Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 7

most important thing in
your life. If it doesn't you will fail. If it does, you might just succeed...
Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with
words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no
less impressive than sailing single-handed round the world."
Clancy is spot on, but I prefer Orwell's take on the matter.
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle," he said, "like a long
bout of some painful illness."

Orwell, of course, was not only suffering the pains and birthpangs of
the novelist, he was also genuinely ill with consumption. You might
say he took his research for Down And Out In London And Paris a
little too far, as that's where he apparently picked up the wicked bug
that eventually brought his words to a permanent end.
Of course, after all that hard work, after sailing single-handed round the
world and finally reaching - salt encrusted and storm battered - the
safety of port, the hardest part of all is yet to come.
For when that manuscript is finished, it must be touted to publisher and
agent.
Expect them both to be hard-nosed and cynical, 'cos they've seen it all
before and crushed many a shrinking violet author in the clenched fist
of their business realism. Hard work? You ain't seen nothing yet.
After months and years at sea in an ocean of words, the novelist now
has to boil the whole thing down into a mere page full of words.
Condensed, concised, rendered down to its barest and simplest points.
And all the way through you have to make it clear what an exciting,
original unmissable work it is.
So, you still think writing a novel is hard?
Try selling it to a jaundiced publishing world. Ocean sailing! Where's
my life jacket?
July 2003

Primal Expression
ALL humans beings are storytellers, cave painters, poets and musicians.
We are creatures of creation; it's central to our nature to express
ourselves.
This has been true ever since the first spark of self-awareness

compelled us to ponder the dark depths between the stars, to search for
meaning in our relations with those around us, and with the world in
which we live.
Creativity is the central strand that binds our diverse cultures together.
It strikes out from one generation to the next to transmit those cultures
from the dawn of time to the ever-distant tomorrow. This urge to create
ramifies into everything we do, even into the darker aspects of our
collective psyche - the capacity to destroy.
Art in its many forms was mankind's first expression of dissent; a
subversion of the dominion of Nature. It stood for our own battle to
escape the incarceration within the savage Eden that is the natural
world.
Countless generations later, artistic expression in all its forms is still a
basic act of defiance and of dissent. This time nature is not the object of
our rebellion, but the human society that surrounds us and stifles us in
everything we do.
From the day we are born, we are subliminally informed that we are fit
only to labour or to perform some functional task for the market and its
support systems. That and to dutifully consume material products.
Modern society catalogues humanity. It compartmentalises the human
soul, splits it into components and neatly files them away. Here is our
box, and there we must remain.
Capitalism needs throwaway components. We are expected to be near
automatons performing repetitive tasks, regulated by the manager's
clock and to live out our lives in the service of the market. This is
called freedom.
In return, we get a little food, a roof over our heads, and a varying
ration of pocket money to spend on consumer things like clothes and
cars and holidays in the sun4.
Capitalism does not need a wealth of thinkers, or visionaries or people

with untrammelled imagination. Such people are in general a hindrance
to the smooth flow of profit. Instead, the vast majority is expected to
channel imagination into other avenues.
So the accountant finds clever ways to boost a client's profit. The
scientist working for an armaments company finds ever better ways to
kill and maim. The labourer is simply crushed.
Or so it would seem.
Dig a little deeper into the Dark Continent that is the majority of
mankind and we find the burning fires of ancient creativity. Sometimes
it screams at us from the walls of our prison cities in the most colourful
displays of graffiti art.
At other times we must peer a little harder into the crevasses and
shadows of our narrow world, think a little laterally to realise that
despite its circumstances, humanity still fights to express itself, any
way it