The Tower Mythos

I: The Magician

Long ago, in a land much like our own, there was earth below, and sky above. On the earth there lived a score of little creatures, simple things who dreamed brightly. They looked around the earth and were dissatisfied with the limits of their existence. Life was short, and cruel. There was no shelter from the rain. They were trapped in a world of torment, and saw no means to escape.

Then one day there came a brilliance to their kind, one different to the rest. Food would not sate him. The earth around was an especial torture, for he looked up and dreamed of the sky. Perhaps, he thought, Heaven is the place where I was always meant to be. He thought that if he could reach it, all of his problems would be solved.

He envisioned the Tower. He would learn of the earth and all of its contents, and perfect its shape. He would build foundations and supports, master architecture to make the tower scrape the belly of the clouds. Then, perhaps, he would ascend to his place in Heaven.

When the others on the earth saw his efforts to create a tower, they believed him great. They called him ‘The Magician’ or ‘The Wizard’, for what he did was magic to them. Many understood the beauty of the tower, and offered to help him build it. Though they lacked his brilliance, their hands could labour and turn the physical earth. Over time, more and more of the creatures flocked to the tower. They built their homes in its shadow. This was how the metropolis was born.

By  JC Barquet

II: The Metropolis

The more people who came to the Tower, the harder it became to support them. Great farms and fisheries were needed to feed the creatures of Metropolis, forests were stripped bare and mines cut into the earth. One magician could not oversee all of this, and because these were matters of earth and not heaven, he let others manage the affairs of the city. He locked himself inside the highest room of the tower, and philosophized over how to make it become even taller without collapsing.

In the rooms below him, others established a hierarchy to determine who was closest to the heaven, and who closest to the earth. Hierophants and Empresses, Kings and Courtiers all vied for the position of master of the earth. At some times they shared this power, linked to one another in arcane conspiracy. At others, they divided Metropolis into districts of higher or lower importance to the cause. The magician grew distant from his city. Many on the earth even questioned whether he was real. Every once in a while the highest of them would say, “I am the Magician!” and use the powers of earth to convince people of the claim.

In the lowest districts of the city, life was as bad as it ever was. Though the creatures of earth labored tirelessly for the tower to keep growing, they saw little of the greatness on its upper levels. Everything on earth seemed to disappear up the steps of the tower, leaving behind only scraps for the laborers. There was a terrible separation between the Hands that brought together the energies necessary to keep the tower standing, and the Mind that made it grow taller. The tower’s foundation was unstable.

What the Metropolis needed was a Heart that would tell the Magician what the Hands required, and deliver to earth the beauty of the Magician’s Mind, and all it envisioned.

But this would not be so easy. For from those that schemed to puppet the earth came a sorcerer of particularly evil temperament, who sought not to rule the tower, but to destroy it.

 

III: The Wheel

By Michael Whelan

The evil sorcerer is known by many names. Sometimes, he is called ‘The Necromancer’, to show the abject disconnection between his living mind and his dead hands. Sometimes, he is ‘The Devil’, or ‘The Man in Black’, or a ‘Wicked Witch’. Whatever his name, all that is known of his motives is that he wishes to destroy the tower. Subtle and insidious, he knows of the growing gap between the Mind and Hands, and that all the Tower really needs to be destroyed is to be allowed to grow while its foundation crumbles. But there is a problem with this design: the birth of the Heart. He knows that should she reach the Magician, the Tower will be saved.

She the Heart also goes by many names. She has been called ‘The Lady of Shadows’. She has been called ‘The Lamb’, or ‘The Stone’. She is quick and cunning, and kind, with strengths belied by her form.

The Necromancer imprisons her within the tower, where he believes that she will be under his rule. Exercising control over the world, he believes that it is only a matter of time before the tower crumbles.

There is one person he does not count on standing against him, because he has already failed to find his heart and comes from outside of the world in which the Tower is built. This unlikely antihero was vanquished long ago by the black magician, found wanting and forever cursed by his failure. He is ‘The Hanged Man’, ‘The Gunslinger’, ‘The Voodoo Cowboy’. Once he had the potential to be as great a magician as the one who built the Tower, but having failed in his ambitions, he turns to petty sorcery, earthly dabbling, and profitless pleasures. No-one would ever expect that this wasted creature would have a part to play in saving The Heart, and yet it is he who finds her, and is tasked with helping her. They begin their long journey to the top of the tower together.

