Writing for a future

Write Space
Literary news, views and reviews
http://taurangawriters.org.nz

This week's Write Space by Karen Sole.

Intent on slaying the dragon of writers' block, I search for inspiration in the Guardian online.

My thoughts go to the Stephen Lawrence murder trial; Amanda Hocking who has got filthy rich publishing 1.5 million of her own books on Kindle, selling them for less than the price of a cup of coffee, and in the process has ‘changed publishing forever' (Guardian, 12 January 2012), to the recent film adaptations of two of Emily and Charlotte Bronte's novels.

Jane Eyre I've seen and loved, and felt sure that Charlotte herself would have been well pleased with Mia Wasikowska's proper, limpid, inexperienced, but on-the-brink Jane, and Michael Fassbender's Rochester: all smouldering sexuality behind stern intellectual provocation to passion.

I am waiting for the New Zealand release of Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

The Guardian's man in Venice for the festival last year called the film ‘a brave, brooding, and impressive piece of work'.

It seems apt, it being the book that spoke to my teenage sensibilities decades ago.

I wonder if its magic works on current teens, who are in thrall to the Twilight phenomena, and are bombarded with images of so-called passionate love affairs of the rich and famous, which crack and splinter at the slightest touch of – reality?

In the end it is the Lawrence family, the people who gathered round them, the trial, the outcome, and superb investigative journalism and comment in the Guardian that steals my imagination.

The reportage forms an instructive body of work which exposes the deliberately lazy workings of institutional racism, and the individual and collective racism that it reflects, as well as the stoic, tenacious and methodical campaigning of Stephen Lawrence's family and supporters.

The application of advances in forensic science pulled all the strands of the case into its irresistible vortex.

That story, from beginning to end is like a counterpoint to Dostoevski's elaborate expose of the distorting tendencies of circumstantial evidence, perjury, the effect of hearsay, and rash media coverage and a myriad of human frailties, in The Brothers Karamazov.

In this way, information loops, sways and loops back, alerts, reminds, refers, suggests: communities of interest gather round an idea, whether it's a book, a film, a TV programme, an event; big and small ideas bouncing around the globe that stimulate enquiry and continuing interest in the printed word whether it's on paper or Kindle, or computer screen, aided and abetted by images or not.

And here we are, back to Amanda Hocking, who needed a few hundred pounds to pay some bills, and became a millionaire.

Intoxicated with input, writers worldwide are still coming up with new and exciting work, and are, as Paul King advised in the first Write Space column, embracing new publication methods and media, at a place near you.