stories that must be told, or those they have imagined, well and with a sound internal logic and a magnificent beauty. That takes a worrying mind, and in writing and life, the bane of the worrying mind is in not knowing when to stop, not knowing when the considerations surging through its synapses have begun to feed on themselves and serve no purpose other than a soul-sucking downward spiral.

For worrying and for writing, the only solution, the only way out of the maze of forks in the road, of alternative routes and traps along the way, is in decision and action. Thinking can only take you so far, and eventually you have to decide on that one scenario, on that one idea, on that one thing to say which will be the right thing, and then having said the right thing you will let things fall where they may, for even the writer cannot always know where the world of their creation is leading them. Theirs is as much a leap of faith as any other mortal’s, but leap they must.

Creation, whether external or internal, reserves its mystery, even from the ever computing mind of the writer. We can dabble in conjecture, educated guesses and experienced opinion as to what will work and how, but we can’t predict the outcome of the things we create with absolute certainty, in life or in fiction. As writers and as human beings we can only give the process of considering scenarios the benefit of our best understanding; We can draw a line on the blank surface ahead, and keep writing our stories.

Samir

Of all the much touted maxims of modern society and intellectual thought, things like separation of church and state, equality and equal opportunity for all and the like, the one I think is the most artificial construct is detached, unbiased and impersonal reporting. There is a prevailing falsehood about the effect of personal bias on the story that a reporter tells and how it affects the perception of ‘the truth’ by the reader. The falsehood is not in believing this bias exists and changes things, but in that it may actually be a perfectly avoidable evil.

I just finished reading Dreaming in Code, and what stays with me after Scott Rosenberg‘s comprehensive and appropriately fragmented tale of the early years of the Chandler open source project, is not primarily the insights gleaned about the process of programming software, although those were numerous enough even for a closet coding enthusiast like me, but rather the impressions that remain from his last concluding chapter with his more personal take on his involvement with the project and its originator Mitch Kapor. Stray bits and impressions from a quick scanning of his end notes, and the human dynamic of 3-years on a project like this, which emerges from his acknowledgements, is what will stick until my next reading.

Detachment is a fine theory, but what does it most often yield? Dry, uninteresting, unengaging, indecisive waste, for the most part, which forms the daily news. There’s a reason I don’t read the news, because as we step into a world of instant feedback, always-on telecommunication and global sharing of information, you come to realise that ‘the facts’ are in fact not all they are cracked up to be. I never read the news, on paper or on screen, so you can save your breath about my personally contributing to the downfall of fat publishing empires by not buying a ‘real’ newspaper. In spite of my disinterest in the news of the world, however, I am somehow constantly aware of the facts of the world, more than I would like on most days. For example, I can’t help but see a few headlines on the Yahoo! home page every time I log-out of my often neglected email address. Even less avoidable is the exposure to the essentials of what has people huffing and puffing in short 140-character bursts on Twitter. And this, mind you, is after following less than 50 active tweeters, none of whom are closely related to traditional news media. ‘The Facts’ are much simpler and cheaper than you think.

There are, of course, the ever fascinating gory details of how many dead, and how exactly people died, and what new suffering I should be fearing for myself based on what’s happening in the world, but those are drugs I’ve never been interested in smoking. I find my thoughts, as cutting and disturbingly cynical as they can be, to be infinitely more interesting and educational than any amount of surrogate suffering dished out on a daily basis by objective reporting and devoured by most. So I decline to partake.

As soon as there is a reporting of events, even facts, there is a subjectivity to them. Subjectivity, the bias of the observer, is a simple fact of existence that even science has a growing realisation of, so it seems pompous and entirely self-serving for news and non-fiction writing to maintain some religious sense of objectivity. There is no real balance, or covering every side, or seeing both viewpoints, when we gladly ignore the viewpoint that’s clearly counter to any social norm or against the current mode of politically correct thinking. News and objectivity in reporting is a myth and it is about time we realised this. Perhaps the slow decline of print media and traditional news channels is in part an unconscious realisation of this fact, brought on by that great leveller of ‘balanced’ opinion, the internet. The internet, as an amorphous entity, is ever ready to go off on clearly inhuman tangents if those tangents are popular enough, or to challenge nonsense if it isn’t popular enough to ignore. The reality of balanced reporting, and the fantasy of everyone having their say, is closer to utter chaos than utopia.

Why then chase this outdated dream, when the invested reporter or writer, one who accepts their role in the process of observation, interpretation, and representation in relatable stories, is so much more affecting and informing? Why must the events and stories of the world be read in long pages of pretend facts when those could be read and gleaned in bullet-points, and when a personal story about the broader sweep of events, developments and people, even if it attempts to stick to the ideals of objectivity, can be so much more informing, involving, eye-opening, insightful, and most importantly, more human?

