Tag Archives: writing

Going to the crows

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Last Tuesday at 2pm, a baby across the street was screaming about the heat. By 7pm I swear it had turned into a crow.

The noise of baby crying its head off and young crow gurgling came from exactly the same direction. And I’ve no evidence to suggest that the baby turned into a crow. But I’ve no evidence for a different explanation, either. 

There will be a sub-section of philosophy that deals with this, probably. At the University of York in the early 2000’s, I used to look in awe and wonder at the notebooks of fellow students studying philosophy. I stood in the break room of the University Radio station, gazing in disbelief at a page covered with ciphers, which was probably some kind of logical argument, but I could neither decipher nor understand the subject matter, let alone the detail.

Let A be the proposition ‘A baby exists.’ Let B be the proposition ‘A crow exists.’ Let T be the proposition ‘A baby turns into a crow.’

∀x(Creature(x)→CapableOfSurpriseTransformation(x))

Creature(Baby)

∴CapableOfSurpriseTransformation(Baby)

P(T)=0

I’m making this up, I was a psychology student and we had nothing so useful in our toolkits. We just knew that it was possible to turn your classmates into Nazis by locking them in a basement for 3 weeks. And that hasn’t particularly come in handy in my career, yet.

I tried to engage Child 1 in a bit of whimsical banana-ing about the crow/baby conundrum. Child 1 was not interested because he’s more interested in ‘The Grind’, at the moment. Not Grindr, that’s something else. The Grind is where you go into the forest and kill boar for 37 hours, just to buff your Level 1 avatar to a Level 2, so that you can kill a slightly bigger boar on open ground. I’m being facetious. Child 1 has been at this for years and now has a Level 48 avatar. His eyes don’t work in daylight, but he can one-shot a Zorah Magdaros and that is Something, apparently.

I’m talking about computer games, but I am worried that grinding too much for too long can damage the psyche. The Grind teaches kids that we are weak and feeble and not enough as humans. We have to level ourselves up gradually, we should never expect to stop. Before enlightenment, taught the Buddha, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

But keep chopping wood, carrying water, every day, basically. Is it necessary? I know some seriously successful people who are still grinding in their 60s, and I wonder whether there is any point at which they will stop, unless stopping becomes the goal. Presumably, that is the main challenge of retirement. We either spend it genuinely learning to relax, and making friends with the crows, or we spend the entire time chasing more ways to grind, forgetting that the whole point of having been doing this for 40 years is that we can now stop.

Sam is already making friends with the crows by feeding them ham. This has led to a hilarious shopping list which had ‘crow ham’ listed just above ‘ham.’ Because we want to make friends with our local corvids, but we also acknowledge that we can’t be feeding them Tesco Finest Wiltshire Thinly Sliced or we’ll end up bankrupt.

To work actively against Grind culture—even though most of us are still in it for another few decades—Walk the Pod Series 58 will be on the subject of Rest (is Resistance). Your new series starts next Monday 7 July. Listen here.

If you’d like to support my work, you can do so at Patreon: https://patreon.com/c/rachelwheeley, but I’ll always put most stuff out for free. It’s just if you like to keep your local walking podcaster in crow-ham.

Coming Up with ‘New’ Ideas

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First of all, forget new ideas. There aren’t any. See through toaster? Already exists. Dusting drones? Done. DIY bath milk? What are you even talking about Harriet, that’s not a thing. Oh alright then, it is.

Whatever you come up with, it won’t be new. New is just old + old smooshed into a ball. All the way back to, “I wonder what happens if I bang these rocks together?”

Think about it. See through toaster = toaster + window. Dusting drones = drone + your Nan. You can work out the bath milk one.

Point is, you’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing. Nobody’s got anything – every thought has been thought before. The good news is, it doesn’t matter. Smashing old ideas together is a valid way to become Elon Musk/Cardi B/any other entrepreneur you can think of.

How is it done though?

Years ago, this dude J.W.Young wrote a thing about how to come up with fresh stuff. He was in advertising, so we can assume he had to produce every day. He didn’t believe in ‘new’ either.

