August 16th, 2010
Over the last few days I attended a writer’s conference interstate. The taxi driver who drove me to the airport yesterday afternoon asked me what I’d been up to. I told him and he shyly confessed to me that he was writing a book. He was tertiary educated, presented as very intelligent, outlined the story he was writing but revealed that he could not overcome his own fears regarding his ability as a writer and was stuck gathering research material for the book rather than writing, editing and submitting. I’d hazard a guess and say that his manuscript probably had much to recommend it. The story certainly appealed to me – a family saga starting in Poland and moving to Australia. But he couldn’t get over his fears and thus was unable to complete the book and move on to the submission stage.
I understood immediately what he was feeling. I know several sensitive and wildly talented writers and artists who do not have the inner resources (or external support) to overcome these crippling anxieties. Their work remains undone or obscured by those who can cope with the emotional demands of creative work. A great pity.
I understood what he was telling me because I’ve felt those fears as well. I’m toughening up every day, but when you are starting out as a writer the self censoring, the constant self doubt and worry that you are just wasting your time and will be humiliated if you show someone your work can be crippling. But you cannot move forward unless you let go of the fear. You cannot develop unless you open yourself up for constructive criticism, as my friend Pete Morin says in his blog. You cannot drag the same manuscript around for ten years, tinkering here and there but refusing to submit. Burn it or shred it or dig a hole in the garden and leave it there wrapped in plastic for a few years, but let it go and write something else.
Or stop writing and do other things. Draw a line under that part of your life and move on, because hanging around when the magic has gone is a living death.
The decision to move onto something else is not an easy one, but nor does it signify failure. You have to ask yourself do I want to do this – with all the attendant agony, or do I not. Because if you do, you must find ways of dealing with the angst so it doesn’t hold you back. If you don’t want or need that pain in your life, let it go. Walk away and find a more soothing and rewarding occupation.
I walked away from the stress of the art world – and if you fear public humiliation and exposure as a talentless wannabee do not venture into that world - into a private world of growing vegetables and cooking. I got very good at the cooking; I made all sorts of Italian preserves, pasta, gelato, and foods from all around the Mediterranean – French, Lebanese, Spanish. I read their cultural histories and the history of food and ingredients, I grew heritage seedlings, scoured seed catalogues, haunted growers markets and French cheese shops, and it was a very soothing and creative period in my life. Constantly praised for my cooking skills, no one ever said ‘re do that bit’ or ‘cut that chapter’ or rejected what I offered. When I felt it wasn’t enough anymore, I decided to try writing. Now I just throw meals together because I’m consumed with what I do now. It’s probably the antitheses of the speedy modern life but that fallow period of almost ten years was vital to my journey back to public creative work.
I need the intensity and challenge of a creative mountain to climb. If I don’t have it I build that mountain in my head, and as anybody knows, it’s painful having a mountain inside a human skull. If I could walk away from it all and be happy I would, but I know it’s not possible for me. It is for some others and sometimes walking away is the healthiest thing to do.
So my taxi driving friend, what do you think?
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: creativity, Food, madness, writing | 8 Comments
August 3rd, 2010
I’m a stony eyed killer.
I’m your go-to gal when you want to kill off your darlings. I kill my own without any feeling of remorse. I highlight them, they startle in the sudden shock of light, knowing what’s coming is no pleasant cut and paste to a new context. I press delete. I feel nothing except a frisson of satisfaction in the job. I take a swig of coffee and keep moving.
I wasn’t always like this. My darlings were precious and I indulged them whenever I could, but it proved to be an unhealthy attachment, a toxic dependency that could only bring me down.
I had thirty thousand of them, the start of the sequel to The Book of Love, which I wrote in 2008 as I was still under the spell of my characters and could not let them go. I had to be with them, so I started a sequel, little knowing that one day a big publishing house would say, ‘do you have a sequel?’ Of course, I chirruped, not realising the full and fatal implication of that simple affirmative.
I had started a sequel so finishing it should be easy. What foolishness, what utter inexperienced naivety, what lazy self deception. I struggled to shoehorn those thirty thousand beautiful words into a sequel. I … had … to … use … them …*panting noises*
I learned, through flagellating myself with these words day in and day out that it had been a bad creative decision. Two years before I had been in a different place as a writer and words written then, no matter how beautiful or funny, simply were not working. As I and my manuscript slowly steamed toward the iceberg, my publisher had the presence of mind to alert me. A pit was dug, the words assembled, the delete button was pressed. After that moment, killing a paragraph here a sentence there arouses nothing in me other than pride that I can be so ruthless.
As the editing of the sequel comes to a close and the sun sets on the smoking delete button, I look around for my next project and dig up a manuscript written in 2006. I start work, I get frustrated, I can’t get it to work, my mojo has not awakened, what is going on?
Done it again, haven’t you? How much pain do I have to go through before I learn to let go?
So I extracted the characters and will build them a new world. And I killed the rest.
I killed them and it was good.