As human beings, we read for an insight into what another human being thinks and feels, and what they glean from their interactions or observations of other human beings. This is the fundamental human activity, the one thing that takes us beyond the level of instinctive beast, this sharing of memories and stories of self-analysis. Stories are human, the ones that are born in the human imagination, and those that merely pass through the imagination between the observing senses and the storehouse of experience. The human imagination is an essential aspect of our humanity and also the way we perceive and understand the world. Yet as a society, we have chosen to ignore this equal power at our table, and we’ve banished it to the position of unacknowledged bastard or entertaining buffoon, the black sheep of the family we must all be ashamed of. It has gotten to the point where we even refuse to acknowledge that the imagination is the only one at the table that reads and describes a picture of our world to the rest of our being, the virtually blind masses of our intellect. ‘Stop dreaming’ is the commonly spit out warning of the vengeful adult as the unfettered child is slapped out of listening to their imagination, their storyteller, and another bastard is born.

We lose ourselves in fiction and fantasy, because in that realm the human spirit is sanctioned in its biases, its emotional investments, its unbalanced interpretations, its unobjective reporting of the facts. But in the things through which we learn of and understand the world, the stories and non-fiction accounts through which we explore our real world passions, learn our crafts, form our personalities and absorb our opinions, we choose to banish all those parts of our minds that make us who we are. We see emotion as a guilty pleasure, tucked between the lines and secretly sniggered at in mental back-alleys like a dirty thing, all the time self-righteously proclaiming a perfect objectivity that cannot exist. We live a lie, when what we should be doing is embracing the filter of our existence and demanding that our tellers of facts and stories be human rather than feign inhumanity, while remembering that there is no perfection in the given truths.

As writers, we must strive above all else to be human, tell the story of human affairs honestly, and with all the emotions, pains, biases and joys which our humanity grants us the ability to see and to share. To not do so would be dishonest and hypocritical. To imagine that doing so is a completely avoidable evil would be delusional and dangerous.

Samir

Like much of my fiction reading, The Gates of Eden (1983) by Brian Stableford was picked up in a bargain bin, where all the strangest treasures are to be discovered, this one in a second-hand book store. The cover art by Doughlas Chaffee showed an auburn-haired beauty standing handsomely holding a spacesuit in an alien landscape. I love the traditional science fiction paintings of the time, so I had to see what this was about.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.

The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost–until its call was heard appealing for a xenobiologist.
…

And the blurb continued on the back cover, but I was already hooked and wanted to know more. So I picked up the book.

Lee Caretta is the xenobiologist who narrates his tale. The book drops us straight into one of his nightmares, which we learn he suffers from on occasion, along with blackouts. All this is unknown to his space-faring colleagues and is nearly forgotten as he gets a call to visit the vessel Araidne which currently orbits a strange habitable swamp planet dubbed Naxos. The entire initial survey team has died suddenly and mysteriously, and Caretta, along with a few other experts, is called in to find out how it happened. They must determine if the planet is safe enough for further exploration and possible colonization, which was the Ariadne’s original mission in heading off into the unknown.

The author, Brian Stableford, is a scientist. It shows through in the thoughts and words of the characters in The Gates of Eden. Thankfully, he is also a very fine writer of fiction and the short book makes for gripping reading with much to admire in the crafting of the phrase and the succinctness of the words. The book plays out like a very tight procedural, a science fiction murder mystery of sorts, with the usual assortment of shady characters and unknown motivations, but mixed liberally with a whole lot of biological discussion and hard-core science-fiction musings. The reality this story creates is an intriguing one, because on one hand humanity has found other habitable words and intelligent alien species and faster-than-light travel, and on the other hand, Earth has undergone no revolutionary changes and remains very much as we can experience it now, stagnant for centuries. It’s a premise that is dramatic in its mundanity.

I enjoyed The Gates of Eden, not just because it is very well written in a technical sense and engaging, but because it took me back to a childhood of reading Asimov and those more straight-forward and clean science fiction stories of old. It is from a school of science fiction written by a particular type of geeky writer, perhaps for a particular type of geeky reader. The story is, at its core, an episode of Star Trek. A ship arrives in orbit around a planet, there is a mystery to solve, teams go down to the surface and intrigue and adventure follows. This is procedural science-fiction at its best, and it even abides by many archetypal elements from those old stories I grew up reading; There is the mildly ineffectual male protagonist, a female sidekick who is his superior in many ways, the both practical and philosophical discussions about science and humanity, and in the end, the real problems are solved by people putting their heads together and figuring things out with words and discussion rather than just incendiary devices and bravado.

There are complaints that can be made about The Gates of Eden, mostly to do with the fact that it might feel too short, and in its brevity, many of its plot choices and character motivations come out feeling clichéd. However, I do wonder whether those choices would have seemed tired back in 1983, before all of us had been exposed to thousands of hours of rehashed television plots and a multitude of pulp fiction in every conceivable medium.