Here’s his method:

  1. Collect ‘materials’. Both general materials and those specific to what you’re making.
  2. Digest the stuff. Here we have to be like a ‘curious octopus.’ Pick each thing up, feel it all over like a randy, sorry, curious octopus. Feel for the meaning of it. Bring two things together, see how they fit. You’re looking for relationships and ‘synergies’.
  3. This is my favourite part. ‘Make absolutely no effort of a direct nature.’ I read this as: take the afternoon off and go to the pub.
  4. The ‘A-ha’ moment. Yes! This is what we’ve been waiting for. The ‘new’ idea hits us as we soak in a tub full of bath milk. There’s nowhere to write it down so we squirt it as best we can on the wall in Original Source Shower Gel.
  5. Idea meets reality. “The cold, grey dawn of the morning after.” We’ve all been there. See if the thing has legs. Tell people whose thoughts you value for feedback.

The good idea, according to Young, has ‘self-expanding qualities.’ If a friend thinks of things to add, you may be onto something. If they say nothing but nod politely as their eyes glaze gently over, you might want to drop it.

Coming back to his method years later, Young added that pursuing ‘general materials’ for the idea producer’s reservoir is best done as an end in itself, rather than whilst boning up for something.

With thanks to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings for an article about Young and a bunch of other stuff on creativity, productivity and how to be a human in the world.

Do creative projects have a life of their own?

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“There are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.

The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.” – George RR Martin

This gave me great hope when I read it a few weeks ago.

“Maybe I’m a gardener!” I thought to myself, watering some tomato plants. Maybe that’s why I’m rubbish at writing long stuff. I get scared by the bigness of a project and dive into a completely alien way of working.

Maybe, I think, if I work out what all the sections of this are, and plan it to the nth degree, then eventually I’ll just fill in the detail in all the little compartments I’ve created and the thing will be finished and beautifully structured.

But I just don’t work like that. Neil Gaiman explains his writing method:

“Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gender, number of a character, you can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft. It is you telling the story to yourself.

Then, I’ll sit down and type. I’ll put it onto a computer, and as far as I’m concerned, the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.” – Neil Gaiman (The Tim Ferriss Show”)

Another gardener! Write it, allow anything at all to happen, and then pick out the bits that make up an elegant plot in draft 2. He even goes on to say he prefers hand-writing his first drafts because then he can pick out the bits he wants when typing up, rather than having to delete whole pages of work on the computer.

Then I listened to another interview today which suggests that we may not be in control of our creative projects at all.

A true creator knows that you follow the thing to where it’s going, not where you think it ought to go.” – Adam Savage (via Tim Ferriss, again.)

Now that’s really interesting.

Is it that a creative project has a life of its own, and we’re not the master of the thing we came up with at all?

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” – Michelangelo

It’s all very well for people of extraordinary vision like Michelangelo, but not everything is captured inside a block of marble. And if it is, not everybody can see the statue. Some just see a very difficult and painful afternoon.

I guess if you look at it from outside your own skull and the point in time that you’re at, every creative project has a trajectory and a rate of ‘success’, but we can’t see all of it from the beginning.

So maybe the point is just to set off along the path, and see where we get to.

Edinburgh show: Meet in the Middle

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Show posterIn three days time, Nicola Houghton and I will be heading up to the Edinburgh festival to perform our brand new show, Nicola Houghton & Rachel Wheeley: Meet in the Middle.

The Edinburgh fringe is the single biggest celebration of arts and culture on the planet. Last year there were over 50,000 performances of 3,398 shows in 300 venues all over the city and this year there will be even more.

This year, one of those 3,000 shows will be ours!

Nicola and I are neighbours with three kids each, but we’re from very different backgrounds. Nicola grew up in a working-class household on the gravy-soaked cobbles of The North, surviving thanks to raffle prizes, knitted underwear and treasures found in skips. Meanwhile I was growing up at Eton College, entirely failing to get off with Prince William and mixing with teenagers who had never seen an onion. I didn’t go to school there, because they don’t accept women. This is the story of how that panned out.

If you’re going to be in Edinburgh between the 4th and the 11th, drop into Bar Bados on Cowgate at 6pm to see what we’ve been working on! We’re hugely indebted to Steve Cross and Andrew Smith for photography and poster design respectively. Thanks to everyone who came to see our London previews. I’ll let you know how it went when I get back!