Day Ten

There is an irritant about maintaining a blog. It comes from an expectation that you produce something on a regular basis, if you don't you'll disappear. This expectation - which is both self-motivated and a constituent of blogging - provokes a kind of self-exasperation. Repetition is almost unavoidable, of expressions, phrases and tone, if not always of subject. Rather like life, it stretches out in front of you, murky and shapeless.

Reactions to events, to people, and ideas define moments. Big events - the kind which turn you in a very unexpected direction - offer a kind of narrative. Such is Life.

If you write prose, you work within the conventions of a structure. An architecture. For example, when you set out to write an essay, you first establish a premiss, which is then explored through a series of arguments, references and reflections to arrive at some kind of conclusion. Which may well be open-ended. In a piece of fiction, whether it's a short story, novella or novel, you create and populate a world in which things happen - either inside the characters' heads or in the fictional world you've created, generally a mixture of both. Language is the medium. Grammar is the tool.

Unlike Life, and unlike, it seems to me, a blog, there is a shaping which carries the writer through this process. Even if conventions relating to plot and character are subverted - if 'experimental' or 'avant-garde' is your chosen style - there continues to be a structure, a logic, a set of loose rules, which drive the work. In an essay, the subversion seems to occur around the authorial 'I', the distinction betwee the subjective and the world of fact, of what is known. The more you know about how to manipulate these different forms, these conventions - about what is possible - the more stimulating, or accomplished, or achieved, a piece might be. The knowledge - call it skill, perhaps talent - allows you to play. The performance becomes more interesting. And this is only the starting point.

All of which, again, returns me to the questions about discipline, the editor, the critic. The imagination.