creativity

Ways to write a world

~ ERWhittington ~ 1 Comment

I wrote a whole world, once. Then I wrote another. Then another.

What is there to do with these worlds, afterwards? They sort of linger, lolling about in your head.

It’s a funny thing to finish a world; it’s a sudden decision to stop; simply to stop putting down the lifeline of its words or thought pattern. You walk along and hear a character’s voice, remarking on something which has amused him; speaking words which he is certain, by the way, is the kind of thing he’d say; he’s become quite witty – quite worldly, even stuck in that fertile ring of performance you formed with your sentences, that belt you put around him, that supposed perimeter defining him, a sort of spritz put about the sense of him. Continue reading →

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Zephyrs & Value (in a world of paper)

~ ERWhittington ~ Leave a comment

I find it quite interesting (by which I mean annoying) that when I play a piano piece I used to know very well, but which has – through my recent abandon of it – started the gentle cascade towards only semi-memory, it is the old favourite parts that I mis-play, or forget completely. I get to the most beautiful part of a piece; the section I would once have felt my way through with my eyes closed, or while gazing absently at the blue picture frame in front of me (which used to belong to my Grandma and contains a poem about how much more we would value the world if it were small enough to fit in our hands), but this time my fingers freak out and have no idea what to do. Continue reading →

One Way of Growing Up

~ ERWhittington ~ 1 Comment

I have decided to decide that there are various ways of growing up.

An instinctive and reasonable way of looking at ‘growing up’ is to see it as a sort of transformation. In ‘growing up’, a person is changing, becoming something else, and becoming something new and ‘other’. In conventional, connotational best-practice, a grown-up life might include the reality (or appearance) of restraint, responsibility and self-control. Such a life trajectory swings towards stability, maturity and relational stability (stability that is both relative and related to relationships). This is usually seen as a necessary and positive, even noble, thing; by embracing what I would like to call ‘serious living’, a person can open up their life to different modal avenues, experience important milestones (promotion/houses/marriage/births, etc.) and better relate to other ‘serious livers’, thus fitting into society more easily. By growing up, then, a person boldly sheds the nonsense of their past and of their childhood, creates a secure future (or the hope of one) for themselves and for those around them, and leaves skittish folly to their offspring or, perhaps, to their nostalgia. Continue reading →

North South East & West; How to be Both, or More

~ ERWhittington ~ 2 Comments

(Note: I found this blog post saved in my ‘drafts’ folder. I’m not sure when I wrote it, why I didn’t quite get around to clicking ‘publish’ and I never actually do a ‘draft’, preferring instead to pour things out in an unthinking flurry of fate and parentheses, but here we are. Its content seems timeless, at least… So I’m giving it an airing.)

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