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?
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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.
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August 1st, 2010
I wandered along the other day thinking about whether or not I held a principle that I would die for - as you do. Something beyond self interest. I probably will never be put to the test so it’s easy for me to say, yes, there is one.
Universal education.
Education for all is a cornerstone of the Enlightenment, right? Education to banish ignorance and superstition so we can approach living in as reasonable a manner as we can, valuing reason and knowledge above our animal lusts for power, possession and shagging all who wander inadvertently into our orbit. We all agree on that?
You are nodding your head, sipping your coffee, saying yes … go on … your point, madam?
My point is this. It is only a principle, not a reality, despite all the posturing and blather of our politicians and educationalists. We have education. Just enough so we can find the remote control and switch onto Master Chef, find the car keys and make our way to Consumer Durable to buy a molten chocolate fountain, and then relax in front of some funny Youtube videos, then go to bed with our f**k buddy. And don’t ask me to read, crikey, I might over stimulate myself and goodness knows what will happen then?
I rant because I was myself perhaps overstimulated last night while attending a social event distinguished by a goodly smattering of very intelligent people, employed in the tertiary education sector in Chemistry, Languages, Nuclear Physics, IT, Engineering and, bless ‘em, Creative Writing.
I know from my own observations that tertiary education is sliding into laughable territory - user pays, buying places, overseas students, lowering the bar so that it’s practically underground – have all contributed. But when I hear anecdotes from those in the frontline – and yes they are anecdotes, but put a glass of wine in the hand of any academic in Australia and you’ll hear the same things – they produce a frisson of fear in my vitals. I’ll be dead before we see the real impact of the Great Dumbing Down, but my kids will feel it and it’s not going to be an easy ride for them. I suppose a single purpose electric donut maker will be some consolation though.
I wouldn’t die to save the Australian education system as it is, and as it will be in ten years time. But I would willingly stuff the petrol soaked rags into bottles and bay for the blood of all vocational educationalists as I storm the barricades erected around the lickspittle lackeys who design education to fit the interests of the capitalist running dogs of the corporate world rather than human beings if I thought the educational values of the enlightenment could be restored to education.
Modern History does not start in 1945. Or maybe it does for those curriculum design bots.
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July 23rd, 2010
I am learning to type and click with my left hand as my right arm - despite the numerous potions and unguents massaged into this feeble overused limb - still hurts. But it’s the time of year, in the great circle of publishing, when manuscripts are returned to the humble scribbler for structural re-fits and while I can rise to this task, I can’t blog. I have posted a selection of reviews of The Book of Love, (on the Books and Reviews page) and a couple of interviews, (on the All About Me page) and will return to blogging when my arm recovers.
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July 7th, 2010
Many published novels consist of only a fraction of the words and scenes generated by the writer. The published version of The Book of Love emerged from roughly two hundred thousand words of drafts and redrafts to a svelte eighty three thousand. Many scenes and characters fell to the floor unused, usually because the plot moved in different directions or scenes were cut because they served no purpose or they were rewritten from another character’s point of view in order to better understand what was happening. The Book of Love had many different endings before I selected the one now in print. I’m going to share some of these unused scenes in an occasional series – From The Editing Crypt.
The following scenes show what could have happened if William had believed Robbie’s version of events and the book recovered from the farmhouse in Lucca was not a fake and Sebastian had never followed Lily to Italy. William, having nabbed the book at the farmhouse, returns to the police headquarters in Lucca where Robbie tells him Lily is returning to Sydney with him. William returns to Rome and gives the book to the Culture and Heritage division of the carabinieri - not to Weston’s - and believing Robbie, flies home to London. Lily also believes Robbie’s lies – that William was using her to get the book back - until Robbie lets slip that he’d spoken to William in Lucca and told him that Lily didn’t love him. Realising why William has gone she decides to fly to London and tell him the truth.
The passengers wore their closed up faces. Tapping keyboards, flicking pages, rummaging in bags, all waited for the boarding call. Lily hoped she was doing the right thing. The idea of going home to Sydney and never seeing William again appeared absurd now. It wasn’t the way this should end.
Only the unlucky died young, horoscopes preyed on the dreams of the powerless and you could pass a soul mate on a busy street and never know - sharing a current of air, maybe a curious glance, and then gone. Ahead of you a lifetime of compromise for which no fairytale prepared you. Fate was a con. There was only her and she had to act. If she were wrong about William then humiliation and hurt would be the worst she’d suffer. Those would pass in time.
