Writing Style, Inspiration, and Justification

There are two major problems within many academic circles. Communication between academics becomes stylised into an excessive use of jargon. And many books are written without much ability in presentation and literary style. Always remember that an academic may be a good judge of the accuracy of your ideas, but is seldom a good judge of whether your writing is readable to non-specialists.

If you want to influence people through your ideas, then it is necessary to develop a pleasant writing style. Otherwise your audience will be limited to a few fellow academics.

To achieve a good writing style takes plenty of practice over a long period of time. It is not easy to come by. I developed my writing style by regularly editing my articles over several years. Each time I began another edit, I concentrated on removing obscurity : I would take a difficult passage and work on it to make it more intelligible. All this was a hard struggle, because it forced me to attain clear thinking.

It took me many years of regularly editing my books before I achieved a readable style. (All my books were written long before I began putting them on the internet). In terms of stylistic clarity, the two thinkers who most influenced me were Freud and Nietzsche.

A major issue that a male writer faces is that of using masculine pronouns. The only pronouns in English that are non-sexist are passive and plural ones, plus ‘you’ and ‘ I ’. These are alright for short articles, but a long book for a serious audience cannot be written using these alone. So the main pronoun that I use is ‘his’, since I am male. I tried using ‘his’ and ‘her’ in alternate chapters, but stylistically it did not work for me.

Coherence

It is easy to write superficially on any topic. This way the internal contradictions in the writer's thinking remain hidden from view. My basic style of thinking is pattern thinking. This means that all my ideas have to be coherent or consistent with each other : any contradictions indicate flaws in my understanding.

It is not too difficult to achieve coherence in any one particular topic of interest, for example politics. The difficulty comes when attempting to extend ideas from one topic into other ones. So ideas about power in politics need to be coherent with ideas about power in religions, and in relationships, in sexuality, in ethics, etc.

My ideas arose from a long psycho-analysis that I did several years ago. I began writing them down in my notebooks. When a person does this, then he can see where ideas link together and where they don't, and where contradictions appear. Contradictions can lead to two different thinking styles.

The most common style is to accept the contradictions and be satisfied with obscure sections in one's explanations and descriptions of one's ideas. The obscurity serves the function of hiding those aspects of the writer's ideas that he does not fully understand. Such a thinker is usually labelled a difficult thinker (or sometimes labelled a profound thinker), since the reader has difficulty in understanding him.

The alternative style is to try to solve the contradictions. This can be very hard to achieve, since the thinking processes have to plunge into deeper levels of the mind. But this is the only way to attain lucidity in one's explanations and descriptions. My rationale for adopting this style came from one of Freud's axioms – this is the view that if you have a psychological problem that troubles you, then by fully understanding that problem it will cease to have any significant effect on you. A problem can only be fully understood if you have achieved lucidity in the analysis of it.

Sources and Inspirations

As to the sources of my writing, this is something that I am still trying to understand. There are three factors involved.

The First Factor
The starting points of my psychological explorations were always the theories of other thinkers, principally Freud, R D Laing, Nietzsche, Carl Rogers, plus others such as Rollo May, Erich Fromm, Rudolf  Steiner. An alternative perspective was provided by Buddhist theories of the mind, together with the ideas of Paul Brunton. Brunton was a western yoga practitioner and philosopher, from whom I first came across the idea of philosophical idealism (which is the idea that all phenomena are products of the mind).

The Second Factor
This was the process of inspiration. This is the difficult part to understand. What appears to happen is that my soul generates a stream of inspiration in me. This allows me to generate novel ideas and associations from the material that I am reading or reflecting on. These novel ideas are coloured by my prejudices and wishes. Therefore, at a later date, I have to edit these ideas in order to try and remove these limitations. Since I am focused on a very high level of independence from traditional theories, my soul almost never presents me with information directly ; instead, I have to work out my own conceptual presentation of the creative flow of inspiration, in a way that reflects my experiences. Hence I am both intuitive and empirical.

Another way to view the process of inspiration is that of  form and content. The stream of inspiration generated by my soul is the form. The ideas that I produce and work with are the content.

The stream of inspiration for a thinker and writer is unlike other abilities: to develop it, one has to get in the mood for it. I developed a single-minded obsession with understanding what lay ‘underneath’ my beliefs and attitudes. I presumed that these were emotions. I had almost ‘tunnel vision’ ; I could not leave any particular problem alone until I had made some progress on it. Then I could turn to another problem. So sometimes I had one problem going through my mind for months on end.

This obsession prepared the way for the eventual flow of inspiration which would give an insight into that problem. My psychological distress was the ferment from which an insight eventually came and relieved, to a varying extent, that distress. Most psychological problems have many factors to them, and so require several instances of insight to fully understand them.

The Third Factor
This is the process of  justification, the need to validate the writer's attempt to repudiate an injustice that he/she has suffered or can empathise with.

Justification

Why did I write my books?  During my 40s and 50s, when I went through endless years of very deep self-analysis, I found that the ideas being created in me often bore little resemblance to traditional ideas of consciousness, spirituality and ethical philosophy. So the most important drive in me was that of justifying my own perspective on reality.

During the early 1990s, when I was constructing my theories, social psychology appeared to be the dominant mainstream psychology in England. In nearly all the books on it that I read, it was suggested that individuality did not exist. Typically, the reasons given for this view were that the child grows up in a family (which is a social group), learns a language (which is a social phenomenon), and has to relate to other people all his life. Therefore individuality is repudiated since it is believed to be a fiction ; it is assumed that there is only a social fabric to life.

I used to find this belief very upsetting, and in order to refute it  I focused on explaining individuality at the expense of social concerns. I think that I overdid this presentation. I removed most of this emphasis during later editing, but some still remains.

Justification presents a particular problem to a writer. He needs to consider how his writings will affect other people. Since my writings often concentrate on very difficult psychological problems, I have to think about how a reader will react to my ideas. Sometimes it is like walking a tightrope.

For example, look at faith. Faith is an answer to some of life's issues, but for other issues it can be a barrier. How should I present an analysis?  How can I be critical without being discouraging?  One approach that I have adopted is to try to avoid blaming anyone. And I present problems within an evolutionary perspective, so that a person can see how some problems are automatic products of evolution (such as the development of sensitivity, which can make a person susceptible to trauma).

There is an article on Justification on my website The Subconscious Mind, at
http://members.freezone.co.uk/ian-heath/

or on my website Patterns of Spirituality, at
http://www.dawndreamer.modern-thinker.co.uk/index.htm

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.