Hugh M Vaughan - writing

The measure of a writer isn’t success, but how hard he tried to do what he knew he couldn’t do,

William Faulkner, American writer.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was written by Stephen King, the American writer of horrors and is one of the best and the most concise advice has come from the book. A memoir that highlights events in his life that have influenced his writing but also offers solid advice for aspiring writers. On Writing is King’s first book after he was involved in a car accident a year earlier. It’s organized into five sections, in which he highlights events in his life that influenced his writing career; “What Writing Is”, in which King urges the reader to take writing seriously; “Toolbox”, which discusses English mechanics; “On Writing”, in which he details his advice to aspiring writers; and “On Living: A Postscript”, in which he describes his car accident and how it affected his life. My take on his advice is that you become a writer by reading and writing, one word at a time. But bearing in mind, as Emerson put it, it is as if the writer is writing about oneself, but the thread throughout the writing is universal humanity. The sentences should reflect the emotional inner life in a sharp but deftly touch, the internal cadences of the person being written about. Mark Rothko says that about his paintings, “I’m not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, says Samuel Beckett. The brewing, the percolating, ageing in the mental cask, I hope. The premise of Wabi-sabi-a phrase that stems from an ancient Japanese concept, meaning beauty in imperfection. And failure can also be fertile ground for comedy. Tragicomic writing is a well-established genre, comedies of errors are universally popular, and bathos a familiar literary technique, all about failure? Being human, we need to laugh and wince at reminders of the enormous gap between what we want to be and what we are. It’s recognition of our humanity. And life contains both failure and success. The American Dream has always been the notion that if you don’t achieve this ideal you have somehow failed, probably due to a defect in your character. We’re not enough, haven’t done enough.Where Art Thou? Art according to Yeats is the daughter of Hope and Memory, removed from the “desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle.” Art allows the existentialist to create another world, as Wassily Kandinsky, the artist and writer, said, the creation of a work is a creation of a world, a subject breathing spirituality. While feeling the weight of the literary geniuses, and my insignificance, then look no further than the Celtic ones. James Joyce, a man ahead of his time, turned the idea of a novel on its head. We buy into some notion that Art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. I am reminded by Kandinsky again, that there is no must in Art because Art is free. The brutal, Australian noonday light? That breathless pink and blue dash at dusk, while the scabby scrub to the west is ablaze of orange? A firm favourite of mine and Australia’s is the iconic Arthur Streeton’s 1896, The Purple Noon's Transparent Might. A landscape painting of a blue winding river and a green river bank. This painting shimmers, under the glare of the still, hot haze of an Australian sky.Reading powers the imagination. Literature can and does reflect life - a lived life, a reflected life. Live a good life, declares Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, stoic philosopher. What is a good lived experience - separate from commuting, from earning, from schooling, from just getting by. Work to live, I hear you cry. Look. Listen. Observe, the flâneur. Detach. Join the analytic pub crawl. Paralytic on the sense of place or history. Detached and swooning. Playful and drifting. The dérive. A tangle of fragmentation. According to Michael Foley, poet and writer “Everything fragments and flies apart, apparently irreparably, but often there are strange, unexpected re-connectings and re-combinings, late recognitions and re-conciliations.” Buy the books here.

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