The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt).

Dr Fox recounts the tale of one doctor who had scribbled TTFO – an expletive expression roughly translated as “Told To Go Away” – on a patient’s notes . . .

Thanks to Tom Baker for this one

Although they are different, they are similar, these places. The Fragrant City is watered by the Barada; while this place is penetrated by the river Ouse. Both cities have long and bloody histories. But while I sit in the café window with my chips and ketchup and buttered bun and watch the people hurrying home with their bags of vegetables from the market, I am not reminded of my birthplace. These are not my people, my rivers, my memories, my vegetables. And although in The Fragrant City I am invisible, a statistic, here I have no existence at all.

I am here to collect existence. My teacher spells it out to me in verbs and vowels and nouns and capital letters. I make the strange signs on the paper, the letter A like a tent, the I like a man, the S snaking away at the head and tail of words.

And this existence of language which will ensure I can support a family when I return home, comes to me quickly. After two weeks already when I enter this café the young woman recognizes me. Although I know the words to order my chips and ketchup and buttered bun, I no longer need them.

Before I say a word she says, ‘Chips, ketchup and a buttered bun. Hold the tea till later. Right?’

And I say, ‘Yes, thank you, please, missus,’ and hand over my money and she counts the change back into my hand. She gives me the ketchup in small plastic sachets and when the chips arrive I tear the sachets open with my teeth and spread them like clotted blood. The young woman is amused by my accent, and I by hers. We both smile and have a pleasant meal, so aiding the digestion.

In the market a man has a stall rich with silk and wool for covering furniture or cushions. He has one roll of pure, figured silk, which he calls Damask. When he has a break between customers I explain to him that the word was stolen from my own language, and he listens and nods, pretending interest, but he doesn’t understand.

I think… skip the bio if your life is entirely boring and devoid of events, but add it otherwise. And preferably add it with more details than the “John doe is a farmer from wherever who lives with her husband and five cats in a two-story house, and likes to write fiction in her spare time.” which is usually added on the last page of some books.

*

Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Jenny Diski: Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.

*

I don’t get language. I know a lot of words though I’m always a little wary of dropping most of the big ones into conversation not out of any lack of confidence but because they don’t belong in conversational English. Take a word like borborygmia for example (the sound of wind moving through your digestive tract), it’s a lovely word but what’s the point in using it if you have to explain it?

from Jim Murdoch’s archive

(3)

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

Tom Leonard

*

Jean Hannah Edelstein at Guardian Unlimited rants about Do Ants Have Arseholes? This is the title of Amazon’s current best-seller and one of the projected all-time-greatest-Christmas-hits. Sorry if you want the link. Please don’t give me one of these for Christmas, or any other concept book. I’ve already got serious doubts about Christmas. Something that parades itself as a festival of peace and good will to hide its aggressive, wasteful and essentially cynical commercial nature; what is that? There must be a word for it.

*

Kirsten Reach in The Kenyon Review reports on a seminar with Margaret Atwood.

Atwood believes some beautiful books become terrible movies because “intrinsic language doesn’t translate onto screen very well.” She gave the example of Inside the Volcano, saying onscreen, it’s about a drunk. She gave Bladerunner as an example of writing that was improved by its conversion to film. On the subject, she also recommended “Introducing The Book.”

I should have known at that point that I’d be starting a new story. When I was younger it was characters who came to life first — now, it’s settings. Within a few days of coming home I had a character who wasn’t particularly fazed by trees in her town giving way to blue sky and asphalt, and who really didn’t understand why anyone else would be. As I read indignant letters to the newspaper editor from my fellow townspeople and wondered why no one had yet mentioned Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, I thought about this character, who said, flat out, that she spoke for the cars, not the trees.

That was two weeks and 14,000 words ago.

Some have said that writing is like an archaeology dig. You walk into your square with a set of tiny brushes, and let what you uncover dictate where your brush goes next. Maybe you know from previous digs what you are likely to find, but it’s never exactly what you’d predict – and there are always good and bad surprises. That’s the way it is for me.

Had anyone asked me three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known that I’d be writing about someone trying to baptize themselves in a hotel swimming pool. Or an unemployed man who’s gotten himself into some trouble, and isn’t sure how to get out of it. Or a girl’s birthday party at a bowling alley where the smell of pizza fills the parking lot. Or little cans of energy drinks with six exclamation points in their names. Or people who brush their teeth while they drive.

I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, or the day after that. I can’t wait to find out, though. I don’t write because I’m a master storyteller. I write because I love stories, and I’m fascinated by how, a good deal of the time, there really is something worthy underneath all that dirt.

Erin writes short stories and novels. She blogs at: http://www.rarelylikable.com

* Phases of Creation

* Let the poem guide its creation.

* I wonder if the Biblical God had a master plan, or when he saw he’d created birds did he only then think of fish; when created earth only at the instance of that wonderful sight did he imagine water.

* God may have created the universe in seven days. That seems about right in the number of phases I can detect.

* Perhaps, the initial input is inspirational but it could come through creative reading – a term you once used. Books lead to books.

* Reading an excellent poem inspires me to attempt my own.

* The transition from reading to writing is hardly direct, but involves numerous other influences that inform the emerging poem, when I’m sat at my desk actually writing.

