“At some point, my writer's brain started to whisper a mantra...”

Make it a simple story about hope.

Make it a story about human resilience.

Make it a story where people still laugh, brush their teeth, still fall in love, a story where people redeem one another by small gestures, a story where people have no choice but to keep going in the face of huge tragedy and unspeakable loss.

From 'Author's Note' by Gae Polisner, in The Memory of Things 

On building bridges (... and getting over them)

It is too easy to allow time to pass.


It is too easy to let all the other could, should, woulds get in the way of what it is you really want.


But if the fire of a story burns within you, you will have no rest until it’s written, or spoken, or somehow shared.


This week, I had the good fortune to hear the very talented Markus Zusak speak. Markus is back on Aussie soil after touring the US with his new book, Bridge of Clay, and he spoke to an enthralled full house in the theatrette at the National Library of Australia. Being an ardent admirer of Markus’ earlier works which include The Book Thief and The Messenger, I queued up with everyone else to have a copy of his latest novel signed, but mostly to thank him for speaking so authentically about the struggle he had writing it. Particularly because it’s been thirteen years since his previous novel was published, and he’s been working on Clay for most of that time.


Markus has spoken about using failure as fuel before, as in his 2014 TED talk, The failurist:


Here’s the thing with writers. Everyone thinks that to be a writer you’ve got to have a great imagination. You don’t. You just have to have a lot of problems. Clearly. And it’s getting around those problems that gives you the power to imagine. You’ve got to imagine your way around them.



This book looks as if it will be just as deliciously chewy as his others. 

Why do we need to work so hard?

The question asked by a fellow writer today:  If 85% of everything that’s published today is crap, why do we need to work so hard to improve how we write?

Guilty as charged

Sometime during the Year of Getting Organised, I came across some old material.  You know, stuff I’d written, typed with an actual typewriter onto actual paper, a long time ago.  Some of it was while I was at school, along with some truly cringe-worthy short stories from my early adulthood. 

And it was bad.  Baaaaaaaaad.

Once you get past the psychic slap of how truly awful some of it was – if you can get past it – you can read it again, for insight. 

What I found in this early writing was a sense of my own stuck-ness, and in the very middle of it, a desperate need for beauty, for inspiration, for connection, as lifelines out of the mire. There’s even a (hideously plodding) story based on this very theme – a theme that even I didn’t recognise at the time.

But I also saw fragments of my craft emerging: the oblique slant of words used in fresh way, some nascent plot ideas, and a blunt personal honesty that was possibly the reason that continuing to write was so daunting.

I also recognised was what was missing: artistic self-belief.  The brazen self-worth needed to foist my imagination into the bright rule-bound world.  The mindfulness to persist with writing from that space, to plough through my inexperience until I achieved something that even my cracked self-censor could grudgingly acknowledge might be ok. 

So, what can I take from this insight?

In the time since I wrote that material, I have come to understand a number of things.  Like, that writing improves your writing. And living, without writing, also improves your writing.  I understand now how fickle a commodity confidence is – that its weight and value is mediated in direct relationship to how badly you need it.  That it makes bad writers lazy and tortures good writers and constricts their efforts to a trickle.

And that none of that matters while you’re writing.  The most important thing is to just keep going.

I have learnt that uncertainty is bearable. Not knowing all the answers is a good thing. The bits that are missing tell just as much as the bits that are in the story.

But mostly the thing that I have learnt is that the writing is only 50% of being a writer.  You can be technically precise and grammatically correct, and still fail at the wholeness of the craft.

The other 50% of being a writer is the story that you bring to the endeavour – and that’s where the magic takes place. It’s where the jagged edges of your lived experience abrade a raw opening in the words, creating a space for the numinous to enter. It’s what gives life to your work.

So, these are my crimes, if any: believing too much that I had to be “good at” writing before I’d even begun, and believing too little in the stories that needed to be told. In this, I include my own powerful history, left unspoken for too long. In this respect only, I am guilty as charged. 

For these errors of omission, I hereby make restitution: not in silence, but in well-timed speech. Not in secluded reflection, but in decisive word-driven action.  I will hone my craft until it has the gleam and heft of the finest Damascene steel, and holding it as a sabre before me, I will carve a path to my own bold future.  

the strange pull

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull 

of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.

~ Rumi

Key words

After filling myself with that unique blend of inspiration and wonder that comes from attending a fabulous writers’ group, I had a tiny, effortless moment of insight. 

I was thinking about writing.  About my own writing, and what exactly I aspire to.  I imagined for a moment that someone else was describing my writing, and the words that I would like to hear them using to describe the essential qualities common across my body of work. 

As soon as I’d framed the question, the answers came – each one arising with clarity and colour in my mind: 

Strange
Beautiful 
Truth

Strange – because strangeness stretches us, grows us and gives us new understanding.   In essence, strangeness is at the very heart of originality. It’s the new, slightly askew view, the novel approach, the uniqueness of a thing. 

