Use your sensory understanding of the world to consider how abstracts can be made concrete.Introduction
The French writer and critic Hélène Cixous interprets writing as a process of explaining yourself to yourself, of pushing into the places of your experience where you have no articulated understanding of the world. She suggests that when we are presented with a gap in our knowledge of our lives, some of us are compelled to fill it with words. To write stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. We are aware that experience will always be more than can ever be written and still we feel a need to create narratives about it.
Maybe it’s the satisfaction of wrapping something external to ourselves up in words that drives us to sit for hours creating extended verbal universes. These mental structures are dramatized explorations of the emotional turbulence we all experience: anger, love, hate, guilt, paranoia, jealousy, betrayal, fear, joy. But it is only in the art of these narrative constructions that we have the power to make abstract concepts appear concrete on the page.
Take this paragraph, for example:
She curled up on the bed. From deep down inside her came a pitiful cry for a love that wasn’t there. It was lost to her. She thrashed herself about, trying to prevent herself from being engulfed.
The emotion being described is vague: what is she being engulfed by? What does this mean? What is the writer trying to say? We can’t really get a handle on the character because the emotion is being told to us in a way that is hard to visualize.
If we replace description with metaphor we might write instead:
She lay on the bed and curled up like a caterpillar.
Or we could suggest her emotion through a description of her physical actions:
She lay on the bed and curled up so tight her knees were pressing into her eye sockets.
A combination of metaphor and suggestion makes it possible to show what the abstracts mean in the first example. The image grounds the concept, making it easier for the reader to understand how the emotion is affecting character. As a reader I have more empathy with a girl who feels like a caterpillar than with one who feels as if she’s being engulfed.
Use your sensory understanding of the world to consider how abstracts can be made concrete.
Try this exercise: list abstract words and then describe them through the senses. What colour is love? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? One of my students said ‘love tastes like Fizzy Chewits’, another claimed it felt like ‘watching the last-ever episode of Dallas’.
Be surprising. Love doesn’t always have to be imagined as sunsets, hearts and flowers. Avoid clichés. If you’ve seen it somewhere before, scrub it out. Personalize your metaphors, think about your associations, your memories. The Dallas metaphor came about, my student explained, because he had been watching the last-ever episode of Dallas when a girl he really liked rang him up and asked him out. One of the joys of new writing is that it presents the world to us in a different way. Strong metaphors are the ones that make the reader and the writer alike tingle with the pleasure of articulacy.
Take this example from Chekhov:
Ryabovitch stopped, undecided what to do. Just then he was astonished to hear hurried footsteps, the rustle of a dress and a female voice whispering breathlessly, ‘At last!’ Two soft, sweet-smelling arms (undoubtedly a woman’s) encircled his neck, a burning cheek pressed against his and at the same time there was the sound of a kiss. But immediately after the kiss the woman gave a faint cry and shrank backwards in disgust – that was how it seemed to Ryabovitch . . .
His heart pounded away when he was back in the hall and his hands trembled so obviously that he hastily hid them behind his back. At first he was tormented by shame and he feared everyone there knew he had just been embraced and kissed . . . But when he had convinced himself that everyone was dancing and gossiping just as peacefully as before, he gave himself up to a totally new kind of sensation, one he had never experienced before in all his life. Something strange was happening to him, his neck, which a few moments ago had been embraced by sweet-smelling hands seemed anointed with oil. And on his left cheek, just by his moustache, there was a faint, pleasant, cold, tingling sensation, the kind you get from peppermint drops and the more he rubbed the spot the stronger the tingling became.
ANTON CHEKHOV, THE KISS
Ideas of loneliness, desire, love, disappointment are all conveyed in this story through metaphor and suggestion. Ryabovitch, the shy, embarrassed staff-captain, falls in love with the strange woman who kisses him in the library. The story examines how this small incident awakens him to his own loneliness. Before this moment Ryabovitch doesn’t question his life: afterwards, he finds himself craving physical contact and believes himself to be in love.
What Ryabovitch feels like physically is the best way to suggest to the reader what he might be feeling emotionally. Think about how we might change the paragraph to create more sinister or less pleasurable inferences. What if it stings? Or burns? The connotations of ‘peppermint drops’ are ambiguous. As sweets they suggest childhood, naivety; but as aftershave or smelling salts, they hint at something vital and arousing. Ryabovitch’s rubbing of the spot mirrors the way he turns the incident over in his mind, the way it becomes more meaningful the more he thinks of it. The art of this story is the way it shows the effects of unarticulated emotion on character. It is precisely the interplay of abstract idea and concrete image that makes the text spark with energy and expression.