Others of the Dispossessed join their journey along the way, manifest in the spirit of the tower itself. They sometimes meet a cowardly warrior, or a mindless scarecrow. Beggars, thieves, and whores are those who end up being the champions of The Lady, because all of them are in one way or another those made worthless by the disconnection between the Hands and Mind. But by being exposed to Her, they connect with their own Hearts and find the qualities that once held them back from greatness.

By Gregory Manchess

As the heroes approach the Tower, they make many stories of victory over the neglect of the Necromancer. All of earth is won over, and at last the necromancer is defeated. The Heart rules in the Tower, restoring balance and communication between the Mind and Hands.

IV: The Wood Between the Worlds

Reaching his coveted position at the top of the Tower, The Hanged Man learns the secret of moving between the worlds, and the fate of the one from which he came. He finds the means of creating his own Tower, becoming the magician for the next age.

The space between the worlds reveals the true nature of reality: a vast network of towers, all with their own story, all connected by the same central players, who wear different faces from earth to earth. Most importantly, the new magician believes he has found the means to create a Tower which will climb higher than any that came before it. He sets out with this goal, ultimately doomed to the fate of all magicians who came before him. He creates a Tower in a Revised Eden, which falls prey to a new Devil.

By Victoria Thorndale

~~~

Greater Aspects of The Tower Mythos

The Magician:              This is a symbol for ‘Brilliance’. The Magician is easily identified with genius and science, an embodiment of The Tower as a person. The Magician is not always the one who rules the Tower, but is always the one who envisions it.

The Tower:                   This is a symbol for ‘Power’. Towers perfectly exemplify an abstract power that reaches beyond brute material force. It can be associated with divinity, or with magic, or even with the more subtle magic of language, politics, reason and rhetoric. It is also seen as a bridge between a lower state of existence and a higher one. Those who control the bridge determine who gets to cross.

The Metropolis:            This is a symbol for ‘Society’. It is popular to express The Tower as a city or nation because The Tower Mythos mirrors the problems that arise as a result of social hierarchy, and suggests how these problems can be fixed.

The Mind(s):                 These are symbols for idealism, aesthetics, and morals. The Emperors, Queens and Hierophants fit into this category. In the beginning of The Wheel, they are seen as corrupt, or open to corruption. They spout ideals of control, strict order, and crippling extortion which permits them to lead extravagant lives. Inevitably they attempt to control The Tower by means of force. The Mind’s restoration is shown in the Metropolis as social consciousness and movement up or down the class system by means other than force. It is shown in the Magician as a return from isolation within The Tower.

 

The Hand(s):                     These are symbols for practicality, cultivation, and productivity. The labourers, bourgeois, and crafters fit into this category. In the beginning of The Wheel they are seen as being oppressed to a point of dysfunction, suffering famine or plague, or openly riotous. There are those among them who hold that violent revolution is the only way to achieve their goal, though without the Heart success in this regard only leads to a different corrupt Mind. By the end of The Tower Mythos famine ends and plagues are cured, and the working class experiences a renaissance.

By Neville Dear

The Necromancer:        This is a symbol for ‘Corruption’. The Necromancer, though he is one kind of magician, does not have a brilliance for creation. His talent is for destruction. As such, he needs a Tower to destroy. The Necromancer, like the magician, is not necessarily the one who rules The Tower, but is always the one who envisions its destruction. The Necromancer may be taken as what happens to a Magician when he loses his Heart.

The Wheel:                    This is a symbol for ‘Revolution’.  It denotes both travel and a cyclical pattern. The stories that take place in The Tower Mythos are most commonly part of The Wheel, markedly distinct from the events around it, which are mostly related to background and setting. It can be seen as the action linking cause (what comes before The Wheel) and effect (What occurs after it). The Wheel is an effective symbol not only due to its association with travel and cycles, but also because of its physical shape. A central, transverse axle holds the wheel in place, and the wheel moves around it. There is a distinct hub and rim, joined together by spokes. All are good points on which to base metaphors.

