"Welcome to the Inner Circle Writers' Group Journal!"
Prizes for the Writing Competition have been decided, thanks to some input from the Head of the Inner Circle Writers' Group in Finland!
If you are on a Christmas break, take the opportunity to put your skills to work in a new way and plunge into the exciting Free Writing Competitions taking place here at the Inner Circle Writers' Group!
It won't cost you anything and your work will be reviewed by other writers around the world. You can be voted as a First, Second or Third Place Winner! Your age will be taken into account and there will be runners-up.
There will be prizes!
FIRST PLACE in each competition will win a copy of The Master Authors' Secret Handbook PLUS two hours of special consultancy on story writing!
Value: £124.99!
SECOND PLACE will win a copy of The Master Authors' Secret Handbook PLUS one hour of special consultancy on story writing!
Value: £74.99!
THIRD PLACE will win one hour of special consultancy on story writing!
Value: £50.00!
ALL MEMBERS OF THE INNER CIRCLE WRITERS' GROUP CAN BE JUDGES IF THEY WISH TO BE! Have a read of the entries which will be posted soon and vote for first, second and third place by e-mailing me at
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
(Want to be a member? That's easy! Just e-mail the same address
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
and request membership! It's free!)
Here are the competitions:
Free Writing Competitions!
Questions? Please get in touch:
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
3rd December
There's a lot said in today's media about the so-called "celebrity culture" in which we live, usually referred to pejoratively. I've read that watching the TV show "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here" is thought of by many as an indispensable "guilty pleasure" -they know it's wrong to watch, but can't help themselves.
And then there was all that fuss about John Sergeant leaving the "Strictly Come Dancing" show, and the controversy about whether it was a dancing competition or Saturday night entertainment. Wherever you look in today's world there are stories about celebrities of one kind or another, and no matter how much some may complain about it, this phenomenon doesn't show many signs of going away. In fact, as the economy worsens, many will inevitably seek their consolations, surely, in further guilty pleasures of this kind.
But is it all bad? Whenever there's a trend in culture, it's often wise to step back from it and look at it slightly awry. I don't mean the celebrity phenomenon itself -there are plenty of people doing that- I mean the criticism of the celebrity phenomenon. It seems all too easy to weigh in and throw punches at the "Hello" magazine-devoted, style-thirsty, media-oriented and celebrity-hungry "masses" and pretend that we aren't one of those foolish enough to fall for the charms of "Celebritain". My point is: what are its charms, exactly?
The main charm is not the celebrities themselves. It's not even what they do -which let's face it is pretty inane and commonplace, just usually well-dressed or vaguely exotic by association.
No, it's the fact that it's a shared passion.
It used to be music hall. Then it was cinema. As the population surged into movie theatres for the shared, big-screen experience, so they huddled at home around their radio sets for the same reason. Then, in the early 1960s, it was television which brought the nation together. (And let's face it, before all these it was probably the Church.)
Each medium in turn lost its innocence, its charms faded. Then about ten or fifteen years ago, came the internet, and with it even easier access to the lives of others. But, as social media like Facebook and Myspace show, the subject matter isn't really as important as the fact that it's shared.
We seek media (and invent it) so that we can share. Celebrities are just the ephemera which travels on those communication lines -the communication lines are what is important. The sharing is what draws us, keeps us, even nurtures us. Famous faces come and go; we adore them momentarily and love to hate them too; we rake over the details and detritus of their lives in an inexcusably demeaning way -and consequently attract criticism, quite rightly- but that's not the point.
The point is that we all do it, to one degree or another. And it's that hardly mentioned fact which keeps the phenomenon alive. We want to feel part of something larger than ourselves, a community which has something in common -even if that common ground is littered with superficiality.
So next time you pick up a "Hello" magazine in a waiting room, or tune in to watch who's about to be evicted from a reality TV show, you don't have to feel quite so guilty -you might be, perhaps, on some level, simply be reaching out to share something with your fellow human beings.
The fact that there are better, more dignified and more enlightening things to share shouldn't detract too much from the underlying positivity of that impulse.
22nd November
I know I only wrote to you recently about the fast-moving developments in the Inner Circle Writers’ Group -but here I am again, because things are indeed fast-moving round here!