Rome to London was not a long flight compared to flying anywhere from Australia, so the claustrophobic feeling of endlessly circling the globe in a pressurized cigar didn’t weigh too heavily. Besides Lily was preoccupied with thoughts of what she was about to do. After the folderol at Heathrow of customs and immigration, she headed to the nearest newsagent to buy a map of London and the Underground. People rushed past, but in no hurry herself she dawdled along following signs to the free bus service that would take her to the airport Holiday Inn.
In her bland hotel room she laid the map out on the bed and examined it. William appeared to live in a part of London she had never been to, Bermondsey, near London Bridge. A far cry from leafy Muswell Hill in North London, where she and Robbie had always stayed with Sebastian’s ex girlfriend. Lily juggled the map around, peering at it closely and making notes on a piece of paper - Heathrow to Acton Town, change to the District Line, change at Westminster for the Jubilee line, then off at Bermondsey. Down this road, then left into that road then right here, then slump on the bed and wonder what the hell she was doing.
He might be horrified to see her. He would be at his most polite and BBC- ish. ‘Lily, how nice to see you, yes, we must catch up.’ All the time backing away thinking, ‘How did that tart find me?’ He would turn and walk away. No, no, he would turn and look at Tawny Knickers who, insatiable for foreplay with a gun, had flown over from Rome to be his lover, and they would exchange horrified looks, a wisp of Fatal Attraction in the air. Lily would never boil a bunny, but they didn’t know that.
She sat up, tore the Underground map off the larger map, and folded it with her notes and put it in her handbag. Then, after a quick moment, stuffed the whole map in her bag. She laid out her dress and went to bed with the British Woman’s Weekly Best Ever Jam Recipes supplement.
‘William, come in.’
The mahogany paneling gave off a dull glow. Shelves of art books lined the room, and a small Francis Bacon hung on the wall. The smell of money and coffee lingered in the air. Thomas gestured for William to take a seat. ‘Good to have you back in one piece.’ He sat forward staring intently at William’s forehead. ‘Make sure you put in a claim for that. I’m sorry to hear things got so nasty.’
William shrugged, ‘These things happen.’
‘Quite.’ Thomas leaned back in his leather chair and looked at his watch. A young man with a flop of hair over one eye brought in a tray carrying two gold-rimmed cups and saucers brimming with coffee, a pot of sugar, and a small jug of cream.’
‘There are some issues with this ah … last retrieval.’
William said nothing as he stirred his coffee.
‘Do you know how much we were paid to get that book back? And you give it away? Of course the Italians are thrilled with our largesse, but it wasn’t your decision to make.’
‘No, it wasn’t. But-‘
‘If we run about retrieving artworks and giving them gratis to museums we will be out of business. No one will hire a company who gives away the assets they are hired to retrieve. You’re not fucking Robin Hood, you know.’
William smiled and sipped his coffee, replacing the fine porcelain cup in the saucer with a chink.
‘You want to be careful the client doesn’t slip a horses head into your bed,’ Thomas continued with a snort. ‘They’re furious upstairs, absolutely outraged. Weston’s comes out looking like a responsible corporate citizen, returning national treasure, yes, but where’s the money?’
He waited for a response from William then continued after a faint sigh.
‘Got one in Barcelona for you, same collection. A cache of statues. That’s if you want to go head to head with the lads from Sicily,’ he said. ‘No pun intended. And bring the wretched things home with you, don’t donate them to the Prado.’
‘No, thank you, Thomas. I’ve had enough. I’m resigning from today.’
Thomas blinked and said nothing for a moment as he studied William. ‘More money?’
‘No. Burnt out.’
‘Back to Collection Management? Because your name is shit at the moment, and I don’t think they’ll have you.’
‘No.’ William shook his head. ‘Out all together.’
‘Can we talk about it? Have a drink with me later and …no?’
‘I have some business in Australia, urgent business. So if we can get the paperwork out of the way…’
Lily found her way to the street that held his apartment. Fear prickled her insides. It was tempting to turn around and go back. She found the right house number and looked up. It was not a house but the upstairs flat of an Art Deco building from the nineteen thirties. No doubt the interior was all polished wood and stainless steel with empty spaces, lots of sleek, camouflaged technology and one image on the wall - a black and white Mapplethorpe photo of the back of someone’s head, perhaps. The bed would be half a white cube and a television screen would be mounted on the ceiling above. All would be cool and contained.
