Writing - Poets and Kings

Time I chatted with Charles III. 

Why Poets Terrify Kings

Power has always had an uneasy relationship with poetry. Armies can be drilled, laws can be enforced, but poetry slips through cracks where swords cannot reach. Kings understand this better than anyone. They fear poets not because poets command battalions, but because they command language — and language can make people see the world differently. A throne rests not only on armies but on belief. And belief is the poet’s battlefield.

When Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was not being sentimental. He was describing a power deeper than decree. Poets legislate by shaping the imagination of nations, by naming what people feel before they can speak it themselves. They turn private longings into public voices. Kings may give orders, but poets give meaning — and meaning can undo any order.

History leaves us plenty of examples. Osip Mandelstam’s single poem mocking Stalin was enough to seal his fate. One short stanza frightened a dictator who commanded millions of soldiers and secret police. Why? Because a poem can travel mouth to mouth, heart to heart, untraceable and indestructible.

Kings tremble before poets because poets remind us that no authority is final. Where power seeks permanence, poetry whispers of change. Where rulers demand obedience, poetry stirs the imagination toward freedom. To read a poem deeply is to glimpse another way of being, another horizon — and once a horizon is seen, it cannot be unseen.

Poetry terrifies kings because kings can kill the poet, but they cannot kill the poem. The words remain, carried in memory, whispered in secret, rediscovered by another generation. Power seeks to silence; poetry insists on speaking. And in the long span of history, it is the poem, not the decree, that endures.

God Bless

Writing - Nothing changes

 It is often stated that 'there's nothing new under the sun', and 'history repeats itself'! We are also advised to learn from the experiences that history tells us. I am reading a book about the Luddite rebellions of 1811/12. Even 200+ years ago, there were people concerned about the reasons for civil unrest. 

The events of 1811/1812 occurred mainly in the north, from Nottingham, Cheshire, Lancashire, to Yorkshire, and concerned the use of automated machinery in the cloth-producing industries. It began in the knitting factories and spread to cotton and wool processing. Workers were frightened of losing their jobs. There were several violent acts, mostly against the machinery, all over the area. The government at the time was weak and slow in responding to the problems and allowed things to ride without attention. There were underlying issues that sound familiar today. One of the major events that escalated the need for a response from the administration was the assassination of the prime minister Spencer Perceval on May 11th 1812. 

Spencer Perceval 

In fact, it seems that his killing was a mistake. The real target was the Home Secretary, Richard Ryder, was the intended target but the assassin, John Bellingham, became frustrated at the fact that Ryder wasn't in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament, and he shot Perceval instead. 

John Bellingham 

A chaplain from the Manchester area had concerns about the rifts in society and came up with the following. 

Canon Parkinson writing On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester, would later state, 

"There is no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed.... There is far less personal communication between the master cotton spinner and his workmen, between the calico printer and his blue handed boys, between the master tailor and his apprentices, than there is between the Duke of Wellington and the humblest labourer on his estate, or than there was between good old George the Third and the meanest errand-boy about his palace. I mention this not as a matter of blame, but I state it simply as a fact." 

Sound familiar?

The government sent the army to the north to manage the situation under Thomas Maitland. After just two days he reported back to Ryder.

Before the end of his second day in Manchester, Maitland was telling Ryder that the high price of food in relation to wages required very serious consideration. He gave some precise examples. Potatoes, now the most frequent food of the cotton worker, had risen from 7/6d to 18s a wholesale load. This had caused an increase in retail price to the worker such that, where once his penny would buy him 3lbs of potatoes, now it bought only 1lb.

Maitland carried on to say that if wages had increased to maintain a closer relationship with the owners' remuneration, there would have been no reason for the unrest. 

This is the exact same situation that pertains today, and more and more people are becoming unhappy about the worship of billionaires, and at the same time, the increase in the number of poor in rich western countries. 

God Bless 

Writing - Slacken Imagination

 Have you found yourself thinking that you've run out of imagination? Where is the next idea coming from? How do full-time artists do it? Even how brilliant is she/he. In fact, the problem is that we live in a world where information and opinion flood the senses 24/7. Our minds follow paths through that plethora of noise and favour some ideas and facts more than others. When someone suggests that you 'think outside the box' or indulge in some 'blue-sky thinking', they are just asking you to allow the strictures on your thinking to be released, or slackened off to allow in alternative ideas. 