Several writers are now using the website to tell people all about their own work, even showing them extracts -for FREE!
All they did was send me whatever it is that they wanted me to promote -a title, an outline, an extract, a chapter, or just a 'blurb' about the work- and provided that it was legal and not offensive and so forth, I put it up on the site immediately and others are now able to read about it -without it costing them a penny!
What's in it for me is that they are telling their friends, family, colleagues and so on about the site, mentioning it on social networking sites- so loads more visitors are calling by to take a look. As I said, everyone wins!
If you want to be part of this, just e-mail whatever you want to
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
and I'll process it as fast as I can!
But I also wanted to point out that the Inner Circle Writers’ Group offers much more than that.
We now offer expanded Essay Services and Programmes for Schools!
Check out the pages opposite now and see what’s happening!
I hope to hear from you soon!
18th November
Things are really taking off around here.
Within the last 48 hours five writers have sent me work to promote on the site, and the word is spreading fast around Facebook, Myspace and so on that writers can promote their own work using this site.
That could be you too!
All you have to do is send it to me. I'll make sure it's appropriate to post and maybe ask you for some information about yourself to act as an introduction. Within a matter of minutes, you could have your work visible to the rest of the world at no cost to yourself -a new writer's dream, surely?
Many thanks to those who have sent submissions in already -I'm working on them!
Keep checking the rest of the site too -there's plenty of free material available to help new or established writers, including the e-book '7 Ways to Improve Your Writing and Be More Successful' and some free articles which approach the subject of writing in a unique way.
2nd November
Have you ever read a movie review after seeing the movie and wondered if the critic has seen a different movie to the one you saw?
Such was my experience upon reading Roger Friedman’s review of Quantum of Solace for Fox News after seeing the film myself last night. He begins: “Here’s the truth about the latest James Bond movie, ‘Quantum of Solace.’ It’s not very good.”
He’s wrong.
Not only is the latest Bond movie very good indeed, it is clearly so good that either I saw a completely different film, or Mr. Friedman’s ability to judge a good movie becomes highly questionable.
Mr. Friedman said he had “high hopes for a roller coaster ride full of explosions, inexplicable derrying do, some decent quips and memorable lines, even a smidgen of smarmy sex for James with a couple of babes.” Now, as far as I recall -and this was only last night- this is exactly what the film contained, plus a lot more, and all tastefully and professionally delivered. I’d heard that there was “no sex” in this Bond -it turns out that wasn’t true either.
Mr. Friedman said he wanted gadgets, a great theme song, and a spectacular opening sequence -again, I saw everything listed there, including gadgets: MI6’s spectacular computer hardware was real enough to be feasible, but fascinating enough to look like something from the futuristic Minority Report.
Mr. Friedman says that director Marc Forster has made a meditation on death and trust, and here at least he’s partially correct -the film is deeper thematically than the average Bond film and deals very effectively with what it brings up. But I think Friedman misses these subtleties. We are left pondering Bond’s depth of character -is he an ironic anti-hero, imprisoned in his own mind as his female co-star at one point suggests? Or is he in fact an epic hero re-invented for the modern world, motivated by duty rather than inconsolable rage? We are left to decide.
Mr. Friedman’s very critical of the Alicia Keys’ and Jack White’s ‘Another Day to Die’ theme tune, and at first, when I heard the piece separate from the film, I didn’t like it either -it seemed all prelude without substance. But in the cinema, with the big screen and motion and darkness, it was perfect.
Harking back to earlier Bond music, Friedman says “the people behind James Bond theme songs knew enough to match their pop hit to the original John Barry music, provide a bit of drama and suggest romance.” This is exactly what Keys and White did and you can hear the echoes of other things in there too, from Goldfinger to the haunting chords of You Only Live Twice.
Then we get into realms where I really think I saw a total variant of the film Friedman saw. The film starts with a violent, incredibly fast-paced car chase which pulls no punches and doesn’t give you time to breathe. It’s so fast, as are the rest of the action scenes in the film, that it is a little disorientating -my only criticism of the film- but for Friedman it is “the shortest, least interesting opening sequence in Bond history.” Was he asleep? Or did he enter the cinema having escaped from the police after a gruelling hour-long car chase through Central London? Because only those options would make the opening seem uninteresting.
