The Blank Sheet (or Writer's Block)

Apologies for the delay in producing this blog.  But the blank sheet is exactly what I've been suffering from.  A common condition for all creative people.

Many of you who have contributed tweets or read my blogs are creative people, writers, artists, perhaps musicians too.  So you all know about the blank sheet and understand the hesitancy contemplating that untouched emptiness, like a fresh fall of snow staring at you, and waiting for the first mark to be made.  But it's also exhilarating; that launch into the unknown.  It's what keeps us all buzzing, what life is about.

 For travellers too, the blank corner of the map is worrying.  What's there?  Why hasn't it been filled in with cartographical information.  Or perhaps it's just incorrect guesswork filling the gap, as I sometimes found on my treks in #WalksontheWildSide?  An intriguing opportunity to explore, or a scary void?

The important thing about writing, painting, playing an instrument, or even drawing a map, is that they are all languages.  A way of communicating.  And they are very similar because they all portray an image.  They all tell a story.  They are all different ways of constructing a plot.  Choosing verbs and adjectives is like choosing colours, or juxtaposing harmonies and discords.  Should this description be hot or cold, abrasive or calming?  Building a picture.  Playing with the images being created in the reader/viewer/listener's brain.  It's very exciting.  Creativity is exciting.  And intimidating.  Because it's easy to get it wrong.

Vasari, in his descriptions of the North Italian Renaissance painters, used to talk about 'making' a picture, not painting one, because it's a technical process, in those days also involving grinding the pigments and applying the 'fresco' plaster etc.  So also with writing, not just stringing words together to transmit an idea but filling it with flavours and nuances.  Or for a musician building sounds into a complex structure which colours the airwaves and transcends into the shimmering peace of a flat sea or a raging hurricane.

Every writer knows that the story is the easy bit.  It's how it's told that matters.  The mixing of words, like colours on a palette, is the really important and often complicated bit.  Of course there are technical issues to be respected (or consciously abandoned) like spelling, grammar, punctuation etc.  Every tiny dab of the brush, scrape of the palette knife, the lightest semi quaver, is part of making this vital image.  Creative artists sweat blood over these details.

And it all starts with a blank sheet.  Maybe the brain is teeming with conflicting ideas.  Maybe there's just a vague abstract notion of the eventual colour that is wanted, the rough shapes.  We're in the realms of scouring the imagination, stretching the mind.  Even digging deep into the soul.  Some writers like John Clare went insane.  Some of the best creativity walks a gossamer thin tightrope between brilliance and madness, and can spill over either way.  Or both.  John Dryden wrote, in Absalom and Achitophel, 'Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide'.  Some creative artists border alcoholic oblivion, like Dylan Thomas who somehow managed to sharpen his perception through whisky, until he destroyed himself.  The creation of beauty, the agonies of birth, the glory of pulling together the impossible. 

But faced with the blank sheet a painter friend insists that it is of paramount importance 'to attend'.  Like any job of work, if you don't 'attend' in your studio, study or music room and worry at it like a dog with a bone, it won't just happen of its own accord.

Although brilliance is rare, most of us do our damnedest to cover the ground with our feet of clay and stretch our fingers towards the unattainable perfection.  It's a journey worth making, a goal to strive for, a secret joy to achieve.  All starting with the same blank sheet. 

And now suddenly I've filled it!

What were you doing 40 years ago?

What were you doing 40 years ago?  I went for a walk.  I'd read about a lake set in the volcanic desert of north-west Kenya nicknamed the Jade Sea which, in certain weather conditions, turned jade green.  The world's biggest desert lake with its densest population of crocodiles.  Lake Turkana.  I wanted to see it.  So I decided to make a walk on its west side in the lands of the Turkana tribe.  It was extraordinarily remote in 1980, a little-explored region where I even came across people who'd never seen a white man before.  I walked with some local tribesmen and loaded donkeys for 150 miles, blisteringly hot and digging in the ground for our water.  The area was also beset with bandits of different kinds!  It was an exciting time, and I was hooked.  Over the next five years I kept going back until I'd walked on all sides of the lake, covering about 1200 miles. It became more and more exciting, and more and more dangerous!

Eventually I had to write a book to describe it all:  Walks on the Wild Side published by Eye Books.  The most important thing for me was absolute truth.  It was exciting enough without any lily-gilding, and the story is told in great detail, including the killing of one of my companions.  But first I had my busy career in the Film Industry, doing Special Effects in movies like Alien and The Empire Strikes Back. So only after I retired did I have the time to write.

Those treks taught me a lot about our relationship with our world, and how penniless and often half naked tribesmen had a dignity which commanded respect.  In many ways they were more honourable than their wealthy Western counterparts.  Who has been destroying this planet?  Not them. 

And of course I leaned a lot about myself, my own reaction to danger and fear.  When planning a trip into remote life-threatening places, the most important lesson to learn is not how to get fit and strong (although important), or even how brave you think you are.  The most important is to understand your own mortality and to accept how small you are.  When we have left our Western props behind, we realise we have no more rights to life than the people we are amongst and we find ourselves absolutely equal to them.  Without that understanding we can never relax in extreme situations or be able to cope with the risks of death, dangerous thirst or sickening diet.  There is no sanctity of human life.

Lockdown

Good Morning, it’s April 29th and we’re deep in lockdown.  Hope you are faring well and coping?  This awful pandemic has thrown up all sorts of questions about our relationship with the world around us and our place in it.  Whoops, a heavy subject I know.  But the world is getting smaller, and people like me born in the middle of the last century are old enough and ugly enough to have seen huge changes.  Many good ones of course, but also some serious worries.... did you know that in the 40 years since I made my lengthy treks through the volcanic desert of East Africa (Walks on the Wild Side published by eye-books.com), 60% of the wildlife on this planet has been destroyed because of human activity (WWF stats).  Young people are inheriting a mess, and I pray that they will be up to sorting it out.  In the 1960s my generation was deeply critical of the ones before it and the mess they'd made with two world wars and the pollution of the industrial revolution, and we were determined to make the world a better place.  But as we got older a lot of people seemed to forget these ideals.  We produced Trump!  It's so important to follow ideals.

40 years ago much of the world was a simpler, cleaner place.  Tribal East Africa was sometimes an extremely dangerous place to be with lots of raiding and even gangs of bandits keen to aim a spear or AK-47 at you.  Yet there was also a strange kind of decency about it.  The wealthy West was happy to look down its nose at these half naked, and sometimes starving, people and call them 'savages'... but hold on just a minute, who are the ones who have been ruining this planet?  Not them.  Time for a mirror please.  We are the savages, fountain pens and keyboards instead of spears and automatics. 

So, will we all come out of this pandemic a more responsible kinder world?  I would so much like to believe that we will, but greed and corruption are hard to conquer.  What do you think?