Of course, that may be a little scary. Stepping away from conventions may entail attracting criticism, a factor no human is truly happy accepting. 

Like the box above. The sides aren't straight. The shading is not complete. I don't see what you are getting at. 

The short answer is that there is no right answer. The idea is that you take from the sketch what you want to take. 

You all know what this curly line represents. You may attach, colour, breed, situation and more, but the style you are happy with emerges from your experiences and preferences. 

In the visual arts you are free to copy life or make representations of life in the form that satisfies your imagination and artistic desires. Where did Munch see the 'Scream' or Dali his melting clocks? 

Similarly, when writing we are as free as a visual artist to create situations as we feel are appropriate to your narrative. 

God Bless 

Writing - Messages

 I've written about messages in writings in the past. Dickens highlighted social problems in the nineteenth century, and George Orwell wrote about totalitarianism and democratic socialism. I was inspired to write about a possible future energy crisis. 

Blurb

The story is a speculative journey into a possible future that may lie ahead of us all. There is evidence that such a future may not be impossible. We have been warned that unless we increase the ability to produce electricity, there could be power cuts in the next ten years. Our modern-day lives are permeated through with the need for electricity and its production.
Although Cessation could be categorised as a dystopian story, I find that rather a negative word, and the purpose of writing the tale is to allow elements of hope in a seemingly desperate situation.
The story begins in 2023, a couple of years after the lights go out for the last time. Our group of survivors is thrown together on a farm in the low Pennines north of the M62 motorway and within striking distance of a number of northern towns which could prove useful for supplies. Initially, the group is small and lives on a farm called Serendipity, but as time passes, the size of the group waxes and wanes for a variety of reasons. 

Although the story was written several years ago and begins in 2023, the issue could occur any year in the future. Nowadays, if I were to write something along dystopian lines, it would probably be about a public reaction to the poisonous form of capitalism that the world is under the thrall of at present. There are so many countries that are being run for the benefit of billionaires to the detriment of the larger population that something must break soon. 

Don't fight shy of tackling thorny problems! 

God Bless 

Writing - Enjoy it

 To all those would-be authors who are feeling depressed, frustrated or jaded in some other way about not getting published or the lack of an audience. You are doing something that most folk only dream of and never actually attempt. 

I recall many rejection slips, which were compounded by the publication of autobiographies by footballers that were frankly awful. The reason for their success was their fame, which had nothing to do with their ability to write. In fact, the quality of the writing is like the proverbial 'curate's egg', some is really good, others terrible. 

It was then that I discovered self-publishing, which actually served the purpose of my ambition to see my babies in print. I knew that when I began writing, it wasn't to earn a fortune, but a personal goal. 

Over the years, I self-published, earning relatively little, probably not enough to cover my costs, I enjoyed the experience. Remarkably, I still receive a trickle of royalties from various countries. 

It would have been possible to sell more if I had worked harder at the selling part of the role, but as I have always said, 

'I couldn't sell fridges in the desert.' 

God Bless 

Writing - Variations

 Writing over a period of time, in an imaginative way, requires backup notes, stamina and acceptance that writing is a dynamic process. Over the period I wrote the Steele novels, the characters aged, changes occurred in the setup, and one or two characters disappeared. 

Maurice Flitcroft 

The changes that arise in your writing are entirely under your control, but it is plain that if your writing is to maintain its dynamism, then changes will be necessary. Whatever you decide upon will fit better if it is seen to develop for a reason or as a result of a previous action. The direction of your tales will be maintained. 

BFG 

If Superman had been changed into a gill-breathing giant, without some level of explanation and previous fans may totally lose interest. So it is a process that requires care and nurturing. Rather like an actor who changes roles, preparation is necessary. 

