Writing and the Art of Self-trepanation 2. Getting on with it.

Here’s a question for you. A man is working at the top of a tall ladder when the ladder starts to tilt sideways. If he can’t stop it moving, should he jump off the ladder or hang on to it?

This is one of the titbits that I discovered when I was sorting through bookmarked websites for my current book. It reflects how I feel at the start of a book – the tension between wanting to jump off or hanging in there and going for an exhilarating ride. At the moment I am hanging in there, going back through the huge pile of references that I have accumulated and putting them into categories relevant to different chapters. It points up the advice that my Ph.D. supervisor gave me: “Just keep going”. In other words, do something rather than nothing. If you don’t start, you will never finish. This is what Wendy has been saying, although heaven knows she has enough trouble getting started with writing tasks. I just wonder what she is going to say when I bring a box full of references with me on our holiday in Cornwall next week?

Writing and the Art of Self-trepanation 1. Getting Started

The eccentric Joey Mellen performed a self-trepanation in the Spring of 1970 in an attempt to enhance his consciousness. "He applied the drill to his forehead, but after half an hour’s work the cable burnt out ..... next day he set out to finish the job. ‘This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.' "

John Michell “Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions”.

Mellen could have achieved the same effect with much less danger simply by becoming a writer, which can feel very much like self-trepanation with the difficulty of starting the job, carrying it through, and the subsequent effect on the brain.

Getting started can be a major problem, as many writers have found. When Jean Tangye began to write about her life at Minack in Cornwall, she only got started after her husband Derek, an author himself, locked her in a shed with her permission, a typewriter, a pile of paper and absolutely nothing else.

Wendy hasn’t had to go to those extremes with me, but she certainly gets exasperated when I ask her to comment on the 50^th version of Chapter 1 before I get started on Chapter 2. It’s very important to do this sort of polishing when preparing a synopsis and sample chapter for a publisher, and an amplification of the old journalist’s maxim always to put a piece aside after you’ve written it, even for half an hour, and then come back and edit it. It really blocks the path of progress, though, when it comes to writing the rest of the book.

Or does it? Most writers are singularly coy about how they go about writing (Somerset Maugham, for example, in his “Writer’s Notebook” doesn’t say a word about the subject), but Bertrand Russell tells a story which indicates that my approach might have its merits. I polish, not to improve my prose, but because every time I read what I have written I find things that I have glossed over rather than thinking them right through. Then suddenly something becomes unblocked and I can write subsequent chapters much faster through having put in all that thinking. Compare Russell:

“Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation. The most curious example of this process, and the one which led me subsequently to rely upon it, occurred at the beginning of 1914. I had undertaken to give the Lowell Lectures at Boston, and had chosen as my subject "Our Knowledge of the External World". Throughout 1913 I thought about this topic. In term time in my rooms at Cambridge, in vacations in a quiet inn on the upper reaches of the Thames, I concentrated with such intensity that I sometimes forgot to breath and emerged panting as from a trance. But all to no avail. To every theory that I could think of I could perceive fatal objections. At last, in despair, I went off to Rome for Christmas, hoping that a holiday would revive my flagging energy. I got back to 'Cambridge on the last day of 1913, and although my difficulties were still completely unresolved I arranged, because the remaining time was short, to dictate as best as I could to a stenographer. Next morning, as she came in at the door, I suddenly saw exactly what I had to say, and proceeded to dictate the whole book without a moment's hesitation.”

Actually, I don’t believe him. I think it was the deadline that did the trick. I need the rest of his advice like I need a hole in the head.

My Writing Environment

Like Roald Dahl, I am most comfortable when writing in an armchair – my writer’s womb, although so far as I know most wombs are not fitted with an angled book rest on the left to hold notes and books, a small table on the right to hold pens and whisky or a glass of wine, and a wheel-in table (like the ones that you can eat off in front of the TV) to write on. In Dahl’s case the “table” was just a flat piece of board, and he wrote with a pen. Sometimes I do that (most often while editing), but mostly it holds a lap-top computer.