It was early, around eight am, and she knocked on the door. She saw the buzzer for his flat and pressed it. No answer. Swallowing with difficulty, she tried again. Still no answer. Maybe he was asleep? Her shoulders tensed. He had to be there. If he’d never left Italy she was wasting time, money and valuable heart space.
Her fall back plan was to try Weston’s in Little Bond Street. Searching London in a summer dress with nothing but a thin beaded cardigan and kitten heeled sandals smacked of poor judgment. An English spring was not like the Italian spring. Her teeth chattered and a little voice whispered, ‘Give up, think of warm and cosy Heathrow, a standby air ticket back to Australia, cosseting by the cabin crew, hot towels, free gin and tonic, warm blankets.’
There was no answer, no matter how many times she buzzed. He wasn’t there. She took the piece of paper with the Weston’s address out of her bag, and her Underground map and studied them. If she got on at Bermondsey she could get off at Bond Street without needing to change lines, and a short stroll should take her to Weston’s. Maybe he’d gone to work, but as far as she knew he was on contract and it very unlikely he’d have an office there. However they could get a message to him. She’d come all this way; she had to give it her best shot.
The offices of Weston’s were as expected, the Fiona’s were all around her, only not plump with pearls, but sleek in tight suits with their sexy heels sinking into lush carpet, their haughty faces reflected in the polished mahogany. The girl at reception stared at Lily’s beaded cardigan and sandals. What could a raggedy boho want with Weston’s? Must be one of the cleaning staff. Lily blinked and raised her chin. In the coldest voice she could muster she said, ‘Lily Trevennen, I’m here to see William Isyanov.’
The girl raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. ‘I’ll check if he’s in.’ She tapped a few buttons and spoke into her headset while Lily drifted across the foyer to look closely at a painting. She didn’t like the painting, but wanted to appear unconcerned.
The girl glanced over at her trying to disguise a giggle into her headset. She was probably saying, ‘One of Will’s indiscretions has turned up,’ or ‘You should see what she’s wearing …’
‘I’m sorry, Miss, er…’
Lily didn’t answer.
‘Mr Isyanov is away at present. Would you care to leave a message, or can we help…in any other way?’ She said this as if it were highly unlikely.
‘No. Thank you.’ Lily hesitated, then asked, ‘Is your name Prudence or Fiona?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Lily turned back to the front door. ’Never mind.’ No way would she leave a letter for William with that girl. She’d probably take it to the staff room and have a good titter with the office staff at lunchtime.
Unable to lie there any longer, William turned the music off, left the flat and walked up the road in the cold morning air. At the newsstand he scanned the headlines and realised he couldn’t give a toss about the rest of the world. Sitting in his flat, alone with his thoughts held no appeal, so he kept walking up to the Thames. He would go and book an airline ticket to Sydney today. No point in waiting until he felt better, he could be dizzy and nauseous on a plane, just as he could at home. And he wouldn’t come back without her. At the Thames embankment he turned around and started back.
She buzzed his door again, and again there was no answer. With the letter in her hand she walked across the road and looked up at the window of his flat one more time. Then she saw him, tall and lean and lovely, his face still battered, but the black eye had gone down and he appeared able to see. He’d turned the corner and was looking down at the pavement; hands in the pockets of a black woollen jacket. And Tawny Knickers was not with him.
Lily wanted to run across the quiet street and hurl herself at him, and despite her fear and uncertainty, she smiled with the sheer pleasure of seeing him. He looked up, saw her smiling at him and stopped, a look of shock on his face. Lily crossed over and walked right up to him, still smiling.
William had taken his hands out of his pockets and simply stared at her, almost with disbelief, then ran his hand through his hair and looked at the sky, then back at her. ‘You look very cold. Would you like a cup of tea?’
So formal, so very English. A disconcerting start, but he needed time to gather his thoughts. He held his feelings in so tightly she wasn’t sure what would happen, so she nodded; get the cup of tea out of the way. She followed him into the old house and up the stairs to his flat. Neither of them spoke as he opened the door. The flat appeared to be one large space with tall ceilings, polished floorboards, Persian rugs and books on every wall. A large desk, covered in paper stood in one corner, and behind an ornate Chinoiserie screen in the other, she could see a double bed. There was a small kitchenette and two lounge chairs by a gas fire. Surrounding the gas heater was an original Art Deco fireplace, and on the mantle piece a selection of Art Deco Gouda vases, a riot of colour and pattern.