Thomas Cromwell 

I spent 10 or 12 years writing the Steele novels, but after four, I had a change in inspiration and wrote a dystopian story, which someone suggested would be good for a TV series. That tale was 'Cessation' and set in the future, predicting the breakdown in society as a result of electricity running out! It was a total break from Steele and as such provided some refreshing opportunities which the remainder of the Steele books were to benefit from in quality. 

Change is okay! 

FYI - the sketches are of actor Mark Rylance playing three of his many roles.

God Bless 

Writing - Identity

 When characters are being prepared for a story, a writer needs to establish when the character appears on the planet. In defining the identity of your characters, their depth will be determined to a degree by their longevity. When I created Patrick A Steele, he had an almost whole life story. The explanation of his personality was defined from his late teenage years and is an integral part of who he is as an adult superhero. 

 By establishing a level of longevity with your characters, you endow them with realism and provide readers opportunities to identify with those characters. Also, the way the characters react in differing situations will be established by their personality. 

On the other hand, it wouldn't be feasible to carry out that level of work for all of your characters. You may need to have a lighter touch with peripheral figures, and that is within the purview of the writer. 

Steele has a fairly constant support group, irrespective of the adventures through which he travels. In addition, there are characters who will appear and disappear quite rapidly that do not require a detailed history. 

God Bless 

Writing - Anonymity

 Anonymity is defined as: lack of outstanding, individual, or unusual features; impersonality. A mysterious word suggesting mysteriousness that can be useful in creating plots and twists in plots. An author's meat and drink. When we write, the enigma is how to tell your readers as little as possible about a character and still maintain their importance. 

The figure in the sketch is anonymous. There are things you can describe, for example, she seems to be female, young, but older than school age, probably. She seems to be trendy as described by her clothes and hairstyle. However, the bottom line is that what we are looking at what could be a mask. 

Alternatively, she looks sad, almost haunted and fearful. She doesn't look impersonal. If you saw her, you would remember her. 

A mask is totally inflexible in its purpose. Has it been created to instil fear as well as conceal the identity of the wearer? A limited scope, whereas anonymity, to use the cliche, is so that your character can hide in plain sight. If they are too explicit, they can help identify the wearer. 

The anonymous person is of medium height and weight, with nondescript hair colour, without any distinguishing marks, and wearing average clothing of indeterminate colour. A 'grey' person. 

God Bless 

Writing - Silence

 Silence is golden and speech is silver.

The phrase originated in Arabic culture and became popular in English through translations in the 19th century.  It emphasises that while speaking can be valuable, there are times when remaining silent is even more advantageous. So it is true in story writing. 

It may seem obvious to say that there should be periods of silence in your story writing, the enigma being that you are describing silence with words. It is quite simple to think of examples where authors have enjoyed themselves describing haunting and mysterious episodes in their work, but it may not be as easy to produce as one would expect. 

When describing action scenes and interactions between characters, the vocabulary used is possibly easy to describe as 'ordinary', as those activities are 'ordinary'. Whereas the words used to describe silence are 'softer' and tending towards the passive. Also, it may be that you want to create darkness in a piece of writing with tension and menace. 

Practising using the silent words can be made easier by looking at suitable pictures like the above. In that case, you would be describing attitude, expression, and body language, a feeling of threat, and the accompanying adrenaline surge. 

Then there are the scenes where no human input is planned or required, but there is an atmosphere that adds value to a piece of writing. The view is of a wild and confused sea whipped into a frenzy of action and irrepressible violence that is well out of the control of any human. Alistair Maclean, in HMS Ulysses, spends a couple of pages describing the sea at night on a convoy route north of Finland during the 2nd World War. It is brilliantly done. 

Charles Dickens' description of the marsh near Pip's home in Great Expectations is haunting. 

There will be hundreds of such examples, and it is worth reading other writers' work to enrich the development of your own. 

God Bless 

Writing - Conspiracies

 Conspiracy theories are explanations for events or situations that assert the existence of a secret plot by powerful, sinister groups, often with negative or malevolent intentions. CTs can spice up a story and provide a motive, but if you read the mainstream media, they are the stuff of the confused and malcontents. Many examples are created on All Fool's Day and at the advent of a significant event, like landing on the moon. 

