Category: writing

Why I’m so slow (reason #zillion)

Every now and then, I write a really good sentence. One that is so balanced and so well-tuned, that I know I will never give it up. Sometimes, such sentences come out of the blue, but very often, they come after days or weeks of knowing the line is there, but not quite putting it down. These moments of resolution are fine moments indeed. The problem is, that I then spend the next three hours so caught up in admiring the sentence what I have wrote, that it becomes the only thing I do all day.

Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic

I have been awake most of the night, fretting about a deadline I have to meet. The deadline is still weeks away, but there are two major projects with more or less the same deadline. And they are Very Important Projects (to me, not to humanity). Usually, I’m very good at balancing more than one project. I think it is how I work best, because there’s no time to waste, I am focussed and productive.

The problem at the moment is that both are at more or less the same stage. Which is: well-developed structure, good understanding of the characters, knowing where I want to end up, but very few words.

This is good, in that I do have a very clear plan, and that means I am (hopefully) working efficiently. By which I mean, not writing too much plot that will never be used. But I’m in that messy stage which, experience tells me I must muddle through, just getting the words down, imperfect though they will be. Most of what I write today will be discarded in the end.

Which makes it hard to see the progress. And also, I can feel the deadlines looming, and I don’t feel like I’ve got time to write words which will only be discarded. But if I don’t write them, then I’ve got no chance of getting to the words which will be kept. If you see what I mean. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t. I’m just writing this to trick myself into believing that I’m actually writing something.

And meanwhile, the shows on ABC kids that my boys are brave enough to watch will soon end, and it will be back to the bloody Uno.

If you need me, I’m in the garret, muttering must not vacuum cutlery drawer, must not vacuum cutlery drawer.

Why I blog

It was my blogiversary on Saturday. Two years of blogging.

I thought perhaps I would use the time to reflect on all that has happened over those two years, because they’ve been quite full-on years for me. But it was a crap post.

Then, after reading the thread at Pavlov’s Cat’s, I began to toil away at a bit of a ‘why I blog’ post, an earnest essay on the frustrations of reading irritating people whose basic argument seems to be ‘blogging has failed, because blogging hasn’t changed the world’. A comprehensive, annotated account of the very many things that blogging is and can be…

…but you don’t have time to read all that. And I wouldn’t be telling you anything you wouldn’t already know. And also, it’s December. I’ve got salads to make.

So, I’m going to tell you of one piece of blog-related news which has been very exciting for me. I took a post I wrote sometime ago, added it to another post, wrote some more around it, submitted it to a journal, they accepted it, and now, it is included in Best Australian Stories 2007. I can’t tell you how very excited I have been about that.

That’s not writer’s block, that’s just a very

I’ve been doing that thing where you set your timer then write like the clappers until the bell rings. It’s what you do when you don’t know what else to do, but you know you have to do something. And that’s how I know I’ve just spent twenty minutes refreshing bloglines, checking comments, updating my facebook status, eating an apple, finetuning the radio, picking at the piece of stickytape on the windowsill, making another cup of tea, flicking through the mail and so on.

Talk to you again in twenty minutes time no doubt.

While I wasn’t watching Dr Phil

I’m sure you already know this, but just in case you don’t, I’m going to tell you what I have learned over the last day or so.

You can try too hard to make a piece of writing do too many things. You can stop reading there if you like. Or you can cast your eyes down through the explanation below. But warning, it’s a much longer post than I expected it to be.

I’m working on two writing things at the moment. Two main things anyway. A new novel (new novel: that’s gotta be tautology) arrangement which will be this collection of short stories which all become one story in the end – nothing that hasn’t been done before in some guise or other, but I’m enjoying it. As I go, I’m also working out how to create a sustainable piece of web fiction, with the intention of creating a novel and a related fiction blog. I don’t know that the web-based stuff will be particularly cutting edge, because my storytelling is very word-based (I don’t know much about pictures and so on), but still it is interesting and a little bit new. And that’s going very well. Thanks for asking.

The second thing is what I told you about yesterday. This play which I was going to write through the process of standup. And what a pickle I got myself into. Didn’t I?

There is a lot of reasons for the emergence of that pickle.

