“For me writing is the outcome of an unquiet mind.”

Last year, Simon from St Jude’s asked if I would like to contribute to the first edition of Random Spectacular – a new occasional journal that would set out to explore the visual arts, writing, nature, travel and much more. I quickly fell on the idea of interviewing a very special writer – The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life. Despite the popularity of the Spitalfields Life blog, the GA had remained a shadowy figure and no-one had yet interviewed her, or him. That intrigued me.

The interview was published in the first edition of Random Spectacular, which sold out in less than 48 hours. I’ve written a few words on why this new, irregular journal is such a welcome addition to the world, over here. Simon asked Justin Knopp of Typoretum to design a unique piece to accompany the interview. Justin created a lovely typographic page using hand-typeset antique wooden and metal typefaces, which you can see below.

My conversation with the GA covered terrain that may interest those working at the intersection of writing and technology, or readers with a taste for urban reportage. Or you might simply enjoy it as a portrait of someone for whom writing and life are one. Here’s the article.

From Random Spectacular, issue 1

‘In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.’ With these words the Spitalfields Life blog was born, back in August 2009. Today, thousands of people from around the world come to read each daily posting by its eloquent but enigmatic creator – the Gentle Author.

Typoretum typographic print

The spirit that pervades the blog is best captured in the Gentle Author’s extraordinary promise to readers: ‘How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight. Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months… Like Good Deeds and Everyman in the old play, let us travel together.’

I wanted to find out more about the writer whose words transport me each day; whose stories take me through previously unseen doorways in my own neighbourhood in the East End. But that also required a promise from me – that I wouldn’t reveal the identity or gender of the Gentle Author. I feared that this guarding of the person behind the pen might go hand in hand with a reticence to talk. What I encountered was something else entirely. Here are some of the words we exchanged over a pot of tea in east London.

TR: ‘I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane’; what led up to that awakening? Where had life taken you?

GA: I did have quite a big career as a writer, with a play due to open on Broadway in September 2001. For obvious reasons, it didn’t open, and then my father died quite unexpectedly a week later. My mother had dementia, and the only thing she knew was that she didn’t ever want to leave her home, in Devon. So I decided to give up my career and go to be her full-time nurse, which I did for five years. During that time I couldn’t really leave the house. It changed my view of the world and I decided I didn’t want to go back to the work I had done before. Being the only child, I inherited the house. I sold it and tried to buy a place in Lisson Grove. That fell through. I tried to buy another in King’s Cross and that fell through. And then a house in Spitalfields came up. I was reluctant to live in Spitalfields, but the house was so wonderful, and I was desperate by then, so I took it. The only person I knew in Spitalfields was Sandra Esqulant, landlady of The Golden Heart.

TR: Why did you choose to blog?

GA: I was attracted to the notion that you could write something and it would be published immediately, and that you could assume an intimacy with the reader comparable to the relationship I feel when I read novels, especially those from the nineteenth century. I also calculated that from then until I reached the age at which my parents died was around ten thousand days, and I found I could respect the idea of doing a story every single day through that time. It was the best possible life I could imagine for myself.

TR: Your promise to readers includes a picture of a sundial on Fournier Street that features the words ‘Umbra Sumus’ – ‘We are shadows’. Reading your writing for the first time, I had the immediate feeling that you were either pursuing or escaping something.

GA: Well, there’s a wonderful notion that Kierkegaard described – that being a writer is like being in the continual state of running through a burning house, trying to decide what to rescue. I do feel that sensation a lot of the time. Also, that people’s stories go unrecorded is a matter of grief to me. I think that arose after the death of my parents. I grew up in Devon around old people, and I used to knock on their doors and ask to spend a day with them. I suppose I have a vertiginous sense of all the stories in the world, and accompanying that is a sense of the loss of all the stories. So I have a compulsion to collect as many as I can, for as long as I can.

TR: Your stories became longer after a couple of months of the blog, and that coincided with you writing more pen portraits.

