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"Fabulous Storytelling" Mick Herron

I have been writing and publishing books on a variety of topics since my bestselling Angry White Pyjamas came out in 1997. Other bestsellers include Red Nile, a biography of the River Nile. In total I have written 15 mainstream books translated into 16 languages. The include creative non-fiction, novels, memoir, travel and self-help. My publishers include Harper Collins, Picador, Penguin and Hachette. I have won several awards including two top national prizes- the Somerset Maugham literary award and the William Hill sportsbook of the Year Award. I have also won the Newdigate Prize for poetry- one of the oldest poetry prizes in the world; past winners include Oscar Wilde, James Fenton and Fiona Sampson.

A more recent success was Micromastery, published by Penguin in the US and the UK as well as selling in eight other countries.

Micromastery is a way of learning new skills more efficiently. I include these methods when I coach people who want to improve as writers. If that's you, go to the section of this site titled I CAN HELP YOU WRITE. I have taught creative writing in schools and universities but I now find coaching and editing is where I can deliver the most value. In the past I have taught courses in both fiction and memoir at Moniack Mhor, the former Arvon teaching centre in Scotland.

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"Micromastery is a triumph. A brilliant idea, utterly convincing, and superbly carried through" - Philip Pullman

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Saturday
Mar282015

The Polymathic Principle

 

Everyone will tell you one thing; specialise, specialise, specialise…don’t.

Suppose you have a child who seems unusually talented at science, who appears to have a natural inclination towards math and physics. You might be tempted to send your offspring to special classes in extra math with the dream that they would achieve great things if only they specialised early enough. Walter Alvarez, a doctor, saw things differently. His son Luis was gifted in science but he chose to balance this by sending him to a school specialising in arts and crafts. Instead of fast tracking through advanced calculus, Luis worked at technical drawing and woodwork…which didn’t stop him from going on later to study science and ultimately win the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physics. Luis attributed his success to his ability to build any experimental apparatus he could imagine.

Developing fine motor skills was also essential to the success claimed by celebrated US astronaut Storey Musgrave. His early training as a boy growing up on a farm gave him the skills ‘to fix anything’ just as crucial in a space station, as later degrees in engineering and medicine.

There is informal recognition of the advantage of a polymathic background: 82% of scientists and engineers surveyed by Robert Root-Bernstein answered Yes to the question “Would you recommend an arts and crafts education as a useful or even essential background for a scientific innovator?”[1]

But scientists and engineers are not alone in needing inspiration from elsewhere. Artists and writers also gain from having a non-arts background. WH Auden, Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov and David Foster Wallace all had maths or science educations in addition to their literary pursuits. In terms of multi-modal skills, Foster Wallace was also a sports scholar as a young man. Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey were both football players; Albert Camus played in goal for the Algerian national soccer team and Samuel Beckett was a notable cricket player in his native Ireland.

An early taste for multiple expertise is rather more common than we might think. My own childhood background is far from unusual: I built treehouses, go karts, repaired bicycles and motorbikes, took photographs, went rock climbing, looked at things under a microscope and wrote poetry. I managed to maintain this wide spread of interests into adulthood- by ignoring the advice given to me by careers officers, teachers, employers but luckily not my parents.

They understood the need to maintain a wide base of knowledge. Intuitively they understood about the synergetics of knowledge.

Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine learned, when he was a child, how to stitch incredibly tiny and intricate patterns from his lace making mother. He later used this skill in making ground breaking advancements in the field of surgery.

Hans von Euler-Chelpin focussed on fine arts at college before an interest in colour lead him to the sciences, eventually leading to the 1929 Nobel prize in chemistry.

Leading astro-physicist Jacob Shaham claimed, “Acting taught me how to read equations like a script with characters I had to bring to life.”

All these high achievers are demonstrating the same thing: there is great synergy in having multiple areas of expertise.

