writing

Don’t Write Bollocks.

March 1, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

You wouldn’t think it would be a difficult rule to follow, really, the one in the title. The internet makes us all writers, gives us all an audience, provides us with endless opportunities to read, learn, digest. It’s hard not to inhale information when Facebook is filled with links, videos, rants, shares and the like. And if you move your face from Facebook (clue is in the name), my word, you could learn a lot.

Let us not forget that in only a few hundred years we’ve come from not even being allowed to read the book we were supposed to live by in our own language, right through ‘the holy grail is a job being allowed to write for a newspaper or get a book deal’ to ‘open laptop and splurge opinion out to several hundred people at once’. And audience. A community. The ability to inform and be informed.

With that information dissemination blessing comes responsibility of course.

For the love of goodness, don’t press share until you’ve checked it is real. Snopes, my friends, Snopes.
For the love of sanity, don’t share repetitive, needy memes. If it starts “it occurs to me”… it needs deleting.
Don’t write something unless you are happy to stand by it (and that includes passive aggressive Facebook updates).
Learn fast: if you use Google as your doctor, you’ll be dead 6 times by dinner.

But Google. We could blame a lot on Google. If you are old enough to remember life before a decent search engine, you’ll know that once upon a time, when you searched for something you got, by and large, a useful page written by someone with a passion who knew something about the subject matter. Or, you know, possibly you would get drivel with the most important word in the article written 55 times in white text at the bottom of the page. But still, mostly you got somewhere real.

And then came ‘content’, regular updated content, which is a whole different thing to ‘words on the virtual page that someone really wanted to write’. Meaningful keywords and meta descriptions and all that jazz to keep websites fresh and lovely and churning over in the Google machine. And of course, so came blogs and all the wonder that is what blogging which can do. Which is great, really great. I love blogging. The world is made better by blogging. MY world is made better by blogging. Infinitely.

But if Google was a cupboard under the stairs, it would have a serious date with a 40 day declutter.

And I’m far from guilt-free. I make part of my living writing copy for websites, trying to put together something half way meaningful from facts gleaned off the internet, a few nuggets of opinion and ideas of my own and a healthy smattering of keywords and useful phrases. It’s not perfect but I do it a whole lot better than some people who also get paid not very much at all to assemble words on a production line. And of course there are the times when trying to write for money, on my blog or elsewhere, squeezes out every last individual thought I have and all the energy for writing something worth saying.

It happens. It’s not pretty and it’s self-defeating in the end, but it happens. Possibly as self-defeating as raging against your own industry.

The thing is, in amongst all these words and all the splurging of beautiful and boorish writing, of eloquence and assaults on grammar, come headlines like this:-

“Practical Tips for Thoughtful Self Gifting”.

It’s like something from the feverish dreams of a copywriter; charged with the creation of a mail-out sales spiel to remind humans, in the ever growing scream of cacophonous void that is the internet, to come and buy… come and buy.

“Here is help on how to buy something you want, for yourself”.

Really? Has the world improved for this? Are humans so dumb now that we need help – practical help – on buying something nice for ourselves?

If this is sales and content, we need a new ploy. We are filling the universe sized space of the internet with an ever decreasing circle of meaningless nonsense; once that headline gets past an editor, are we lost?

It’s an amazing thing, being able to find words, hear words, create words. It’s the ultimate liberty, to have the right to write and the right to read and hear. And the internet is made better by the raw outpourings and connections of words like these, the raging rant of the grateful mother, pulled under by the every day ordinariness that most of us don’t ‘Facebook’ for fear of either being sectioned, seen as less than perfect, or deemed needy.

My lovely friend Josie, who lives a life making a living much as I do, with words (only I fear, rather more connected to her soul as she does so) wrote about losing her voice online. I know I have; somewhere in the fear of accidentally plagiarising, being unoriginal, speaking words spoken yesterday or being shot down for daring to voice and opinion, I lost my words. I lost them – most of all – because I wrote with such brutal honesty after Freddie died – and nothing I write will ever be as good again.

But if we all think like that, soon the internet will be full of nothing but the cud of redigested copy.

I’ve taken a leaf from Josie’s book – grabbed a notebook and started hunting, in private, for my voice.

Why you won’t get a word from me.

January 2, 2015 by Merry 5 Comments

I’ve been watching with a vague, perturbed fascination as bloggers sign up to a defining word for the year. I noticed this happening last year too, in lesser numbers. Perhaps it is something like a January ‘Elf on the Shelf’ and it will sweep every manner of social media channel for a while, piling up motivational images and quotes and fueling a right on positivity wave that makes everyone happy, successful, creative and marvellous.

Perhaps everyone will be the happiest mum, with the most successful blog and the most improved photos with the most bestest selling of novels and the top pinned craft post by next year.

That would certainly be a lot of worthy happiness.

I might say I’d worry about the fallout, of the people who pick aspirational words and then measure themselves against everyone else as they sculpt a social media presence to prove how they’ve achieved it.

But to be honest, everyone else isn’t really my problem.

It’s not that I don’t understand, or even admire the sentiment and god knows we should all do whatever works for us. I had years worth of blogging where people repeated “You write about yourself online, for strangers, with your real name??? That’s WEIRD! It’s probably DANGEROUS! WHY????” at me. Years of New Year posts and aspirational planning, navel gazing or positive thinking.

