“All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of Beggars’ Teeth.”*
Is the mark of a great artist that they walk a fine line between genius and insanity? While the rest of us mere mortals toil in our mediocrity, does the visionary merely summon their muse in bursts of creativity that produce great works in days? Does their innate, inborn talent supplant the need for hard graft?
I found myself thinking about these questions when I recently visited the Musée d’Orsay’s wonderful exhibition “Van Gogh/Artaud: The Man Suicided by Society.”
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My flash-fiction, “Tony’s Phone”, reached the shortlist for the Words for the Wounded competition and was commended by the judges. That’s not quite getting published but I’m still pretty chuffed. I still haven’t decided whether it counts as a point on my rejections score board or not!*
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This is something every writer experiences. It has certainly been my problem in the last month. I’ve been productive, to be sure. I’ve got a little stack of blog articles, two or three almost finished short stories, even a book chapter that just needs another 400 words. But, for whatever reason, nothing gets finished.
This blog article will lay out some techniques that can help when you are having trouble finishing. They are all things that have worked for me in the past. This is for when you have bits of work that just needs that last push, but every time you boot up the computer you find yourself scribbling notes for another project or starting off that short story idea you had in the shower and BAM – the day is over and nothing is finished.
I’m hoping writing about these ideas will help break my block. With a bit of luck it will help you as well.
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On the first day of April I signed up to Camp Nanowrimo, an internet based creative writing project where participants try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. On April 30th I posted my final count. I only managed 30,000 words.
I knew I wasn’t going to make it from quite early on. The colourful, super friendly Nanowrimo website gave me a graph showing me day by day exactly how much I was falling behind; just how much lower my average words per day was than the rapidly increasing target needed to finish on time; the glaring little endnote that if I continued at this rate I would finish some time in late May.
In the last week the near impossibility of reaching my goal haunted me. In theory, sure, I could rattle out 5000 words a day. But when I sat in front of the keyboard the words would come so slowly. I would look up, two hours would have passed, and the word count would only be 600 words up. What was I doing wrong?
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I recently studied Peter Stockwell’s two-week course on cognitive poetics via Future Learn, a free online study resource. Cognitive poetics is a tool of literary criticism that applies some elements of cognitive psychology to understanding of literature, and particularly how readers engage with and understand a text. In this article I’m going to talk a little bit about what cognitive poetics is, and then briefly about Future Learn as a useful tool for the writer.
Cognitive poetics begins with the idea of the “Theory of Mind”. This is our capacity to recognise other entities as having beliefs, perspectives and world views of their own. Somewhere in our earliest childhood we begin to recognise that those around us might be thinking, feeling creatures like ourselves. But how do we know that they are people? And how can we figure out what their individual beliefs and perspectives are?
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