The Heart:           This is a symbol for ‘Restoration’. The Tower’s Heart is frequently replaced by soldiers or a guardian when it is not in its rightful place, showing that force is being used in absence of conscience. The Heart is the point of mediation between the Hands and Mind. The Heart also tends to restore the balance to all metaphorical extensions of The Tower: by encountering people, people are healed. By encountering a nation, the nation heals. By being placed in The Tower, The Necromancer is healed and replaced by a Magician.

The Heart is also identified with sacrifice, and does not always survive the turn of The Wheel. When the Heart is sacrificed the Tower is destroyed, along with The Necromancer. Hands and Minds are rendered equal, and are tasked with building a new tower in the revised Eden. Should the Heart survive and enter The Tower, then it is taken that the Tower, Metropolis, and Magician are all saved too.

The Hanged Man:

This is a symbol for ‘Struggle’. The Hanged Man is a third variation of the Magician, endeavoring endlessly to become his equal, but held on earth, incapable of breaking through to the upper levels of The Tower. The corruption that has seeded the earth and stripped it of its resources prevents him from constructing his own Tower. Thus he becomes an enemy of The Necromancer.

At the beginning of The Wheel, The Hanged Man is suffering the same disconnection between Hands and Mind as The Tower and all its other manifestations, capable only of the lowest sorceries and mechanical pursuits. It his encounter with The Heart that restores him to his true ambitions, and enables him to face The Necromancer. He is frequently depicted as an antihero; sacrificing and pragmatic, an abuser of drugs (including alcohol) and language. He is, in a word, ‘Real’ rather than ‘Ideal’ due to his unwilling imprisonment on earth. He changes over the course of the story, becoming more Ideal as his heart is restored.

The Hanged Man is the Magician of the revised Eden. Once he has reached the top of The Tower, his struggle is rewarded when he discovers the means of creating his own, either by building in the ruins of a destroyed Tower or entering a world where a tower has never been.

By Robert Sammelin

The Wood Between the Worlds:

The Wood is a symbol for the fabric of reality, the ‘hidden truth’ that the Magician discovered by reaching the heavens. It is a physical manifestation of the phrase, “It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.” In a way, the Wood can be identified as a Library (another place made of trees and filled with stories). The Wood’s part in the Mythos is to reinforce the idea that nothing really ends, but simply becomes part of something larger and more complex.

The Revised Eden:

The Revised Eden is the name for an earth without a Tower, upon which the Hanged-Man-Turned-Magician plans to create a new, improved Tower. The ultimate teaching of The Tower Mythos is that even this attempt shall fail, but the way in which it fails may be different, or less harsh. There is one significant difference in varieties of The Tower: The fate of The Heart. In some instances it is sacrificed to save the world, and in others it and its Tower survive to become part of the greater world.

Lesser Aspects of The Tower Mythos

A Rose by Any Other Name

The Rose often depicts a revised attempt at creating a Tower more in tune with its heart and the earth from which it grows. One of the permutations of the Tower, The World Tree, is seen as a stable basis for the Hand-Mind relationship which promotes the idea of conservation working alongside civilization. The message here is clear: Don’t forget that the earth is what keeps the Tower standing. A balanced Tower works in harmony with nature.

Sexual Metaphysics

The Tower is pretty obviously a totemic symbol, erect and phallic. It appears at once to mean Power, but in the context of the greater narrative it is an unstable power that, ungoverned by a heart, becomes corrupted. In order to remain stable it needs to heed the Eden that surrounds it, and if not it will crumble and no second Tower can be born to an Eden Revised.

The ultimate lesson to this is the necessity of connection and cooperation between sexual partners in establishing a lasting existence.

The idea of The Tower as a rose or a flowering tree is also important in this sense: flowers, in sexual symbolism, are associated with femininity due to the way they are pollinated and due to their passing resemblance to female genitalia.

Masculinity is identified with brute force, mechanics and ‘heartless’ emotional disconnection.