I have to pick out some specific further comments and wonder again what cinema this critic was actually in:
“James Bond doesn’t mourn on screen.” Yes he does -subtly and understatedly, but very powerfully through Craig’s excellent acting. Craig has a more serious grasp of what 007 is all about than anyone since possibly Connery.
“The secondary cast works well, especially Judi Dench as M, although there’s lots less of her.” What? M features more in this film than in just about any earlier Bond epic, and more meaningfully.
“There’s no Q, and no one to introduce James to new gadgets (this in the time of new gadgets in the real world every hour and blogs galore devoted to them!)” So did Friedman really drift off to get a Coke during the whole linking scene with MI6 equipment choreographed deftly with real-world action?
“The Daniel Craig version of Bond isn’t very articulate or quick verbally, hence neither are his opponents.” I counted about a dozen one-liners which were not only brilliant but better and more serious than anything in recent years.
“James Bond is not going to be one of those that anyone wants to see over and over again.” I beg to differ. I will almost certainly see it again at the cinema and will definitely buy the DVD.
But I’ll be getting a different version to the one reviewed by Friedman, clearly.
19th October
Social Netweaving
The more I see of social networking, the more I see it as the beginning of the massive social “vias” which will reduce actual living human contact and lead to The Machine Stops (see below).
I grew up in a house without even a telephone -and in my early youth not even a car- and yet I now find the internet addictive: instead of ignoring or putting aside trivial hankerings for data, I now look up the slightest query on Google and have my thirst for knowledge at least partly slaked, to the point where when looking for something in my bookshelves I instinctively reach for Google to find it and find it frustrating and unsettling to actually have to search for anything “manually”.
It’s part of what they call the “culture of self-gratification” which ranges across everything from shopping to pornography, from poetry to violence, from apathetic ramblings to terrorist plots. This is worrying. It’s a revolution often compared to the invention of printing in mediaeval times, an invention which suddenly made widespread education possible and could be said to have hastened the development of a middle class and therefore brought about the end of the Middle Ages -but I think it’s more radical even than that. Just as in the Middle Ages we saw that the average person was born, grew up, died and was buried in the same village, compartmented socially, intellectually and even spiritually by the existing system, now we begin to see the breakdown of any kind of compartmentation -it’s a fragmentation of what we have called “society” into strata and sub-groups and strands which are weaving a whole new definition of what “social” means.
“Social networking” might be an appropriate term, but I might re-name it “social net-weaving” as we all get tangled up in skeins of the sticky world wide web which connect us together and also divide us in unforeseen ways. When African villagers have access to websites worldwide, and huge banking corporations can be brought down by a rumour started in another country, when the Icelandic economy collapses because some people failed to pay mortgages in New Mexico, and when Polynesian islanders can read instantaneously about the governmental decisions of a politician in Alaska, this world is fast becoming not only unrecognisable but ungovernable.
It might be that “terrorism” is just the superficial rash which indicates a deeper malaise...
What puzzles me also about Facebook is how people have the time to do these things -they’re obviously not out there doing much in the real world, nor are they even inside reading about life through literature. No, it seems that they are online, constantly chattering to the point where the only honest entry to What Am I Doing Now is “I’m sitting here wasting more time on Facebook...”
The Loners’ Club
Loners’ Parties would only work if you sent out non-invitations. Plan a date, send out non-invites and wait for no one to show up. Then sit back and read a good book with a nice cup of tea. That’s my kind of party. My non-invites would read something like “Grant Hudson invites you NOT to participate in an uninviting evening of relaxing and insightful reading. Please don’t bother to reply to the address below. Don’t bring your own drinks, etc. Looking forward to NOT seeing you there!”
