Iskander: Blog

Spike Milligan, when asked why he wrote, claimed that God's finger pressed on him and he had to write. As a fully paid up atheist, I am pretty sure there is no God, so I do not have that excuse.

Robert Heinlein famously said:
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

And that, in part, is certainly great advice in today's virus-infected world. Humour aside, I think Heinlein was suggesting that most writing should stay private due to its quality - or rather lack thereof. It may well be important to the author, but that does not make it worthwhile to others.

I - and many, many other authors - write and then publish their work for free on one of the many internet sites that exist to facilitate this. So it is clear that writing, of itself, draws people to it. I can only speak for myself, others will have their own reasons.

I learned to read at age 6 - quite late compared to my children (but much earlier than my dyslexic brother). Interestingly, I can remember it all coming together and the shapes on the page becoming words, sentences, stories. Against this, I do not remember learning to read music: it is as if I could always do so - which is manifestly not possible. But I digress. Reading opened worlds to me - and I dived in to escape an unhappy childhood. I rapidly discovered a major disadvantage of reading: books end leaving me aching for more. To overcome this, I started imagining sequels - what happened when She returned as promised, more adventures like The Horse and his Boy with the Narnia four, a sequel to The Chrysalids. From there it was a short step to attempting to create my own worlds - a task given a much wider canvas as Science Fiction burgeoned during the 1960s.

But my attempts at writing all foundered early in chapter 1: I reread my work and it was severely lacking. In part, this was due to heightened self-criticism from my exposure to the great writers and their writings in several languages but mostly to an honest recognition that what I wrote was dross. For decades, this situation persisted.

I watched my daughter walk away from her completed Science degree to start a career in fiction - and she has succeeded. We have spent many hours talking and corresponding about her writing. I was privileged to read early drafts of her books and send back my thoughts. Through all this, she encouraged me to write - and eventually I sent her the first draft of what became the opening of Through my Eyes. Again. I sent her more and she provided more feedback, but at about Chapter 3, she told me that she did not want to read any more until it was finished. Training wheels were off, I was being sent solo.

As I approach the end of TMEA, it has been an interesting experience: parts of the story flowed easily on to the page, yet other parts were a huge struggle. From the release of the first chapter, the feedback I have received has been a significant extrinsic motivation to continue - please continue to provide it - but it is not the most important motivator.

I might disagree with Spike Milligan about God - but something intrinsic pushes me to write.

The world is changing fast around us: many of us are now confronting real fear for the survival of our loved ones, our friends, ourselves. There is even the whispered threat of possible societal breakdown in the future of some countries. Amid all of this, we are perforce learning new ways of living, interacting and working. A psychologist in private practice tells me that the levels of anxiety amongst the clients seen this week are higher than ever before. Yesterday I carried out our weekly shop and throughout that exercise felt something approaching tangible fear just from being out and about in what is normally a very safe area that is well known to me: a truly unsettling feeling.

As I sat working on the final chapter of Through my Eyes. Again. this week, I felt at odds with the world in many different ways: my book is set in the past, the threat of nuclear annihilation is one which has (hopefully) passed but most of all because Will's fictional problems seem insignificant in the light of what is happening around us.

And yet I find solace in writing: its forced involvement in a world apart allows some perspective when I return to reality and that is important at times like this. In the online world, we are bombarded with information, much of it very dark at present: being able to pull back has allowed me to maintain some personal balance in spite of the gales of change buffeting us. So far all my friends and loved ones are safe and, with a little gentle chiding in one case, they have adopted all the measures that give them the best chance of staying safe even though they are scattered across several continents and in many countries where Covid-19 is reaping differing dark harvests of sickness and death.

So, if TMEA is allowing you to escape and then provide some perspective when you return to our world from Will's, perhaps my writing is in a very small way contributing to the overall journey through this particular vale of tears.

Stay safe!

Physically (but not socially) distance yourself!

Wash your hands!

There is a curse: "May you live in interesting times!" which is usually linked to China, even though there is no evidence to support this. Wherever it is from, we are certainly all living in interesting times - far too interesting, I fear.

It seems that every country either is already or will shortly be affected by Covid-19. The extent of the disaster each country experiences is going to be determined in part by the decisions our leaders make or do not make and in part by how we, as humans in a cooperative society, order our lives in this new and very different reality. Unfortunately, it would seem that many of us are having a great deal of difficulty understanding the changes we need to make to keep ourselves, our loved ones and our society from the abyss.

The Angel of Death is abroad in many countries, reaping a surging harvest and he is poised to start his bitter work in many others.

My teenage years were spent in Europe with the ever-present possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. Indeed, that experience is part of the background to Through my Eyes. Again. My coping method then was designing a nuclear survival bunker and assembling lists of equipment and stores to stock it. We now find ourselves in a very different crisis and one we were given plenty of warning of with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. Some countries learned those lessons and made preparations and are bloodied but not bowed by Covid-19. But many countries did nothing - or worse.

In my country, we not only did not read the tea leaves when SARS and MERS appeared, but we also defunded critical areas of science and societal preparation. When Covid-19 came knocking, beyond travel restriction, we did nothing to prepare ourselves for the pandemic we are now suffering and we will pay a heinous price for this inattention.

Perhaps we will learn from this experience; I am certain that we will be living in a very different world in 2021 when, hopefully, a vaccine for Covid-19 will become widely available. But we have to get there and that requires … something. Perhaps not hope, for I have precious little hope. The words of the great cellist, Pablo Casals come to mind: "The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step." I may have no hope, but I can still move forward, one step at a time - and so must we all.

All we can do for the moment is hunker down, practise excellent hygiene and take the gentlest care of one another - from an appropriate distance.

Time enough to pick up the pieces when we get to the other side.

I have made a small, but important, correction to chapter 7. The date immediately below the Chapter 7 heading incorrectly showed the year as 1962. The repost corrects this to 1963, but there has been no other change in the content of chapter 7.

Warning: some early chapter spoilers in this post

In Through my Eyes. Again. the protagonist, Will, has been physically abused by his father since he was six years old. It is clear that whilst not approving of the violence, Will's mother is compliant for some complex of reasons. The story depicts only one more such abusive incident, when Will's father slaps him so hard he is thrown across the kitchen. Will's reaction to this causes his mother to move to stop the abuse, but Will's fear and distrust naturally remains and colours his actions into the future.

As is common for first novels, there are elements of autobiography in Will's story, but these are more seeds, starting places from which the story grew. My relationship with my father is one of those seeds and I have certainly had my own struggles arising from childhood stuff over the years as a result.

There is no tag for 'child abuse' at SOL and in writing my story I did not think about how that content might affect people who have been victims of child abuse - and it is clear that my story is stirring things up for some people. I was aware that the story elements involving suicide could well be problematic for some readers and so I explicitly warned about these.

But I did not think through what drove Will towards suicide and how that alone could be difficult for some people.

Authors inevitably deal with difficult subjects - to some extent, this is part of the remit of storytelling: to bring dark subjects into the light and to subject them to examination through the medium of a story. I certainly did not have this as an aim when I started writing, but now see I have blundered into this.

I hope that Will's story is helpful to those people who had had abusive childhoods and perhaps also to people now close to them.

If my story causes difficult thoughts, please seek professional help.

So - should I have warned about the child abuse? I don't know - perhaps the 'blurb' should have included a warning about this element. But one of the wondrous things about a story is that each person reading it reads a different version, coloured by their lives and their experiences which they bring to the words on the paper (or screen).

And that makes content warnings hard.