The  engine of polymathics, why it works, is the synergy between different areas of knowledge. The more you know the better- but not just arithmetically, exponentially. Fields of knowledge cross-fertilise each other in many, often surprising, ways. The kernal of creativity is, after all, putting together things that have never been put together before. Learning skills, honed on one area become useful in another. You get different perspectives the more you know, and a different perspective can mean everything.

Synergy is the ‘extra energy’ liberated in system that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an idea that has been around since Aristotle.

If you have three or more areas of expertise there is a real rise in many allied areas of knowledge acquisition and deployment. You learn faster and act smarter.

Why three or more? It’s what I have noticed. And the wider apart they are the better. Best is a physical or modal skill such as dancing or bookbinding or fly tying or parachuting PLUS a factual/informational field be it scientific, historical or literary PLUS an area of creative endeavor- singing, acting, writing, painting.



[1] Lamore and Root-Bernstein 2011

 

Thursday
Mar192015

the simple and the subtle

Broadly speaking, formal, ‘public’, or, if you like, ‘modern’, life presents things as significant the louder more shocking and in your face they are; it also presents things that are super complicated as being more significant than that which is very simple. 

But I wonder if the opposite is true: that life is better appreciated by looking for, and showing a preference for, the simple and by being better attuned to the subtle.

When people start aikido they quickly get into very complicated discussions about foot placement and angles and such like. The real masters tend to say the same things again and again: it’s all about stance, for example. After a while you realise it isn’t the actual words that matter so much as the importance you attach to them (if that makes sense). The better you get at aikido the more importance you attach to something seemingly very simple that is ignored by a beginner who prefers more complicated (an by implication, truer) explanations.

Becoming more aware, building awareness builds an appreciation of subtleties. All wine tasters know this. Having the courage to stick with the simple also helps. I wonder if a preference for over-complication is a dry intellectual substitute for subtlety.

Monday
Mar162015

Arabeye Media Monitoring

I have been most impressed with this new service reporting on arab social media and focusing on somewhat overlooked news http://www.arabeyemedia.org.uk/

Saturday
Mar142015

New Statestman review of Prank book

This came out this week in the New Statesman...somehow I never get around to saying how much I love public pranks- Virginia Woolf dressing as an Abyssinian Prince and visiting a Royal Navy battleship comes to mind, as does Jaroslav Hasek sending fake science reports full of learned references to the Czech version of Nature. Private pranks are practical jokes...which aren't as much fun for some reason..maybe because the crime is never victimless- or the victim is us- or the joker is a self-righteous git...not sure, anyway here is the article:

Click here

Friday
Mar132015

nano adventures

My esteemed fellow adventurer Alastair Humphreys has made a great job of popularising micro adventures, yet only the other day I thought- some times the day is so short there isn't even enough time for a microadventure! Of course it's largely psychological, one should make more time, de-stress, take it easy etc etc...and yet- sometimes all you need is a nano-adventure. This is the tiniest possible division of adventure possible- there is none smaller. A nano adventure is so potentially short, time doesn't really come in into it- it is pure experience. Here are a few I've had: walking across Corfe common knowing it was Enid Blyton's choice for Kirrin Common in the Famous Five books; brewing up in the lee of an outdoor loo in a storm using an M kettle (I know, it takes all sorts); nightwalk from Chapman's rocks to pub in Worth Matravers; climbing a dartmor tor in the snow wearing inappropiate and very slippy DM shoes; spending two hours at midnight in a vigil reading the Kasidah at the grave of Richard Burton on the 100th anniversary of his death; circumnavigating Portland Bill on foot; sit on top canoeing through rock arches near Salcombe; sneaking under a locked door at the bent Pyramid at Dahshur; finding a horned viper 3km from Cairo's ring road; fishing for grey mullet using a hazel stick and a bent pin and bread paste; locating a standing stone on a map and finding it; driving through flooded roads with water coming in under the doors; tickling trout; running the undercliff at Lyme Regis; walking across stepping stones on any river you choose...simple stuff that takes less than an afternoon- start looking for potential nano-adventures in your life!