While this is by no means a masterpiece of fictional storytelling, I can say unequivocally that it is gripping, it kept me entertained throughout the reading, and I know I will read it again given a spare day with some time to kill in cerebral relaxation. That can’t be said for a lot of fiction, and I don’t think there can be a better testament to the qualities of a story.

The Gates of Eden is a wonderful little nugget of science fiction which is over a little sooner than you would like it to be. But within that time, it creates in your mind a comprehensive universe, alien and yet not too far removed from our own, characters who are utterly relatable even within their archetypes, and a story that keeps you entertained, occupied, and imagining. Such stories are always a pleasure to live.

Samir

For writers, bookshops are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you were probably first inspired to have writing ambitions somewhere in a bookshop, surrounded by the wonder of words; On the other hand, bookshops and the books in them can be the greatest obstacle to writing that was ever conceived.

I am often asked by people much better read than me, whether I have read their favourites from the recommended reading list, be it a Victorian classic or a modern fantasy marvel. More often than not, I haven’t read them, because I never followed the recommended reading lists and because I simply haven’t had the time. Think about it, the most common sort of book, the novel, is hundreds of years old. Many of its classic examples are from the early decades of its existence, but ever since then that list of recommended novels has been growing every year. There are the popular but well regraded yarns, there are the much awarded and much lauded brilliances, and there are the cult favourites that grow in popularity with time and discussion. All these are recommended, and with time, it becomes more and more impossible to read even a minor selection of them, if you wish to do anything in life besides read. That’s not even considering the other forms of book in both fiction and non-fiction.

Obviously, doing nothing but reading in life is a possibility, either as off-hours entertainment or as your work, if you’re one of those few people who worked their way into the position of a book reviewer or other commentator on literature. On some days it might be a chore, but on most days you are doing what you love for a living. If you are a writer and not just a reader, however, losing yourself in the created world of others is not a healthy option for your craft. For a writer, reading is an education but education is also the easiest form of procrastination, especially when it comes as easily as to a writer.

When I walk through the doors of a large bookshop, especially one with a sprawling fiction section, with its multiple aisles of carefully segregated genres and wonderfully balanced stacks of best-sellers, I am at once overwhelmed and also taken over by a form of book-lust. Those among you who would consciously admit to your bibliophilia will know what I am talking about. For that moment, you are utterly consumed by an impulse to read absolutely everything in front of you and posses every beautiful edition of every middling piece of franchise fantasy, because you are besotted and that is how lust works. Then your rationality kicks in, to some extent, and you resolve to not give in completely to your impulses. You lose yourself among the sweet smelling aisles and you come out either victorious against the overwhelming paperback hordes, or having come to a respectable compromise between your spending money and your book lust.

Respectable compromises are a relative and varied thing. I know many people who likely dispose most of their disposable income on books, and quite random ones at that. Not necessarily good ones or memorable ones or collector’s editions or special editions, just any books. They are addicted to reading. They’re reading all the time, every day of he week, every hour of the day, and when they’re not, they’re either pretending to work at a job or bragging in various social circles about all the books they just read.

Some of them even have ambitions as writers. I understand the feeling completely, they would be writing right now, but they really need to read more to hone their craft, to absorb the techniques of the masters, to ridicule the foibles of the literary quacks, to criticise the uneven sentence formation of the popular authors with their long-running book series and their populist fan followings. They need to learn more and then their masterpieces will be written. I know that most of them will never write.

No one ever became a master chef by eating a lot and doing little else. No one became a magician of culinary flavours by only analysing the preparations of others and never crying over an onion. The only way to learn how to write, to write well, and maybe even become a “writer”, if you must, is to write, and the more you read without control, the less that is likely to ever happen.

Sure you can fool yourself into lauding your continuing education in the craft of the written word, but all you’re learning to do is read, if that. Writing is a whole different ball game and you know it. You know why there are so many mediocre writers out there who are published in glossy paper backs so that you can question their intelligence and their literary merit? Because they’re the only ones who bothered to show up everyday, write, and finish their manuscripts. The rest of you literary geniuses were too busy raiding bookshops, obsessing over thematic inconsistencies, and arguing the pros and cons of race and gender archetypes in genre fiction.

In writing, as in every creative field, there is a fairly strict divide between the two sides of the realm: there are the creators and the consumers. The creators might start off as consumers and continue to be consumers at a very limited and discerning level, but the real consumers always remain consumers and do nothing else. To write, you have to make that transition from being a consumer to being a creator. You have to build up your skills and more importantly your confidence to put your effort where your mouth is and do the work. Reading all the books in the world and being able to spot grammatical niggles at twenty paces will make you a very good consumer, a very opinionated consumer even, but never a writer. A writer writes. A writer writes a lot, and consistently, and bravely, and against all odds, and against better judgement and many detractors.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to be detractors. It’s easier. It’s so much easier to tell someone what they’ve done wrong after spending a few hours with a book than it is to spend the few months or few years writing it, and revising it, and revising it again. It’s so much easier to read and read and imagine you are creating a better writer within than to write more and actual learn to write better. It’s so much easier to be a serial escapist, forever losing yourself in the next imaginary cocoon of someone else’s work, rather than to face the harsh reality of wrestling with words and sentences and beating them into submission, and seducing them into poetry. It’s so much easier to be a book lover and aspiring writer than to actually ever have the courage to write.

