Russell Davies

Semi-retiring
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Agitate, educate, nominalise

When people try and say 'write like you speak' a lot of what they mean is get rid of nominalisations. It's especially important because a lot of people are actively trained to write like this, so when they try and write in 'public' they tend to do more of it.

I'm always on the look at for good/bad examples. These are a couple:

"In the 1970s, the poet Elizabeth Bishop taught writing seminars at Harvard. Shy and nervous leading classes, she still managed to produce a long, confident list for her students headed ‘If you want to write well avoid these words’. Many of the words were nominalizations, like creativity, sensitivity and ‘most ivity-words’. Others were those dressed-up noun categories that have crept into daily use and distance us from the real: life-experience, relationship, aspect, area, potential, structure, lifestyle."

From First You Write a Sentence, Joe Moran

For today’s poem, I gift to you this one about nouns conversioning to verbs. pic.twitter.com/TkpxwCf8TS

— Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston) October 16, 2022

October 17, 2022 in writing | Permalink

How arches work

There's a phenomenon I think of as revenge acrostics. This isn't that. But it's in the same ballpark.

"Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: “The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down.” Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn’t giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they’d invented it, he could just unscramble what he’d published."

(Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks)

Royal Society version

 

September 22, 2022 in writing | Permalink

welcome to my cyberstation

Wiredstyle

I dug this out of storage the other day.

Websites

Websites2

Did anyone really ever have a 'cyberstation'? I remembered almost everything else in here, but not that. More here.

December 14, 2008 in writing | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

blog all dog-eared pages: maps and legends

L1060617_2

I just finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends. It's a splendid compilation of his essays and suchlike, published by McSweeney's. The cover is fantastically elaborate and the contents are similarly exuberant. I dog-eared a lot but I'm just going to excerpt a few big bits, because they give you a sense of how superb it is. (I hope they're not too big for Mr Chabon and/or his lawyers.)

This is how it opens, it's from Trickster In A Suit Of Lights - Thoughts On The Modern Short Story.

"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jagermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliche and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life's lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you - bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted - indeed, we have helped to articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

I'd like to believe that, because, I for read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka's formula: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end - here's my point - it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."

Isn't that great? Sets out his agenda - both the point of view and the kind of writing you're going to be riding on. I love this willingness to throw words, metaphors and references around like we're all as smart as Sorkin characters.

This is from a piece called The Killer Hook - Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

"In a popular medium that needs to label everyone a journeyman hack or a flaming genius god - like the world of comic-book art - Howard Chaykin is something else: a craftsman, an artisan of pop.

...What I'm talking about is a kind - the toughest kind - of balancing act. Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. Like those other postwar East Coast Jewish boys, Barry Levinson and Paul Simon, Chaykin, a man as gifted with a quicksilver intelligence, as irrepressible a sense of verbal play, and reservoirs of rage and humour of apparently equal depth, has spent most of his career seeking and sometimes finding, that difficult equilibrium.

The pop artisan within the received formulas - gangster movie, radio-ready A-side, space opera - and then incorporates in the style, manner and mood of the work bits and pieces derived from all the aesthetic movements he or she has ever fallen in love with in other movies or songs or novels, whether hackwork or genius (without regard for and sometimes without consciousness of any difference between the two): the bridge in a song by the Moonglows, a James Wong camera angle, a Sabatini cannonade, a Stan Getz solo, the climax of The Demolished Man, a locomotive design by Raymond Loewy, a Shecky Greene routine. When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place. It's that filtering consciousness, coupled with the physical ability (or whatever it is) to flat-out play or sing or write or draw, that transforms the fragments and jetsam and familiar pieces into something fresh and unheard of. If that sounds a lot like what flaming genius gods are supposed to be up to, there here's a distinction: the pop artisan is always hoping that, in the end, the thing is going to fucking kill. He is haunted by the vision of pop perfection: heartbreaking beauty that moves units. The closest that Howard Chaykin has yet come to fulfilling that vision - though he has approached it many times - is probably still American Flagg!"