A Real Paradox
It’s probably one of the central philosophical questions of all time: do we participate in the world and thereby try to reform it? Or do we withdraw from it and, by example, lead the way out of it? This is what the monasteries tried to do back in my favourite time period- set up alternate societies which would serve as beacons and exemplars to the corrupt world around them. What happened was that they were too successful -recognised for their virtue, they were heavily rewarded with material goods and treasure and land by the very corrupt souls they sought to reform, and became burdened with the wealth of a society from which they were trying to abstain. Within a couple of centuries, they became the very thing from which they had tried to flee: corrupt controllers of a twisted and unjust society. This in turn required action, and brought on the Reformation.
I think it’s a question which underlies most of our moral struggles: do we try to change things? Or do we try to escape? Finding ourselves in a prison, do we try to get out or try to reform the system?
This isn’t just pointless intellectualisation: think about any situation around you. Should you try to change it? Or walk away and escape it? Tricky.
It’s something you may have come across before, though perhaps not quite in these terms -the willingness to modify one’s life to fit a script already developed, or design one of one’s own.
Do we try to build our own worlds? Or join those being built around us? Or do nothing and just get caught up, like sitting in the lobby of a hotel and watching scaffolding being erected and walls being put up and painting going on around one, and then being told that one has to move out because the blueprint doesn’t allow one to remain in that spot.
Looking back now, I can see many early signs of new realities taking shape around me. I ignored them, blundering on with my romantic ideals and thinking that I could never be “edited” out. I was a key player, I thought.
Then I “smelt the coffee”, as they say.
People do amazing jobs of building shining and bright new realities in which they star. Good luck to them. But all such realities are inevitably built on sand, at least in my experience. The best we can do is make sure we are strong in ourselves and ready to rescue someone when the world collapses a little too far.
Rather than write my own script -we’re being continually tempted to do that- I think I’ll try to find out what I should have been doing all along...
Quantum of Solace (how appropriately named!) is coming, November 14th. Seen the trailer. Looks good.
5th October
Considerable amounts of theorising occurs on the subject of “Writer’s Block”.
Most of it is off-target. The recommended remedies for it are usually asinine.
What are the supposed symptoms of this thing called “Writer’s Block”?
•attempting to begin an essay without doing any preliminary work (the anodyne suggested remedy for this is “Do the preliminary work”).
•trying to work with a topic which bores you. (Suggested remedy? “Find something you are interested in.”)
•not wanting to spend time writing or not really grasping the assignment. (The recommended handling for this one? “Resign yourself to the fact that you have to do it”.)
•anxiety about writing the essay. (Tautologically then, you’re anxious because... you’re anxious...with the suggested therapy of “focussing your energy” and “stop the non-productive remarks running through your mind and replace them with productive ones”.)
•stress to the degree that you can't put a word on the page (for which the remedy is “Stretch!” and “Breathe deeply.”)
Any writer actually struck with the peculiar blankness known as Writer’s Block will immediately recognise the unworkability of these usual suggested remedies.
So what really is this phenomenon all about?
Sometimes writers just apparently “dry up” and have no more to write. What’s happened is that they have “poured out” too much without reference to the basic guidelines and structures which their work demands. They need to “refuel”, in other words -but not any old fuel will do.
If you’ve “run dry”, there are two workable things you can do which should have an effect right away.
1. Stop writing for a while, go and experience something -do something different, go and absorb what life has to offer for a short period- then come back and take another look at the assignment. You will see possibilities which were hidden from you before, and will be amazed at how much material you suddenly have on hand.
2. Refer to the underlying structures and templates which form the foundation of what you’re trying to write. All stories have hidden basics which to many are totally invisible, but which form the canvas upon which the author works. These basics are outlined in The Master Author’s Secret Handbook and the other books in the “Secrets” series. Look them over and you will see that what has happened is that you as a writer have wandered away from them into a “desert” without a map. Find the map, get some direction and the ideas and life will flood back into your story.
Some writers’ block actually stems from a hidden or submerged fear of or anxiety about your audience or readership. It might help to remember this -it’s a principle which underlies most of the approach used by the Inner Circle Writers’ Group and is commented on further in its books:
Your audience, whether made up readers or potential publishers, does not want to tear you apart; it is made up of people who are seeking exactly the same kind of thing you are seeking.
Your readership is made up of people who, like you, sometimes get tired, are sometimes bored, and perhaps, on occasion, become embarrassed or annoyed. Only a tiny percentage are actively hostile. Use your common sense, put yourself in the place of your readers, and realise that they, like you, are just human beings.