The simplest reason is, that as elsewhere has commented (even as I have been writing this post), competitions can be something of a distraction. They distract you from the path you were on, and you begin to reshape your work in unnatural ways. Now please, do not read this as me saying that government funding and competitions and that type of thing mean that people write what they think they need to write to get the funding or win the competition. It happens, I’m sure. I’ve heard people say that’s what they did. But I’m equally sure that what generally, more often happens is, as elswhere has succinctly said, you decide what needs to be done, then do it. And, because it comes from your heart or your soul or wherever it is your creative pieces come, then you have a better chance of winning the funding or the competition which happens to be around at around about the right time (which is rarely going to be in the early stages of your first draft). If you are at the right stage of your project at the time of a deadline, or if you have anticipated the deadline with more than two months to go, it (the deadline) can give you particular focus and, importantly, a sense of achievement. A most elusive, but powerful, thing. Not that I’ve ever won a competition, or been involved in their administration, so you shouldn’t really be taking my word for it.

There are more substantial and complex reasons though, for the pickle in which I found myself. Because after several years of being singlemindedly focussed on a singular goal, over the last year, my focus has broadened. And perhaps, slightly changed. You see, this standup comedy thing wasn’t in my plan. Not that I had an articulated plan as such, with three month, six month, one year, five year goals. But I did have a vision of who I would be, should everything go my way. I would be a writer, and very particularly, a novelist. And in the year or so before I had my first child, I had a few good nibbles, and a bit of an idea that I could maybe make it happen. Maybe. Enough to make me think I should give it a try.

Now, while having children obviously inhibits writing in very many ways (let’s not even pretend that we can count them), there was an unexpected bonus (and no, not that monetary vote-buying one which I never got and anyway my vote isn’t for sale). It has given me time to hide myself away a bit and have a little stab at writing things – novels – without having to talk too much about it with anyone (except, obviously, the internet).

That’s one of the reasons I’ve been happy to have things – professional career-type things – on hold while I had young children. So I could spend time with them and chip away at writing a novel. When I say happy, of course, I mean happy interspersed with intense, and often long, periods of frustration and boredom and worry about the gurgling sound of my career and so on thrown in. But I’ve been more or less happy, because I thought I was gathering all of my momentum and ideas and then, as both my children went off to school all the groundwork would be done and I would hit the ground running. And get my novel done, so that before anyone noticed I wasn’t really doing anything, I could give them an invitation to my book launch and they would say oh and I wouldn’t have to explain myself anymore.

Of course, it was never going to be that easy. Not really. But it was a plan. A solid, focussed plan.

But then I started performing comedy and having fun while I was doing it. My plan is now much less clear than it was and I have more decisions to make than I thought I would.

Writing a novel – especially your first one, with no idea whether or not it is good or will see the light of day – is a lonely experience and to a large extent it is feedback-free. Word after word after careful word all without an audience. Except the mister who, let’s face it, is biased. So in a way, standup has come as something of a relief. Of course, it takes a loooong time to write a joke, but, once written, the feedback is immediate – for better or for worse. And I can’t tell you how good it is to make people laugh (conversely, I can’t tell you how awful it is making people sit there with their arms folded waiting for a laugh).

And that is why I started trying to do too many things. To make small pieces of writing be too many things. Because all of a sudden, I want to do two things, instead of one. And that is why I need to re-focus myself, and why I have defined two projects. The novel – as described above – andthis standup story (working title After Hours Shoot about a librarian who is dead, but nobody has noticed). If, in the process of writing that, I end up with something suitable to enter in this competition, then I shall submit it. Otherwise, I shan’t.

Once I let myself make that decision – on the way into school this morning – then I had two quite productive hours this morning. And then, it was back on the preschool/school pickups again, and making lunch, and playing soccer, and admiring plasticine sculptures and so on and so forth.

Of course, written like this, in a few neat, if rambly, paragraphs, it all seems more straightforward than it really is. Because none of this is likely to make me a living. Or help me reduce my (current) financial dependence on the mister (and, yes, I know, we all make different contributions to relationships and so on and so forth, but committing to financial dependence was not something I was ever expecting to do).What of my career? I mean, I thought I was going to spend my life working for development agencies, and I like being on boards. But I can’t look after young children, and work at a job, and think about strategic directions, and write another manuscript – some people can do all those things, but I can’t. I thought I could, but I can’t. Not with everything else that comes with being part of a family and having friends, and so on. And so forth.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying: that idea I had, to try and have it all, to save time and so on…that’s not a bad idea. It’s possible. It might work. But it’s not a practical plan.

I should’ve stopped at one coffee, shouldn’t I?

So at the moment, I’m writing this play.

It was this idea I had, because I have such limited writing time, that I would write this play using my standup gigs as an opportunity to test things out as I went along. And it would help me to get a start on writing my first full length show now that I’m on this weird standup comedy path which has taken me by surprise, but seems to be something I am beginning to really enjoy.