Her eyes lit up when she saw the vases. ‘It’s just what I imagined when I first met you, only without the red velvet drapes and painter’s easel.’
He stood by the closed door watching her. She could see the pulse racing in his neck.
‘William,’ she chided, ‘there’s not a scrap of Bauhaus austerity in this room.’
‘Lily-‘
‘I’m sorry, I blather on,’ she said, looking back at the fireplace
‘Francesca gave you the address, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Lily said, ‘You’re not cross, are you?’
‘It depends why you are here.’
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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
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June 15th, 2010
Repetitive Strain Injury appears to be an occupational hazard for writers. Consideration must be given to where you write and how you sit when you write.
I did consider it, and then promptly forgot as I slouched, tensed, lolled, stayed at the keyboard for hours on end and did just about everything a writer shouldn’t do. And so I have RSI from my shoulder down to my wrist.
I’ll be limiting myself to important emails and very short writing sessions for now - all blogging activities have to cease until the injury heals.
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May 30th, 2010
bring on the adverbs
I am painstakingly working my way through 90,000 words examining their arrangement on the page to see if I can achieve greater fluency, clearer descriptions, less cluttered dialogue and an elegant solution to every tiny problem I encounter.
That is my goal. I won’t achieve it. There’ll be clangers and clumsiness, excess and irrelevance and even a fair old swag of self-indulgence. But I’m slaughtering my darlings as cold bloodedly as I can. Having rewritten most of the book I’ve waded through a veritable Thermopylae of blood, and I’ll keep up the slaughter as long as I have to.
The perfect text will always hover out of my reach, but at least I’m trying.
I’m always astonished at how some writers don’t do this. I’m thinking of a piece I read recently, posted in the public domain, by an unpublished writer as an example of his writing skills – not an informal communication, or even a blog post. Numerous spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes and clumsy expression pointed to little time spent polishing, cutting, polishing and cutting again and again.
The competition for readers is intense; the competition for publishers is three times as intense. I know typos slip through, apostrophes can be wild and faithless creatures and trained proof readers can miss errors. But if every line is plagued with such mistakes it signifies either a sloppy, unprofessional approach or an eagerness to get the piece out before it’s ready. Either way, it’s not good.
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Tags: editing, reading, writing | 3 Comments
May 16th, 2010
In twenty words or less tell me why you write
I write because I have to. Writing really helps me to quieten the little voice in my head!
Do you have any formal training in creative writing? And how long have you been writing?
I have been writing on and off since I was a teenager, but didn’t really explore the option of getting serious about writing until about six years ago when I started writing my first book NOT LIKE MY MOTHER. I have a communications degree and worked as a journalist for ten years. I also have a Masters degree in Creative Writing.
What do you consider to be your successes as a professional writer?
I have had a number of short stories published, and have obviously been published as a journalist, but I feel my real success has been in actually completing my first novel NOT LIKE MY MOTHER which took me five years to finish (yet to be published!). It’s about something very close to my heart, the injustices of the Balkan wars. I really wanted to try to convey the horrors of what happened through fiction to try to create awareness in a non-confronting way. It tells the story of three generations of women who experience love, war, displacement and loss.
You were selected to take part in the QWC/Hachette Australia Manuscript Development Programme in 2008. What were some of the highlights? What impact did it have on your writing and professional development?
The highlight of the program really was getting to sit down one-on-one with a Hachette editor and get valuable feedback on my manuscript. Bernadette was so positive and supportive, and really made me realise that I am a good writer. While Hachette’s marketing team ended up deciding the time wasn’t right to publish my manuscript (apparently people don’t want to read about depressing things like war in the middle of a GFC!) I was really honoured that Bernadette loved my work and fought hard to try to get it across the line.
What do you really love about writing?
I feel a real sense of comfort and peace when I write, and so while I get really chuffed when people read and like what I write, it is a purely selfish past time.
Rejection comes with the job of writing, so how do you get over it and keep going?