To write in a way that just lists abstract terms instead of investigating them is too telling. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is one of the most common catchphrases in writing classes, but students are often perplexed by the notion of telling. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I’m writing, so I’m telling a story, aren’t I?’ In this context to tell is to over-explain, to burden your writing with unnecessary exposition. Chekhov could have written a paragraph telling how the kiss made Ryabovitch recognize his own loneliness, but this would have read more like notes or an essay. It would make the story shorter, too, more like precis.
Take this example:
She was devastated; it was all too much. She felt terribly sad. It had been such a long time since she’d seen them. Years in fact. They had been so happy that summer in Cornwall, they were all so glad to be a family again. It was so terrible, being ripped apart like this. But Sofia knew she’d manage somehow. She was a survivor, always had been.
All these sentences are statements about character, they are telling you what to think about how the character thinks and feels. Abstract words are too big conceptually to mean much without descriptive associations, and if we never get to watch how the character behaves in action and dialogue, we won’t really feel as if we’ve got to know them properly. If writing is a dialogue between a reader and a writer, then narratives that are too telling are a one-way conversation: there is no room for a reader to project their own imagination into a narrative that is telling them very bluntly what to think.
Margaret Atwood compares the process of writing to ‘wrestling a greased pig in the dark’, suggesting that the meaning of a text is always somehow very slippery for a writer. While a text is under construction it is impossible to see the whole picture. Even when a piece is finished, the writer can have a certain sense of astonishment at what they have created. For all the notes and forward planning and reading a writer might do, the finished product will always be different to the original idea because it has become a tangible body of work, not just an abstract idea. This is the point where a writer can begin to draw links, see the hidden meanings, smooth down the writing into something more coherent.
On a day-to-day level, the writer is engaged with minutiae, not big ideas. The practice of writing is a succession of small choices – finding the right adjectives, getting the character from A to B, deciding on the progress of the next scene. Writers who start with a manifesto, instead of a character, usually become unstuck very quickly.
Political ideas in fiction are best explored through character or metaphor; take Émile Zola’s Germinal, for instance. Germinal is a great, angry blockbuster of a novel about the struggle between the labourers and the owners of a coal mine in northern France during the Second Empire. The environment of the mines is imagined in graphic, physical detail as a strange, labyrinthine underworld, where men work in terrible, inhuman conditions:
Not a word was exchanged. They all hacked away, and all that could be heard was their irregular tapping, which sounded distant and muffled, for in this dead air sounds raised no echo but took on harsh sonority. The darkness was mysterious in its blackness, thick with flying coal-dust and heavy with gases that pressed down upon the eyes. Only reddish points of light could be seen through the gauze cover of the lamps. The coal face was scarcely discernible; it went up slantwise like a broad, flat, sloping chimney, blackened with the impenetrable night of ten winters of soot, and in it ghostly forms moved about and an occasional gleam threw into momentary relief the shape of a man’s haunch, a sinewy arm, a wild, dirty criminal-looking face. Now and then blocks of coal shimmered as they came loose, their surfaces or edges glinted suddenly like crystal, and then all went black again, the picks tapped on dully, and the only other sounds were panting breath and groans of discomfort and fatigue in the heavy air and dripping water.
ÉMILE ZOLA, GERMINAL
What stops this novel being a political tract is characterization and description. No one, on either side of the debate, is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but all the characters are shown to be battling within a system that is beyond their control. Political struggle is illustrated though the characters’ emotional and physical struggle while the mine continually heaves and shifts around them, a living, monstrous beast that feeds on human flesh.
The fumbling, half-realized nature of work-in-progress is an inevitable part of the writing process: no text arrives to a writer fully formed. We tend to forget that a good novel or story is the product of endless redrafting. Writers must free themselves up, allow themselves to make mistakes, write whole scenes they might end up cutting. Only by letting themselves loose on the page will a writer ever stand a chance of wrapping their abstract demons up in words.
