First of all, an apology. If you are a human, and are looking to become a QR code, then the headline may have lured you in under false pretences.
Tag: writing process
An Autumnal Equinox
Today marks the arrival of astronomical autumn here in the UK. The autumnal equinox occurred at 01.04 GMT. Autumn is my favourite season. I love watching the trees and their foliage change from a hue of greens to their golden autumnal colours.
Autumn is a time when I retire to my writing den and start a form of writer’s hibernation…
The Butterfly Collector
November petered out. December whistled on the horizon. Jack sat at his writing desk and looked onto liquorice daylight which hung on fading ivy. Fingerprints, dead bugs and pigeon droppings adorned his window. Today was one of those writing days where the whiteness of his journal burned his eyes. His pen felt like a heavy wooden club…
Why Do You Write?
I have been revisiting several George Orwell’s novels recently, maybe a sign of the times we are living in. Whatever your thoughts on Orwell’s views and beliefs, there is no getting away from the fact his writing was visionary. My most recent read, Coming Up for Air, written in 1939, could be a mirror reflecting events happening today.
As is oft for a writer, one thread moved into another and I found myself reading…
The Zen of Seeing
‘We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes. Our looking is perfected every day – but we see less and less.’ – Frederick Franck
When I read the above quotation, the words felt quaint, almost warming, and hard to believe they were written only forty years ago. The extract is taken from the start of a book, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing / Drawing as a meditation, written by Frederick Franck in 1977.
I bought the book a couple of months ago from a car boot sale and the reading has brought home a realisation, as a writer, I was becoming blind. Not in a physical sense, more in a way that I was detaching myself from the world around me.
Where Franck mentions television tubes, change those words to iPhone, iPad, laptop, desktop, television screen. Technology appears to have made the world bigger. Has it become smaller?
There is an excellent exercise in the book where Franck asks the reader to concentrate their eyes on something in front of them, then close their eyes for five minutes and try to relax. When their eyes are reopened, he asks the reader to refocus on the object and record what they see. Although this book is predominantly aimed at artists the exercise can be adapted for most creative practices.
(more…)