I’ve not changed. I’ve been doing all that over this festive break too. (Not the new year post round up though, I’m rather scared of rocking the boat with those, these days and ending up in despair a year later.)

I’m certainly planning, evaluating, allowing myself the concept of a fresh start. It always feels natural for me to do it now, when the rush of Xmas at work closes down and we can breathe and be together and think about preparing ourselves and the business for the next onslaught. It’s not so much the change of year date that causes it as it being very much part of our rhythm.

I love a fresh start. I hate placing expectations on myself and anything imposed, even psychologically, on me causes an instant fail mechanism to kick in. The minute something external is measuring me, I work out how to fail. It’s a dreadful habit. If I join a diet club I figure out how to cheat so I fail. If I came up with a word, I’d come up with a reason at the end of the year why it didn’t work to me.

One of the girls wrote up a history of her life over the last 4 years the other week and it struck me painfully how almost nothing but Freddie, Bene and surviving have occurred for almost half her life. We’ve had no great amazing adventures. There has been very little fun or innovation or excitement. Nothing memorable but living or dying brothers. I can’t define wanting to change that in a word.

I can’t even define how I want my other blog to be in a word: I managed to say I want a return to “record” and “legacy”.

I’d like to be more meaningful.

I’d like to be doing more than surviving.

I’d like to get some adventure back.

I could sum that up in explore. Or grow. Or climb. Or create. And none of those would be all of it.

I don’t want to dream, I want to do. I don’t want to write, I want to publish. I don’t want to improve, I want to be brilliant. I don’t want to be a survivor, I want to be an inspiration.

I don’t want to publish, I want to publish brilliantly.

I am ready to shine, but I’m lacking the time or head space to do that in a way that I would believe if I did it.

Besides which, I can barely manage a week without one of 5 kids needing me to divert to focus on them and it is hard to believe in shining if mostly you spent the week saving other people from drowning.

No word can define what changes I want to make or aspirations I have to follow.

Success sounds too commercial. I don’t need roots, I need leaves and flowers and to thrive where I am so that I can transplant safely.

I’m bored of dreaming. I’m bored of existing. I’m bored of grey days and managing to stay breathing.

I’d like a little mystery and beauty.

I’d like to stand on top of the hill and say “I did it. I got here.”

I can’t do any of that with a word because there are about 6 people living in this body, all fighting for airspace and none of them believe in the same word. And that before you count the 6 people living in the house with me (all of me) who all need accommodating too. There is probably at least 6 of several of them too.

It’s crowded.

It is plans that work for me. Goals, measurable goals and ideas with a list to be ticked.

January has some simple goals.

Write 7000 more words.
Write a synopsis.
Send it to someone.

I need that out of my system. Either it will work and I’d find someone who thinks I’m worth publishing, or I’ll forget that dream forever.

Read 3 interesting books.
Lose 6lbs.
Run more days than I don’t.

After that, we’ll see. Best to re-evaluate in February. I might be someone else by then.

Book Review #20 Lady Chatterley's Lover – DH Lawrence

June 3, 2011 by Merry 1 Comment

Even if I was academically up to the task, (which I’m not!) a review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in terms of themes, message and relevance to the world wouldn’t suit this blog for one and is hardly a world requirement for another 😉 The literary world does not need to know what Merry thinks of a classic in order to sell more of it 😆

Probably more relevant is what I got from it anyway. And that was a lot; my age old apathy about reading ‘classics’ or ‘worthy’ books was not so in force here, as I read another DH Lawrence as an S Level book while in my final English A Level year. I loved Sons and Lovers, one of the few books, along with Cider with Rosie, that really spoke to me in those years. Perhaps it is that I like a connection to an author who write autobiographically or partly so; I seem to remember really enjoying the Sheila Hocken books about Emma and Blue Above the Chimney’s too. Plus DH Lawrence was writing about a landscape familiar to me, as I grew up in Nottinghamshire and in fact went to the school opposite his too. As did my uncle. (And Ed Balls, but we won’t dwell on that!)

So, having enjoyed Sons and Lovers, I did expect to enjoy Lady Chatterley – and I did. What really struck me though, was my preconceived ideas and also the hang over of ideas and misconceptions and downright prejudices that lurk in my brain.

What I thought I knew of Lady Chatterley was that it was a book about a woman who has an affair with the gardener and that it was salacious in the extreme at the time it was published. I’m a bit old to get the trembles from that and didn’t expect it to be exactly shocking in this day and age (it isn’t, unless you could the talking to willies bit!) but what I didn’t know was anything about why she has the affair or how it ends.

What Lady Chatterley really is is “desperately lonely and unhappy woman who wants to be adored, held and have a baby” something many if not most women can probably relate to at some point. And what really struck me is that buried somewhere in my brain is still some outdated, repressed private school and middle class notion that if a woman has an affair, it is her failing and her fault and she’s in the wrong and if the affair is saucy, it’s probably sordid and she’s just a no good from the start.

I love the book on many levels, the characters, the language, the rude and brutal sexuality of it, the coal miners and the images of pit heads and dirty villages I can still recall. But what I liked the most was it reminded me again to keep my mind open, not judge, check why I believe why I do – and celebrate myself for being a woman who loves rude and dirty passion, deserves to be wanted, acknowledged and respected for herself (I am) alongside cuddling, being loved and longing for happiness.