Beautiful – I aspire for my work to be lyrical, to capture the fragile moments of ordinary and awful beauty that wash over us and around us, often unnoticed.   

Truth – I aspire for my work to contain at least a fragment of truth – the truth of our shared humanity.  While truth is a many-splendoured thing, and its name has been put to the service of terrible crimes, there is another type of truth:  the unadorned place of connection, the sacred space from which the power of sharing our stories arises.   We do something profound when we acknowledge the reality of another person’s lived journey.  We can do this when we gift our readers with a piece of ourselves, so that they can enjoy the jolt of recognition in an otherwise imagined/imaginal/fictional reality.    

That’s a big ask, right? 

Yes, and no.  I’m going to write what I’m going to write.  It will be what it is.  Along the path to publication the writing will be held up to objective standards, those elements of the craft that are determined by either consensus or debate to be what is required for “good” writing, for publication, or even for commercial success.  None of that, however, creates any personal impetus or satisfaction:  that, my friends, must come from within.  

Once you have overcome the peculiar notion that even a single person on the planet might want to read what you have written, everything else about the quest for recognition and readership becomes even more absurd.  No two people will ever share the same opinion of your work, because each reader brings a part of themselves to the story that they are reading.  Essentially, you are pitching your work to an endlessly shifting finish line.  

So what, then, can a writer aspire to?  Fortune?  Not often.  Fame?  Not likely.  Popularity? Oddly mediated, and even more fickle than ever in the age of the one minute meme. 

The only thing left to aim for is to write something good.  And the only definition of “good” that will be even remotely useful to the writer is the one they have crafted for themselves. 

Strange beautiful truth, it is, then. 

Note to self: eat that frog

Yes. I admit I sometimes struggle on the time-management front.  What writer doesn’t, given the time demands of our craft in our already-full lives?

Some people deal with this by getting up, monastically, at 4am and forcibly shoving an extra couple of hours into their lives that way, but that ain’t gonna happen.  I am not a morning person.  Neither is Neil Gaiman, as famously homaged by Diana Wynne Jones in Deep Secret, so I’ll just take that as a  literary sanction for sleeping in.

So, without adopting the schedule of a cloistered nun, there are a number of other tools we can use to improve our time use.  Some of them address big-picture issues, like goal setting, getting your house/desk/psyche organised, or prioritising by using some kind of box/list/diagram/mnemonic with daily, religious fervour.

But there’s another simpler one:

Eat that frog.

No, not the chocolate variety, although they are good too.  (Especially the sublime, velvety goodness of a Haigh’s chocolate frog).  There must be some special compound in good quality chocolate that stimulates creative thought, right?  However, to date this strategy is evidenced more by my splendid physique than by my impressive publishing record.

No, the idea of Eat that frog is to do the one thing you’re most dreading first.  Get it done at the start of the day when your energy is high. Once it’s done, you will have freed up all the time and energy you might have spent avoiding it – and the whole day will be more productive.

This is not a new concept.  Maggie Stiefvater, a YA author that I admire enormously, has talked about time management and the work ethic that allows her to combine writing, painting, and all the other things involved in being an all-round  creative genius and a mother.  At the top of her list is Work first, then play.  Which, if you think about it, is a variant on the frog eating. 

This is a really good writing tool – especially when you’re circling around a hard bit, something that you’re avoiding, something that is starting to look like writer’s block.  Jump on in, eat that frog.  The worst thing that can happen is that you will write a terrible first draft - and aren’t all first drafts awful?  Now that the frog is no longer glowering at you, you can go back and revisit and refine what you need to.  The best thing that can happen – and it may surprise you – is that you release a whole new wave of ideas and energy. 

Note to self:  this post is not about frogs, or time, or even about writing. It’s about resistance. It’s about the inexplicable obstacles we place in our own paths. Especially when we’re about to push through to a whole new level of understanding or achievement. Why do we do this? Who knows?**  All I know is that the times when the resistance is strongest, and the pressure is greatest, are the times when we are closest to breaking through to the place that we most want to be in.

That’s worth eating a frog for.

And here's a nice cautionary tale about what happens when you don't:

I kissed it but it just got bigger
by Cpt<HUN> @ Flickr

  

**Actually, Stephen Pressfield might know. He has written a whole book about this, The War of Art. I haven’t read it but it comes highly recommended by a fellow writer whose entire being lit up when he was describing its value to his writing practice.  

Write every day

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world. 

~ Robert McKee

I wrote a lot by Mullenkedheim @ Flickr 

Get started writing

I was thrilled to be invited by Connie Berg to co-present a “Get Started Writing” workshop for members of the public at the Tea Tree Gully Library.  The aim of this two-hour workshop was to introduce participants to writing by “doing”, and give them some tools and hopefully some inspiration to continue on with it.