What’s more, readers are not just seeking some vague thing, but are, consciously or otherwise, hunting out very precise structures and recurring patterns.
All great authors use these patterns, from Hemingway to Tolkien, from Shakespeare to the Beowulf poet.
They are the secret language of fiction. Knowing them thoroughly means that you will never suffer from "Writer’s Block".
September 27th
For those of you who have been waiting in anticipation... the wait is over!
The fully revised and expanded edition of The Master Authors’ Secret Handbook is here at last!
What will this book do for you? Here’s a quote or two:
“For as long as there has been Mankind there have been stories. There are literally millions, perhaps billions of stories out there, and thousands -perhaps hundreds of thousands- of ideas therefore on ‘how to write successfully’. Since writing is something that human beings have been doing for a long time, and since the growth of widespread literacy, in the Western world at least, almost everyone you meet will have some opinion on the subject. A large part of what this book is about is distilling those opinions, by comparing them to what actually happens in fiction, into workable fact.”
These are some of the questions which The Master Authors’ Secret Handbook asks and attempts to answer:
• What is Fiction?
• How does it actually (as opposed to just theoretically) work?
• What makes a successful story -and, conversely, what makes an unsuccessful one?
• How did the great writers become great? And are there any guidelines or even rules which make that greatness more accessible to any writer?
The amazing thing is, it turns out that there ARE certain principles -very specific and unwavering- which lie behind most of the fiction that we encounter!
How exactly do you improve your own writing? Unless you know exactly what to do to really improve your work in the direction of more success, greater effectiveness, better communication of your ideas, thoughts or feelings, you will probably waste hundreds of hours (and pages) in experimentation.
Writers’ failures are based largely on not knowing the technology of writing as used by great authors through the centuries. Writing successful stories -stories that will survive and be treasured and remembered- is a matter of knowing and applying underlying patterns.
The Master Authors’ Secret Handbook divides things into seven separate categories:
1 - The Greatest Tool of All
2 - The Secret Language of Fiction
3 - The Four Seasons
4 - Case Studies
5 - Emotional Keys
6 - Providing Rewards
7 - The Writer/Reader Relationship
Each of these categories is examined in turn and explored. Great secrets are revealed!
The world behind the world of fiction will never seem the same again: you will be able to see straight through to the blueprints which made each successful book possible. Your sense of wonder, far from being obscured, will be enhanced, and you will not only appreciate what you read to a far greater extent, you will also be able to improve your own writing quickly and dramatically and vastly increase your own chances of being successful no matter what it is that you are trying to write.
The course that is part of the handbook should also help you to apply what you learn.
It’s a rapid journey with a lot of ground covered in a short time -have fun, and be a better reader and writer as a result!
To get your own copy of The Master Authors’ Secret Handbook, just e-mail
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
Full price is £49.99, but for members the whole book and course costs only £24.99! And membership is completely free!
E-mail now and order your copy!
September 14th
Anyone who shares a hankering to go North into the frozen lands of the Arctic must have rushed to watch television star Joanna Lumley travel to distant parts of Norway to realise her lifelong dream to see the Northern Lights in a one-off special film for BBC One, shown last Sunday evening. Travelling eventually as far as the island of Svalbard, Joanna took us on her very personal journey hoping to see the magical Northern Lights.
Growing up in tropical Malaysia, Joanna (who I was once lucky enough to see “in the flesh” at a wedding of a mutual friend) said: "I had never seen snow and never felt cold. In the Far East, cold was a luxury and snow was only in pictures in fairy stories." Having lived for twenty-six years in South Australia, where temperatures can hover in the low 40s Celsius for days (and nights) on end, I shared her dream and (before I escaped back to England where pullovers are a part of the way we think even in Summer) I relished the opportunity to wear one on rare occasions, imagining myself somewhere much colder.
On her epic journey Joanna revealed to us the nature, history and culture of the region -we, like her, were charmed by Norwegian tales of life in the far north. One of the most fascinating aspects, I found, was the visit to the remote fishing town of Å in the Lofoten Islands (imagine a town named by a single vowel!) which I found reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy with its enchanting archipelago.
