Coachwords

If it's good enough for Norman...

2006-11-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

Sound advice from Norman Mailer, in a Sunday Times feature about his relationship with his son John Buffalo Mailer, a playwright, screenwriter and journalist.
"I have a rule of thumb about writing, which I passed on to John. No matter what comes up, you have to keep on working. You make an agreement with your unconscious to write every day".
John adds another pearl. "One of the best pieces of advice Pop's given me about writing is to learn how to say something once."

How much the crack?

2005-11-18T05:05:00.000-08:00

How much, the crack?
Well…that can be a somewhat ambiguous question from a stranger on the street, even in a quiet Swedish town. I’m a fading white male and not often used to being approached as a prospective purchaser or seller of drugs – or was it sexual favours. Surely not.
Context and background can lead to miscommunication. My questioner was young, male and swarthy, and couldn’t speak English very well. Obviously not a native Swede, because all Swedes are tall and blond and speak very good English. So I decided to ignore his inquiry and walk briskly on.
My interrogator follows me, matches my speed and taps his wrist. Is this his chosen or recommended route for ingestion of stimulants or soporifics? Ah…no… light dawns. He’s asking me for the time? “How much, the clock?” Not the crack…the clock, stupid. Oh, of course. Time to show sympathy and understanding, with some big smiles and bigger gestures..
Clock – big, on wall, up there. Watch – little, on wrist, down here. Big clock. Little watch. Oh yes – it’s ten to six – and I show him my watch with renewed trust and appreciation of the human condition.
We make up things faster than we think. And it’s better to start from a place of trust and open communication.
By the way – how much is your crack?

It's just not cricket

2005-09-08T04:22:00.000-07:00

Forgive me for mentioning cricket. Most of the world has escaped that infectious disease which is usually caught before the age of reason. If you do happen to be a sufferer then you have a rich choice of metaphors, or even clichés to draw on. It’s just not cricket when you’re on the back foot, bowled a googly and stumped. If only we all had exactly the same sporting interest and knowledge then how rich would be our common storeroom of metaphors.
Well, at least we all have boxing in common. We can come up to the mark, throw in the towel, be out for the count and punch above our weight.
I know, I know – metaphors slide into clichés. I spent many a long year erasing them from the copy of dewy-fresh journalists. Now I’m a coach I can wallow in their self-indulgent warmth.
Metaphors. They’re my meat and potatoes.

Tired old clichés and muscular metaphors are par for the course at http://coachwords.com

Mr. Patel's words of wisdom at the crossroads

2005-08-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

Some people just can’t help writing. There’s a newsagent in the centre of Epsom (yes, of course his name is Mr. Patel) who each day writes a satirical wall poster commenting on the news, often in an hilarious and outrageous manner. Every time I pass there are a couple of people standing at the central crossroads in town and chuckling at his words of wisdom. Despite all sorts of blandishments and praise and encouragement he’s still too busy to put his thoughts down in a blog for the wider world to see. Our loss. Perhaps we can persuade him to change career and become a full-time writer and comedian. But that might just be like hard work compared with running a newsagent’s shop. Let’s leave him to having his innocent and creative fun each day.
For the rest of us, writing is fun and ease at http://coachwords.com

Poverty is no crime?

2005-08-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

How do we learn to break the automatic connection between creativity and poverty? “Starving” and “artist” are two words that stick together.
Jerome K Jerome, best remembered for “Three Men in a Boat”, is both a help and a hindrance. I believed when I read him as a child that he was a gentleman of leisure; his life filled with ease and pleasure. Now I discover his family fell from prosperity to poverty.
Hence the power of one of his comments: “It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn’t be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.”
But Jerome rose from poverty to success and prosperity through his writing. And then he had the cheek to write: "I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
But that’s just another myth. Writing is hard work, or is it?

