Is this working for you, Alan Smithee? – by patrick cullen

Whew! Just finished the rewrite of a 12,000-word corporate policy that must’ve been written — I assume or maybe just hope — by a committee, no member of which would seriously identify themselves as a writer (if they did, they wouldn’t be accurate).

We’ve probably all seen this kind of thing before. Our working lives are ripe with opportunities to write — policies, procedures, specifications, reports, speeches etc — and while some of us take such opportunities and run with them, others who’d baulk at writing anything longer than a shopping list or a txt msg , reluctantly drag their feet toward ‘the end’. Or, perhaps worse still, they enlist the help of other people equally enthused about writing and, together, they get themselves into one giant mess of collaboration. The last time I saw this kind of thing was in a screenplay that I was asked to rewrite, and the thing took so much rewriting that I ended up with my first ‘screenwriter’ credit.

In both of these cases — policy and screenplay — I was really rewriting, versus writing, so a credit on the policy is not expected, but the ‘screenwriter’ credit was something else altogether. At best it was generous; at worst it was an embarrassment. It’s not a great film, nor was it ever meant to be, but if I’d known I was to appear in the credits I’d have likely appealed for an Alan Smithee credit.

Alan Smithee? He’s no one really; really, he’s no one — Alan Smithee’s just a name used by film folk who no longer want their name associated with a project they worked on. The name itself is an anagram of ‘The Alias Men’ and directors have made regular use of it. But other users include screenwriters, cinematographers, producers and editors; even actors and transport drivers have managed to dissociate their names.

What your name is associated with is important. John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screen Writers Guild (the former name of what is now the Writers’ Guild of America, or WGA) said, “A writer’s name is his most cherished possession. It is his creative personality, the symbol of the whole body of his ideas and experience.” Writers often use a name other than the one their parents wrote on their birth certificate. Pseudonyms are used for all sorts of reasons, to hide identity (‘Anonymous’ being the least discreet), to conceal gender (M.J.), and even to get an author’s work on the shelf beside another name author in the hope that incidental sales will follow.

But it’s the idea of collaborative writing that’s got me thinking about what I would or would not want my own name associated with. In the collaborative writing I’ve done so far I’ve essentially been the Band-Aid applied to the trauma created by a committee of non-writers. Committees have a lot to answer for and, given enough time, textas and butcher’s paper, they might just ‘groupthink’ their way toward that answer or even a clearer definition of the preceding question. Criticism of committees is certainly not some new sport. Back in 1963, in his Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy wrote: ‘Nowdays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on ‘team-work’ is bunkum — a conspiracy of the mediocre majority. No advertisement, no commercial and no image can be created by a committee”. An extreme view, sure, but Ogilvy’s one man confident in his own abilities, and he was talking about committees of the 60s, not our newer-age type of committee.

But in either scenario, would I have been better off going it alone? I doubt it. As a writer who really does enjoy rewriting it was a relief to have some raw material to work with, even if that is 12,000 words of corporate-speak, or what may have been Orlando: The Short Film (or how to lose yourself in 5 minutes or less).

So, despite my gripe, I think that I’d keep putting my hand up again for this kind of work. When it comes down to it, though, I might happily leave my name out of the credits. What do you think, Alan Smithee? Should we admit to this? I can live with it for now. How about you?

Ever written something you wished you hadn’t? Or seen someone else get the credit for something you wrote?

Is this working for you, Alan Smithee?

So, what do I owe you?

By Patrick Cullen

Acknowledgments — is there any part of a book more fraught with being under- or overwritten?

Over recent years, several articles about the phenomenon of the very long acknowledgment did the rounds. From memory it all started in the US after a critic wrote disapprovingly about the three-page acknowledgments that Christopher Coake included at the end of his story collection We’re In Trouble (little did he know what trouble he was getting into!). For effect it may have been reported as four pages of acknowledgments but it really is only three.

Coake, at least, begins his acknowledgments by foreshadowing its extent: “This is my first book, so please forgive me the indulgence of a long list of thank-yous.” And, yes, the list is indeed long but of obvious importance to that writer, and I imagine to those who appear on it.

Although I can no longer find the specific article in mind, I do recall that the issue was soon covered locally from a slightly different angle, albeit with sufficient duplication to warrant, I think, an acknowledgment of the source article, at least — stick with me — ‘as the source of the idea behind the angle of the article’. My recollection is sketchy; maybe a nod was given in the right direction, maybe not. But I’m really just trying to leave a trail of logic here without passing too quickly over the places where credits might be due.

The angle I’m working here now, if I am to acknowledge it, is that I’m really not sure how sufficient compensation can ever be paid. (Even this notion, I’ve got to admit, is just a thing I picked up from another writer.)

So, what do I owe? And to whom? I should start from the outside and work my way in.

Cover concepts go back and forth, and if you entertain an artistic bent a real designer will actually straighten it out for you and belt you over the head with it. And then hand you a proper cover, like it or not.

I happen to really like mine, so thanks ‘Design by Committee’ for that off-level, fractured horizon.

The cover of my book does include some kind words from wonderful writers and the word ‘brilliant’ rates a mention from one of them, but the only mention of the word ‘brilliant’ in reviews of What Came Between is specifically in relation to that title.

The book’s about 45,000 words long and there are those three words getting a shining star pinned on them and I’ve got to admit — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — that I didn’t even come up with those three words.

I wanted to. I tried to. But I didn’t. I was grateful enough that someone else did that I added her name to my growing list of acknowledgments, and though it was a surprise to her, I’d have been ashamed to leave it out.

And all the words between the covers? My wife has more patience as a reader than I though humanly possible. That kind of commitment wasn’t in the vows. Never underestimate the fault-finding abilities of a spouse… No, let me try that again: never underestimate the value of the fault-finding abilities of a spouse. You are ideally matched if you like to write and they like to read widely and they also read well, and closely enough to relook at a page in which all the words remain but in slightly different order, and they can bear the idea that they must “reread this story now because I changed a character’s name — just like you suggested — and I really need to know if it changes the tone of the ending”.

