writing

The Facelessness of Writing

Writing is a weird business. The main part of what we do is faceless – we spend time alone, curled over keyboards or notebooks, looking inside ourselves and picking things apart. When we do send things out into the world, it rarely involves live-action relationships with editors and the like. Emails, forums, blogs. So much of what we do happens under layer after layer of facelessness.

I don’t know what many of my favourite authors look like, or how they present in person. I was shocked to find John Marsden is such a confronting mixture of crude and intelligent. I’ll admit that Camus’ theories are more palatable than Sartre’s based on their author pics. Last week at the Emerging Writers’ Festival I was surprised by how much Carmel Bird just looked like someone’s mum. I love Alan Bissett’s writing all the more for his outgoing personality, and I’m reading Death of a Ladies’ Man in his very attractive accent. The way authors look and present themselves in person, face-to-face, can be worlds away from how we imagine them through their writing.

This made the Emerging Writers’ Festival an amusing space to meet and greet. The main thing that struck me over and over again during the two weeks was how weird it is that the two sides of our job are such polar opposites. Absolute isolation versus schmooze-fest. I’m not saying that either is preferable – I love both. But when someone talked about me without knowing I was in the room, or when I had the “a-ha!” moment where I connected someone’s writing projects to that person I’d been talking to for the last hour, it really struck me how singularly bizarre writing is.

08/06/2011 5

NYWM Day 4

“Essential Reading” is my creative output from today, as suggested by the exercise on the National Young Writers’ Month blog. “Blackout poetry” involves you, a sharpie, a book or newspaper you don’t want or need, and your “on” brain. For me, this resulted in a piece about what it is to be human in the modern world: something equal parts positive and negative – there’s the drive to connect with others and find pleasure, but there’s also the domineering will-to-power type stuff. I think it worked well. Hit the link above to view the piece (as a pdf). And give it a go yourself – it’s a good brain-starter!

As for National Young Writers’ Month itself and my goals for the month, I’ve started working on a short story I’ve been meaning to write for some time. I’ve also started thinking about possible destinations for things I’ve polished that are ready for submission… It’s all systems go here. While EWF’s wrapping up, NYWM is fulfilling my acronym-desiring project-based needs.

04/06/2011 1

National Young Writers’ Month

Express Media, that amazing bunch of enthusiastic helpful people behind Voiceworks, are gearing up for National Young Writers’ Month. During the month of June, there will be heaps of events, as well as web-based discussions and exercises to help get the brain doing brainy things.

I’ve just registered for NYWM on the Express Media website, and there’s already some great discussions going on in the forums. When you register, you’re asked to set yourself a goal. My goal is to write and polish (whole process, from scratch) at least five pieces of poetry or prose throughout the month of June. Reading other people’s goals on the forums is making me think that maybe I should try to incorporate LGWABP into my goal in some way too…

The NYWM launch proper will be part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival…

16/05/2011 1

Because Every Time You Pick Up Your Pen, You Realise You Know Nothing

Last night was the launch of the program for the Emerging Writers’ Festival. As always in the Wheeler Centre, seating was a little awkward, but the entertainment made up for it. To launch the program, Ben Birchall hosted a panel made up of Paddy O’Reilly, Sean Condon, and Meg Mundell. While there didn’t seem to be a specific point of discussion, the wandering topic of the event was a good way into the festival, which encourages us as writers to think about our practice and process, the wider implications of what we do, not just the act of publishing but the whole idea of “being a writer”. It’s so important to have space and time to do this, to make meaning of what we’re doing.

Paddy O’Reilly provided the quote I got the most out of from the night – “I learn,” she said, “every time I pick up a pen, that I don’t know anything.” In a way, this is possibly the worst thing for me (as someone at uni studying the craft of writing) to take on board. It’s also really constructive though. It’s such a positive way of tackling blank pages, new projects – don’t try for that level of production I reached by the end of my last project, because that was something different. This is new, I’m starting from scratch, and I know nothing, so just do it.

Having spent an hour or two picking out my dream itinerary from the very spunky looking program (all individually screen printed, as last year), I’ve come up with the following events as my picks from the 2011 program. All links back to program descriptions (and tickets) on the EWF website –

26th May – The First Word

28-9th May – Town Hall Writers’ Conference

31st May – Not Your Nana’s Slide Night

4th June – The Writers’ Toolkit

4th June – Tram Tracks

4th June – The Pitch

5th June – Page Parlour

5th June – Spelling Bee

Also, right throughout the festival the #ewf11 hashtag will be active (already a fair bit of action on Twitter), and panels will be hosted online. There’s a whole extra level of discussion that occurs over the Town Hall weekend if you’ve got access to Twitter on your phone. There’s a silent layer of discussion going on on Twitter at the same time as panels are running, it enriches the whole experience. I’m so glad this year I have a wanky phone with internet access so I can get to that – last year I saw tweets post-fact and was a bit disappointed I’d missed them.

