creativity relaunched

A few weeks ago I started a course called, gloriously, "Brand Journalism and Corporate Storytelling".  Any guesses what that might be?  I'm not a storyteller, but I've got to do with brands in the corporate world.  I work in a marketing department and communicate products, brand and company.  Telling stories is one way of generating interest, raising awareness, getting the word out; but it's more than that.  Storytelling is the latest attempt to rise above the noise of too many ads, too much obvious marketing and too many jaded consumers with ad-blockers and no mind for the 10001st message targeted at them.

The first module of three days focused exclusively on strategy.  What's your core story, what themes do you want to cover, what topics fit those themes, and how can they be illustrated with stories?  How to write these stories was covered in module 2, which ended today.

Storytelling is creative writing, something I've dabbled in before, without much success.  Back then, at Imperial, I was pushed to free expression in the spirit of the surrealists and to ponder my identity.  This time, the formal aspects of writing stood center stage.  It's been quite edifying.

I had not heard of the universality of the hero story, preserved in its structure across time and cultures.  I had not considered the story as simply being something that happens to someone, told with the purpose of enriching the reader.  Formulate this purpose (including something and someone) convincingly and a passable story will result, the teacher asserted.  A certain way with words is probably still required, but seeing building blocks, rules and patterns felt rather reassuring.  Maybe I can do that.

To assess the degree of formality in what I consider good non-fiction storytelling, I decided to look at last week's Economist.  How do the first sentences of articles set the scene?  How much of protagonist, place, action and scenery is in them?

• As Italians trickled back to the cities from holidays on the coast and in the sun-baked countryside, the scene was set this week for what promises to be a difficult autumn.
• Last year, Saudi Arabia's young and powerful crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, pulverized Awamiyah, a rebellious Shia town near the eastern coast.
• A row of health workers in blue gowns and face masks sit at tables outside the tin-roofed bungalow that was the home to Kambale Vincent, one of 75 people who have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo this month.
• A year ago, insurgents armed mostly with makeshift weapons attacked a series of police posts in Myanmar's Rakhine state, killing a dozens security personnel
• Tucked away in a corner of Gerrard Street, in the heart of London's Chinatown, three middle-aged Chine women sit on the ground, their legs tightly crossed, in silent meditation.
• When loudspeakers in Kouzi, a village in the eastern province of Shandong, blared out urgent warnings of floodwaters heading towards them, residents were anxious, but they did not panic.
• Prosecutors are still investigating what caused Genoa's Morandi bridge to collapse on August 14th, killing 43 people.

This looks as if there were a common theme.  People, place and vivid detail – how hard can it be.  Turns out these are only seven beginnings out of maybe 100 article in the magazine.  The rest didn't follow the template.  There might be more to creativity than ticking boxes.  Good thing that there's also six more module to my course.

structure

It is an indicator of how dramatically the time available for my leisure has contracted – though not the topic of this post – that I still haven't finished reading the New Yorker I bought when the year was less than a fortnight old. It had a lady in a green fur on the cover and in it the usual mix of miscellany and eclectica, nothing that would immediately catch my attention but which would, with rare certainty in an unstable world, entertain me.

Browsing through it in the newsagent before making my way to Kensington High St. for the workweek-ending coffee, I noticed an article with illustrations of a rather unusual kind. Besides the characteristic cartoons that are scattered throughout each issue, photos or topical drawings often anchor an article in the reader's perception. The one I had in front of me was different. It contained seven diagrams of maps in various states of abstraction, labeled Fig. 1 through 7 in the style of scientific communications.

The essay was called Structure and had to do with writing. I was intrigued because I'm suffering from an inability to resolve a paradox: On the one hand, I'm a very structured person. I love and need structure. My work revolves around determining (protein) structures. To make sense of the world around me, I try to put it into a structure I can understand. This comes naturally to me.

On the other hand, when I write, the anticipated structure of the final product is no guidance. For this blog, most of the time I sit down with only a vague idea of what I want to write about. Random thoughts cross my mind. If I'm lucky, they transmogrify into sentences. Over time, fragments of paragraphs fill the screen, an expanse of incoherence. In a laborious process that always takes much longer than it should, I expand and rearrange the bits until they finally coalesce into something I can accept onto my blog. While I'm frequently happy with the results, especially later when rereading triggers memories whose existence I had forgotten, I'm not at all happy with the process, which seems haphazard and wasteful.