Ironically, I was nominated to run the section on poetry, for which I have great appreciation but little compositional skill.  I had enormous fun putting together a haiku worksheet, and a shared poetry-writing exercise, which was enjoyed with amazing and occasionally hilarious results.  Participants then wrote some of their own fiction, and had the opportunity to share their work with a supportive audience.  Anyone who’s engaged with a good group of writers knows how enormously rewarding and encouraging this can be. 

But life is a wonderful and mysterious thing, and the workshop held a surprise for me.

I was surprised at the late arrival of lady who had both the face and the surname of my Grade 3 teacher, Mrs R.  Could it be my most fondly remembered teacher?  She had been flaming-haired and vivacious, passionate about imagination, about learning.  I remember, as the quiet, strange girl that I was, that this was the teacher who showed me that if you put in extra effort, you can produce something good.  Something beautiful.  Something that you can be proud of.  Even though I spent only two-thirds of the year in her classroom, it was a pivotal time in my learning.  She encouraged my reading, but even more importantly, she switched me on to writing, neatly and well. 

I remember the shining feeling of pride seeing two gold stars and a smiley stamp on what must have been one of my very first works of imaginative fiction.  I clung to that feeling when I was suddenly uprooted to a distant, hot land.  I changed schools five more times in the next five years, but the memory of her and what she had taught me kept me engaged with learning, even in desolate emotional terrain.  I had wondered since whether I might ever meet her again, and hoped one day to thank her.

And yes, thirty years later, in this community writing workshop, it was indeed Mrs R.  She remembered the sad, quiet girl I had been at age 7.  When the class ended, she handed me an acrostic poem she had written for me.  This beautiful, expressive, expansive teacher – who’d had no idea of the impact she’d had on my life - had seen a spark inside a quiet child and coaxed it to a flame.  She was rewarded all these years later by seeing that girl transformed, and that flame now blazing as passion for writing and the joy of sharing it with others.  

The significance of this moment was not lost on me.  It seems like more than just coincidence that I reconnected with the teacher who taught me to want to write well, in that same space – the sphere of writing, of sharing learning, of getting started on the thing that calls you.  It affirmed in both of us the power of sharing what you’re passionate about, in a moment of unexpected, exquisite denouement.

So, the moral to this story, if there is one, is to get started.  Get started writing.  Or painting.  Or singing.  Or whatever it is that lights you up, get started doing that.  Do it often, and share the joy that it brings you.  It creates a space, a magical chink through which all sorts of unimagined rewards can enter your life.

What are you waiting for?   

Light it up... by young_einstein @ Flickr

Cake: the ultimate metaphor

There's a certain amount of healthy egotism involved in being a successful author/artist/pastry chef. Not only do you need to believe in what you produce, your belief needs to shine through your craft in such a way that it is visible to other people.  It's an essential element in attracting an audience.      


strawberry cake by Kanko* @ Flickr



Look around. There are thousands of writers out there. Some of them write well, some of them badly, but they all believe they're providing something that is worth someone else's time to consume. We can't all be the next bestselling author, can we? Even if you baked the tastiest cake ever, if every other person at the morning tea has also baked a wonderful cake there's a chance yours might never get eaten. So how does a cake get chosen?  It might be a very ordinary cake that happens to have magnificent icing, or it might be baked by someone whose cake was memorable last time, or maybe everyone saw a similar cake on TV so they think this one will taste good too. The choice of cake is as individual as the people who are choosing it.  So too with writing.

So how does that choice happen?  How do I, as a writer, elevate my craft to the extent that it rolls deliciously off the page and straight onto my intended audience's tongue?

And does it really matter whether I sit here typing away and never make the moves to earn the readership?  Does it matter if I ensconce myself in a long and happy but solitary writing life? If all the work I've ever done slides quietly with me into the grave? 



Yes, it does. It matters to me. And the reason it does - besides a pathetic desire to rise above the ordinary - is because writing, for me, is about connection.  It's not about the cake in and of itself, but about the mysterious transaction that occurs when I invest my time and energy to create something of beauty, something that will nourish another person. And equally, it's about receiving that same gift from others. When I sit quietly, listening to a fellow writer read her work, I'm receiving something precious and true, that has spilled from the very essence of who they are.



This is true of all the great works that we have read - whether they were books, poems, essays, blog posts, letters, published or private. The connection allows us to perceive and honour the great truths and gifts of our lives, whether that is self-knowledge, healing, or simply the power of telling our stories and having them heard. It is so valuable that it is worth reaching through my inadequacies to embrace the necessary self-belief.  And to keep writing.  And sharing my cake.

What is it that motivates you to keep writing and sharing?