Truth in Assynt

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

I’m reading a beautiful book. At The Loch of the Green Corrie is by Scottish novelist, poet and mountaineer, Andrew Greig.

Part memoir, part meditation on fishing and wilderness, part tribute to another Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, it speaks to me particularly because it’s set in Assynt, a wild corner of the northwest Highlands where I’ve spent time making music during each of the last two summers, and where the Lewisian Gneiss that thrusts skywards through grass and heather is one of the oldest geological formations on earth. (Scotland drifted around a lot, for a very long time, before finally settling where it is now.)

At one point Andrew Greig describes a childhood game he and his brother used to play. They called it ‘Copsbrook’ after a third, imaginary player. He says this: ‘I have never known a game as demanding, as absorbing, as pure and difficult as playing Copsbrook – unless it is trying to write a poem, a true poem, that has no visible constraints but bends around its inner necessity.’

I really love that: ‘… bends around its inner necessity.’ There’s the sense of shaping a rim to a wheel, endowing the core of a thing with the means of its own movement into the world. And I love it because true as it is of writing a poem, it’s also true of the whole business of communicating.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the value of constraints in the creative process. Here Andrew Greig describes the constraint-less constraint. This is where the essential truth of what you want to get at gives shape to what you have to say.

All of which implies an honesty, a seeking-after-truth, that might seem all too rare in the business world. And yet … I truly believe people are longing for it. They’re fed up with corporate platitudes and spin, with failure of nerve and the bland drivel that results, with disingenuity and vacuity.

I ran a workshop today for a very large technology business. The participants were senior people, educated, intelligent, articulate, experts in their own field. The feeling of longing to let what they had to say be bent around its inner necessity was almost palpable. I hope I encouraged them to reach for it.

It’s very simple really.

People like truth.

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Memorabilia

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

My maternal grandfather, a retired admiral, could recite The Hunting Of The Snark in its entirety. As a young midshipman he had committed it to memory and there it had stuck for the remaining seventy-odd years of his life. I still remember as a child shrieking with terror and delight when, with a flourish, he would declaim the final line: ‘for the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’

He had, as we say, learnt it by heart. But why do we say that? Without going into the niceties of where memory actually resides, wouldn’t it seem more rational to say that he had learnt it by head?

In fact, the expression is supposed to derive from the ancient Greeks’ belief that the heart was the seat of the intellect (and in a nice etymological parallel, the word record pursues the same train of thought, deriving from the Latin word cor for heart, thus to re-heart).

But the Greeks’ anatomical mistake serves as a useful reminder (in English we’ve got the anatomy right, you see) of something else – that most things worth remembering (not, in fact, re-member, as in reconstruct, but re-memor, Latin for mind) engage the heart as well as the head. Which, of course, is why so much that is written and spoken in the world of business is so instantly and permanently forgettable (Old English: for meaning far from or away from, plus get meaning get).

Except that sometimes it’s memorable for the wrong reasons. I heard a captain of industry speaking on television the other night about the success of his business. He expressed it this way: ‘our headcount has grown fifteen per cent in the last year.’

Our headcount? If all he recognises are heads, the chances are his company is not a great place to work, regardless of how successful it may be. Well, that’s just a perfectly normal piece of business jargon, you might say. Maybe so, but it’s still very revealing of the underlying thinking that persists in so many organisations, where – however much their leaders may assert the opposite – people are really thought of as ciphers, two-legged information processing machines.

Now if he’d said, ‘our heartcount has grown fifteen per cent in the last year’, it would have been a different matter altogether…

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Hold me

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

As in life, so in art – we do need constraints. In their own way they can even liberate, by relieving us of the pressure of having to encompass everything. That has certainly been my experience with the two 26 projects I’ve written about in the last year: 26:50 with International PEN and 26 Treasures with the V&A. In both cases we were permitted a very limited number of words for our response to a brief. These constraints actively encouraged creativity.

