Dame Diana Rigg (20 Jul 1938 – 10 Sep 2020)

It’s very rare for me to publish 2 posts in 2 days, and possibly unprecedented to publish 3 in less than a week. However, I couldn’t let this pass, for a number of reasons. Arguably, Dame Diana Rigg has had little to do with philosophy but quite a lot to do with culture and, of course, storytelling, which is a topic close to my heart.

In one of the many tributes that came out, there is an embedded video (c/- BBC Archives, 1997), where she talks about acting in a way that most of us don’t perceive it. She says, in effect, that an audience comes to a theatre (or a cinema) because they want to ‘believe’, and an actor has to give them (or honour) that ‘belief’. (I use the word, honour, she didn’t.)

This is not dissimilar to the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that writers attempt to draw from their readers. I’ve watched quite a few of Diana Rigg’s interviews, given over the decades, and I’m always struck by her obvious intelligence, not to mention her wit and goodwill.

 

I confess to being somewhat smitten by her character, Emma Peel, as a teenager. It was from watching her that I learned one falls for the character and not the actor playing her. Seeing her in another role, I was at first surprised, then logically reconciled, that she could readily play someone else less appealing.

 

Emma Peel was a role before its time in which the female could have the same hero status as her male partner. She explained, in one of the interviews I saw, that the role had originally been written for a man and they didn’t have time to rewrite it. So it occurred by accident. Originally, it was Honor Blackman, as Cathy Gale (who also passed away this year). But it was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel who seemed to be the perfect foil for Steed (Patrick Macnee). No one else filled those shoes with quite the same charm.

 

It was a quirky show, as only the British seem to be able to pull off: Steed in his vintage Bentley and Mrs Peel in her Lotus Elan, which I desired almost as much as her character.

 

The show time-travelled without a tardis, combining elements of fantasy and sci-fi that influenced my own writing. I suspect there is a bit of Emma Peel in Elvene, though I’ve never really analysed it.

Does history progress? If so, to what?

This is another Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. The last two I submitted weren’t published, but I really don’t mind as the answers they did publish were generally better than mine. Normally, with a question like this, you know what you want to say before you start. In other words, you know what your conclusion is. But, in this case, I had no idea.

 

At first, I wasn’t going to answer, because I thought the question was a bit obtuse. However, I couldn’t help myself. I started by analysing the question and then just followed the logic.

 

 

I found a dissonance to this question, because ‘history’, by definition, is about the past and ‘progress’ infers projection into the future. In fact, a dictionary definition of history tells us it’s “the study of past events, particularly in human affairs”. And a dictionary definition of progress is “forward or onward movement to a destination”. If one puts the two together, there is an inference that history has a ‘destination’, which is also implicit in the question.

 

I’ve never studied history per se, but if one studies the evolution of ideas in any field, be it science, philosophy, arts, literature or music, one can’t fail to confront the history of human ideas, in all their scope and diversity, and all the richness that has arisen out of that, imbued in culture as well as the material and social consequences of civilisations.

 

There are two questions, one dependent on the other, so we need to address the first one first. If one uses metrics like health, wealth, living conditions, peace, then there appears to be progress over the long term. But if one looks closer, this progress is uneven, even unequal, and one wonders if the future will be even more unequal than the present, as technologies become more available and affordable to some societies than others.

 

Progress infers change, and the 20^th Century saw more change than in the entire previous history of humankind. I expect the 21^st Century will see more change still, which, like the 20^th Century, will be largely unpredictable. This leads to the second question, which I’ll rephrase to make more germane to my discussion: what is the ‘destination’ and do we have control over it?

 

Humans, both as individuals and collectives, like to believe that they control their destiny. I would argue that, collectively, we are currently at a cross roads, which is evidenced by the political polarisation we see everywhere in the Western world.