Writing is fun and ease at http://coachwords.com

A Beginner All His Life

2005-08-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

This week’s Economist magazine reviews an exhibition of work by Andre Kertesz, the Hungarian photographer who died in 1985, which is on show in Los Angeles and New York this autumn.
“You don’t see the things you photograph, you feel them,” he’s quoted as saying, giving words of inspiration for all of us stumbling to create.
The Economist also quotes him as seeing himself as “forever a beginner who discovers the world again and again.”
Read the Economist’s full review if you can. Here’s just a part of it: “In an age when photography was not yet an established profession, the unconfident Kertesz dabbled at a series of day jobs - first as a bank teller and then as a beekeeper – until his girlfriend, Elisabeth Salamon, an artist, insisted he leave Budapest and seriously try his hand at photography. In 1925 he moved to France. Poor and lonely, he created some of the most poetic images of Paris ever captured on film.”
I hate the fact that his early life story supports the myth of the artist as marginal and poverty-stricken. But I love the spirit of the man, forever a beginner. If you’re just beginning to write, remember that Kertesz gloried in the essence of a beginner all his life.

Dictionary Boys

2005-08-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

In the dim and distant past I had a Latin teacher who would bemoan the "dictionary boys" whose only resort was to try to translate their Latin homework word by word with the help of the dictionary, with comic and tragic results. More often than not I was among their number.
Since then I've been proud to count myself as a dictionary boy; one who enjoys thumbing through the English-only version of the great book. If you turn to the dictionary you find several treasures before you put it down. Long may dictionaries exist in paper form. Looking words up on the Internet is quick and easy, but you don't get to glance sideways at other entries. Not that the result is always immediately useful or useable. Today's sideways glance taught me that an emery-bag is a bag of emery-powder for cleaning and sharpening needles. Not everyone knows that.

The World In Our Pockets

2004-12-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

Delightful news of progress towards the ultimate goal that all books will soon be available to everyone, everywhere. Google has reached agreements with the libraries at the universities of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, University of Michigan and with the New York Public Library to make their content freely accessible on the Internet, according to a report in The Times of London. The project will take six years. Not all volumes will be available, but it's a huge leap forward. Think of the delight of wandering through all the world's great literature, and the world's trashiest novels, from the comfort of your own home. Creativity and scholarship fitted with after-burners.

The Brass Cannon

2004-12-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

Copyright exists only in the exact form of words, not in ideas. So you can happily plagiarise all the world's greatest stories and write your own versions. Aren't there supposed to be only seven themes after all (or am I just making that up?).
Sometimes it's just quicker to quote in full and give full attribution. That won't protect you from the full majesty of the law, but I'll talk about copyright and moral rights later when I'm feeling more serious. In the meantime here's a joke from Valerie Stewart. Now, where did she steal it from?
"A long time ago, there was a Yorkshireman living in a small village and he
supplemented his pension by polishing the brass cannon at the town's war
memorial, for ten shillings a week. He'd done this for several years
without any apparent discontent; but one day he came home, took off his
flat hat and tweed jacket, and said to his wife 'That's it. Aah've chucked
in t'job. Finished.' Wife replies 'Eeeh, I am vexed. What possessed you to
do that?' He replied 'Aah'm fed up wi' being beholden to other people.
Aah've been saving up to buy me own brass cannon and I'm going into
business for meself.'"

Early bird catches the worm?

2004-12-13T05:24:00.000-08:00

The power of routine can be a great help for writing. Lots of writers like to get their work done before lunch, or even before breakfast. Noel Coward was a morning man. Perspiration before lunchtime. But Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code may be taking thinks a little to the extreme. He starts work at 4 a.m. (that's right - there can't be many times of year when he sees the light before he's written his first words). And he has an antique hourglass on his desk to remind him to move and stretch. He also uses gravity boots to hang upside down, to change his perspective.
Don't get too upset, all you owls. The larks like to be virtuous and say that the best writing is done early in the day. But tell that to jazz musicians, or actors, or comedians. A lot of great writing happens in the small hours of the night. Does that mean the owls have finished their work before Dan Brown has even started his?