English

What was your favorite subject in school?

I loved history until we did the Victorian era. Don’t know what it was about it but I just couldn’t get my head around it. Oddly, when I went back to university aged 40 the Victorian Era came up and I still can’t remember much about it. I still love the subject, apart from that.

Odd when you think it was a massive period in modern history, where so many things changed, and many not for the better. A time when we swapped poverty for a different form of slavery, which is how I see working life.

In the UK you get four years of freedom, from then on your life is proscribed until you’re 67 now, probably 80 or 90 for babies being born now. Unless someone finds a better way.

Where is Gene Roddenberry when you need him?

For non-Star Trek fans, his vision for the future was one where everyone was given everything they needed, and then you chose a role in which you wanted to contribute to society. Even the top people only had very ordinary apartments.

English

What is there to say? Writer, poet, playwright? Creating images with language, exploring emotions, human behaviour, the world. Placing yourself in the footsteps of others, exploring the stars, creating a new universe. A new world.

Films, TV programmes, books, children’s books and entertainment, and all of it only based on one of six plots, or a mixture thereof.

What’s more, all of it based on only 26 letters in the English alphabet. I’m afraid I’m woefully uneducated on other alphabets but I’m sure that all writers have that exact same feeling of wonder.

The games I can play! The worlds I can explore! The worlds I can create. The what if’s I can play with?

Star Trek and Star Wars are great examples of world creation, as is Disney. Other cartoons and children’s authors have achieved exactly the same. Words and images that have survived centuries. Books still read and turned into films and tv series, when such things couldn’t have been imagined by the authors.

A certain bear who has become one of the lasting memories of our wonderful Queen Elizabeth II. Marmalade sandwich and all.

It’s a truly magical world.

Thoughtful writing

If you want an insight into the mind of a writer, read The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. He puts himself into the book and explains how he is led by his characters.

Leslie Thomas, a famous UK writer of the 1970’s, said on a chat show that he would go about his daily life, then one morning he would wake up with a book fully formed in his mind.

He would know the entire plot, including things about the characters that he didn’t need to put in the book, but helped him to understand how they acted and what they would do.

He would sit down and write that book, then go about his day and wait.

Fascinating.

Franz Schubert

Slightly to one side, but then music is written. I saw a fascinating documentary many years ago, so much so that it feels like another lifetime.

It was interesting but would have impacted me far more strongly now.

It was about a young man who had taken the musical world by storm as a pianist, focusing on the work of Schubert. At that time he was thought to be one of the best ever pianists playing Schubert’s music. But the documentary was made for another, even more fascinating reason. This…

Left is Schubert, right is András Schiff.

As young men the two of them were almost identical, even here they’re remarkably similar. I couldn’t find images of them at the same age, and of course one is a painting, but I’ve never forgotten it.

Did Schubert actually return?

In my world

There’s an explanation for this kind of magic. It has been suggested that everything that has ever been and will ever be is already in existence, including art, music, writing, and when the soul that created it comes here, they simply download it.

The first time I heard that I thought “No…that can’t be…Leslie Thomas!” And I started to think those magic words that keep you youthful…

What if…

This has been my genuine experience. When I’ve really written a lot, including my play, it just fell onto the paper. The words were just in the air above my head and I grabbed them and wrote them down as fast as I could. If they’re not there, they’re not.

Trust the Muse

I was taught at university to edit my work to make sure it was as good as it could be. I sent two plays off to a theatre once, one I’d worked on, one that I threw together in a hurry because they asked for two.

When I received the letter with their reactions, I nearly fell over. They said that both were great and they were interested in my work (then the theatre closed), but what a pity that one play hadn’t been edited nearly as well as the other.

It was the other way around, the play they thought had been worked to death had just been checked for errors and inconsistencies as I’d had no time to do more.

I’m not arrogant. I don’t feel that every word I put on paper is a diamond and only silly people can’t see it, far from it. But I did learn one thing there, trust the muse and don’t interfere with it. Just make sure your spelling and facts are right.

If you doubt yourself – trust the muse. In other words…

“What if…?“

What if this world is magical!?!

Creative magic

So I love English as a subject, please substitute your own language here, and I love what it allows me to do.

I can explore wherever I wish, I can create a world, I can imagine what it’s would be like to be someone completely different.

Moreover, my life experiences have been very real. Every single thing I believe has been born from an experience that happened. Experiences I would never have known to go looking for. Things that weren’t even in my vocabulary, until they were.

I think it was that explorative, creative mind, that allowed me to stop and think about them and ask myself – did they feel real? That allowed that magic into my mind. The fact that those poems and plays were just there one day and that was a fact, opened my mind to more possibilities.

But you know the real beauty? In reading the weirder parts of this blog, you have three choices:

• To believe this is true for me.
• To be cautious but also feel that there is something in it.
• Or to think it’s just creative writing, building a new world.

It isn’t creative writing for me, it’s a window into my very real world, but as the reader you have choices as to how you read it. Whether to accept it. But you always have the power to turn the page, close the book, shut down your e-reader, or test out the magic.

That’s what I love about writing – it’s an offering and the author leaves it entirely to you once it leaves their hands.

Magic.

Thank you

To all you wordsmiths out there who entertain me and make me think about life in a different way. Since I have joined WordPress I have enjoyed insights into so many worlds I will never be able to visit (if it’s hot I flake out under a fan), but I have seen into your worlds through the magic of your writing.

Most importantly, I have learned and continue to learn from you.

Wow, that love of English has travelled far and wide.

Deb xx