Andrew Blackman

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Please share any quotes that inspire you, on writing or other topics, either by commenting on this post or by posting on your own blog and linking back (feel free to use the icon if you want).

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This is a deeply religious book, in a couple of different senses. First of all, the main character, Celie, narrates the book through letters she writes to God. She is trapped in abusive relationships, first with Pa and then with her husband Albert, referred to by her as Mr ______. She writes to God because she has nobody else to talk to after her sister Nettie disappears, believed dead. Gradually, through her relationship with Shug Avery and piecing together the truth about her past, she rids herself of the traditional view of God as an old white man and comes to view God as a more creative, loving, playful entity, symbolised by the colour purple, put in a field just for the fun of it. Celie finds her sexuality, her ability to stand up for herself, begins to make a living doing something she loves and starts to like life.

It’s religious in another sense because Alice Walker has tapped into something deep and rich in creating this book. She starts by dedicating it to “The Spirit, without whose assistance neither this book nor I would have been written” and ends it by writing “I thank everyone in this book for coming. A.W., author and medium.” This sets up quite an expectation, but the book delivers. The style is not literary – it can’t be, because it’s narrated mostly by Celie, who is uneducated and admits herself she can’t write well. But still there is a beauty in its simplicity. Normally any kind of dialect begins to irritate me after a while, but this doesn’t. It is powerful. The horrific events at the beginning of the book, particularly, when 14-year-old Celie is raped by her father and has two children by him, then sacrifices herself to save her younger sister Nettie from the same fate, are incredibly powerful, and the power is heightened by the simple, childish language.

It’s also a political book, in the best sense. It evokes the injustices of the Jim Crow South and of colonial Africa beautifully, and they always feel like part of the story, not like a political sermon. It works well because character always comes first. Everybody in the book has a character – there are no purely symbolic characters or representatives of political positions. They’re all introduced and drawn carefully so that I believed they were real and cared about them. And while the book speaks some harsh truths about men, and white men in particular, nobody is a stereotype of evil – most of the characters have some redeeming features, and the “good” characters have flaws too.

There are also lots of lovely little insights, like this from Mr ______ towards the end: “Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.
So what you think? I ast.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.”

Andrew Blackman Book reviews alice walker, color purple, Interesting things I've read

“Central to natural writing is an attitude of wonder.”

- Gabriele Lusser Rico

Please share any quotes that inspire you, on writing or other topics, either by commenting on this post or by posting on your own blog and linking back (feel free to use the icon if you want). With luck, I’ll accumulate enough inspiration to get me through the week without any bouts of doubt and self-sabotage.

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

I don’t normally review film on this site, and don’t plan to start. But I rent regularly from Lovefilm.com (for those of you reading in America, it’s a British version of Netflix), and have had a run of several really good films that I wanted to share with you:

Our Daily Bread

The Lives of Others

Black Gold

Vodka Lemon

Our Daily Bread is hard to describe without making it sound like what it’s not. I could call it a documentary about industrial food production, but it’s absolutely nothing like Fast Food Nation and those types of film. There’s no voiceover, no real argument, hardly any talking at all. For most of the movie, you are watching truly bizarre scenes of food production, in complete silence other than the buzz and thump of the machines. It’s like an extended art-museum video. The interest comes from the really odd subject matter – the combine harvester moving eerily across a broad field, the sometimes alien-looking scenes of unbelievable machines doing weird stuff to sweet peppers. There’s also some blood and gore, and some cute little fluffy yellow chicks being hurled into a machine and spat out into a vast battery-farm type shed. But it’s not so much an animal-rights movie. It focuses more on us, on the strange world we have created, and on the effect of this world on the people who work in it. Hard to describe, but it was an absorbing film to watch.

The Lives of Others is a really moving film about East Germany and the surveillance society, and it was particularly effective because the Stasi secret police are not presented as evil people but ordinary people operating within an evil system and adopting the usual human strategies of adaptation, compromise and occasional surreptitious acts of rebellion. I liked how it viewed the investigation of an intellectual from both sides simultaneously, the watcher and the watched, and my sympathies were split between them.

Black Gold is much more of a normal documentary film than Our Daily Bread, and it definitely does take sides, but the subject – the global coffee industry – is really compelling. It’s a familiar story of farmers in poor countries getting shafted and corporations making massive profits while pumping out PR about their largely imaginary ‘ethical’ policies. It succeeded in getting me outraged all over again, though.

Finally, Vodka Lemon is an Armenian film about a town slowly dying in post-Soviet Armenia. Snow falls constantly, and old people sit around drinking vodka and reminiscing while waiting desperately for their sons to send home money from richer countries like France. Again, it’s hard to explain why I liked it – not much happens, and it’s pretty relentlessly depressing. But it’s beautifully shot, with lots of wide open snowy landscapes increasing the sense of isolation and loss, and some good dry, pain-tinged comedy as an old man lugs a wardrobe halfway down a lonely road to sell it and a family argues over money for a new bride. I suppose part of it is that I like seeing new things, a new place that I’ve never seen before and a completely different way of life. It’s a very sad film but shot through with humour and lots of competing stories of human interest. Definitely a good film to watch.

