TNS – The News on Sunday

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He wore a white coat — yes, in bed — and scribbled his words on scraps of cardboard with pieces of blue crayon; two well crafted sentences a day was a full day’s work. If this sounds appallingly decadent, and exactly the sort of life you imagine novelists lead, consider this: he was almost blind — the crayons helped him see what he was writing; the white coat helped reflect more light onto the page at night. Perhaps this is merely apocryphal, but process stories such as these — Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee a day; the German poet, Schiller, would get high on the aroma of rotten apples in order to write — abound in the literary universe, if only to shame lesser writers like me, staring bleakly at a blank screen, the blinking cursor as impatient and accusing as a tapping foot. Sky and spirit both darken; the screen remains incriminatingly bright, unmarred by text. A regular writing day. I hate writing. I love having written. Perhaps Joyce stared despairingly at his cardboard scraps too. Perhaps he stared down his abyss, feeble vision notwithstanding, while I give up too early: avert my bleary eyes and slink off to bed. Perhaps I am too weak-willed for this life. Perhaps I need stronger coffee. Perhaps I need putrid fruit in a bowl on my desk. Perhaps I need to go to writing school, that wholly postmodern phenomenon derided and championed in equal measure. You can’t be taught how to write, goes the most common lament against creative writing programmes; an equally common criticism, somewhat paradoxically, is that the output of MFA graduates tends to be depressingly similar: over-stylised, devoid of historical consciousness. The formal writing programme produces writers who write for other writers, as opposed to a wider audience; this is to be expected, the criticism continues, if you professionalise what is often considered to historically have been a fairly laissez-faire vocation. Structure kills creativity is the underlying argument: the author, Eric Bennett, who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, wrote in the excellent collection MFA vs NYC that the programme was like “a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins.” A confession before I attempt to argue otherwise: a regular writing day does not involve looking at a blank screen all day. It involves doing just about anything else I can before I muster up the courage to face the screen. (This is why Hemingway reportedly advised wrapping up a writing day mid-sentence, so that you can plunge right back into the flow the next morning). This is a problem, says the poet, Mary Oliver, because writing is a courtship between the heart and the mind: “If Romeo and Juliet had made their appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.” Read also: The province of the fearless Great, I thought, when I first read this: if love was conducted the old-fashioned way, I would’ve failed at that too. But Oliver does cleverly complicate the conventional structure-versus-creativity binary. Perhaps the true value of a writing workshop or an MFA is just that: a promise that you make to yourself, to keep showing up — a commitment device, in the parlance of economics. Perhaps the mind will learn some things along the way, about adverbs and second-person narration and the banality of echoing dialogue, (and perhaps you might have to eventually unlearn a great deal of things, as one often needs to with formal education) but mostly it is a great, grand gesture towards the heart — or soul, or whatever part of the psyche it is that produces writerly magic. I’m here now, heart. Your turn — show me what you’ve got. [post_title] => Structure vs creativity [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => structure-vs-creativity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-04-21 17:00:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-21 12:00:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81866 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81870 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:24:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:24:36 [post_content] => “Thank you, ma’am. Have a good one.” Men and women behind the checkout counter tossed this farewell greeting at me each time I went grocery shopping in the US. ‘One what?’ I always wanted to ask, but the imperatives of sociability forced me to smile politely and respond with the predictable ‘you too’ instead. It was just a meaningless phrase of courtesy, I knew, meant to lubricate the tedium of everyday interactions with a dash of affected cheer, but something peevish within me demanded better: a real interaction. A refusal to utter rote sentences, even churlishness would have fared better with me, for at least it would have had the ring of authenticity, but everywhere I went they all soldiered on with barely concealed resentment at their thankless and low-paying jobs, resolutely spouting stock phrases that would help them keep their positions. Good morning. How may I help you ma’am? Have a good one! Ding. Customer service in the US is so standardised you would think salespeople are all sent to the same greeting factory from where they come out perfect little role models of sales perfection. At least in word, if not deed. In Pakistan, by comparison, salesmanship runs the gamut from downright ‘take it or leave it’ to ‘Chhotay, hurry up and get a 7Up for baaji!’ When the service is bad, it’s very very bad, but when it’s good, it’s dazzling. That’s what comes from lack of structure: failure, difficulty, but also singing success, unfettered by pre-determined notions of correctness. Structure creates the English cricket team: stolid, dependable…dull. Growing up laissez-faire on streets playing tape-ball cricket produces Wasim Akram: original, innovative…thrilling. Much creativity depends on the freedom to travel unhampered on seemingly useless paths. My friend, a corporate man, thinks summer holidays are a left-wing conspiracy to hamper children from learning optimally all year round. I feel summer holidays are when children truly get to ‘learn’, by devoting themselves to pursuits that ‘structure’ otherwise never allows. Ask a reader and they will pay their greatest debt of gratitude to languid summer afternoons of reading whatever they could get a hold of — a world where parental structure loosened up to allow for passionate indulgence, a life beyond a ‘time table’. More than school libraries and unorthodox literature teachers, the slow days of summer allowed for a deep dive into creative pastimes. It was this lack of structure that created the adventurous, the daredevilish, the fun. [box type="shadow" align="alignright" class="red_lines" ]The other great stifler of innovative thought is organisational structure. To stay within an organisation you have to fall in line with its ideals, or else get booted.[/box] The Greek philosopher, Socrates, did not have a university to aid his thought. He took his philosophy on truth to the common Greek public and sharpened his skills through seemingly endless, unstructured conversations. The tales of a thousand and one nights were started by one person, picked up by another and stitched together in a looping narrative that derives its magic from disjointed strolls through chaotic streets. Over a hundred years ago, Frederick W Taylor’s scientific management inspired both Henry Ford and Vladimir Lenin to break down every job action into small steps that could be measured and analysed so as to create improved efficiency. That’s where structure works best, when human beings are needed for machine-like functions that require precision and repetition, but with the industrial and computer revolutions those tasks have been relegated to machinery. Human beings now need creativity to be relevant. And people who think only of becoming cogs in a machine are bound to become redundant. The other great stifler of innovative thought is organisational structure. To stay within an organisation you have to fall in line with its ideals, or else get booted. These are the most fertile grounds for entrepreneurs and innovators, people who refuse to accept the existing structure for what it is, and set out to break the mould. Steve Jobs thought people needed computer machines to be more beautiful, more simple, yet Microsoft with its clunkers, was thriving. Nobody seemed to care for Jobs’ ideals of aesthetics and ease. What was there was selling, the structure worked, what was the point of reinventing the wheel? Read also: The sorrows in between And yet through the force of will of just one individual the existing structure was smashed. Suddenly it seemed people had wanted simplicity and beauty all along. But there’s a catch-22 here, Jobs himself created the most well-oiled organisation with the most draconian culture. Every minion in the company had to know his place and wasn’t allowed to challenge the leader’s vision. You had to be part of the most rigorous structure in order to practically implement the great man’s innovation and creativity. For all of creativity’s claim to free-wheeling spiritedness, in the longer run it needs structure to flourish. True innovation though, is the province of the fearless, those who stand apart and aren’t bogged down by outside ideas of what constitutes as normal. [post_title] => The province of the fearless [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => province-fearless [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-04-21 17:00:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-21 12:00:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81870 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81868 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:23:45 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:23:45 [post_content] => This is definitely going to move away from the much-discussed, rather strained relationship between creativity and structure. It will look at life which is much larger and defined by a lot more than these two arbitrary formulations. Or maybe it will look at two lives, a mother’s and a child’s. The life of the child must take precedence as it did in their lives. The child was not prepared for a normal school and the mother did not know of a life for her child outside a normal ‘structured’ school. The school turned out to be everything it was not supposed to, for the child. It tried to teach him in a way he wasn’t prepared for. The school came to the conclusion he was under-performing. It convinced the child he was under-performing. The mother too stayed concerned why the child could not perform. What no one realised was that the child was unhappy at school and the way they were all dealing with him was making him unhappier. They did not know how this labelling of underperformance in academics would shape the personality of this child for the next many many years. In his early years, the child would come home and ask his mother why a period in school lasted for thirty minutes and why couldn’t it be forty-minute long instead. If he had ten more minutes, he tried to convince his mother, he would be able to copy the lesson on board and do all other chores that were expected of him. Truth was that he preferred to watch out of the window than listen to what was being taught. Time did not mean a thing for him. At home-time, the child stood alone, friendless, telling his parents to move quickly to the car and be away from school as fast as they could. At home, the mother and child struggled with