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Imagine, Emma Mctaggart (author), Ester De Boer (illus.), Boogie Books, 2015.   What would you do in your most fantastical of daydreams? Totally let your imagination run free…where would you go? In Emma Mactaggart and Ester De Boer’s explosive ‘Imagine’, we are taken on a zoo adventure wilder than you could ever devise!   Utterly […]

“If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.” – Lady Catherine De Bourgh, Pride and Prejudice

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As one contemplates the snowy wasteland out one’s office window, one cannot help but feel that one has made tragic errors in living one’s life to have arrived in such a bleak position. And so, one’s mind turns to the daydreams and idle “planning” of other life-paths.

I’ll bet I would have been a good designer of board games, I think, and perhaps I’ll do it still. (I actually made one or two in college, but remember nothing about their schematics). I read this French documentarian knocked out Risk one weekend and made a bazillion dollars. I should do that.

On the other hand, I should have gone into the executive end of publishing, where I could conceive of entire lines of books and hire other people to write them. I am a slow writer but a veritable idea factory. What would be great about that is that ideas are perfect little gems, and any problem with the product would be on the writer.

Or I should have become proficient in Spanish and have some international role in some industry (I don’t care which) that would have me, right now, on a beach in Costa Rica drinking something out of a half-coconut.

If I had tried those things, I would have been great at them.

What are your Debourghings, dear readers?

 A to Z Challenge Day 15: O .   .  4 Stars Ollie Tuloolah Tubithah Dethoolah Ardellis Devadisl is one very lucky girl.  Her wondrous name comes from not one relative.  No, Ollie (for short, just today), is named after SIX aunts.  This story is about what is like to be Ollie for one day. What does a little [...]

Ask some people to define the perfect job, and they’ll start by describing the salary. Ask others, and they’ll begin with working conditions, or colleagues, or sense of purpose, or flexibility. There are as many perfect jobs as there are types of people; and there are as many types of people as there are... well, people, probably.

So to anyone who’s just dropped by for some careers advice: sorry. Can’t help. Whatever your skill-set, you’d be better going and asking a careers advisor. No, what I’m musing about today is why writing is my perfect job - or, at least, the perfect job for someone with my particular well-defined and carefully honed flaw-set.

For a start, I’m a procrastinator; and I’d imagine there are very few jobs which suit the procrastinator quite so well as writing. When you’re a writer, you see, you start work on a story long before you actually realise you’ve started work on a story. By the time you get round to thinking it might be time to procrastinate, it’s too late. You’ve started work.

Procrastinators - assuming I’m typical of the breed, of course - are daydreamers; and there’s no telling which bits of your daydreams may end up sparking off a story, or changing its course, or providing a resolution, without your having the slightest intention of doing any work. The characters form, the plot builds up, the dialogue begins to whisper, all inside your head and long before you ever consider putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. It happens while you thought you were avoiding making a shopping list, or doing the washing-up, or paying the bills. And once the story has firmly taken root in your imagination, and is expanding by the day, well, you might as well sit down and tap out a few ideas. It’s not as if you’re actually going to do the whole thing. Not at once, anyway.

And then: well, disappearing down to your shed and writing the next bit is a great way to avoid all those other tasks you’d otherwise have to be doing, isn’t it?

So much for procrastination. But I also suffer from its equal and opposite flaw: a fear of finishing. A dreadful drawback in most spheres of work, I’m sure you’ll agree; but the thing about writing is, you never really finish. Not properly.

You get to the bit where you write the closing sentence, of course; but you never know if that really is the closing sentence. No, you send the MS off to your editor safe in the knowledge that it really isn’t finished yet; that she’ll get back to you sooner or later (later if you have a procrastinating editor who should really have been a writer but never quite got round to it) with lots of helpful suggestions about how to improve it. Finishing the first draft really isn’t finishing the story at all, because there’ll be lots more to do.

Even when you’ve finished the rewrites, in all probability there’ll be more rewrites, and maybe even more. At no point do you send back the re-re-re-re-redrafted work knowing that that’s it, and it’s al

See this picture? It’s the cover for The Third Elephant, beautifully and atmospherically created by artist Helen Craig, and shows a small carved wooden elephant, who lives on a high shelf in a forgotten room with two grumpy older elephants and a wise grey mouse for occasional company.

The one thing he loves, the one thing that gives him joy and hope, is “a miniature marble palace, whiter than the moonlight that flickered around it. Elegant minarets graced each corner, and the beautiful dome was tipped with gold. It was a palace fit for dreams.” You can see that in the picture too.

But, with the house due for demolition, the room is suddenly stripped of everything, even the beloved palace. That night,“he thought about what the mouse had told him: wish for what you want, wish for what you dream about. “I wish,” he thought, as hard as he could, ”I wish I could see the white palace again.” The moonlight flickered around the room like secret laughter.”

Thrown from the window, he goes on to adventures where he helps three young people as much as they help him. Eventually the small third elephant does get his wish, although it isn’t exactly the miniature white palace. It is more than the miniature model. What the Third Elephant eventually sees is the famous building itself.
Hey! Going a bit heavy on the book promotion here, aren’t you, Penny? That’s perhaps what you’re wondering? No, it’s not that. I’m talking about past and present matching up.

You see, long ago, that miniature white palace really did exist. It was kept in my grandmother’s best room, with other objects from India where she’d lived as army child, wife and mother. Little myself, I would creep into that room when Nanna Rose was too busy to notice and tell me off. Then I would stare at the palace and daydream, because the room felt full of untold stories. My quiet grandmother never ever spoke about her life in India. Was that from sadness, loss, grief, regret, relief? I never knew and by the time I should have been bold and asked, both she and the room had gone.

Years later, when that lost white palace re-appeared in a short scribbled exercise, I seized it, although the writing soon became tough going. I had to know enough to ground my story. So for ages I researched fiction and non-fiction, websites, maps, films, videos, interviews and more. I picked up oddments of information and wove them into a vast nest until the words were so many that the whole thing seemed about to topple over. I hid the wretched weighty unreadable mess away.

Time passed, and then I saw a charming brass statue in a shop: Ganesh! He who makes impossible things possible. He who, with his helpful tusk, is god of writing. Ganesh with his kindly elephant head. It seemed a sign.

I had a few strong words with myself, went home, hauled out that unwieldy manuscript and began again at the beginning. I discarded anything that didn’t help the wooden elephant’s story, or that of Sara, Nita or Jack. A year or so later, The Third Elephant was published, and some people and children read it and liked it. One or two loved it.

I loved it too, although my finances and circumstances had been way too tight for any travel or first hand researching. I slightly regretted that I had made my story largely from dreams and illusions.

However, something wonderful is happening. I have a friend. She is living in India for a while. So, just after my next ABBA post, I will be off on my own small adventure, though I will be too excited to write about all this sensibly by then.

You see, even though it is long past the making of the book, just like the Third Elephant, I will be on my way towards the “beautiful white palace”. At long last, I’m getting my wish, and seeing the Taj Mahal for myself.

Wonder what objects have long inspired your dreams?

www.pennydolan.com


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Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.