Actually, it’s probably 50:50 with a spouse: they’ll either tell you to stick at it, or just tell you where to stick it.

Friends are a different kind of animal altogether. If they read, that’s great; if they write, even better; if they read and write better, then you can’t possibly let them live!

Never one to take my own advice, especially around the time of New Year’s resolutions, I’ve chosen to let Ryan O’Neill live. It’s the least I could do by way of acknowledgment. He found holes in my stories and saw that they were mended, and if I play my cards right I’ll continue to do so, despite my own feeble attempts to reciprocate advice: “Typo here, Ryan…Oh, it was intentional? Damn you and your post-modern ways!”

Decent writerly friends are worth so much more than a classroom full of fellow students who sit primed to contrast apparent deficiencies in your work to the early works of Virgina Woolf, later works of Nabokov, or something of their own that they’re right in the middle of.

But there are other people who hold greater power and a greater potential to influence — for better or worse: editors.

Debate about the role of Gordon Lish in the editing of Raymond Carver’s work has been brought to a head by the republication of Beginners, a collection which sees the restoration of a group of Carver’s stories to their earlier, longer forms.

While it’s worth looking into the Lish-Carver (or was that Carver-Lish?) debate as a worst-case scenario, my own experience was relatively painless. Sure there were nights of frustration, but that frustration was wrapped up in the logistics of rewriting on top of fulltime work and way-too-casual parenting.

The frustration was not so much what my editor, Aviva Tuffield, was asking me to consider; it was that I didn’t feel I had time to consider what she was asking of me. And when I really didn’t feel that I had the time, I just offered up a little of my trust. Surely I owed that.

So, what else do I owe? I’ll acknowledge that I owe this book and the possibilities of others to follow; that’s all: everything.

What Matters Most – by patrick cullen

Every time I see ‘Three Things’, that section of the Good Weekend where a person is photographed with – you guessed it – ‘three’ significant possessions, I get to wondering what I’d be happily snapped with.

From what I’ve seen already people tend to have something that relates to their cultural heritage, a historical artefact from their profession, and something they were given by a loved one.

If I was to play by the rules I might tuck Mary: The Cullen Family History under one arm, my laptop (if I was making a lasting claim of being a writer) or a packet of Weet-Bix (if I was going to admit where the money comes from) under the other, and I might top it off with the towering felt hat that my wife, Peta, bought me on a whim (hers not mine).

But if I was to make up the rules as I went along I’d probably pick from a very different list of things.

Maybe I’d pick the rock I dug up on my first day of kindergarten in the late’70s. It’s something I’ve never had properly identified but to me it looks like a pyramid-shaped jersey caramel. It’s been with me for 30 years, moving from my childhood bedroom in Young, to uni accommodation in Wagga Wagga, then two different terraces and three different houses around Newcastle. The rock now sits on a shelf above my desk in a room of the house I designed and built with my wife.

I might choose a book, though I know I’d have trouble narrowing it down to just one that says ‘This is me’. I’d take another close look at Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, Saramago’s Blindness, Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, and the scripts for Kieslowski’s Decalogue and his Three Colours Trilogy and…you get the idea.

Perhaps instead I’d pick at random a single story from a list that would no doubt include Carver’s ‘Errand’, Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’, John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’, Tillie Olsen’s ‘I Stand Here Ironing’, Tim Winton’s ‘Neighbours’.

I’d even consider tearing out the first page of Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, somewhere near the middle of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, or the last page of J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. Paraphrasing, no, just bastardising Coetzee, I’d hold any of these three pages aloft: “And in this way,” I would say, “one can write.”

But if I was to choose just one written work it would most likely be A Story Book for Dad by my son Joseph, which is something that, at the age of four, he dictated to Peta. It begins: “When we were out walking we saw a stink bug. It had lots of pretty colours. This sting bug is doing a fart on the tree” (it’s an illustrated first edition but, thankfully, not scratch-and-sniff!).

My daughter, Adah, is four now and while she’s yet to get into writing she does draw and paint with great enthusiasm. In her work I’ve seen myself transformed. I’ve seen so many versions of myself that I’m starting to wonder if I even know who I am. Or if it’s just that I’m everything to Adah.

This is surely where choosing three things becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. If I chose Joe’s book, I’d be keen to choose one of Adah’s pictures as well. But of all the memorable work she has created the most impressive was the beard of mascara she quietly gave herself one morning.

It was one of her earlier, impressionist works.

I think what matters most is this fleeting, impermanent stuff. It’s the best stuff in life and it’s the stuff of great fiction.

It brings to mind ‘Portrait of Electricity’, Murray Bail’s story in which a museum exhibits objects from the life of Huebler, a photographer. A tour group have been shown everything from a chair bearing the contours of his buttocks and a “smooth piece of yellow soap (thought to be his)” to his “Dejecta. Coprological data…”. There’s also the handpiece of telephone with a foot of cord and the guide, pointing enthusiastically at the cord’s exposed wires, says “…through the electrical copper, springs, the black bakelite you see, he spoke, propelled his thoughts… His breath travelled along these wires, his personality travelled along these wires.” A woman asks what Huebler’s voice was like and as the group waits expectantly, “The guide, clearing his throat, smiled. ‘Let me attempt an imitation.’”

You can just imagine the tour group’s response. There is no substitute for experience, for something lived, something real.

I do have both my children’s earliest laughs on tape but rather than go play those tapes on my own I tend to just seek out fresh laughter. And it doesn’t take long to find it either.

Sometimes it sneaks up behind you, and other times it’s just right there in front of you and if you’re too intent on what your doing you can miss the important stuff going on right under your nose.

Thinking about choosing three significant things has got me wondering even more about what really matters. Things that really matter – things like the sound of a loved one’s voice – are not the kind of thing you can really possess. What really matters in life, and I guess in fiction, is that an experience or resonant detail stops you in your tracks for a moment.

A photograph may capture a fleeting moment but there so much more it misses, so much more to which it can never give voice.