books and copies, Math and Science. English was an exception and the English teachers were somehow special. The child was a spelling wizard. And perhaps Geography too where he could fill the maps with closed eyes. At least one Geography teacher was convinced this child needed special attention and he would sparkle. She could not bypass the system, the so-called structure. It is really difficult trying to contain one whole life, where each day is a huge load, in a certain number of words. Time passed. At the parent-teacher meetings, the teachers would tell the mother how well-behaved the child was. In an all-boys school, that apparently was their only concern. No teacher understood the anomaly that a disciplined child represented. There were rare moments too; the child could transform once he was on the school stage to perform. The lines that were hard to comprehend in a classroom were memorised with ease in the form of a script. But the burden of underperformance in the class remained too heavy to bear. He did not let anything distract him or make him happy, not even dramatics. He chose sadness and sadness chose him. The structure crushed him. The school that showed a bit of flexibility in smaller classes became a brute force in O-levels, refusing to accommodate children who could not bring good grades and earn a big name for it. It ruthlessly kicked out children who failed as it routinely did. The child could not have been happier than being pulled out of school. The struggle of the mother and the child, in fact of the entire family, is on. Try selling the structure versus creativity debate to this mother and many others like her and they’ll tell you what a load of crap we are talking about. Meanwhile, this mother who is in the habit of thinking is forced to recall her own growing up years, in public schools, colleges and universities; of a system structured to produce unquestioning minds and how difficult it was to unlearn those lessons and discover and bring some meaning into one’s own lives. Creativity was a far cry. But for now, she wants to stay focused on the child. She would not squander this chance to talk about it more because it allows her to speak for all the other children whose abilities are put in question by the rigidity of structures. Diagnoses like attention deficit disorders and the attendant medicines (them too for the privileged few), the huge dropout ratio and the incapacity of society to absorb these hundreds and thousands of kids are all problems that keep bothering the mother. She is convinced the schools ought to change. They must all rest on one foundation — make and keep the children happy. Once they are happy, learning will automatically follow, the mother thinks. She also wants to share what ultimately worked for her own child — immense amounts of confidence-boosting that must begin with one’s immediate family. The sorrows are deep, ingrained. You need to keep trying, with love that is unconditional. There will be good days followed by bad days and may be worse. Healing after all takes time. Read also: Music of the spheres As for schools, obsessed with structure as they are, the mother’s advice is to grab those children who fall behind, lift them, cheer them up, tell them they can do it and they will. They must train the teachers for this and the teachers must train themselves, to break the structures at times, to bend the rules at other times. The teachers’ potential in transforming children’s lives must not be underestimated. So if you ask this mother and her child what these last twenty years have taught them, their answer would probably be: make the structures of your education system creative enough to accommodate diversity, because as of now they’re pretty inflexible. [post_title] => The sorrows in between [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => sorrows [to_ping] => [pinged] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/music-spheres/ [post_modified] => 2018-04-24 00:39:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-23 19:39:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81868 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 1 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81872 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:22:05 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:22:05 [post_content] => Well, creativity is the Holy Grail that we all go in search of and rarely find or achieve. For starters, perhaps a distinction has been made between art and craft in wanting to understand the complex debate. It is assumed that the tools have to be mastered to be able to be effectively creative, for if one does not have command over tools how would creativity be expressed or take any objective shape? Some may say in retaliation that it is the craft or the mastery over it that limits a person’s array of creativity. It is a very difficult question to answer as it is impossible to pinpoint creativity. The same is the issue with originality, as to what is original or how original, is there originality in toto or is it originality in stages or only in parts? Structure could imply systems of feelings or it may mean the rational codes that mankind has so painstakingly evolved. In our traditional pedagogical set-up of music there has been great emphasis on riaz (practice), the implication being that there should be total control and command over surs. Once this has been achieved through ceaseless practice, even the most accomplished of musicians then leave the rest to what they call bhaag — or stroke of good luck or even pure chance. They do not draw a necessary connection between rigourous practice and its fulfillment or a transformation into an art form. To talk of creativity would yet be a step ahead. But what does being subservient to