Sunday morning in my study – outside the weather is fluctuating between snow and sun, inside the beautiful flowers from my daughter, delivered earlier, mid snowstorm, are opening up in the warmth. And on the radio David Almond’s Desert Island Discs, which has got to be my pick of the week. For me he says everything important there is to say about writing: that it’s a discipline and is hard work, that there has to be a part of you that doesn’t care about acknowledgement but just keeps writing, that you have to allow it to happen, that when we’re writing we become someone else and how he had to write Skellig , ‘out of the side of my eye,’ which echoes what I said recently here about not over thinking what we do. He also says all the important things about children and their education, as well as choosing Doris Day and the Four Tops! Its worth noting that David was writing for twenty years before his breakthrough with Skellig.
If you didn’t catch David then you can listen again here – don’t miss it, it’s such a treat.
Another treat from that great talent pool of the North East is Bridie Jackson and the Arbour’s performance of Scarecrow on Clive Anderson’s Loose Ends yesterday evening –you can hear her HERE – just click on the right hand link and be blown away..
Happy Sunday x
PS this weeks newsletter has competitions and thoughts on the titles we choose – it’s free – if you would like to receive a copy every Monday just sign up on the right…
I’ve often thought about the long dark night of the soul writing can be. And how as you accord with Almond, we must keep plodding on at it, often ignored. In the poem below, Auden talks about the painting “Fall of Icarus” by Breughel. How the event must have seemed spectacular, but then the world continues on in all it’s myriad little ways. And so it is after completing a novel.
About writing they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
And so it is when wriitng a novel although I don’t regard it as suffering which was Auden’s original take….Thanks for this Warren, its beautiful and apposite.I love ‘but for him it was not an important failure…’