George R.R. Martin On His Development As A Writer

George R.R. Martin is without question among the most well-known writers of this generation. Even before the adaptation of his books into an uber popular television series by HBO, Martin occupied a special spot in the hearts of millions of bibliophiles. I am among those who look up to the man not just in the context of a reader but as an aspiring writer as well.

As with any aspiring writer who looks up to a writing giant, I’ve always been curious as to how Martin developed as a writer. What books did he read as a child? What made him decide to write stories under the banners of science fiction, fantasy, and horror? Why didn’t he take the routes of spy thrillers or historical fiction?

I found bits of answers to these questions in his Introduction for the anthology book Warriors 3. Published in 2010, Warriors 3 is a collection of stories by seven bestselling authors (Diana Gabaldon, Robin Hobb, Lawrence Block, Carrie Vaughn, David Morrell, James Rollins, and Joe R. Lansdale). Martin co-edited the book with Gardner Dozois.

In his Introduction which he aptly subtitled Stories from the Spinner Rack, Martin takes us back to when he was growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey. A kid who loved books, Martin agonized on how to budget his dollar-a-week allowance.

“My allowance was a dollar a week, and figuring out how I was going to split that up between ten-cent comic books (when the price went up to twelve cents, it really blew the hell out of my budget), thirty-five-cent paperbacks, a candy bar or two, the infrequent quarter malt or ice cream soda, and an occasional game of Skee-Ball at Uncle Milty’s down the block was always one of the more agonizing decisions of the week, and honed my math skills to the utmost.” – George R.R. Martin

Martin recalls the joy and mystery of going through the paperbacks in a spinner rack at a corner store. In those days, the books weren’t arranged or shelved based on genres. The books were mixed together. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a Barbara Cartland heart-stopper and a Robert Heinlein space saga.

Martin remembers his days going through the spinner rack:

“Looking back now, almost half a century later, I can see that that wire spinner rack had a profound impact on my later development as a writer. All writers are readers first, and all of us write the sort of books we want to read. I started out loving science fiction…but inevitably, digging through those paperbacks, I found myself intrigued by other sorts of books as well. I started reading horror when a book with Boris Karloff on the cover caught my attention. Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp hooked me on fantasy, just in time for J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. The historical epics of Dumas and Thomas B. Costain featured sword fights too, so I soon started reading those as well, and that led me to other epochs of history and other authors. When I came upon Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling on the spinner rack, I grabbed them up too, to read the original versions of some of my favorite stories, and to see how they differed from the Classics Illustrated versions. Some of the mysteries I found on the rack had cover art so salacious that I had to smuggle them into the apartment and read them when my mother wasn’t watching, but I sampled those as well, and have been reading mysteries ever since. Ian Fleming and James Bond led me into the world of thrillers and espionage novels, and Jack Schaefer’s Shane into westerns.” – George R.R. Martin

Martin now laments today’s bookstores where “genre is king”. You walk into a store and you know exactly where the fantasy or the self-help books are. The mystery and surprise that the spinner rack afforded is now gone. Martin admits it’s good for selling more books but he adds that it’s not good for readers.

“It’s good for selling books, I guess. It’s convenient. Easy to find the sort of books you like. No one has to get down on their knees in hopes of finding jack Vance’s Big Planet behind that copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

But it’s not good for readers, I suspect, and it’s definitely not good for writers. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller.” – George R.R. Martin

Hanif Kureishi on Writers and the Writing Process

You don’t have to be familiar with Hanif Kureishi and his previous work in order to appreciate the contents of his book Dreaming and Scheming (Reflections on Writing and Politics). This nice collection of essays and insights that was culled from nearly two decades of Kureishi’s non-fiction writings is some sort of a love letter to writers and aspiring writers. With brutal honesty, Kureishi traces his writing roots from the nights he watched his father stubbornly write unpublished novels to the day he himself made it as a successful spinner of words.

Kureishi has the uncanny ability to inspire you to pick up a pen and start writing at the same time telling you that most of what you are going to write will likely amount to nothing. Zero. Zilch. If you love writing or if you think you love writing, Dreaming and Scheming is a book you should read. Below are samples of the gems and nuggets you can find in the book.

“Writing seems to be a problem of some kind. It isn’t as if most people can just sit down and start to write brilliantly, get up from the desk, do something else all day, and then, next morning start again without any conflict or anxiety. To begin to write – to attempt anything creative, for that matter – is to ask many other questions, not only about the craft itself, but of oneself, and of life. The blank empty page is a representation of this helplessness. Who am I? How should I live? Who do I want to be?”

“You don’t want to make mistakes because you don’t want a failure that will undermine you even more. But if you don’t make mistakes, nothing is achieved. Sometimes you have to feel free to write badly, but it takes confidence to see that somehow the bad writing can sponsor the good writing, that volume can lead to quality. Sometimes, too, even at the end of a piece of writing, you have to leave the flaws in; they are part of it. Or they can’t be eliminated without something important being lost, some flavor or necessary energy. You can’t make everything perfect but you have to try to.”

“At one time I imagined that if I wrote like other people, if I imitated writers I liked, I would only have to expose myself through a disguise. I did this for a time, but my own self kept coming through. It took me a while to see that isn’t a question of discovering your voice but of seeing that you have a voice already just as you have a personality, and that if you continue to write you have no choice but to speak, write, and live in it. What you have to do, in a sense, is take possession of yourself. The human being and the writer are the same.”

