Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

graham stewart

Is it me or just the weather?

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OK, it’s the weather

Photo by Azzurra Visaggio on Unsplash

It may be wishful thinking — or some misplaced arrogance — but I think I notice the small, weird changes in the weather that creep up on us. Mostly, this is down to my age, of course, and the fact that I have memories of a time when weather patterns seemed to be content to fit more neatly inside their allotted seasons. In my Edinburgh childhood, for instance, winter meant snow and sledging on the steep slope from the second green on my local golf course. Every winter.

I have never taken my children sledging in this country. That’s not because I am a horrible, kill-joy father. Lack of snow had a lot to do with it.

On Sunday we had snow. Not for long and it lay around for only a few hours before getting bored and melting away for the most part. Some hardy iced clumps hung about for another day but it went from pristine layer of white to messy clumps of brown-stained ice in no time. The temperature for most of Monday and Tuesday was close to freezing.

Yesterday, still cold. Then it rained in the evening. I slept poorly and heard the rain whenever I woke during the night. My usual waking time of 5am arrived and I got up.

The first think I do most mornings when I get into my office is to slam on the electric heater while the central heating gears up to a decent temperature. This morning I came into the office and thought I must have left the heater on all night. But when I checked it, it was cold. The rain had stopped. I looked at my phone and the weather widget told me the temperature outside was 11 degrees. At 5am on a January morning.

Not normal. So not normal that I have thought about most of the day and finally got it out of my system by writing about it here.

This is another post that I won’t be sharing on Medium. Here’s a final image for you: I’m sitting writing this in bare feet. Again, in January. In a Victorian house that is not easy to heat, I might add. I have single-glazed windows in my office. But bare feet are OK this evening.

The only essential tool you need for writing

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And you can take it everywhere

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

I think you’re finally on the road to successfully writing — not to be confused with being a successful writer — when you switch from thinking of all the things you need in order to write to realising all the things you don’t need.

Judging by many of the posts on Medium and in other writing forums, many neophyte writers get quickly hung up on everything ranging from types of pen to computer operating systems and whether Scrivener is better than Word. What type of chair to sit in or should they stand? What time of the day is best for writing?

Is it better to write drunk? That’s surprisingly common. (And I’m not going to poke too much fun at that because I used to think that drink and writing went so well together that I spent a lot of time drinking and no time at all writing.) The answer to the question — and I can only speak from my own experience — is a resounding ‘No’.

A quiet place or a coffee shop with ambient noise? Lockdowns just about everywhere are making that one a bit redundant. So quiet or listening to music. If I listen to music, I soon drift off into the music and forget about my fingers and the keyboard.

The truth is — especially until you are so successful that you get to order your days around your writing and have the luxury of choosing when, where, and what to write on a given day — that the only thing you ever need to write is you. Your unique brain with all its unique thoughts.

Stop worrying about all the incidentals. You can write with a pencil on a pad or just create sentences in your head and worry about putting them on paper later. Every time you refuse to write because of tools, location, noise, or time, you’re telling yourself that other things are more important than your writing.

And they may be. So be honest. Do you want to write or do you want a beer?

Be like Shakespeare: use constraints to free your writing

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Your results may vary

Working within certain limits — whether self-imposed or not — can often be liberating. This is especially true when it comes to creativity. A specific material, a defined word count, a time limit.

The most famous among modern writers who embrace limits are the members of Oulipo. And possibly the most well-known of their creations is La Disparition (The Void) by Georges Perec. This is a novel written without a single use of the letter ‘e’. That’s hard enough in English; in French a task only a madman (or genius) would attempt. The purpose, of course, is not only to have fun and solve some sort of puzzle but to create works that, well, work.

Self-imposed limits have been around for as long as writing.

Shakespeare worked well with constraints. He also worked well with others, according to some accounts but that’s neither here nor there. Constraints. The most obvious place to look at those constraints is in the Sonnets. A sonnet is, by definition, a poem written to a particular format and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have a format that he made very much his own. In his own way, Shakespeare is an Elizabethan Oulipoist. Oulipotary? Oulipont?