The next time you find yourself in one of those situations where you’re surrounded by the temptation of fresh, crisp, reading material, where the plump prose and the sensual covers call out to you to posses them and make them your own, hold back a second. Before you give in to your bookish instincts, decide on whether you want to write or you want to be a reader who forever deludes themselves with grand claims of wanting to be a writer. I can tell you categorically that wanting to be a writer is a lot easier, and a lot more glamorous in the mind. Writing on the other hand is hard work, a slow process, and what you write is guaranteed to be misunderstood or misinterpreted by everyone who reads it. But writing is better, because then you would have written, and you will have created, and you can let the other weaklings worry about your own seductions that call out to them from the shelves and trap unsuspecting readers in their embrace.

Samir

People watching is a common pastime; As a social species, it is instinctive. If you’re a writer, however, it can be the difference between flat featureless prose, and descriptions people can fall in love with. Being a keen observer of people gives you insights into human behaviour which are invaluable, whether you are a writer of fiction fleshing out a believable character, or a non-fiction writer trying to explain in a relatable manner. The best places to observe people have probably always been the bazaars and marketplaces, the ports and public squares, anywhere where people gather to carry out the essential realities of life: commerce, travel, relaxation; Anywhere they are unaware and not self-conscious. This is why airports are a fertile ground to observe a variety of people, and so are malls.

I was at the mall yesterday, and it was full of 20-somethings trying to dress and behave like teenagers. I know this because there are usually real teenagers flooding the corridors around the cinema on weekends, with their fake hair and their awkward perfunctory hugs as they meet and greet the other creatures in parallel packs. In spite of the appearances, this group was different and stiffer (if that was possible).

Children are great subjects to observe because they do the things that adults avoid in public. By the teenage years they’ve already begun to formulate their own rigid social rituals, and adults get more and more straight-jacketed in their public behaviour, for the most part. But children do what comes to mind, rather than what they ought to.

Going down one of the long curving passageways of the mall, a little girl was walking towards us, holding her Mother’s hand. The woman had dishevelled curly hair and was wearing a white full-length dress with an abstract patchy pattern down the front. The girl had straight brown hair and was wearing a short French-striped dress with matching stockings, which like most things looked exceptionally good in the minuscule size. As she walked along, she wasn’t looking ahead or at the shops, but instead at her Mother’s feet, as she tried to match her steps exactly. She was completely engaged and her Mother was smiling in amusement.

A little further along my stroll, a Filipino couple were sitting on bench as their daughter, a girl of few years, with a small ponytail and a green outfit, attempted to put on a dance performance in an empty corner. The dancer kept looking down at her feet to check herself as she continued; An unexpected conscientiousness.

Near the toilets, a father and his pre-teen daughter were walking by. He turned to her and brusquely asked her to wait there by the railing while he used the facilities. She wrapped herself against the large glass pane, her bespectacled face barely resting on the wooden hand-rail. She made no attempt to seem nonchalant; Unlike the other adults waiting there, she simply was.

These little behaviours are a great insight into children, on the surface, but also into how most of us think on deeper levels. You too would be trying to match your steps with your partner, or counting the tiles you walk on, if you allowed yourself to. Maybe you do, in your mind, even though it never shows. These windows into our inner world are a priceless resource for writers.

Adults have their own quirks to observe, some they try to hide, some that have become habits over the years, and a lifetime of accumulated character. On the top level of the mall, a far-eastern woman in a short black outfit walked past, she had a svelte look about her that placed her firmly in the realms of deadly Hong-Kong movie female assassin or mid-level marketing executive in a real-estate company. I tried not to turn around and look, lest I be marked for murder, or worse yet, sold real-estate.

A short, chubby, ginger-haired woman in a large pink t-shirt walked passed, and by the time we had circumnavigated an entire level of the mall and moved to the lower level, we bumped into her again, leaving an opticians. Looking up at the glass railing of the higher level through the central atrium, I spotted the unmistakable black silhouette and adequate legs of the far-eastern woman from before. She was still shuttling between unknown targets on the same level, walking gracefully down the sparsely populated corridors in her relaxed gait.

How people interact within the different relationships and dynamics on display in a public place makes for fascinating viewing. As I rounded a few more corners, two families were passing each other a few metres in front of me. A Russian woman, with husband and daughter in tow, stopped and turned around as she noticed the other couple speaking Russian. She called out to get their attention, and they continued to talk for a while, possibly asking directions or advice on something touristy from the sound of it.

