David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing - Posts Tagged "writing-tips"

It’s no secret that I use the Goodreads blog to talk about writing which makes this space a lab, of sorts, and myself the subject. So, when I Tweeted that I had got sucked into my own book (https://goo.gl/62X7wv) I was being honest despite it sounding weird.

I know you’d think that the writer of the book knows it inside out, has polished its every word and knows exactly what each page contains and on the whole, in a general sense that’s true. At the same time the writer reading the book, as a finished product, months after it was finally finished and sent in to the publisher is not quite the same person who wrote it.

To understand this we need to do two things. First, establish what writing actually is. And second understand that beyond the mechanics of writing there is a neurobiological activity that is linked to its performance.

Writing is a form of communication. The father of information theory, Claude Shannon, stated that: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”

By using writing, a means of remotely representing a ‘message’ the writer has perceived, the problem of communication is multiplied several fold. A writer isn’t just a writer. He’s an encoder, using semiotics (https://goo.gl/2DS1UI) to distil and encode a message which then needs to be unpacked, decoded and experienced by someone the writer has never met and may be culturally and linguistically, even, removed from him. To make matters even worse the receiver of the writer’s message may not even be in the same timeline as the writer any more.

We know that writing works. So, the problem presented above is academic, at least where Terran writers and readers are concerned. But that leads us to ask exactly how? How is it possible for someone we have never met, who may have even lived hundreds of years before us, in a world technologically and culturally different to ours, be able to touch us with words that paint pictures inside our head?

The clues come from the neuroscience of writing (https://goo.gl/hvcpQU) where the moment a writer’s words resonate with the reader, the neural signature of the reader’s brain is very similar to that of the writer’s at the time of writing. When Jane Austen writes that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” her words light up the same neural centers in her readers irrespective of the time they live in, the gender they possess or the age they are.

While we could argue that a 21st century digital marketer living in downtown Manhattan inhabits a reality that is decidedly different than that of an 18th century lady living in Georgian England the truth is that the picture compiled by our mental connections as different centers in our brain talk to each other makes as much sense today as it did in 1797 when "Pride and Prejudice" was written.

The similarities stem not so much from culture or education or even language, all of which have evolved significantly in the intervening time, but from the simple fact that the fundamental neurobiology of Jane Austen, the person, is pretty much the same as that of any other person walking around today. The way she thought her readers felt about marriage, relationships, security and courting is not significantly different from the way we feel about them today even if we have replaced the courtship protocol of dancing at a ball with swiping right on the Tinder app.

If emotions, feelings and perception are generated through our neurobiology which then gives rise to thoughts, ideas and values how does my opening statement of being surprised by my own writing fit in? We’ve seen that a writer, in order to write, must not only get his own brain under control but he (and I am using the gender pronoun symbolically here, out of convenience) must also understand and mentally structure all the information he’s absorbed. He then must filter that information through the needs of his readers.

In psychology, all this involves the activation of specific mental processes such as mental modelling, mirroring and empathy. The writer’s brain then works not only as a filter through which reality is perceived but a simulation machine that understands what the readers understand and then renders everything through a commonly shared language of word-pictures.

To do that the writer’s brain has to work in a state of excitation. Anaïs Nin alluded to that when she said about writing “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Similarly, Lloyd Alexander commented that “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

Writers create entire rituals that allow their brain to warm-up and reach that level of performance and just like world class sprinters can’t just show up at a dinner party and break a world record in sprinting (they’re just not psychologically prepared for that) so do writers (I surmise, extrapolating from my own experience) can’t just switch on the state of mind that enabled them to write the book they did, when they were in the full flow of exercising their craft.

That makes writing a performance art. Each time it takes place it’s fresh, unique and ephemeral. With the added bonus of a permanent record left behind.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

Talk about writing to a writer and we are not really talking about a physical activity. It’s not about the dexterity with which fingertips find keyboard keys or hands handle a pen or a pencil or, god forbid, a fountain pen. These are the skills of a scribe or even a calligrapher, people who make it their life’s intent to breathe beauty into an activity whose physicality is frequently overlooked.

