Printer woes

A writer without a printer is like a message without an ear to hear it.

Fortunately for the tragically printer-compromised amongst us (*cough me cough*) there's the promise of a brighter future (pun intended) here: 

Riddle

So, I'm supposed to be writing, but this is what happened instead. (#distractible) 

She steps on the Moon without any light.

She curses at Mars but still it is night.

At Mercury she voices a spirited cry.

At Jupiter she stumbles, and then realises why.

When she’s at Venus, she still carries a load.

No gifts yet at Saturn, it’s not the end of the road.

She’s not pretty or happy in the light of the Sun,

Her path hasn’t ended nor has it begun.

She is numbered like sisters

And heavens and stars

But she is ever alone

And ceaseless is her path.

What is she? 

Guesses?  Use the comment box.  

ETA: (Sat night) OK, this riddle isn't going very well. None of my family members have managed to work it out yet!  Also, I thought it would make better sense if I tweaked the answer a little. (So I did). I'm still not 100% sure if it works, but I'll leave it up here in the spirit of a beta reading. Enjoy! 

“… and back again” – The Hobbit’s long journey home.

(Warning: Long. Get a cup of tea). 

I was all of ten years old when I read The Hobbit, and since then, my recollection has been muddied by a fabulously overblown three-part movie adaptation. So when a friend waxed lyrical about it recently, I was moved to re-read it. I found myself entranced all over again, but this time for very different reasons.

Three guesses

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve been reading Tolkien, and thinking about stories and mythic journeys (more on that another time), and puzzles and codes (more on that too), and macrocosms and microcosms.  And the confluence of all of these has steered me creatively towards reworking a fairy tale.

I love a good fairy tale, but don’t be fooled, it’s not all magic wands and princess dresses out there in fairyland.  There are plenty of nasty little blighters with sharp teeth and even sharper wits lying in wait for our unsuspecting characters. But there are also lessons to be learned, fortunes to be made, and hopefully some happy endings, too.  

Fairy and folk tales give us plenty to work with.  I’ve previously penned a flash fic based on a particularly disturbing old story. My vignette takes place entirely on The Stairs which lead down into a very dark place:   

I tread down the stairs, cautiously, testing each one’s soundness before transferring my full weight.  Each step groans a slow warning to me.  It’s dark down there.  I reach the edge of the light, then dip my slippered toe into the pool of darkness.  It rises to my calf, then my knees, then my thighs, with each downward step, closing around me in its silky depth, swirling and enfolding my fine skirts.

I bet you want to know what she finds at the bottom, right?

I’ve also written a conte merveilleux of my own invention. It adopts the shape, style and symbolism of an old folk tale, and weaves together elements of faerie with a love story.  Delivering sweetness and heartbreak in less than 1200 words, Sweet Apple is one of my favourite pieces of writing.

For my next piece, there are so many stories to choose from, and so little time! The source story needs to have enough inherent complexity to permit a meaningful reworking, but enough simplicity to allow the original elements to remain intact.  For a while I was thinking about the two girls, one kind and one mean-spirited, who encounter an old lady by the well. The kind sister is rewarded with roses and pearls falling from her mouth whenever she speaks, but the unkind sister has toads and snails dropping out of hers. 

That’s not all of the story, because their mother is horrible too. (Family dysfunction 101). All is not lost though, because a prince just happens to be riding his horse through the forest at exactly the right time (!). There are plenty of gender stereotypes to chew over in a re-telling, but the most delicious temptation lies in the hilarious story possibilities for things-falling-out-of-people’s-mouths.  

But there is another story I keep returning to, like a task that must be completed by dawn. I’ve spun it round and round in my mind, and it has cast off fine filaments that have burrowed into my imagination and taken root.  As a child, I never liked this story. There was always something deeply unsettling about it.  As an adult, I recognise the themes of manipulation, deception, and greed, and it strikes me as a thoroughly modern tale. It deserves a more thorough telling, which examines the motivations and actions of all its characters and provides a resolution for each one of them, regardless of their position in the social hierarchy.  But since my denouement leans heavily on the original fairy tale, I’ll keep its name to myself, and leave you to guess which story it is.  