While I was passing by some lingerie stores ahead, a couple in their 30s were sharing a remark about one of the the more outlandish costumes in the shop display; The audible whispers, the leaning in, the shared grin, but only a slight one. Exiting one of the many generic looking fashion stores targeted at teenagers, an older woman was pointing out a girl who just passed by in a faint animal print dress with a sash around her waist, to her younger companion. There was approval in their faces and a mild tinge of something like envy in their backward-angled heads and attentive eyes, about something they wished they could pull off as well as the specimen they had just noticed.

A couple pushing a baby stroller, a stocky man in tan shorts and his petite wife with pulled back hair and a very spa-enhanced face, were offered perfume by the Lebanese salesman manning one of the central stalls on a lower level. After waving him away and walking a few steps, the man looked back and said ‘shukran’ (thank you) with a raised hand, a cultural after-thought. The salesman shouted back ‘affwan’ (welcome) in return, as each party continued with their business.

Our mannerisms and the unique body language we develop, one gesture at a time through life, often defines us and the way people see us. We are unaware of these minor quirks but they play an important part in what makes us recognisable to those who know us, a specific gait, a way we hold ourselves up, a habitual body movement. The smallest twitches can make the biggest impact.

On our way out of the mall we visited the supermarket. At the checkout, a woman with short dark hair and a knee-length dress suit was conversing quietly on her bright blue phone as she was going through. The attendant bagging her groceries was playing safe by keeping things in separate bags. Still cradling the phone on her shoulder and also handling her wallet, she went up to him, put a stray item he had kept aside into the one large bag already prepared and did a strange rotatory motion with her fore arm, trying to tell him to put everything into one bag, while continuing her conversation on the phone uninterrupted.

These scenes were from a single evening stroll that lasted all of 30 minutes. Observing people is fun, and in a mall it can be even more so as you go about your business and notice the other strangers you share the space with for that fleeting time. As a writer, these situations are filled with wonderful observations to make, about humanity and behaviour, about quirks and curiosities. Above all, it’s an unending reservoir of untold stories and unsaid hints. Hints that you can borrow and use in your writing, so that when you introduce your imaginary strangers, you leave readers with the nuances that convince them that they’re spotting an old friend across a crowded street.

Samir

Writing is an important activity in the human pantheon of activities. We often ascribe this importance to the fact that human society works on the sharing and passing on of ideas to those who will come after us, or in the case of today’s magnificently connected world, those who are our peers in distant and close-by places. Where writing doesn’t get its due is as a record of thoughts explored and solutions found, for yourself.

Many of us write diaries and personal journals when we are younger; Some continue this practice throughout their lives, a daily or irregular dumping of their thoughts, stories and concerns on paper. It makes us feel unburdened, as if what ails us, or simply interests us, has been shared with a friend. Fittingly, some personify their little book of thoughts with a name, that ultimately silent and non-judgemental good listener. But this cathartic explanation of the value of personal writing has in ways limited the scope of what we imagine writing can accomplish for us. The written word need not be limited to being that unfortunate companion you choose to weigh down with your every dissatisfaction, writing can also be your personal reference bank of how you’ve been here before, and how you succeeded in navigating this impasse the last time.

Let’s face it, if you write for pleasure or are one of many who are compelled to write, putting your thoughts down is an act of desperation, of urgency, a need to shed your rain-drenched clothes and move to an awaiting warmth. Such desperation brings with it a certain lowering of boundaries, a dropping of the self-censorship we all practice at every moment of our waking lives in order to remain appropriate and acceptable in the eyes of those around us, in our own eyes. The mirror is the harshest critic, the most cowardly of tyrants. When we lower these levys, when we express our thoughts unburdened of our own proprieties, when we write out of need because we simply must, we share things, with ourselves and others, which are more true, more honest, more revealing of how that complex mechanism that is our unique mind works, and what makes it continue to work despite the ever mounting odds of life and existence. These insights are crucial. Not just as a piece of crystallised empathy to be felt by other human beings, who will see glimpses of their own experiences, their own fears, in your thoughts and musings. They are crucial for you, the writer, the unburdener, the forgeter of your discarded troubles and often your discarded solutions to the unique face of your less-than-unique conundrums.

There is a magic in this act, this expressing of thoughts, not only in that it removes an internal phenomenon into an external reality, but also in the subtle fact that that which is nebulous, fleeting and ephemeral is pressed with some degree of permanence into eternal reality. Suddenly your thoughts are a tangible object, a limited collection of words, a narrowed down, focused version of an internal chaos. These decisions on your part are magical and revealing.