I generally use this collage exercise early on with students – perhaps in the third or fourth session of the term – because it does seem to open eyes, hearts and minds to some of the essentials of poetry. Also, it encourages students to relax their control of language in order to allow a lighter and fuller control to emerge. And introduces the notion of abstract or concept words (e.g. ‘health’ or ‘jealousy’ or ‘dissatisfaction’), versus concrete words (anything you can perceive with the five senses, e.g. ‘fence post’, ‘lightning’, ‘growl’), and what happens when they link in metaphor. (Abstract lifts and expands concrete, while concrete grounds and particularizes abstract.) But to the exercise:
1. Write 100 words’ prose description of a bed you slept in as a child. It needn’t be perfect Virginia Woolf-type prose, as it is only raw material, but write in sentences rather than in note form, as the verbs will be important later.
2. When you’ve done that, write another 100 words on the bed you currently occupy, what’s in it, what surrounds it, what you do in it, etc. We spend one-third of our lives in bed but no one seems to write about it!
3. Write a final 100 words on a fantasy bed, a bed where money is no object, a bed that can be made of anything you like. (When I was working out this exercise initially, I found myself inventing a bed made of meringue and chocolate.) You may find this more difficult than the previous two sections, so let yourself go to town on it.
4. It’s interesting to read back at this stage, and sometimes in workshops I even get students to pair up and read their work to each other, partly to loosen up the class, and partly because of the interest involved in deciphering common strands that exist in some cases between the past, present and fantasy bed. Another point that can be made is that this preliminary stage of the exercise may help them with characterization in novel or story . . . To imagine what sort of bed your fictional character slept/sleeps/would like to sleep in brings you in quite close, I think, and is a tactic I’ve used myself when in difficulty.
All this will take up to two hours. I usually go on with the second stage in the next session. Their homework is to type up the three 100-word pieces (preserving the originals), and cut them up into very short phrases and single words, put the cut-up words in an envelope, and bring them back next week – with scissors and glue if necessary. It’s as well to have scissors around, as some students will cling to favourite or fancy phrases and have to be encouraged to dismember them, and many will have left predictable or clichéd phrases intact. I always ask people to separate ‘books’, for example, from ‘shelves’, and ‘chest’ from ‘drawers’, to open up the possibilities for, say, ‘a chest of tortoises’. I also ask them to fracture subject from object and noun from verb, so that as many elements as possible can be set free to play their part – and play is the operative word – in what is, after all, a completely new composition.
Now they have to lay out all their words so that they can be scanned easily. Next they can begin to assemble short sequences, intuitively, without worrying about commonsensical things like meaning or narrative. At this point the rationalists in the class will object that the results of such a process can only be random nonsense, but you can counter this by pointing out that this would be true only if the words were assembled face down! I think it’s important to make the point that words don’t need to be whipped into shape all the time by a big boss writer (in fact they hate it, and will probably dig in their heels and refuse to be of any service). Given a little space, they will play together creatively. Given a little love, they will love you back. They like to cooperate, with themselves and with you, and will do so, if you let them. By the way, this is an excellent exercise for anyone who is suffering from blocks or general stodginess in their writing.
The one thing I do stress at this point is to use normal syntax in the reassemblage, for syntax provides a holding frame for the new, non-realist images and meanings. Otherwise students should be encouraged to keep an open mind and allow their themes to emerge, rather than attempt to reproduce their original pieces in any way. It’s important that the unconscious be given permission to play its part. Which indeed it does, judging by the reactions of surprise, recognition, even illumination, when the writer sees what kinds of motif are emerging.
The reassembly takes a long time – at least a two-hour session. The short sequences should be put to one side or written down. Later they can be rearranged, verb-tenses unified if necessary, etc. I do urge people to use all the words if possible – at least if this is their first encounter with collage. When they are more confident they will scan more fluently and very quickly take what they need from the selection of words in front of them, and disregard the rest.
In the next session the finished pieces can be read out. Those will be very open texts that, compared to naturalistic prose, make big demands on the listener. (However, it’s always good for students to be aware that the reader is willing to work. How hard is another question, of course!) I ask everyone to make notes during the readings, to see if there is a consensus about which images and sequences resonate, and why they do. Then we can begin to put our minds to uncovering some of the deep structures that are operating within the text.
I’m sure that every tutor will focus on different aspects, according to their own aesthetic tendencies, for it seems to me that there is so much to be discovered. For me, the main elements to be found in this heightened language are the way abstract-concrete combinations challenge the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces and articulate poetic truths; the joy of surreal juxtaposition and distortion; the determination of words to combine on the basis of sound – assonance, consonance, etc.; there’s also the certainty of encountering at least one or two images of searing originality!
