Month: November 2012

The Pen is mightier than the IPad

On By kepagewriterIn My Writing2 Comments

Despite the fact that I have an IPad, a macbook and a PC in my house, I still find myself writing first drafts on paper. It may be my age (I know that is starting to sound like a dubious catchphrase) but I definitely view writing work up on a computer as a second stage, as some sort of best version. By the time I write anything on the PC it has already been re-worked a few times on paper. (A sign that it is my age: until recently the English exam board demanded that one piece of coursework be handwritten. The students wrote their work on the computer and then copied it out in their best handwriting. I didn’t see why the PC needed to be involved at all.)

Part of the problem with writing straight on to the computer – for me anyway – is that getting ideas down can often feel quite urgent and isn’t always perfect. The ideas are key and need to be expressed. However, often you know straight away that the wording will need to be changed or perhaps you find that you’ve used the same word a few times. But the idea, that is pressing and you need to concentrate on that or potentially lose its immediacy. On paper, it is very easy to indicate what may need to be changed later with circling, underlining and with arrows and footnotes. Not so much electronically.

And once the idea is born, it is very easy to feed it with detail as you type it up so that the version on the PC is fleshed out and stronger than the first. I suppose it is a case of old habits die hard as I first started writing when I was a student 20 years ago when all I had was a word processor which was less than user friendly and now it’s just the way I work. Even though I love my IPad unreservedly (unlike my kindle which I still sort of view as a wolf in sheep’s clothing as if one day it will bite my hand off) I can’t see this process changing.

Constant Contact

On By kepagewriterIn Updates and informationLeave a comment

It’s been a weird couple of months. For various real life reasons – my own illness and my mother being in and out of hospital – I haven’t been able to have much of an online presence. As a result, I have been running up and down the road between my home in Sheffield and hers in Newcastle. Book promotion and blogging have been the furthest things from my mind. And even if I had been able to think about such things, she has no internet so it would have been impossible anyway.

It is astonishing how out of touch I felt. And how deprived I felt when I was there. It has quickly become second nature to be constantly connected. I don’t just mean in terms of social networking either. The idea that the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips is an easy one to get used to. Why bother racking your brains trying to remember something when you could just look it up? Especially when to takes such a long time to get my brain into gear some days.

It wasn’t that long ago, when the Internet was a mere babe, that we had to put up with a dial up connection. (OK, so it was about ten to fifteen years ago but that isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things.) It was a chore to use the Internet then; the tying up of the phone line, the constant loss of signal, the slowness of pages loading, the fact that downloading was nigh on impossible. All these things seem chronically old fashioned now. Now that we are used to being able to hop onto the web wherever and whenever we are.

It was interesting to note that when my mother came home from hospital, her main mode of conversation was the phone – the land-line not her mobile. She talks to people all the time and wouldn’t think of anything else. She does have a mobile from which she sends rambling texts which are signed off love mam. But she only does that as a last resort, when, for whatever reason, I am not able to speak to her.

By contrast, I can’t think of the last time I picked up my land-line and phoned some one from it. In fact, I could probably get rid of it if not for the insistence of my mother and my in-laws that this is the way we should communicate. If I want to speak to friends I use Facebook, I text. If I have to actually speak to them, I phone using my mobile. (It should be obvious to you that I absolutely hate it when people say I’ll message you or Facebook me even when that person is me. But then I was suitably pedantic when people first started to use text as a verb.)

It is quick and convenient to text or use Facebook. The recipient can choose when to reply and you don’t have to worry that they will be bathing the kids or sitting down to dinner or whatever. It is also incredibly lazy. Why waste the energy that having a real conversation would take when you can send a one sentence text? Convenience and quickness have become the baseline of our communication.

The other thing I have noticed lately – and I am guilty of it myself – is that no one is ever bored any more  Everyone feels the need to be constantly entertained. Just look at the commuters on the average train and you will see them staring at screens of various sizes, doing things that seem crucially important but probably aren’t. All are lost in their own little worlds. Even in the pub you often see groups of people or couples who are not talking but messing with their phones. Virtual communication 1, Real communication 0.

Obviously, this could have a huge effect on everyone’s social skills. Especially now that younger and younger kids seem to have phones. Furthermore, what would happen if no one daydreamed any more  If every second was taken up with some form of electronic attention. Would all the great – and currently hypothetical – novels of the future remain unwritten? No more great discoveries would be made. (If Newton had been sitting under the tree playing on his IPhone when the apple landed on his head, would he have been able to draw himself away from Angry birds for long enough to hypothesise about gravity?) No more exciting leaps into the future. Sometimes you have to just be sitting staring out of the window, watching the world turn, to see the one thing that would make the world just a little bit better. Or sitting under a tree.

This song, picture, book could change your life

On By kepagewriterIn CultureLeave a comment

It may seem naive but I really do believe that art – and that covers music, literature, film, TV  paintings and sculpture – can change your life. Although perhaps I should explain that I really don’t mean that you see a single film (or whatever) and then you are a completely different person. I don’t believe that that really happens or if it does it is part of a process of change that has already started even if only on a subconscious level.

However, I do think that you are a product of whatever you read, listen to, watch. These are the things that help to shape how we think about the world. The things you love and the things you hate help to create your personality as much as the things that you do and say. They send a message to other people about what you think and about who you are. I really do believe that it is that important.

That’s why I find popular culture a little depressing at the moment. Reality TV. Simon Cowell’s choice of Christmas number one. It’s all so thoroughly empty. What sort of people will the current generation be, with their heads filled up with Made in Chelsea and their ears full of the aural equivalent of candyfloss. What will their world be like if this is all they expect from culture, all they think that people can achieve? A miserable world indeed.

I can still remember the first time I felt truly amazed by a piece of literature. At GCSe, I studied A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney. I was blown away. I was an avid reader even then but I had never read anything that felt quite so relevant to me. The characters seemed like people you might meet. A pregnant teenager, her black boyfriend, her (probably but never directly acknowledged) gay best friend, her scarily uncaring mother. It was much more like reality than anything else I’d read or been taught.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Macbeth and Of Mice and Men which we also studied. But well written as they are, they didn’t feel relevant in the same sort of way. I have no doubt that studying A Taste of Honey started to shape my opinions about important things such as racism, sexuality and freedom. A first step on a lifelong journey.

It is also true that the current educational system is failing students in many ways. For a start, there is no imperative to even study a whole text. As long as you read the scenes that are to be tested in the exam and watch the film, there is no need to read the whole thing apparently. Except for the obvious one of enriching lives by reading a piece of literature which presumably wouldn’t have been included in the syllabus if not considered worthwhile in its entirety.

A lot of young people feel disconnected from the literature that they are made to read at school and this is perhaps understandable when often the most modern thing they read is Of Mice and Men. Perhaps its about time they were encouraged to think that literature is about more than murdered kings and war. If they read something about their lives perhaps they would understand why reading is so important.

I have changed a lot since I was that sixteen year old reading A Taste of Honey for the first time, obviously I suppose. We all grow up, get jobs, study, have relationships and so on. As important as all that is, I would be a different person sat here today if I hadn’t read A Taste of Honey and all of the great books, films, art and music that came after that. I’m grateful to them all for changing my life.