So maybe in that photograph of me I’d leave the hat on top of the cupboard and instead turn my back to the camera and press my harmonica to my lips. The harmonica’s something I’ve become quite dependent on lately: the low notes really suit a melancholic state: they make the most beautiful music from even the most wistful sigh.

Some Other Possible Words of the Year – by cate kennedy

So ‘unfriend’ is the word of the year for 2009.  According to Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program, “it has both currency and potential longevity.  In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood  … ‘unfriend’ has real lex-appeal.”  It beat such competitors for the title as hashtag, intexticated and sexting.

Lex-appeal.  Right.  I reckon they need a wider demographic for that judging panel.

My three-year-old’s singing an elaborate invented song from the back of the car.  Suddenly she breaks off.
“Mum!”
“Yep?”
“You know how we say the sky’s cloudy or sunny or rainy or windy?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we say it’s darky?”
“Well… that’s a good question.”
“Why?”
“Um…I don’t know.”
“And last day…”
“Last day?  You mean yesterday?”
“Yes.  In the night.  Yesternight.”
“We don’t say yesternight.  We say last night.”
“Or last day.”
“No.  It’s crazy, I know, but we do say yesterday.”
Silence while this baffling error in logic is absorbed.
“Well, yesterday, that man with the stick…”
“When?”
“The man pointing it at the people playing the violins.”
“Was he?”
“Yes, Mum, yes!  You remember.  Why he waved that stick?”
“Oh, the conductor.  It’s called a baton.”
She sighs from the back.  Then adds in a smaller voice: “Does everything in the world have a name?”
And I kick myself, again, for throwing up these obstacles pointlessly, like road barriers, in her way.  “I don’t know why we don’t say ‘darky’, “ I say. “That’s a really good word.”
My daughter wakes up of a morning and her mind instantly revs into a perfectly-tuned machine of creative enquiry, free of guile, ready to get started.
“I want a biscuit.”
“Oh do you now?  And what’s the magic word?”
“Abracadabra?”
“Fair enough.”
I wish when I was sitting at the desk I had a quarter of her inventiveness and faith in the flashing power of language.  Like Shakespeare, she believes that if you don’t have a word or phrase at hand, just make one up.  There’s probably no time in her life she’s ever going to be this linguistically unselfconscious again – soon enough she’ll be corrected when she invents or mispronounces a word, just like I found myself doing with ‘yesternight’ in the car.  Soon enough the world will be anxious to let her know that her rich, complex attempts are mistakes to be fixed, or gaffes adults will ask for like an adorable comic performance piece.  I try really hard not to ask her to repeat her attempts to other adults, no matter how cute they are.  I hate that dawning realisation on her face that the word she used sincerely is a joke to others, a joke we’re all sharing except her.
And yet I still find myself unthinkingly, reflexively correcting her, even when it doesn’t matter.  What could it possibly matter, for example, that she knows a conductor uses a baton rather than a stick?
It’s a narrow, deeply-rutted track, that prescriptive path of correct answers.  I see kids struggling with it when I teach a poetry session in a school.  Sometimes I resort to games just to get over the default mechanism they’ve been trained to operate within.
“Describe the world without using the letter ‘a’,” I say, “or only in words of one syllable. Let’s try describing a day on the beach using similes, and the person who uses similes nobody else has thought of is the winner.”
“What will they win?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know.  This Freddo Frog.”
The kids’ faces look at me with a mixture of wary apprehension, suspicion and anxiety I’ve never seen, yet, in my three-year-old.  “Is this a test?” someone will say uneasily.
“No.  Just have a go.  Just for fun.”
It’s been my limited experience that the older the kid, the harder they find an exercise like this.  Like Picasso said, all the best artists are in kindergarten, and I will never forget the grade three girl once who wrote: “The sun like a slice of pineapple, and my dad’s big watermelon smile.” God, if I could write a line like that I’d count myself a better poet.  In fact, I think the most valuable thing I was ever taught about poetry came from a four-year-old child.  Home from playgroup, she was pumped with an important discovery.
“This is five,” she announced jubilantly, holding up her outstretched hand.  “Did you know that?  That it’s five?”
“Yes, I know,” I said, the answer excited kids must get barraged with all the time.
“But do you know what?  This is also five!”  She held up her other hand.  “They’re both five!”
“Yes,” I said, diligent absorber of fifteen years’ worth of competitive education, “but what about when you put them both together?  Do you know what you get then?”
“Yep,” she said, bringing her two open hands together.  “A butterfly!”
Now, you are writers, so you will know that in that moment I felt a piercing jolt of pure envy.  I wanted her wonderful, limber, exultant four-year-old mind.  Not my own, because clearly, all I could see was ten.  One tunnel-vision correct answer.   Five plus five equals ten, and that’s all there is to it.
I was thirty-eight before I really tried to write a poem, and I still find it the most difficult thing to attempt, of any form.  Something’s lost there, choked into submission – the thing that would let me observe in a flash that five plus five might occasionally equal a butterfly, the rush of seeing.    It feels like there’s a vestige of it left there, like a little patch of remnant rainforest, and the rest is plantation, all correct and accounted for.  I wonder about this fear of getting it wrong, and the way it misplaces our inspiration and true intention.  The way some first-year university students once reacted when I asked them to write me a short outline with their poem when they submitted it, so I would understand better what they were trying to do, and try the near-impossible task of assessing and grading poems.  (Can poetry even be taught?  What do you think?)   Oh, a sea of eager hands.  How long did the outline have to be?  As long as it needed to be, I said, don’t get sidetracked by it.  Just half a page or a page.  Was that single-spacing or double-spacing? they wanted to know.   Well, let’s say single.  Then came the clincher:  What size font?
I wish I was joking about the font question.  I really do.

“Mum!”
“Hmm?”
“Do you know this broom is tired because it’s sweepy?  It’s really sweepy!”
Oh, remind me again – never correct this, let me see the unadulterated delight on her face, and remember how it felt.  Remind me again that writing is sitting at the desk and willingly getting it wrong, over and over and over again.  Acknowledging that not everything in the world has a name.