Finally, even the fact that the texts contain elements that can’t certainly be pinned down and questions that can’t easily be answered seems to me to be important, for it forces us to accept that poetry brings us up against what I can only call the mysteries. And in these days of debased mediaspeak and empty formulaic language it’s no bad thing to pay a little homage to the indefinable; to ‘learn to love the questions themselves’, as Rilke so wisely advised . . .
I like to read fiction with ‘stuff’ in it – with content, new things I did not know before, references I can draw on and link to literary and other culture more widely. I like quotation, intertextuality – in language and structure. I like science and mythology and theology and history and knowledge deployed in fiction as allusion, as metaphor and quite simply as information.
If I like it as reader, it has to become one of the things I work with as writer. My interior life, although it is already stuffed with ‘stuff’, is not, to be honest, that interesting – not interesting enough to sustain a life’s work, and to engage readers for the next two hundred or so years.
Learning new things, exploring new material, finding out, research is key to my fiction and something I try to infect my students with. For one thing, curiosity, wanting to learn, moving into new territory, aligns the writer with the reader. This is, after all, what we are asking the reader to do – to be curious enough about what we, the writers, are up to, where we are going and what we are saying, to stay with us, to read our texts. Where the writer’s own curiosity, research, exploration is engaged we will be writing in sympathy with that aspect of the reader.
This follows, I think, from the whole business of walking about with your eyes open that Alicia Stubbersfield is talking about. When your eyes are open enough to notice that different trees turn different colours in the autumn, you are probably going to want to turn to a book of information and find out which trees are the colour you need and whether they are likely to be growing in the place your fiction is proposing for them. If you have enough natural curiosity you may also learn why trees change colour, which is very interesting as it happens and will deepen your fiction, empower your imagination, expand your mind and engage your readers – even if you don’t actually put it in this particular bit of writing.
Over two-thirds of my own published short stories are researched. The sources seem to vary immensely – mythological tales from a wide range of sources dominate perhaps, but there are stories based on scientific concepts, on medical, historical, mathematical, and biblical material. What seems to happen for me is that a personal or internal idea has to meet an external and very concrete image (the planet Neptune was discovered by theory, not observation, in 1845) before I can shape my private emotion into fiction. In the novels this is even more marked: they are about the history and science of infertility; about catastrophe theory in palaeontology and mathematics; about chaos theory and neurology; and most recently about the science, history and craft of glass working.
In Brittle Joys (Virago, 1999) I originally conceived the central character as a glass-blower quite casually, because I wanted a very self-conscious and self-ironizing character and I read somewhere that glass as a medium was ‘hopeless at irony’, which seemed a pleasing irony to me. To have a glass-blower, I had to learn something about contemporary glass and how it is made, even though her work was not at that point central to the book. I found Stephen Newell, a wonderful glass-blower, who let me sit in on his studio sessions. But gradually, talking to him and following up on suggestions he made about history and technology, the glass itself moved into the centre of the novel – and actually has turned out to be the bit that readers like most.
The personal impulse that started the book – to explore what the connection between gay men and some heterosexual women (fag hags) was about – met an extraordinary depth of congruence with the transparent fragility of glass; with its liquid heat and rigid coolness; with the way it is made – its communal choreography made necessary by the real physical dangers of the process; and with its extraordinary history. In Brittle Joys glass became more than incidental image or metaphor; it became the controlling force of the novel – it shaped the characters and drove the plot. The constant effort to learn more sharpened my imaginative intelligence as well, kept me engaged and moved the novel beyond my domestic concerns into far larger metaphysical and abstract ones, while the precision of research kept (I hope) the book grounded in some social reality. For lots of reasons, the writing of Brittle Joys was not a happy time for me – I really do not think that I would have finished a novel on the emotional themes if I had not had a governing discipline that stirred my own curiosity and kept me in touch with something so sharp-edged. And, moreover, it is still fun to know some obscure but fascinating things about glass.
I am constantly amazed by the difficulty I have luring students down this path. It is as though people who come to writing classes are escaping from, rather than moving into, reading. I have discussed this with other creative writing tutors, so it is not just me. Somehow students believe that reading and writing are completely different and disconnected activities, and they don’t want to read, or by extension ‘research’, as part of the writing process. But writers need to read – not just to understand genre and form or to develop narrative strategies, but in order to enrich their language and extend their knowledge and sensibility.
So I have developed a number of writing games, designed more or less to trick writers into exploring resources they might not think of or might resist if they were just told to use them.
