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.

Welcome to Wordaholics Anonymous – by di jenkins

My name is Diana, and it’s been six months since my last rejection. It was late, and I was jittery. I’d been checking Varuna’s News & Diary page with the ferocious regularity that lets you know you have a serious problem, and when I looked again, they were there: the five recipients of the 2009 Varuna HarperCollins Manuscript Development Awards. My name? M.I.A. Inside a voice whined, “But…but… Charlie finds the golden ticket – and then he gets into the chocolate factory, and… and… and now spoiled Veruca Salt, fat Lederhosen-loving Augustus Gloop, cowboy kid Mike Teavee and vile Violet Beauregarde, now they’re all going instead of… instead of… oh look, screw you, Charlie Bucket, this isn’t about you, I’m talking about me.” And then I stamped my foot in a manner that would do Roald Dahl’s brats proud.

God it sucked.

But it didn’t suck half as much as the previous year, and I guess that’s what my month here is about: how and why we rejects keep going. And on the guest blogger thing, I am so chuffed – even if the esteemed assembled company makes me feel a bit sick. Sure I work as a professional writer, but I don’t have a published novel, I’ve never had a single short story accepted, and I don’t have an agent. I keep thinking Simonne and Charlotte have made a horrible mistake, and any minute now they’ll realise, and then they’ll get a real author to step in, but until then, well, let’s just don everything in the jewellery box and jump on the beds.

I began 2008 with a January 2 follow-up consultation with Varuna, having failed to make the long list for the MS Development Awards. Very soon after, I signed up for a Professional Development Residency. This is a non-selective program – anyone can do it. I coughed up the dough because I was desperate – desperate – for peers, community, and direction. It was a significant amount of money, but I can’t put a price on the experience. It changed everything. The ongoing writers’ group that formed there – we five christened ourselves the Darklings – is invaluable, as is the alumni network. I kept redrafting, and a year later, I made that long list. Then I made the short list. And then I failed to win a place. But you get that – sometimes over and over again.

I’m a word addict – aren’t we all? – I love reading, writing, hearing, and sounding out the words of the world. I’m hooked on language, and it’s why I pick myself up and dust off after the latest rejection. My first draft bombed out of the last Vogel I was eligible to enter. Then a literary agency sent a ‘With Comps’ slip, leaving off the compliments. A year later, a commissioning editor at a publishing house passed. Twice. One of my many first chapters failed to move another editor to ask for more. An agent who requested the full MS (happy day) then called to pass (dark day). And finally HarperCollins didn’t pick my MS. They picked five others.

But you have to keep trying, right? To write well, improve, and always, always to learn: these are precious things to me. That’s a golden ticket right there.

I write without apology or permission because it’s how I honour my niece. Her death in 2003 – so early, so absolute – brought everything into painful, permanent relief. I asked myself what truly mattered to me. Because this is it, this is my finite life, already underway. So many things matter, but at my own fleeting core is this: living, loving, laughing, and trying. For me, those four roads all meet here, in this small act of one letter following another. I’d dearly love to know how you all got started – and what keeps you going.

The Real Thing – by kathy charles

I’ve been thinking recently about the challenges of writing a fictional story using real people as characters. I recently purchased a novel called Sway by Zachary Lazar, which is a ‘reimagining’ of the 60s that features such characters as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charles Manson and Kenneth Anger.  I had initially thought that such fictionalised accounts of the lives of real people were pretty verboten unless the person in question had passed on, and that such reworkings of history were relegated to historical novels and period dramas. As I explored further I found more examples of this kind of fiction in contemporary literature, including the following:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Virginia Woolf)
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (Marilyn Monroe)
The Road to Welville by T.C. Boyle (John Kellogg of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal fame)
The Castle in the Forrest by Norman Mailer (Adolf Hitler)
Resurrection Days by Wilson Tucker (features the main players in the Cuban Missile Crisis)

In a polarising piece for The Guardian, fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay argued that to use real people as characters in fiction created ethical dilemmas. He wrote:

‘Here’s the New York Times on Oates’s, Blonde: ‘If a novel can’t deliver Monroe’s beauty … it can give us her interior world.’ What has happened when a reviewer suggests that a novel gives us the true inner world of a real person? This is nonsense, and it is pervasive.’

