Craft evolution

Of all the books I read as a child, one stands out above all others: Maurice Gee’s The halfmen of O. This a story of a Susan, who, with her cousin Nick, becomes trapped in the world of O. She becomes involved in a quest to restore balance to the world and save it from the evil Halfmen. I read it when I was about eleven and I’ve never forgotten it. Today this book has reminded me of how much I can’t live without my craft, of what it really means to me.

Gee is a New Zealand writer, but apparently his books have a far reach, in fact, I’ve just learned The halfmen of O is to be adapted into a movie. I am at once excited and apprehensive about this. Gee’s writing has stayed with me for more than two and half decades. He was the first author whose writing style I remember really appreciating in equal proportions to the plot. Even as young as I was, I could see the merit in Gee’s style. I wanted to emulate him so much that I wrote several stories that mimicked the book. The imagery of his words and the uniqueness of his style created an atmosphere I easily became lost in. These days I’m less inclined to emulate other authors, since I’ve found the joy of creating my own style. It is in constant evolution. This is one of the best things about writing, and being a writer – the constant evolution of the craft.

What’s simple is true

Away from the computer my life looks and feels somewhat charmed. I read, cook, garden, listen to music, renovate, take long excursions with Bruce and Ernie, our 5 month old puppy, play with friends, and mostly examine the light-filled (and sometimes the dark) crevices of life. And then I return to the computer and write about my experiences, observations and reactions. Most of the time I feel like Don Music, that character from the Muppets who bangs his head against the piano when he gets blocked in the middle of the alphabet or some well-known verse. My point is, the reality of actually sitting down to write challenges every idea we have about a writer’s life being glamorous. It requires humility, determination and most especially patience. Humility and determination I have in equal doses, but patience is something I have to work at. Each time I sit down to write I have to remind myself not only to be patient, but to be flexible and open-minded too. I have to tell myself to let go of the urgency to have written, the urgency for gratification and instead to concentrate on the enjoyment of actually writing. Each time I do sit down I entreat the powers that be to grant me enlightenment, forbearance and conclusions. This makes me think I need a personal prayer . . .

mmm Jam . . .

I’ve spent much of the last two days on my feet cooking. Good cooking, like good writing, is an art-form. Though I am no chef I seem to have a much easier time coming up with tasty and unique dishes than I do coming up with interesting and original prose. I tend to cook by the seat of my pants – choosing ingredients based on mood and personal preference rather than from a recipe.  While I will occasionally refer to a recipe for the basic set up of a meal, I almost always end up customising it to suit mine or my husband’s taste. This kind of behaviour would have some people I know accusing me of being one of those impulsive creative types who can’t follow instructions. All true. But my creative cooking is never without purpose. I like to bend tradition, to come up with unlikely combinations of food – like mixing Persian with other international flavours – to test my own wits in the kitchen. Whenever I discover a tasty dish at a restaurant I will always try it at home, adapting it of course. I can’t always recreate the atmosphere, or the exact flavour, but the process and sometimes the result is rewarding.

So my list of accomplishments this week is: Persian paste for marinating chicken, my own version of basil pesto (using home grown ingredients) and jam. Today I made mixed berry jam (boysenberry, raspberry, strawberry and cherry) and a blackberry jam.

If I could only apply this enthusiasm to writing, that novel would be “cooked” in no time.

Chaos

Yesterday I spent most of the day out in the garden, which I’ve dubbed Bibliotopia. I set myself up with music, a comfy cushion and a pot of tea on a porch swing and did some time thinking. It’s surprising how exhausting a day of thinking can make you feel. I thought about my book, about other people’s books, more books I could write and all the books that will never get written. I  had ideas. I wrote one of them down and then thought about the likelihood of it ever being written given my current commitments. I jotted it down anyway to be stored on an index card for that someday when I’ll have time to write it. I have a few of these index cards, but most of the ideas are written on scraps of paper scattered throughout the house, or are locked in my mind. When I was working I used to fantasize about having the time to manifest those ideas into real volumes of text. Now that I have time it is taken up with a thousand other tasks – being a wife, training a 5 month old puppy, taking care of the house, writing a novel, maintaining a blog, trying to launch an online magazine, trying to get through a growing stack of books, and of course, having time to think about doing all these things. I’m 36 years old and I wonder if I will ever get my writer’s brain sorted out and then I think that the chaos is what allows me to be a writer. Chaos is what allows to me propagate ideas in the first place. I guess I’m happier with chaos than without it.

Review your own work

This week I’ve been playing the part of administrator rather than writer. Through the process of organising and tidying I have come across many fragments of writing scattered throughout various folders – some are “on hold”, though most have been abandoned. Generally my rule is: if a piece remains unfinished for several months it gets moved to the Reject folder. Why a reject folder? Why not just eliminate them entirely, send them to the trash? This system allows me to follow my own progress as a writer. I’ve kept rejects from as long as twenty years ago to remind myself that I have improved and can only continue to improve by continuing to write. Shamefully, my rejects folder contains two fizzled short stories and six abandoned novels. I would never show these to anyone else, but I get a kick out revisiting them every few years.