the structures imply — that the surs are limited in number and there can be no music beyond these, but many have tried to create music through atonality, or even by distorting the application of the sur? They have just been playing around with intonation — the way a note is applied which is culturally specific. In our recent history musicians have attempted to break the structure by being independent of the raag’s strictures which they may find limiting, experimenting with form, mostly saying goodbye to the various progressions, from the exacting elaboration of the raag in various tempos, while just latching on to the song format which the coy listener is easily attracted to. They want to make the lyrics more in synch with the contemporary sensibility. Then in reaction to the outside/Western influences, abandoning the single melodic line in wanting to supplement it with some kind of a harmonic structure. These days the entire thrust has been not on the production of natural sounds but on the immense possibility of playing around with computer generated sounds, which can be engineered far beyond the scope of natural sounds. Once that has been done, the next step is to create some order or system in it that may conform to a conventional definition of music. Borrowing wholeheartedly from other sources now can fall under the umbrella of experimentation and innovation and the easiness of it all is not an inhibiting factor in all this. Jazz and rap have been rampant after Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Actually, music round the world is beginning to sound alike which was or has never been the case and the traditional musical structures are being infiltrated with new sounds and rhythmic systems. Many of it is experimentation for the sake of it, and results in individual initiative as against the collective response which may be still conditioned by conventional responses. Perhaps in the ancient world or that world that still casts its magical shadow over us, creativity was based or happened to be pure inspiration. It were the muses that took hold and in that possessed state whatever was said, or sung or painted fell under creativity. And it appeared that inspiration was otherworldly becoming worldly through a human agency. The human being was only a messenger or a source of transmission and not the originator — only a conduit and to use a contemporary phrase, a facilitator. The less his or her person was involved the more original or purer it was supposed to it. The involvement of the individual only seemed to be a corrupting ploy with the role of adding or editing, not totally desirable for it sullied the pristine sheen and marred it with human intention and limitation. The ultimate function of music was “sur ka giyan” to have a deeper bonding with sound or an organic oneness with “kun fayakoon”, or “ahat” or “nawai saroosh” or “the music of the spheres.” For them what mattered most was not innovation or experimentation but the internalisation of just one sur, the tonic note which was called “ishwar” because of its entirety. Of course, then there has been a debate, whether creativity really exists or not. Or what is meant by creativity, a more nineteenth century idea fuelled whole-heartedly by the Romantics and in the later centuries a kind of a trade-off occurred with its lessening of importance. Read also: Straitjackets of rationality  It is now asserted with greater confidence that actually it is all a construct, which in other words holds the implication that it is not a discovery but rather a man-made contraption in a manner of understanding. If there is one construct then there can be many others as well. It is related to the race, the people, the history rather than some metaphysical entity that needs to be acquisitioned. But one has seen all this to happen, even if the divine and the metaphysical appellations are removed in this contemporary age of rationality and causal figuring out of thought, action and even emotion. There is a heightened state that is either transcendental or elevating or transporting, call it what you may, but it is a state different from the ordinary. Perhaps it is the same division that exists between love/labour and inspiration/perspiration, and to many it is difficult to draw a line between the two. [post_title] => Music of the spheres [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => music-spheres [to_ping] => [pinged] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/straitjackets-rationality/ [post_modified] => 2018-04-21 17:01:36 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-21 12:01:36 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81872 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81875 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:20:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:20:11 [post_content] => “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” ―Pablo Picasso Creativity is everywhere unless you are Plato and you want to banish poets and artists. According to Susan Sontag, the original function of art was “incantatory”. People used their own bodies as art instruments, singing, chest thumping, painting the picture of their own hands on cave walls. Art was something supernatural and magical. Through art, you could invoke the spirits living above and around ‘primitive’ human habitations to intervene in the worldly affairs. A good performance of magic could kill your enemy. Mimesis was power. Create an image of your enemy in the shape of a doll, sing some good songs to cast a spell and your crops would grow abundantly and your enemy would wither away. Then came Plato who made poets and painters justify their work and their existence or they would be expelled from his ideal republic. Since then, artists have to