Category: Essay

Reading books

There’s a general consensus that reading is good for you. That reading is boring is also a common held belief. Very contradicting if you think about it, but I guess books are like vegetables, you gotta eat ’em.

Schools doesn’t help literatures case. Forcing you to read a book you don’t like is never fun. But I can’t really hold this against schools because how else do you make children read when there are more readily available options? Parents have the ultimate responsibility, but I digress.

As an adult, there’s a point of pride having read a certain amount of books each year. That you need to read them whether you find them boring or no. I know I’ve fallen into this trap. It’s a task to be completed rather than something to be enjoyed. But does it have to be?  Lately, I never slug my way through books if it lost my interest. I skim through it, find the keynotes and sometimes the story draws me back again…

Like any writer, I’m easily bored and I have around five books that I read at the same time. Jumping between them whatever flights my fancy. Sometimes I find stories extremely predictable and sometimes still, my predictions are more entertaining than how it turned out! But I guess that’s the sickness of the writer.

I can do better.

In any case; you have no obligation to finish a story properly if it has lost your interest. You don’t get smarter by reading fiction, you really don’t. Some fictions can be very profound, but for those where reading is a chore, they never got anything out of the story anyhow.

by Stamphers

LoTR and Info Dumps

The biggest problem with writing fantasy stories is that we have to present a whole new world organically without overwhelming readers with names and places. Tolkien has an interesting way of presenting his world which I don’t think many have tried to emulate since. He does something that is generally frowned upon in the writer’s world today and that is he stops the plot by giving context to his places. This might seem like a bad idea but I think this is extremely vital to do in a fantasy setting. It usually goes like this: The heroes reaches a new place and then Tolkien gives some context to the history of that place and what the people living there are like through narration. One example is his introduction to the people of Bree, why there are both Humans and Hobbits living there and that it once was a an important crossroad town.

What’s so genius about this is that Tolkien can show a world and tell about organically because he makes us care about his world as we explore it. Many writers dumps a lot of information about places that the reader, and often the heroes, have never been to.

Why should we care?

Another important thing that most fantasy authors don’t do, I think, is that they fail to give context, or history, to small places, places that does not necessarily involve the main plot. Often the heroes just visits a town, something happens there, and then they move on. It’s just a nameless town with nameless people, a plot device. This makes the world hollow and forgettable, I believe.

Is there other ways one can convey the same information? You could use dialogue but I find it highly unlikely that the history of the places the heroes visits would come up in conversation very often if they are on a quest to save the world.

I don’t know about you guys, but if I would journey across the land, I would like to know a thing or two about the places I visit. Today we have the internet, but decades ago, people would have to pick up a history book, and that’s how LoTRs sometimes feel like, a very entertaining history book.

by Stamphers

Earnest Improvment

*This is another old post I made; June 2016 in fact. But it still rings true and I think it deserves to be shared ^^

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men; true nobility lies in being superior to your former self – Earnest Hemingway

I love this quote so much; self-improvement is to be better than you once were. To always challenge yourself, to try new things, to never do what’s easy, that is my creed.

You will never get anywhere if you’re content with your current skills or trying to measure yourself to others success. It is only what you can accomplish that matters because you are different from the person you look up to.

I hear sometimes people ask who you wish to be and they usually pick a celebrity. But that means you as a person is dead. You become this other person because you’d never had this person’s experiences while still retaining your own identity.

You can never emulate another person’s journey to success.

by Stamphers

Books are Spellbinding

It doesn’t matter what kind of of book, which genre it is in, books has a way of transfixing the mind, bringing it back to the present which is the greatest gift we have in these times of infinite distraction:

Books pierce into the depths of the mind, opening up another level of consciousness that we don’t understand – a mind free of distractions. Everything we do and everything we see and have done is bombarding our mind, constantly, but when we read, we have this moment of clarity, where we focus only on the words before us somehow opens up the floodgates that had been damned by everything else that concerns us. It is when we read that we are the most clear, when the mind wanders freely and we have our most profound thoughts. However, as soon as we put the book down, our train of thought is lost and we aren’t sure what we were thinking about to begin with. It is as if these thoughts are only meant for the clear, so abstract that they cannot be actualised in the distraction filled reality that we live in.

However, there are also those times when profound thoughts happen once we write. It doesn’t help mulling over everything as the mind is clear when we write. It forces us to focus on nothing but the words in our heads.

Perhaps the ancients were onto something, words are magic.

 

by Stamphers

Good Ideas Will Never Leave You

Ever tried just writing something down without anything in mind? Often, a word or a sentence will appear… anything can be formed then; a story, an essay, a poem, a blog post, a diary entry, anything. These are the true thoughts, those that have festerd and merge with other ideas for lord knows how long, until they become true. They are the thoughts you’ve resisted to write down because the written thought is where they come to die, they’ll leave you.

However, thoughts that come to you because they were written, they are the thoughts that you would never have considered without a pen in your hand or a keyboard in your lap. They are thoughts that amaze you to such a degree that you can hardly believe they come from you. You wonder if maybe somebody else is guiding your hand, telling you what to write.

When I write fiction, I have countless thoughts that it would be impossible to return to all of them, because they are a mess, and sometimes incoherent and only makes sense to the person I was at the time. I always fretted over this, trying to organise them so that I could find them easily, but that ended up taking as much time as writing itself, and, I found that I rarely returned to them. Instead, I’d write them down again from memory and I believe that is for the best, because you only recall what sticks with you and those ideas are often the best parts.

What we need to realise is that a story is organic, and so is your mind. Accept your flaws and the unknown. Embrace that there are things beyond our explanation and let it shine through your writing.