What is it that makes the icy North so fascinating to some? The origin of Joanna’s own longing to see the northern lights came from a little book called Ponny The Penguin, in which a small penguin is pictured looking wistfully up at the glowing curtains of the Aurora Borealis. Yes, penguins are only found at the South Pole, but that’s not the point. Deep snow, high mountains, strong, cold winds, layers of thermals, fleeces and woolly socks, travel by dogsled through an Arctic wilderness -for some, a magnificent environment; for others, a terrible nightmare of discomfort. But it’s not the physical side which holds the main appeal -there’s something far more spiritual going on in the North, something which Ponny the Penguin’s picture suggested.
Constantly moving and changing unearthly light in the night sky, from horizon to horizon, sometimes resembling huge curtains hanging down across the heavens, the Northern Lights are a kind of symbol of this spiritual beckoning. As Joanna said at one point: “It has all come from the sun and our little tiny planet that we're trying to save... you see how majestic it is, and that it's part of the massive universe, and you begin to feel very humble.”
But what are the lights symbolising? C. S. Lewis developed a desire for the North through poetry, as he describes in his autobiography: "I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and read, 'I heard a voice that cried, Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead.' ...I knew nothing about Balder, but instantly I was uplifted.... I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described...” (Surprised by Joy)
Later, Lewis heard a recording of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and was struck again by the power of the North: “To a boy already crazed with 'the Northernness'... the Ride came like a thunderbolt.... it was ... a new kind of pleasure, if indeed 'pleasure' is the right word...." In fact, the theme of “Northernness” is a central link in Lewis’s autobiography, to which he returns repeatedly: "The history of Joy, since it came riding back to me on huge waves of Wagnerian music and Norse and Celtic mythology several chapters ago, must now be brought up to date."
He describes how the “thrill” he got from these things -music and poetry and pictures which evoked the distant North- actually led him spiritually astray at one point and he began to desire them for themselves rather than what they were pointing to. He assumes that what he wanted was the “thrill”: “I formulated the complaint that the 'old thrill' was becoming rarer and rarer. For by that complaint I smuggled in the assumption that what I wanted was a 'thrill,' a state of my own mind. And there lies deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire fixed on something else -whether a distant mountain, or past, or the gods of Asgard- does the 'thrill' arise."
So the lights are symbolic, with their swishing, spectral curtains, of a deeper mystery, a longing in the soul for something hard to put into words. When Joanna Lumley saw the marvellous display, finally, crowding the silent sky with wonder, what was it evoking? The restlessness, which Lewis describes in greater detail, which lies in our hearts: our desire to experience something which we realise we will probably never fully experience in this world -to see what lies behind the curtain.
(I’ve always found the name “Fred” mildly amusing, but apparently in the Lofoten Islands, which Joanna passed through on her trip, “fred” means “peace” and is carved into stones in graveyards there. Perhaps beyond the curtain, Fred awaits...)
Care to comment?
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
Grant Hudson B.A. (Hons.)
Inner Circle Writers’ Group
P.O. Box 546
East Grinstead
West Sussex
RH19 4XJ
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 (0)7738 447764
The ‘write’ place for writers: helping you be more successful
All content on this site is copyright protected by Grant Hudson and
the Inner Circle Writers’ Group ©2008.
September 7th:
Apparently, people living in Queensland, Australia,recently had the telecommunications network called Optus crash, along with its backup, leaving hospitals and airports adrift. I am reminded by this and by many other similar events on an almost daily basis of E. M. Forster's famous short story 'The Machine Stops' which tells of humanity’s increasing reliance on intricate technological infrastructure for the functioning of everyday life.
The story is an example of a kind of technophobic British science fiction from the author of historical dramatic novels such as Howard's End and A Passage To India. It’s a dystopia, depicting the human race as living underground in tiny, individual cells, fed and protected by an omnipotent Machine. The human race has basically ceased to want to have direct contact with each other, and, as time passes, the origins of the Machine are forgotten, and some begin to worship it as a god -eventually, it collapses.
Sound familiar?
