In 2022, writers Nathan Dean (italics) and Barry Hale1 (regular text) fell into a conversation about art, about writing, about making a living as an artist and the importance of dream-logic in fiction. In March of 2023, Nathan suggested we do it formally, as a blog, so here it is, on the off-chance others may want to join the conversation.
For Part 4, click below:
Well, that was certainly a worthwhile tangent. I’m particularly drawn to explore the Hookland concept.
Walking and silence are certainly key to my own creative process, as is the ritual use of abstract sound. I have a small collection of CDs which I know are effective at opening the creative portal - if I put one of them on, I know before it’s finished I’ll be at my desk, typing furiously. They dissolve time.
Oh, and solitude is important. I can go for weeks at a time without any kind of human interaction when I’m writing. In fact, I prefer it that way. I prefer to get immersed in the work to the exclusion of all else, then come out the other side, the way one might return to normality with the dawn after an acid trip.
In your journeys into alcoholic and chemical delirium, did you discover the essence of yourself as an artist, as you expected? Certainly there are many writers and artists who swear the best work flows once you numb the inner critic with a few drinks. I’ve experienced chemical derangement and have often enjoyed it, but I tend to find anything stronger than tea compromises my ability to write. I’m lucky, in the respect that I have some psychopathic tendencies; I do have an inner critic, that’s what makes me want to get better at what I do, but I don’t really care what others may think of my work. I’m not doing it for them or their approval so, fear of what others may think is no obstacle to my getting the work done. Maybe I’d think differently if my earning a living depended on it. I certainly admire writers like Alan Moore and J G Ballard for being able to walk that tightrope between what is commercial and what is experimental. Both uncompromising writers who have found great success, they inspire me, but, as I once said to a publisher who advised me there’s no money in writing; “If I was in it for the money, I’d be doing something else”.
That last quote, I believe Vonnegut used to say something similar in his lectures. And regarding chemical delirium, my vices were nothing more than alcohol and marijuana in the past, but nothing more substantial. I remember the first time I really tried to write on weed, was given some excellent stuff from a friend going abroad, but I found I just wanted to relax, look at the sky, and eat biscuits. I have singularly no idea how any beatnik achieved any sense of writerly excitement on marijuana, indica, sativa or otherwise; the biscuits always won out. But regarding drink, although I miss a quiet tipple, I know my addictive nature would simply ruin it for me all over again. My relationship with such things stem from a mythologisation of the past, where I thought I could be the next Burroughs, but now as we have discussed above, the legend of him, of popping open a briefcase of benzos and writing experimental epics! This just isn’t the case, and like as well that middle-class belief in the struggling artist as the winning methodology, drink just deranged me into an arsehole, not a genius.
There are other ways of achieving that psychotropic state however, even without the need of ayahuasca, or any other compliment of substances; I’ll add, I am not averse to the use of them. In my own therapeutic studies, reading R D Laing and Gabor Maté, there is certainly room for psychotropics for medicinal and mind-expanding purposes, but for me I feel its a rabbit hole into mind-closing, rather than the intention here. What I find is - like you say - solitude is a fine way of inducing a more trance-like state. I’ve experimented with isochronic waves in the past, but also, in simpler terms, meditation, visualisation. In the Oneiriad manifesto, a kind of manifesting autowriting is implemented, and I find I can slip into that state with enough time and relaxation that I need no more than a cup of green tea to start the process. Mind over matter.
I think the general sentiment here is to be aware of what works for you (as the old Hunter S Thompson adage goes), and be mindful of its deleterious effects as well as the derangement. The arts is quite a long road with many bizarre waystations along the way, each weirder than the last. But as I’ve been reading in metamodernist theory, perhaps the next big risk isn’t to do something extra deranged, but sublimely mediocre.
That made me laugh - with recognition! You and I are not so different. I refer to that process of opening the mind as “Open Channel D”, and I do it every morning. I make some tea, I sit in my armchair that overlooks the park opposite my window, I put on one of my collection of drone CDs that dissolve time, and within just a few minutes I’m in the zone. And over time I’ve come to develop a Pavlovian response to the ritual of it, anticipating the coming dopamine hit from being productive/creative.
