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All he could hear was the roaring of the crowds below him and his father’s warnings on how to control the instrument. Though his vision was fine he was blinded by the beauty of the clouds and mesmerized by the feeling of the wind of another atmosphere that no one had experienced before him. All of this was never planned but soon had to be because of his father Dedalus’s gift and the thought of losing his son. Even after jumping off the cliff with a perfect diver’s arc, his father kept on shouting and warning him not to fly too high or too low. All Icarus could think about his father was that He was confident about his new instrument, but not about his son. Funny!

Icarus did pay heed to his father’s warning until he felt his coral pendent flutter, which made him open his eyes to the reminiscence of its past owner. Chryses, he thought, how she would have looked right now, how her hair would look with the Hyacinth set on it, how this pendant would look on her petite frame, and how beautiful her golden eyes would look. Her golden eyes, he yearned to see them again like any other day, and like any other day, he looked at the sun. The only difference he could see was that it was bigger than usual. As he went on flying, he closed his eyes for a moment just to see her and only her in his memories. He had first seen her by the Hyacinth Garden picking the flowers and was as if struck by lightning. Her existence itself had left the young Icarus with such an impact that although they never exchanged words of greetings, he knew her likes and dislikes, her foes and friends, and her thoughts and wishes. Although he was never acknowledged by her he was happy with his unrequited love, but not for long. The very essence of a creature like her made the boy resolute in marrying her no matter what.

But who knew that fate had other plans, who knew that on the very day of her eighteenth birthday in the town square asked to marry her and before she could respond engulfed her in his embrace, that she would be called shameful, that she would leave him forever. It rained as if Nature were mourning the miserable fate of Icarus. As the raindrops falling on his face caressed him with pity, he saw his beautiful Chryses getting dragged out of the sea, her eyes still golden yet dull. With the unbearable suffering of grief and loss, he went on a hunt like a mad lover to look for those eyes. Those eyes that did not lack life and warmth in them, those eyes which would regain his sanity and his sunken heart back from the depths of the abyss. He did not care for the screams or the beggings but only for the love, he had lost. Soon declared murderer no less than a monster for blinding many a few women he was sentenced to death. But his search was still not over and thus he planned to fly out of the city to the other places in search of the golden orbs to befit his dead bride.

As Icarus opened his eyes to reality he realized, he was close to the only object that reminded him of Chryses and he could not stop himself from nearing it. His father’s shouting, the gushing of the wind, and the crashes of the sea, all went dull along with his senses as he went on flying close to the sun while unsheathing his dagger with a longing heart. Now even closer how beautiful it looked to him and how much more enchanting it would look on his Chryses. The thought went on and on until the wax melted. The next thing he saw was the vision of the glowing sun growing smaller, barely visible now under the veil of tears, tears of separation from his beloved woman who was hiding behind the feeling of failure. It all ended in a few seconds with a splash and the surfacing of the panting breaths of the boy who knew that although he was far away from the sun, Icarus knew that he could no

longer live and welcomed life’s friend with open arms. With open arms, a smile on his lips, tears of relief that were not visible and only one thought in his mind, Chryses. After that centuries passed and the tale about ‘The fall of Icarus’ was changed throughout history as passed down from mouth to mouth. He was the boy who flew too close to the sun but alas! Not for his arrogance or his foolishness but for his longing. His longing for love.

The Creative Benefits of Writing Your First Draft

Writing the first draft of my novel longhand is something I’ve begun doing over the past month, and I’ve found it has a number of benefits. I began it because I had stopped writing my novel for a while (I had been reading a book about story structure instead) and wanted something to get me started again.

Writing longhand is linked to journalling, a private occupation. You write only for yourself, and you write whatever you feel like writing. It encourages the link between thinking, creative brain and hand, a link which has been a part of us since we first learned to write as children. 

You may enjoy the process more. It’s a good way to tell the story to yourself. It has the advantage of making sure you focus on the story, not on its possible future readers. The first draft is for you alone. You are its writer and its reader.No-one else ever needs to see it. It’s an example of Stephen King’s often quoted advice abour writing the first draft ‘with the door closed’. 

