You know the cry. “Get your Big Issue, support the homeless and long-term unemployed!”
Well today you really should. I mean, you always should, but today even more so – today and every day for the next two weeks, from a different vendor every time. Go on.
Why? I’ve got an article in it. It’s titled “My Brother The Chef”, and it’s about the ways that my brother (whose birthday it is – Happy Birthday!) and I have created a relationship centered around food.
It’s been a week since I made my recent writing goals, and that means I’ve done a week’s worth of writing exercises. A lot of people have shown interest in what I’ve been doing… So here’s a list of the last week’s work. I’ve included where the exercises come from, if you notice a heap coming form good sources in future, you might find it worthwhile chasing these books down.
1. Write something you’ve been putting off – imagine you’re telling someone about this article/letter/essay you’ve been meaning to write, but can’t start. Write down what you’d tell them. (from Mark Tredinnick’s “The Little Red Writing Book”)
2. Write a list of 10 things you know to be true. (from Sarah Kay’s TED talk)
3. What are three things that could never be photographed? (From John Marsden’s “Everything I Know About Writing”)
4. Write a letter to yourself to be read in five years. (From John Marsden’s “Everything I Know About Writing”)
5. Write a character sketch of someone you’ve seen on public transport (suggested by Tiggy Johnson)
6. Observe someone’s hands (this can be in memory or imagination. Describe them as fully as possible. Notice shape, skin texture, any jewelry or disfiguration. What clues do these hands give you about the person’s life? (from Meredith Sue Willis’ blog)
7. Today was a mash-up, to create new exercises out of something else. In doing this, I found some really interesting connections. More of this tomorrow. Or Tuesday. One day soon, I promise.
Yeah, the sky’s blessedly blue outside for the first time in forever, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
It’s the end of the holidays for me – I’ve found them to be long, but productive. It’s only
taken me about 7 weeks, but I’ve finally figured out how I would (try to) spend each and every working day if I were a full-time professional writer, in order to get shit done. For the last week or so, on days when I haven’t worked, this is what I’ve done.
I’d wake up early. Well, early for me: 8am, maybe 8.30. This still gives me two hours of quiet writing time before my boyfriend even thinks about consciousness. I check my email and Facebook, but only out of the neurological need – I don’t spend a long time on there. If there’s stuff to reply to, I do that later in the day. I update my GoodReads account with what I’d read the night before.
I read a short story. This week I’ve been chewing through the contents of Tiny Epics, which has been sitting on my shelf for over a year now. I regret not reading it earlier. Likewise with Bel Woods’ Get Smart which I read last week in page seventeen #8. That girl can write! What do your days look like to produce such brilliance, Bel?
After my short story, as per my writing goals, I read an essay. It’s not always pertinent to what I’m writing, but I’ve been learning an awful lot. Did you know that stabbing a lobster in the head doesn’t actually kill it? And that lobster deaths are a big point of concern for the RSPCA? And I never knew anything about Peter Porter, but now I do, thanks to Clive James – weird to read a dying great write about a dying great.
I write morning pages. These are at least three pages (so, for those of you who can’t convert longhand ideas into tech-speak, that’s about 750w) of whatever. They’re the pages where I supposedly get my brain warmed up to write my way into brilliance. Usually it’s just me pondering story ideas, brainstorming or bitching about how I can’t be arsed doing the dishes.
I do a writing exercise. Also, as per my writing goals, I’ve done one every day so far. It’s been fun. Out of six days, I’ve only had one day turn into something I feel I could follow up. But that’s still a higher hit-rate than when I wasn’t doing an exercise every day.
I work on a WIP.
I work on something that potentially can make me some money. I know that writing for money isn’t the point; I’m not trying to turn all my writing into a money-making scheme – that’s dumb, and would take the enjoyment out of it. I’m trying to find places that I can make money for doing something I enjoy more than my current job. I’ve been writing some copy for Weekendnotes, a guide to things you can do on weekends in Melbourne. It’s fun – it’s not exactly lucrative, but I’m enjoying the experience, and it’s really good exercise for banging things out on demand.
I do any business stuff I need to do. These last few weeks that’s involved getting an ABN, making an invoice template, posting submissions. Looking for comps and new publications I’d like to submit to happens during this time too.
Lastly, I catch up on my Google Reader feed (which is looking comparatively clean at the moment), and I blog, if I’ve got something worth saying or sharing.
Usually this whole routine takes up most of a day. Some days I don’t get around to all of it. As you can imagine, I sometimes get stuck in one piece or another – if it’s a good exercise, or a long story or essay, or if I find myself venting something worthwhile in Morning Pages…
But I feel like finally, after faffing about for six weeks, I’ve figured out how to execute a truly productive day. Now I go back to uni and that’ll jumble everything up a bit, but I’ll be trying to keep at least a few days a week like this.
What do your writing days look like?
In the spirit of oversharing, which I’m very fond of (and fond of the internet for), I’m posting some of my latest writing goals here so that you can all keep me accountable if I try to let them slide away into the abyss.