Also exciting news connecting LGWABP with the EWF this year – I’m one of the bloggers whose content is being pulled into their Planet. A “planet” is a feed which draws in content from selected blogs, which are tagged in a certain way. So throughout the festival, anything that I tag with “emerging writers festival” will appear in that feed. Lisa (festival director)’s experience as a blogger has made this feed really nuanced in the way it works, as she understands that the planet benefits both the writers and the festival. Had a non-blogger created this, it may have turned out a bit differently.

SO! Go check out the EWF program, tickets are all on sale, program’s up, I’m part of their blogging planet, the #ewf11 hashtag is already active – get involved!

06/05/2011 2

A Story for a Public Holiday…

It is unclear what Leo does, but Camilla suspects that the machinery has something to do with it. Leo’s property is full of machinery. Leo is an old Dutchman, all white hair and mystery. Camilla knows very little about him, only the machinery, and a taxidermy eagle in the corridor of his house, and 8 or 10 sheep he keeps on his small patch of land here in Queensland.

Camilla is 6 years old, and a diminutive 6 year old at that. Her father helps at Leo’s property, though the nature of the jobs is beyond what Camilla cares about. She likes to spend the time at Leo’s looking at the eagle (only later does she realise that its eyes are the unsettling bit), and teasing the sheep.

Today, Camilla is “herding” the sheep with her sister while their father helps Leo. They hold sticks that are as tall as they are, slapping the ground to scare the sheep into action. Camilla’s sister will later insist that they were hitting the actual sheep, but this is not how Camilla will remember it.

Amongst the sheep is a large ram called Bubby. He has a black face, and comes up to Camilla’s shoulder, she guesses, though she hasn’t gotten close enough to properly tell. He is the only male in the pen.

Hitting the ground with their sticks, the sisters send dust flying into the air. The female sheep move into a huddle in the corner of the pen, and the sisters think they are doing a great job. They could be farmers. Then Camilla sees Bubby.

Bubby stands at the far end of the pen, his eyes gleaming at her. He lets out a sinister baa. Camilla looks for her sister. She’s nowhere.

Bubby walks at first. Then he gathers speed, and when he reaches Camilla he knocks her straight down. There is dirt in Camilla’s eyes. All she sees is a black blur, and feels an immense pressure on her chest. Bubby rears on his back legs like a startled horse, coming down heavy on Camilla’s chest. The dirt, the pressure, the oily smell of wool, the dry taste of dust.

“CAMILLA!”

Camilla’s father runs into the pen. With the kind of force only an angered parent can produce, he drives a blundstoned foot into Bubby’s flank. He literally kicks the sheep off his daughter. It doesn’t send the hefty animal far, but it is off Camilla.

Later, Camilla will be somewhat casual about the memory. She will not be fond of sheep, and she will remember how it felt when her father told her to walk the few blocks home. But when she recalls the event, it will not be one of trauma, it will just be a story, like any other story, from her childhood.

25/04/2011 2

Writing What You Know

“Write what you know!”, that’s the advice. That’s how we end up with a lot of the same characters, and they’re much like ourselves or people we know. “Write what you know” is scary – why would anyone want to read about my life? Disaffected youth – unless you’re an amazing writer or have an amazing twist, surely that’s just same/same, yeah? No, what I know is boring!

Henry James (in “The Art of Fiction“) wrote that “writing what you know” can be almost anything, as long as you’re “one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”. Even so, it feels like I’m writing something pretty imagined or untrue if my experience of a thing only extends as far as having seen it from a distance. For James, this is okay. But he, too, says that writing what you know is the way to go.

For a long time I did this – I wrote the same poem over and over, I wrote characters who were my age and in my relationships. Nothing differed very much – I spent a long time producing similar work. When I broke from this, I swung the other way – writing characters very unlike me, in situations which required a lot of research. Sometimes this worked; some of this stuff I’m proud of. Some of it is also just plain rubbish.