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: imagination, madness, writing | 6 Comments
July 2nd, 2010
Dan Holloway is a contemporary writer who I truly admire. I read and re-read his work and I’m always left hungry for more. He possesses a phenomenal energy, intelligence and generosity of spirit and his commitment to independent publishing is matched by his actions in starting the Year Zero Collective and in publishing his own works through various independent publishing outlets.
We ‘met’ in the over heated world of writers online and are both members of the ethereal Grey Havens, a small, online, raggedy crew of writers with other lives in law, PR, journalism, child rearing, academia, writing and teaching.
Dan has recently released (life:) razorblades included and kindly agreed to talk about the work on my blog.
“My writing has been called bleak, dark, and bereft of joy and hope. The first two of these I will readily concede. The latter two, never. In a world where the default setting is vanilla, acceptance, expectation, normal; in a world where the tragic few who wrestle with life full-on and fail are condemned when it is not they who are too sick for the world, but the world too sick for them; in a world where the grey, suited swamp of the billion walking dead is revered; in this world, anyone or anything that celebrates the full, damaged, despairing, fucked-up and spectacular reality of life is a shriek, a shout, a holler of joy to pierce the eardrum of death.”
From the introduction to (life:) razorblades included.
Dan, you say your work has been called dark and bereft of joy and much of the work here is what you call ‘confessional art’, that is art where the author wears their heart on their sleeve, takes us into the darkest corners of their lives, writes the painful and the personal, and lays it bare and in our faces.’
How is Skin Book ‘confessional art’ if you are writing from a fictional character’s point of view? If it is fiction, then how do you see it as confessional?
For me confessional art is simply taking what is in your head and externalising it in the way that makes the very best sense. I don’t think questions of autobiography or “veracity” need come into it at all (although of course much confessional art IS autobiographical, like Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Every Slept With 1963-1995). As writers we happily accept that the “truest” way to convey something may be a metaphor, or a myth, and that’s how I see confessional art - it’s simply choosing the vehicle that is the very most appropriate one for whatever you are trying to scrape out of your head and onto the page. What’s particularly important for me is that an author never loses fidelity to the absolute relativism of truth (paradox intended). The moment we try to convey to a reader something that is true to them we are lost in the world of the impossible, in generalisation, in things beyond our reach. It’s only the absolute specificity of what’s inside us that we can hope (possibly without real expectation of success) to convey. And, ironically, it’s in that specificity that our only real chance of reaching out to other individuals lies.
To come back to the fictional character’s point of view - I think we need to separate out point of view from circumstance. I’m not a 17 year-old lesbian growing up in Hungary, never have been, and possibly never will be. Nor am I a 30-something woman who killed her abusive twin and flayed him to make a journal from his skin. The details of their lives are not the details of mine. But their point of view is mine. As a writer it’s my job to create the details that can best house and display that point of view, that best give it the grist to play out the questions that form the incessant noise in my head. The fiction is in the detail. The truth is in how characters deal with those details. I think art probably has to have both. Art fails when the truth is in the detail and the fiction is in the point of view (which is why autobiography is no more confessional than a novel); or when there is fiction in both - not because I don’t like escapism - I do - but because there is, I think, something inherently dishonest in pretending that we can create a point of view outside of our own.
What process does your writing undergo from first impulse through to the beautiful crafting?.
It really varies a huge amount from piece to piece. My stories always start with a picture of a character. I tend to follow them around, and watch what happens, and then the story comes out pretty much fully-formed. At that stage I’ll edit and edit to cut it down.
Most of the time I edit for sound if that makes sense - as a reader I sound out what I’m reading in my head (that sounds really daft, but I used to do competitive speed reading, and apparently, we sub vocalise at up to 1500 words a minute, which is about 4 times as fast as the usual reading speed, so it really is something for writers to think about), so as a writer what really bothers me is how the sentences sound. I want the cadence to be exactly right, and the rhythms to work – even if sometimes that means my punctuation’s wonky, or I say “s/he said” too much.
For poetry, it tends to be the other way round. I start with a skeleton and work up, building sentences in. I have a very bad habit of writing lines that are hard to resolve (going back to the sound thing – it’s really old fashioned, I know, but I like my sentences to “resolve” the way a musical phrase will resolve), so I often run on and on and that needs to be edited really toughly otherwise it’s impossible to perform the poems. I do a lot of live readings, and whilst my breathing technique is OK, I don’t want to set myself an impossible task!
Simon Beckett said artist’s need to find ‘a form that accommodates the mess.’ I read on your blog that Skin Book was meant to be a Flash Novel not a poem. You were emphatic that it was not a poem and yet it reads as a verse narrative. Why was the form so important?
I was a teenager in the 80s and a student in the 90s so I grew up with Young British Art and the whole text thing, which has left a lasting mark on me in terms of how I present things
I’ve read a lot of collections of work recently for review purposes, and by and largely I’ve been hugely disappointed in them because they’ve been just that – collections. For me a collection should give you something more than you’d get by reading the pieces separately. The way they’re placed should lead you through, should make you see things in each piece you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. In the case of razorblades, I want to take people on a long dark night of the soul and out the other end.
