Category: writing

So begins the first day etcetera

Right then, I’ve finally wrangled a draft of the memoir into shape enough that I can call it a draft and today I will ship it off to someone for their feedback. Which means that it is time to take step two in the return to my freelancing career.* I have determined that I am strong enough to return to the cycle of rejection, rejection, rejection, sniff of success, rejection, rejection, acceptance, oh sorry journal has just folded after all, rejection, acceptance.** This means, today I shall be finding a journal or magazine currently taking submissions and then, over the coming days (or weeks – see asterisked explanation of career) writing an entire complete piece and submitting it for consideration.

*career applied here in the loosest of possible applications
** yes, yes, happiness and success gurus, I know I’m supposed to be envisioning success, but please to be allowing me some reality…for as Dr Phil says, ‘The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour’

On not

I’ve been reading a lot about creativity lately, particularly about writing, but about creating more generally. And particularly about doing it. About sticking your bum to the seat, about putting in the time, about letting the housework go. And so on. I’ve got myself good goals and am filled with optimism and the joy of getting it done. I’m more or less sticking to my programme of little bits lots of times, stitch by stitch, step by step, brick by brick and so on.

Now, I’m not sure why, but all this reading has led me to wonder about all the people who don’t become writers. All the brazillions* of people who go to weekend workshops, join groups, find mentors, go on retreats, invest in scrivener, but don’t, in the end, write ‘writer’ on their departure card.

I know some of them become lawyers or travel agents or gardeners or nurses instead. Some of them are lazy or unfocussed or find they’re better at something else. Some of them are handed lives which making writing impossible. And a not-small number must be a bit like me, setting plans and meaning to get onto it, just as soon as I am settled in to Abu Dhabi, once I’m back from Edinburgh, after Christmas, once I finish work and so on and etcetera.

But some of them, one or two at least, must, at some point, have looked around and thought, ‘This isn’t working, is it?’. There must be some who looked at their words on the paper and thought, ‘I know I could do this, but the world won’t miss me if I don’t, I’m going to finish knitting that silk, lace scarf instead.’

There must be someone out there for whom not writing was an active decision. And their’s would be an interesting book.

*still my favourite George W joke

A matter unexpected

One of the consequences of returning to work is that I never have the house to myself. It is no longer mine to roam around unhindered, moving from my desk to the sink, trailing and trialing my thoughts uninterrupted.

I have taken to getting up early. Earlier and earlier every day, greedy for every moment that I can spend alone. Knowing how deeply I love to sleep will give you some idea of just how much I value silence and solitude.

I sit at my desk, pen in hand, computer screen dimmed. I barely dare to write so fragile is the silence, so scared am I to lose it, so badly do I want the time to stop.

Even though I’m already awake, the sound of the first alarm still ruins my day.

Getting things done

The mister and the lads got back from their Al Ain daytrip rather late last night, and because I still hadn’t finished my book, when the mister asked about my day, I said, somewhat despondently, ‘I must be the most unproductive person in the world,’ to which the mister replied, ‘but how do you know that everyone else is productive?’

It’s the kind of thing the mister says, and it sometimes cheers me up and sometimes gives me the screaming shits.

Anyway, the ensuing conversation reminded me of a lesson I have already learned, but seem to have forgotten. The lesson is: it’s no good having a to do list which reads ‘write book’. A list like that just leaves you feeling despondent and unproductive day after day after day.

So then, I spent an hour with a purple texta, making a list of the things I need to write in order to finish this draft. And today, I will work through one or two of those things and when the mister and the lads get back from the supermarket and their game of squash I will say, ‘I got a lot done today’.

Another way of looking at it

He says: ‘Mum, ever since you’ve got that computer you’ve just been living on it.’

I reply: ‘I’m trying to get my book written, I need to work really hard on it, otherwise I will never finish it.’

He asks: ‘What’s this one about?’

I tell him: ‘It’s a memoir…’

He interrupts: ‘Oh, so it’s like your memories?’

I say: ‘Sort of.’

He is perceptive: ‘So it’s about Denis, right?’

I say: ‘Yes, and some other people.’

Eagerly: ‘Me? Am I in it?’

Thinking quickly about how I’m going to answer it: ‘Well, I don’t want to write too much about you and your brother…’

Interrupting (again): ‘Because we’re not memories, right?’

It’s still hot

I’ve been writing a set of essays which I hope will one day be published either singularly or as the set that I am constructing them as.

Actually, I think they are more memoir than they are essays, but memoir sort of declares to the world that you are a fascinating person to whom fascinating things have happened, whereas I am a person who made a couple of extraordinarily stupid decisions, attempted to make up for them by making even more and increasingly stupid decisions, then thought that writing non-fiction would be a good (by which I mean, among other things, legitimate) way to further avoid the frightningness that is the second draft of my next piece of fiction and, lacking both the expertise and the gumption to investigate any other subject beyond myself in any depth, thought I may as well write about those stupid decisions.

