Comfortable Disorientation

What makes something great?

I've been following the Guardian's debate about who is Britain's greatest living author with interest.

For those that haven't seen it, the debate was sparked by a Guardian Books article about Martin Amis, that (lazily? knowingly? provocatively?) stated "Amis is often described as Britain's greatest living author". This was challenged by a fair few indignant readers, who for various reasons objected to such a grand title being awarded so wantonly. This prompted an article in last friday's Books insert, that opened up the debate (here) and solicited opinions from various writers and literary experts such as Joel Rickett* (here). There's also an ongoing blog debate here.

While it's fertile fodder for discussion and the debate is fascinating, I can't help finding the whole "who's the greatest?" concept a bit futile. It bothers me because that there's no attempt to clarity what is meant by greatness.

Now I use great all the time, most often to express a personal enthusiasm for something. But clearly I understand this is different to say, The Great Wall Of China, where we're using great to depict scale, size and ability to inspire awe.

Unlike most of the blog commentators, many of the Guardian's experts have outlined their greatness criteria but they certainly don't agree.

So what does someone need to demonstrate in order to justify the moniker of 'greatest':

Consistency?

Range?

Mastery of style and craft?

Uniqueness and originality?

Memorability?

Popularity?

Longevity?

Insight into human nature or into our life and times?

Influence?

These last two, insight vs influence reminded me of this insight discussion on Pink Air, making me think it might be of interest to some of you.

* I've mentioned Joel Rickett as I'm half-hoping he'll Google himself and find me here. I went to uni with him and want to get in contact. This is my tentative first step towards that goal...

Writer's bible

I'm not sure if "writer's bibles" are standard practice in the TV industry, but I've just read one that makes me think they should be.

I'm once again immersing myself in the shiny, happy world of kids' TV and had been given this bible (a 10-page word document) as background reading. I've been dazzled by it. It's simply a wonderful, charming document, beautifully written and bursting with ideas as well as information.

As you might expect, the bible gives an overview of the show, describing it's core themes, values, rules and characters. Yet rather than being format-laden and officious, the tone is fun, playful and inspiring. It's made me appreciate quite how rich, layered and alive the show itself is - impressive, given that I'm talking about a show with 10-minute episodes, aimed at pre-schoolers.

Each character comes to life in 2-3 short, spare paragraphs peppered with quotes, examples and gorgeous words. They're all rounded, balanced individuals complete with quirks and foibles. There are allusions to the grown-up concerns of the adult characters, even though these have minimal relevance.
The document is generous in offering storyline startpoints. It's crammed with possibilities, interesting tensions and hints of ideas. Boundaries are lovingly outlined, clear but never limiting.

I would love to see the process by which a team of writers take this bible and turn it into a series of stories. I'm half-minded to try and write one myself. The bible doesn't just describe the show, it embodies it, using nothing more than words on paper. I'm smitten.

Truthiness

The visitors to Merriam-Webster Online have voted truthiness as the 2006 word of the year.  They define the word as follows:

1. truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

I'd not heard of it before but rather like it. In fact, I've decided to adopt it.  At the moment I'm quite interested in the fuzzy, fudgy boundaries between objective and subjective truth, reality and unreality, fact and fiction. Truthiness sounds light, happy and playful, it just feels like the right term for describing a whole load of stuff to do with half-truths, almost-truths and those things we wilfully prefer to think of as truths.

More reasons to write

Since posting about the relationship benefits of writing love letters here, I've been looking into what else writing can do for you. Writing has not only has been proven to have all sorts of emotional benefits, it also has positive physical impact. The most consistent link seems to be with an improved immune system but lots of other health benefits have been reported too. There's loads of information on it but this 2004 article in The Age does a nice summary.

James Pennebaker from the University of Texas seems to be one of the most active psychologists working in this area and he provides some guidelines about how to write in order to optimise these benefits. He also answers one of my questions, whether it makes a difference if you handwrite or type (it doesn't).

I'm fascinated. What are the relative impacts of different kinds of writing? Are authors generally a happier, healthier lot than the rest of us? I'm a big fan of getting people in groups to privately write stuff down - are there greater implications of this than I was previously aware of? I want to research this. Though James & his colleagues appear to use a quanitative method to explore content, which naturaly bothers me.

Perhaps, if writing makes us happier & healthier, it might go part of the way to explaining why blogging makes us nicer?

Why we like serendipity

It’s hard not to like the word serendipity. A few years back the London Festival of Literature did a survey to discover Britain’s favourite word. The top 10 turned out to be as follows:

1. Serendipity
2. Quidditch
3. Love
4. Peace/why
5. Ornomatopoeia
6. Hope
7. Faith
8. Hello/family/football/muggle
9. Bollocks/compassion/fuck/home
10. Jesus/money

All in all it’s a fantastic list of words. I’ve been thinking about why we like serendipity in particular. So far I’ve come up with:

It means something nice: Unexpected treasure, fortuitous discoveries, stumbled-upon finds. It’s a lucky, happy and optimistic kind of word. Who wouldn’t want some serendipity in their life?

It’s a fabulous word to say: that first bit, ‘seren’, is smooth and calm – you could be about to say serene or serenity but instead the ending goes all wiggly. ‘Dipity’ it’s fun and a bit silly, it’s hard to say without smiling.

It has a good back story: The word comes from a 10th century Persion fairytale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’. Serendip is also an old name for Sri Lanka. So the word has an alluring sense of exoticism, romance and mystery.

It’s unusual without being poncy: It’s not a word that you get to use everyday, but nobody will ever think you’re trying to be clever when you drop it into conversation.

It is often discovered serendipitously: I bet a lot of people remember discovering the word. When you first encounter it makes you pause and think ‘what a great word, I’m going to use it again when I can’. I first stumbled across it reading this book when I was about 11-12

I hate being common & predictable but it's definitely one of my favourite words.

When did you last write a love letter?

And no, flirtatious texts and/or emails don't count.

If it has been a while, the BPS Research Digest provides a couple of good reasons to write one soon.

Firstly, a recent survey of 2000 women by the UK government Department of Skills and Education (DfES), found that 44% hadn't received a love letter in over a decade.  That's a lot of ladies, I wonder how many men?

Secondly, they point to a recent survey  by Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker at the University of Texas that suggests writing about your relationship can help make it last longer.  They asked students in committed relationships to write down their innermost feelings about their relationships for 20 minutes on three consecutive days.  Three months later, when compared to a control group (who wrote about their daily activities), they were significantly more likely to still be in their relationship. You can read the paper here.

This is one of those wonderful research findings that makes easy intuitive sense.  It's not hard to imagine that the experiment prompted it's subjects to think about their relationship in a way that transcended the mundane & everyday - and that this could have a lasting impact. 

I wonder what the people involved in the study wrote about & how it made them feel.  I wonder how honest they were in their writing or whether they edited their feelings.