Longer pieces, like those that end up on my website, are created differently and sometimes benefit from a more structured approach. I might, especially for the write-up of a trip, start with a list of encounters to relate and places to describe. I might know what I want to write about. That's in the nature of the subject. But the process of writing still occurs by trial and error, and I have no idea of how to streamline.

The article, by John McPhee, a veteran staff writer (a.k.a. freelancer) of the magazine, doesn't exactly dispense magic. It takes a structured approach for granted and then to the next level. The seven accompanying sketches outline seven increasingly non-linear ways of telling a story, illustrating a quest to get as far away from chronology as possible in something as inherently chronological as a journey. I grew more fascinated by the page.

It's very easy to describe a journey linearly. The result is oftentimes very boring to read and rather unnecessary. The order of events in a journey doesn't have much to do with the understanding of a place that the final written piece should reflect. There's two ways of achieving a coherent narrative: Bruce Chatwin was a great master of modifying reality to match his artistic vision, single-handedly creating the genre of fictionalized travel writing. John McPhee has a different approach. He struggles hard to creatively structure the material he has collected to achieve the perfect fit with what he wants to express. Where to start is the crucial question, followed by where to go next, and the simplified maps that accompanied the article were examples of his answers. They showed merging strands, a spiral and a chaotic back and forth.

How would that look in practice? As it happened, only two months ago did I finish Best American Travel Writing 2005, which contained Tight-Assed River, a window into life and work on a river barge on the Illinois. I struggled reading this. There seemed to be no forward and no back, no today and no tomorrow. The barge would travel up the river one moment and down the next. I was confused and couldn't make sense of what was going on.

Turns out that the materialization of Tight-Assed River is described in great detail in the New Yorker article I've now finished, though I made the connection only very late. Figure 7 shows the barges as little arrows, red going upriver, green going down. John McPhee is mighty proud of his concoction – and it got him into a prestigious anthology – recalling the realization that there would be "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end", the journey an "endless yo-yo" where "a chronological structure would be misleading".

For me, it doesn't work. The non-linearity feels deliberately obfuscating. But that doesn't mean that structured writing isn't for me. I can see little drawings and outlines as being rather helpful, as long as they structure they represent isn't madly unorthodox. Prerequisite for this to work is obviously that the material is already there, in neat little topical piles, ready to be organized along the structure. I won't have the chance to put this into practice anytime soon. There's simply not enough spare time in my life in the moment.

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For those interested in a less-mangled but still far-from-linear narrative by John McPhee, A Fleet of One, a ride-share on a hazmat tanker across the US, is available for free at the New Yorker.

hesitant reclaim

Yesterday I said that I have to reclaim the blog or close it for good. This being a product of my vanity, what I expected from my dear readers was an outcry of shocked indignation. "How can you even think about it?" was the only possible response. Instead, what I got was the valid question of whether I was going to write fiction when I stop blogging, as if that were a foregone conclusion. I'm not going to answer that question. I can't – I simply don't know whether I've got fiction in me.

Taking one step back, I'm not sure yet that the blog needs to go. It's certainly of no use to me in its current form. It doesn't help me develop my writing skills and thus defies its purpose. But instead of shutting it down, I think I can claim it back.

When I said yesterday that the blog was a vanity project, I was right in my choice of words but not in my understanding of the situation. There can be no doubt that I write about myself, but I pick my stories with my readership in mind. Sometimes I choose words, phrases, details or mementoes specifically for one reader or another. To some extent, I'm writing for you who are following faithfully.