But there’s another side to this, and whenever I think of it I see myself aged 23 on a large horse careering across a field in Argentina. There are several things about that image that still make me shiver. One, I’m not a natural horseman, in fact horses frighten me and this one knew it. Two, the ground was covered with termite hills, three feet high, baked hard as concrete, and tapering to sharp points. Three, fields in Argentina are the size of English counties. Clinging to my steed’s neck, I thought the ride would never end.

Sometimes I get the same feeling when I have to write something, particularly to the sort of brief that ends with the client saying vaguely, ‘Oh, you know the kind of thing we want…’

I go home, sit down and look at my notes and there’s a horrible moment of paralysis. It’s not simply where do I start, but where on earth do I stop? How am I going to give this thing structure, form, some boundaries so that my thoughts don’t just slither about like amoebas and go wobbling over the edge of the earth?

So I look for whatever I can find that will help to contain the job and make it seem manageable. There’s always something. Maybe it’s the word-count. Maybe it’s the designer’s layout. Maybe it’s something the client said that I hadn’t picked up on. And if none of those are available, I work through my notes to start giving some kind of shape to what I do know. Perhaps there’s a chronological flow to the information or some kind of inherent organisational logic. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made or a story to be told.

Whatever it is, I’m looking for a constraint, something that encloses the work I have to do and makes me feel safe in the knowledge that it will end and that I can get there; that I’m not back in that seemingly boundary-less Argentine field. For constraints don’t merely liberate, they also protect one from the void – sometimes known as the blank page.

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Out of the darkness

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

On Wednesday evening, as the Chilean miners emerged one by one from that hellish, six-hundred-metre-long metal tube, President Piñera, who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of bons mots, declared that his country’s most precious resource was not copper or gold, but ‘we Chileans’.

It wasn’t a particularly original sentiment, although in the circumstances it did have a very particular resonance. But what made it interesting was his choice of the word ‘we’.

How often has one heard the leaders of businesses and other organisations trot out the old cliché, ‘our people are our most precious resource’?

Leaving aside the notion that people can be relegated to the status of mineral deposits, it’s the ‘our’ – that possessive pronoun – that gives the game away. It implies something paternalistic, a little condescending, and it always carries an underlying sense of disconnection, as if the speaker and the people they are referring to don’t belong to quite the same tribe.

But what the Chilean president did was to make the statement inclusive rather than exclusive. He placed himself in it, as one of the resources. ‘We Chileans’, he said. And in that moment, with that simple phrase, he summoned the image of a nation profoundly united.

As the miners were being winched to the surface, I was running a workshop for a large financial institution in Edinburgh. I invited the participants to use art materials to portray where they felt their organisation was at present, and their group within it.

One group created an underwater scene, complete with octopuses and sharks, shoals of small colourful fish, shipwrecks and a submarine. In the bottom left-hand corner was a blacked-out section, evidently a cave, from which peered several small pairs of eyes.

‘Who’s that in the cave?’ I asked.

‘Our leaders,’ came the answer. ‘They don’t like to come out much.’

The kind of leaders, no doubt, who would be quick to proclaim that their people are their greatest resource, while failing to acknowledge that they themselves are part of the same rich seam of human talent and energy and emotion.

While this was obviously a source of huge frustration, even anger, for my group, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for those wretched leaders, failing to connect with the tribe they belong to, trapped in their cave by their own fear. For a moment, they even reminded me of the miners…

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Why fiction?

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

‘Why should I read fiction?’ This was a question put by one of our students in Spain, a couple of weeks ago.

It’s a good question, and a reminder for me that not everyone has the passion for stories that I share with my fellow Dark Angels tutors, John Simmons and Stuart Delves. People read for many reasons. It may be to learn or to become better informed, it may simply be to be entertained, and it doesn’t have to involve fiction. Even if they do read novels, it may not necessarily be for any reason other than to be caught up in a ‘good yarn’.

