Seymour Jacklin's Blog, page 5

Dipping a Toe in Flash-Fiction Waters

I have ‘artists envy’ for folks who seem to be able to finish stuff.

When it comes to creativity, I can go some way with the saying “It’s more about the journey than the destination,” but surely the full miracle of creative work is in that breathless moment when you can stand back and say, “It’s done.” That’s the elusive hit we’re really looking for. Something is not created until it’s completed and a thing, be it a sculpture, picture, story or performance, stands where before there was no thing.

I think some of us are scared to finish. As long as a work is in progress, it has the potential to be awesome. Once it’s done, it’s either awesome or not. I’m certainly scared to finish things. I trail so many works-in-progress, the drag can be crippling.

This week I’ve been rescued by a little thing called Six Minute Story. I wouldn’t have given it the time of day if not for the suggestion of one of those artists I envy, Xe Sands, who is such a sparkling enthusiast for creativity in general and words in particular that not going along with something she’s excited about would feel like telling a kid that she couldn’t have an ice cream.

Six Minute Story gives you a random writing prompt and a box in which you have just six minutes to write a story. And that’s it … If it doesn’t work out, you can hit refresh and try again.

It’s heady stuff. You go from nothing to done in less time than it takes to hang out the laundry. It’s helped me to write a few stand-alone bites that I’m moderately happy about and to experience repeatedly the breathless moment of “It’s done.”

Throughout September, Xe’s ‘Going Public Project‘, which propagates contributed recordings of literature from the public domain and creative commons, is showing off stuff from Six Minute Story. Anyone can get involved even if, like me, you thought writing prompts were twee and ‘flash fiction’ was not quite ‘proper’.

I’m pretty stoked because this week’s post features a snippet of Xe’s voice doing my words and frankly that’s another tick on my bucket list.

So, my writerly readers, go here to start your own six-minute adventure. Or go here to listen to this week’s offerings and find out more about the Going Public Six Minute Story September challenge.

Other things to do

Follow the Going Public Project on Facebook

Read my bits on Six Minute Story

Filed under: #GoingPublic, Inspiration, Writing Tagged: Audio, Creative Writing, Creativity

Mandala Meditations

Summers tend to be inherently disordered. Because it’s Summer, because everyone else is on holiday, because there is a wedding to go to virtually every weekend, because it’s too hot to cook and a salad or sandwich will do, because being outdoors is possible and therefore compulsory, because the nights are too bright and warm to sleep normal hours, many habits and routines fall by the wayside and need to be resumed in the Autumn.

As I’ve begun to pick up threads of habit and find ‘normal’ life again in the last week, I’ve taken up mandalas. Jung used them with his patients not only diagnostically but therapeutically. Having noticed their appearance in many cultures and creeds, he went on to find mandalas a useful tool for centering and ordering the personality internally and situating it cosmically:

The severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state—namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements.

This is evidently an attempt at self healing on the part of nature, which does not spring from a conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.

To begin with, I’ve just been ‘journaling’ by drawing one each day, usually using forms related to how I’m feeling or what I’m preoccupied about. Well, making pretty patterns and colouring them in is a great way to lose yourself for an hour and is obviously therapeutic. Each of these has become a meditation and a prayer that seems to have gathered and offered, directed and consolidated the day. I think this may be a new creative practice for the next season.

So here are the mandalas from the last four days:

05/09/14 – Potential

06/09/14 – Change

07/09/14 – Voyage

08/09/14 – Resurrection

If you want more, here’s a pinboard full of them from my Pinterest.

A good starting point for further exploration is Peter Patric Barreda’s MandalaZone website.

Filed under: Art, Inspiration Tagged: Creativity, Doodle, Journaling, Spirituality

A Doodle a Day Part IX

Sometimes when my journaling habit collapses, squeezed out by the busyness that I perceive in my life (whether it’s really there or not), I still find time to doodle. I have very basic app on my phone that makes it easier.

I like to ask people the question: if you could swap your primary creative talent for another, would you? And what would it be? Most people say, ‘no, I wouldn’t.’ But I’ll admit I have artist’s envy for people who can draw as wonderfully as a couple of people I know. When you’ve looked at these phone scribbles, go and check out the work of a couple of pros:

Daniel Weatheritt – A very inspiring illustrator I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently.

Philippa Cappelman – A gifted draughtswoman friend who has recently launched out.

Self Portrait

Swift

I’m still fairly obsessed with trying to draw swifts

Tree

Dog

Mooning Hare

Crustacean – I love these creatures and wish I could draw them

The Good Land

See some of my previous doodle posts.

Filed under: Art, Inspiration, Miscellanea Tagged: Creativity, Doodle

I thought it would be fun if we blog hopped

My blogging badly needs a shot in the arm, nay an intracardiac dose, of blah-blah fuel, so it is with great pleasure I’ve accepted Rob Rife’s invitation to a blog hop.

