No gods, no kings, no billionaires
My Amazon Associates ID is “legenofthesun-21”.
Not, “legendsofthesun-21″.
Which kind of explains why I haven’t been getting much click-through referral joy from the programme.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how it explains me getting any kind of click-through referral joy in the first place. (Scratches head.)
Paul Graham’s recent essay, “The Age of the Essay” struck a chord with me. The kind of essay writing he describes, a more free-flowing exploration of ideas than the traditionally structured “taking a position and defending it” essay, is exactly how I write.
Writing makes me think better. By putting words down on the page, my thoughts take better form. And the more thoughts I write down, the more ideas arrive. It’s like letting them out makes space for new and better ones.
I never learned how to write a “standard” essay at school, like most of my British and American contemporaries did. It wasn’t until after we were out of university and married that Abi told me about the technique of “say what you’re going to say, say it, and then say what you just said.” This came as a revelation to me, and has always struck me as a deeply uninteresting way to put an argument.
We did have writing exercises at school in the Netherlands, but we were never restricted to writing just essays. In every writing assignment, up to and including our final exams, there was always at least one topic choice that was open to a fictional approach. No matter how bizarre the topic, I always chose this option.
All our Dutch teachers warned us (and me especially, as a persistent offender) of the danger of sticking to fiction for these assignments. Stories are harder for teachers (and external examiners) to grade, and so they generally get judged more critically, and end up with lower average grades than essays. It was always deemed easier to write a competent essay than a competent story.
I’m sure that my contrary nature contributed to my insistence upon always choosing the story option, but mostly I just enjoyed writing fiction. And at school I always wrote stories the way Paul Graham describes “real” essay writing: I started with an idea, and then I developed it. If I didn’t find myself excited and surprised by the road the story took as it flowed out of me, then that was an indication that my readers would bored, too.
At school, I don’t think I ever knew where a story was going to end when I sat down and started it.
Looking back on it, this is probably what I used to enjoy most about writing fiction.
It is certainly what I enjoy most about blogging. When I get a-rambling, I rarely start off with a well-defined idea of where I want to go with the thought that prompted me to start a new entry. I rarely start off having done all the research (if any is needed) to back up what I say. If I start an entry in a new Firefox window, then chances are I’ll have about twenty or thirty tabs open in it by the time I come to press “save”, and I’ll always have learned something new on the way.
Coming back to fiction: it has been about a year since I last tried to write any, and probably three since I actually finished a story. So why did I stop?
Until now, I probably would have mumbled something about not having enough time, or not having anything really interesting to say, both of which reasons are thoroughly nixed by the existence of this blog. I think I realise now that the real reason is: I stopped enjoying writing fiction.
So, digging deeper: what made me stop enjoying it?
Plot. Endings. Structure. At some point in the mid-nineties I started being more concerned about these things. It started to worry me that I usually had no idea where a story was going. (Although this was a perfect jumping-off point for the “Best Openings” contest in the IMPs writers’ group on Compuserve.) I got into the mindset that I had to have an outline before starting a story. I started to feel inhibited about writing without an ending in mind. And guess what? Pretty soon the ideas just dried up. Without ideas, I couldn’t come up with endings, and so I stopped creating beginnings. Catch-22.
One of the things I have started admitting to myself is that I don’t persist with things I don’t really enjoy doing. I started taking Tae Kwan Do lessons earlier this year, but stopped stopped going after a month or two. At first I tried to rationalise away the reasons for not going to the classes (family demands, injured shoulder, etc.), but the deep down real reason is that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I had hoped I would. Likewise, there are plenty of reasons I could trot out for selling my drum kit earlier this year, but the real reason is that I wasn’t enjoying playing as much as I used to.
The other side of this coin is that if I find myself persisting with something, that’s a way for me to know that I really enjoy it. Blogging, for instance. I’ve been doing this since 2000, without much sign of stopping. Ergo, I must enjoy doing it. Likewise golf. I don’t play very often these days, but I do still play.
(Curiously, I feel like this piece of self-knowledge is related to my realisation that a personal music player must have an FM radio built in for me to actually keep using it regularly. It has the same sensation of lifting the veil of self-delusion, and drawing the sting of unfulfilled desire.)
In summary, the only way I will ever write fiction regularly (and consistently) again is if I find myself actively enjoying it. And I to enjoy it again, I must stop worrying about outlines and endings, and just let it flow. I have to start surprising myself again. I have to start writing to please myself before I can even think about sending stuff out into the big wide world again.
That’s certainly what I do here with this blog. Some posts are for the benefit of family and friends, to let them know what I’m up to. Some posts are pointers to, or snippets of information about things I find interesting (like the Movable Type tutorials I’ve written). And some posts are just for myself: me thinking things through out loud, talking to myself in public. You might find them interesting, or you might not. If you take away something of value from the post, that’s cool, but it’s a fringe benefit. I’m no pundit, and I’m not trying to generate an audience for my ramblings.
I’ve had some story ideas brewing for a while now. We’ll see if this new self-knowledge helps to turn them into something tangible, or if it’s just another layer of writer’s block to hide behind.