I was emphatic it wasn’t a poem because I still somehow feel I don’t “get” poetry, and I don’t think of myself as a poet. It’s like cooking – I love cooking anything savoury, especially coming up with sauces and reductions that take weeks because there are so many layers to them. But it’s all by feel. And I get really nervous around puddings, because there’s this aura around them that they’re exact, there are rules. I feel a bit the same with poetry. Poets do all these weird things with indented lines and placing stuff on the page and I feel like I don’t understand it, so I can’t really be a poet. And SKIN BOOK has the full structure of a novel – I’ve spent years railing against classical ideas of structure (I hate rules – like I say I always feel like I don’t “get” them) in novels, and I wanted to show I could actually write one if I tried – albeit one that’s only two and a half thousand words.
I find puddings intimidating as well. I’ve had to stare down quite a few.
Life can be a living hell for some people and I firmly believe there are worse fates than death. It takes an incredible act of will to embrace the life you speak of in the introduction. an you talk about the introduction and its importance in locating the following works?.
In terms of the actual content, I think there’s a lot of glibness about life. Choose life is a phrase that’s wheeled out again and again (especially that awful ending to Trainspotting), and that’s just such a cop out. What do people mean choose life? By and large when someone tells someone to “choose life” they see them walk out the door and give a big sigh of relief that the person’s off their conscience, and that really sucks as an attitude. Life is HARD.
Telling a suicidal person to choose life has consequences, and if you’re not prepared to see them through the consequences, and explain that choosing life is more difficult and more painful than choosing the opposite you should butt the hell out. I think there’s such a simplistic attitude to suicide and death, and life, and I wanted to challenge that. I wanted people to realise what they’re doing when they talk about choosing life. I find the idea that deciding to live means you’ll be happy ever after really offensive. “To live” means a lot of things. It’s fine to tell someone “to live” but that has consequences. Consequences that in some cases may be immoral and utterly unacceptable to the majority. But if you’re not prepared for that you should shut up. That’s why I ended with SKIN BOOK. It’s about two characters who are beyond acceptability. One character is a sex criminal, and the other killed and skinned her brother as a child. Together they’re happy. There’s no comeuppance or karma. They chose to live.
reading (poem)
cinched in the waist of a wholesome window
five streets from soho
ohso proper doorways
and strangers in sunhats with san miguels
and they’ve all got drinks and kisses
and they’ve all got slickety laughs
and they’ve all got smiles and cigarillos
and just enough friends
and just enough coke
and just the right words
and just the right names
and in streamers we tattoo the streetlamp black
and in velvet our tongues streak the glass
and we’re all strung out for the smell of piss
and all the beers are someone else’s
Dan Holloway
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: creativity, Dan Holloway, imagination, madness, writing | 9 Comments
May 10th, 2010
One of my very first educational experiences as an art student took place at the feet of a lecturer - we sat on the carpet and he sat on a chair - assigned to aid the First Year’s transition into this strange new world. He’d been a sculptor and conceptual artist but had moved into art theory and history. On our first day he told us that art, sex and religion, were the only areas our society sanctions as being legitimate spheres in which to experience ecstasy.
Wow. I really was at art school.
I’ve never forgotten his words - they intrigued me when I first heard them as much as they still intrigue me now, many years later. Discussions along these lines took place every day. I was expecting a little more emphasis on the technical side of art, but this was the early eighties and conceptual art had slouched into the nation’s art schools, an unfiltered Camel between it’s fingers and a copy of Baudrillard under it’s arm. Learning to paint was simply a matter of being tossed into a white cube studio space with the necessary materials and being left to figure it out in between tutorials on Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. So where was the ecstasy?
I’m not talking about the satisfaction of acquiring skills, or being overtired and spinning out on coffee and cigarettes or even completing a painting or other artwork to general acclaim. I never knew what that lecturer really meant until a couple of years later, when on an ordinary day, I stapled some paper to the wall, picked up a stick of charcoal and began to draw. About half an hour later, while totally absorbed by what I was doing, I suddenly understood what he’d been on about. I find it hard to explain but extinction of the self comes close, extinction of self and unity with the act or idea.
Three years later I had a similar intense experience, again while drawing. I don’t know the physiological basis for it; there were no paint or turps fumes around, nor chanting or drumming. I don’t want a reductionist explanation of it nor do I see it as having any mystical significance. But last week, after a long, hard day of writing I experienced a similar feeling. No, it wasn’t hysteria or relief or a lifting of pressure – although maybe that lent an edge to it - but more a rightness or unity, a submergence of the self in a creative act. It verged on the sublime. Three times in twenty-five years of creative work. Maybe I haven’t been working hard enough.
Those three occasions, particularly the last, reconfirm my own belief that whatever the outcome of the finished work, whether it hangs on a wall or whether it gets published, all the royalties and sell-through and rights sales and reprints and reviews can only stand in the shadow of such transformative creative moments. It’s why we do it, and keep doing it – nothing comes close, except, as my long ago lecturer said, maybe sex and the religious experience.
Related posts
Categories: art |
Tags: art, creativity, imagination, madness | No Comments
The Black Demon on the Writer’s Shoulder - flick him off or not?
for a good feed ...