The informality of writing by hand in a journal encouraged me to jump in and write the characters and scenes I felt like writing, rather than writing in a linear fashion as I had been doing. Having already lived with this story for a long time and written about half of it, I found this easy to do. I found I was spending more time in the minds of my point of view characters, and learned more about them, and their backstories, as a result. I enjoyed the writing, and my wordcount crept steadily upward. I didn’t write every day, but I haven’t missed many, and the progress that I’m  making is encouraging. 

There’s plenty of opportunity to discover new ideas in the writing. Though this kind of discovery writing can be especially effective if you know what you’re trying to achieve in a scene or chapter, i.e. if you’ve already written some kind of outline. That way if you have a new idea, you will know whether or not it will fit into your story, and often even exactly where it will go and how it will nudge the story in one direction or another. 

The quality of what you write doesn’t matter at all in this draft. It can be as messy as you like. (Though make sure you can read your own handwriting!) You don’t have to worry about finding the ‘right’ word or about the quality of your sentences. That means you can write faster, and get more words down. A draft written in this way will arguably have more cohesion than one that has taken a year to write.

There’s an editorial benefit too: you can do a little editing while typing it up. Though you can speak the words too, if your dictation software is good enough to make it worth your while. Not so much if you keep having to stop to correct errors manually.

Other Benefits of Writing, Not Typing

If ‘work’ to you means sitting at a screen, and writing fiction is not your job, why would you want to sit at another screen during your free time in order to write your novel? If you get yourself a notebook and pen you will be able to feel that you have taken a break and you will be in a more relaxed state of mind, whether you are sitting in a café or at home.

Your posture will be different (if not actually better; you will probably be hunched over the desk!)  And you won’t be adding to your risk of repetitive strain injury from keying (though we did use to talk about writer’s cramp.)

It felt at first like going back in time to when I wrote my fiction as a teenager, but as we all now spend so much time repetitively tapping on keyboards in front of screens, it seems like a good idea to change our posture now and again, and who knows, maybe change the way our minds work as a result.

You can keep your handwritten novel in one notebook (or a series of them). It’s lighter to carry around than a laptop, and easier to open. (You don’t need a password. No batteries either.)

There are even smart reusable notebooks, The best smart notebooks for 2022 | Digital Trends you can buy from which you can upload pages and save them digitally. 

If you have not created anything for a while, or even at all, and would like to, I would recommend reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way Home | The Artist's Way (theartistswaybook.com)  and its sequel, to get you started. It contains inspiration and exercises to get your creative spirit moving again. It has been translated into many languages, and sold millions of copies, inspiring people all over the world.

So, have you considered writing a draft of your novel longhand? Or do you prefer the benefits of your keyboard?

The other day, my brother was telling me about his project to fix the engine on his Boston Whaler boat. He said he started with the most likely thing to fix and replaced that and when it didn’t work, the next week he worked on the next likely thing. 

This went on for a year. Each week he’d work on the boat and repair or replace one thing until, at the end, he’d run out of ideas to fix. So, he went back to the very first thing he tried, the one that was most likely, and changed it out again. And – it worked! Finally, after a year, it sputtered to life and stayed running. His conclusion was that it must have been a combination of factors that caused the problem and made it difficult to tease out.

It reminded me of tinkering with our lives. When something doesn’t feel right, whether it's physically, spiritually or mentally, it’s hard to find the source or maybe even identify what system has a problem. And then we engage in a year long (or more) battle to fix one thing at a time.

Research professor Dr. Alison Gopnik, an expert on cognitive development, talks about the idea of the local optimum from artificial intelligence. As she describes, “It’s when you are trying to do something often you can be in a situation when any small change is going to make things worse, so you just end up being stuck. But if you made a big change, then you can actually make things better.”

Exploring the idea further, she says that we, especially as adults, get very good at doing things one way whether be how we turn on our computer or drive to work, and we forget there are other ways. She suggests, “Just doing something that we’re not good at, doing something really different than the things we do every day, can be the sort of thing that will kick you out of that local optimum and give you a sense of other alternatives.” 