What I should be doing instead is taking vanity to the next level, by writing for myself as if no audience existed, taking the blog back to its original idea as a vehicle for my learning by doing. The question is whether I should start a new, anonymous blog to avoid the temptation of falling back into the comfort of talking about myself. But maybe, if I write only for myself, the readership will quickly lose interest and dwindle, and there wouldn't be a difference. I might just try that and see where it takes me.

failure to write

The two types of writing I love most are short stories and travel writing. Travel writing I've done quite a bit of, and I'm rather happy with some of the results. If I had got a lucky break here (when I contacted the Guardian before going to Syria) or there (when I submitted the walk through Hama to a travel writing competition), I might be doing much more of it – and maybe getting something more tangible out of it than the pleasure of remembering good times and sharing them with friends.

On the other hand, my foray into short story writing has been utterly pathetic. When I started attending a semester-long creative writing course last year, I hoped it would open my mind to another world and set me on the path to fictional glory – or at least ability. But I was pretty much lost from the first moment, out of my depth, empty of making up anything. I started two stories whose fragmentary beginnings received a warm response during group critique, but I've been utterly incapable of taking them anywhere.

Tonight, when I should have been sleeping, I pondered the state of the world and a little chess puzzle and suddenly realized with absolute clarity why it is that I suck at fiction writing. My approach is flawed and the blog has to do with it.

This blog was started as a writing exercise. I believe that one's writing can be dramatically improved by dogged persistence. The blog was supposed to be self-inflicted pressure to learn by doing simply by having the feeble nagging of an empty sheet replaced with the reproachful glow of the date of the last post. One week and no activity? How is this a blog when there's nothing happening?

No matter the weak fictionalization – the obscuring of details, the deformation of chronology, the invention of incidents to drive a story, and the avoidance of names – the blog is me. It chronicles, with some artistic license, chosen aspects of my life. It is not entirely autobiographical, but it couldn't be much further from fiction.

What I realized tonight is that the difference between blogging and fiction is in the narrator. In fictionalized blogging, the writer imagines himself as the narrator, even if the story is told in the third person. In proper fiction, the writer imagines himself in the shoes of the narrator, even with a first person narrator. It's what would I do versus what would the character do. It's obvious which approach drives a story forward.

Until tonight, I was fully subscribed to the dictum that all fiction is autobiographical. It is true that there are often strong aspects of the author's biography in fictional writing, probably most of the time. But that doesn't necessarily make the writing autobiographical. A good writer fills the characters of a story with elements of his biography because that's what he knows best, but he is not the character.

In my blog, I'm always in character. I realize that this fictionalization thing has been nothing but a lame excuse. It lets me continue with a blog that does nothing for my fiction writing ambitions, an effort that, if anything, is detrimental to them by sucking my energies into a black hole of pointlessness.

To generate fiction, a writer has to leave the characters he has created. He has to let go of them lest they become a collection of surprisingly dull alter egos. The writer must stop imagining realities alternative to his own and start simply imagining, letting invented but convincing characters drive the story.

This blog's original purpose was to get me started as a writer, to get me comfortable with language, ideas and expression. It has done that, but I have long hit a wall. I'm not making any progress anymore. My blog has degenerated into little more than a vanity project, my fifteen minutes of fame twice a week. Even to myself, is just like any other blog.

Is it time to reclaim the blog – or abandon it for good?

characters

Creative writing hinges on characters. Stories rise and fall with them. More than clarity of language, more than the fire of the plot, more than the description of the setting, it is the credibility of the characters that makes or breaks a story. There are some basic tenets of how to illustrate characters – by their own thoughts and words, in monolog and dialog; by the words of other characters; by objects and behaviors ascribed to the character; by conflict that arises; by plain narrative.

But the compelling drawing of a character is not only in direct words, and a character rests not only in what the writer consciously commits to paper. It is in innuendo and allusion, in possibilities of a future and in the imagination of a past. Most of that happens in the mind of the reader. It can be argued that the reader will only pick up what has been put before him, that he can only read what has existed in the writer's mind.

On the other hand, there's the concept of the death of the author, rather dear to me in its subversive logic. It is said that each piece of writing only comes into existence through the reader, that each reader turns a piece of writing into something highly individual, interpreting, judging, feeling. Each reader makes the material his own. This implied supremacy of the reader, at least what regards to the enjoying of a piece of writing, doesn't excuse the writer because only a successful writer can die. Only with successful writing is the reader willing, even enthusiastic, to take the piece beyond what's in the words.