Is it nonsense? I was asked recently in an interview whether I would consider writing a non-fiction book because so much of my novel ‘Hollywood Ending’ is based on true stories. I am a huge fan of non-fiction (in fact, I have to admit, I actually read more of it than fiction). So often the main players in history aren’t aware of the immensity of their actions and the ripples that will reverberate into the future. By immersing fiction with nonfiction I can explore the magnitude and emotion of real-life events through characters that I can construct and control. I feel I can mine for more emotional depth using fiction, and that in writing non-fiction I would be constrained to reporting ‘just the facts’.

But how would you approach writing a novel that features a real person as a character? How much research would you have to do, and would you have to get permission from the person you are basing the character on? The internet doesn’t give any clear-cut answers on this one, and I’m yet to find out whether Zachary Lazar asked Mick Jagger’s permission to use him in the book ‘Sway’. Personally, I find this kind of fiction very exciting. Could a fictionalised account of a real person’s life give us more understanding than a straight-forward bio?

So, have you ever written a piece that featured real people as characters? Do you enjoy this kind of fiction, or do you think it raises ethical questions about the nature of privacy?

Thanks for having me on the Varuna boards! I’ve enjoyed my time here and look forward to reading all your contributions and being part of such a great writing community. Thanks again!

A Balancing Act – by kathy charles

I’ve been feeling really guilty lately. Less than three weeks ago my novel came out, and my mind has been focused on media, sales opportunities and getting the word out. What my mind hasn’t been focused on is writing. I made a comment to my mother that I was feeling terrible that I hadn’t written anything in weeks, and I was going to clear my social schedule as much as humanly possible so I could get back on track with my new manuscript.
‘But shouldn’t you give yourself a break?’ she asked, concern creeping into her voice. ‘Your book just came out. Surely you can have a rest now, if only for a few weeks?’
‘No way,’ I said firmly. ‘If anything, I’ll feel more stressed the longer I don’t write.’
‘Okay’, she sighed, and I could hear the resignation in her voice. Having a break probably was the best thing for my health, and my sanity. My life had become a massive juggling act, with my day job, my writing commitments, and my social life fighting for attention. The first thing I had to do, I decided, was prioritise. But how?

Most writers don’t have the luxury of having infinite hours in which to write. One of my favourite writers, Charles Bukowski, worked in a post office for most of his life before having his first novel published at the age of 49. At the time he said: “I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Stephen King famously juggled short story writing with his day-job of being a highschool teacher, and wrote the novel ‘Carrie’ in a trailer home, his typewriter balanced on top of the washing machine. Most of us have to fit writing in around other commitments: spouses, family, work, children, even pets. Sometimes the responsibility of balancing all these things can be overwhelming, and hard choices need to be made. If the majority of your writing time is relegated to weekends, you may find yourself missing out on social events like friend’s birthdays. Even the act of agreeing to a quick Friday night drink with work colleagues is enough to make you feel positively guilt-ridden, in turn destroying any enjoyment you might have gained from the evening. I have had moments where I’ve felt guilty just for having a shower or brushing my teeth, unable to ignore the precious seconds ticking away where I could be drafting and redrafting. When M.J. Hyland was promoting her second novel ‘Carry Me Down’ she remarked to a journalist that she was frustrated with a publicity schedule that had left her little time to write. “If I go for more than a week without writing, you don’t want to meet me in a dark alley”, she said. “I feel like I’m coming off something, I feel really awful and it affects everything.” But sometimes, finding time to write just feels impossible.

So, how do you balance all your commitments, as well as finding a few quiet hours to squeeze in some writing? Has your finely-balanced house of cards ever come tumbling down?

Just the Facts, Jack – by kathy charles

On the publicity rounds for her new novel ‘Siren’, crime writer Tara Moss has revealed the lengths she will go to in ensuring her stories are as authentic as possible. Whilst on tour she regaled audiences with anecdotes about being set on fire by a special effects company so she would know what it felt like to be burned alive, and she even showed footage of a controlled session where she was slowly “choked-out” so she would know what it felt like to be strangled unconscious. Obviously Tara Moss isn’t squeamish when it comes to research, and says she ‘needs to experience first-hand the events that she incorporates into her crime novels’.

