Tag: ideas

0

Influence

I am often asked in interviews about my influences as a writer. Who are the writers who have influenced me? This has become an even more common question since I started writing crime fiction, as, I suspect, interviewers try to get a sense of my books, or give a sense of them to readers who haven't read me. All well and good. But in fact it's a question I've never felt entirely comfortable with. It's the one I drag my feet over and leave till last, like the homework you always left till late on a Sunday night, somehow hoping it would magically disappear. And I usually come up with a list of people who I think may have influenced my writing, trying to answer honestly, but more often than not simply mentioning the last few writers I've read and enjoyed, or whatever jumps out at me from my bookshelves at the time. It's not that I don't think I've been influenced by anyone. I have. But who exactly? And in what way? In effect every book I've ever read has exerted an influence, whether I've liked it or not, feeding into the general pool of stuff that's floating around somewhere inside me. The fact is, I've always thought that writing should come primarily from living and experience, not from other writing. It's what happens and how I digest it that provides the bulk of source material for me. Not what I get from other books, (unless it's straight information). I've always known this, but have never really had the courage to say so, always falling into the trap of thinking that if a question is asked, it must have an answer. If I'm asked for my influences, I should provide a list of them. But today I decided to change that, thanks to a passage I read in an inspirational book called IMPRO, by Keith Johnstone. In it Johnstone talks about his time as a play-reader at the Royal Court Theatre in the 50s. The vast majority of plays he rejected on the grounds that they were 'pseudo-Beckett' or 'fake-Pinter' etc. Only plays that came from the 'author's own experience' were considered. 'It wasn't a matter of lack of talent,' Johnstone says, 'but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.' Sometimes it takes something like this - a comment or quote - to help see clearly what you yourself really think. I'm there with Johnstone. Which just means I've been influenced by something I've read... But I like these sorts of contradictions. Anyway, next time I'm asked a out my influences, I may just say what I really think.

4

Quality, not quantity

I've finally worked out why I loathe the dominant 'safety culture' of our society so much. It's not just that it limits and restricts, curtailing our need for adventure. Or that it manipulates and conditions (as opposed to educating) us into certain patterns of behaviour. Or that it just makes life dull, giving far too much power to headmistressy busy-body types to tell us what is or isn't acceptable behaviour. Or that it reduces a sense of self responsibility, based instead on the laughable idea that someone else is always to blame (and thereby sue-able) for our misadventures. Or that it infantilises an entire society. No. What really gets me about the 'safety' obsession of today is that it assumes that the objective of life is to live as long as possible. That's it. Nothing more. In other words, that quantity overrides quality entirely. In a society where people live relatively short lives (say an average of only 30 or 40 years) you would be forgiven for thinking that longevity was something desirable in itself, and that anyone who made it to 60+ was probably doing something right at least. Make it to 80+ and you would be considered semi-divine. The Anti-Pope Benedict XIII was almost 90 before he finally gave up the ghost. In the XIV century it was taken as a sign by his supporters that he had been right all along in his stance against Rome. But in a world where life expectancy has risen so much, dying in your 90s or even later is no longer note-worthy: it is becoming the norm (at least in the developed world). So you would think that in such circumstances we would focus less on simply staying alive and more on giving our lives some sort of meaning, or real quality. Yet the reverse is the case. Hence all the laws brought in 'for our own safety', trying to smooth out all the rough edges of life, to help us slither unhindered towards an ever more distant end. All this does, as I think we sense, is to kill us at some level. We may be physically alive, but what kind of life are we actually permitted to forge for ourselves? What is the point of living so long if you never really have a chance to live at all? As a society we have been blinded by greed, perhaps - a greed for more life. Like a kid in a sweet shop, we have a taste of something we like (longevity) and we want more of it, ever fearful that it might be taken away from us. But sweets in themselves are not food. And life should be measured in more than simply years. How awful, we cry, when a talented artist dies young. What a waste. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

0

Speeding up

It's not just that we feel that life is getting faster. Biologically it IS getting faster. I've just found an extraordinary quote in an article in the London Review of Books on The Origin of Our Species, by Chris Stringer. Steven Mithen writes: "[Stringer] stresses that we are continuing to evolve... Indeed, changes in individual DNA sequences suggest that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years. We are evolving a hundred times faster than we were when we split from the lineage of the chimpanzees around six million years ago."

1

No news

Turn off the news. Just turn it off.

Nothing is more guaranteed to chip away at your energy, life-spirit and optimism.

It's a drip drip effect of poison, slowly and steadily infecting its way inside. We know how it works, how it appeals to our primitive desires for drama and excitement - substitutes for attention, but very poor ones at that. And yet still we come back to it, switching on the radio, the television at set times, in a ritualised behaviour pattern ('Oh, I'll just watch the news and have a cup of tea.'). The very thought of living without the 'news' can even make us feel quite empty, depressed even.

That's because we're addicted. It works like a drug.

I know. I used to work in the news media. I used to feel strange and lost without some news input everyday. Yet at the same time I hated it, and how it was making me stressed and anxious all the time. Which is exactly the same feeling as having a drug addiction - you both want and hate the drug that has taken over your life.

But now everyone is supposed to be a journalist. Not content with having a small clique of addicts, the 'news' tries to suck us all in, encouraging us to take part in it by sending in our photos, videos and comments, with the promise of a few seconds of that other drug that has quickly eaten into us in recent years - 'fame' - if our stuff is chosen to be aired.

Remember what it used to be like going on holiday? You went abroad, not knowing the local language too well. And cut off from your own newspapers and radio stations, (and there was no internet back then) you lived in a curiously blissful state, unaware of the 'world events' going on elsewhere. I think that was one of the crucial things about a foreign holiday - you entered a different space in many ways, and, importantly, one cut off from the angst-machine of the 'news'.

Then, when you came back, you picked up a newspaper and found that not much had changed in the fortnight you'd been away. Life kept rumbling on. And you thought about ways of trying to maintain something of the relaxed frame of mind you brought back with you from holiday, but never quite managed it. Everyday life, problems, worries, the 'news' - all there, bringing you down again.

The thing is, there are problems in life that can't easily be dealt with, or brushed away. But we can turn off the news. It is within our control.