Successful in this context means good, which takes us back to the first point: the character must be compelling. It must be consistent, even in its contradictions, and powerful, even when it is weak. It doesn't have to be comprehensive, but it has to be convincing. The reader likes, even demands, to imagine, to refine the character, to personalize it, to make it his own. If the character is convincing as a person, the reader is willing to accept flaws in its design, though the writer couldn't do worse than take this as an excuse for shortcuts.

No matter how one see's the position of the writer, the character in all its details must exist in the writer's imagination before the process of writing can begin. At the beginning of a novel, a scaffold is fine, a sketch of a person, the roughest of outlines, because as the plot advances, the blanks will be filled, the character be refined and the picture become more convincing.
In a short story, especially if it is only a few pages long, all the characters must be completely preformatted. There is no room for improvisation. They must have names and professions, builds, hair color and ages, histories, dreams and ambitions. They wear clothes that help define them, have quirks that give them sharpness and depth. Even if none of this is mentioned, even if the characters are nameless and poorly described, their names and descriptions must exist in the writer's conception.

The writer must know his characters inside out and identify with them. Even if action and reaction will only later convey characteristics, these characteristics must be established at the outset in the writer’s mind. Otherwise no believable character will result. The writer must care, from the beginning, even if he passionately loathes the character because otherwise, again, the character won't progress beyond one-dimensionality, contours and silhouettes.

Good writers are thus deeply compassionate, people's people if you will, or passionate misanthropes, noticing every annoying detail of a persona and building characters from that. If the writer's imagination isn't clear and concrete, the descriptions will ring hollow and fake and the suggested actions and behaviors lack in justification. The characters won't go beyond simple caricature and appear inconsistent, artificial, ridiculous.

For me, the creation of character is the biggest step to make in creative writing, the highest barrier to break. If find it frankly daunting. One cannot simply sit down and start writing, seeing in astonished disbelief how the story unfolds – as I frequently do on this blog. Instead, one has to have a plan, one needs to know the characters. On the blog I know the character as well. It is a version of me that I choose to project. A story is different.

I am not a dreamer, I don't concoct fantasy worlds from which I can pluck the most bizarre or most banal figures to turn into characters and populate stories with. So how do I do it? Creativity doesn't exist in a void. Nothing is new, nothing comes from nowhere. Everything is a permutation of something that was. I go through life with open eyes and ears, pick up oddities and conjecture background and dreams of people I encounter.

It's impossible that there wouldn't be enough material, but the next step is still hard, appearing insurmountably steep: Combining these fragments, these shreds of invention into composites that I can believe in and that I can then, in turn, ask the reader to believe. Three months ago, I suggested a tag for all writing that owed more to creative doodling than to the exploits of my public persona. This tag found use exactly five times and then disappeared, in line with my withering enthusiasm and confidence at the creative writing workshop.

Over the last few weeks, instruction has become much more structured than it was before, analyzing conflict and character in way that I outlined above. Thinking through this, as I've just done, fills me with a faint hope that I'll manage to finish a little story – it would be a first – by next week, as I promised Ronnie, the irrepressible teacher, who's quite a character himself.

dinner

The third exercise heaped upon me at the Creative Writing workshop related to food, with specific emphasis on the cultural aspects of preparing food, the influences of hygiene, religion and ritual, and how my identity relates to this. What I came up with, incubating in my brain for a few day before being written down in a frantic twenty-minute effort right before the course, has nothing to do with this at all. It missed the point almost completely, but I think it's quite nice anyway.

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Burton stepped out into the yard. It was about time: The sun was setting and Mrs. Burton was getting anxious. He surveyed the scene with the eyes of an expert. On the patch of sand towards the left, Tyler and Ben were fooling around. Heads slouched forward, they were engaged in a kind of friendly battle, an exercise of strength and skill. Thrusting back and forth and kicking their heels, they threw up clouds of dust into the wind.

There was no ball. It wasn't clear what their game was about. Burton laughed it off. They were young and having fun. Not a worry in the world.

