Tag: writing

Ideas

Time for a break

By Martin Vogel

Another Advent Calendar of blogposts comes to an end. Thank you for following. I hope you’ve found something worth reading here over the past 24 days. I’ve tried to leaven my tendency to the dyspeptic with more constructive fare. The Nick Cave post has been the most popular of the series. He has a discerning fan base who seem to find their way to Nick Cave related corners of the internet quite quickly. Unplanned, the series began and ended with reflections on accessing one’s whole self. Significant, perhaps, that I didn’t get round to writing about my own experience with this until the end of the run. I’m taking a break from blogging now to make my overdue contribution to the festive preparations. I will resume posting in the new year, but not on a daily basis. Have an enjoyable break. Happy Christmas, happy holidays, however and whatever you celebrate.

Advent Calendar blogposts

  1. On bringing your whole self to work
  2. The benefits of dual nationality
  3. The serious business of playing the fool
  4. From toolkits to relationships: getting real about what happens in coaching
  5. Feeback without tears
  6. Nick Cave as coach
  7. Embrace boredom
  8. Messages from history for Brexit Britain
  9. Shaping disaffection is the way to mend broken politics
  10. Taking the pulse of an organisation
  11. Why write?
  12. England’s shame
  13. Beyond codes of ethics to ethical maturity
  14. Generating expansive conversations with open space
  15. A moderate proposal
  16. The leaders we create
  17. Tracking down Conquest’s law on organisations
  18. The thoughtlessness behind organisational perversity
  19. We’re better than this
  20. Britain’s duff leadership culture
  21. Grounds for optimism
  22. On getting it wrong
  23. Exploring voice
  24. Time for a break

Image courtesy Marilylle Soveran .

Ideas

Why write?

By Martin Vogel

What’s the point of writing? Amid the torrent of tweets, snaps and status updates, the verbiage of fake news and the dreck of junk mail, why would we need more words in the world? And yet we do. We constantly need to write the world afresh. For all that some authors, such as Jane Austin, endure, mostly the great writing names of an age fade away. Who now reads Graham Greene or Kingsley Amis? Even Martin Amis? The Neapolitan Novels are today’s Dance to the Music of Time.

Writing is an act of engagement with our world in the here and now. Note, this is so even of historical fiction or sci fi: it normally reflects contemporary concerns. How could it not do since it is shaped much more by the filters and perceptions of the age and culture in which it is formed not that which it is about? But writing need not necessarily be a public act. Writing as engagement with the world is an act we can all get in on.

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Ideas

Here ends the Vogel Wakefield Advent Calendar

By Martin Vogel

It was only in the last week of November that I conceived the idea of writing a blog post every day in the lead-up to Christmas. I was inspired by my email provider, Fastmail, whose Advent calendar blogs I have enjoyed over recent years.

For various reasons, I’ve written very few blog posts over the past couple of years. In part, this has been because I’ve felt the world to be moving too fast for me to fashion my thoughts into timely and relevant written pieces. I wondered if giving myself a commitment to publish every day might break the logjam. I made the commitment semi-public by telling folk about it and announcing my intention just once on Twitter. This created enough expectations of me to be motivating; but not so many that the stakes would be inhibiting.

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