While this mostly self-indulgent outpouring into never-to-be-seen tomes has its uses, there is also the danger of writing too much for yourself. How many times, in the heat of the moment, in the reverie of an involved conversation, have you quickly scribbled something on a piece of paper, only to have no recognition of what you have written shortly after? It happens to us all. Sometimes it is a common matter of the written script assassinated in a hurried attempt at efficiency and speed, other times the letters are perfectly legible, the words fathomable, but their meaning distant and shadowed in doubt. Writing only for yourself, you make the bold assumption that you shall be the same you when the message needs to be read and understood. But the fact is that you have already changed by the time whatever frenzy brought on the expression is done, and what you wished to express in that most personal way to your future self has become a long forgotten language. This metamorphosis into an incompatible other can sometimes take years, or it can take the length of a phone call involving furiously scribbled notes on the margins of telephone books.

For this reason, it is useful to write for others. In doing so you make fewer assumptions about the universal nature of the secret linguistic handshake you are about to perpetrate on your audience. You try to be understood, you explain, you clarify; Your future self will appreciate these clarifications. Explaining things to others calls for greater clarity and to achieve that clarity we must understand what we are trying to convey in more depth for ourselves.

In the simple blank-paged notebook in which I am scribbling this piece as I think of its form, before it will be transcribed and polished for general consumption on my site, there are a cornucopia of ideas. Some are snippets, separate and removed from everything else that came before. Some are merely the latest thought in an unending web of interconnected notions that can be traced back many years through a series of well-thumbed notebooks. Such thoughts are often prefixed or postfixed with a note; Something along the lines of “See also: note on story about a gerbil and a robotic donkey in previous notebook.” It’s simple, straight-forward and lets me maintain a loose mental linkage that can be tracked back if needed, down the archive of older iterations and details of continuously developing ideas. Some of these notions will never come to fruition, some might do so only after many hundreds of casual notes referring to earlier thoughts and explanations, earlier fancies, earlier unburdenings of mind that came about because an idea had to be expressed, and because I was compelled to write.

On this internet thing, such connections are built into the structure of everything. In fact, links were in many ways what resulted in the idea and execution of this vast global collection of human information. The concept of hypertext, text which has in-line links to appropriately connected material, existed before the net, but the net gave it true meaning. Today we write our diaries on the ephemeral and immortal paper of cyberspace. Some choose to protect them from the world, but most have them open for all the world to see. This public display of outpourings can certainly seem self-indulgent and stink of what the cynical call navel gazing, and in many cases it might be true. But, if you put the effort into making your very special thoughts mean something in general, if your concerns and solutions are moulded to the understanding of those outside ourself, those hyper-links can truly shine.

Like it or not, there will come a time when a relative stranger of some importance, your future self, will be lost. Not lost in geography, but in thought, in a quagmire of many potential actions, in a net of contradictory decisions, and they will freeze. Freeze from a complete lack direction, a blankness, a disconnection, from their surroundings, from people, and sometimes from that person of some importance that came before them. In that darkness of disconnection, not seeing any light or any way forward through the uncertainty, when your future self flips through their note book, or browses randomly trough their own blog, or stares at old sketches and visual explanations, make sure you wrote as much for them as yourself, and also make sure you left them the guiding lights of reference to lead them back to your solutions. When you can’t see anything and every step in every inky direction seems fraught with peril, see also is often all the light you need.

Samir

We decorate and gild, and wrap them in fine leather,
We worry and fret, and wonder if they’ll ever be,
We protect them with armour against every possible weather,
We even provide flippers, for when they’re stranded at sea.

And in all this finery and glut of security features,
The most important thing lies forgotten and ignored,
That our true aims were the most delicate of creatures,
Who will suffocate, if in this monster stored.

But by then we have our eyes on a higher summit,
Our dreams touch cloud and expectations soar,
Making it a growing possibility to plummet,
Or just give up along the slope-climbing bore.

Worst of all is that the peak is ever receding,
And the effort to return seems equally grim,
Until eventually it comes down to conceding,
That you’re better off killing your plans on a whim.

The burden of best laid plans is that we must fulfil them,
They often slow us down and dampen all that’s aglow,
They buffet our sensitive inspirations and kill them,
So in life and in writing, learn to respect the flow.

Samir

Though her reputation preceded her, I had never read a book by Ursula K. Leguin before this one. I’ve always been a fan of the old-guard of science fiction and fantasy writers, of whom she is a much revered member, so when I spotted this book for a bargain and the synopsis seemed thoughtful and intriguing, I jumped at it.

It was only when I got home with my new acquisition that I actually opened the book and decided to dip in, as I often do. The book started thus:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world as important as that wall.