He called to the older one but there was no reaction. As he approached, they retreated. The ensuing game of dodge took them to the farthest corner of the year where the hedge met the shed. It was there that Burton managed to grab Taylor and, furious batting of wings notwithstanding, twist the turkey's neck in one swift motion.

Inside the house, Mrs. Burton was shaking her head. She agreed that a new approach to food was necessary, but eating only those animals whose first name you know seemed a bit radical to her.

making strides

Today was the fifth session in the year-long Creative Writing course I'm taking, and the third that I attended. Just like the first two, this one seemed more about post-structuralist philosophy and contemplations on identity than about writing. The tricks of the trade are not ladled out steaming hot from the cauldron of creative incubation as I had hoped. Sometimes, I sit and stare at the teacher and wonder what the hell I'm doing there.

These moments feels endless but they are brief. The class is not half as bad as it seems from a distance. All these pseudo-philosophical musings help define characters in the context of modern society, and the open the floor wide to discussions. Today, towards the end, we were asked to react to a photo by Eve Arnold, showing a new-born baby's fragile hand hanging on to her mother's left index finger as if it were the only life buoy on the Titanic. The background was black and featureless. What do you see?

My partner in this exercise, a recent mom, saw loss. A mother is never closer to her child than right after birth. She has to help him grow and steer him towards independence, losing a little bit of the little one every day. The baby is fragile but also strong. He grabs the outstretched finger with surprising power and won't let go. In contrast to what one might think, it is the baby who calls the shots.

I saw an idea – tenuous, blurry and ill-defined. Sometimes, anywhere, a scientist realizes that the thought currently bouncing around in the emptiness of his brain has the potential to develop into something concrete, something substantial, something important. At this point, and perhaps for quite a while after that, it is not clear what's really going on. But the incipient idea has taken hold and won't let go. It will take elaboration and nurturing of the crazy thought to realize its full potential, to fill the blank canvas of its existence with meaning.

One simple image of two hands touching, two radically different visions – and neither terribly literal. We didn't mention that the baby was only born minutes before the picture was taken. Does that mean we're creative? This week's assignment is food as ingrained in one's culture. Talk about non-sequiturs.

Below are the two previous assignments (once I upload them).

identity

The Creative Writing workshop's second exercise was supposed to be a literary self-portrait but I had forgotten that particular detail before I committed the first word to the screen. Instead, I'm writing about identity, which is what we were talking about in the course.

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Look at me! Throw me a glance. What do you see? Look at my face. Look again! What do you see? My identity? Are you sure?

Project your ideas and your preconceptions, your expectations and prejudice onto my skin, and you'll see them roll off like water on Teflon, little balls of mercury on a clean tiled floor. Paint my skin white or brown, yellow or black and watch it stay the same. My skin is mine; it glows from inside.

I dress like a bum, like a fop, like a frat boy, like a girl. I'm a chameleon of fashion before your eyes. You watch and you judge, yet you don't comprehend.

You can call me names and shelve me by categories. You can put a label on the tidy box of what you perceive and satisfy your curiosity, but your associations are yours, and I am mine. I run through the grip of your understanding like water, leaving the phantom pain of a missed opportunity.

My identity exists in your imagination only.

surreal self

As the first assignment in the Creative Writing course, we had to write a surrealist I am poem. I am not Salvador Dalí. Here is what I wrote. Please take into account that in contrast to the blog, which a fictionalization of my realize, these creative pieces are a realization of fiction.

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I am the pain in the morning, the pale sun that holds the moment, a reflection of the night that emerges from cerebral memories. Thick feathers drown visions and cushion the shadows in the mist. A dream blinks, swerves and disappears, noisily.

I am a fallen silence, a frowning song of separation, prolonged instances of unspoken sadness. My brain runs liquid over rocky thoughts, gushing rapidly towards the reservoir of conscious sanity. Leaves fall limpidly and coat the past.

I am a distant interaction, a melting contact of unproven heft, the rancid smell of yesterday's clouds. The brown steam of parental love shrivels and fades, breaking coldly in its own time. Dark hands dissolve, and the unspoiled warmth of childhood cracks. A damp hope settles and retracts to a bed of dismay.