Dahl had his armchair in a shed in the bottom of the garden. Mine (a dilapidated old wing-back chair of which I am inordinately fond, to the disgust of my wife Wendy) is in an attic study, where I am surrounded by books, plus a stereo that I can operate by remote control. I am not the only one who is inordinately fond of the chair. If I get up for 5 seconds, our cat Yasmin takes it over. It is for this reason that I have a second chair (a rocking chair) to which I can move if she beats me to the armchair.

In the English winter, she has the armchair full-time, because we disappear off to Australia while a friend comes in to look after her. There I have a different armchair, which I suppose makes me an armchair traveler. The Australian one is situated next to a large window, through which I can watch the parrots feeding on the veranda and Wendy working in her beloved garden.

The most important thing, though, is to get into the armchair every day, no matter whether I have any writing ideas or not. Something might come, or nothing might come. One thing is for sure - writing doesn’t happen just by dreaming about it. It happens by doing. “Just keep going” is the watchword, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike.

The Secret of Writing

“You want to write? Well f*** off home and write”.

The above is the full text of a talk on "The Secret of Writing" given by a famous American author to a group of hopefuls at a hotel in London after he had looked down at his audience with some distaste. There's more to it than that, though. In my own case the additional secret is always to carry a small notebook in which to note down ideas and quotes before the memory of them disappears, which these days happens over a fairly short timescale.

I have been sorting out my notes from the last couple of years during the past month, while waiting for my agent to sort out a contract for my latest book. These notes include over a hundred book titles that seemed brilliant at the time, and a mass of ideas for articles on things that have grabbed my attention. Often they concern the way in which science is sadly misunderstood by many people, including a classic gaffe from a BBC News commentator: “The temperature was minus sixty Centigrade, which means it was three times as cold as a domestic refrigerator.” If you can’t see why this is funny, you are not alone. When all reasonably educated people can see why it is funny, I will have done my job.

This fallow few weeks has borne fruit in the form of better lighting in my study, and a set of shelves where my writing notes are now properly organized under the titles of books that I am realistically aiming to write over the next few years. I wish that I could share the titles now, but writing is a cut-throat business. For the moment, all I can share is how I go about it.

The notebooks are one way, with tear-out pages (which I always date) to go in files. These notebooks have become an essential part of my life, because I never know when an idea is going to come. The latest one came when I was idly listening to a repeat edition of the endlessly funny BBC radio programme “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue”. Others have come while I am in the bath (resulting in a pattern of wet footprints across the carpet as I rushed for my notebook and pen), watching TV, or on one frustrating occasion out in the middle of Narrabeen Lake on my windsurfer. I kept repeating the idea out loud as I sailed to shore, only to be distracted and lose it. I’ll never know what it was now, and it might have made my fortune.

In the meantime it is time for me to f*** off and write another synopsis and sample chapter for my agent to try to sell. I will also try to write this blog more regularly, and I look forward to comments as to whether it is a help to potential writers. Who knows - the comments might even help me.

How I Write

As with most authors, I started writing because I had to – not for money, but from a feeling that I had things to say and that this was the way to say them. As I wrote, I found that it wasn’t just a matter of knowing what I had to say, and then writing it down. It was more like the old Andy Capp gag (at least, I think it was Andy Capp; if it wasn’t it should have been) where Andy’s wife Flo says “How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?”

I don’t really know what I think until I start writing it down. The process of writing for me is like an internal conversation. That conversation can lead to the sort of situation that Bertrand Russell experienced during a lecture, where he started presenting a point of view, only to change his mind half way through and switch to arguing for the opposite point of view!

My science often proceeded in the same way. I would start with an idea, and then watch evidence pile up which showed me that Nature and I were not on the same wavelength. That was fine, though. I might have started with a hypothesis, but this was just a way to ask a question of Nature. The important point was Nature's answer, not how I had phrased my question.

My job as a writer is also to ask questions, rather than starting with a fixed idea and amassing evidence to “prove” it. That is the approach of the Eric von Danikens and Dan Browns of this world. Their approach might sell books, but I could never make myself do it. I start with a question, and the resulting book shares my journey of exploration and discovery. The questions so far have been along the lines of “where did the science that I have used all my life actually come from?” In future books they are more likely to be along the lines of “what is the place of science in society and its relevance to our view of the world?” These are questions that are very important to me and my own world view, and my aim in writing is to share my journey of exploration, wherever that might lead.