Did you know that when the word “lengthy” came into common usage it was mocked by word-purists?  Whatever next, they scoffed, “widthy”?   Well, yeah, why not widthy?  I was thinking about this strolling home across the track from my little study last night.
Mum!” my daughter was calling from the house.  “It’s time to come and read a story! Come and read one very now!”
The sun, that big slice of pineapple, had gone down and the first few stars were appearing.
I humbly submit to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the sky was not crepuscular, twilit, gloaming, eventide or dusk-like.  It was not noctilucent, meridian, murksome or even tenebrous. Yesternight, I am pleased to confirm, just very then at that moment, the sky was darky.

This is my last post, so thanks for having me.  Let’s just all keep at it

Infinitely Private, Infinitely Deep – by cate kennedy

OK, stand tall, say it loud: I’m a technophobe and I’m proud.  I wanted to write a blog this week about the famous statement that the internet is a million miles wide and two inches deep, and to illustrate it I had a perfect illustration – a black and white photograph of a public swimming pool in Tokyo, positively teeming with people, uncountable numbers of people, all paddling round in the shallows.   I can’t share it with you, though, because I have to scan it, and the computer says no.  The installation wizard does not recognise the software to allow my old scanner to scan the picture.  (And what a lumpy, last-century thing it looks, too, my scanner,  perched here on the desk;  industrial grey and big as – what were those things called?  – a fax machine.) The installation wizard does not recognise that I have torn this postcard especially from a huge precious book of collected postcards I keep on the shelf, glued to the pages of a vintage photograph album.  Yes, I know, laughable, isn’t it?  Glued to the pages!  Hard copies from years ago!  Surely I should have all those cards on disc, being slowly and endlessly displayed on a random shuffle on my flat-screen photo-displayer thingy?

I’ll admit to you – the whole million-mile-wide internet world is starting to seem to me like a gigantic, addictive, shallow, pretty ominous time-waster, and I’m wondering if anyone else is feeling the same.  I’ve had to be coaxed all the way into the two-inch deep pool; I’ve never even read a blog until the Varuna alumni one started this year, and I was such a greenhorn doing it for this month that I had to ask Simonne this week to organise me a gravitron.  No, wait.  A gravatar.

I’ve never been on Facebook.  I wouldn’t know how to Twitter if you held a gun to my head.  (Twitter!  Couldn’t they think of a better name for it than that?  Doesn’t it just make it sound even more like banal gossipy drivel?  In fact, I even feel vaguely alarmed that I used ‘Twitter’ there as a verb, the way ‘Google’ has become a verb, the way that brand names have entered the lexicon as actions we now undertake ourselves….)

So, yes, that’s my confession.  And don’t worry, the irony hasn’t escaped me that I’m communicating this to you through the very technology I find myself so unwillingly embroiled in.   And if you were sitting here talking (such a quaint and archaic idea) instead of reading this via cyberspace, I know we’d come up with a list of curious anecdotes about the creeping dependence on technology we’ve noticed in ourselves and those around us – the compulsive text-messaging of teenagers, the desperate grip they keep on those phones, the way a day can be lost pointlessly, dully net-surfing, the way we keep checking our emails, unable to concentrate without knowing the contents of our in-trays, our iPhones, our Blackberries.  (Blackberries!  What focus group came up with that as a good name?) Or our sixteen year old German exchange student, who ran in wide-eyed at midnight once wanting us to drive her back to the house where she’d left her iPod, because she couldn’t face a two-hour train journey the next day without it.  Wasn’t she travelling with a friend, allowing for two hours of pleasant shared conversation?  No, because the friend would also have her iPod, and then what would she DO for those two hours?   What will we DO without our fix, without our downloads, without a million-mile storage capacity?   My God, the yawning vacuum of unconnected, unstimulated time!

I was at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival this year and found myself at Southbank crushed into a huge crowd, a crowd that rivalled the one depicted on the Tokyo swimming pool postcard, come to think of it.  We were all watching a massive display of fireworks breaking right over our heads, and I tore my eyes away to glance at somebody next to me, just to make eye contact with someone, and saw I was standing in a sea of raised arms.  At the end of each extended arm was a mobile phone, recording it all.  Nobody else around me, as far as I could see, was watching the fireworks, they were all watching the tiny windows in their phones.  Nokia would have been delighted at the vision before me – handheld appliances in their thousands, chosen in preference over the real thing.  For me, there in that great crowd of people, I felt suddenly lonely.

But what was I hoping for?  Some communal sensation of shared experience, I think.  The thing that’s always got us out en masse, dancing in the streets, watching spectacles together, sitting in audiences together watching a play or a concert unfold before us.  I wonder if I’m alone in feeling that that experience feels diminished if I can download it straight afterwards onto some device,  buy a recording in the foyer, see it on TV,  watch it on a two-inch screen any time I want.  It feels diminished partly because that reproduction is something that encourages us to absorb that play or music in isolation, alone with our buds in our ears, watching in privacy on our own screens somewhere.

This is a serious shift, I reckon.  I run a small theatre company and we’re always conscious that a ticket to a play costs the same as renting 5 DVDs, more or less, and as people choose more and more to stay home with the DVDs, they’re losing the knack of experiencing things collectively, of being a part of a greater social whole.  When we can convince them to attend a live performance, they comment on the action on stage as if it were a movie, and they were sitting at home on the couch watching it, and check their mobiles constantly for calls through the performance.  They’ve lost the knack for being in a public audience the way the teenager at the party who dumps her boyfriend in the other room via a text message has lost the knack for difficult, necessary conversation.

It seems kind of ironic that the more connected we demand to be, the more disconnected, in ordinary ways, we seem to be becoming. Today, for example, 30 new channels begin broadcasting through Foxtel, swamping us with more and more choices for how to fill in our days.  Apparently this is just the beginning.  Soon we’ll have more still, and more technology to search and record everything we’re missing by watching something else.    Like the impulse to hold up our phone, and record a spectacle (for what?  for who?) when we could be just letting ourselves be absorbed in it.   That simple unmediated experience seems reduced, inadequate; naive, almost.