The greater truth

"A lot of what frightens people about writing is this precise idea that once we put something on the page we are rendered vulnerable. There is truth to that, but the greater truth, for me, is that once I put something on the page I am also rendered a little less vulnerable. I have created for myself a piece of turf on which I am willing to stand." 

From The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron

Regardez bien

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.*

Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Le Petit Prince by lab604 @ Flickr

* This is my secret. It's very simple: you can only see clearly with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye. 

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.  

Sharpen

It’s been a while. I’ve been really, really busy.  And then the school holidays come, with incessant demands on my attention, sucking the last of my intellect from my skull, draining it through my nostrils like an ancient Egyptian funerary nightmare. 

But when I’m not writing, the unexpressed writhes and scratches within me, until I can contain it no more and it claws its way free. 

So I carve out a space, sharpen my nib, and I write again. 

Note to self: dragons*

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."

 The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937) 

Smaug, by Eric Fraser

* Actually, make that reptiles, generally. Reptiles that slither close and hiss softly but do not blink, and those that skulk quietly in the long grass. And the ones that spit venom. Especially those.  But not tortoises. Tortoises are usually wise rather than cunning. 

Beautiful moment

That beautiful moment, when the word you need flows effortlessly onto the page.

The perfect irony, when that word is Sisyphean. 

Sisyphus by Jason Tamez @ Flickr

Excruciating

It’s Friday, and the weekend looms ahead of me, filled with that most excruciating of experiences:  the getting of feedback.  I’ve submitted a couple of my more recent short stories to a writers’ group, and I will be hearing their unabridged opinions at our next meeting.

Feedback isn’t always pretty.  Writers’ groups contain people with a variety of experiences, opinions, and differing levels of writing and critiquing skills.  While some people like to try to understand what the writer was trying to do, and attempt to pitch their feedback accordingly, others come from the hold-nothing-back camp.  Of course, we’re all there to learn and to understand our own writing better so that we can improve it, so the forthright opinion of our peers is valuable.  But it needs to be constructive, not destructive.  It is possible to be honest without gouging out the tender roots of a beginner writer’s confidence.  

What do I mean by this?  Studies have shown that it's usually the more experienced learners who want to hear negative (but specific) feedback.  People who are just starting out welcome more positive comments, because they need the encouragement.  In a group with a variety of experience and, more importantly, confidence levels, it can be quite tricky to know which end of the continuum to pitch your comments to, so inevitably there will be some misfires.  It pays to put on your psychological flak-jacket before seeking feedback from a group, in case you’re on the receiving end of an enthusiastically well-intentioned mortar attack.

So, armed with my bullet-proof silk & mohair fingerless gloves, I have submitted two short stories for the consideration of the group. I wrote the first of them several months ago. I loved the process of writing it, and felt very pleased with the result.  Since then, the satisfied glow of completion has ebbed a little, leaving me wondering how successful it really is.  Re-reading it, I’m not sure it is as smooth as I’d first thought.  It’s short, very short, maybe painfully so.  But I think it might still contain enough cleverness and charm (and “punch”) to satisfy the reader.  

The second story is brand new, and much rawer as a result.  It started, as many of my stories do, with a single burning scene in mind, and the rest of the narrative has grown around it in misshapen concentric rings.  I’m still much too close to that interior place of creation to have any ability to judge either the story or the quality of its delivery.  In my inner eye, the salt marsh locale is beautiful, desolate, and gloomy, but I’ve described it sparingly, and maybe some readers will want more physical detail.  I do know it’s still quite rough in places, the pacing is a little clumpy, and I really need to learn a whole lot of new words that mean “grey”. 

On the other hand, some aspects of this story are quite nuanced, requiring the reader to make a leap.  I know from experience that not all readers are able or willing to do that.  Some people expect to have every last, excruciating plot point fed to them, with a disposable plastic spoon, no less.  And after a beta-reading by a family member who expressed denouement disappointment, I suspect there will be quite mixed feedback on this one.  And that is a good thing, if it helps me to understand how it is received variously in the mind of the readers.

the strange pull

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull 

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

~ Rumi