GA: I have a personal sense of responsibility to people that I’ve met to do them justice. The idea of trying to sum someone up in a thousand words is terrifying. That was why the stories got longer and longer. The other thing that happened in the first year – unexpectedly – was that a lot of readers came along. It gave me a different responsibility; to not disappoint the reader. You want to give them something wonderful. So I became more ambitious.

TR: That is a terrific counterblast to the common, pessimistic notion that people don’t read much any more, and that writing for the Web should always be short. You show that the Web can be a place for a longer and more personal form of writing.

GA: I respect the discipline of writing; that things should be well structured and a story well told. But I also aspire to write in an unmediated way, and to not withhold an emotionalism if that’s how I react to a subject. I am also attracted to use vocabulary in a way that it is not used in journalism, but is perhaps more common in fiction. I chose to be this voice speaking from the darkness, because I want to be in private with the reader. I want the reader to understand that the writer’s intention is benign, and that we can trust each other. And I hope the readers create their own sense of who they are listening to and take ownership of what they read.  In this sense, the Gentle Author is a conceit to bring readers closer to the subject, and I want the subject to be the people I’m writing about, not me.

TR: Do you have to get into the character of the Gentle Author when you write?

GA: Graham Greene said that reading Charles Dickens was like listening to the mind talking to itself. It is the internal voice that I aspire to in my writing – what I hear inside my mind.

TR: Tell me a little more about the ‘hare-brained’ task you have set for yourself.

GA: I wanted readers to know they could rely on something new every day. And I felt that if I created this cage for myself, then I could have no escape. I have written more than 700,000 words in the last two years, so it has worked to that degree. It’s a miracle. I spend most of the day running around the streets after people and doing interviews. In the evening, I sit down to supper, and then I write. The golden rule is that I can’t go to sleep until it’s done. People sometimes think that I knock off six stories in advance and press a button each day, but it isn’t like that at all. I may write interviews up a few days later, but it appeals to me that the Gentle Author has no choice but to write a story every day. I’m aware that it’s an excessive way to live but I think life is excessive.

Justin’s letterpress forme for the poster.

TR: Your interviewees tell you remarkable things about their lives. How do you earn their trust?

GA: You have to be open-hearted and honest, and you hope people see that it is just you, and that there’s no ulterior motive. That no one’s paying you to do it. That you are doing it for love. People are wisely suspicious of writers, so I commonly send someone a piece I have already written and they can see what the outcome of being interviewed will be like.

TR: Your neighbours in the City of London seem to be a difficult subject for you. You have written that you wander ‘like a ghost among the men in suits hurrying with such inexplicable purpose between the glittering palaces.’

GA: The City is an incredible repository of stories and tradition and myth. You go to speak to the Vintners Company and they have been there since 1546. Or you go to speak to John Keohane, the Chief Yeoman Warder, and he talks you through the ritual they have been performing at the Tower of London since the thirteenth century. But equally you are aware of it as a violent, corporate world, and it is hard to reconcile those things. One of the rules of what I do is that there are no bad people in this equation. The challenge is to try to understand what individuals are doing and why. With the City, that’s a challenge that lies ahead for me.

TR: Back in Spitalfields, you write about the tension between tradition and change, such as the spiraling rents that have threatened to push out merchants like Paul Gardner.

Unless you have gone and shaken hands with Paul Gardner...

GA: It’s very difficult to trace what’s a right or wrong way for change to happen, but it’s vital that good things don’t get destroyed. For me, Paul Gardner, the Market Sundriesman, incarnates the essence of Spitalfields. Unless you have gone and shaken hands with Paul Gardner you can’t really say you have been to Spitalfields. His shop is where all the small traders in East London go to get their bags. What happened in Paul’s case was that the landlords showed themselves to be enlightened and recognised he is a special case. I hope people appreciate that the things that make this place distinctive are worth holding on to. One of the lessons revealed by the crash in the City was that the short-term profit motive is destructive and people need to take a longer-term view.