Femininity is identified with diplomacy, nurturing, and empathy.

The implication is that The World Tree – the most stable permutation of The Tower – is female, or that the magician at its peak is feminine.

Why is The Tower Mythos so recurrent?

The Tower Mythos recurs whether or not people are aware of it because it is based on forms that affect the world we live in, principally:

Evolution:       The idea that hierarchies will always emerge, strong elements will succeed and weak ones fail. A power vacuum will cause conflict over resources, those who have not earned power yet still possess it will attempt to exploit others to stay in power.

Entropy:         The idea that systems will arrange themselves in a way that gives off the maximum amount of energy to neighboring systems. In The Tower Mythos, the earth is one system and the sky is its encompassing neighbor, the Tower the channel between them, and The Hanged Man the manifestation of the maximum potential of the World.

Sequence:        Expressions can be arranged into a state where latter components are extrapolations of former components. As a cyclical Myth, cause and effect are interconnected in a fluid network that allows for maximum variation. All that will happen has technically happened already, so the order in which things occur is of minimal consequence to the events of the narrative.

Opposition:     Every expression that exists has an absolute state, a negative of that absolute state, and a neutral point between it. The Tower Mythos is very effective at demonstrating this through parts that connect in the form of ‘Thesis-Synthesis-Antithesis’. For example, ‘Earth-Tower-Sky’, ‘Hand-Heart-Mind’, ‘Necromancer-Hanged Man-Magician’.

Logic:              Most Tower stories are a sum of their conceptual elements. Given the interactions between all possible permutations of class, worldscape and character, similar events are foregone conclusions.

In short, The Tower Mythos recurs because it makes sense. It is a metaphor for the systems we encounter every day, both personally and in the world around us.

The Tower Mythos, being a story, also has all major characters and plot elements that fit the contemporary terms of conducting a narrative:

The Magician:                                                    Creator of the Situation

The Tower:                                                          The Conflict

The Metropolis:                                                  The Setting

The Mind(s):                                                        The Obstructive Secondary Characters

The Hand(s):                                                        The Assistive Secondary Characters

The Necromancer:                                             Antagonist

The Wheel:                                                          The Storyline

The Heart:                                                           Love Interest (Not always Romantic)

The Hanged Man:                                              Protagonist

The Wood Between the Worlds:                     The Turning Point

The Revised Eden:                                             The Conclusion

The Tower Mythos is not a Monomyth, but it is a specific interpretation of a monomyth with attributes that lend themselves to broad interpretations, and similar interpretations frequently recur. For example, the nature of its Protagonist as a reluctant or unlikely antihero, or the return to a Garden of Eden at the story’s conclusion, or the bafflingly consistent use of Towers, flowers and trees to mirror a climax. The Tower Mythos may be one small part of a larger story. But the gist of it is that it does rise again and again.

As such, it is incredibly helpful in understanding the concepts behind a story, and identifying the elements within a story from their subliminal associations. For example when someone is looking for a story’s point of conflict, they may not find it because ‘conflict’ is too abstract. However if they simultaneously condition themselves to look for a ‘Tower’, there is more chance of finding a concrete association with Conflict and realizing all the other conceptual elements that form around it.

The Tower Mythos can get a little out of control, a clear example of Apophenia, the habit of seeing patterns in things where there are none (For example with number patterns, or religious characters in breakfast foods). It encourages a feeling of conspiracy. Yet, we do know that not all that may be considered apophenia is. The Golden Ratio is a concrete example of a recurrent number pattern. It occurs because reality has certain immutable principles in common with mathematics. If The Tower Mythos is the same, it holds that it too has this quality.

