The urge to write
George Clark, 18 June 2008
Most days I write at least 400 words. On the shelf above me is almost 2 metres of A4 folders of notes from 1965 through to 2000 when I went environmentally friendly and stopped printing them out.
No fiction or poetry or travelogues or journalistic essays. It is nearly all about facts and ideas with an early predisposition towards intellectual cleverness and a later one to intuitive wisdom: with some recent merging as post-modern modes of thought link to traditional and mystical ones.
Subject matter ranges across 12 major disciplines in my personal quest for understanding and for better ways to be human. There are as yet no solid conclusions but the journey has spawned the occasional output that others might find helpful in their own questing. My vocation seems to be to facilitate learning – both of myself and others.
The urge to write might be an offshoot of the human urge to speak which involves communicating and being social. As it is I now live alone and work from home so I am something of a hermit. While this can lead to stewing unnecessarily in my own juices it has the advantage of not having to stew too much in the juices of other people. The jury is still out on whether I am pulled by the vision of mystical peace or pushed by the demons of burn out and world weariness. But either way there is ample solitude in which to practice mindfulness and renunciation.
I write both professionally and for pleasure. Professional work is both paid and voluntary. These days the paid writing is mainly to do with plain language – mostly rewrites of government policy documents but also some original stuff aimed at popularising key development concepts. Voluntary writing is wider in scope and includes basic copy writing for the local Boat Festival and Salmon Bothy and more original pieces related generally to social development and channelled through the CCSD, Hakikazi Catalyst and earlier for the BPL.
But the bulk of the writing is done for pleasure. This includes handwritten prose, lists, mindmaps and doodles: although there are not so many of those these days because my handwriting is getting very poor. So most input is through the keyboard where there is a mix of structured and spontaneous writing.
Most of the structured writing takes the form of one-pagers although there is the occasional essay and dialogue. These are often based on handwritten drafts. Some are reports of what other authors have said that is clever or wise, but increasingly they are home grown. Most of these end up on my various web sites and blogs.
But spontaneous writing makes up the bulk of what I produce these days. There are the 20 minute flows of consciousness which follow the instructions of Dorothea Brande and there are the less rushed daily diaries. I open one of these first thing every morning and add to it throughout the day with time stamps along with way. These are mainly prose although there are some lists, continua, matrixes and the occasional illustration. They are a mix of the banal and the brilliant. Some of the brilliant bits are extracted and built into one-pagers or essays.
It is said that if you want to be a writer then you must write. I took a couple of correspondence courses on writing a few years back – they were on creative writing and on journalism so they did not truly suit my needs but they offered a lot of good ideas. I have also (a) acquired a fair collection of 'how to write' books which have been useful and (b) set up a blog where I put links to useful places on the internet.
In November of 2007 I systematically estimated how many 'spontaneous' words I had produced. It comes to slightly over 7 million[1]. That indicates a fairly strong (possibly abnormal) urge to write.
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