Tomorrow fades. I am tired.

creativity unlocked

The new semester stated a while back. I didn't care too much; I don't have to take classes or teach them. I see by the throngs of freshers crowding the hallways at Imperial and the sofas in the Library Café that the quiet of summer is over, but I could have guessed as much from the turning leaves, misty mornings and early nights.

For me, the new semester presented a dilemma. For nearly two years, I've attended evening classes teaching Arabic. I've made some progress, more than I would have considered possible, but precious little from a practical point of view. I know how to read and write, I recognize the odd cultural phrase, and I can surprise native speakers with a judiciously placed greeting or inquire of well-being, but I can't hold conversations, follow shows on the radio or read newspapers.

Would I waste more time on this and buy into another year of confusion and illumination in equal measure? My sister thought it would be a good idea. She told me she was very excited about our forthcoming trip to Syria, traveling the periphery of the country with possible excursion into Lebanon and, the epitome of off-the-beaten-path, Iraq, and that I should keep studying to help us get around safely. I didn't know anything of this trip – certainly I wasn't involved in any planning and in any case, knowledge of the language would probably be the least worry on it.

I signed up for creative writing instead, payed my dues and waited for the module to start. The overeager neophytes had already dispersed into confined lab spaces and coffee shops when the evening classes were kicked off, and I was starting my twelve-day residency in Colorado. I missed the first two sessions, but then, last week, the time had finally come. I stepped inside another unknown classroom for something that I couldn't explain or define. I didn't even know what to expect.

Creative writing. What does that mean? Is the emphasis on writing? Is it on creativity? Will the class teach technical aspects and skills, or will the focus be on exploring possibilities and discovering new horizons? Can creative writing be taught at all? Enough academic programs exist to give the impression that it's possible but skeptics remain unconvinced.

I walked in, late, rushed, and exhausted after a long day. I hadn't had lunch and hadn't even had time to grab a coffee and a muffin from the Library Café that sits halfway between Biochemistry and the Humanities, a precious location but the staff are slower than my usual progress through a blog post, and a line of prospective caffeinators, always coils through the atrium. I was fatigued and brainwarm when I took my seat.

The class was no workshop. There was a teacher and he was in control, flipping through the slides of his presentation with conviction and obsessively name-dropping literary terms, cultural movements and artistic icons of an earlier time. Do you know this? Does that ring a bell with you? Expressive, gesticulating, enthusiastic and slightly mad, his demeanor was a perfect match for his appearance: On his head, over a trimly cropped lawn of stubby hair, exploded a bewilderment of Rasta dreads. Later, when we got down to doing some work, he turned out to be pathologically positive and one-hundred-percent encouraging, and possibly a good teacher, though that's still too early to say.

The teacher is a self-proclaimed Surrealists, though that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Dalí once remarked that the only difference between him and the Surrealists was that he was a surrealist. I love Dalí and I take his word for unshakable truth on this subject. No one else was able to show the beauty in madness quite as stunningly.

Let's say the teacher uses surrealism as a tool (which is to ignore that he also write surrealist poetry) to remove us students from the reality that we tend to cling to when writing. Creative writing is often fiction, and to get a hang of fiction it's crucial to let go of our experiences, of what we see and read daily. Fiction starts in the head, and is always new. Surrealism might just be a good first steps towards fiction.

We were asked to just write without much thinking and certainly without breaks, shooting for strange juxtapositions, warped images and metaphors that don't gel, the things I tend to avoid when writing because I want my writing to make sense. I guess what I took home from that first class is that writing doesn't always have to make sense. If it sounds good, if it has rhythm and color, the reader is likely to accept it.

Nonsense might make sense to the reader who's exposed to it and who tends to interpret, give meaning and see depth in incongruities, all because if the writer wrote it, there must have been a reason. After the reader has taken the first step of starting to read, it's more difficult to abandon the piece and admit defeat than to continue and try to cut through the contradictions and clashes. By reading, the reader accepts a certain authority in the author and is likely, at least initially, to blame any lack of understanding or feeling of elusiveness on himself and not the writer. I know that I read like this. Now I just have to learn how to write like this, too.