www.michaeljmaguire.com Creative Technology & Technological Creativity

A friend on Facebook asked this interesting question:
"what does actually 'creative writing' mean? what do you have to learn to become a creative writer?"

1. Monkey in cockney rhyming slang, is five hundred English pounds.
2. Monkey has become the basic unit of literary stupidity thanks to widespread miscomprehension of the Infinity Monkey theorem
3. Monkey mind in the Buddhist tradition is one where thoughts jump from one idea to the next without proper or sincere concentration

Kate Pullinger, winner of the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction and general all round generous good Gurl. Kate was co-course leader for the M.A. in creative writing and New media in DMU, a really generous Fiction tutor, highly talented and ultra aware in the area of Digital Literature. Anyone who has the pleasure of knowing Kate will be utterly delighted that her talents have received the due recognition she deserves, I know I am.

I'm developing a model of my academic research and again became interested in visualizations and representations of reality - however diverse, hence the embedded video above. ‘The reality is’ seems to preface every political pontification I’ve endured lately in main stream media – particularly prevalent on TV since the first banshee budget wails began, as a phrase its been utterly overused since the start of the credit crunch. In fact my own reality is creative in a mostly subjective and entirely personal manner, remaining far outside the allegedly true, common or existent narrow ‘ realities’ being hawked by snake oily mouthed morons appearing on TV of late. The reality is… they sound utterly removed from what I know, experience and understand to be parts of ‘my own shared reality’ so please stop trying to graft your consensus based, transparent, politically motivated, constricted and infantile interpretations onto my life by employing equally redundant rhetorical assertions about what constitutes my lived experience.... especially when I’m cranky because I’m digressing from writing PhD materials.

Modern warfare is released worldwide today, a much anticipated title for xbox and PS3. Two of my three sons have been speaking about it as the sole true heir to Call of Duty also how the new on-line multiplayer gameplay better live up to the hype. I refuse to let either of them queue at 12 midnight for the release of a game that will certainly be given an 18 rating, they won't play it until I've first had a look at it, Hype or no Hype.

Oh yes back in the day, that is the Amstrad day, didn't we enjoy trying to get those dungeon gates to open up while surrounded by sparsely deployed, non the less atmospheric little flickery flame things, many oddly pitched tones and much blank areas punctuated by porous paving .. erm no actually, come to think of it, that just distracted from the right pain that was the repetitious searching for the correct jump spot. All that while hoping it wouldn't crash again (as it often did).

I was contemplating using my invented phrase above as my own epitaph – a poetic tradition. Some day it will be true and remain true for eternity. As a writer I would do anything but write, that is until I begin writing and then inertia shifts and Frost’s ‘poem in its dawning’ idea kicks in. I mention that regularly because for me it really encapsulates crossing a cusp between perfunctory, performative and productive. Beginning really can be the half of a thing. Compositional techniques or knowledge work only when writing. So ‘starting’ is the initial difficulty.