And yet, and yet.  It’s everything we do as writers.  Everything.  Consciously and sometimes painfully trying to clear away the clutter that’s standing between us and the observed thing, listened to and heard afresh.   Trying to immerse ourselves in the very heart of something, to shut off the white noise and just pay attention to what’s before us.

And all the while, here’s this two-inch deep, packed, chattering world waiting outside our room, jostling for elbow room in our heads, shallow and opinionated and endlessly distracting.  A million Facebook strangers keen to let me know what they ate for breakfast, a million Youtube sites keen to have me watch footage of their cats doing something funny.  Trite is the word that springs to mind, so I was relieved to hear the wonderful Wells Tower at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival articulate my own fears when he graciously answered a question about why he’s not enamoured of the net.  “It just seems the opposite of what I want to spend time doing as a writer,” he said.  “The writing consciousness is infinitely private, infinitely deep, while the internet is infinitely public, and infinitely banal.”

Infinitely private, and infinitely deep – yes.  That experience of feeling an idea taking shape, moving us towards something we might get onto the page.  Despite what we keep getting told, there’s nothing else we need in this moment – not more research, not more net-surfing, not more information – our only requirement is to hold still, and let ourselves be submerged in the deep dark possibilities of this thing which has captured us.   It’s hard not to feel a ripple of disbelief at how simple this one condition is, this necessity to give something our total unfiltered attention.   Hard to resist the urge towards self-reportage (and what else is Facebook?  Can someone make me see?) but I think Wells is right – it’s private and deep.

When someone tells me a story, there’s something in me listening hard to hear where that story’s come from.  Any suggestion of hypocrisy, for instance, and I’m out of there like a shot.  Ditto for the story designed for self-flattery, or formulaic moralising, or one where I suspect the storyteller has not been entirely honest.

So, I’m asking myself now – and please weigh in here with your own interpretation – what is it I’m looking for?   The truth, I guess, but truth, as Barry Lopez once said, “cannot be reduced to aphorism or formulas.  It is something alive and unpronounceable.”

I think what I want is the sense that that story has been created in a private, deep place before being brought to the surface.  What’s thrilling about watching a virtuoso musician onstage is knowing that we are hearing and witnessing in those brief minutes the evidence of thousands of hours of isolated practice.  All those hours have been distilled, now, into the gift of what’s before us. I don’t want to watch it on YouTube, I want to be there, live, listening to it.  I want to remember our ancestors, sitting in a circle, defining what it meant to be human, taking it in turns to tell stories.

The night after the iPod Incident our exchange student and I walked outside late at night and there was a perfect pale ring round the moon.  We stood there marvelling at it. “What causes it?”  she asked. “I don’t know,” I said.  There was a pause and she said: “We should Google it.” There was a longer pause as we stood there gazing at it, no answers, outside in the deep night air and loathe to go in. “No,” she said eventually, dreamily.  “Let’s not.”

Betty Can Read – by cate kennedy

My peripheral involvement in a great exhibition that opened in Melbourne this week had me picking up and reading a book I hadn’t looked at for over forty years, a period of time which hardly bears thinking about.  Nevertheless the moment I opened the first page I experienced that curious vertigo sensation that comes when we pick up something from our past that has practically imprinted itself on our DNA, so deeply is it inscribed in our buried memory.  The book was “Playmates”, the second in the series of John and Betty primary reader books (“the Earliest Reader for Little Ones”) published by the Department of Education in the early 1950s.  The Department sure got their money’s worth out of those books, since they were still in general use in the early 1970s, which means two generations of Australian schoolkids learned to read with them.

If you were in primary school during those decades, you will recall the spookily well-behaved John and Betty  (“John is big.  He can help father.  He can dig with his spade.  Betty is big, too.  She can help mother.  She can water the garden with her little can.”) their pets Fluff and Scottie, and their robotically-polite little friends Peter and Ann. (“Betty likes to play with Ann. “Let us skip,” says Betty.  John likes to play with Peter.  “Let us have a slide,” says John. “Up you go, Peter.  I can slide after you.”   “Let us go for a walk,” says John.  “Yes,” says Peter.  They go to the pond to see the ducks.  “Let us feed the ducks with my bun,” says John.  “This is fun,” says Peter.  “Yes,” says John.)

The moment I read these lines every year that has passed in my life since the age of five slip away, and I am back in my prep classroom with Miss Cresp in her miniskirt, paging through “Playmates”, spelling out those phrases. The room smells of chalk and sandwiches in vinyl schoolbags and cardboard Globite cases.  Two kids who are always as obedient as John and Betty are studiously punching the foil tops in our recess milk bottles up the front of the classroom, and I am thinking that the kids in this book live on some other planet where boys feed ducks buns instead of lobbing bits of brick at them, where they address each other saying “let us” instead of “jawanna”  (as in “jawanna go on the slide?”), where Betty has a pram and a doll and John has a drum and a truck, and they play nicely with Baby. (Later, I will see there are a few passages in John and Betty which do actually ring with a kind of resigned universal truth:  ‘ “Betty! Betty!  See the mother duck with the six baby ducks!  They will let me feed them,” says John.  “Do not fall in, John,” says Betty.  John did fall in.” ’ Yep, put a six-year-old boy and a pond together, and watch what happens.   Then of course John had to hurry home to get dry and have some hot milk: ‘ “Betty may get it for him,’ says Mother.’ Of course she will.)

I’ve been an early reader and know John and Betty off by heart, but have been told by Miss Cresp – the first of many crushing announcements by teachers – that this will be my reader for the rest of the year.