There’s always a missing element from the beatnik myth making, an essential element that I developed as a child, growing up in a rural nowhere long before the internet existed - Boredom. It’s an essential element for the development of a creative imagination. We should remember that these beatnik guys in the fifties were writing in a time when people didn’t have much, when TV was rubbish, when you had to write a letter, hitch a lift, hop on a flight to meet each other. They had hours of every day to amble around inside their own minds, to entertain themselves with thoughts, with books. Henry Miller, as a young American ex-serviceman living in poverty in Paris, talks of an imaginary world he built at the foot of his bed, a place he called Ubiguchi. I’ve done that. As a child I used to imagine such worlds - just to fill the endless hours. I think boredom is a form of meditation, an effective way to Open Channel D.
It crossed my mind that we might talk about writing - the process of writing, yes, but more specifically the motivation for writing a particular book, story or article. You’ve hinted at it above, I think we both have, but maybe those reading this that are also writers or aspiring to write might find it interesting if we explored it a bit.
For example, I’ve been asking myself why I’m drawn to certain ideas and reject others. You can have ten good ideas a month, but why is it that we’re motivated to pursue one over all the others? It’s instinctive, for sure, but let’s assume instinct isn’t the expression of some random whim, but a decision based on deep-rooted unconscious understanding that is so innate it does not need scrutiny. So here’s my question; what was the core motivation for you when starting your last writing project? Are you even conscious there was a core motivation?
Going off on a tangent, I’ve been doing a couple of the BBC Maestro writing courses. I’ve completed the Julia Donaldson course on writing picture books for children - because I have a bunch of ideas for them, and I’m currently working through the Lee Child course - Lee Child writes the Jack Reacher novels.
Boredom certainly plays a big role. As a sickly child, with odd friends who preferred inside to out, and the weight of nerdery on my shoulders before it started cropping up in every teenage Netflix drama, being inside creating my own worlds was the first port of call for my own sanity. Or insanity. Or whatever lies between which a writer uses to survive. I remember when pokémon came out, I had to design my own, which were far more complicated in their evolutionary stages. I remember designing my own galaxy of planets. I still have the folders for both the cards I made and the alien sheets, each smothered in data. My plan is to use these to write a sci-fi epic, utilising my childlike innocence for the worldbuilding, but my developed (arguable of course) writing style of now to bring it to life. Like a conversation with myself, across time.
But I find that ideas usually pick themselves. Instinct, as you say, plays a large part. Between projects I will start like 20, with the mindset only one will survive, like a Darwinian finch; whichever one wins out, must be the one I continue with. In terms of what fuels that instinctual drive, I couldn’t say. In my own spiritual belief system, again inspired by the Morrison mode, I’d say we were tapping into less material forms of existence. If we live upon Malkuth, to use Qabalist language, the material plane, made of atoms and causality, then our ideas live in Yesod, the dream plane, comprised less of “laws of physics” as “laws of narratology”. And we’re peering through some psychic membrane into this world, and pulling out what happens there, recording it like a seismograph does an earthquake. In this regard, plot holes, incorrect information, discontinuity, is the act of tapping into a very subtly different reality to the last one, enough comparable to make us think we’ve returned to the same idea, the same world, but in truth changed enough for an editor to be annoyed by such.