For weekly classes I might ask the participants to bring in a quirky story from a newspaper: they’ll have to read the newspapers anyway! Then I ask them to swap stories and write a fiction based on someone else’s choice. I might send them off to find out, by reading or interviewing, the arcane languages and details of particular professions (work and its processes, which consume so much of our time in the real world, and form our vocabularies, our physical presence and our mental contents are dangerously neglected in so much contemporary writing) and then use these in fiction or poetry. Learning to use what you have learned is as important as learning how to learn it. We’ve all read bad historical fiction that is either full of uncomfortable anachronisms or so bunged up with the author’s research that you can’t find the fictional wood for the research notes trees.
Or I will ask students to find an ‘old’ story – from mythology, fairy tales, the Bible – that engages them and retell it from a different point of view or perspective; or suggest that they find a quotation to serve as an epigraph for another student’s work. (I don’t tell them until afterwards that George Eliot made up all the epigraphs in Middlemarch.) This exercise has an interesting side effect – often the quote selector and the author will become very engaged in discussing the original intention of the piece of work – the attempt to apply a quote reveals a surprising amount about the success of the piece in communicating mood and tone as well as concept and story.
But a favourite group exercise in this area – though definitely one for a group, not the solitary student – is a development of the TV game show Call My Bluff.
Here is a list (prepared by me and refined by a workshop I ran in HM Prison Ashwell) of eight somewhat obscure words, each with three meanings – one of these is the real meaning as defined by the dictionary, the other two are tiny works of fiction:
Knurl
Oeps
Jobbernowl
Deipnosophist
Haysel
Collybist
Myrmidon
Ozena
Now you have to guess which is the true meaning. It will be mainly guesswork actually, but this list is carefully compiled to reflect the major sources of English vocabulary – there are Teutonic, Romance, and classical derivations.
Next you have to write a short narrative using all seven words (which usually leads to warm admiration for the ingenious and also to merriment, since a sensible plot is perfectly possible, but weird-sounding).
Finally, on the spot if you can produce enough dictionaries, or between classes if not, compile your own version of the game. With a bit of luck you will get to produce some tiny fictions within a rigidly imposed genre of dictionary entries; you will get to think about the history of words and thus of language, you will almost inevitably encounter a large number (more than the required half-dozen) of new words and above all you will spend time inside one of the best reference books available.
During feedback on these exercises it is usually possible to introduce elements of rhetoric, aspects of the way words sound and look, some history of language – a deepening of the understanding of how these basic tools of writing can be deployed in so many ways – not just for sense, but for sound and tone and mood as well.
At the very least it stimulates a kind of curiosity about language, which may be quite inspiring. The group of young male prison inmates I originally played this game with got truly excited about the muscles of language and how it worked, leading to a wonderful philosopher-poet discussion based on the question: ‘What colour were carrots before oranges arrived in Britain?’ Researching the answers to that (it’s very complicated because of the history of horticultural names among other things) led us into Persian and Middle Eastern folk tales and thence to an extraordinary short story by one of them that used flying-carpets as a central metaphor for drug use and abuse; a new way of writing about dependence and excitement and risk.
We are used to the ideas of grounding writing in the physical senses, and of training eye (and ear, finger, nose and tongue) to observe accurately, to pick out with precision the salient detail, the appropriate image. The idea of using our intellectual senses to the same end seems less developed in writing courses and books about the creative writing process.
In recent years there has been a significant departure from the popular assumption that science and literature (or the arts in general) had negligible common ground. It was held that the creativity and harnessing of intuition so manifest in the latter arena contrasted starkly with the clinical, cerebral, fastidiously numerical and emotionally arid qualities and processes of the former: as clear a distinction between right- and left-brain activities as could be imagined.
Increasingly, however, poets have found in science strong and vivid metaphors for the human condition; and concepts from twentieth-century physics, such as black holes and chaos, have provided fertile ground for the writing of good and imaginative poetry.
