Rainer Maria Rilke's Rubbish Lorry

I'm just back from New York and still dazzled by the vibrancy and brightness of the city – the vast electronic hoardings that pulse with colour in Times Square, the vivid yellowness of the taxis and....

...this!

It's an American garbage truck and even in the murky light of early evening you can see that it is decked out with the Statue of Liberty and the Stars & Stripes and the lettering is in red and gold – in fact, the whole thing is done up like a Christmas tree and very lovely it looked.

In creative writing terms, this got me thinking.The truck caught my eye because it should have been ugly and functional, but it wasn't – it was actually rather joyous. It was a lesson in the unexpected. As a writer, you need to see things with a fresh eye, so that you can re-invent them for your reader. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke talks about finding beauty where it wouldn't normally be apparent and this is a key part of your job as an author. Think of the loveliness in a plain face lit with emotion, or the softening effect of sunset on an industrial wasteland.

My garbage truck was, in its way, a thing of beauty, weird and wonderful enough to make me stop and take a photograph. If you want to arrest your readers' attention like this, seek out the surprising; follow Rilke's advice and look for beauty where you wouldn't expect to find it.

Letters to a Young Poet

My first agent gave me a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (thank you, Xandra) and over the years I have found it to be the perfect primer.  It doesn't cover the nuts and bolts of getting published or the technicalities of structure, but it is a wonderful meditation on how to live receptively, to tune in to your surroundings and your own experience, in order to be able to write sensitively, accurately and to the best of your ability.

At one point, Rilke says, "Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?" Astute guidance for ordinary living, but indispensable advice for a writer, both in terms of the process of writing, which can indeed be fraught with anxiety, grief and melancholy, but also in terms of the subject matter you may want to choose -- sorrow is a great catalyst for change, which is in turn the fulcrum of good fiction.

Apart from zooming over to Amazon (or better still your local independent bookshop!) to lay your hands on a copy of the Letters, try writing about a testing episode from your own life, either as a piece of autobiography, or as the preparatory work for a story.  See if you can achieve critical distance from what happened without losing any emotional intensity.  It's that rubbing your tummy while patting your head thing and when it boils down to it, that's what writing is mostly about.

Have a very Happy Easter...

and here's a seasonal door with St George strutting his stuff to add to the sum of your happiness.