Those of
you that know me know of my abiding love for the works of Will Shakespeare.
OMG! I love that man. The music in his words, his puns and double entendres, his passionate love scenes his love of the dramatic, his sense of the ridiculous. I wonder can men be bawds? If so Will was both bard and bawd. I read something recently
about him and I’m para phrasing it here - I can’t remember it exactly nor the
author. It described writers as magpies who love not shiny objects but
interesting words, or little bits and pieces of information that are stored in
the database in our brains to be taken out and mulled over and regurgitated in
some piece we write, perhaps even years later.
Writers
need a smattering of psychology and of philosophy. We don’t need to read all
philosophies or examine all psychological analysis, we can simply rob something from a book on
such weighty matters, we usually have inquisitive acquisitive minds. The internet was a godsend to us for it gives us access to information that might have required a lot of effort otherwise. You can
tell a fiction writer from his\her library. Its contents will neither flatter
the eye nor indicate any systematic capacity for reading. Instead of neat rows
of well bound books you will find dog-eared books on witchcraft, animal
training, second hand dictionaries and guides to punctuation and grammar. Un scholarly history books, travel books, some
great writers some contemporary writers, some not so great writers who simply
tell great tales, notebooks full of odd facts picked up in pubs, betting shops,
knitting circles, cobblers, shops, on buses, in taxis, on the radio.
What no
amount of academic training can bestow on any potential writer (and we all have
potential) is the gift of words. It cannot teach the fundamental skill of
putting words together in surprising patterns which seem to reflect some
previously unguessed truth about life. And this was Will’s great ability – he
told truths in a new way to an undereducated populace who lived short brutal
lives. Of course they weren’t even then, new truths. All the great truths
were already there, and have been since Man first stood erect and thought. People may not have experienced them at that stage but that
does not mean they did not exist. So reading, reading widely and listening and
observing are all vital to any writer of fiction and I believe that there must also be an innate curiousity about everything about ability to work things out for oneself.
Why am I
telling yiz all this? Sure, ye probably knew it all already!