One of the things Dr. Gopnik suggests when we get stuck is to spend time with kids. Kids literally have different brains than we do. Their brains are wired to reward them for finding the things that can teach them the most.  Or, adult brains are wired to reward us for getting things done. As adults, we have a harder time getting a sense of novelty because of the habits and life we are locked into.

This is an idea that is of course in no way new. Meditation helps us to open that sense of awareness again. Even when the practice is to focus on just one thing like the breath, we find that open sense of well-being after we’ve completed the practice. As Buddha said, “Most problems, if you give them enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.”  

Psychiatrist and author Scott Peck echoed a similar sentiment in an interview. He said that he was able to get so much done in his life because he spent two hours every day doing nothing. When he called it his thinking time, people felt free to interrupt him, so he started calling it his praying time and found he was left alone. 

Which leads me to the conclusion that play, meditation and prayer in many ways help us to face life when things aren’t quite right. It is the practice of doing nothing in a mindful way that can open the doors to elegant solutions. They may be the same solution that changing one thing at a time like my brother did with the boat will eventually deliver. But maybe it’s possible to get to the same place without the aggravation or elapsed time. By doing something completely unrelated to the problem, or even nothing at all. Doesn’t that sound like smooth sailing?

Read more

• Writing in English as a Second Language
• 3 Important Self-Care Routines for Better Mental Health

There are many people writing in English as a second language, and doing it very well. Some of them are friends of mine. But they live in the UK, so they’ve been able to learn and adapt to subtleties and changes in the language as they come across them in everyday life. But what if you live elsewhere?

The Advantage (and Disadvantage) of having English as your First Language

I feel that we in the UK take for granted the fact that English is one of those languages which is spoken, understood and read throughout the world. That gives us home-bodies an advantage, but it’s also apt to make us lazy. We can learn to communicate in other languages if we like, but unless we’re going to work or teach abroad, once we’ve left education behind, we don’t have to. And the more languages you learn and use, the greater your understanding of language in general.

Unique Local Words

No matter which language you learn first, you will take in your stride its unique elements which can catch out anyone who hasn’t grown up with them.

The individual regions within the UK have words that have developed locally and are unique to them. (And English is only one of the languages spoken in the UK, but that’s another story!)

A Disadvantage of Writing Poetry in English

On the other hand, those of us who write poetry, like me, have problems finding suitable rhymes. There are relatively few of them in the English language compared to, for instance, French and Italian. So, perhaps in self-defence, our modern poetry has largely moved away from rhyme.

Instead, we often use the ‘off-rhyme’ or ‘assonance. The film Educating Rita famously has the line ‘Assonance means getting the rhyme wrong.’

The Order of Adjectives in English

This is my personal favourite quirk of the English language.  There is a recognised order of adjectives, and the weird thing is that this seems ingrained in us English speakers as if it’s part of our DNA. So much so that, in speech at least, whenever get it wrong and if we did, the result would sound ridiculous. The order is: OSASCOMP, which stands for opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Of course it would be very unusual to use all of them, but if you did, you could describe something as a cute little 1960s square red Swedish leather armchair. But not as a leather red, cute Swedish 1960s little armchair, unless you want people looking at you funny.

English Loves Breaking its own Rules

And there’s another thing – rule breaking. The correct part of speech for the end of that sentence should have been ‘funnily’. But the term ‘looking at you funny’ can typically be used. On the other hand, I could have used ‘strangely’ and no-one would have batted an eyelid.

By the way, you can also use the term ‘batted an eye’ and even ‘batted an eyelash’: they’re interchangeable.

Helpful Dictionaries and Apps

So what can we do to feel more confident about our English usage? We can check online or printed dictionaries for the meaning and spelling of any word or phrase we’re unsure of. We can use apps like ProWritingAid or Grammarly to find and fix any errors. Even in a Word document those little red and blue underlines can help us pick up on a grammatical or spelling error. We all use them – even editors like me.

However, it’s important to be aware that many of them will correct to U.S spellings rather than UK if you don’t change them. But if you’re writing for the U.S. market that won’t be a problem.

Advice for Novelists

If you’re writing a novel in English and it’s not your first language I would recommend asking for line editing as part of your editing preparations for publishing. Your editor will use their knowledge of the language to ensure your writing is easy to read and to enjoy.