Nevertheless, the question invited us to reflect on the fact that there are deeper reasons for reading fiction, good fiction at any rate; and since it was seriously put it deserved a serious answer. We (the tutors) hit our stride quickly: because it helps you to see the world around you in a new light; because it reveals universal truths; because it highlights moral dilemmas; because it reflects what it means to be human; because it stretches your heart and mind; because it challenges your view of things; because it helps you develop and grow – these, from memory, were just some of the reasons we gave.

But what have discussions about fiction got to do with business writing? one might ask. After all, isn’t business writing about facts and the hard realities of commercial or organisational life? Well, yes, but to whom do those facts and hard realities apply? People. People whose lives wherever they are, at home or at work, involve searching for universal truths, facing moral dilemmas, reflecting on what it means to be human, and so on. I rest my case …

Yesterday morning during a workshop I was asked a different question, yet one which seems go hand-in-hand with the first: ‘How do I become a better writer? Would reading help? And if so, what – newspapers, novels…?’

Yes, I answered, and yes again. Reading does help, in fact it’s probably the best way there is to become a better writer. Reading good writing, in the quality press, in serious non-fiction, and perhaps most of all in good literary fiction, is an invitation to anyone with the least curiosity to investigate how it’s done. Syntax, vocabulary, rhythm, texture, colour, energy, all can be learnt from what we read, and the more we read the sooner we stop learning and start breathing it in.

But most importantly of all, reading – for the story or the style – teaches us that the best writers, in any field whatsoever, are those that are deeply preoccupied with being human. For them, making the connection is everything.

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Dawn chorus

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

Finca el Tornero de Abajo is the Spanish home of my childhood friend, novelist Robin Pilcher. A chestnut farm on a hillside in the Sierra de Aracena, 100 kms northwest of Seville, it’s a place of magical light, long views to distant ridges, tumbling wooded slopes and clear, clean air.

One wakes there to a morning chorus of dogs, roosters and a donkey, their voices echoing up from the valley as it floods with sunlight. And there’s another sound when the Dark Angels are gathered there, as we were last week: the sound of human voices raised together in celebration of existence.

Since our courses are about helping people to develop their metaphorical voices as writers, we work on the principle that it’s good for them to exercise their physical voices as well. So the day begins with five minutes of singing, usually a simple but beautiful early Christian chant: ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est (where there is kindness and love, there is god).

Religion has never had any place on our courses and never will, but that’s not to say it can’t offer us a rich seam of music and language. The melody of Ubi Caritas is easy to learn and the sentiment is one that most people find hard to disagree with, even though some might prefer to substitute the word ‘truth’ for ‘god’. Most importantly, though, the chant brings us together in a way that these days is all too rare.

Once upon a time the human voice was the predominant sound wherever one walked on earth, but today it’s drowned out by machines, and even when it’s not, half of us have our ears blocked by headphones. But at Finca el Tornero, our voices ring out in unison across the valley, the chant at once a confluence of sounds, a raising of consciousness and an invocation. It brings us together in a way that reminds us of both our individuality and our shared humanity. It’s good for our lungs and our heads, our hearts and our souls.

And when we come to the other exercises, that word ‘kindness’ is at the root of everything we teach, for kinder words are those that work harder to recognise our human kinship. Nothing is more vital to good writing or any other kind of communication, and yet it’s so often missing in the world from which our students come, the world of business. Each year we watch them drink at the well of kindness like desert travellers at an oasis.

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Cable news

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

When the business secretary Vince Cable yesterday announced his plans to shine ‘a harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour,’ the director general of the CBI, Richard Lambert, went on the attack, saying: ‘It’s odd that he thinks it sensible to use such emotional language.’

Cable probably hasn’t replied directly to Lambert, but were he to have done so, he might well have echoed the children’s novelist, Philip Pullman, when he was leading a group of writers to protest at publishers’ plans to badge children’s books according to the age band for which they were deemed appropriate (the plan happily fizzled out).