However, it isn’t always the case that multiversality, fractal realities, comic book spiritualism, is the reason for what I write. The Oneiriad is certainly that. But GAMMA FOUR, which I am currently editing (shock; horror), was inspired by my time living on Twitter recovering from my surgery, seeing the world collapsing in real time through the echochamber lenses of all these accounts. It’s a political satire, a time travel fiction, a meta-fiction playground, and a few other things. I just had to get all that noise out of my head, a kind of anti-metamodernist book (very little sympathy in it). The next one is going to be a fantasy novel inspired by Tudor England, and a magic system I’ve never had the write story for, and it’s going to be the exact opposite. I recently published Red Forest: Wood For The Trees (Season 1) as well, a TV Faux, my Twin Peaks, and that returns to my previous writerly format of accessing the dream-layers, pulling out from them whatever I find there, autowriting, manifestation, blah blah blah–
Speaking of Maestro, my fiancée got me a Masterclass subscription! I did David Lynchs (which is wonderful for the transcendental meditation, but seemed a bit of a simmer in regards to creativity, unexpectedly–or expectedly). I’ve done half of Werner Herzogs, which is intense and wonderful and literary. And I also did Roy Choi, a Korean-Mexican chef who set up a food truck business, because I’m learning I love cooking!
What you said about narratology helped me to understand something of my own motivation for writing, and I’ve said it above I’m sure, but it’s that chance to subvert the accepted narrative, to take what is considered “reality” and twist it just enough to undermine one’s faith in it. It’s about wanting to alter reality for real, to make it a place I want to live in; to topple the status quo; to leave cracks in the world for the wild weeds to push through.
Going back to the Masterclasses; I’m no fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, I’ve never read one. I have seen the two movies based on his books, both starring Tom Cruise, and the TV series based on Killing Floor; Lee Child’s first novel; I find them hilariously (and, I presume, unintentionally) camp, but I do find it interesting to listen to a man talking about his creative career - a man who is and always will be far more commercially successful than I will ever be and whose style to me at least seems obvious and bland. But I applaud him for it - as he says; he’s not writing for those who love books, who read 20, 40, 60 books a year and are looking for some new literary thrill, he’s writing for those who maybe buy one or two books a year - and, if they choose his book, he wants to make it easy for them to enjoy it and maybe motivate them to buy some more. I think that’s a noble aim.
Fundamentally, Lee Child is of the same mindset as Michael Moorcock - keep the train rolling on, keep the reader entertained, make them hungry for another one. It’s just that Moorcock took the right kind of drugs. Richard Allen is another one; back in the seventies he wrote all those books for New English Library about hells angels, skinheads & suedeheads; books I hoovered up when I was 14. But he knew next to nothing of those worlds - he was a middle-aged Canadian just writing for money. I miss that aspect of the publishing world; hacks writing five or ten trash novels a year for peanuts. And there’s a serious lesson to learn from all those guys - it’s just a book, so crack on and get it done. So what if there remain plot holes and anomalies; let the reader sort them out. Lee Child says readers know enough about books to fill in any gaps the writer may leave behind - any unresolved plot lines they will dismiss as red herrings along the way to the conclusion. Just as long as the conclusion is credible.
Child also says that all the James Bond books are basically a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur - Theseus uses a woman who falls in love with him to gain access to the underground lair of the supervillain, kill him and escape. And, just like Bond, Theseus then abandons the woman who’d helped him. I’m going to read three of Child’s 27 books and a few of the books he recommends, just to observe the craft in them. And I’m going to return to the Bond books, all of which I’d read in my teens, just to revisit those through new eyes. Fleming once said if he hadn’t had invented James Bond he would probably have become a psychopathic serial killer. One interesting speculation; Bond may have been based on actor Christopher Lee - Lee was Fleming’s cousin and served alongside him when Fleming was part of wartime British Intelligence. Lee was attached to both the SAS and the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and did the kind of behind the lines spy stuff that Bond would later do in Ian Fleming’s books.