Tuesday
Mar102015

Tibetan monks raise body temperature

 

In Magic and Mystery in Tibet Alexandra David-Neel talks about the incredible ability of certain Tibetan monks. They are reputedly able to raise their body temperature at will. She writes of monks draped in wet sheets at -35 degrees C and great gouts of steam rising from the wet cloths as their superheated bare torsos turned the icy garment into something like a steaming pudding cloth. Other travellers have also made passing mention of this technique but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Western science was able to catch up with Eastern expertise.

Greater knowledge of Tibet and her monks- whether they live on the Indian side or the Tibetan side of the border, indicated that the monks involved were practitioners of gtum-mo- (pronouced ‘dumo’) a form of breathing found in the teachings of the Tibetan Vajrayana. This was derived originally from the Indian Buddhist Vajrayana tradition.

Gtum-mo is a combination of breathing exercises and meditative concentration. The basic form involves performing ‘the vase’- this is a breathing technique where air is brought deep into the lower abdominal region and held there, making a pot belly or ‘vase’ of the stomach. There is a forceful version of this where the air is sucked in, held and then expelled with great vigour. There is a also a gentler version where the transitions are far less marked and the intake and exhalation of breath, though deep, is gentle.

Accompanying the breathing are two varieties of meditation. For the forceful breathing (which is used to ramp up body temperature quickly from ‘cold’ so to speak) the meditation is to picture internally an inner flame, something like a Bunsen burner flame, roaring hot, that starts at the navel and shoots up to the crown of the head. You have to imagine that flame in all its heat, roaring noise and light burning up through the core of the body.

For the more gentle variant of body temperature manipulation the mental image is of a surging sensation of bliss and rising warmth throughout the body.

In January 1982 Professor Herbert Benson[1] reported in the august pages on Nature on his studies into what he termed gTum-mo yoga. Conducted in the Dharamsala monastery of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, three monks were able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by a creditable 8.3 degrees C. This is rather impressive- certainly it would make the difference between frost bite and frost nip or merely coldness. If climbers and others who venture into highly refrigerated environs could learn these techniques many digits might be saved.

In 2002 Harvard Gazette reported 2 monks- of Western origin and living in Normandy- who were able to raise their body temperature using gtum-mo techiniques.

But it wasn’t until 2013 that a more comprehensive set of tests and a general survey of previous attempts  was made. In the previous thirty years it had been found that raising peripheral temperatures- of hands and feet- could be made quite easily through various easily taught meditations, and, in fact, by training people to use simple biofeedback techniques. Typically a digital thermometer would be connected to sensors on the subject’s hands and feet. By sensing a greater awareness of the temperature of the hand or foot, whilst avoiding trying to force it up, the temperature could be made to rise as long raising temperatures was what was on the agenda.

But complications entered the field when it was found that raising core body temperature did not accompany raising peripheral temperatures. One theory suggested that various forms of muscular contraction served to raise hand temperature.

In the 2013 tests Dr Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues[2] showed that unlike biofeedback results, gtum-mo genuinely raised core body temperatures- so much so that the wet sheet dried by body heat alone was shown to be fact not fiction.

Kohevnikov located one of the very few nunneries where a body temperature raising ceremony exists. This was at the 4200 metre high Gebchak convent close to Nangchen in Qinghai province. The ceremony was held annually and the nuns participating would wear only a short skirt, shoes or sandals with a wet cotton sheet draping the rest of their body. It would be performed in winter when air temperatures would be dry but -25 to -30 degrees C. Anyone who has dipped their hand in water at these temperatures will know the extreme discomfort involved, and how hard it is to regain skin warmth after drastic colling like this has happened. Ranulph Fiennes dipped his hand in icy sea water to release a sunken sledge and did not dry and warm the hand immediately. He later remarked that these two minutes of carelessness cost him the finger tips of that hand. I’ve swept a frosty tent surface with a bare hand at -15 degrees C and found the hand still cold even ten minutes later after wearing a mitten. Such anecdotal evidence makes even the existences of the sheet ceremony all the more impressive.