I was going to enter the play in this competition (I really must write one day about the impact of competitions on my life, because I think they are an interesting phenomenon), not because I thought I would win, or would even be in with a chance – I’ve never written a play before – but because of all the benefits you do get from entering competitions (for example, deadlines). As I say to the mister, over and over again, you can’t underestimate the power of a deadline.

But it seems perhaps you can. Underestimate that power, I mean. I really don’t think I’m going to get it done. It’s just the thing that in between everything else keeps getting pushed to the back of the line. Over the last week, I’ve been thinking look, just give the idea of the competition away and give yourself time to do it properly, but then last night when I wasn’t really watching Australian Idol, because I couldn’t bear it, but couldn’t stop watching it (and if I wrote that post about competitions, I would tell you why I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it), I was reading 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I see where Sex, Lies, and Videotape was ‘written in just eight days’. But then, I’m no Steven Soderbergh, and he probably didn’t have to pick the children up from school at three o’clock over the course of those eight days.

Plus, I’ve had two coffees today, and I can’t concentrate. Which you might be able to tell from the range of incoherent thoughts in those sentences and paragraphs above.

So, now I don’t really know what to do with these three hours which I have blocked out for this play and which must not, under any circumstances, be used for anything else. Not acupuncture, not phone calls, not other writing projects. And definitely not for defrosting a pot of that rather delicious potato soup and buttering a piece of that rather delicious fresh bread and then sitting in front of Dr Phil.

UPDATE: the soup is just a leeetle bit lemony

Home again

‘Oh, three weeks,’ I say breezily when people ask me how long I’ll be away.

‘Three weeks?’ they ask. And then: ‘are you taking your children?’

I shake my head, because it softens the No, which, as you can see, is a much harsher word if you say it with a capital N.

It went like this: meeting in Perth for three days; home for one night, then on a plane to Tasmania where I stayed here as part of this programme; then on a plane (or, as it happens two planes, one of which was terribly, terribly small and a little bit chilly) to Canberra to go in this comedy competition; and then, early the following morning, I got on a bus to drive across the Hay Plain and ended up back in Adelaide.

As my children themselves would say ‘that’s not really for children’.

When I’m away from my children I do feel a kind of disjointedness, a vague restlessness, a need to keep moving forwards to the time when I will see them again. I miss them. I ring them every day and wallow in their voices, long for a cuddle with them, look at their photos for hours at a time. But I also observe of myself, a certain distance from the missing-ness. I’m not sure how to articulate this, and I’ve been trying to put it into words all day. I’m not going to judge how much I love them by how much I miss them. Nor am I going to make any judgement about myself as a mother in relation to others on the basis of how much I miss my children when I’m away, because…well, because it’s pointless and doesn’t help me to answer the questions I’m asking of myself. After a few basics have been covered, there are so many differences in being a mother that you just can’t afford to judge yourself in relation to others. Like the sign on the back of my grandmother’s toilet door said in some kind of rhyming prose ‘there will always be someone better than you and always someone worse’ (there was also a poem about bowls which ended ‘what he could do with kitty, I could do with jack’ and so I think from that you can guess quite a bit about the rest of the house).

So the best I can come up with is the rather obvious observation that we all miss our children in different ways, because so many people, when I tell them I’m about to go away say ‘I could never do that’. This means a whole lot of things I know, including ‘I would miss them too much’ as well as ‘there isn’t anyone else who could look after them for all that time’ as well as ‘that really sounds like a shit way to spend a few weeks why on earth would you take three precious weeks of your life and flush them down the great toilet bowl of the past in such a fashion’.

I can make any number of sensible justifications for trips away. For example: you try starting a new novel when your study has two doors which make a perfect circuit for little boys to run around. Or this one: it’s my trade-off instead of going out to work two or three days a week (two days a week for one year being the equivalent of a few weeks away). But obviously I don’t really need to make the justifications to myself or I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t go away. I mean, I applied for the residency. I accepted it with much excitement. I quarantined the time and protected it ferociously as I thought over and over to myself during the last six months ‘it’s all right, your quiet time is coming, July will be here soon’.

Three weeks was a long time. The longest I’ve been away. And for the first time, I did cry at the airport (in between Perth and Hobart). But it’s been a bit of an emotional year, so I’m not convinced that was all about missing my boys.

In Hobart, I lived by myself. Like, I was the only person in the cottage. The bedrooms, loungeroom, kitchen, bathroom were all for me. Just me. It was pretty strange at first. I met the mister when I was eighteen and we moved in together when I was twenty two, so you can see that I’ve not lived by myself very much at all. Also, there was no television and no internet (I’m thinking of making a t-shirt). And, like I said, it’s been a bit of an emotional time around here. I’m in control of the shadows, but I have to work at it. So I was very glad for the mister’s company when he came to visit for a few nights on his way home from a meeting in Melbourne. And there were some very special uni friends who took good care of me. But mostly, I would say that I liked being by myself.