This interaction is based on the perception that science – albeit an essentially distinct discipline – can successfully be trawled by writers in order to achieve fresh insights and images. Though welcome, this view does not embrace what appears to me to be the much more fundamental and powerful reality, that the writing of a poem and the pursuit of scientific research are similar activities, in terms of their creative challenges. In both, one sets off on a journey towards a goal that can be only dimly perceived, where diversions may prove more rewarding than the main track. One is looking for links, shapes and relationships. One needs to be able to dream. Success in this first and most crucial stage of creation does not come from pushing, from imposing one’s intellect and prejudices on the question being addressed – which is often, in any event, incompletely formulated – but by being open to the seemingly chaotic and irrelevant impressions and images which come to mind. The setting for this first stage is the subconscious, which is fundamental to all creative activity and owes no allegiance to a particular discipline. Isaac Newton, probably the supreme creative genius in the history of science, whose work at the age of twenty-three utterly transformed our understanding of the physical world, and whose revolutionary approach to scientific investigation still holds sway, has – because of his stature – been pilloried (so too Albert Einstein) as the archetypical narrowly focused, close-minded, unimaginative scientist. Yet if one reads Newton’s Opticks, which presents, almost in diary form, his ruminations about light and related topics, together with the experiments he composed and executed as a consequence of his dreaming, it seems clear that he went through the same set of processes as one often does in the creation of a poem. His writing is beautiful, sheer poetry. I cannot share the view that to demonstrate and explain why sunlight is a mixture of all colours in the spectrum is to reduce a rainbow to a prism.
As mentioned earlier, science – perhaps particularly modern physics – contains many ideas and processes that have strong parallels with human life, and which can be effectively harnessed by poets. To take a few examples: Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, or more accurately Indeterminacy, is based on the recognition that in order to observe something we must disturb it. At the very least, one quantum of light must bounce off the object into the eye of the observer, and this collision moves the object so that we don’t know exactly where it is. Everything we see or touch we alter.
There is an echo of Heisenberg’s central idea in Newton’s First Law of Motion, formulated almost three hundred years earlier. Since light travels at a finite speed, what we see when we look at celestial objects is light that set out from those objects some time ago. In the case of our sun it is a few minutes, for a distant star it may be millions of years. It follows that stars we see may have expired aeons ago. Perhaps more interestingly, an observer on a star, looking now at Earth, would see our planet not as it is but as it used to be. Perhaps Shakespeare would be visible, or mammoths, or the birth of continents.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity teaches us that the length of an object, or the time interval between two events, is not an absolute, invariant quantity but depends upon the perspective of the person making the measurements: specifically, the relative motion between the person and the object or events. The concept of truth thus becomes a relative quality, requiring a more subtle definition than hitherto.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, popularly expressed in terms of ever–increasing entropy, states that in an isolated system energy can flow only in one direction, downhill, from higher to lower forms. In our solar system the highest form of energy is gravitational: the contraction of the Sun under gravity producing temperatures so enormous that thermonuclear reactions occur, in which in the deep interior of the burning Sun matter is transformed into energy, according to Einstein’s equation (hydrogen burning to form helium); this heat then being transported by turbulent convection to the Sun’s surface and converted to electromagnetic energy (radiation, in the form of sunlight), which flows through space to Earth, where photosynthesis in the green leaves of plants transforms it to chemical energy, which we (humans) take in by eating either the plants or animals that have eaten the plants. This unidirectional transformational chain of energy flow continues to its inevitable terminus, cosmic waste heat in a cold, dead universe. Human life can be considered as an interruption, lasting typically eighty years or so, in this inexorable degradation of energy.
Several areas of science involve the behaviour, characteristics and variability of large populations of particles, notably atoms and molecules, which are often regarded as the building blocks of matter. The numbers involved are immense – a gram of material contains about a million, million, million, million atoms or molecules. The temperature of the air can be defined as the average speed of the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen of which it is primarily constituted. If the air is heated the average molecular speed increases, and thus the temperature. But not all the molecules will have the average speed, some will be much faster, some much slower. Science is concerned with statistical probability, which recognizes and quantifies the distributions, variations of speed – or any other property – around the average value. The further a value is from the average the less likely it is, but it is not impossible, and some degree of likelihood – however slight – can be assigned to it. For example, somewhere within a glass of ice-cold water taken out of the refrigerator there may be a region where the water is boiling. Somewhere within a torrent of water rushing down a mountainside when snow melts in the spring, there will be some water molecules moving uphill. Such effects are not quirks or aberrations but stable consequences of random variability in large assemblages of particles. More graphically, they may be regarded as a consequence of the actions of the Maxwell Demon, a mythical creature who always operates within the bounds of physics but only just, in the far wings, where the almost impossible can happen. It is the Maxwell Demon who causes boiling to occur in ice-cold water, and who causes a small number of the randomly moving molecules in a drop of ice-cold water to interweave into the unique configuration that is the template for ice, thus causing freezing of the drop – a process which has been described as no more probable than the bricks in a great pile of rubble spontaneously interlocking to form a cathedral.