explain what their work signifies. Interpretation is the end of magic. The spell is over. Rationality has laid bare every haunted corner of the forest and every grove is catalogued in the taxonomy of Linnaeus. The witches and fairies are no longer there; therefore, any human being can walk into a forest with a chainsaw and massacre the trees. The so-called ‘superstitious’ people were more eco-friendly than Platonic rationality. No wonder, Karl Popper considered Plato, Hegel, and Marx as the enemies of an open society. But Popper believes in falsifiability. What cannot be falsifiable is not scientific for him. Once again, art, magic and superstition need to explain themselves in the court of reason. Rationality, as it has been unleashed on the world after the Enlightenment, has expanded the reach of violence to those nooks in dark forests where churrails and picchhalperis lived. Only art can undo the disasters of rationality. There is no justification for seeking an explanation of a work of art. Life is Dionysian as it is. Apollonian structures only stifle it. For Michel de Certeau, the crayon doodles of a child on the pages of a government-approved textbook are to be celebrated as the child’s way of writing back to the government. Everybody can paint like Jackson Pollock and everybody can bring Duchamp’s Fountain to the gallery. There is nothing to it except the will to be free of the straitjackets of rationality. [box type="shadow" align="alignright" class="red_lines" ]Grades make students competitors instead of collaborators. Grades are like private property and you have to keep up with the Joneses. Some educational systems have tried to undo the damage caused by these institutional attitudes.[/box] This view is even supported by rational methods of studying these things. In a TED talk which has been viewed more than 50 million times, Ken Robinson has argued that every child is a genius and an artist before these qualities are killed by schools. The test is very simple and it is reported in the Journal of Royal Society of Medicine. The test is this: how many uses can you think of a paperclip? If you are a creative genius, you will come up with more than 200 uses of a paperclip and you will even be flexible when you imagine its size. The findings of this test are quite revealing: “A longitudinal study of kindergarten children measured 98 per cent of them at genius level in divergent thinking. Five years later, when they were aged 8 to 10 years, those at genius level had dropped to 50 per cent. After another five years, the number of divergent thinking geniuses had fallen further still” (J R Soc Med, 2011, Volume 104, page 391). It means the demands of the educational structure kill creativity in a majority of children. You have to learn how to not let education kill your creativity, that uneducated, raw Dionysian spirit that is within every unschooled child. Why does education kill creativity? It is because it fosters creativity-killing attitudes. Let us try to make a list of anti-creativity attitudes of educational institutions. Firstly, education can close the natural openness of the human mind by instilling the notion that there is only ONE correct answer to every question. This can produce intolerance for all those who want to show any flexibility towards those answers which are considered socially or structurally as “wrong answers.” Secondly, education can kill the spirit to explore alternatives because students witness their teachers punishing those who have produced ‘wrong’ answers and then teachers are seen rewarding those who have the ‘right’ answers. Thirdly, both learning and play are structured in schools as if time were an institutional matter. Read also: Editorial Fourthly, grades make students competitors instead of collaborators. Grades are like private property and you have to keep up with the Joneses. Some educational systems have tried to undo the damage caused by these institutional attitudes by removing grading and degrees altogether. For example, College de France, which was established in 1530 and is the most prestigious educational institution of France, offers no degrees and maintains no enrolment records. All lectures are open to public and professors can share the result of their creative inquiries in 12 lectures a year. The learners come there if they are interested in a topic and are not punished or rewarded for understanding the lecture the right or the wrong way and there is no competition between the learners. Anyone who overemphasises the importance of structures for creativity should study the work of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid who have even taught the art of painting to elephants. [post_title] => Straitjackets of rationality [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => straitjackets-rationality [to_ping] => [pinged] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/editorial-124/ [post_modified] => 2018-04-21 17:01:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-21 12:01:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81875 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 2 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81874 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:18:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:18:52 [post_content] => This perhaps is the eternal debate — structure or creativity, structure of creativity, structure at the expense of creativity or vice versa. What is ironic is that a simple Google search leads you to corporate companies having this discussion more than writers or artists or musicians. Creativity in the modern capitalist world is understood in terms of innovations leading to nothing less than windfall profits. Understandable, no doubt. But most stable institutions, it is