Eternity stretches away before me in a wasteland of drums, prams, skipping ropes and brown sandals. There’s something dutiful in me that wants to believe there’s more to this book than meets the eye, because an adult has given it to me and after all adults hold the keys to the kingdom.  There must be some secret to absorb beyond this dulled repetitive sing-song of reading aloud, android voices chanting descriptions of android characters over and over.  I’m there teetering perilously close to a five-year-old existential crisis when I notice on page 35 that Betty’s shadow as she pretends to be a bird is actually a bird, and John’s, as he hops, is actually a rabbit’s.  It’s like the author has drawn a visual gag just for me, a wink, a private joke.  I’m so desperate to see the point of the exercise that this tiny, simple thing seems instantly elevated to the significance of a Zen koan.

This week when I looked at “Playmates” again with the dizzying sensation of sharp recognition, this page leapt out at me with that memory as fresh and intact as ever.  I recalled exactly how it had felt to be seized with the idea, at five, that the author was giving me a wave, more or less;  a small secret reward for those who were looking.   I’d forgotten the page until that very moment, but that revelation seems to have lodged itself in there every time I’ve opened a book since.  I’m looking for the wave, the pleasurable little jolt of getting it.   That’s stayed there while my memory of actually learning to read, to spell out words on a page to make them mean something, has sadly disappeared.

So I want to hear how people recall the experience of learning to read.   Was it an exhilarating rush or a dull chore?  Sudden or painstakingly laborious?  A pleasure or a pain?  Phonic or ‘whole-word’, in the great guinea-pig lab of the Education Department? Where were you when it happened, and what did you make of it?

One of the artists featured in the exhibition this week has created life-sized wooden carvings of John and Betty, looking uncannily like the real illustrations only surrounded by kangaroos, possums and nesting birds.  “I found the book so boring,” she said, “that I sat there and found myself thinking of what might be between the pages.  I imagined what they might have been pointing at that I couldn’t see.”

What’s stayed with you, my fellow readers and writers, from your own days of spelling out the words and looking between the pages?  How does your inner five-year-old’s irrepressible imagination wander in search of connections, and what do you glean from it? I’d love to hear.

Thank You Notes – by cate kennedy

I received a note from a writer friend the other day, expressing his gratitude for a quick email I’d sent to him praising his latest book.  Considering his stature and reputation, that gratitude surprised me a little, and made me realise how much all of us crave feedback from our peers, or from anybody, after we’ve written something and sent it out into the world, clutching its bus fare and little lunchbox, uncertain of how it will be received or welcomed.  How small and defenceless it suddenly seems! And where’s this great gush of protective anxiety coming from?

I remember chatting to another writer once who’d made the leap from comedy writing to performing stand-up himself.  We were sitting backstage at the time waiting for his bracket onstage and he’d just returned white-faced from the loos, shaking like a leaf.   “Why do you do this?” I said, “why put yourself through this kind of fear?”

“I got tired of never hearing any feedback,” he answered, “just slaving away by myself writing in my room, never knowing if it was funny or not.  Now, yeah, it’s like going to the gallows but at least when I make the joke I know straight away if my audience likes it or not.  And when I do hear the laughter, that’s the drug that makes me want to do it again.  I’ve traded isolation for instant gratification.”

If someone were to ask me the hardest thing about writing, I fear my answer would sound a bit petulant: ‘It’s the loneliness.’   Even when my day is going well I still miss, sometimes, the companionship of a job, any job – the chatting with work colleagues making coffees in the staff kitchen, the in-jokes, the breaks in the day that are to do with camaraderie and talk.  Alone in your room you write a line and there’s nobody to bounce the idea off; you worry that perhaps you are in danger of losing perspective, of becoming a crashing bore, of losing your touch.  That’ll be your story out there under the bright lights, delivering its hard-won routine, and nobody in the audience will get it.  It will stutter to a halt, lose their attention, stumble offstage to a chorus of slow claps, and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.   At times like this I understand my suffering friend, on tenterhooks before his name was called, going out there with his raw material to invite the heckling.  At least he’d know to do it differently next time, with that brutal feedback, and that’s his reward for bravery.

When you’re a writer, no such adjustments will be possible once your work is published, and any of you who have waited at this stage for a critical public response to trickle belatedly back to you will understand what tenterhooks are all about.  (Quick etymological check: couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor.  They’re the hooks used to stretch material taut as it dries.  That’s YOUR material we’re talking about.  Ink-damp, just created, pierced taut with hooks…)

Perhaps that’s why our faith in our editors sometimes must verge on the slightly fanatical, and why we’re so grateful when someone, especially someone we trust and admire, writes to tell us they got it, and they loved it.   It’s like an imagined burst of laughter, or a collective gasp of recognition, or a round of applause.  When it happens, we momentarily forget our isolation, and take a little grateful bow of relief.

The writer who wrote to me thanking me for my feedback granted me – and you now – another perfect metaphor.   “Writing a book” he wrote,  “is like doing a Mount Rushmore face:  hanging down the sandstone cliff with a chisel and a hammer, chip, chip and bloody chip, it goes on forever, you have no idea what the massive thing will look like seen from a distance.”

Chip, chip and bloody chip.  Sound familiar?  What am I fashioning here, what will it look like, why did I choose such hard, unyielding materials, why am I doing this?   Here’s a tidbit for you – 90% of Mount Rushmore was carved using dynamite – two million tons of solid granite had to be shifted before workers could put up the scaffolding and be lowered down to start the fine work – and even then most of it was with jackhammers.  It was a long, long time before they allowed themselves the luxury of the hammers and chisels.  By then, I imagine, they must have had a phenomenal respect for their raw material, for the mountain itself they were trying to clear even to begin.  And, like writing, it does seem to me that the true skill lies in this clearing and carving away, in the appreciation and creation of negative space.  A reader sees something thrown into plausible relief only because a writer has spent vast amounts of invisible time hanging down a cliff in a harness, hesitantly paring away what’s redundant.   Sometimes, as the Mount Rushmore workers found with the massive face of Jefferson, the almost-finished likeness develops cracks and fissures so bad it needs to be blasted off, and started again.  They must have felt sick, setting that dynamite, knowing how much work they were about to undo by depressing that lever.  Sick, but seeing what needed to be done.