Ten pages later, I managed to stop reading. It was clear I had to read this book as soon as I could, so I dropped the other novel I had been suffering through in slow agony and took up this one instead.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin tells us the story of Shevek, a brilliant theoretical physicist, born and bred on the world of Annares. It is sometime in the far future when human beings live on other worlds around other stars, with Earth reduced to a marginal existence. Annares is the rugged and mostly barren moon of the planet Urras, the prize of human civilisation. Almost two centuries ago a revolution occurred on Urras led by the anarchistic philosopher Odo, who envisioned a utopic society free from the evils of possessions, profiteering and hierarchical leadership. The revolutionaries were finally allowed to leave in peace and set up their own society on the barren moon Annares, and there they had stayed, completely cut-off from the rest of humanity except for essential trade. The story starts with Shevek breaking this embargo by leaving for Urras on a ship, to continue his work and learn more about Urras while showing them the human face of Annares. The rest of the novel tells of Shevek’s experiences on the wondrous world of Urras, and also the circumstances of his life on the bleak world of Annares that result in his departure. These two threads of the story are played out in alternating chapters of the book till the conclusion.

While I never managed to read this book in large gulps, it was no less pleasurable to absorb over the many weeks it took me to finish. In spite of the many gaps in my reading, the story of Shevek always remained fresh in my mind, and his thoughts and motivations always came flooding back whenever I opened the book again. LeGuin is a masterful storyteller and one who isn’t afraid to delve into the depths of her subject matter when required, while breezing over or cutting out years worth of events when their telling is unnecessary to the heart of the story. The drastic passage of time is hard-earned in the minds of the reader, but time well-lost such as this, is aptly rewarded with our complete attention.

There are pages of dense ponderings over the nature of time and the universe in this book, but it never seems forced and these ponderings are integral both to the character of Shevek and the way the story is presented. The crux of Shevek’s theories in the book are to come up with a grand unifying theory of Time that weaves together two seemingly contrary ideas, that of Simultaneity and of Sequence. The trope of presenting the story in chapters that alternate between past and present, with the two threads leading to the start of the other thread hints at the two visions of time itself, that of a straight line and that of a cyclical existence. It is a clever and effective device.

At it’s core though, The Dispossessed is a story of humanity, society and the struggle between the two. Shevek is unquestionably an individualist, an ‘egoist’, as the communal people of Annares would label him. This makes him an aberration in a society designed to make everyone feel equal, often at the price of people’s special gifts. On Urras, a world very much like our own, ruled by the pressures of politics, commerce and possession, Shevek finds himself equally at odds with a humanity that’s alien to his concepts of right and wrong. This is the story of how he reconciles those two alienations in some ways and also how he comes to realise that Utopia can be strived for, but it is hard work (which ties in pretty well with my piece on unrealistic expectations), and it is a constant struggle rather than a perfect destination.

I loved The Dispossessed, and like all good stories, I know I will want to live it again in time. It is a tale of surprisingly relevant social commentary. As with all good commentaries on life and the human condition, I doesn’t so much force a conclusion down your throat as much as introduce you to the vast vistas and let you come to your own understanding of how things work, and how they could.

The best stories are often simple, only littered with human complexities. In the best tales nothing much happens on the surface other than the inevitable, and yet minds and hearts change, and with them all of existence within the framework of the story changes. The best stories are not a reportage of facts but an interpretation of happenings from the view point of the character with whom the reader identifies. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin, is very much the story of that character, to whom nothing much happens but the inevitable, and yet minds are changed, and the Universe can never be the same again.

Samir

In writing you most often try to communicate a message or a feeling. You want your words to be absorbed by the reader, and hope that you’ve been clever enough with the words to create the exact reaction in the reader’s mind that you had hoped for. Of course, such reactions can never be predicted perfectly, but we all share enough common patterns of thinking and belief to make this attempt at connecting with the reader not wholly a fool’s errand.

Writing is also often about story telling. Somewhere in the human psyche is hard-wired the ability to recognise and appreciate a good story, something with a beginning, middle and end, something with a progression of events or circumstances, or moods, that lead somewhere. We are constantly trying to impose this story structure on life itself, and our own lives in particular. We attempt to make our beginnings have interest, our journeys have some adventure, and our ends satisfying. Since we are living the story, we’re constantly compressing the middle and extending the end to accommodate ever newer realities. Success and failure are measured by us, not in the inherent value or comfort of either situation, but by whether they fit well into our story, the story that we hold in mind as our own ideal biopic, constantly knitting together the strands of random circumstance into a cohesive tapestry.

Such a deep obsession with story means that any writer of fiction or non-fiction needs to inject into their work an element of story telling. Tell a good tale and even the most complex and vague of concepts become acceptable to human ears and imaginations. Little wonder then that parables have played such an important role in the communication of our affairs and the storing of our knowledge, since records exist of our writings. Before there was writing, you can be sure that around every flickering firelight, storytellers wove and presented a gripping tale.

The power of parables is that they harness the basic nature in which human knowledge, learning and understanding works. We don’t know things in isolation, but instead in a dense web of relations with other things. Various basic understandings build to larger ones and ever larger ones, until we reach the lofty realms of the abstract and the unfathomable. Almost anyone can be made to understand anything if they have enough of a grasp of things on a simpler level. It allows them to make all the connections to support understanding of the more abstract.

