All Work or All Play in Writing?
I reviewed Charles Davis' Standing at the Crossroads a couple of years ago, and soon I hope to read and review his upcoming Pilgrim of Love. If it's anything like Crossroads, I know I'll love it.
Featuring mad monks, alchemy,
and illicit love on Mont St. Michel in the early seventeenth century, Pilgrim
of Love is a ludibrium or capricious game, a classic adventure story informed
by riddles, myths and conspiracies. It is the eve of the Enlightenment, magic
and mysticism are enjoying their last great flowering. When a young pilgrim is
entrusted with an enigmatic emblem suggesting something occult is afoot at the
Mont, he believes he is on the brink of uncovering a great esoteric secret.
Instead, in seeking to decrypt the riddle, he discovers more compelling
mysteries concerning love, life, illusions, folly, farce, and the fatal
absurdity of human being
The author creates incredible characters, sets them in glorious scenery, and weaves a wonderful web from the result. In my humble opinion, he's an excellent writer, and I'm delighted to welcome him to my blog today to discuss where his writing comes from. (To find where he comes from - an he's seriously well-traveled - please visit http://charlesdavis2.wix.com/charlesdavis#!bio/c1ktj and enjoy!)
Toy Soldiers – What
Makes A Writer?
What makes a writer?
Apart from a writer’s mother, that is, and I don’t mean that in a Freudian
sense. But what persuades thousands of people that sitting in a room on their
own telling themselves stories, a carry on that could have you put away with a
rubber wedge between your teeth in any other walk of life, is a sensible
pastime for somebody who claims to be a mature and coherent adult?
As it happens, I
wouldn’t claim to be a mature and coherent adult myself, nor would I claim that
for anybody else I know. We all carry a large chunk of childishness inside us,
one that surfaces all too often, and it’s just a question of whether the chunk
of childishness that persists is appealing or not. Enthusiasm, generally good.
Volatility, generally bad. Buoyancy, admirable. Petulance, a royal pain in the
arse. Even so, we’ve got to pretend to maturity and coherence, otherwise we
might as well pack it all in and apply for a berth in the Big Brother house.
But make-believe aside, where does a writer come from?
I wouldn’t venture an
answer for anyone else, but here are a few of the many reasons I became and
then remained something akin to a writer:
a. Play. You know what
it’s like when you’re a kid, how you can spend hours on end lying on your tummy
in the garden messing about with your toy soldiers telling yourself stories.
I’m 54 now, bald, bearded, a bit baggy looking, pouchy about the eyelids, not
noticeably infantile in my physical characteristics. You can imagine what the
neighbours would say if I was lying on my tummy in the garden with my toy
soldiers. Tell them I’m ‘a writer’ though and everything’s lovely -- some of
them might even be impressed.
Yet what do writers do
but mess about with toy soldiers and rag dolls and coloured crayons and any
variety of building block game you care to name? We’re at it all the time,
orchestrating battles, dressing up Barbie, constructing new worlds, colouring
in our picture books, unknotting the knotty business of existence by working
things out in the stories we tell ourselves, imposing some order on the
incomprehensible chaos that seems to surround us. Writers just keep on doing
what other people would like to keep on doing but feel obliged to give up
because some fool has sold them the maturity myth.
b. Portray. When I was
a kid (there’s a bit of a theme emerging here, but nonage isn’t strictly
relevant in this instance), I used to draw cartoons for which I was much
praised and of which I was mightily proud. In adolescence, I stopped drawing,
my artistic career curtailed by faint praise from an art master I admired and
by the realisation that I wasn’t really that talented after all. There was,
however, a lingering desire to represent the world in some manner, to look
around and recreate what I saw, and it was that need to portray things that
eventually pushed me into writing. My facility for cartoons still surfaces
sometimes, betraying me into caricature and burlesque, but I wouldn’t mind
betting most writers could tell a similar tale, a sort of Neanderthal urge to
daub the shape of a bison onto the cave wall, leaving our mark and showing what
we have seen.
c. Pontification. Had
a sort of epiphany when I was seventeen years old. Been reading Herman Hesse. I
know, I’m sorry, it’s horribly clichéd, but I was seventeen and he was Herman
Hesse and we were made for one another. It was just one of those things. Flung
into a turmoil of emotion, I sat up all night writing down my adolescent
lucubrations, and come the rising of the sun, I found myself thinking, “By god,
this is better than working”. I don’t for a moment believe the word ‘ideas’
would be appropriate for the feeble maunderings I produced that night, but that
doesn’t matter. What I had discovered was the overpowering and uncontainable
joy of just sitting down and telling people what one thinks, which leads us
onto . . . .
d. Lack of brain. What do I think? I’ve always admired people
who can extemporise on a subject, who can play with ideas, juggle with thought
processes, throw out startling notions that may well be contradictory but still
stimulate. I wish I could do the same, but my brain doesn’t function like that.
It takes me dark ages to work out what I think about something, and, often as
not, I need to tell myself a story about a subject before I know precisely what
my values are and how they accord with the topic to hand. It’s sad, really,
several hundred pages and I’ve produced what a pundit would toss off in a
couple of pithy soundbites, but there you go.
In short then, the
answer to my original question is: playfulness, parody, self-importance, and
stupidity. Why oh why can they not frame these things like that in the Careers
Advisory Office? All that guff about talent and ability and aptitude and
opportunity. It would have saved me years of angst if they’d got to the point
directly. “Right, Davis
What skills you need
to be a writer is another matter altogether. I’ll tackle that in another blog.
In the meantime, I’m going to play with my toy soldiers, in a way that is at
once reductive and vainglorious, and I’m going to do it at great length.
Frivolous? Fatuous?
Fat-headed? Affected? Get on with you, I’m a writer.
Standing at the Crossroads: http://www.amazon.com/Standing-at-Crossroads-Charles-Davis/dp/1579622135/
Pilgrim of Love: http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Love-Charles-Davis/dp/1507775008/
and the author can be found on his website at: http://charlesdavis2.wix.com/charlesdavis
Comments