TR: You seem to revel in those lively nights out with the Bunny Girls and the transvestites and the boys’ club reunions, but how do you feel about Spitalfields on a Saturday night – the drinkers and clubbers?

GA: I think it’s a very beautiful phenomenon. I often go out and walk the streets just to see the crowds on a Saturday night. Nothing has changed much there. In the 1860s The Eagle Tavern on the City Road was getting 12,000 people turning up a night and there were complaints about the crowds then. I think the young people who dress up and come to show off their outfits on Brick Lane embody a wonderful flowering of culture. So many people compete for ownership of this place, but the truth is that it belongs to everybody and nobody. There is a magic in Spitalfields, but if you love the area you must also be generous to others who love it too.

TR: Will there be enough space in your life to do other types of writing, as well as your daily report?

GA: Well, Dickens wrote six or seven stories a week for Household Words, but he wrote the novels of Dickens as well. My background is in fiction, and originally I envisaged that there would be a chapter of a novel by me on the first of the month through the year. That has been sidelined, but as I get more confident and more in control of what I’m doing it could resurface. I’m attracted to the idea that the Gentle Author might have fictional adventures.

TR: What about visits to other places far from Spitalfields?

GA: I am a favoured person in that I have had so many experiences and lived so many lifetimes in my life already. I remember, I went to Los Angeles for the Millennium and I was with a friend in a car on New Year’s Eve, and we turned left onto the freeway into oncoming traffic. She said: “We’re going to die.” And I said: “I don’t mind because I’ve done so much stuff, but what about your son?” There are lots of places I would like to go back to – Beijing, Cuba – but what I do now forces me to live in the day. My mind is so crowded I don’t have much space to think about anything else.

TR: Of course, I must ask about Mr. Pussy. How is he?

GA: Yes, I should explain about the cat. My father died and my mother was inconsolable, so I bought a cat to give to her and that was Mr. Pussy. He was alone with her for the first year and he acquired this very calm personality from her. Now he carries all that emotional history with him. His age marks the time since my father died and his peaceful nature stems from my mother. For these reasons he means a great deal to me, and he is always a presence. Most of the Spitalfields Life stories are written in bed late at night, with him sitting there.

TR: You said something curious in a story on Dennis Severs’ house, which was: ‘Much as I love a good chat, I have many times wished that I never had to speak again.’

Dickens in Old Spitalfields Market

GA: I think talking is hard. We take people’s words to be the expression of who they are. But I have always felt, with me, that was a contradiction because I didn’t feel that in speech I could represent who I was. That was why I began to write, because by writing down I could wrestle with words and become more truthful to who I am. So yes, I think it would be wonderful if I could get through the rest of my life without talking. I once lived on an island in the Outer Hebrides. I was the only inhabitant and I had to row 45 minutes to the shore to get my mail. I would not see people for months on end and I did so much writing then. Your internal monologue becomes much more apparent when all the interference of external conversations is gone. Walking is very important in that respect too. I long for the release of the mind.

TR: So, writing is a release from the deluge of thoughts in your head.

GA: Yes. For me, the act of writing is writing it down. So I write it out first time and that is it. There are no drafts. Writing is the act of recording an internal monologue. Coming back to the notion of the mind talking to itself – for me writing is the outcome of an unquiet mind, I suppose.

TR: How has Spitalfields Life changed your life?

GA: I walk down the street and sometimes people lean out of windows to wave and come out and shake my hand. It is a beautiful thing, yet for that to happen in the middle of this huge city is bizarre. Generally, I don’t understand why people don’t talk to each other more. I think this is a political construct, this situation where we are all alienated from one another. A book that was important to me as a student was Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society. I think one of the outcomes of mass distribution through the printing press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that it made everybody strangers to each other. We see all those people out there as ‘the masses’. It’s rubbish. It’s a lie. The hope of the internet is that it allows everyone to talk to each other again, and not be strangers.

The Gentle Author’s stories can be found at spitalfieldslife.com.

Tim

You can buy a limited edition Typoretum poster here.

