Scottish Writers' Centre The ‘Architecture and Design’ of Writing with Ian Blake

Ian Blake discusses some of the most important points of ‘architecture and design’ in the writing process.

Structuring your work is a key aspect of good writing, ensuring that related sections are linked together and that the ideas and arguments progress in a logical and orderly manner. Much like the architect who designs, structure in writing orders your ideas with similar points linked together. Ian Blake discusses and shares the importance of developing a structure on what he terms the ‘architecture and design’ of writing. Through probing his own book Flight Into Egypt, about the anonymous secretaries who noted the minutes for the Final Solution, Blake discusses some of the most important points of ‘architecture and design’ in the writing process, and the underlying structure in all writing.

Ian Blake is a regularly published, prize-winning poet who writes and lives ten miles from the nearest shop in Wester Ross, looking out towards Skye. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and Balliol, Oxford, Blake is a former climbing instructor. He was a columnist for The Irish Times, and a New Eastern archaeologist who explored the Dead Sea shore of the Judean Wilderness until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. He has since taught English at Public Schools and is a past President of the Clan Mackenzie Society of Scotland and the UK, and Chairman of the annual Gairloch ‘Iain Dall’ Young Pipers Festival.

Although many of his poems celebrate the almost vanished West Highland way of life, they also reflect universal themes. Blake’s longer poems deal with the destruction of Dresden and the Holocaust and could well be classified as ‘war poems’ in the widest sense. Of Waiting for Ginger Roger’s at Loch Oich (2007) the RJ described it as a - “beautifully balanced and highly readable collection.” The reviewer in Markings (2007) wrote, “he moves outside himself through empathy observation and accuracy…excellent on old age.”