I’ve always been happy enough with my own company. It comes with the territory of being a bit of a book nerd I guess. I like parties, but I like being by myself too. I like it a lot.

It wasn’t really like living by myself, of course, because it wasn’t real life. What I liked most was that I didn’t have to make any decisions for anyone else. I didn’t have to think about what people were going to wear or to eat. I barely had to make any decisions for myself. It wasn’t my house, so I didn’t have any cluttered cupboards to niggle at me. I had so few clothes that the washing was a simple matter of a load every few days. I had no garden of rampant soursobs to make me think ‘I really must get on to that’.

All there was to do was think and write and delete and think and write some more.

That’s not real life, but it was a lovely, lovely interlude.

The solitude. I liked the solitude.

I was happy to be home. My youngest boy said ‘I’m so excited I’m going to go upside down’ and then did a handstand on the grubby lounge, and it made me laugh and it still makes me smile. It’s been a gorgeous weekend of boys cuddling my legs for no reason at all. It’s good. It’s good to be home.

But being back amongst it all, amongst the races, the jumps and the screams, it makes me know that I really did enjoy the last few weeks. And if I can, I’ll do it again.

It’s probably because I had caesareans.

PS I will write about the guilt another day, because I find that a most fascinating thing.

Should I blog?

I ask this very specifically, for and about people like me who want to be ‘writers’. I apologise in advance for the earnestness of what is to follow, but I’m preparing a couple of workshops that I’m giving over the next couple of months and as I’ve been trying to articulate how I see blogging as a form of writing, and its potential (or otherwise) for ‘new’ writers, I couldn’t think of any other way to think it through than to write myself a blog post (so I guess the simple answer is ‘yes’).

In asking this question I’m not saying that my blog and my blogging habit all stem from ‘wanting to be a writer’. My blog and my blogging habit are about…well, you’ve got a blog, you’ve read my blog…you know all the things that it’s about. And this question can be easily applied to the wider set of questions, ‘should I blog instead of…’, and I’m sure you have your own range of neglected options to insert here – knitting, playing with children, getting together with friends and so on.

I’m not going to define exactly who I mean by ‘writers’ or ‘want to be’. You can decide for yourself whether or not it applies to you, but I do think that the discussion is slightly different for ‘new’ and ‘established’ writers (as discussed in posts such as this and this at Sarsaparilla).

So, having apologised for this post, my blog, my writing and myself; having determined that we are simply addressing one very small part of blogging; having broken a most important blogging rule (get to the bloody point) I shall ask the question again (because by now you’ve probably forgotten what it even was).

Should people who want to be ‘writers’ blog?

First up, the most obvious argument against blogging: blogging is a distraction from other writing. You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you? So is vacuuming the dust from the corners of the cutlery drawer. As is teaching myself to say the alphabet backwards (actually, I did that the night before my matric biology exam, but I offer it here in case you haven’t thought of it for yourself and need a new procastinatory activity). And reading The Advertiser, weeding the grevilleas, watching Grey’s Anatomy. The list goes on. It’s a spurious argument that one about distraction (do you know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word ‘spurious’ in a written sentence), presupposing too many things: that every moment I have spent blogging might have been directly applied to some other project; that I haven’t also been writing other things; that other writing projects are all more worthy than this; and that blogging is only about writing.

Perhaps now is a useful time to recall the wise words of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: abstinence from all things bad, moderation in all things good.

There is a danger that blogging will swallow your best ideas. That once blogged, they can not be used in some other form. The scrape of the spoon on the bottom of the saucepan that led to this post isn’t available to me any more, for example. But that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily lost anything. I love that piece of writing. It works perfectly as a blog post and wouldn’t work so well anywhere else.

I’ve become less worried about it too since I began performing standup. In standup – though I’m a beginner there too, so speak only from a beginner’s perspective – it seems okay to repeat yourself on your way to getting it right. You should polish your pieces until you think they will work, but very often you (I) don’t know whether they will work until they’ve been said outside the safety of your empty kitchen.

Blogging has sharpened my writing. I know, when I blog, that someone will read what I have written, and quite possibly that someone will read it only a few minutes after I’ve finished writing it (if I got hit by a bus, would I be happy for that to stand as my Last Post). I’ve been able to experiment with voice and with point of view and blogging has heightened my awareness of the every day. I might think, for example, of the colour lipstick I wear and the sentence I could use to describe that on a blog.