© Christopher Stamfors

by Stamphers

Our Mind’s a Stranger

They say you must write to learn, to ascertain information better. I wonder if that’s true. Surely, some information can simply be absorb into our consciousness, surely, we don’t need to know the details, only it’s there to be gathered when needed – which is never when others want you to need it…

We won’t remember it clearly, of course, that’s not because we have poor memories, but because the information has been twisted and transformed; merged with other ideas in an indistinct way that cannot be ascertained. But we know it’s there, we know it when we write it down, when it’s fully formed, when it has festered in our brain.

Trying to force a memory is never good, because those ideas aren’t fully formed, they aren’t ready to come out; and they will never come out how you remembered them once they submerge into the recesses of your mind. They are twisted as thoughts gather upon each other until they become part of who you are. Only such thoughts are worth coming out, when they have been untangle and rearrange the twisted mess into something comprehensible, present it in a meaningful way for others and yourself.

But can we truly trust that this will happen, or will the thought be lost in the void if not printed on paper? Let me ask you, will you ever return to a note? The thousands of ideas and thoughts collected over the years? Most likely no, why should you? You have new thoughts every day, what makes the past ones special? They aren’t, because they are shallow thoughts, the genesis of greater ideas that is now is gone because it is now on a piece of paper… Words are where thoughts come to die, or be recreated, you choose which is which.

© Christopher Stamfors

by Stamphers

The Swedish Myth

In Europe, Sweden was amongst the last to be christened. I think there is a correlation between the time of christendom and how pious a country is. Granted, Sweden was highly religious, as most of Europe were, during the renaissance up until the end of the 1800s. But this is a relatively short time spann, considering how much earlier other countries became christened. This could explain why the people in the southern Europe remained Catholic while countries in the North converted.

But let’s backtrack a bit, because the nature of Norse mythology and the geographical location of Sweden, is also important when learning about Sweden.

It was actually with relative ease the vikings embraced Christianity. They saw Jesus as simply as yet another deity in their already large roster of gods. Not much changed for the converted, but in time, as we all know, the christian belief and practises overtook the Norse. It is said that the people in Svealand (the area around Stockholm) in the 11th century would still call for Thor’s aid when charging into battle, which is a sign that the old Norse traditions died hard.

I’d like to believe, as a Swede myself, that another reason Scandinavians converted with relative ease is that we are a very practical people. It’s easier to believe in one god rather than several, after all. However, something that remained even though Sweden was Christian, were the stories about the creatures hidden in the woods, under your house, in the sea and in the darkness of the night. These tales about trolls and other magical creatures stayed in people’s consciousness for many centuries to come, especially in isolated villages, which Sweden had many of. It is well known that Sweden is sparsely populated for its size, this was especially true a couple of hundred years ago. Imagine, large stretches of untouched forests and a village, with only a couple hundred people were the nearest neighbour is a week away on foot. This meant that the peasant communities had to be self-sufficient and it’s not hard to imagine the tales being told in such small and isolated communities. Parents telling their children about trolls snatching kids if they are not careful, or about werewolves and Draugs by the campfire during winter.

But it wasn’t just the wilderness where these fairy creatures could be found, they could be found on ships and in homes, were the animals lived and under rocks. There were ways to appease these creatures, much like they had done with the Norse gods before them. One such tradition was to offer a bowl of porridge to the house elf to keep the home safe and don’t cause mischief. These creatures weren’t strictly evil but there were those that were malicious and could kill you if you angered them. These tales became christened, of course, as they became more and more associated with the devil. A very clear example of this change is that they say trolls hate the sound of church bells and could be driven away by the holy cross and such. It was a comfort for these people to have these explanations to why bad things happened to them and that they had ways to prevent misfortune.

These traditions were so hard to get rid of that there are documents about maidens running around naked in the meadow in 1600 century Småland as a ritual of fertility.

All these things, I believe, has shaped how Swedes view themselves and the world today. For instance, the famous Swedish melancholy stem from Stig Larssons movies, but has roots further than that. It is not so much that we are a depressed people, we are an inward looking people, think a lot and are more comfortable within small groups. We aren’t very spiritual either, though most people would acknowledge that there’s “something” that we cannot explain. But if we don’t believe in Gods anymore, nor fairy creatures, then what is this “something?” We don’t have an answer to that and it’s how should be when confronting the otherworldly. The norse Gods were faceless, imageless; we knew they existed and our sacrifices matter, but that was all we knew. Perhaps we are going back to this ambiguity?

A little brain dump from my part. Hope you enjoyed it!

by Stamphers

Do I Know Best? – Satire

Parents know best, we all know this, for they have lived their lives, they know the mistakes and how to avoid them. So did their parents and their parents-parents. How could any child be so irresponsible to not cherish the wisdom and the path their parents had set for them?

Why would anyone set out on a difficult journey to find a truth that had already been found? To seek that which have already been sought and discovered a thousand times over? Perhaps this time, the answer will be different? Perhaps I am special and my path is set elsewhere, were glory and wealth can be found!

Why would anyone seek such a goal when happiness is easily attained, already provided for you? For happiness is bliss! Not knowing that which you could have – not knowing what others have.

Are you willing to poison your mind for this quest where the ultimate end will be your downfall? Your distraught?!

Your happiness will fade and you’ll return home, knowing that you did not stack up to the world – that your parents path is all you can hope for.

And when you have children, will you tell them the truth? Of what you’d wished you had done? Or do you keep silent and hope that the next generation will reach that which you never obtained?

© Christopher Stamfors

by Stamphers