~~~

MINI-UPDATE:

I'm still finding connections to the tower, trying to be strict about what I consider part of the Mythos and what is really little more than my own feverish imagining.

This candidate struck a chord I can't help but work into the melody: Amanda Palmer put up an animation of an old voice-note of Neil Gaiman sleep talking. It made me think of The Wood Between the Worlds immediately.

Props, Amanda.

21st Century Writing Styles:

If you are not illiterate, which I think it is safe to assume, you have probably already given some thought to the best manner in which to go about writing. If you are hyper-literate, you most likely have tried one or two of these styles in order to get away from the difficulties of the particular one most exercised by you. Each has advantages and disadvantages. I recommend rotation between them, as they can have a profound effect on your craftsmanship.

Here are some of the more common approaches:

Position #1: The Perpendicular

 The most common stance for any form of computer-based writing, The Perpendicular is generally considered as the accepted style for office work and casual drudgery. If you do it right, it can be quite effective. A large desk means you can spread out several reference books, while your computer monitor rises up from them like an obelisk, suitably compounded upon as the metaphorical summation of all their worth. While in The Perpendicular, it is important to pay attention to three factors: the temperature of your feet, your access to liquid sustenance, and how often you stop writing to check what’s happening on the internet.

The first two are comfort modifiers. It is very difficult to write with cold feet. Every few seconds you’ll find yourself thinking, “Hey, my feet are cold, maybe I should stand up and get a blanket or a pillow or something.”

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU DO THIS.

It’s a slippery slope, dear reader. Once your feet are warm, you will begin to feel sleepy. Then as your eyes flutter, you will begin to think you should have ‘just a quick nap’ so you can concentrate better. Then you will wake up hours past your deadline feeling groggy and bamboozled, as though you’ve just been mugged by polite and persuasive unicorns. It is not a nice feeling.

The trick is to prevent your feet from being ‘too’ cold. Place something hard beneath them, so that your legs are perpendicular to your torso. Adjust the room temperature, not your personal temperature. When you feel the sneaky sense of frostbite in one of your feet, tuck it underneath the other one until it gets warm. Then cross over. You may even find, from careful application of pressure, that if your feet are on something with a sharp edge it helps to drive your bottom foot into it a bit. Pain helps to focus the senses. And if your feet are itchy the sensation is magical.

Liquid refreshment is very important. Tea is great, as is coffee, but you don’t want to let it control you. It’s very easy to slip into a refreshment cycle, wherein you drain a cup, get up to go to the bathroom, fill another cup with your choice beverage, and hurry back to your desk, only to repeat this cycle every twenty minutes. By the end of the day your teeth will feel like tree bark, and your tongue will taste like it has been dumpster diving. It’s gross, and the grosser you feel, the easier it will be to crawl under your bedcovers and cry about how no-one loves you and you’ll never make it in the real world. Stop it. You are not an animal, you are a human being.

Tea is not something that sustains you, it is a reward for work well done. Once you manage to separate the need for tea from your ability to write, you have broken the refreshment cycle. You can still have tea, but only as much as 3 or 4 times a day, while reading or staring at nature, in between periods of writing. Water is different. You should keep a supply somewhere near but not at your desk, so that a careless nudge does note deluge your notes and keyboard, and so that you have to stand up to take a sip . This way you will not drink every time you are thinking of what to write next, and avoid unnecessary bathroom breaks.

Access to the internet is a devilish thing. It’s very useful to have around as a fact-checker, encyclopaedia, dictionary, thesaurus, and jukebox – but it is also evil and soul-sucking. So long as it is around, you will think of all the things that you could use it for. You will look at pictures of funny cats, read blogs, check what computer games are coming out and indulge in all your personal fancies. And if, at the end of the day, you have written more than a page, it is practically a miracle. It feels like you’ve been doing a lot, it feels like you’ve been learning loads. But when you look at what you’ve actually produced the next day, you will be astonished at how little you can remember of what you actually did while you were sitting at your desk, ‘working’. There is something you need to remember for using the Perpendicular:

Input materials should always equate with output materials.

For every word you read, you should produce a word. For every picture you see, you should write a thousand words. For every video you watch, you should write an essay. If you are not doing this, you need to break out of The Perpendicular. It isn’t working. Move on to another style. Cut off your input, and assume a more focused stance.

Even an experienced master will suffer without flowing into another form of writing after spending too long in The Perpendicular. Your eyes will water, you will get sores on your posterior. Your spine will slowly curl over until your head is on your desk, and if you’re like me you will sit there ingesting tiny bubbles of air that you will slowly deliver for the rest of the day in the form of micro-belches. It is a horrible, horrible point to reach. So don’t demand it of yourself. Move.

Position #2: The Composer

This is an especially focused position that comes in handy if you have a piano, best supplemented with a laptop or a handwritten journal. Sitting at a bench demands a certain rigidity of the spine, which makes you feel super-fancy and thus hyper-critical over the quality of your work. Also, because you don’t have space for anything on the piano, you will have to make do without your dictionaries, guidebooks and the Internet. Essentially, The Composer forces the writer to ‘wing it’, constructing a work of art in the moment as though piecing together a melody. This style works particularly well for poetry or thought journals, which can suffer a foul tempo if they are not written in a single sitting.