Limited edition poster by Typoretum

Cover by Mark Hearld and Emily Sutton

Any day now, the first edition of Random Spectacular will be flying through the postal system to homes around the country. Designed and published by St Jude’s, this occasional journal promises an exploration of the visual arts, literature, nature, travel and much more. A sneak preview here suggests there’s a visual treat on every spread. Typophiles should find much to savour. I’m also looking forward to immersing myself in the words when my copies arrive. All profits from sales will be donated to Maggie’s Centres.

At a time when many design and culture magazines are struggling – Grafik magazine closed last week, for example – it’s heartening to see a new title, especially one that has high production values and a confident approach to the sheer enjoyment of creativity. This magazine is all about reading for pleasure.

Its randomness is a sensible strategy; there’s no requirement for the publishers of such an epic collaboration to be defeated by their own promises of regularity. Besides, there’s something rather tantalising about not knowing when a magazine you enjoy will appear next. As an aside, I’m hugely impressed by the people behind Eye magazine, who have somehow managed to publish a stunning issue regularly since 1990, come hell, high water, recessions and the proliferation of design blogs.

Talking of blogs, my contribution to Random Spectacular is an interview with The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life. In fact, it’s the first interview the Gentle Author has given. I think my subject is one of the most interesting writers in Britain today. The interview discusses aspects of east London life, and of a writer’s life. I start by drawing out the surprising background to the extraordinary promise made on the blog, which says:

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

A Typoretum typographic print accompanies Tim’s interview with the Gentle Author.

Buy the magazine to read why the Gentle Author felt compelled to make this commitment. To promise a story every day is the opposite strategy to that of Random Spectacular, but it also makes sense. The web has enabled this writer to form a consistent connection with the reader. And by imposing a daily deadline the writer is forced to produce; forced to create the momentum that will transform thoughts into words that can be shared. Even slow writers can become prolific when there’s a meaningful deadline hanging over their head. The Gentle Author has written more than 700,000 words in 2 years.

Prolific publication is made possible by the web. Indeed, Spitalfields Life is an important counter-argument to the ridiculous but common notion that people don’t like to read online. Many of the daily posts are more than 1,000 words. Some much longer. Even friends who rarely touch a printed broadsheet tell me they consume the Gentle Author’s post each morning. People will read online if writers write well for them. The greatest obstacle to better writing online is the miserabilist mantra that attention spans are shortening and ‘web readers’ can’t understand anything unless. It’s written. In very. Short. Sentences.

It’s partly the variety and unpredictability of the subject matter in Spitalfields Life that keeps people hooked. Each story is a surprise, like a gift. One day we are taken up a church tower normally off-bounds to visitors, the next we’re with bunny girls in Wapping or inside a small factory on the Hackney Road. Spitalfields Life is always somewhat random, quietly spectacular.

Tim

The original article I wrote can be found here. It now has some further comments from others, including one today from Tom Albrighton.

The new article that got me going this morning is here: Less Text, Please: Contemporary Reading Behaviors and Short Formats. I enjoyed Tom Johnson’s thoughtful take on the subject, I just don’t agree with him. The response comment by usability expert Caroline Jarrett is particularly interesting.

Tim

‘Why has the myth of shrinking attention spans become so widespread, when all around we are gaining the benefits of more powerful and varied reading technologies?’

Design Week magazine has published some of the most useful articles on writing and design over the last ten years. It was an article on tone of voice in DW that led to the first meeting of 26, when the writers and clients quoted decided to get together to talk further.

The latest design writing piece in the magazine, Screen literate (29 July 2010), examined the power of the written word online. It was triggered by the launch of Yahoo’s first editorial style guide, which the internet services provider describes as ‘the ultimate sourcebook for writing, editing and creating content for the digital world.’

The quoted contributors to Anna Richardson’s article offer some sound points. Andy Budd of digital design consultancy Clearleft makes the can-never-be-made-too-often call for content and design to be developed together, “rather than pumping content into a bucket”. Jon Melville, content analyst at Civic, states that writing for the web requires a number of skills, including an understanding of “usability, search engine optimisation and decent grammar”. That hangs a question mark over the often-held belief amongst copywriters that they can turn their hand to any media for any client. How many really understand web usability?