One thing I appreciate in Child’s take on the craft of writing is his absolute conviction in the rhythms of the words on the page and how they have a physiological effect on the reader; he talks about the cadence, the pace, and the need to choose words and sentence lengths that emphasise the nature of the thing described. A fight scene, for instance, benefits from short words in a rhythm that might resemble punches. I’m a great believer in that. Sometimes it’s the tiniest of changes that makes a paragraph land correctly. He also talks about drawing a chapter or a book to a close, and the importance of the book’s final sentence in easing the reader out of the world you’ve built with a sense that there’s no more to be said about something. For the three novels I’ve written so far, that end sentence took a lot of fretting over. There’s a difference between Child’s genre novels and my work tho’ - whereas he is looking to ease the reader out of the world of the book with the feeling that all is resolved for now, until the next time, the next book, I prefer to leave the reader feeling unsettled. There is a conclusion, yes, but I like to leave the sense that there’s so much more that will happen once they’ve left. We’ve glimpsed a world, we’ve witnessed the end of an episode within it, but it can only get stranger from here on in. In Secret Cages, I end the book exactly where I started it, implying that the whole cycle of the story could go round again but maybe in a completely different way. In Nemoseeds, I end the book in the middle of a cataclysm with a phrase voiced by the protagonist that suggests elsewhere in the world everything is just the same as it ever was and there are those who would know next to nothing of this moment. In the one I’m writing now, it may be that the protagonist’s story has come to an end; an invitation to delve deep into some dark adventure was offered to them but they refused, but it ends with the implication that the antagonist accepts the call to that adventure in his stead. We know what he’s about to get involved with, and it will be horrific, but we don’t need to see it - that’s another story.
I’m intrigued by the Werner Herzog masterclasses - where are they (added a link above)? I love his nature documentaries in contrast to the kindly uncle David Attenborough, Herzog comes across as a nihilist, obsessed with the amoral brutality of the natural world.
Going back to that thought of where ideas come from and how do you know whether it’s the right idea - I realise whenever I come up with an idea it is the audience I first think of - one of the first questions I ask myself about it is: what’s our relationship going to be through this story? What can I hide from them about it and for how long before I reveal what’s going on? So I definitely want the reader to be intrigued enough to delve into a mystery and want the mystery to be explained - even if that explanation may be outside of their expectations. My second question is always about the way I like to write, and whether or not this is a suitable vehicle for that. Am I interested in telling a story? Yes, but often I’m using landscape and location to create an atmosphere in which events are visual metaphors for some internal processing of a character’s complex emotion. For me, the streets of London or Paris take on the role of the wild moors in Wuthering Heights. They are both a real place and a symbol for some internal passions that struggle within a character to find their expression.
I recently saw this quote from Kit De Waal on working-class writers and it resonates with me because I’ve said it for years about both writers and film-makers from working class backgrounds; “working-class writers, it seems, must endlessly regurgitate their own life stories – or versions of them – whereas middle-class writers can explore the world, the universe and beyond. The assumption being that working-class writers and stories are marginal. They are not: more than a third of the population is from traditional working-class origins. And it is also assumed that in order for these stories to be commercial they have to be filtered through middle-class sensibilities or explained for an imagined middle-class reader. This squashes the multiplicity of working-class experience into a few standard tropes: the misery memoir, the escape, the clever boy or girl “done good”.”
There’s an expectation in the predominantly white, middle class culture of publishing that working class writers are only acceptable when writing poverty porn; a series of vicarious adventures in council house land for the genteel reader to get their thrills from slumming it before going back to their well-insulated lives. This, more than anything, is why digital and self publishing needs some radical pioneers to break the mould.
I always had a problem with regional film production for exactly this reason - that regional voices were limited to expression of what it is to be someone with regional roots. But what’s wrong with someone from Nottingham or Devon making a film set in some imaginary space where their regional identity is irrelevant to the narrative? The middle-class hands on the controls of production and distribution aren’t keen on that, because they feel they are doing something worthy by telegraphing their commitment to regional voices. But schemes to level up the region’s talent should not hold them in the ghettos assigned them by the middle-classes, like some subcultural zoo exhibit. True levelling up will enable regional talent to express itself in the same way international talent does. I want to write fantastical fiction; I shouldn’t be expected to endlessly rewrite the story of my life as a london kid who moves to the rural east midlands nad has to deal with the local prejudice against the outsider. Maybe there are some who’d be fascinated by that story - doesn’t mean I want to write it. And I shouldn’t be expected to; just because my writing of it would fulfil some salving of a middle-class guilt I don’t share or care about.
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The header images for these subsequent posts are pieces by Barry himself!