If you are a Renaissance person, and you take to writing music and building houses in-between committing your intellectual frolickings to paper, then The Composer can also serve as a means to focus your thoughts through music. While this does drive distraction through the roof, especially for novices such as myself, a simple stroking of the keys can help capture the emotional register of your work, and leave inspiration trilling about the earlobes. If you are not, then it’ll still make you feel fancy if you care to pretend.

You probably won’t ever be particularly inclined to hold with The Composer for extended periods, but that’s okay. It is intended for short, intense bursts of writing – a break of pattern just long enough to pull one out of the slump of a Perpendicular quickly slipping into a parabola.

Position #3: The Horizontal Flop

This position is best when coupled with a laptop and a futon, or some other kind of low cushioned area. The trick is to position yourself in such a way that your chin and arms dangle off the edge of a comfortable surface which holds your prone body. The laptop then lies on the floor in front of you with its screen pushed back as far as it can go. This style works best for those suffering from sore muscles or laziness, or extreme vertigo. It can be quite enjoyable, as pushing buttons from this angle is likely to make you feel like some bizarre space-bug who is just now learning how to type things. There is a profound sense of achievement attained through every typed word.

The Horizontal Flop is great for those who suffer insomnia. One minute you’re typing and thinking out a particularly complex phrase, and the next you’ve drifted off, partially asphyxiated by the edge of your bed pressing into your throat. You will wake up dazed and confused sometime later and read your work, possibly a little overwhelmed by how overwhelmingly crappy your writing is when you are sleepy. You do get points for trying.

THE HORIZONTAL FLOP IS NOT A SERIOUS WRITING STYLE. You will lose consciousness many times. You will spend half-an-hour on a single paragraph. At some point you will need the bathroom, and you will not get up to use it when perhaps you should, leaving your work with a backwash of sloshy associative metaphors. The Flop is for depressed writers who are attempting to salvage a small modicum of professional credibility during a creative dry spell. It can sometimes be a great help in pulling a writer out of a depression by convincing them that they aren’t ‘totally’ worthless. But once that point has been reached, another style should be attempted at once.

The Flop is a good position to sleep in if you are a dreamer, because upon waking you can immediately type out a list of all the important details of the dream. It’s also great if you know you are going to be grilled by your colleagues the next day:

“The article? Oh, yeah, it’s getting there! I was in front of my keyboard all night.”

Position #4: The Rembrandt

At some point you have to admit that you spend way too much time sitting down. Generally because there are small sores sprouting on your otherwise lovely derriere, and occasionally because when you stand up your legs topple over sideways. It’s the 21^st Century, so we get it – working is done from the seat of your pants, whether you are flying an aeroplane or working as a corporate wage-slave in one of those cute little white boxes.

Some highly odd research has recently suggested that standing at a desk rather than sitting at one is enough to classify as exercise over extended periods – as much as three marathons a year for a full-time job. With this in mind, it is important to get your exercise done, even while you are writing. Stand at your desk. Lift your monitor/journal/IPad up in front of you (on a stack of digest novels, if necessary) and gaze at it as if it were a painting. Hold your keyboard as you might hold a paint pallet, or rest it hip-height in front of you. This, esteemed reader, is The Rembrandt, and aside from feeling fancy it counts as physical labour. In between typing you shall no doubt fill your moments of deliberation with arm stretches and leg bounces which would otherwise be restricted by attaching a large and comfortable object to your posterior.

What is immediately apparent about The Rembrandt is the sense of energy and motion it lends to its user. No longer are you a slouching pen-pusher – you are an Earth-being! You can stand proud and tall on your Earth-legs and declare to the world that nothing shall keep you cowering in your chair! Your life has VALUE!

For a few hours at least. Time wounds all heels, and eventually you shall sit and rub your aching feet. But surely that brief flirtation with gravity counts as a jog. Well done, you.

Position #5: Couch Garnish

Lacking a desk, the most comfortable place to write with some sort of lumbar support is on a sofa, or a bed. In all honesty I have never had much success with this style, and generally end up sliding into a ‘The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table’ position. But I know many people without desks who must use this position regularly, or, if it is really as impossible as it seems, fib about working to seem more interesting. Placing their writing tool on a lap (when sitting) or a knee (when lounging), they gain the paradisiacal comfort of relaxation coupled with diligent scribbling.