No, writing’s not a job for the impatient, or anyone dependent on instant gratification.   And there’s such basic fear in losing your judgment when you’re up so close, chipping flints off, unable to step back for a crucial bigger perspective.  No wonder we’re grateful when someone gives us a distant thumbs-up, a line or two sent from far away, letting us know that what we’re doing seems worthwhile to them.  I’m not trying to mythologise the writing process here, just make a mental note to myself to write to more authors when I finish their novels or stories or poems, to not forget what a necessary part of the endless process of vulnerability and connection this is.

I have a letter from an elderly woman named Audrey who wrote to me a couple of years back to let me know that something I’d written had touched her deeply.  “I’m an old duck of 78,” she wrote in a lovely sloping hand, “but I’m going to try to stick around a few years longer to see what you write next.”

I have to tell you, that letter meant more to me than any reviews that book received at the time.  It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.  The perfect state to write in, if you ask me.   Audrey, pass me my hammer.

A Pox on Whose House…? – by di jenkins

Here we are at the end of the month already, and I guess we’ve come full circle, because I want to talk again about being part of the Alumni network and a member of a tight writers’ group – although a very different aspect of my experience, to be sure.

It’s about the hard-to-say stuff.

I burst with pride every time one of my writer friends has a win. I love them, I admire them, and I have enormous respect for them. My chest swells. I experience their every success very much as something I too can celebrate. And I cheer, I really do, but sometimes just after I’ve raised a glass to toast them by proxy, my chest caves violently inwards, my posture curls like a singed hair, and before I know it, I’m regarding my wine glass with grim determination and thinking, “Plenty more where that came from, you loser.”

At some point soon after that, I bury my head in my hands and start wailing to my husband that I’m a complete and utter failure. Then come the mean thoughts. The really sick ones, the checklist of all the ways in which I have been unjustly overlooked, unfairly discounted, and basically cheated of my due. This is all obscurely related to my friend’s triumph, as though they’ve personally done me out of something, and on purpose. Then things start getting really ugly. I splash some more wine into my glass and start looking around for someone to grab by the scruff of the neck, someone who’ll tell me that no, no, of course I’m a good writer, I’m great, I’m awesome, that special someone who will say – no, insist – that I’m even a better writer than my friend, that friend who’s got the Midas touch, and whose star is on the rise, and whose writing I truly, truly love but who I also still sort of want to stab to death at the same time.

It lurks in my heart, that terrible, terrible desire to hear those words, and worse, to believe that they’re true. This is the darkest place in me, where vanity and envy routinely come together and gleefully plot my wholesale destruction. I hate that they’re there, and I’d love to drive them out.

My husband sometimes attempts appeasing me, but he and I both know it’s pathetic, I’m pathetic, and eventually I start wising up to the fact that I am yet again simply oozing poison, and I need to just let this unfortunate process take its course. Let it out. Let the vileness do whatever the hell it has to do, fulfill its foul purpose, and then leave the better me to finish celebrating my friend’s success. This frenzy of ill-will never lasts long, but it’s still there, and that makes me feel just awful.

So far, the only thing I’ve found that works as any sort of antidote – apart from all the overwhelming and genuine good will, that is – is a two-part treatment. First, I know on a really basic level that my own chances of publication are no better or worse for someone else’s success or failure, so I quickly remind myself of this thing I sometimes forget I know.

Second, I acknowledge my evilness to my writer friends. The last Darkling retreat (this is the writers’ group that formed out of our Varuna residency), one of us was on a huge roll, JB, a very fine writer and one of my favourite people in the whole world. Be that as it may, at some point, the stories of how JB’s work was being received left, right, and centre started eating away at me. I felt like I was being left behind, or even travelling in reverse. My smile grew tight. My own praise started dying on my lips. And so over dinner one night, I told JB and the other Darklings how I was feeling, I just admitted it, and that nasty, bitter feeling up and left pretty much immediately. It lost all its power once I said it out loud.

I don’t know… perhaps I’ve said too much, and now I’ll be a total pariah, but these two things really do help me, and so here I am, admitting it again. I think it’s harmful keeping these things quiet, at least in my own case, but perhaps I’m madder and meaner than most. I just doubt that, so I thought I’d best come clean.

I’ve already stressed, I hope, how invaluable these networks have been and continue to be to me. If you’re reading this as someone who is just starting out, or as someone who has written a great deal but feels lonely and adrift, with all my heart I say to you: other writers are out there, and we’re all going through very similar things, and in time, you will gather your tribe about you. It’s not easy putting yourself out there, I know this from my own experience, but the rewards are great, and the relief, profound. The friendships, shared knowledge, and our unique (by its nature remote) camaraderie all add up to something very much worth the risk, and I hope you go for it. There can never be too many writers, and good luck.

I’ve had a really wonderful time talking to all the people who’ve stopped by to chat these past few weeks – it’s been such a privilege for me, and thanks.

Learning How to Suck it Up – by di jenkins

Like many people who go on to try their hand at fiction, I did well in English in school, generally topping my year. This was a wonderfully cosy arrangement, and I liked my place at the top of the class. It was very nice up there. Then I won a place at a Canadian international scholarship school for my senior years, where I sat the International Baccalaureate. I gave myself another hearty pat on the back, thinking this a very nifty trick, right up until I looked around that first English class and thought, Oh shit, I bet you topped your class back home too (in fact, Irish writer and Man Booker winner Anne Enright attended the same school a decade ahead of me).

Thus began a rude awakening in which I would never be considered the best of anything, by anyone, ever again.

The IB is a peculiar diploma; it’s out of 45. Part of the course is a compulsory 5,000 word ‘extended essay’ which, when you’re 17, is, like, the single biggest crisis of all time. A creative writing EE was an option, and I took it, as did one of my fellow Australians, Nick, a good mate, a natural writer and a very lazy boy. I did a rotten job (see last week’s post). The EE is worth a possible 2 points; I scored 0.

