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A few years ago, it was my privilege to be introduced to David Helfgott after one of his piano recitals. On that occasion he had different things to say to the various people invited backstage, but his only words to me were: Be aware, be aware, be aware.
This phrase has since assumed almost oracular significance, and has become a kind of personal mantra, one whose possibilities and implications can never be exhausted.
In the course of a long-running cyber-conversation with a poet acquaintance, we discussed at some length what it is we look for in the writing of others and aim for in our own. Although the discussion focused specifically on poetry, which we both write, my ideas about writing embrace other genres as well. This essay is based on my contribution to part of that exchange, and an extended reflection on ideas I was prompted to interrogate and re-examine.
The qualities I look for in writing include honesty and integrity, meaning that the writer has not set out to deceive or mislead the reader by masquerading under false pretences. I should not have to point out that integrity does not impose restrictions on imaginative experience, nor does it preclude risk-taking and audacity, which are vital aspects of creativity. Creative integrity enables a writer to make discerning choices and decisions, to take informed and voluntary risks that do not jeopardise the work's credibility and viability.
If a text lacks energy and vitality, it will languish under its own inertia, and when language is the medium of expression, creative energy must infuse and galvanise that medium, so that language generates the necessary communicative impetus to convey the totality of the creator's concept: the sensibility as well as the sense.
If I ventured to use the word Originality', how would I define it in relation to writing? If there is something about a text (as there usually is) that marks it as distinct from other texts/the texts of others, meaning that the given poem/ story/ essay could not have been written in precisely the same way by any other person (although this can't be proved), the degree of uniqueness or...