Rob Rife – Ascendant Canadian Bard in Yakima Valley

Basically, it’s a writer’s pyramid scheme, blog-based chain letter, tasteful tag-fest thing. I’m one of three writers Rob’s asked to answer four questions about writing and the writing process.

It is hoped that this will entendril the blogging writersphere ecosystem with fruitful vines of interconnection, lead readers to discover new and lovely writers and give others an insight into what makes some of us tick.

Not only because Rob’s said nice things about me in his post but also because, in my opinion, he’s “one to watch” as he climbs steadily the ladder of latter-day bards, I really hope you hop back up the vine and check out his writing. I think it speaks for itself in a unique voice and it takes a lot make me think, as I do, “when that book comes out I’m buying it” whether the author is my friend or not.

So…

1) What am I working on?

When I’m not writing for others, I’m mapping the terrain between my subconscious and conscious realities, my dreaming and waking worlds, and dredging up short stories as I go. These are broadcast semi-regularly as a podcast at Stories from the Borders of Sleep. They are stories for hearing rather than reading, so any book that may come from them in the future will be more of a spin-off than a substantial target met.

Borders of Sleep illustration by Robyn Trainer

This is a long-term project. I intend to continue it until the twelfth of never and would be quite happy to let it be my life’s work. It provides a creative discipline through the need to continually bring out new material and is immensely satisfying as I know it goes straight to an audience that, my stats tell me, downloads on average a hundred stories a day.

Alongside that, and not a million miles removed from it, I’m working on a book that probably sits in the ‘self help’ section. Broadly, it’s about using different parts of the body as a way of connecting inner reflection with outward action. If that sounds too wooky, then it could alternatively be described as a book about anthropology and time management.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I honestly don’t know because, with perhaps one exception, I don’t really read the stuff that might be similar. The exception is that I have derived a lot from the works of George MacDonald. He occupies the high points of mythopoeic romance to which I can only aspire.

To feed myself, I study literary classics, folklore and history, watch TED talks and look for books in brooks and sermons in stones. I should probably be reading Paul Coehlo, Haruki Murakami, Susanna Clarke and Neil Gaiman, but I don’t have time.

3) Why do I write what I do?

It has always been the same motivation for me, that simple line from the screenplay of the film about CS Lewis, Shadowlands:

We read to know we are not alone.

Books have been my greatest comforters and companions in helping me make sense of this way between earth and heaven where we all have the temporary use of a body, a mind and some words. Therefore, put simply, “I write to let others know they are not alone either.”

4) How does my writing process work?

I need to work in long stretches of time so it only really happens when I have a few uninterrupted hours in the dead of night or the wee small hours. Saturday mornings are good, too.

I write standing up because I constantly need to fidget or walk away to calm down or let the kinks work out in my head.

Actually starting something is Mount Everest, everything after that is Cool Runnings (apart from editing, which is K2). Finishing something is a serious hit on my dopamine receptors.

I usually only need one or two ideas, the rest takes shape as I go along. So I might start just knowing I want to write about a couple of trees I saw with intertwined limbs. Then it’s just a case of letting my imagination play out and making sure I take notes and keep up.

That sounds easy but it takes quite a toll on me. I think I write in a trance – it’s a bit like getting drunk. I get elated, then I get hung over. Maybe a better answer to the previous question is just that I’m an addict.

And on to …

This is the bit where I tell you who to hop on to next … watch this space because I’m still recruiting. My nominees will appear here shortly, once they have agreed to participate in the Blog Hop. They will then be due to post their contribution in a fortnight … and so on.

Filed under: Blogging, Inspiration, Writing Tagged: Community, Creative Writing, Creativity, Fantasy, Fiction, Writing

Swifts for the tacit longings of our adult years

As we approach middle age, is it normal for birds to become more fascinating to us? We start feeding them, watching them, doodling them. Do they represent our longing to shed the earthbound web we’ve woven for ourselves and to be as light as air? Maybe it’s just me.

Once again my scratchpad (the notebook I keep strictly for rough work/business notes, lists of action items and phone calls) has been invaded by the doodling dreamer.

try to make a swift with as few strokes of the pen as possible.

Filed under: Art, Inspiration, Miscellanea Tagged: Creativity, Doodle, Freelancing, Nostalgia

Notebook Wars

A good writing implement can bring out the best in us.

I’m mainly a pencil person for taking notes, doodling and writing. For journaling, inking in or neater work, I adore the triplus® fineliner by STAEDTLER. But lately, a couple of fountain pens have been added to the arsenal. A good one, well primed, is a wonderful writer. A bad one can fill a page very quickly with bizarre textures and symbols.

The pages of my scratch book have recorded a strange battle over the last week or so:

 

I like to believe that even the way we scribble when trying to get a blasted pen to work can be pressed into the service of narrative.

 

 

 

Filed under: Art, Inspiration, Miscellanea Tagged: Creativity, Doodles, Humour, Journaling

Review: Witchcraft by Charles Williams

Witchcraft by Charles Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is, as it promises to be, an un-sensationalising account of the history of witchcraft from Roman times until the end of the Salem Witch trials in the late 1600s.