Andrew Blackman Interesting snippets armenia, black gold, films, movies, our daily bread, the lives of others, vodka lemon

I’ve got an essay included in the new book Quarter Passed, published in the USA by Twenty Stories Publishing. It’s a compilation of stories, essays, poems and photographs by twenty-somethings from around the world (27 countries to be precise).

I wrote the piece back in 2006 when I first moved back to England, when I’d just made the decision to give up my job as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and put all my energy into fiction writing. I was feeling very insecure, with no real prospect of publication, no job lined up to keep me going in the meantime. So when I saw an ad somewhere for submissions to something called ‘Quarter Life Crisis’ as it was then, it really struck a chord. I wrote an essay, submitted it, heard nothing for three years, and then a few months ago received notification that I’d been selected.

So receiving the book itself recently and reading my essay again was a rather strange experience. It had been such a long time – I’m not a twenty-something any more, after all, but a thirty-something. It was like reading an essay by someone else, someone I had a lot in common with but still didn’t quite recognise as myself. The title is “Tainted” and the premise is that through my twenties I discovered the massive amounts of injustice in the world and it tainted what I would previously have seen as achievements. By the age of 23, for example, I was earning a six-figure salary and had my own office on the 18th floor of a Wall Street office tower, and I knew I didn’t deserve a penny of it. I was weighed down by the thought that it was more than my Dad, the most conscientious person I know, had ever earned. It was more than billions of people who worked a hundred times harder than me would ever earn. It changed my view of the world. Whereas a lot of people become conscious of how the world works by being victims of injustice, for me it was through being a beneficiary of injustice. That’s what the essay is about really.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s my best piece of work. It’s heartfelt and contains some good ideas but I think I could have written it more coherently. Thankfully, however, a lot of other essays in the collection are much better. Brandon Miree, for example, achieved the amazing task of making me care about a story on the NFL (American football). It’s about getting to be a player in the NFL but not quite making it – being a reserve, getting a run in the team, getting injured. About the fine margins between success and failure, particularly in a winner-takes-all environment like modern-day professional sport. Wade Forrest Wilson did a beautiful short piece about the stresses of being a cook in TGI Friday’s, through the extended metaphor of boiling milk. Maya Bastian wrote movingly about the death of a friend and the sense of human fragility it gave her. Jayar Pacifico excavated the pain, guilt and awkwardness of trying to come out as a gay man when he already had a fiancee and a baby daughter. Dawn Ng kicked off the book with a terrific meditation on the meaning of home, the yearning to get away and the urge to go back again, as she described moving from Singapore to the USA. I loved the opening image of a five-year-old girl in Singapore drawing a crayon picture of a house based not on her own reality (a small flat on the 20th floor of a huge skyscraper) but on an ideal-type American house – a square with a triangle hat, a lawn and a dog.

I enjoyed reading this really disparate set of accounts from people around the world. American voices are most prevalent, as you’d expect from a book published there, but there’s good representation from Europe, Africa, Australia, Fiji, etc etc. And of course America itself contains no shortage of different experiences. Each piece represents a strong individual perspective, and although the editors have grouped them into broad themes, there’s no attempt to draw conclusions or make points. It’s just a collection of different ideas on what the twenties meant for various people. Of course I’m biased, but I do think it’s worth a read.

How about you? What were your twenties about? Hedonism or hard work? Excitement or disappointment? Gains or losses? Would love to hear more on the theme.

Andrew Blackman Other writing news quarter life crisis, quarter passed, twenties, twenty stories, twenty-something

I’m gettin ready for a talk at Islington North library, just off the Holloway Road, tonight at 6:30pm. I’m a bit nervous to be meeting people who probably know the Holloway Road a lot better than I do. Hope I got it right!

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road book event, islington, library, On the Holloway Road

I’ve been asked to judge a short story contest run by the London Bridge Festival. Entry is free, word limit is 1,000 words and the theme is “London, Glamour and Grime”. More details and entry requirements available here.

Andrew Blackman Other writing news london, london bridge festival, short story contest

My agent just spotted a great little review of my book in the latest issue of Notes from the Underground:

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road andrew blackman, book review, notes from the underground, On the Holloway Road

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Please share your own quotes with me if you’d like to, either by commenting here or posting on your own blog and linking back.

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration, nietzsche, quotes

A Youtube rarity – a professionally shot, high definition, one and a half hour video. It’s about the planet Earth and our place in it. Some quite amazing cinematography, and an important message. If the version on this site doesn’t work, try going direct to Youtube.

Andrew Blackman Inspiration climate change, environment, home, planet earth, video