I developed fairly thick skin back in my days as a journo, but when I got my first rejection letter for a short story I had written I was devastated. It gets easier every time you get one, and I really try to stay very humble about my writing. If it gets accepted and published then that’s a bonus, but in the meantime I take great joy in writing and nurturing my creative side.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the first draft of my second book THIRTY SOMETHING AND SINGLE AGAIN. A chic lit novel that regales the tales of a woman who finds herself back on the single meat market, after having been married to her high school sweetheart for twenty years, and discovers it’s not quite like it used to be.
What books are you reading and where is your favoured reading spot?
I tend to have numerous books on the go. Currently I’m reading Wild Lavender by Belinda Alexandra, Commited by Elizabeth Gilbert, Ben Naparstek in Conversation – Encounters with 39 Great Writers, and Starting out in Shares – The ASX Way.
My favourite reading spot is curled up in bed under the doona on a rainy day.
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May 12th, 2010
A few years ago, when I decide to write, I read an article on obstacles in romantic fiction. The author of the article stated that the writer must find an obstacle that will keep the lovers apart and fuel their desire. This obstacle could not be anything that could be cleared up by a good talk between the couple.
I remember thinking that most of the time obstacles in romantic relationships usually stem from not talking to one another. Lovers can avoid talking for many reasons – the assumption that the desired one should be a mind reader, or will judge the other harshly or probe for weaknesses. Or perhaps the lover doesn’t have the language to describe their feelings or would rather escape into a bottle or work or television instead of talking it out.
I‘ve been giving some thought to my male protagonist, trying to work out why he’s taking the stance that he is – which is basically not talking and subsequently letting his perceptions of his love relationship become wildly distorted. I look back over his life, (I know this guy pretty well by now), and see control has been a big issue for him and that he’s a linear problem solver who likes to act. When faced with a crisis he cannot solve, both in his work and relationship, what does he do?
He has a few drinks – that’s a given. He tells his closest male friend nearly everything, keeping the relationship stuff mostly to himself. He’s not going to go to see his girl and say ‘we need to talk’ because what if he did that, told her he’d never stopped loving her, but finds out that she has stopped loving him? Too painful, too humiliating, not doing it. Instead he’s going to do a Clint Eastwood and ride off into the sunset because his own heart scares him more than all the guns and outlaws out in that there wilderness.
What does she do? Tells her closest friend, has a cry, eats chocolate and examines his every word from the last six months for any hidden meaning she may have missed. Does she go and see him and say ‘we need to talk?’ No she does not. Because she’s angry and he’s a selfish pig and can come to her for a change.
A good talk might have saved all the agony, but nobody is willing to put his or her cards down first. Not talking, for a host of reasons, is the classic obstacle for couples. Particularly now when divorce, religion, and social pressures don’t provide the external obstacles they once did.
Sebastian Faulks says in the introduction to his short biographical book, The Fatal Englishman, that when writing about real people he resisted the urge ‘towards unity that finds it’s best expression in fiction, when the events can be shaped and patterned to echo the themes, while characters can be made, within the limits of their realistic capacities, to behave in a way that adds further harmony.’ He continues by saying ‘The lives of real people, unlike those of fictional characters, seem to exert a small but constant outward force away from order.’
In real life then, my two characters, both too stubborn or fearful to sort it out probably move onto the next partner and do it all again, until there is no happy ending, just regrets, and eventually compromise and maybe a hint of wistfulness.
But, lucky for them, it’s not real and I’m looking for harmony and thematic unity. So my man stops on his way to the sunset and says to himself, ‘Hmm, I sure do miss her. Maybe she’s worth the risk. I’ll go back and see if we can talk it through.’ And my woman thinks, ‘I don’t mind doing all the emotional heavy lifting – as usual – I’ll go and find him and tell him how I feel so he’ll feel safe with me, and then we can talk.’
Most couples avoid having a ‘good talk’ until they are dragged in front of a counsellor or so much is at stake they can no longer avoid it. And I consider this to be an excellent obstacle. Not as exciting as the king forbidding such a union, or being separated by war and never losing hope, or even battling social prejudice to be together. Not talking is realistic, it comes from within the characters and therefore is within their capacity to deal with it, and thus allows for a vast landscape of psychosocial hills and gully’s for the novelist to explore.
Sebastian Faulks, The Fatal Englishman, Vintage, 1997
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The Black Demon on the Writer’s Shoulder - flick him off or not?
for a good feed ...