This semester, I have to pitch and submit an extract of “My Novel” (such an optimistic thing to call this nebulous being) for a university subject. I started to plan out a novel about a character I’ve had on the back-burner for some time. He’s a structural engineer who’s obsessed with the possibility that if his buildings aren’t sound, people could die. He’s a solid character, I do like him. He’s based loosely on someone I know (so this would count in James’ definition of “what I know”), and I am interested in writing him, eventually. However, in trying to start planning a novel about this guy, I realised it didn’t ring true. I was writing yet another story I wasn’t sure about, that was trying too hard to be NEW! I realised that by avoiding “What I know” in the strictest sense, of characters like myself or my immediate family, I’ve been denying some amazing material from my own life.

My family history is mostly a mystery to me. It’s a light that shines (dimly) only as far back as my grandparents on Mum’s side, and to my father on his side. Even within that limited space, I have the makings of a novel. It’s a matter of being comfortable with the fact that it warrants writing, and it will make a good story. Deep down I know it will, but I’ve been so afraid of being the stuck, clichéd writer who can only write what they know, that I’ve avoided it and gotten stuck in the other extreme.

I’ve talked to both my parents about writing our story, or some fictionalised semblance of it, and they’re both fine with that. What comes next, I suppose, is about the ethics of writing what you know. This question, I suspect, is much harder to answer.

On a panel called “Mining The Personal” at last year’s EWF, Benjamin Law talked about how he handed everyone in his family a red pen and a copy of his manuscript before it went anywhere. I think this is the most honest approach, and one I’ll certainly be following myself. But how do I wrangle the material in the first place?

What do you think about the ethics of writing (fictional or non-fictional) personal stories?

14/04/2011 7

Versioning

I just came across this post by Cid Tyer about “versioning”. I like her system – my own way of doing it is incredibly disorganized and can do with a jazz-up of Cid’s description.

Versioning is one of those tricky necessities when writing on a computer. You’re working on a piece, and you save it. Simple enough. Then the next day you come back and scrap half of what you worked on the day before, substituting it with something different. Save again. Then realise you actually liked what you had two days ago – too bad. It’s gone.

By saving versions of your work as you go, you can always recover any earlier work you’ve done.

I like to do a lot of editing long-hand, which means I have print-outs of earlier drafts of my work with notes scribbled in many a margin. I’ll probably keep doing this, but at least by saving different versions of a WIP I can save myself the hassle of hours of shuffling through paperwork for the right edit.

It’s also nice to sometimes show yourself just how much a work has evolved. Early vomit drafts of pieces that ended up working often make me feel better when I can’t seem to find my way into or out of something new. Sure, it’s bad now, but it has potential to not always be that way – look what happened with this other piece!

So today I give “versioning” a thumbs-up.

26/03/2011 6

Writing Research Brought Me This:

I’ve been writing a lot this morning, making headway on a piece I’ve been pottering around with for weeks. A deadline is looming, so I’ve knuckled down.

I’ve done a shuffle of the story to give it a snappy opening line, because they’re so important. New opening line:
“Hugh stares in horror at seven shopping bags full of soup and beans.”

This is subject to subsequent edits, but it’s much more engaging than previous beginnings.

HOWEVER, I’m posting today to show you this messed up thing that my research brought to me. I’ve been researching agoraphobia today, and that’s been fine. Then later I started researching canned foods, and a friend sent me this link. I think the silk worm pupae and the fish mouths get me the worst… Though the whole canned chicken is pretty vomitous.

Enjoy!

20/02/2011 0

A Mind of Its Own

I’ve recently committed myself to 3 “morning pages” per day. For the 3 days that I’ve done these, they’ve mainly consisted of reflections about my writing, which has been helpful, and has also raised some questions.

Yesterday I found myself reflecting on a piece I planned to write based on the recent mouse plague in our kitchen. Having scribbled down some initial images, I was pondering where to take these ideas. A poem would lend itself well to the strong imagery I wanted to use. But, I also thought, perhaps our mice would do well in a short story too. In my morning pages I wrote something like, “I’m not sure yet what this piece wants to be.”

What it wants to be… It struck me as such a strange idea. To think of a story or poem as a separate being with a mind of its own. As a free-thinking agent.

Should a piece of writing be able to want anything? Does this kind of attitude make me a lazy writer? Shouldn’t I be wrangling my words in whatever way I want? If I sit back and let a story guide itself, it may have an internal logic, but will it be the best story or poem that it can be?

I don’t have an answer to these questions, but they’re things that my morning pages brought up for me today.

What do you think? Can stories or poems have a mind of their own? Should they?

03/02/2011 5

Sam van Zweden

Writer

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