Along with the good sense, there’s an assertion from Anna, the journalist, that I’d like to challenge. “Attention spans are much shorter” amongst “online audiences”, she says. This is a common belief, but I take a different view. The excellent Poynter EyeTrack studies, which looked at how people read print and digital newspapers, suggest that while online readers may navigate quickly to the content that interests them, they often read for longer than offline readers when they’ve found what they’re looking for. It’s a myth that we have all become Twitter-brained visual grazers with no appetite for prose. I’m with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who said: “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.”

In my experience, good digital design enables readers to be more ruthless about navigation and more immersed in conversation. The best digital design provides efficient journeys to great content destinations. That’s why usability is so important for writers working in digital media – get that bit right and you’re more likely to gain your reader’s full attention (possibly for longer than in print). The speed with which people move through the content they’re not interested in isn’t evidence that they’re not interested in spending time with online content per se. Incidentally, much print design is now influenced by web design, and comparisons should note this dynamic relationship.

The myth that readers are increasingly tough to reach and retain is fed by mountains of books, articles and talks on the enormity of information being produced and the supposed increase in demands on our time. We are swamped by communications and content, apparently. This version of society and culture suggests that the contemporary, connected reader must bravely navigate an ever-rising ocean of content in a small nimble craft. But such an interpretation of our collective media experience is wrong. There have been many periods in history when people had less time and faced enormous work and social demands (extreme poverty tends to require most of your attention). And previous generations have experienced larger single leaps in communications technology than we have, from the arrival of printed bibles to radio, film, TV and the Filofax. OK, maybe not the Filofax. But what’s most important here is that humans are hugely adaptable. We respond quickly to the new and incorporate it into our life. We interrogate innovations and use, reinvent and mash up whatever can provide us with practical benefits and pleasure.

'Living Identity' project, a collaboration between Moving Brands and Tim, using augmented reality software to create new links between digital and print content.

In terms of reading, I think we’re witnessing something rather wonderful unfolding before our eyes. We’re seeing a flowering of reading and writing that crosses generations and classes. We can now read a novel, use our phone to access a library to check a reference in it, share what we have found with our friends via social media, read our friends’ responses, draw on competing sources of information via the web, watch a video of the author talking, and so on. And we can often do that on the move. And we can have a similarly rich media experience in terms of content about everything from news reporting to poetry to fashion to cookery to politics to gossip and on and on. Thanks to digital technology, our reading can be deeper, richer, more rounded, more instinctive, more timely and more diverse. This mirrors the way our diet has improved and varied. Today’s media can provide readers with more flavours, more choice and more nutrition. Of course, there are many, many serious issues to address around literacy and education. I’m particularly concerned that many schools seem to lack the appetite to teach great, demanding literature. But the proliferation of new ways of accessing, navigating, reading and re-using content is not part of the problem, it is a potential aid in addressing the problem.

So, that leaves us to question why the myth of shrinking attention spans has become so widespread, when all around we are gaining the benefits of more powerful and varied reading technologies. For me, it points to a fear of change driven by a lack of confidence in the robustness and flexibility of our culture. Whenever I hear people bemoaning the fact that ‘young people don’t read anymore’ it suggests to me that they fundamentally mistrust others, particularly the young. But I think that cynicism goes deeper; I think it suggests we don’t trust ourselves. It suggests we feel technology (and so content) has become a Frankenstein’s monster – created by man but raging out of control. That’s not the reality I experience. Really, there are no chaotic seas of content to drown in. There are no systems so complex we can’t redesign and improve them. There are no demands on our time that we can’t reorganise or reprioritise. We created reading. We created digital media. We created culture. And we are recreating them every day. Far from being helpless victims of technology-driven dumbing-down, we are actively paying attention in all sorts of new and productive ways.

Tim