* This unlegislated element that actually writing or typing seems to not only to reproduce the text, but help create it. * It doesn’t surprise me that ‘unwriting’ readers think in dualistic terms of individual inspiration or a formula; either way the reader can’t imagine the power of the text to direct its own fate. Yet to me this departure is a key moment in creation, when I stop listening to my ego and other poets, instead to what the scribbles in front of me on the paper are saying ‘themselves’.

* The Biblical God rested on the seventh day. Perhaps he rested every day after an instant of creation or an hour, or as Dylan Thomas said, you can’t achieve much after two hours.

* Letting the poem rest in fallow seems essential in creating a finished work. Does the poem work on itself? I don’t know but I know that when after a week, month, better longer, I return to the poem it has changed, is more naked in one sense and full of more potential in another.

* Time-creation helps disrupt formulaic tendencies; because new influences have reached me: new poems read, new experiences felt, new observations made, and new language streams have been waded. When I return to the poem, these fresh influences come into play, are applied. One new word can change a whole poem; can open potential unseen at first.

* Editing is an enduring joy and pain. Mostly my poems must undergo this inspection, enhanced by feedback from honest readers is part of this phase.

* Reading poems out loud in public is a significant stage; how does the audience respond to your voice and words, also you hear the flat notes much better when in the pressured moment of performance.

* God may’ve been satisfied after seven days but some poets rarely are. I have to spend sometimes years in re-writing, reading and gaining feedback before I’ll believe the poem has any quality. I must change and refine it in some way.
This is a result of a work ethic; it’s very difficult for me to separate the notion of achievement from timed effort. But Michael Longley read from his collected works a poem that took five minutes to write. Perhaps as I become older – and am weaker sleepier – I’ll accept reward from less exertion.

* The general reader -as I did – finds it hard to believe the number of hands that go into creating a piece of work; like one God, to the general public, there must be one author. Yet experience shows that the comments and reflections of friends as interested readers is part of the creative process. A classic example is the Waste Land which I believed was Eliot’s work alone, very Newtonian; not a collaboration of editor and author and a remarkable reader. It appears disturbing for the devout reader to think that they must seek a handful of signatures; especially if you throw the question back. I mean if you imply that they have helped create the book. Perhaps one day books will be seen as the product of a communal creativity and the artist as its conduit; I think in ancient Greece this could’ve been the case, at least sometimes. Yes, queues at book signing would disappear if the reader was expected to write their own signature. It’s that question of authority, authorship, if this illusion was replaced by a collective ownership the whole publishing industry would collapse.

* The cult of the author’s supreme power must prevail, either as single inspiration or the master of a recognized formula, though both are remote from what I consider the complex phases of creation.

* God then is a sole authority figure, but even the big bang suggests a distant one act to creation. From genesis or an initial explosion a formula is produced that’s only repeated. The complex, difficult path of interaction, relativity, one event affecting another is still difficult to sell in places of worship as it is in a bookshop.

* I enjoy the evidence of collaborators or co-conspirators; enjoy being seen as the author.

I’m a relative creator who welcomes and uses other influences to create. The initial inspiration is often suppressed under the strength of the poem (creation creating itself) and formula becomes distorted as I struggle to be true to what is emerging as ‘my’ poem.

Paul Sutherland is a poet and the editor and founder of the international literary magazine, Dream Catcher.

I have been thinking about your question. I think my first creative phase comes visually – I can see a picture very clearly and then normally an idea or a theme will come, either in discussion with a real person or from the page which brings the image into techno-colour, if you like. It’s only when I have the two things that I feel there’s enough to carry on. Normally there’s some tension between the two, so in my short story ‘Chains’ for example, I was thinking about the daffodils that have been planted in very straight lines in our park and knew I wanted to do something about them. And then a friend said something about chains which I misunderstood and which made us laugh a lot, but after that I knew the two – the straight edged daffodils and someone being misunderstood could work well together. Another time another friend gave me five random pieces and somehow, once I had picked one – Stockholm – I knew what the story was going to be about. I had such a strong image of the harbour there. Does that make ANY sense?

That’s about all I need to start because really the creative process for me, once I have got started, comes in the writing. My first drafts rarely make much sense, and I edit and edit, which I see as very creative too. Like polishing a stone until it’s a jewel! Another key creative aspect for me is finding the right voice for the piece. Sometimes I think this comes instinctively – Verity’s voice in Something Beginning With felt very natural until, six months later I had to come back to the manuscript, and couldn’t ‘get’ it at all. It was only when I played the same music as I was playing then that it came back to me, so there was a rhythm involved there, I think, as well as a mood. Recently I’ve been playing with changing my endings. They can feel very firm and fixed to me, so carrying on, or giving a different feel did, at first, make me feel I’d crossed some awful line and might get shot or worse. But hey, it now feels amazing. I try to link up my beginnings and endings, either with an image or with some words – I’ve been really excited looking through my bookshelves to find other writers do that. I guess I was away from writing school the day they taught that and have had to find out the hard way! Of course it’s made me want to do the opposite. I guess that’s another creative phrase – reading and thinking hey, that’s not how the story should go, there’s a much better story in this. And writing something completely different, but which nevertheless has its creative roots in another piece.

That’s very exciting to me – I love the idea of writing and reading as a conversation between us all.

Sarah Salway is a poet, short story writer and author of the novels Something Beginning With (ABCs of Love in the US), and Tell Me Everything (both published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Ballantine in the US). She blogs at: www.sarahsalway.blogspot.com