The Process...

Thursday seems to be becoming justification day. There are those of you out there that don’t think I need to justify what I write and (to some degree) you are right. After all, and as I have always said, this blog is ALL about me.

However I am a process guy, and I want you to keep reading – so I am very aware that sometimes in order to understand what I am ‘going on about’ it would probably be simpler for you to understand the process that I sometimes use to generate the pieces that I post. I want you to keep reading, so I have a responsibility to explain why I do some of the things I do – I’d hate you to lose faith.

I find it quite easy to write. As Chunky Gould, my English teacher, used to say; ‘my imagination will get me hanged one day’. Give me a subject and I will research, write about it, and try to bring it inwards so that it has a personal slant (ME again) - and hopefully usually make it readable in the process.

So, what’s this process? Now there’s the rub.

Yesterdays post. What was it about? If you read it you’ll know that it was quite a bit about post-boxes, that David Bowie put in a brief appearance, and that there was a lot of reference to the blues (da-da-da-da). But why?

Let me explain.

Process fascinates me. I have spent my life looking for better ways of doing things, designing processes leading to improved quality/productivity/speed, ultimately price, and all of my real-life has been about delivering as efficiently as possible through process.

Asleep yet? I almost was. What I do in my real-life with process is all very worthy but a bit boring in creative terms, so I’ve been looking for a process that could help me to generate creative and challenging ‘whatevers’ - and I’m using this process within this blog occasionally. You may have noticed - they are usually the posts that leave you scratching your head and wondering if I have finally and totally ‘lost it’, or the ones that you simply give up on and don’t bother to read at all.

I’ve used ‘The Process’ as I call it, to generate themes around my beach sculptures so that I have some story behind the picture, I’ve used it at times to generate some of the more surreal posts that run throughout this blog, and I’ve used it in the past to help me generate ideas for paintings. It isn’t unique and it isn’t particularly new – Dali used it in the composition of his paintings, Bowie in his lyrics, and the ‘Dice Man’ (in the novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart) used a variation of it to give direction, albeit random, to the actions of his main character.

This is what I do. I write down what I consider to be eight totally unconnected subjects on slips of paper – I have various ways of generating them (pins, next thing I see, next word spoken), place them in a hat (in this case a real sea-captains hat that used to belong to my great, great uncle Alexander), and draw out three of the eight. These three subjects then become the themes for the post and I try to make a piece of interesting writing (based around personal experience and research) that combines these three threads into a single strand.

Here are my potential options for yesterday’s piece – ‘Post-box blues’

- The song China Girl by David Bowie
- Second World War barrage balloons
- Shifting sands
- Blues
- My oldest daughter Cloe’s trip to Uganda
- Minestrone soup
- The shoes that I can’t throw away
- Post-boxes

I’m pleased that I didn’t draw ‘Second World War barrage balloons’, disappointed that I didn’t get ‘Cloe’s trip to Uganda’. But you get what you get, and given what I got I’m not that unhappy with the result.

So there you have it – ‘The Process’. By the way I’m considering a slight shift in how I generate my potential threads. I’m thinking about asking you to suggest the subjects that I put into my great, great, uncle’s captain’s hat!

That should make it really interesting… ideas anyone?