So, what’s with the sonnet?

The sonnet’s origin lies with Petrarch, an Italian poet of the 14th century who decided to give up the priesthood after gazing upon the beauty of a young woman called Laura. (I like that name but I have yet to write any poetry dedicated to my wife.) The sonnet then came to England through translations of Petrarch by Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century. It quickly found popularity, not just in its original Petrarchan form of two quatrains followed by a sestet in the rhyming pattern of ABBA ABBA CDCDCD but in many variations.

So, basically, what we have is a poem of fourteen lines adhering to a strict rhyming pattern.

Variations are the life-blood of literary games — and development. This was Oulipo before Oulipo. Poets reading sonnets grasped how the constraints of the form could liberate their creativity. As could changing the constraints.

The constraints lie not just in the rhyming pattern but in the length of the poem and even in the line length. By the time Shakespeare started using the sonnet, he had refined the structure. Shakespeare’s self-imposed constraints are a rhyme pattern of ABABCDCDEFEFGG, lines of ten syllables, and the use of iambic pentameter. The iambic pentameter is the sound an actor with a wooden leg makes crossing the stage. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. It is the sound of the great speeches from Shakespeare’s plays, too.

So, Shakespeare gives us three quatrains and a rhyming couplet and it is in the couplet that the magic — the turn — usually happens. This is where the poet resolves the problem posed in the first twelve lines or reveals that the meaning is subtly different to what was first thought. Petrarch set his turn nearer the middle. Shakespeare holds it back for more effect. It becomes the pay-off.

Let’s look at Sonnet 29 — if only because I read that this morning. It’s what got me thinking about sonnets and constraints in the first place.

In Sonnet 29, “the poet” spends lines 1 to 9 describing how he compares his life to others and finds it wanting. Lines 10, 11, and 12 give us a sort of pre-turn, a relief from self-pity. The poet remembers that he is in love and his mood changes. Sonnet 29 is more like Petrarch in this respect because the turn starts earlier in the poem. The full turn in the final couplet is simple reinforcement. His love allows him to realise he would not change a thing:


“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

As I said at the top, the work needs to pay its way if it’s not going to be just another throwaway collection of words. With Shakespeare, there’s a good chance that the words will be so good that you even forget the constraints under which he was working.

What better way to wrap up the whole thing by simply laying out the text here?

Sonnet 29 – William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy counted least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Beautiful. One full stop only in the whole poem. And from first to last line it carries you, in a single breath, from despair to acceptance.

The Shipping Forecast

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Yesterday’s post was the first since the start of 2021 that I haven’t published simultaneously on Medium. There was good reason for that. In any sensible world I probably wouldn’t have posted it to this site, either. The fact that I did is part of a useful lesson for me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Seth Godin and his belief that the vital part of creating is shipping. Putting it out there. This is what, in the end, makes the difference between a diary and a blog.

At the same time, as much as publishing every day is a worthy aim, there comes a time when publishing for the sake of it — with material that is plain poor — is verging on the self-centred. An ego trip, even. It may also fall into the category of abuse. Ok, maybe not quite that far.

I want to post every day and I want to make my posts worth reading. At the very least I want to make them worth writing. Yesterday’s failed on both scores. And yet I had nothing else. By putting it up solely on my personal site, I was able to accept that the post was not something I needed to advertise. Visitors to this site are few and far between. And I have to remember that anyone finding themselves in this internet backwoods can choose to read or not to read.

But posting was important because I have committed to post.

So, the post fell neatly into a grey area between shipping and hiding. That suits me.

And at least it has given me some fuel for a topic today. This post won’t be making it to Medium either.

Back to normal tomorrow. That’s what the forecast says, anyway.

