The Big Idea
Collection of quotes from Martin Shaw. A eastern orthodox mystic leaning storyteller.
His home website: drmartinshaw.com
But now I can have a break from all that clarity.
Get a little lost. Wander down into my laboratory of words and start to chuck stuff about. I can be as obscure as I like. As ephemeral, as risk taking. It’s been suggested I start an old school fanzine for these edgier propositions. We’ll see. Ted Hughes always advised writing in different tones without ever quite losing your essence. Write for kids, poetic lunatics, tortured literalists, just don’t sell your soul in the process. It’s not that you write or think in different languages, but in different dialects, with different ambitions. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it’s braille by candlelight, other times a declaration boldly pinned on the doors of the church. One doesn’t exclude the other.
He has a quote from Robert Bly:
Robert Bly once told me that prose writers needed a little ‘Jack’ in their essays: that they have to write in a plain fashion sometimes to really get an idea across. If you dance in words too often the reader gets dizzy, he said. On the other hand, certain ideas are delicate and require unusual approaches.
It’s good for us to stay connected to the moon and her hair or the Witty Wife, but in the end it’s the Jack or Jackette in us that builds the castle or the book. Team work!