Parables also work because they utilise the mind’s love for stories to get its attention, and then frame a fact or concept in the garb of the familiar. We understand stories, we know them well. So in presenting so many familiar scenes to the reader, you guarantee enough investment on the familiar level for their minds to make that leap to the unfamiliar concept that you hope they will make.

This is why the stories and moral tales we expose children to are so important, not just as lessons and lectures of social norm and of good and bad, but as a fertile source of raw material for future stories to build on, and for future understanding to stand on the shoulders of.

Good writers must learn to use this mechanism of parable to make their writing more effective and engaging. Parables provide a common ground, a neutral territory where both the writer and the reader are comfortable, where there is no threat of assault with a deadly idea, and where they might exchange stories and share insights into the night.

Samir

Aspiring writers have always been told to write what they know, and to read the classics. If everyone would have stuck to writing what they knew first hand, the written word would never have gone very far. The advice about the classics, however, hasn’t been brushed off as easily. Although you expect writers to be free thinkers, most of us want to be told exactly what to do, just like everyone else, and it sounds reasonable that an exposure to the best examples in the field would improve your skills. It makes sense to think that as a writer, you are what you read.

I am a designer, and one piece of advice in that field has always been to pay attention to the negative space, the blank part of the page that surrounds what you put on it. That space defines your design as much as the elements you put on the page. This nugget isn’t always understood by the aspiring designer, and not paid attention to by many who grow to proficiency, but a similar principle might hold true for writers and what they choose to read. I think if you’re a writer, you are what you don’t read.

The complexity of all crafts is that not only must you be well versed in the subtleties of human sentiment to express what you need to, but you also need to be a master in the language of your medium, if your expression is to be understood by anyone. This dual mastery of both expression and language is not as common as you would think. It is probably the foremost reason why many dabble in crafts of various kinds, but only a few distinguish themselves with their creations.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. An infant, ordained to be a painter or visual artist of some sort, is brought up blind-folded. She is never allowed to see, except at occasional intervals when she is sat up in a dark room with black walls, and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci are flashed onto a screen in front of her. If she has never seen anything in the world besides the visual depictions by da Vinci, what are the chances she will ever invent Pointillism?

Thankfully, visual artists rarely have to face such a nightmarish reality. They grow up absorbing visual information their entire lives. A study of the masters might steer their artistic interests in a particular direction, but the richness and depth of their visual experience means they will always end up being slightly unique, they will bring something into it which is their own because their visual experience has been their own.

Writers are not always so lucky. Reading is not a basic biological process like seeing. To experience writing is not a basic human function, so it is much simpler to have a straight-jacketed experience of what is and isn’t possible in the written word. If you only read the approved reading list, you’re like that blindfolded artist in the dark room. You might have a great repertoire of expression in your craft, but you will always lack something in the language of it. What we experience is not just about what is the best for us to emulate, it is about weighing the possibilities, being able to recognise what you like and don’t like, what works and doesn’t work. It is about having the entirety of life to draw from in your work, the good, the bad, the weird, the disturbing.

I find it strange to hear lesser actors speak of their difficulty in performing a role far removed from their personal experience, because the solution is a simple one: ACT. That is inherent to the job description. Writers are duty bound to bring a similar imagination to the proceedings, but imagination helps more in expression than in the language of the medium. If you’re a classically trained writer, your limitations in language are defined by all those things you abstained from reading, the things that were somehow beneath you, or maybe even irrelevant to you. By doing so, you gave up the benefit of experiencing all those bad or brilliant metaphors, those ripe or rancid turns of phrase, those grotesque abominations of grammar and those glorious accidents of sentence structure, which might have made perfect sense in that piece of pulp pornography, but no one has ever tried in a computer manual. Simply because they never knew it could be done.

Imagination can take you far, but there are only so many experiments any of us can commit to in a lifetime. The fact of the matter is, the majority of your random experiments will fail. The diamonds in the rough are few and far between and your ability to express anything as a writer will be severely damaged if you are constantly trying to invent over trying to communicate. Which is why you must read as far and wide as you possibly can. Not because it’s good or inspirational, but because people have experimented before you and to ignore the rich treasury of results as to what works and doesn’t in various writing situations is utter madness.

You are what you have never read, because it is what you chose to not read that defines your limitations as a writer, and above all else a writer must be free of limitations. If entire universes are to be birthed within you, if rich characters are to take their first steps in your mind and battle through unforeseeable odds to tell their stories before laying down to eternal slumber, if new ideas are to be born and take root in the hearts of many from the spark set off by your words, you need to be drawing from more than the language of works approved by those who likely never wrote anything themselves. You need to be drawing from the vastness of all existence, or at least as much of it as you can manage to read.

Samir