I read it in the hope of unwrapping something more of the mystery of Charles Williams, the man himself, but quickly became drawn into the drama as he tells it, particluarly, through historical documentary evidence from trials.

Williams handles the material carefully. It is almost impossible to disentangle fact from fiction in this particular aspect of history, where hysteria and confession under torture were commonplace. He nevertheless outlines atrocities on both sides of the conflict between witchcraft and the church and secular authorities throughout the ages and makes it clear that he senses evil at work in both the prosecutors and the prosecuted. He doesn’t enter his opinion into the debate on whether witchcraft is material or illusory, but proponents of both views come under his scrutiny.

Surprisingly and unfashionably, the Spanish Inquisition comes out in a more favourable light when compared to other Inquisitions across Europe at the time, and King James I is commended for his intelligent handling of the issue in England. The medievals and the philosophical movement of the 1600s also seem to embody something closer to Williams own sympathies, while he draws the centuries in between as a full-scale war, a morass of perversion and confusion, touching every level of society and the church and fuelled by an unhealthy obsession with the Devil and sin. Ultimately, in Williams’ reckoning, it was the skeptics who saved Europe from insanity.

I did not obtain from this book much illumination to apply to the growing interest in Wiccan practice in our own times: Williams is talking about something quite different when he speaks of witchcraft. However, it speaks pertinently to the handling of our society’s spectres – real or imagined – in which a spark of truth ignites a profane fire that quickly gets a life of its own. Proponents of the “war on terror”, for instance, would do well to heed its lessons.

As far as the mystery of the author goes, there are precious few hints about his own spirituality, although a brief mention of the Zohar provides recognisable elements that are also found in his novels.

Ultimately, I was surprised not to find more of his penetrating vision of underlying spiritual realities in his description of the conflict. But I’m coming to realise that this is Williams to the core: the historical plane, to which he limits his analysis, incarnates and reflects all others such that there is virtually no need to be initiated into mysteries other than the open secret of Love.

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Filed under: Books Tagged: Books, Reading, Spirituality

A Mysterious Message from Avebury

Last night, I had occasion to share my postcard collection with a room of some twenty people.

“Find me a picture that speaks to you of God,” I asked them.

At the top of the first cluster of cards I picked through was this:

Avebury

Although this wasn’t the card I chose for myself in the end, it struck me how the sacred stone circles of Britain have played a part in my own journey towards Divine Mysteries. I flipped it over …

The back side of the card brought a flood of memories from my 18-year-old self, who sits like a lodestone in my consciousness and frequently pulls at my internal compass needle.

Dear Seymour, We are sitting in a pub with our local draughts, (beer not women!) having journeyed to the sacred stones – and halfway back. Meeting bearded bards and chalkened travellers, Listening to tails From near and Far. Met the sacred guitarist of Avebury, Played a beautiful song to me as the moon danced upon the clouds and shone incandescent against the stones. LUV Owain, Meic, Rob Surtees :-) Robin.

I include a scan of the original to show how my messengers clearly passed the card around, each adding their own lines in the true spirit of the bards of old. They would have been excellent company: one of my English teachers (the biggest single influence on my education), his two sons (companions on many woodland adventures) and another pal from school (an occasional co-conspirator in mischief).

Ahhh … the summer of  ’95.

Filed under: Inspiration, Miscellanea, Things Found Tagged: Fantasy, Nostalgia, Spirituality

Review: Descent into Hell by Charles Williams

Descent into Hell by Charles Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the back cover of this book, the Saturday Review states, “Reading Charles Williams is an unforgettable experience.” Its true. Coming away from one of his novels, the world always seems intensified, as mediated through his vision. He gives me a taste of reality that rings true and reawakens my deepest convictions about the way things really are.

I am sure I held my breath for entire paragraphs during the unfolding of this novel, almost afraid to break the spell of the words.

In Descent into Hell, Williams uses a play within a play, within a setting that is itself merely a shadow of the cosmos, to build a story that simultaneously pierces several layers of heaven and earth and pulls them into each other. The characters are recognizable and, as a reader, I was constantly trying to work out which one was me. This had the effect of the best kind of fantasy literature, enabling a vicarious exploration of all the “what ifs” of our possible selves and their choices that is both instructive and therapeutic.

If you like a story that processes your soul and opens your eyes to the darkness of dark and the lightness of light as well as the blueness of blue and the redness of red, dive in.

This is one of those few books I expect to revisit – just after I’ve read everything else he’s written.

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Filed under: Books, Inspiration Tagged: Books, Fantasy, Fiction, Reading, Spirituality

One Big Story Part II

As a partial explanation of my failure to maintain this blog for the last few months, here’s one of the things I’ve been up to:

 

Filed under: Books, Editing, Inspiration, Writing Tagged: Books, Community, Creative Writing, Creativity, Fiction, Local, Publishing, Reading, Writing