At a meeting with senior publishing industry figures, Pullman opened with an impassioned warning of the perils of attempting to compartmentalise readership. The leading publisher heard him out, then requested that they keep the emotion out of the discussion and consider things rationally – to which, so the story goes, Pullman responded that he would very much prefer to keep the emotion in, if they didn’t mind, since this was an issue about which a great many people felt very strongly.

Vince Cable provoked Richard Lambert’s displeasure by using simple, unambiguous language to pose questions that many people might want to ask: ‘Why should good companies be destroyed by short-term investors looking for a speculative killing, while their accomplices in the City make fat fees? Why do directors forget their wider duties when a fat cheque is waved before them? Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.’

This may be rhetoric, depending on your viewpoint, but what is undeniable is that Cable’s choice of words summons images and stirs feelings. Which is where he and Philip Pullman will always have the edge over the dull pedlars of business-speak. They are clever men, both of them, and quite at ease with all things rational, but it’s in their readiness to make room for emotion that they become more than twice as effective as their less inspiring counterparts.

Today we take a group of business people to Andalucia for our annual Dark Angels advanced writing course. Apart from tuning their senses to the sights and sounds and smells of a foreign landscape for five days, we will also use a series of writing exercises to tune up their emotions, because we firmly believe that the best leaders and communicators (and increasingly I wonder if there’s really a difference) are the ones, like Cable and Pullman, who choose to keep the emotion very much in, if you don’t mind.

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Treasure trail

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

Visit the V&A from tomorrow and for the next nine days you’ll see something rather unusual: large red panels with alternative interpretations of twenty-six objects in the museum’s British Galleries. There will be the normal curatorial information: stuffed dragon’s head, Ruritania, c 250 AD, ironwood mount inlaid with mother-of-pearl, taxidermist unknown (possibly George, St). And beside it there will be a more whimsical, reflective piece of writing, 62 words long, which captures some aspect of the spirit of the object.

This is 26 Treasures, part of the London Design Festival, and I make no apology for mentioning it for the second time in as many months. The brainchild of Rob Self-Pierson, a recent graduate of University College Falmouth’s MA in Professional Writing, 26 Treasures invites 26 writers to respond in their own way, in precisely 62 words, to an object with which they’ve been paired. Rob took the idea to the writers’ collective 26, and 26 approached both the V&A and London Design Festival.

The resulting project has grown bigger and attracted more publicity than anyone could have imagined. The V&A has welcomed it as ‘a brilliant idea’, while 26, no stranger to projects of this kind, has set up a second stream of pairings, such was the demand from its members for a place among the original 26 writers (who include poets Andrew Motion – a bust of Homer; and Maura Dooley – an ornate mirror). Soon, anyone will be able to submit 62 words on an object of their choice via the website at www.26treasures.com

Blogging about the project this week, my fellow contributor, Sara Sheridan, the Edinburgh-based historical novelist, mentions the ‘refreshingly egalitarian’ approach of 26, by which she means that it’s not a tight-knit little literary club, but one that’s open to anyone with an interest in words. And indeed she’s right: 26’s members range from poets and novelists to language experts and brand consultants, marketing and communications people to freelance business writers, advertising copywriters and graphic designers.

26 is testimony to the fact that the writer’s life can come in many shapes and sizes, not all of which involve writing books, but most of which are defined by a common curiosity in the workings of the world and a passion for the words that allow us to investigate them. 26 Treasures is a lovely example of the unexpected paths down which that curiosity and passion can take one. Do drop in and see it if you can. If not, have a look at the website.

26 Treasures, British Galleries, V&A, 18-26 September

Sara Sheridan’s blog

www.26treasures.com

www.26.org.uk

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Jam yesterday

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

The city of Gurgaon, where I’m staying, is a satellite of Delhi, fifteen miles or so from the centre of the capital. Twenty-five years ago it was mainly green fields. Today it’s the sixth largest city in the state of Haryana, home to many global names in the financial services, telecoms, automotive and outsourcing industries, one of whom is my client.