Even the Internet’s biggest companies are having trouble making the internet function around the clock with the vast volume of information and services now demanded by a race withdrawn into its bedrooms and studies. Last holiday season, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went offline for over half a day. E-commerce companies crashed on one of the busiest shopping days of the year The internet, like anything else, is liable to break down for a range of reasons. An electrical explosion in a Houston data centre of the Planet, a Web hosting company, last month dropped thousands of e-businesses into the dark for about five days.
"The current global computer network, born at colleges and at corporate and military research laboratories, was never intended to grow as large and last as long as it has. Some think it's already heading for collapse, threatened by the growing problems of spam and electronic attacks...” says the US Chronicle of Higher Education
Those innovations are likely to be years in the making, however. Until then, "we'll have to keep patching the Internet," says Andrew Odlyzko, of the University of Minnesota. "On bad days, with chewing gum and baling wire."
As Forster wrote:
“It became difficult to read. A blight entered the atmosphere and dulled its luminosity. At times Vashti could scarcely see across her room. The air, too, was foul. Loud were the complaints, impotent the remedies, heroic the tone of the lecturer as he cried: 'Courage! courage! What matter so long as the Machine goes on? To it the darkness and the light are one.' And though things improved again after a time, the old brilliancy was never recaptured, and humanity never recovered from its entrance into twilight.
“There were gradations of terror - at times came rumours of hope-the Mending Apparatus was almost mended - the enemies of the Machine had been got under - new 'nerve-centres' were evolving which would do the work even more magnificently than before. But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended...”
September 3rd 2008
I read today that the AQA exam board in England is removing the poem Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy, which is about a violent, knife-carrying loner, from its anthology for GCSE English because of “fears over teenage knife crime”. It’s going so far as to advise schools to destroy copies of the anthology, and then sending them replacements not containing this poem.
I’m not a great Carol Ann Duffy fan - though I read that she talks to a great many schoolchildren and has encouraged large numbers of people to have a love of words and education- nor do I particularly like the poem or indeed poems of that kind, but am I alone in wondering will this be followed by withdrawal of Macbeth from GCSE specifications because of the numerous references to murder? Or by editing of An Inspector Calls to discourage the use of disinfectant in suicide?
Duffy’s poem is blackly comic. Nowhere does it insinuate or encourage, even mildly, even aesthetically, that knifing someone else is something that should be done. But clearly a poem is a very powerful thing. Apparently, in 2002, English staff at a school in Hull, East Yorkshire, refused to teach the poem and said they would even tear the page from the book rather than do so.
A spokeswoman for AQA said the board had received a complaint and had now decided to drop it from the anthology “against a background of fears over teenage knife crime”. If someone rang up complaining that a dog gets shot in To Kill a Mockingbird, would that novel also be withdrawn because of public concern over animal welfare? Logic suggests, if AQA is consistent in its application of criteria, that this would indeed happen: according to AQA, regarding the selection of poems in their anthology, it had to respond to current "social issues and public concern".
Poetry extends beyond the current culture or such concerns. In poetry especially, writing and thinking are ongoing, overlapping activities, and one of the primary channels between our shifting, ever-changing and elusive thought-world and the more fixed, slower-moving and fairly solid physical world are the things called words. Writing and thinking; thinking and writing: the only real difference between the two is that poetry in particular and writing in general attempts to encapsulate thought using the established mechanism of words.
A word is an attempt to capture a thought. Virginia Woolf once said that words don’t live alone, they belong to each other, they have histories and associations. Can we edit a poetry anthology because of a current social concern without editing in some way all words, all associations, and, by extension, all thoughts? Words, the use of them, the transmission of them, the understanding of them and debate about them have prompted an exam board to attempt to curtail them through fear.
Words are a channel, a code, an ever-changing, ever-growing set of reference points or “attempts to capture thoughts”, which we broadly share in common in order to achieve certain kinds of communication. Certainly there are other means of communicating, non-verbal and non-written, upon which a great amount of human discourse depends -but only the word can be so precise and intellectually satisfying; only words offer a kind of permanence.
Words are the means, perhaps the primary means, by which that continually moving, changing, fleeting, internal world can gain some kind of longevity, some kind of recognition or acknowledgement. Without words, your inner world would remain largely unknown and unexplored, even by you. As humans invented language, it could be said, so they invented or discovered or defined themselves.