The nuns were aged between 25 and 52 years old and some performed the forceful variety of gtum-mo and some the more gentle kind. It was reported that the forceful kind could not be sustained for very long, so it was used to warm the body up, after which the gentle type would be used when walking and wearing the wet sheet.

Nuns raised their peripheral temperatures easily by 1.2 to 6.8 degrees C. More importantly the forceful type of gtum-mo raised core body temperature by over a degree. One woman was able to get it higher and only stopped because she felt uncomfortable. Another stopped because she was developing fever symptoms.

If peripheral temperature raising results in a lowering of core body temperature then using techniques to merely warm the hands might actually hasten hypothermia. However, if, as the gtum-mo tests show, you can raise core body temperature and peripheral temperature you have the means to withstand great cold- as the nuns show during their freezing sheet ceremony.

As a control a group of westerners who had some experience of yoga or meditation or kung fu, were taught the gtum-mo technique. Very quickly they were able to show similar effects of raised body temperature as the much more experienced Tibetan nuns. Something that appears mysterious and oriental turns out to be rather ordinary after all. I for one will certainly be using it when I next find myself shaking with cold in some Himalayan fastness.

 

 



[1] Herbert Benson “Body Temperature changes during the practice of gTum-mo yoga” Nature 295 21 Jan 1982

[2] Maria Kozhevnikov March 29 2013 PLoS ONE “Neurocognitive and somatic components of Temperature Increase during g-Tummo meditation”.

 

Wednesday
Feb252015

Some info on the Dalai Lama

In his memoir Seven Years in Tibet Heinrich Harrer records his time as the tutor of the 14th Dalai Lama- who at the time was only 14 years old. Fascinated by the outside world the Dalai Lama has had translated from English into Tibetan a recent seven volume history of WW2. He is mechanically inclined and very adept. Despite not being able to read the endglish instructions the Dalai Lama has taken apart and put back together again the film projector he enjoys using. It seems appropriate that Hollywood should have embraced so wholehearted in later years the cause of the Dalai Lama. He was himself fascinated by film and even shot some early movies himself- along with Heinrich Harrer. HH throws himself wholeheartedly into teaching the Dalai Lama everything he can. A discussion of the atom bomb leads to talk about elements and metals- for which there is no separate word in Tibetan. 

The Dalai Lama recognised all manner of different aeroplanes from his books about the war. Anything mechanical he finds fascinating, though the bulk of his training has been in philosophy and history. He gives Harrer his own lessons in the latter, for which HH seems most grateful. In a moment of modest pride the Dalai Lama shyly shows Harrer an exercise book where he has been attempting to transcribe roman letters. Harrer agrees to teach him English.

In his spare time the Dalai Lama wore a red jacket he had designed himself. He was very proud of it. Copying designs he had seen in books he had incorporated pockets – which are not to be found in any traditional Tibetan garb. Harrer writes: “Now like every other boy of his age he was able to carry about with him a knife, a screwdriver, sweets etc.” He also now kept his coloured pencils and fountain pens in his pockets. He loved clocks and timepieces and had bought, with his own money, an omega calendar clock. Before he attained his majority the only money he had was that which was left at the foot of his throne by well wishers.

Attracted to magic the Dalai Lama explained to Harrer that he was making a study of all the methods by which his conciousness could be in one place but his body would be in another. This is a common magical technique- you find similar spells and references in most magical traditions. Almost certainly it is connected to the much reported Near Death Experience of being able to travel anywhere you please while your body stays in one place. Harrer is rather sceptical and claims he will convert to Buddhism if the Dalai Lama can be in two places at once. And yet, in later life, we see him as such an inveterate traveller, and so spoken about, that it seems by western technology he has achieved the ability to be in many places at once.