It’s a city literally springing up before one’s eyes, and full of the kind of contrasts you see only in India. Pigs rootle in the rubbish at the gates of towering new corporate HQs. Rajasthani labourers and their brightly-dressed wives live in plastic-sheeting shelters on the construction sites where they work. Bamboo scaffolding clings to high-rise apartment blocks. Cows amble down the centre of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway.

Yesterday Gurgaon was paralysed by its worst-ever traffic jam. Why? Because the authorities were testing the dedicated lanes that will bring Commonwealth Games traffic to Delhi from outlying areas when the games start in October. In the ensuing chaos of blocked access and exit roads, hundreds of thousands of people (luckily not including us) were stuck on the expressway for up to six hours. Add to that the fact that a late and particularly vicious monsoon has wrecked the surfaces of many of the main roads – the result of cost-cutting and corruption among contractors and officials – and you start to get a sense of what the daily commute for Gurgaon residents may be like in coming weeks.

But this is India. People just shrug and try their best to get to work. If they can’t, they take a day off. Most people that is. Not the Indian national cycle team, though, according to a sad little story on the front of yesterday’s Hindustan Times. The cyclists were brought to Delhi from their training base in Patiala to get in some early practice on the routes where they will compete next month. But things didn’t go quite according to plan.

Despite leaving their accommodation at 4.00am, the state of the roads meant that it took the team two hours to get to the local expressway where they were going to train. They then had just two hours’ cycling before having to stop for fear of being mown down by rush-hour traffic. Then there’s the near-epidemic of mosquito-borne dengue fever, a direct result of standing water from the monsoon, which is hitting Delhi. With no team doctor present to tell them what precautions to take, three of them were immediately struck down with the fever. Another six caught viral infections, leaving only seven of the 18-man squad fit for training, and now – unsurprisingly – they’re back in Patiala again.

What’s this go to do with kind words? Nothing at all. I’ve had enough of language this week with my students. Occasionally it’s good just to write about whatever you feel like – in this case the continuously extraordinary experience of being in India. And it’s my twenty-second wedding anniversary today. So there.

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Crystal clear

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

My final event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, last weekend, was hosting the linguistics professor, David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost authorities on language.

A consummate communicator, David was speaking mainly about the wonderfully titled Begat, his new book about the influence of the King James Bible on the English language. The book features the 257 expressions (fewer than he had expected when he began his research, he admitted) that in one form or another have found their way into the common parlance: expressions such as ‘fly in the ointment’, ‘my brother’s keeper’, ‘east of Eden’ and so on.

During the talk he briefly mentioned another book, A Little Book of Language, which has also just come out. I had been sent it by the publishers and had dipped it into before the event. It describes our relationship with language from our very first infant cry to the way we develop our own distinctive ‘voice’ as adults. It is simply and charmingly written, illustrated with pleasing woodcuts, full of fascinating information (‘salary’ and ‘sausage’ have the same etymological root, for example) and peppered with did-you-know pages featuring talking parrots, rhyming slang, foreign language texting and the like.

But it left me with a question: who was it written for? There was nothing on the jacket to say it was for foreigners or children, but there was something in the voice that nagged at me. I asked him when we met before the event. ‘I wrote it for twelve-year-olds,’ he said proudly. ‘What’s more, I road-tested it with several. They didn’t let me get away with anything!’

Twelve-year-olds. Yet this was a book that would entertain and inform any adult reader. In fact, my bet is that one would learn much more about language from this little volume than from any weighty textbook.

More and more I think that the communicator’s greatest gift is to be able to be universal, to speak to everyone. Today I’m going back to Delhi, and one of the exercises I will set the participants on the communication skills workshops I’ll be running is to describe what they do as if to a twelve-year-old. We did it last time and they found it both surprisingly difficult and unexpectedly enlightening.

I once heard the former Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, say that the adults he found most interesting were those who know that the child inside them is their soul. One of the things that child craves, in this world of ever increasing complexity, is simplicity. And that child is in all of us. We should remember it when we write.

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