 

But this cross roads has social and material consequences for the future. It’s epitomised by the debate over climate change, which is a litmus test for whether we control our destiny or not. It not only requires political will, but the consensus of a global community, and not just the scientific community. If we do nothing, it will paradoxically have a bigger impact than taking action. But there is hope: the emerging generation appears more predisposed than the current one.

Secrets to good writing

I wrote this, because it came up on Quora as a question, What makes good writing?

I should say up front that there are a lot of much better writers than me, most of whom write for television, in various countries, but Europe, UK, America, Australia and New Zealand are the ones I’m most familiar with.

 

I should also point out that you can be ‘good’ at something without being ‘known’, so to speak. Not all ‘good’ cricketers play for Australia and not all ‘good’ footballers play in the national league. I have a friend who has won awards in theatre, yet she’s never made any money out of it; it’s strictly amateur theatre. She was even invited (as part of a group) to partake in a ‘theatre festival’ in Monaco a couple of years ago. Luckily, the group qualified for a government grant so they could participate.

 

Within this context, I call myself a good writer, based partly on feedback and partly on comparing myself to other writers I’ve read. I’ve written about this before, but I’ll keep it simple; almost dot points.

 

Firstly, good writing always tells the story from some character’s point of view (POV) and it doesn’t have to be the same character throughout the story. In fact, you can change POV even within the same scene or within dialogue, but it’s less confusing if you stay in one.

 

You take the reader inside a character’s mind, so they subconsciously become an actor. It’s why the reader is constantly putting themselves in the character’s situation and reacting accordingly.

 

Which brings me to the second point about identifying good writing. It can make the reader cry or laugh or feel angry or scared – in fact, feel any human emotion.

 

Thirdly, good writing makes the reader want to keep returning to the story. There are 2 ways you can do this. The most obvious and easiest way is to create suspense – put someone in jeopardy – which is why crime fiction is so popular.

 

The second way is to make the reader invest in the character(s)’ destiny. They like the characters so much that they keep returning to their journey. This is harder to do, but ultimately more satisfying. Sometimes, you can incorporate both into the same story.

A story should flow, and there is one way that virtually guarantees this. When I attended a screenwriting course (some decades ago), I was told that a scene should either provide information about the story or information about a character or move the story forward. In practice, I found that if I did the last one, the other 2 took care of themselves.

Another ‘trick’ from screenwriting is to write in ‘real time’ with minimal description, which effectively allows the story to unfold like a movie inside the reader’s head.

 

A story is like a journey, and a journey needs a map. A map is a sequence of plot points that are filled in with scenes that become the story.

None of the above are contentious, but my next point is. I contend that good writing is transparent or invisible. By this I mean that readers, by and large, don’t notice good writing, they only notice bad writing. If you watch a movie, the writing is completely invisible. No one consciously comments on good screenwriting; they always comment on the good acting or the good filmmaking, neither of which would exist without a good script.

 

How is this analogous to prose writing? The story takes place in the reader’s imagination, not on the page. Therefore, the writing should be easy-to-read and it should flow, following a subliminal rhythm; and most importantly, the reader should never be thrown out of the story. Writing that says, ‘look at me, see how clever I am’, is the antithesis of this. I concede, not everyone agrees.

 

I’ve said before that if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work. Dream language is the language of stories, and they can both affect us the same way. I remember when I was a kid, movies could affect me just as dramatically as dreams. When reading a story, we inhabit its world in our imagination, conjuring up imagery without conscious effort.

 

 

Example:

 

The world got closer until it eventually took up almost all their vision. Their craft seemed to level out as if it was skimming the surface, but at an ultra-high altitude. As they got lower the dark overhead was replaced by a cobalt-blue and then they passed through clouds and they could see they were travelling across an ocean with waves tipped by froth, and then eventually they approached a shoreline and they seemed to slow down as a long beach stretched like a ribbon from horizon to horizon. Beyond the beach there were hills and mountains, which they accelerated over until they came to flat grassy plains, and in the distance they saw some dots on the ground, which became a village of people and horses and huts that poked into the air like upside down cones.