The mathematician Douglas Hofstadter
described creativity as a set of adjustable parameter dials
that can be applied to any situation...
that by tweaking the dials on, say, Romeo and Juliet
you can create West Side Story.
Now, what Hofstadter also said
was that a genius
is somebody who twists a dial that nobody else had noticed.
Something so fundamental
to the way that we tell a story
that nobody had thought that it could be changed.
So, that is one practical approach
to progressive writing
that... Yeah, how do we do progressive writing?
How do we progress?
And, as usual
it's by considered techniques.
One of the things that will almost certainly lead
to progressive writing
is the idea of literary difficulty.
Now, this is an idea which
I only heard about relatively recently
and then found that I'd actually been practising it
for most of my career.
On my first novel, Voice of the Fire
I made, for some reason, the first chapter
is in an impenetrable made-up Neolithic language.
And it's also probably the longest chapter
so most of the book's readers
would have been turned back in droves.
I always wondered why I'd done that.
But, yes, it is literary difficulty.
The idea of which is that
by making something about your writing
slightly more difficult
for the audience to understand
you are going to alienate
a certain percentage of your audience.
However, the ones that remain
will be forced to engage with the work
on a much deeper level
and so they will actually enjoy it more.
And I think that this is a very important point
about art in general.
That I do not believe that human beings
are actually bred to respond
to being spoon-fed their entertainment
to being spoon-fed their ideas and information.
I think that the art that I have best responded to myself
is the art that has made me do some of the work
whether that be
simply imagining what the characters look like
or what their voices are like
or in actually understanding
a difficult story point
or a difficult way of approaching literature.
That once you've understood it
once you've kind of cottoned on to it
then, all of a sudden, it opens up your vistas.
I remember the first time that I read the writings
of William Burroughs
who was the beat writer who famously
with Brion Gysin
pioneered the cut-up technique
where you get a page of text, or a couple of pages of text
you cut them down the middle
and then you put them together mismatched
so that if you read across
the lines of text
from one half of the page to the other
you'll suddenly get these accidental sentences emerging
with completely exotic uses of words and grammar
that can be very striking.
Of course, a lot of them can be junk.
But, at the same time, you can select.
Now, that is the cut-up technique.
The first time I read it
I found it completely alienating.
But you start to see the poetry that's in it.
You start to realise the things that you can do
by adding a random element
to your storytelling.
So, yes, things like that
are immensely valuable
to actually use
these avant-garde techniques in that way.
That is a way to do progressive writing.
Another thing that was suggested
by the very, very progressive non-musician Brian Eno
was that if we wish to create a work of art
what we should do is look for something
that nobody has done before.
Possibly because it was too difficult
or possibly because it was too time-consuming and boring
and then do that
and you will create a genuine work of art.
Another way that I find is useful
when you're trying to come up with genuinely progressive ideas
is even if you're somebody who comes from
a wretched academic background, such as myself
have a look at some of the ideas
that are circulating in academia.
Some of them will seem strange and foreign
and difficult to understand, at first
but you can find some wonderful ways of looking at things
if you study a few academic books.
For example
I was looking through some books
of academic criticism the other day
I came across the term "misprision"
which, in an academic concept
it means, basically...
If I've got it right
it means a kind of deliberate, wilful misunderstanding.
Where you know that a certain idea
is not actually correct
but you use it anyway
because it opens up creative possibilities.
As an example from my own work
when I was preparing my H.P. Lovecraft opus, Providence
I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism
including a lot of stuff that said that
the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos"
that everybody talks about
when they talk about H. P. Lovecraft's writings
that that had never really existed
that had been an invention of later writers
that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised.
So, I was thinking, "Is there another way
to connect up the various parts of H. P. Lovecraft's
very wide and various storytelling career?"
And I came across this concept of misprision.
And I was looking up one of the... the critics
a guy called Dirk W. Mosig
who was a psychologist
who had brought a very interesting view
to Lovecraft and his writings
and one of the things that Dirk Mosig suggested
in perhaps a moment of madness
was that all of Lovecraft's stories were intended
as episodes of some gigantic hyper-novel.
That he was creating a new form of the novel
that could be told in all of these 30 or 40
short, tiny, fragmentary stories.
Now, that is certainly not true.
H. P. Lovecraft wasn't thinking anything like that.
However, using the concept of misprision, I thought
"But what if he had?
I know that this is not the correct interpretation
of Lovecraft's stories, but what if it was?
What would the gigantic hyper-novel
that Mosig had suggested that Lovecraft was writing
what would that be like
if somebody attempted it?"
This gave me most of the plot structure
for the whole of the very lengthy Providence series.
So, yeah, take your ideas for progress
where you find them
because there is generally something
that will be useful to you.
Another place where it is very useful to steal from
besides the writings of academia
I would suggest some of the writings
in modern neuroscience
where they are coming up
with all sorts of interesting terminology
to talk about how the reading experience
actually affects us on a neurological level.
It was there that I learned of the concept
of indirect free discourse
of which they were using
I believe, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a model
because in that, you can move from the inside
of one character's stream of consciousness
into another character's stream of consciousness
often in the space of a page.
And, in doing this
by being able to actually inhabit
all of the different characters in a novel
the reader will apparently
have a greater empathetic understanding
of all of them
which will increase their involvement with the story.
So, yeah, this is a throwaway concept
perhaps from the realm of neuroscience
but to a committed writer
there is no such thing as a throwaway concept.
Any scrap of technique that you could use
that would give you a slight advantage
over all of the other aspiring writers out there
you go for that.