On the other end of the spectrum, author M.J. Hyland has made no secret of the fact that when she wrote her novel ‘This Is How’, the story of a man who commits a horrific crime, she had absolutely no idea how the penal system in the UK actually worked. She wrote her first draft without having conducted any research, and when she finally did get an opportunity to view a prison for herself, she discovered the reality differed so greatly to what she had written in the book that it was preferable to keep the fantasy for dramatic reasons. ‘I didn’t want facts to get in the way,’ she said.

When I wrote ‘Hollywood Ending’ I felt that it was important I had my facts about celebrities and the manner in which they died correct.  I knew that there was an audience for the book that would be very knowledgeable about many of the events I wrote about, such as the Manson Family murders, and that I would lose credibility in their eyes if I didn’t have my facts right. The acknowledgements page of the novel lists at least ten books that I returned to time and time again to ensure the veracity of my statements. I also did extensive research of my own, visiting the sites where celebrities died. I went to the gift shop at the LA County Coroner’s Office, viewed Hollywood’s most exclusive cemeteries, and even climbed the fence at the bungalow where Marilyn Monroe died so I could get a better point of reference. The city of Los Angeles was also an important character in the story, and I had to make sure I had explained the geography of LA correctly, lest I get letters from LA natives pointing out that there’s no way you can get from the Valley to West Hollywood during peak-hour in under thirty minutes.

Then again, research is also a wonderful form of procrastination, an activity that lets you feel like you are working when perhaps you should be getting on with the task at hand, namely, writing.

So, what lengths have you gone to in the name of research? How important is research to your writing process, and how much time do you spend doing it?

The Sounds of Silence by kathy charles

One of the most challenging aspects of staying at Varuna for me was the peace and quiet. Yes, I know that’s kind of the point, but for a city gal like me who’s used to the constant rumble of traffic and the shrill cry of car alarms and drunks rolling home from buck’s nights, the quiet of the Blue Mountains was a little, well, daunting. Worse still, the iPod I had brought with me was only 8GB, and after a few days I had well and truly tired of listening to the same Sheryl Crow track over and over. Luckily for me fellow writer Alexa Moses had one of those big bad 30GB iPods that was totally packed to the brim with all sorts of musical goodies, and after much goading she reluctantly handed it over to me as a swap, and pretty much had to wrestle it back when my own meagre collection of tunes had well and truly worn out their welcome.

I’m a noisy writer. Every word I put down must be accompanied by a soundtrack pushing forward the creative process. Even as I write this I have the eclectic sounds of the Beatles’ White Album warbling in the background (although I usually skip over ‘Revolution 9’. Doesn’t everybody?). If I’m writing a depressing scene, Leonard Cohen may be what’s needed to push me into a despairing mindset; if it’s happiness I’m after, the Ramones always get me toe tappin’.

Recently there has been a rise in the phenomenon of author playlists: a list of songs accompanying a novel that either refer directly to the story itself or were listened to by the author during the writing process. This is especially prevalent in the YA genre, where readers are eager for ancillary material that will enhance their reading experience. Author playlists are sneered at a little in the adult world, but I find they can be very revealing. For example, the playlist for one of my favourite novels, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, reveals the author of some of the most controversial literature in America to be quite a dork at heart (Kelly Clarkson anyone?).

I decided to create a playlist for my own novel Hollywood Ending because music is such an integral part of my writing process. The playlist for Hollywood Ending is a list of songs that chronologically accompany scenes in the novel. I hope that the list gives readers a different experience of the story, and the tone I was trying to convey. Here’s the list:

1. Los Angeles by Frank Black
2. Clap Hands by Tom Waits
3. Eyes Without A Face by Billy Idol
4. Surf City by The Ramones
5. Malibu by Hole
6. Minor Thing by Red Hot Chilli Peppers
7. Everybody Needs Somebody to Love by The Blues Brothers
8. Spitting Venom by Modest Mouse
9. Goodbye by Grandaddy
10. Graveyard Girl by M83

The manuscript I am working on at the moment is very dark and Marilyn Manson’s music has proven to be the perfect soundtrack, getting me in exactly the right kind of mood to delve into the world of serial killers. I’d love to write a novel with a softer soundtrack, something like Joni Mitchell, but alas, I don’t think I have it in me.

So, does your novel have a playlist? Do you think author playlists are useful? Is there any particular music you favour to get you in the writing mood? Or are you more likely to be wearing ear plugs as you write, determined to block out any extraneous sound so it doesn’t interfere with the world you are visualising in your head? Sound off below!