Are all conspiracy theories just so much fiction? Let us consider fake news. President Trump spends considerable amounts of time castigating the main news sources in the US as spreading fake news, but in reality, much of what he says is terminologically inaccurate and has been proven so. 

For example, Putin fought in the 2nd World War when he was in fact born in 1952. This is just one of many inaccurate statements made since January this year. 

The point is that news sources are being manipulated. In the case of the US, currently, those manipulations are obvious and only the selectively blind refuse to see the truth. However, what about those half-truths that we are unclear about. Perhaps we haven't found out all of the facts about the actions of the government of the UK during the COVID-19 crisis. In time, the truth will come out if it needs to. 

A sage piece of life advice I received from my father was to never believe everything you see and hear on the news. In my opinion, this wasn't my dad being a conspiracy theorist, but rather a man who was fully aware of the owners of newspapers and their influence over what is published. Once again, all you need to do is follow the US news as reported by Fox News and then by the other purveyors of news in the United States. The fact that they are different should ring alarm bells in the collective lugs of the populace. 

As free-thinking and intelligent people, we then have a duty to research information to verify the truth of situations. 

God Bless 

Writing - Developing stories

 You have the idea for your story and even a strong beginning, but how will your tale progress? The chances are that you have a solid plan, but then, while you're writing one of your characters does something unexpected! 

I have read of several authors who state that the characters take over their stories, and that may seem fanciful, but I know that it's true. Patrick Steele was my creation, but once the action is set, it is his skills and attitudes that lead the direction of the tales. There is a logic in that statement. When you have invested in building characters, the process includes all human aspects of personality, so unsurprising that the character imprints itself on the development of your story. 

Don't fight it! 

In the case of the above 'wonky' house, part of an unfinished idea, what should be added next? In this case, I will decide. It may be that I add a broken-down stable, or a bicycle, a path leading to a cave/cliff/pond/river, and so on. Whatever, I will decide according to the house as it is, with all of its faults and facilities. It is that aspect of story writing which is most exciting because even as the creator, you're never quite sure. 

The finished picture.

God Bless 

Writing - Reflecting politics

 Unless you are writing futuristic or period pieces, the current political situation can be an addition that adds 'flavour' to your work. Writers are renowned for being keen to hold governments of the day to account and have been imprisoned and worse in some regimes. Using politics is meat and drink to writers. 

Some notable examples include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose works like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich exposed the realities of the Soviet Gulag, and Václav Havel, a playwright and later Czech president who used his writings to critique the communist regime. Other examples include Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of internal exile for his political opposition, and Nelson Mandela, whose autobiography Long Walk to Freedom documented his struggle against apartheid in South Africa. 

Weaving political views into your writing can be done by including scenarios that demonstrate your point of view. More simply, by delivering your point through conversations between characters in your story. 

Currently, the world is not as enamoured with freedom of speech, and so writing along political lines could be risky. For example, foreign students entering the USA are required to keep their social media public so that it may be examined by security services. Why would they do that if the USA supports freedom of speech. 

God Bless 

Writing - Time

When we decide to write, we make a commitment to spend time, a considerable amount of time in fact, where we will be in solitary confinement. Sounds dramatic! However, during the writing process, you are the only one who can do the work because it comes from your mind. 

Apart from when we are carrying out research, all other aspects of writing have to be solitary. That's okay, it is what we sign up for. 

In my own experience, I first tried writing while working full time, married with children, and it didn't work. I was just into my 60's when I had retired and had the time to write. All budding writers need to examine the issue of time.  

Consider Time

 

It only takes a second to make a mistake,

and a minute to compound the error.

An hour is a significant time to take,

and in a day create real terror.

 

Some real creativity happens every day,

and in politics a long time is a week.

A month can chase the seasons away,

and a good year on January 1^st we seek.

 

When young a school day is so slow,

even though it lasts just a few hours.

When old, months faster than rivers flow,

and time takes away our powers.

 

Time like sand flows through our hands,

like running water we can touch only once.

It never returns for a second night’s stand,

but is gone forever without response.

 

Time is passive in one voice,

and an unstoppable action in another.

It provides the opportunity to make a choice

but is unmoved if we don’t bother.

© David L Atkinson March 2015 

God Bless