Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil

I know that history is a very subjective thing, however, Margaret Irwin in her biography "That Great Lucifer: a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh," makes some pretty good points.  It seemed that Raleigh was a person who preferred to trust, and it seemed that Bacon and Cecil were the type to betray trust.  I mean, just think of this. Robert Cecil sends his sickly son to the Raleigh's to be taken care of. They raise Will with their own Wat until he's healthy.  Then, later, when James takes the throne, Robert Cecil sells Raleigh to James as a traitor.

Bacon was no better. After Raleigh is released after thirteen years of imprisonment in the Tower, the King (James) gives him permission to go find gold (some mine located of the Orinoco), but he won't rescind the death sentence on his head.  Raleigh is concern about this, so he talks to his friend, Francis Bacon, who says 'don't worry, the King made you an Admiral!'  Well, James betrays Raleigh to the Spanish by sending them the expedition's plans, Wat (Raleigh's son is killed), and the expedition ruined.  When Raleigh returns home, Jame's wants his head. So, to make the king happy Francis Bacon informs the King he can kill Raleigh any time, since the decade old death sentence was never removed. Result, Raleigh is killed, and the Elizabethan age is at an end.

So, do you think this double dealing, two-bit snake wrote as Shakespeare?

Elizabethan Murder Mystery

I've been doing a lot of reading about what we call the Elizabethan era.  Seems to be a very smelly time, and that includes the judicial and the political system.  I've also, much to my delight, found out that there were a lot of colourful characters: Dr. Dee, the queen's astrologer, Thomas Harriot (who was mapping the moon before Galileo), Christopher Marlowe (Anthony Burgess believes he was gay), I'm not so convinced.  A couple lines in a poem, or play doesn't mean a person is homosexual. Then, there's the 'School of Night,' or the 'School of Atheism,' ran by Walter Raleigh. Both terms are inaccurate, and were coined by his enemies, set at bringing him down.  It was more like a group of men who wanted to talk about anything interesting and new and intelligent. No doubt Raleigh and Lord Strange and the gang listen to Marlowe discussing atheism, but that didn't mean they were all atheists. Anything I've read about Raleigh seems to indicate the man had a love of knowledge. He once said "He'd rather kill a man than a good book."  And that charge of Atheism that the Privy Council had hit Marlowe with...The Baine's report hangs on a lot of hear say, and some document they managed to take from Thomas Kyd. Listen, if a bunch of scary dudes break into my place, find a piece of paper that could get me drawn and quartered, I might be tempted to say Marlowe wrote it.  Even after that they still tortured Kyd, and they weren't kidding. So, fertile ground to write a murder mystery, very fertile.

Shake or Bacon?

I've been reading this great book "The Shakespeare Conspiracy."  Nice work. This is why I don't think Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays.

1.Bacon was a very active politician and lawyer, and none of the materials about him links him with the theatre scene in London.

2.In his work De Augmentis Scientarium, published the same year as Shakespeare's First Folio, he even attacks Drama.

3. In 1614 the King's Men (Shakespeare's company) appeal to King James to establish a theatre in an area object to by the local tradesmen.  The appeal is refered to the Commisioners for Suits. Bacon is one of the Commisioners and the proposal for a theatre is rejected. Why would Bacon, if he was Shakespeare, reject his own company?

4. Part of the argument is that in Shakespeare's plays there is reference to legal material which indicates a legal mind, like Bacon.  Yet other playwrites have legal material in their plays and weren't playwrites. Enter Robert Green, Thomas Nashe and Philip Massinger.

5. This leads me to the conclusion that Bacon is no more responsible for the Shakespeare plays than his brother Ham. 

Interesting stuff, eh?

Why write?

With a world that places more and more emphasis on the visual, on the vicarious, why should anyone spend any time writing?  Perhaps that in itself is enough of a reason.

A lot of people are writing all the time.  They're texting here, they're texting there, but are they saying anything?  Are they saying anything of any depth?  I signed up on Twitter, but couldn't Tweet.  I tried to, but immediately felt myself turning into a Chinese fortune cookie. For me, I need the substance, the desire to delve thoughts, ideas and place them on the alter of sharing.

I asked a music teacher once what made a professional, and she said it wasn't money, it was how you approached your art, the effort you put into your craft.  Good writing isn't easy.  It's difficult and takes a lot of work. 

I thought, when I was in High school, that my English teacher could write a book.  It seemed he had a solid understanding of literature and technique.  I was wrong.  You can ride on the winged Pegasus of  Blake, but when it gets right down to it, you have to face what you can and can not do.  If you have trouble with dialogue, then you have to confess and set about correcting you deficiency.  If you have difficulty with timing, then you've got to study artists whose timing is impeccable.  But I suppose the key here is recognizing that your work has a problem, because once you do that, then you can fix it.

I've noticed that some writers refuse to rip their own prose apart.  As a result they never improve.  If you are reading a friend's work, please, if the characters are wooden and flat, tell them.  It might be the best thing you ever do for them.  However, if the person giving the advice is wooden and two dimensional...which leads me to the point that writing, good writing, is difficult, but there is nothing like it.

Pacing

I was finishing up on the last chapter of "Colin and the Little Black Box," and realized that I had been tired.  I thought it had been finished.  Beware writing when you're tired.  The mind may be all right, but sometimes what you are thinking just doesn't make it down onto the page.
This brings me to the point of this post: pacing.  Everybody writes at a different pace, and that pace should be suited to your personality type and the environment you are writing in.  For me, I write in limited, but very productive time blocks of about an hour.  Then I get away from the computer, go for walks, think about what I'm writing and where the characters are going.  It lets my mind process what I'm trying to do.  You see, I'm a deep thinking person, but not very quick on the pick up, so I like to do a lot of thinking before I write.  As a result, when I sit down to write, the fingers fly and I slip into the zone.
So, what I'm saying is find what works for you and to do that you may have to experiment a bit.
Happy writing,
Mike

Saying too much

Here we go. I'm going to raid my old Ancient Literary criticism book from university for the following idea. A guy back in the 16th century wrote it, but I'm going to paraphrase it. Demetrius said that persuasiveness has two characteristics, clarity and ordinary language. Anything obscure and out of the ordinary is unconvincing....we must aim to avoid diction which is ornate and pretentious and arrange the words so that the sentence has a firm structure with no attempt at rhythmical effects." He goes on to say that too much description insults the reader's intelligence and leaves nothing for the imagination. I sometimes fall into this problem. I have to remind myself that the reader has to also participate in the work if it is to be successful. See Colin's work for this right balance of description and invitation. Demetrius finishes by saying, "In fact, to tell your hearer everything as if he were a fool is to reveal that you think him one."

Mike

Writing Exercise

Sorry for not posting anything Saturday, things were a bit busy with the arrival of our new adopted daughter, Mia.

So, here is an exercise I've used to get the old fingers typing.

Select an object and then write a description about that object, using all five senses.

Now respond to the object by describing how you feel about it.

Thirdly,  free associate using your object as a jumping off point:  An idea of how to do this is to look at your object, write the first idea that comes to your mind and then just keep writing.  The idea is not to stop writing.  If nothing comes to your mind write "nothing"  down.

Now, write a short fantasy about your object.  A couple questions that could help you start:  "What's the strangest thing that could happen to this object?" or, "Wht is an adventure it could have experienced."

I'm going to try to link my story that I developed using this technique, if I can find it.

Happy writing, Mike