I could have learnt that from my other paper journal, perhaps, but a blog does not work in the same way that a private journal does. Because a blog is not private. Different bloggers deal with this differently, but deal with it they must. Anger, for example. I would never directly blog about my anger with important people in my life. Too hard to mop up. But I do blog about it every now and then. Like here. I can’t tell you how pissed off I was that day. And I didn’t need to once I’d written it down that way. And it gave me an idea, and there’s a larger piece of writing that’s grown from that, and I’ll be able to use it one day (well, I hope so, you know, maybe).

Not only does a blog bring you readers, it brings readers you get to know a bit about. Because blogging can’t be only about the writing. It’s about reading too. Reading a lot. And somehow, I think that can’t help but give you an insight into your own writing that isn’t available in any other form. You get told endlessly at workshops ‘write for yourself first’, but blogging teaches you – quickly – what that means. Not just how to do it, but the implications too.

On the relationship between your blog and your readers, there’s something to be said about learning how to ‘write what you know’ – direct experience – and transposing it to mean more than what just happened or what you immediately felt. But at the same time, you must be honest, because your blog readers (generally) expect that what you write in this form is true. I haven’t quite worked out how to articulate this point yet, but I know it is an important one. Do let me know if you think you know what I’m trying to say.

There’s a lot that blogging can teach you about other forms of writing. I imagine you could learn a lot about writing an open-ended narrative like a soap for example. And there are endless types of online writing which would blogging could introduce you to. I’m not sure about a novel though (and there’s an excellent discussion about that here). Though possibly if you were very good at forward planning and had a very particular kind of structural control. Maybe then.

That’s enough for now, isn’t it? I’ve spent far too long on this, haven’t I? Thanks for reading this far if indeed you have. Back to the shoes and coffee cups tomorrow. Promise.

Meltdown

Flicking through one of my many lists of things To Do – this one divided into Big, Medium, Little, then further into Long (term), Medium, Short – I realise that the deadline for the ABC Fiction Awards is looming. June 29.

I have something I was vaguely intending to enter. It needs a lot more work. Like a lot. But in some ways, I was thinking of giving this particular work this One Last Chance. You know, One Final Push, before I think to myself ‘well, it’s had a good life…it didn’t get published, but that’s life in the big city…NEXT’. And I feel like if I don’t give it One Last Chance then I’ll never be able to move on to the next thing. Which I have to do, because I told someone I would, and they gave me something in exchange. Do you see what I mean?

But June 29. That’s not far away. Is it?

So I have written a plan of what I would need to do. I have used a clean printout and my lamy lead pencil (it’s red). It Can’t Be Done. Not with Everything Else. There’re the obvious things – an important gig next week that I want to write some new material for (I think that is how you use the word gig, though to be honest, it does not come easily off my tongue); a small number of book reviews; an article which is already overdue; an article whose deadline looms; the Big Comedy Piece I am determined to write; the application for something I really want to do; the new novel which I am Determined I Will Begin. And then, there’re other things – the replacement computer I must buy before this one just refuses to start even after I plug and unplug it six times; the move of rooms so that I am no longer trying to work in the middle of the boys’ racing circuit; my determination that my contact with my friends Will Be Maintained. There’s cooking of course, and getting the boys safely home after school. And there are Other Things. Enormous wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night but not mine to blog about things. You know. You’ve got them, I’m sure.

And then, there’s the vegetable drawer which, no matter how many times I clean it, still has liquid in the bottom. Only last week, I cleaned it out, used the edgey veges for stock, converted the stock into soup, which was spooned into containers which were transferred to the freezer. How awesome is that? But wait, there’s more – we went away for the weekend, and because the freezer was so full it seems not to have closed properly and so we returned to a half-thawed freezer and potentially-botulistic soup – oh, it broke my heart, no matter that the ice had formed a beautiful winter wonderland.

Is it any wonder the mister returned home one evening to find me on the recognisable edge of a torrent of tears?

How I said, waving somewhat melodramatically at the vegetable drawer which seems to be filled with liquid mould again am I supposed to create? There was only a slight pause before I began – somewhat melodramatically again – I’m a failure at my job…all I have to do is keep the mould out and LOOK just LOOK.

I’m sure that you can see there was no room for rational discussion here. No amount of no one’s worth should be judged by the state of their vegetable drawer was going to work.
So, he did the only thing he could do. He scraped the cucumber – or was it zucchini – off the bottom of the drawer and then, when I sat down to work on the manuscript, he went into the bathroom and scrubbed the grout with an old toothbrush he had saved for just such a time.

And how do I repay this kindness? A few days later – when PlaySchool is on and I could be addressing the puzzle of the chapter which I know will work, I just have to work out how – I blog.