That gets so much right for me. So much of what I love most is balanced in that lagrange point between art and commerce, not plumping for one or the other but excelling at both. The best people I've ever worked with have never worried about the art or commerce thing, they're doing both: "heartbreaking beauty that moves units".

And good use of a list as well. Lists are like poems with all the form squeezed out, you're just left with the meaning and the metaphor.  Plus, I like the idea of The Killer Hook as a thing beyond music - like Rudy Rucker's Power Chords.

September 02, 2008 in writing | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

words, don't come easy

Typing

One of the reasons I quit Nike was to 'do more writing'. Specifically writing for money, i.e. trying to be 'a writer'. It's been a story of mixed success but it's taught me quite a lot about my priorities, and some other things.

Thing One, I'm blogging a lot less than I did when I was an employee. This isn't to do with hoarding my words or anything it's to do with the fact that corporate life is full of dead holes you can fill with blogging. And it's superb displacement activity. The twenty minutes between a status meeting and a creative review is the perfect time to fit in a couple of blog posts. Whereas if I'm at home, trying to get some work done or get something written, and I find myself with twenty dead minutes, I'm much more likely to watch a bit of telly, have a cup of tea, tidy up a bit, play with Arthur, do some drumming, than write a blog post.

Blogging, for me, is more fun than work, but it's not more fun than life.

Thing Two. I suspect I might actually need to get a proper job if I ever want to write another book. I wrote Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans while working at Nike and W+K. Since going freelance I've written precisely no books.

Thing Three. Depressingly, but not surprisingly, you get paid a lot more for writing PowerPoint than you do for writing books/articles. Unless you're a really, really famous writer.

Thing Four. I'm really lucky to have the Campaign gig. The discipline of having to make up 460 words every week is tremendously educative. Like regular gigging or a weekly 10K. And the experience of writing for print is so completely different than writing online. Slower, no feedback at all, but makes you much more considered and always makes you worry if you're using semi-colons correctly.

Thing Five. With the odd freelance writing job I get I always have to do a delicate dance with people to make sure they know I'm not one of the other Russell Davieses. Either this one, or this one. (I did think I'd write something in the blog sidebar to explicity point out that I'm in no way responsible for Dr W__ and his time-traveling adventures but I suspect that'll just make google confusion more likely.) I'm doing this travel writing thing for someone in August and once it had all been agreed by email they sent some details in the post with a note saying 'love your work' which instantly made me worry that they thought I was someone else. I don't really have work you can love in that way. But I'm not sure of the etiquette you deploy to make sure that a person hiring you doesn't think you're someone better than you are. The reassuring evidence that they do know who I really am is that there's no way the other Russells would do it for the fee I'm getting. I had a similar email correspondence with some TED people the other day who sent me a lovely email inviting me to get involved with a project they were doing. I was massively flattered but it wasn't really up my street so I politely declined. But they then wrote back asking if I could point them in the direction of any of my contacts at the BBC. Damn. They thought I was the other one. Good job I was polite or they might have thought he was a real git.

Anyway. I'm rambling. You can tell I'm supposed to be working now can't you?

June 10, 2008 in writing | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

guardian breakfasts

Biggerbreakfasts

Very excited to have done some stuff for The Guardian today. There might still be time to get one at the newsagents if you're out and about. There's lots of eggbaconchipsandbeans stuff and some excellent words from Malcolm at the LRB. 30 years of reading it and finally I've done a bit of writing.

April 12, 2008 in writing | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

community links

Makinglinks

Anne and I found ourselves in illustrious company recently; within the pages of this publication celebrating 30 years of Community Links. I'm obviously biased but I think Anne's piece about being a governor of a city centre school is rather brilliant - and as a special Christmassy bonus you can get a pdf of it here. If that makes you want to read more you can get the whole book here for only £10.99. I'd especially recommend the Kevin Harris piece on the sociability of dog-walking.

December 20, 2007 in writing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)