ZERO. Nick, who I think dashed off his story in between punching cones, scored 1. I’d never been more demoralised and devastated in my life; I threw myself so far into not caring about that zero that I very nearly failed the whole IB. I also stopped writing fiction for the next eight years, not starting again until I moved to London, where I wrote a truly awful manuscript (see last week’s post), after which I didn’t write fiction for – you guessed it – another eight years.

I just couldn’t hack it.

But then I got lucky, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. From London, unhappy in a ridiculous career, I enrolled in a research PhD at UNSW, and when I got home to Sydney, my life changed dramatically. Over the course of my candidature, everything went horribly, horribly wrong. Everything. At times including the thesis itself. I fell out with my supervisor. He kept disappearing to Finland for endless conferences or a secret second family, and when he breezed into one of my annual reviews, he announced to the Head of School that he had no (read ZERO) confidence in the direction I was headed and didn’t want his name associated with my project. Thanks for coming!

But I hung in there, more out of stubbornness than ability. I landed the most fantastic supervisor, I found my argument, I worked until my eyeballs and fingers bled, and I was awarded my degree. Sometimes I still can’t believe it’s over. It was hands-down the hardest thing I have ever done. I’m not a natural academic; the whole thing was an eviscerating nightmare that nearly killed me. But I survived, and I understood then that I had something all writers need – tenacity – and so I started writing fiction again.

I believe that tenacity is a writer’s secret weapon. I think you need to be tenacious because you’re going to get knocked down. Then you’ll drag yourself back to your feet. Then you’ll get knocked down. Then you’ll struggle back to an upright position, stumbling backwards a little as you try regaining your balance. Your nose might start bleeding. Then you’ll get knocked down again. This will go on and on for the rest of your life.

Imagine a boxer who just doesn’t know he should stay the hell down. He refuses to be out for the count, even though everyone in his corner is screaming and crying and begging him to admit defeat. He doesn’t know what to do except keep getting up again, even though he’s all fucked up and can’t possibly win. And then imagine that boxer is you. That’s pretty much where I’m at with this writing life – is that what it’s like for you guys?

All this is a convoluted way of saying I think everyone finds it hard accepting criticism of their work – criticism is crap – but equally I think everyone had better get used to it toot sweet, because that’s the ball game, and it won’t change. It took me all those years – so many lost years when I might have been writing and learning and improving my fiction – to understand that criticism is good, criticism helps me, and criticism is never, ever going away. I get it now, and I’d love to know how and when that particular penny dropped for all of you.

Whatever Will the Neighbours Say? – by di jenkins

Whenever I lapse into idle reveries involving my MS becoming a published novel, one feeling that creeps over me is dread: pure, unadulterated dread. I’m terrified of what my mother-in-law will think. Scared shitless. Unfortunately I’m confident that, much as we love each other, she’ll hate it, and I think she’ll feel I’ve shamed the entire family. My book has nothing to do with a single member of the clan – except perhaps for a couple of indirect, affectionate nods to my husband – but I doubt my MIL will see it that way. If the mortification doesn’t get her first, I think there’s every chance she’ll kill me.

Why? Well, there’s swearing in it. Quite a lot. And there are sex scenes. Of one, my Volunteer Reader wrote, ‘I do not think I have ever read anything so seedy and depressing as that scene.’ Yeah, see, my MIL is going to have a fit. I don’t think it’ll matter that I’ve made it up; what I’ve written may change the way my loved ones feel about me. This is a truly horrible thought, and for a long while, worrying about fallout fundamentally affected my writing. The problem with that is that anyone who read my earliest drafts could smell a dirty rotten rat.

Readers – and I have been one for over thirty years myself – have an uncanny knack for rooting out imposters. It’s actually a little strange just how acute this sense is among those who like gripping paper in their spare time. You can’t get away with anything before they’re onto you like a pack of wolves. And I know myself when I’m posturing, so I may as well just admit it. I can feel the lie even as I’m composing it, and I bet you can too. It’s a rubbish way to write, but it’s sooo tempting, because it feels so much safer than telling the truth.

I’m not talking about the ‘under oath’ type of truth, only that secret, individual truth that dwells in us all. You know the one, I know you do, and I think we spend so much time protecting and denying this truth that when it comes time to call it up – like, say, when you’re trying to write a novel – some of us choke. But it’s my humble beginner’s opinion that writers must overcome this safety reflex as a matter of non-negotiable urgency. Otherwise the writing stinks, and readers know you’re lying.

I’d like to share an example of how I know they know. When I bombed out of my first crack at the Varuna HarperCollins MS Development Awards, I emailed off my request for the proffered personal comment from one of the judges. On Friday 25 January 2008, Varuna’s Creative Director, the legend that is Peter Bishop, wrote back. With Peter’s permission, here’s part of that email:

…there’s something irritatingly defensive about the voice ­ after a while you feel the voice is very carefully hiding rather than revealing the character, so what seems witty and engaging at first quickly becomes something that is refusing the reader’s desire to engage.[…]The basic invitation to the reader ­ the reason the reader wants to go on reading, go in deeper­ is a little defensive and uncertain. A committed involvement with the second draft process might uncover wonderful layers of voice and character.

I read those words I don’t know how many times, but it only took once to know Peter was right. He’d called my bluff, completely seen through me; the jig was up. I’d been faking it, posing in the interests of self-preservation, and it showed. Faaaark, I thought. That’s torn it. Then I did something involving quite a lot of alcohol.

After a respectable period of mourning, brooding, sulking and reflecting, I decided to go back in there, delete key blazing, and hunt down that filthy imposter myself. ‘Never again’ became and remains my mantra, because there’s a huge difference between fiction and a writer’s lie. I won’t be winning any popularity points if my MS ever sees the light of day, no Christmas stocking for me, and that’s a shame, one that makes me really, really anxious, but… there is no other way. Not for me, anyway. I’d love to know if you’ve also struggled with your own version of truth, and how you manage the remedy.