Doing this dances with danger, however. The only difference between couch garnish and a couch potato is a single bulbous nodule deeply rooted into position. As comfortable as being couch garnish is, it is imperative to get up frequently if one is to avoid abandoning one’s writing as one’s limbs fuse into the crevasses of the surrounding cushions. Because of this, behaving as couch garnish is ideal for when you know that you are going to be interrupted. Use this style for those lingering periods when you are ready to head out of the house but still suffering the whimsy of an unpunctual companion. Use it when you are slowly elegising food as it is cremated in a nearby kitchen. Use it when your parents are around, so they can see that you are actually doing something with the life they so callously granted you.

Position #6: The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table

After extended periods of writing, it is common to morph into something not-quite solid that feels gravity more intensely than other beings. Like cheese exposed to the midday sun, writers begin to seep into their surrounding environment, and without making an effort to periodically lift themselves up, they shall find themselves lying flat on the floor, where there is no truly effective style of writing to follow.

All is not lost! Even when gravity has you pinned down, there are steps you can take to stay productive. You need to find yourself a coffee table. When you are sitting on the floor, a coffee table gains qualities comparable to a desk. By propping your flaccid spine up against the foot of a sofa, you are ready to resume working despite the cruel tug of your mortal coil. Stretch out your legs, and pad your butt with a reachable cushion. You could be here a while before someone comes to rescue you.

Oddly enough, some of my best work has been written from beneath the coffee table. Perhaps it is the lack of distractive influences, or that a brief nap may be had without fear of encountering true sleep, leaving me forced to focus on assembling verbiage when I lie down sideways and close my eyes. Perhaps it is that from the floor I lose all pretense of okayness, and may dip my reservoir into my exposed and quivering heart for the words I require.

Whatever The Thing That Lurks Beneath the Coffee Table is, it is an decent writer. And so its rather tortuous epithet need be included in this list.

Position #7: Antithesis

Antithesis is the tie an office worker wears to a barn dance. They may not be a particularly well-to-do person to begin with, but by taking their professionalism to an unprofessional local, they suddenly have the smarting appearance of wearing a tuxedo to a dinner party, without having to go through with the dangerous act of renting an actual tuxedo. In short, it makes the writer look good by comparison.

To perform Antithesis, move your office to a coffee shop, busy street corner, or pub. Continue to write. Shake your head at the frivolous shenanigans undertaken by those around you in an attempt to escape their work. You love your work. The thought of leaving it at home would very well spoil your evening. By preparing for an outing with Antithesis, you can very easily avoid all the slow parts of a night out, and quickly snap shut your journal to uptake any amusing lark that may present itself. It is the last trick of a relentless writer, who remains unchanging in their desire to capture their ideas despite their constantly changing location.

Antithesis does have its limitations. Moby Dick was not written from the top of a volcano, and if it were there is a good chance lava and sulphur poisoning would have seriously damaged Melville’s ability to think of good sentence structure. So don’t write important things while sitting on a social volcano. Take along a journal for planning things: use it to write flexible descriptions from the perspective of a character, preparing to get inside their head. Write out a plot outline, or a profile for a character or setting. Pay attention to all the bustle around you, think the things that come into your head, and take the chance to write them down before they escape you. All this stuff will make your end-work better, and it needn’t take up the valuable time you spend sitting in your personal Fortress of Solitude.

Naturally, people are likely to bother you. This is a wonderful time to work on synopsis. Say they ask,

“So what are you writing?”

(Which they, whoever they are, will.)

What are you writing? Can you put it into words? Because you will have to at some stage. Possibly when you are confronted with a publisher. Antithesis gives you the chance to test-drive your work in a real world environment, and ensure that though you have been doing everything in your head, it hasn’t become a pitiful, unreadable abstraction sensible to your mind alone. It’s oral writing, which in most societies is simply called ‘talking’. It is also important.

~             ~             ~

There are many more writing styles waiting out there to be discovered. Some involve dirt. Others involve pillow forts. These are just the basics. Try them out. Invent your own. Bathe regularly, and tip the service staff at cafés.