As a writer it is important to be able to review your own work objectively. If you can identify good writing in others, you can identify it in your own work. Likewise you should be able to identify weaker pieces. Here are a few tips:

• Don’t allow yourself to be timid about reading your own work, even if it is old work
• Be clear about your reasons for reviewing a piece (ie, for your own amusement, for the sake of tracking your progress, because you’re looking for a piece to publish)
• Remove yourself from the writing space if it helps. Hardcopies are easy to transport, but electronic copies may require the use of a different computer
• Don’t allow yourself to make corrections – not even in the punctuation or spelling. The idea is to review the work, not edit it
• Mark what you think works and what doesn’t
• Read until the end
• Now ask yourself the following questions:
  1. would I like/dislike this work if someone else had written it?
  2. how would I feel showing this work to someone else?
  3. how do I feel about destroying/keeping this piece?

I have just applied this strategy to something I wrote about twelve years ago and the answer was surprising. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but more importantly I was able to see how I had improved in the years since.

Living means writing

I read an ad this morning about a doctor who claims that open heart surgery does more harm than good and offers advice on how to minimise and even reverse the risk of heart disease, but here’s the catch: you have to pay for it. I am not a doctor. I know as much about heart disease as the next person, but I found this advertisement inappropriate and irresponsible, not to mention greedy. If his treatment could really save millions of lives then as a doctor he has a duty of care to humanity to share his amazing revelation. If what he says his true his treatment could potentially save millions of people worldwide.

These web ads are often dodgy – they give you just enough information to hook you and convince you to part with your cash. They provide testimonials, and sometimes “scientific” data to back up their claims, but often this data isn’t published or peer-reviewed. I cannot trust a person who would sell something as valuable as heart disease prevention or even cure to line their own pockets, especially when it could prevent millions of deaths worldwide each year. I appreciate that doctors need to make a living and I have no problem paying my own doctor his fee, but then my doctor takes extra time with me each visit. He’s shown me slides of his trip to Uluru and around Australia, he shares anecdotes and laughs with me, but best of all he made me well enough to get pregnant and wants to keep treating me throughout. He’s a good doctor who earns every penny and whenever there is new information about diabetes or pregnancy he shares it willingly without demanding extra. The fact that he is on top of new research findings tells me he is passionate about his profession. At the other end of the spectrum I once had a doctor who was in such a hurry to go to lunch he told me I couldn’t be glucose intolerant and implied I was making it all up because my symptoms didn’t support that diagnosis. He was very wrong. Now I have type II diabetes. This same doctor told my step father he had foot and mouth disease. It doesn’t take a genius to know that this virus, is rare in humans. In fact, my step father had a bad case of the flu.

For some, writing, like medicine, is a passion before it is a profession. If you write for financial reward it will show in your writing. Your voice will come across sounding indifferent, bored or monotone and you are much more likely to miss grammatical or spelling errors. It is human nature to want to be rewarded for work and it is equally instinctive for us to want to reward a service. I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t love to make a living from writing, but I’d be a fool to think it is inevitable or easy. It is absolutely possible, but I believe those who do find financial reward in writing are mostly in it because they love it and that is what makes them successful. For me, the act of writing and having written is reward enough. My role as a writer is first to provide that service. I love to be read. If I happen to find financial reward along the way then it is a bonus, but it isn’t my purpose.

It might be archaic or sentimental, but I believe in living for the good of all. Living means writing, laughing, dancing, singing, healing and most of all, loving.

Never say never

A friend said to me very recently that I’d changed so much in the last few years.  All my life I’ve heard this said to me, even my brother said that every time he sees me I’m doing something different. I’ve been called a chameleon, a hedonist and even a dilettante and my response was always that it was natural for a person’s character to evolve, that to stay the same was to be inert. This time though, I listened to what she said and took it to heart because I realised that even I had fixed rules for myself. I was the girl who wanted a career, to be independent, to have educated opinions, I wanted to write, live like a nomad, play music and know a lot of people. I was never going to marry, rely on a man for financial support or have a mortgage, and I was never ever going to have children. These were my rules that I thought unbreakable. Then I met Bruce. In 2006 he asked me to marry him and I said yes without hesitation. In 2007 he had me put on the deeds to his house (and thus the mortgage). We married in July. In 2008 I took time off work to write, which meant he had to support me financially. He still does. Now the never ever is happening too. I was wrong about a lot of things. I always thought I had what it takes to be a writer, but little else. I still think I have what it takes to be a writer, but I can also be a lot of other things. Writers, in fact, most creative performers, are butterflies, changing as often as we need to while maintaining the same core identity.