I did wonder whether I would have anything to say that I haven’t already blogged about. I mean, goodness me, I’ve been rather revealing over these last couple of months. Perhaps, I thought to myself, blogging is a substitute for memoir. But the more I wrote offline, the more I realised that this was an issue barely worth a second thought. For one thing, there’s heaps I haven’t blogged about (for example, you don’t know what my grandmother said to the mister the day we told her we were getting married). But really, it’s not an issue, because as with all these questions, the answer is not an either/or. Blogging and memoir share some similarities, but they are different. Different processes, different results.

While the blog helps me to record things immediately and does provide an opportunity to think and reflect on the things that happen to me, it is altogether a different kind of thought and reflection than I have been doing while writing the essays.

Most of the differences come back to the same thing of course. The immediacy of blogging versus the ‘looking back’ of memoir. Because memoir demands a cohesive narrative beyond the simple chronological narrative of my blog, I feel that it is forcing me to explore situations and emotions more fully, to contextualise everything (for myself if not for the reader, at the moment, everything is done for myself because the reader is still a concept, a potential, rather than an actual).

My blog is a photo album, filled with snapshots where the essays, although potentially stand-alone, are a film.

And actually, that little analogy is bloody brilliant and has just helped me to fill in the gaps of one of the chapters essays I’ve been trying to write, so if you’ll excuse me I’m turning the interwebs off again and re-opening my increasingly large, but ever-more wieldy document.

PS One thing I’m surprised about is the amount of effort I have put into thinking about ego and narcissim and so forth. You’d think blogging would’ve moved me way past those worries. But no.
‘Do you think it’s too self-centred?’ I asked the mister of a piece I gave him to read the other night (this is unusual, I rarely let him read anything).
‘Well, didn’t you say it’s memoir?’ he asked in his engineering way.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

Advice dispensed freely

In an effort to reclaim the self-discipline I’m sure I must once have had, I have been doing that thing where you set your timer and just work at your assigned task until the timer rings.

And this is what I have learned:

the secret to making the trick with the timer work is not so much setting the timer for periods of work, but re-setting it for breaks.

It’s still hot and humid, maybe that’s why I’m not thinking clearly

One thing I am working on at the moment is a series of essays on such fascinating subects as me and the things that I think while I’m busy being me (Oh, so you mean you’re writing a blog? No, I do not mean that, please shut up brain and let me write).

Partly because of that, and partly because of other reasons, I have been reading a lot of memoir and autobiography. I’ve always loved that kind of writing, that kind of book (Do you think maybe that’s why you like blogging so much? Look, I don’t know who you are, but please do shut up and let me get on with saying whatever it is I’m about to say).

Last year, I started a short course in ethics, and did lots of research and writing about ethics and life writing. I find this an endlessly fascinating area to explore, particularly because I think there are almost as many answers as there are writers. More answers than that even, because each person who reads that writer creates another answer and so on. I think that if I’d done as my teachers had suggested and paid (why do I want to write payed?) more attention to that statistics stuff in Maths I that I would be better equipped to explain to you how many answers I think there are in the questions of ethics and life writing and so forth. Though of course, I do think there are some broad and general conclusions about how we should or should not approach life writing.

One specific area I have been looking at while I’ve been doing that research is performance comedy as life writing. I was messing around with that research a bit more at the end of last week, which led me, by various circuitous paths to be comparing Craig Sherborne’s Muck with Judith Lucy’s The Lucy Family Alphabet. No, comparing isn’t the right word, but looking at them in the context of each other and in the context of the other forms that each uses and has used to say the same and different things.

This led me to wonder once again about which form/platform/format I should use for saying what it is I want to say. You see, some of it is firmly rooted in the essays, some of it is sneaking into my fiction, and some of it is leaking into my show as I rewrite and tweak it for possible production in Adelaide.

So now I’m back where I so often seem to be. In a pickle, and I find pickles paralysing, and it’s no coincidence that we now have a nicely vacuumed floor and probably by tonight I’ll have the kitchen sorted.

(So, look, I don’t mean to bother, but this ‘right form’ you’re looking for, it wouldn’t be blogging, would it? Oh, don’t bother me now, I’ve got vacuuming to do).

On genre (a beginning – believe me, there’s more to come on this topic)

Learning lots. So, so much. And answering a great number of the questions that I hoped doing my first solo show would help me answer.

But I’m wondering, still wondering, which section of the fringe I should be registering myself in. When I first registered, I spent a lot of time tossing up whether or not to put myself in comedy or theatre. I steered away from theatre in the end, because I’m not an actor and I don’t have a director. But then, in festivals at least, ‘comedy’ feels so closely aligned to the gag-punch style of comedy that I’m not sure I really fit in there either. Obviously, I want there to be laughs, but I don’t necessarily want it to be stand-up, and I’m not sketch or character comedy mostly because again with the ‘not an actor’.

For the Adelaide Fringe, I was thinking maybe I could put myself in the ‘writing’ category, but does that imply something more literary? Poetry slams and spoken word and so on.

And not that I think I’m some sort of genre-defying genius. Flicking through the Fringe guide here, I see plenty of other shows and performers that are more theatre than they are comedy, more music than they are theatre and so on.

Maybe the guide needs sub-categories. Which leads me to wonder: do other people worry over this stuff or is it just because I’m a librarian?