Standard Life Bank’s internet banking service is useless. “Banking online gives you the flexibility to manage your account when it suits you,” they say. Well, that would often be on Saturday or Sunday evenings. Or sometimes very late on a weekday evening. Perhaps after 11pm.
Whoa there, boy! Did we say when it suits you? Whoops, we meant to say when it suits us. Sorry for the typo!
I mean, really, folks. What’s up with that? Are their servers unionized? Did they threaten walkouts if they had to be switched on 24/7? Do they all pull out their network cables at the end of the day and go home for the night?
Or maybe all of Standard Life Bank’s internet transactions get handled manually behind the scenes? Maybe there’s an army of call centre workers trained to take incoming web page requests, scribble them down on paper, and pass them along to their colleagues who work some abacus magic before approving a money transfer request. Maxwell’s Demon, eat your heart out.
Oh, and their phone banking is even worse. Not open on Sundays at all.
Welcome to the 21st century!
I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately. Not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of establishing that you really are who you say you are. No matter where I turn, I keep stumbling across the issue:
I have often thought about setting up an alternate identity. You know, just in case I might really need to go underground some day. How about you? How far have you gone down that road? In the questions below I’m not talking about nicknames, married/maiden names, names changed by deed poll, or other changes of name where your fundamental identity remains the same.
Score one point for every “yes” you had in the On-line section, and three points for every “yes” under Real life.
Although false identities can be used as vehicles for doing harm, neither the on-line actions I noted above, nor their real-life counterparts are in themselves harmful. Yet the real-life actions carry so much more weight, because identity in the real world is a much more serious thing than it is on-line. It’s serious enough that in many places, establishing an alternative identity is a criminal offense.
People are already twigging to the fact that on-line identity can be equally important. Microsoft’s Passport system was mostly intended as a single sign-in mechanism to help users log in to multiple sites without having to remember multiple user IDs and passwords. It tackles the question of identity in a de facto kind of way: by gradually bundling all your systems access into a single login (“passport”), this login becomes your primary on-line identity.
Six Apart’s TypeKey authentication service comes at the problem from the opposite end: from the outset, TypeKey has been all about identity, with single sign-in thrown in almost as a fringe benefit. It is being sold (in a “free” sense) to users as a mechanism for proving that you really are Joe Bloggs. If you leave a comment on blog X, your TypeKey identity can prove to the blog owner (and to other readers) that you are the same Joe Bloggs who left comments on blogs Y and Z.
However, in support of the axiom that on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog, there is no way for TypeKey to establish that the identity “Joe Bloggs” doesn’t in fact belong to the real-life “Jane Doe”. And conversely, Jane Doe is free to set up multiple TypeKey accounts, so she can also be posting comments as “Adam Smith” and “Mary Robertson” whenever she feels like it.
FOAF and XFN are ways of establishing chains and webs of trust (A trusts B, B trusts C, therefore A trusts C, but possibly to a lesser degree) in a distributed manner. PGP (or GnuPG) public key signing provides a decentralized way of proving an identity, and as such is an alternative to TypeKey, but again with nothing to stop someone from having multiple identities.
As governments become more eager to distribute services on-line, finding a way to extend each individual’s single real-life identity into the on-line space is going to become more and more important. (Hello, biometrics.) Identity is also inextricably tied up with security, the buzzword of the decade, and as such will also be one of the keys to rolling back the tide of spam.
In real life, it is unusual and intuitively suspicious for a person to have multiple identities. On-line, though, it is almost the norm to carry around a different persona for every occasion. The present anonymity of the internet makes this possible. But with an increased focus on identity and security, is this a situation that can continue? Is anonymity a fundamental property of the virtual world, or is it just a passing phenomenon, indicative of the medium’s immaturity? Will it eventually become taboo to represent yourself on-line as anything other than your real-life persona? Or is the freedom to be whomever you choose something that our society is going to accept on a long-term basis?
It keeps me up at night, wondering if now is the last time I’ll be able to feasibly establish a new identity with the low-tech tools at my disposal. If I don’t do it now, will I regret it in twenty years’ time, when the UK has turned into an oppressive totalitarian surveillance state, and my humble blogging attracts the strict attention of the net police?
Okay…straying too far into paranoia there. But you know what I mean. Don’t you?
Sara has been writing about a whole bunch of interesting stuff lately:
Worth more than a couple of quick links in the sidebar, I thought.
While I was dropping Alex and Fiona off at nursery today, I felt (and heard) something in my wrist go pop as I lifted Fiona out of her car seat. Since then, almost every movement of my wrist hurts a lot, and I can’t exert any kind of force (pushing, pulling, gripping) with my right hand without experiencing a great deal of sharp, stabbing pain.
Curiously enough, I can still type. I think this is because my typing posture is pretty good, and I keep my wrists straight while I’m tapping away at the keys. I still think it might be time for a natural keyboard. The only problem with that is that they’re wider and taller than normal keyboards, and I’m not sure if one would fit in the sliding tray under my desk, and still leave me enough room for my mouse. Maybe it’s time for a trackball. (Takes up less room than a travelling mouse.) Might be time to brush up on my Windows keyboard shortcuts, too.
I actually went to see my doctor for the less severe version of this problem last week. Now that it’s taken a jump for the worse, I think I’m going to have to go back again…