said, cannot work without structures. They could be weak or strong but there is a solid foundation on which they try to build the edifice. Take schools for example or colleges or universities. A classroom is the best example of a man-made structure, designed almost to perfection. And yet we have endless discussions and TED talks on how schools kill creativity. It is therefore important to understand what we mean by both structure and creativity. Structure in the case of visual arts would mean the tools, the size of the artwork or anything to do with form; in music it would mean the sur; some would argue the same for writing of all kinds. Most people agree that you need to have a good knowledge of structure in order to be able to defy it or bend it. No creative person can operate in a vacuum. But then there are examples of sportspeople who have experimented on the basis of their sheer talent and scaled new heights. The proponents of structure would say that such examples are occasional sparks while consistency comes with knowing and following structures. Read also: Structure vs creativity In today’s Special Report, we have tried to make some sense of this complex debate. It’s interesting to bring this into the domain of journalism which many believe is a relatively unstructured profession, where people from all kinds of disciplines find it easy to converge and flourish. Some even manage to become creative journalists. [post_title] => Editorial [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => editorial-124 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-04-22 01:57:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-04-21 20:57:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tns.thenews.com.pk/?p=81874 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [format_content] => ) ) [post_count] => 6 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 81866 [post_author] => 29 [post_date] => 2018-04-22 03:26:26 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-21 22:26:26 [post_content] => James Joyce wrote his books in bed, it is said, flopped over on his stomach. He wore a white coat — yes, in bed — and scribbled his words on scraps of cardboard with pieces of blue crayon; two well crafted sentences a day was a full day’s work. If this sounds appallingly decadent, and exactly the sort of life you imagine novelists lead, consider this: he was almost blind — the crayons helped him see what he was writing; the white coat helped reflect more light onto the page at night. Perhaps this is merely apocryphal, but process stories such as these — Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee a day; the German poet, Schiller, would get high on the aroma of rotten apples in order to write — abound in the literary universe, if only to shame lesser writers like me, staring bleakly at a blank screen, the blinking cursor as impatient and accusing as a tapping foot. Sky and spirit both darken; the screen remains incriminatingly bright, unmarred by text. A regular writing day. I hate writing. I love having written. Perhaps Joyce stared despairingly at his cardboard scraps too. Perhaps he stared down his abyss, feeble vision notwithstanding, while I give up too early: avert my bleary eyes and slink off to bed. Perhaps I am too weak-willed for this life. Perhaps I need stronger coffee. Perhaps I need putrid fruit in a bowl on my desk. Perhaps I need to go to writing school, that wholly postmodern phenomenon derided and championed in equal measure. You can’t be taught how to write, goes the most common lament against creative writing programmes; an equally common criticism, somewhat paradoxically, is that the output of MFA graduates tends to be depressingly similar: over-stylised, devoid of historical consciousness. The formal writing programme produces writers who write for other writers, as opposed to a wider audience; this is to be expected, the criticism continues, if you professionalise what is often considered to historically have been a fairly laissez-faire vocation. Structure kills creativity is the underlying argument: the author, Eric Bennett, who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, wrote in the excellent collection MFA vs NYC that the programme was like “a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins.” A confession before I attempt to argue otherwise: a regular writing day does not involve looking at a blank screen all day. It involves doing just about anything else I can before I muster up the courage to face the screen. (This is why Hemingway reportedly advised wrapping up a writing day mid-sentence, so that you can plunge right back into the flow the next morning). This is a problem, says the poet, Mary Oliver, because writing is a courtship between the heart and the mind: “If Romeo and Juliet had made their appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.” Read also: The province of the fearless Great, I thought, when I first read this: if love was conducted the old-fashioned way, I would’ve failed at that too. But Oliver does cleverly complicate the conventional structure-versus-creativity binary. Perhaps the true value of a writing workshop or an MFA is just that: a promise that you make to yourself, to keep showing up — a commitment device, in the parlance of economics. Perhaps the mind will learn some things along the way, about adverbs and second-person narration and the banality of echoing dialogue, (and perhaps you might have to eventually unlearn a great deal of things, as one often needs to with formal education) but mostly it is a great, grand gesture towards the heart — or soul, or whatever part of the psyche it is that produces writerly magic. I’m here now, heart. Your turn — show me what you’ve got. 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