Sunday Housekeeping Jan 24th 2021

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Notes from a snowy afternoon

I joined a call this afternoon organised by GIMMS (The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies). As I had that very morning finished Pavlina Tcherneva’s latest book — The Case for A Job Guarantee — it seemed perfect timing to listen to her in conversation with Phil Armstrong.

It was as I expected. Ms Tcherneva was eloquent, convincing, and, better still, interesting. For me, the best part of the call was when she responded at length to Phil Armstrong’s question about how she ended up in the MMT world — and what keeps her there.

I’m not going to summarise what she said here. The whole talk was recorded and will be up on the GIMMS YouTube channel in the near future.

In addition to the recording, there was a live transcript of the call. As in most live transcripts, some of the translations from the vocal into the verbal were less than accurate. Perhaps most tellingly, whenever the term MMT was used, the transcript recorded it as ‘empty’. I’m sure many of the critics of MMT would call that accurate. I’m happy to laugh along.

In a later transcript blooper — and one for all the teenagers out there — when Pavlina Tcherneva used the phrase “emancipatory”, it became “masturbatory”. This happened more than once. Perhaps the most striking example was when she was describing workfare and especially its use by the authoritarian right. Tcherneva wanted the left to wake up and see that there is a democratic and emancipatory way of pursuing direct employment. Unfortunately, the transcript told us to wake up and see the democratic and masturbatory way.

Oh, how we laughed. But, hey, it was a Sunday afternoon and I was on a call about MMT. I’m allowed to find something to smile about.

And that’s it. It’s possible I may be writing this simply to keep my daily posts going. Never, you say.

And the book that slips into the reading list to replace Tcherneva is The Great Fortune, the first volume of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy.

Sentence by sentence

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Verlyn Klinkenborg’s secret to successful writing

Photo by me

To write a book about sentences may sound like overkill. Or a symptom of some strange obsession. Anyone reading a book ostensibly about sentences may be forgiven for thinking that the author’s intention was to lure them in with an intriguing idea and then soon enough, disclose his real purpose.

After all, most books, while not exactly about sentences, are at least composed of sentences. Surely, a book about sentences would be like reading a book on the architecture of great buildings and concentrating on the bricks. Or studying great works of art by focusing on the individual brushstrokes.

And, in effect, the close study of the brush stroke is exactly what Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing comes close to being. It’s also true that, while the title promises ‘several short sentences’, there are close to two hundred pages of sentences. Some short and some a little longer than would be traditionally considered short. But the focus never varies; the sentence and how a writer builds sentences is what this book is about.

Klinkenborg makes his purpose clear right at the start:


Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn’t say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

Page 1

Part of the book’s charm is the almost poetry-style layout of the sentences and the way the sentences are grouped into stanzas of aggregated purpose, which gradually impose a hypnotic state of acceptance. Concentrating on the sentence affords a release from the tension of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’. The paradox is, that with the focus on the individual sentence, meaning accrues by default. It need not be forced by the writer.

James Joyce knew about the importance of sentences. There’s a story that, during the composition — and there’s a word that suggests a more atomised approach to writing — of Ulysses, he met an acquaintance on a Zurich street. The man asked Joyce how his writing was proceeding. Joyce responded with enthusiasm, saying that he had had a very successful day. Expecting to be told that Joyce had turned out hundreds, if not thousands of words, the man asked why the day had gone so well. Klinkenborg would have understood Joyce’s response. Joyce told his acquaintance that he had swapped two words in a sentence that he had been working on for a week.

Ulysses took Joyce seven years to write. Sentence by sentence.

As Klinkenborg says (as if speaking to Joyce),

Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case—making, fixing, killing, arranging—how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Page 67

The feels counter-intuitive to many writers, who settle into the magic of scenes and beats and story and plot and character arcs. To focus on the sentence may also feel like being unmoored or drifting at sea far from the sight of land. But with each sentence, the promise of landfall is closer.

Trusting to the individual sentence is like finally accepting you can float in the water.