Lightning is a giant spark that releases electrical tension which has built up to an unsustainable level within a thunderstorm. Its massive surge of current along a narrow channel of air creates enormous temperatures, causing the air to expand violently as an audible shock wave we call thunder. This violent, orgasmic process may have provided the source of localized intense energy required to initiate those chemical reactions in the Earth’s primeval atmosphere that led to the formation of life on our planet.
I now provide two illustrations, from my own work, of the utilization of scientific knowledge in the writing of poetry.
In the first example, where two stanzas are presented from a long poem, an old Professor of Astronomy is giving his valedictory lecture, and the scientific ideas that he’s expounding are being increasingly infiltrated, as the lecture proceeds, by images and episodes from his personal life – which he regards as a failure. The first stanza is from the prepared lecture, the second his personal response.
I repeat, my cherished friends! There is no loss
of information. It travels on forever, intact.
What we can’t do is retrieve it, if it’s passed
beyond our niche of space and time. Its integrity
depends on never being found, for everything
we see or touch, we alter. Quanta flick the moon
to read its story – and the old man winces,
recoils. The earth leaps up to falling apples.
Andromeda’s red shift is scarlet underneath.
It is holy only on the dark side of the moon.
Is that how I altered you, Suzanne: by spying?
At my bedroom window throughout the afternoon
as you picked raspberries? On your bowed head,
a knotted handkerchief. Softening your shape,
the smock you said would see you through. Fruit
in your basket was swelling deep. You held
each berry as if you were in church, laid it
like a wreath. At times, you’d toss one high
and swallow it. Such impertinence! Such grace!
Then you felt my gaze, bit your lip to bleeding.
In this second example, a short poem entitled ‘Limitless’, the science is not providing a metaphor but simply a backcloth against which I wished to make the point that some questions – in this case one asked by a child – are so profound that a verbal response is irrelevant, perhaps even diminishing.
‘How much sky is there
in the whole world?’
I could answer that:
give the atmospheric mass
number of its molecules
the global area
the rate at which air thins
outwards to the sun.
But as I look into his eyes
huge, open to the sky,
galactic deep
reaching far beyond the sun
I shake my head
tell him I don’t know.
Some of the basic ideas outlined above form the basis of the exercises and opportunities for writing practice that follow. In addressing these it is important, when ranging widely with your ideas, either to try to confine them within the limits of physical possibility or to recognize when you are outside these limits. Courage is crucial – you will be most creative if you are stimulated by strange concepts, rather than intimidated by them.
One of the old clichés about writing is that it’s always best if you ‘write about what you know’. Why did people ever say that? Why did the instruction gain such currency?
I think it’s because we all respond to writing that makes us feel that we have ‘been there’; writing in which the writer has evoked a setting, an experience, a whole lifetime that is so vivid they have transported us bodily, all our senses alert, into another time and place. Our response as readers is often to feel that such a forceful impression of authenticity is down to the writer’s own experience. They are telling us what it was like so evocatively because the experience was real and vivid to them. They were writing about what they knew. So when we read Catherine Cookson’s account of growing up in 1930s Jarrow or Harriet Jacobs’ memoir of a nineteenth-century slave girl, they ring true because they are grounded in immediate, sensual, recalled detail.
All the essays in this section have been about keeping your work grounded in the everyday, in immediate experience. Alison Fell talks of writing about the associations you have with the bed you sleep in, Sara Maitland about finding out what glass-blowers actually do to create their works, and John Latham explains the minutiae of molecules bouncing around in matter. Whatever they are writing about here, it’s all grounded in physical objects, processes, images. But they are all also talking about those larger concepts, those things beyond the immediately observable. All the essays here are, I think, discussing how we might engage with abstract concepts and realms of knowledge, or even (as Alison Fell puts it) with ‘mysteries’.
How can we smuggle these vast ideas into our writing, without resorting to generalizations or language so opaque that it alienates the reader?
Writing is how we ask questions about the world. Angela Carter said, late on in her life, that it was how she still managed to ask the ‘big adolescent questions, about the nature of reality. Why are we here? What do we think we’re doing here? Who do we think we are?’