Entertaining the troops

Creative performers, like writers, artists, musicians, are everywhere. Across the globe our numbers are too vast to fathom, yet, or perhaps as a consequence, the creative arts industry is one of the most difficult to break into. It would have been far less heartbreak, and perhaps more financially rewarding, to become a draftsman for an architectural company, or a manufacturer than to toil in the creative industry*. Construction, engineering, manufacturing and primary industries all offer apprenticeships where novices can get paid to learn the trade. Whole organisations have been set up to match apprentice with professional tradespeople and regardless of the economic climate, there is (usually) work available in these industries – even as some companies are downsizing or shutting down, others are rising to take their place, at least here in Australia. The economy may flounder, but the world still needs irrigation pipe and electrical conduit, timber and tools, canned goods and fresh vegetables, mechanics, plumbers and sheep shearers. I’m not suggesting that life in these industries is easy or completely immune to economic pressure – my husband works in manufacturing and his company is feeling the pinch despite thirty-five years of service to Australia – but there is something to be said for having an industry trade. With the exception of journalism, to the best of my knowledge there are few paid apprenticeships or internships for writers where mentoring is provided as part of the program. Generally writers must find their own way into the industry, paying inordinate amounts of money to learn from “professionals”.  Even when there are scholarships and awards, competition is extreme; only a handful will be chosen and even fewer will succeed. The rejection rate for writers doesn’t bare thinking about. You’ve heard the stories of writer’s being rejected over and again – Bryce Courtnay, J K Rowling, Conan Doyle, even James Joyce were all rejected more than a few times. Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over 100 times. If Prisig had been a carpenter or electrician and received that many job interview rejections he’d have given up his trade and tried something else. Each time you send a piece of work out for publication, you are essentially applying for a job, but unlike the trade industries, interviewing is subjective and sometimes long, work is usually postpaid to the tune of months or years rather than weeks, probabtionary periods are longer and often the writer must contribute financially to his/her own success. Someone once said to me “you’ve picked a hard career, kid – you should have a backup”. I like contingency plans and had no problem following this advice, but for as long as I can remember I’ve felt a great injustice for performance artists of all kinds. The world needs us as much as it needs trade industries, perhaps more so. Human’s can live without cars, but can we live without stories, art and music? Apparently not. According to the Queensland Government website, creative industires is growing faster worldwide than any other economic industry. This makes perfect sense to me. We are a creative species – there is no society or culture on Earth that lives without music, art or story. When times are hard it is creative industry that populations turn to for salvation, like wartime entertainers performers rally the troops and ease dissension. Musicians bring smiles to the disheartened, story-tellers bring laughter and hope, and artists make us wonder at the beauty of the human mind. All of these are forms of story-telling. I’m glad to have chosen to implant myself in the creative industry as a writer, it is an honorable, and very ancient and necessary profession. If you are a story teller, a musician or dancer, an artist or photographer feel proud, for you are in good company and your skill is needed now more than ever.

*By creative industries I mean writing, publishing, all forms of art, including photography, film and television, music and dance

The writer as reader

I was going to review Maps of the imagination: the writer as cartographer by Peter Turchi as a book for writers, but have since realised that I still have no idea what the book was even about. Maps, cartography, Turchi’s chaotic musings? Admittedly, I originally bought the book for the attractive maps sprinkled throughout, and because of these I felt certain the book would make an interesting read. Interesting, yes, but good? As a writer I give every book I pick up a chance. Writers provide a valuable service to society; writers enhance cultural diversity, educate and entertain, and say things that others are thinking, thus all writers deserve to be read. With few exceptions, I read every book to the last word. This is my own reading code that undoubtedly has its roots in the fact that I am also a writer. But if a book fails to grab me I become increasingly disillusioned with its author, sometimes even offended, but, because a fellow writer has produced this work I often end up blaming myself for not loving it – a case of the reader failing the book rather than the book failing the reader. As a writer it is difficult to engage in immerisve reading, which leads me to question if writers are fair readers. I’d like to believe I’m a fair reader, but ultimately I know I read like a writer, and that is why I couldn’t get into Turchi’s pretty book.

Do or do not

The choice of whether to continue with my Masters degree boils down to ego. When I started the Master of Arts I was specialising in biological anthropology. I learned how to read bones, I learned who is ancestor and who is not, I can tell the difference between a marsupial and a placental mammal, I can even recognise certain pathologies in bones. I loved university, I love anthropology, but I knew all along what I really wanted to do was write, which is why I switched from a degree in anthropology to a degree in professional writing. Yet,  although I don’t practice as a forensic or biological anthropologist I learned more about writing (and myself) during my “science” years than I have from the actual writing courses I subsequently took, and that is a mighty trick considering I was writing and reading mostly dry academic papers and learning how to be hyper-critical. I won’t be returning to the Arts degree this year and it is only my ego that will suffer. It’s time to get on with the business of being a writer. I remind myself once again of Master Yoda’s very wise words: “Do or do not . . . there is no try”.