Ursula Le Guin, renowned American author, once said: “Poetry and fiction use words in somewhat different ways, but they are both attempting to say various things that probably cannot be said at all. Or you could put it this way: Art doesn't tell ‘the truth,’ it makes truth.”
With this in mind, and in defence of poetry in general, let’s take a look at Duffy’s dangerous poem:
Education for Leisure
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets
I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
we did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.
I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.
I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
For signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.
There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
he cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
the pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
That was scary, wasn’t it? Do you see what she did there? She touched your arm. Apparently, that’s enough to make teachers in Hull terrified enough to tear pages out of books, and national examining boards so petrified that they withdraw the whole poem and advice schools all over the country to destroy copies of an anthology containing it.
From which we can conclude with certainty that words are powerful. Poetry is powerful.
Carry on, Carol.
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This is intended to be an ongoing diary, not only of writing related events but of insights and snippets as they arise.
Though it has been three years since this website was launched, it’s taken me this long to get to keeping an up-to-date journal on it, as is the fashion these days -keeping the journal, I mean, not taking so long about it.
I suppose this would be a good place to espouse the purposes and intentions of the Inner Circle Writers’ Group, even if it’s been done elsewhere.
When I originally set it up, the Group was to be the base for a number of activities, only some of which have yet materialised. But its main goal was to provide a unique opportunity for writers to participate as members of a fully functioning group so that they could be helped to create polished works to a professional standard. Sounds a bit high and mighty now, but the basic idea was there.
I wanted to rehabilitate the artistic ability of writers in all aspects of their work, both in creative and technical writing, and to generate interest and appreciation of aesthetics in new ways. The whole point, really, was to provide exhilarating and worthwhile experiences in terms of working in co-operation with others and in contributing to others’ efforts in pulling off major successes with writing.
How was this to be done? Only if the ideas I had were actually workable and “true” on some level would this all come together.
It turns out that they were, at least to an extent that put all of the above within reach. There really are, it seems, principles at work behind writing of every kind, which increase and enhance the ability of the writer to communicate, as well as aiding in the development of plot-determinism, character development and problem-solving skills, and encouraging an understanding of readers’ views.
One thing I wanted to be able to do was to encourage and develop imaginative skills by offering opportunities for writers to display their work to a wider audience. The Inner Circle Writers’ Group was intended to be a channel for new writers in particular to get extracts of their work on the web and to encourage feedback and inspire them to continue and to develop technical and design skills in relation to what they were doing, basically providing a platform for the achievement of excellence.
What then is the general viewpoint of the Group towards writers and writing? The focus throughout is on facilitating and encouraging writers to do as much as possible themselves with as little hands-on assistance as possible, to inspire them to strive towards excellence in every task or skill they undertake.
In relation to any work of fiction or non-fiction, the author should be universally regarded as the final authority for all decisions on his or her own work, except where such authority has been specifically delegated. The publisher hat, if not also worn by the author, should be secondary to the author hat.
The Inner Circle Writers’ Group works towards a full revival of the excitement and vitality of the writing and reading experience to give all writers opportunities to receive the benefits contained in the purposes of the Group, and so should become over time a vital and energised group, working towards common goals in an atmosphere of shared enthusiasm and a spirit of comradeship and enterprise. Writers are encouraged to use time well and gain expertise in a variety of disciplines, with professionalism visible in every aspect of their work.
Apart from that, there is here no philosophy, religion or lifestyle recommendation. Browse peacefully, without disturbance.
This site will hopefully continue to grow and more will be added. Your comments and opinions are extremely welcome. I do visit the site regularly but as I hope you can understand, it is almost always impossible to reply personally. My personal secretary has my trust and above all my thanks for her help in keeping the site lively and friendly in alignment with the above.
Thank you for your time. Join me again soon!
Contact us NOW!
admin@innercirclewritersgroup.com
Grant Hudson B.A. (Hons.)
Inner Circle Writers’ Group
P.O. Box 546
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West Sussex
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Phone: +44 (0)7738 447764
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