0 Just for a Laugh - Heather Dyer

© Peter Bailey

from The Boy in the Biscuit Tin by Heather Dyer

I think I know the precise moment that I moved from being a reader to a writer. It was a joke that did it. My snort of laughter jolted me clean out of the story and back onto the velour footstool in my parents’ front room. I sat there for a moment, staring at the book lying open in my lap. I could hardly believe that the rows of printed letters on the page had physically moved me. A book could be that powerful.

I thumbed through the whole book looking at all those individual words – page after page of them – each one different from the one beside it. Someone had actually chosen each one! That was when I first began to appreciate the author behind the story, and realized that if wanted the stories to continue, I could choose more words, myself. I could bring the marionettes back on stage, and continue their adventures . 

Humour is powerful in many ways: it jolts us out of one closed perspective; it helps brings villains down to size; it releases tension; it puts things in perspective. Humour is good for us. It just a shame that humour is not rated more highly by critics and readers. ‘Funny’ books tend to seen as light and not literary. In Ricky Gervaise’s comedy series Extras, Kate Winslet jokes that she’s doing a holocaust film because it’s the only way she’ll win an Oscar. And the irony was that – in real life – this is exactly what happened with her film The Reader. Humour always loses out to gravity. But can’t we have both?

Sometimes, children tell me that my books are funny. I don’t tryto be funny, but somehow humour always surfaces. And when it does it feels like the whole point.

Why is humour so powerful and so gratifying? Perhaps it's because it jolts us out of our narrow mindsets into a wide, free space that liberates us. Humour, like metaphor and haiku and Zen koan, momentarily disorients us by putting us between two opposing images or ideas at the same time. And in that moment – just for a second – we are free.

Detail: Just for a Laugh - Heather Dyer

0 Hushing and Holding - Heather Dyer

© នរម

I’ve been reading a book called Fearless Creating: a step-by-stepguide to starting and completing your work of art, by Eric Maisel. Like Dorothea Brande’s classic book Becoming a Writer, this is less a ‘craft’ guidebook, and more a ‘process’ guidebook. It’s the sort of book that describes the creative mind set and shows you how to develop it.

One of the exercises that Maisel says is the most important in the whole book is the ability to ‘hush’ your mind. ‘Hushing’ says Maisel, ‘is what we do when we go into a museum and sit in front of one painting for fifteen minutes.’ Hushing is a ‘quieting and an opening’ – and there is no creative life without this ability to hush.

Hushing sounds a lot like the open, receptive state of mind that is associated with ‘right-brain’ awareness, and is also the state of ‘choiceless awareness’ that meditation aspires to. When the mind is quiet and receptive – and not busy with mental chatter – ideas can rise to the surface.

Some writers achieve this state of mind by walking, swimming, doing yoga or washing the dishes. Others know it when they wake up in the middle of the night to write something in the notepad beside their bed. Maisel suggests that it’s only when the conscious, busy, ‘thinking’ mind has grown quiet that insights and ideas can surface.

Maisel also explains that ‘hushing’ needs to be practiced in conjunction with ‘holding’, if any real work is to be done. 'Holding' is the ability to carry an idea for a book or a painting (or any other project )loosely in the back of your mind as you go about your day. By holding the project in the periphery of your vision you allow the ideas and stimuli that you encounter during the day (or during your working practice) to enter it and inform it. I’ve also heard this process called ‘being in the grist’, when almost everything you experience seems to somehow relate to, or feed into, the container of your novel.

Have you experienced the processes of ‘hushing’ and ‘holding’? If so, how do you achieve them?

 

Heather Dyer's latest book is The Flying Bedroom.
www.heatherdyer.co.uk

 

Detail: Hushing and Holding - Heather Dyer