The Story of Writing: From Stone Age to Kindle

In the beginning was the Word...

And it was Good. Mmm. Nice.

Followed soon after by Ugh! That’s yuk!

At first, these were the only words people had.

Then someone combined them to make a suggestion.

Umm? How about it? You and me, babe...??

And that was when things began to happen.

For a long time, no-one bothered to write words down. Eventually the Ancient Sumerians started to scratch marks on clay tablets. This was just to keep track of their trade transactions: how many sacks of grain for how many camels? Then some bright spark thought of putting pictures on the tablets too: it was worth getting your sacks and camels the right way round. They were pretty basic markings, made with a reed stick. If you look at a Sumerian tablet, it looks as though a bird had walked over the wet clay. But this was the first time that words had been written down.

So, strictly speaking, accountancy is the father of literature.

The earliest cuneiform (‘wedge-writing’) tablets date from around 5,500 years ago. Early scribes had to memorize hundreds of signs used to represent common words. At last someone had another good idea, and developed a system of phonograms. This meant you could spell out strange words, like foreign names, from their sounds. Our modern alphabet is based on a system of twenty-two letters used around 1200BC in the Phoenician city of Gebal. It became known to the Greeks as Byblos, the Place of the Book.

Early books were written on papyrus or vellum. The invention of paper came much later, and even then, books had to be laboriously copied out by hand. This was thought to safeguard the transmission of knowledge. When William Caxton set up his printing press in 1472, he was accused of corrupting the public by distributing bawdy ballads.

After this protracted start, the printing process began to speed up. In 1525, William Tyndale’s English New Testament was published. The Church tried to suppress it, but to no avail. Across Europe, knowledge was no longer the preserve of the educated few. Classical works in Latin were replaced by writing in local languages. By the nineteenth century, steam-powered rotary presses made production possible on an industrial scale. Scientists could share their discoveries through academic journals. Reading became a popular pastime for the emerging middle classes. In 1935, Allen Lane was stranded without a good book in his pocket, and Penguin paperbacks were born. By the late twentieth century, personal computers provided printing technology in private homes.

Nowadays, if you are a writer, you have a huge range of options to get your work into print. From gilded behemoths like Oxford University Press to innovative independent publishers like John Hunt; from ponderous leather-bound tomes to Kindle and e-books. The publishing world is changing at lightning speed: the internet means that the smallest minority interests can find their target audience.

But there is no substitute for a real book: slightly dog-eared, the pages turned down at the corners, scribbled comments in the margins. A date and place on the fly-leaf, to remind you where you were. The smell of paper, the weight of it balanced in your hands.

And that’s the story of writing. ‘LifeWorks’ is launched today. Thursday 12^th January 2012. Celebrations!!!

See the full version of this post with pictures at http://janebaileybain.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/the-story-of-writing/
 

‘LifeWorks’ by Jane Bailey Bain is a practical handbook which contains insights from psychology and anthropology. Using myths from around the world, it helps you to develop your own life story. These tools can also be used by novelists and scriptwriters. For more information, see my Author page http://www.facebook.com/LifeWorks1 and visit the main ‘LifeWorks’ website at http://janebaileybain.wordpress.com/books/

 

New Year's Resolutions

What are your New Year's resolutions? Not the ambitious ones you announce, slightly tipsy, when someone asks you at a party on the big night; nor the virtuous ones you make, feeling slightly wistful, when the next day dawns and finds life much the same  as it was before. So many people focus on their shortcomings: things they want to remedy about themselves. But as any trainer knows, criticism alone is a poor motivator. Surely it's better to focus on doing something positive: a new skill (learning a language), a dream (becoming an artist) or a long-held ambition (running a marathon). Things on your bucket list, that you want to do before you finally kick it. That way, we find fresh energies and start to change our selves. Instead of being merely remedial, our resolutions become another step on our life path. And this just could be the month to make it happen.

January is the month of Janus, the Roman god who presides over the turning year. Portrayed with two faces, he looks to both the past and the future. He is the guardian of gateways (modern keyholders are called janitors), and his image was often carved over doors. Doorways imply the entrance to a new domain: they are associated with birth, death and initiation. On a practical level, they are important for marking boundaries. A ‘front door’ separates our private lives from the public domain. Within the house, doors demarcate areas of personal space from rooms for general use. We use doorways to categorize our thoughts: sometimes you forget why you came upstairs until you go back to the hallway. Cicero coined the term ‘memory palace’ in 55BC for the technique of memorising a list of items by visualizing them in a series of rooms. Passing through doorways, whether physical or imaginary, helps us to organize information 
in our minds.

The resolutions that matter are the groundswell ones that creep into your conscious from below, that you find lounging in your mind like intruders because you had no idea you felt that way. Once formed, they seem inevitable and undeniable, a natural extension of your self.  Suddenly it’s obvious what you should do next. You can see it all clearly in your mind now. Everything we do, from making a drink to founding an empire, starts as a picture in our image-ination. This is the right direction: you just need to take the first step. And you know it is a good decision because once you've made it, life feels back on track.

See full version of this post with pictures at http://janebaileybain.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/new-years-resolutions/

‘LifeWorks’ by Jane Bailey Bain is a practical handbook which contains insights from psychology and anthropology. Using myths from around the world, it helps you to develop your own life story. These tools can also be used by novelists and scriptwriters. For more information, see my Author page http://www.facebook.com/LifeWorks1 and visit the main ‘LifeWorks’ website at http://janebaileybain.wordpress.com/books/