Having (just five minutes ago) finished timetabling my next uni semester, I’ve realised I’m committing to some big things here:
– I plan on reading at least one essay a week. This is pretty easy to do during the semester, but outside of it I tend to let this slide. I really want to expand my short non-fiction knowledge base, as it’s something I’m interested in writing a fair bit of myself. So. That.
– This second point is bigger: I’m committing to doing at least one writing exercise every day. Furious Horses style, only without the public sharing. Perhaps at the end of each week I’ll post on here the exercises I’ve done, and whether they’ve been helpful or not, because I know a lot of this site’s readers are writers, and you never can have enough ideas for writing exercises.
– Competitions! I want to start entering competitions. There’s money to be made, folks. And recognition to be given. Might as well give it a crack. If I don’t, crap people might win. And we can’t have that.
– Every quarter, I plan on sending off a piece to a publication which I don’t really honestly believe will accept me. This is how we make impossible things real. This is what happened with The Big Issue, and it’s inspired me.
I’m hoping that making these plans public will create some extra accountability. If I try to pretend this post never happened, give me hell.
I get jumpy after I’ve submitted things. Between the hours of 9am and 5pm, I check my email at least every half hour, just to make sure an editor hasn’t replied to my submission. I’m not waiting for an acceptance letter – I mean, it’d be nice. But I’m just waiting for contact, of any sort. Rejection? That’s okay. At least I can push forward after a rejection.
Weekends are the worst. I was silly enough to submit a piece I had particularly high hopes for the weekend of Queen’s Birthday… So I submitted on the Friday and subjected myself to waiting through Saturday and Sunday, and Monday too. The worst bit? Somehow, the writer’s brain convinces them that editors might take time out from sunning themselves in the park or playing soccer with their kids, in order to work. So weekends become frought too – I fight against the reasonable part of myself and check my email much too often anyway.
This morning I received some contact from the Australian Poetry Journal, where I’d submitted two poems for consideration… My heart jumped, I clicked on the email and discovered it was a notice to let me know they’d received my submission. The sad thing is that this happens so seldom (most of my submissions are met with the internet equivalent of a blank stare) that I was actually a little disappointed.
All of this, however, I can deal with. It’s a necessary part of the process – and it’s all made worthwhile by those rare acceptance letters, those moments when your heart leaps out of your chest because you’ve managed to make a dream come true…
My dream? Getting published in The Big Issue. Coming true? Most certainly. On the 19th of July, the new edition of The Big Issue is being released with my story, “My Brother the Chef” in it. I had to wait for that letter for a few weeks, including that torturous long weekend. I checked my email compulsively. But eventually it happened, and that made all the waiting worth it.
ROOM by Emma Donoghue
PICADOR
ISBN: 9780330519021
RRP: $22.99
Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, ROOM tells the story of five-year-old Jack and his Ma, who live in a space measuring 11 feet by 11 feet. Captive for seven years, Jack is born in Room, and Ma teaches him that Room is all there is. They have a TV, but all that’s seen on there isn’t “real for real”, it’s “just TV”. Jack’s entire reality is confined to Room, where the sky measures only as wide as Skylight, the sea isn’t real, and Old Nick (who Jack sees as akin to an unfriendly God) brings them food and “Sundaytreats”. One day Ma “unlies” to Jack, telling him that most of what’s on TV is actually true, and that Room is only a tiny part of a much bigger world. Jack is reluctant, and finds it “hard to remember all the bits, none of them sound very true,” but eventually helps his Ma escape.
Told from Jack’s point of view, the narrating voice of ROOM is both wonderfully strange and very familiar. Jack has the questioning nature and speech patterns of a five year-old, but this familiar voice is put into a very foreign situation. Limited viewpoints are fun for a while, but can usually grow stale unless executed precisely (a’la Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident…) – Emma Donoghue hit the nail on the head – Jack’s is one of the most original voices in recent fiction.
Throughout the novel, the reader and the author look over young Jack’s head and wink at one another in recognition. Jack describes awful things happening to Ma, but in an uncomprehending way. Every weekday, Ma and Jack get to “play Scream”, where they bang things and yell as loud as they can. Jack sees this only as part of what constitutes the world of Room, part of the daily routine. This reader/author cahoot-feeling continues when Jack gets out into the world (only about 50 pages into the novel – not a spoiler!). Donoghue has managed to see the world through incredibly fresh eyes, wondering at things we take for granted. A writer of historical fiction, she has a knack for finding the strange in the familiar, and vice versa, and this works perfectly for Jack.
Both the main characters, Jack and Ma, ring very true. At times you love them both, but at other times they’re just too human to be liked – these are honest characters, not caricatures or thought-experiments. Taking as inspiration the case of Austrian captor Josef Fritzl, Emma Donoghue has thoroughly researched all the implications (both medical and psychological) of such cases. However, these characters are so memorable and true because at their centre, they are simply human.
Tears. I’m warning you now, there will be tears. There will be laughter also, and happiness – ROOM is easily the most moving novel I have read in a long time, one of those ones you want to dive into and never return.
This review originally published in RMIT’s flagship publication, Catalyst, in May 2011.
Sam van Zweden 