Looking for the answers to these things could take you down many routes. You might become a theologian, a traveller, a quantum physicist, a mystic, a politician. Or you might just become a novelist, a poet or playwright. The novelist, poet or playwright are using language in their experiments and their explorations. Language, because it refers to things, to physical matter and everyday lives, always wants to ground these big questions, so that they make vivid sense to a reader. It wants to trigger associations for the reader and make the abstract into something that is imminent and comprehensible to them.
In her ‘fantasy bed’ writing workshop, Alison Fell is ruthless in not allowing us to write bland, easy generalizations. She always pushes us back to writing about the sensual and the real. It is in her cut-up process, in the random juxtaposition of discrete phrases, that she allows the unconscious to work, so that by putting these vivid snippets of language back together, we see new patterns emerging. She gets us to examine our subconscious processes, and gets us to engage with the ‘mysteries’. She asks us what our real questions and preoccupations are. She wants to know what’s under the surface.
Writing alerts you to what you are really interested in. Whatever you are writing about, your true preoccupations always come out.
Do this now. List five abstract nouns, five states of mind that you are interested in. Write them off the top of your head. They could be envy, hilarity, isolation.
Now go hunting through your books. Find episodes from novels or stanzas from poems or scenes from plays that you particularly like. Boil five of them down to one word each; one abstract noun that represents that scene to you. Maybe all your favourite moments in literature are to do with ecstasy or triumph, or maybe despair or revenge. Can you see a pattern emerging? Which abstract states are you fascinated by? Which do you enjoy seeing dramatically evinced in writing?
Now look in particular at how these states are evoked in the individual pieces of writing. Which phrases give the clues? Are they grounded in character, in supple, evocative language? How does the author bring the abstract notion in?
My own favourite example in this section of the book is John Latham’s conjuring of that agent of chaos and randomness, the Maxwell Demon. I can see that creature immediately and see him as a kind of mythic trickster being, tampering with the laws of probability. My imagination wouldn’t be half so engaged if I’d read something about the laws of probability that used only the abstract terms. To get a handle on such subjects, we need an image, a mythic trope of some kind. We need to see a demon and suddenly it all comes clear. In this, perhaps, we’re not so different to the Egyptians making up sun gods to worship and explain how the universe worked. During the millennium celebrations I was heartened to see a giant metal millipede parading the streets of Manchester, being cheered by the crowds: the Millennium Bug personified. We seem to need to give a face to our abstract fears and hopes. We need to make them into something we recognize.
Sara Maitland writes in her essay about a restless need to research and find out ‘stuff’ from a variety of sources – horticulture, etymology, mathematics. She talks about the difficulty of using that information in fiction or poetry. Every reader likes to find out ‘stuff’ about the world; stuff they never knew before. It does us good. But no one likes to feel they are being clobbered over the head by it. In her example of finding out about a glass-blower, though, I think we have the key. In that research, she was learning to see the world through a glass-blower’s eyes: not only about the physical processes and skills involved, but also the kind of things that a glass-blower might think about as their thoughts go off into the abstract as they work. Thoughts, perhaps, about irony, inspiration or the divine. The writer’s job is to show how that grappling with the concrete and the immediate is what gives any of us access to the bigger questions and how, in writing, you only gain access to the one via the other.
Think of an occupation you know nothing about. Something you are aware of but haven’t really paid much attention to. Say, traffic wardens. What exactly do they have to do? How many hours do they walk up and down the streets? Do they have a set route and timetable or do they just make it up? What kind of satisfaction can they feel? Have they ever been beaten up doing their job?
Everyone sees the world in terms of their own biography, occupation, immediate preoccupations. I want to know what a traffic warden is thinking as she goes slapping tickets on cars. She might just be thinking she needs a holiday or new shoes. But she might well believe herself to be the instrument of divine retribution. How metaphysical can her thoughts be?
Ask her. Ask your chosen person about their job. Talk to a laundrette operator, a cinema usherette, a hot-air balloonist. Let them talk about the specifics of their work. Don’t go crashing in and ask after their philosophy. Listen to what they have to say about the specifics and then you’ll gradually see how they engage with abstract notions. Everyone has their own metaphors. Their generalizations about the world are always interesting and at their most useful when they are grounded in the physical and immediate nature of what they do.
Why not test this out by getting out and about to talk to some people whose view of the world you have never really considered before? Talk to your friends about their work. You might think you know what they do and the kinds of things they get up to, but it’s always worth asking for a bit more detail. It’s always surprising.