“One of the problems of writing, and of using the self as material, is that this will recall powerful memories. To sit at a desk with a pen is to recall familiar fears and disappointments – and in particular, conflicts – which are the essence of drama. This is partly the difficulty of coming to terms with the attitude to learning that you have already picked up from your parents and teachers, from the experience of being at home and at school; and from the expectations of all of these. There is the inability to concentrate and the knowledge that you must do so for fear of punishment. There is boredom, and the anxiety that more exciting things are going on elsewhere.”

“Then there was writing, which was an active way of taking possession of the world. I could be omnipotent, rather than a victim. Writing became a way of processing, ordering, what seemed like chaos.”

“To write is to be puzzled a second time by one’s experience; it is also to savor it. In such reflection there is time to taste and engage with your own life in its complexity.”

“Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself. You can become trapped within an odd, Beckettian paradox. There is the internal pressure of what must be said.”

“If artists suffer it is not because their work involves sacrifice and dedication. It is because they are required to have close contact with the unconscious. And the unconscious – bursting with desire as it is – is unruly. That is often how creativity is represented, as being an unruly force, a kind of colonial mob or animal instinct that must be suppressed. Artists become representative of the unruly forces within everyone. They have to live these out, and live with them, all the time. It is the price they pay for “talent”. If most people in the bourgeois world have to live constrained lives, artists do a certain kind of crazy living for those who can’t.”

Photo credit: Jillian Edelstein

“One of the conditions of being a writer is the ability to bear and enjoy solitude. Sometimes you get up from your desk under the impression that your inner world has more meaning than the Real one. Yet solitude – the condition of all important creative and intellectual work – isn’t something we’re taught, nor is it much attended to as a necessary human practice. People often avoid the solitude they need because they will feel guilty at leaving other people out. But communing with yourself, the putting aside of time for the calm exploration of inner states where experience can be processed, where dim intuitions, the unclear and inchoate can be examined, and where the undistracted mind drifts and considers what it requires, is essential. In this solitude there may be helplessness. You may be aware of too much experience, and an inability to see, for some time, what the creative possibilities are.”

“Any kind of writing is an act of faith. At first it is a “relation” but not yet a relationship. The writer has to believe, somehow, that not only does he have something to say, but that he is of interest to others; that he can engage rather than bore them, that he can stimulate desire and curiosity in other people. He has to believe in the future, believe that writing this page today will, in the years to come, be sufficiently alive for others so that they might even pay to read it.”

“I have always assumed that reading and imaginative writing go together. A writer’s originality can consist of how he distorts or uses someone else’s work. Even a failed plagiarist is an artist. What I’m trying to do, I guess, is get the students to read and look as writers, seeing how the author achieved an effect, being aware of what they can use or transform for themselves. If writing is the translation of feeling into language, I want to encourage a closer acquaintance with the language in order to increase the quantity and quality of expressed feeling. This is not reading for fun, and it is not literary criticism.”

Writing Without Writing: Insights And Tools To The Flow Writing Process

[This is a writing workshop to be held this coming November in Las Pinas City. It will be facilitated by Rem Tanauan, one of the co-founders of FLOW. Below are the details for the workshop as posted by Ime Morales on Facebook.] 

FLOW [For the Love Of Writing, For Lovers Of Words] started in 2015, to give a safe, open, and nonjudgmental space for people to explore what it means to find healing, creative inspiration and spiritual insight through the power of writing.

For FLOW's 25th session, we are launching a workshop entitled WRITING WITHOUT WRITING: Insights and Tools to the FLOW writing process.

For newcomers, it's your opportunity to get a glimpse of FLOW's past 2 years, join our growing community and learn practical principles to help you:

~overcome writing blocks
~write freely (even if you think you are not a writer)
~let ideas flow onto paper
~reach the flow state in writing

Candent Learning Haus in Las Pinas City will host us on November 5, 2017, Sunday, 10:00 a.m.

Workshop fee is Php 200.

Slots are limited. To confirm your attendance, please register through the link below. When you confirm, we'll send you other details about the workshop.

About the facilitator:
REM TANAUAN is one of the co-founders of FLOW. He is a writer, teacher, poet, translator, and a word intuitive. As a trained Ginhawa (well-being) facilitator, Rem integrates creativity and spiritual principles in nurturing well-being practices. REGISTER HERE: https://goo.gl/7qkHJ3

High School Student From Tabuk, Kalinga Wins 1st Prize In Essay-Writing Contest

A student from a secondary school in Tabuk, Kalinga won the top prize in an essay-writing competition organized by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Angel Joy Orpilla, 15 years old and a student from Tabuk City National High School bested 170 other students from all over the Philippines with her piece titled "Dumanay Meets Jica". Orpilla, along with the other winners in the writing tilt, received cash awards and certificates from the Japanese agency.

JICA conducted the writing competition to commemorate the 60th anniversary of economic cooperation between Japan and the Philippines. The contest was opened for Filipino students aged between 11 and 16. It carried the theme "The lives of people in the Philippines and Japanese ODA." The ODA is an acronym for official development assistance. The awarding ceremony was held last August 7 at the Sofitel Sunset Pavilion in Manila.

In his column for the Philippine Star, Alfred Yuson who was among the judges in the writing contest, admired Orpilla's piece saying, "I recall marveling at the way the first-prize winner had chosen to craft her essay, in dramatic fashion, as a narrative. It was what made Angel Joy K. Orpilla’s essay stand out. And what a pleasant surprise to learn that she was from the Cordilleras."

Angel Joy Orpilla. Photo by Alfred Yuson via the Philippine Star.

The other winners in the contest are Luis Antonio Valdez, Katherine Anne Del Rosario, Krystel Iris De Castro, Theresa Mae Villanueva, Apple Jean Dulig, Elaine Espirin, Millen Sidney Paderes, Claire Banganan and Khaleila Daine Luyaben. You can read all of the top ten entries at the JICA website.