So, when we are talking about writing we are actually talking about the invisible part of the craft that writers put into their work which is, as it happens, non-writing. I know it’s paradoxical and probably fairly unique. We look at chefs to learn how to cook better and though we admire the way they peel an onion without tears streaming down their face and gasp at their dexterity with the skillet we don’t think that these things, ornate, overwrought, showy as they might be, have little to do with the true nature of their craft.

Similarly we admire how carpenters work with wood. The sawing and the hammering. The chiseling and the mortise-joint creation. We don’t see these things as incidental to woodworking or anything less than the bulk of the skillset that transforms someone from a person holding a hammer and looking for nails to a true carpenter.

But come to the writer and we somehow know that what that person does is invisible. Maybe even unquantifiable. And this makes writing something amazing we can marvel at, talk enthusiastically about and consider powerful enough and dangerous enough, when it works, to occasionally ban books and put out fatwahs on writers. At the same time it makes writing something which because it is invisible becomes easy to deprecate and reduce into an act that requires tools and actions to take place. ‘Writing’ then becomes a case of filling a blank space with squiggles through a word-producing activity which means that anyone equipped with the right equipment is capable of doing it.

So, why do we need the writer?

Now, I am answering this question through my own perspective of a person who knew he wanted to write from age 12. Who actually felt it as a physical need. Who would, if he couldn’t write, feel a pressure building inside him like a volcano in need of venting. The person I was back then did actually write and often. Often enough, in fact, to have finished two fiction books by the time he made 15 and a volume of poetry by 16. But none of that, in retrospect, was (or is) actually worth reading.

From a purely material perspective of course writing did, indeed, take place. Words were produced and they filled notebooks and folders and binders which then took up physical space in desk drawers. Something was created out of nothing. Those words captured (and, arguably, conveyed) some passion and insights and ideas. The explosive ingredients that made up the physical need to write so imperative.

The reason I don’t, now in my more mature years, consider that writing or, at least writing worth reading, lies in the better understanding my older self has of the process of writing and its purpose. As a young writer-to-be, back then, experiencing the call of my future profession I knew that there were things I had to say that only this medium could adequately capture. At the same time as a young writer I was still raw, unprepared, still short of the memories and understanding that were needed to transform my scribbling into writing worth reading.

I will here, of course, bring up the metaphor of wine and ageing and bread that has to rise and be baked and then cool before being ready to consume and true as these might be in terms of illustrating the premise of reaching a point where a product is fully fermented or completely baked they don’t really explain in depth what I mean. So I will, actually go deeper.

It’s not that I am now smarter than my younger self. Sure I know a heck of a lot more, but I have also forgotten a heck of a lot and I am not even aware of it. Nor has the passage of time itself imbued me with some temporal aspect of maturity or wisdom. What has changed and what is changing still for me is the neural density of the connections my brain has made.

Writing, in truth, is mental activity. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction it requires the writer to stand in the middle of his world and act as a bridge over some of its deepest chasms. And in order for the writer to do this successfully he (or she) needs to pull the nifty trick of seeing himself or herself through the eyes of the reader, of seeing the world through the eyes of the reader and then rendering what he or she sees in terms that the reader can then understand what the writer has glimpsed.

I’ve said before, here, that writers are, essentially, modern day explorers. We are also teachers, prophets, mystics, oracles and minor gods. All the entities in fact that in the ancient world would have been used to divine answers to the questions about the state of the world and the options lying in the future.

Writers pull off the act of writing through the wiring in our heads That wiring sets us apart not just from the readers we are so deeply empathetic towards but also from our younger writing-unready selves who glimpse the potential of what we can do and who we could be but have yet to learn to filter the data we process in a way that makes sense not just to us, as individuals, but to us as writers.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions