I look back over these posts and it seems like I’ve mostly talked about the hard stuff. I wonder if I should be more uplifting. Encouraging. Talk about the good stuff. Because there is so much good stuff: the friendships with other writers, the joy of a good story, that moment when the characters feel real. Pinching something from another writer*, there is the wonderful “perception of beauty … in words and their right arrangement”. I love realising that some item I mentioned in passing a few scenes back can be used to great effect in coming scenes, as if my unconscious is steps ahead of me. I love when I read back over the draft and see that it hangs together. And I love when I start writing from my series character’s point-of-view again, because it feels like settling down to natter with a dear friend.
But there is benefit in talking about the hard stuff. In ‘The Varuna Moment’ I mentioned climbing the mountain when you can’t see the path ahead, because that’s how writing a book always feels for me. I know what’s happened at the start of the story to set me on the path, I know the vague shape of the crest I’m aiming for, but in all other ways I am totally in the fog. And it’s scary: you worry about taking a wrong turn and falling, and you keep hearing voices saying you won’t make it. Sometimes the fear gets so bad that you cling to the rockface unable to go on. You know you have to, though. Whether you have a deadline or not, you are a writer, and that means you have to loosen your grip and take another step.
But how?
Each time I start a new book I think I should know more about what I’m doing, that it should get easier. It doesn’t. The only thing I can take with me on the new adventure is the knowledge that it will be hard. When it’s tough I try to remind myself that it’s always like this, and that feeling bad doesn’t mean I’m on the wrong track. Peter Carey once said, “Students always think when they’re proper writers their self-doubt and their uncertainty will go away. I say to them, this is what you’re choosing for your life. You think you feel bad now, you wait. Because that’s the nature of writing.”**
Fat lot of comfort, really. Words like this are a small fleecy blanket – you feel a little warmer there on the mountainside but what you really need is an ice axe and pitons. Here are some actual things I do in an effort to creep a little further up the incline:
- I write 500 words, or even just 250. I aim for 1500-2000 a day but sometimes that feels impossible. I lower my sights and tell myself any idiot can write 250. Heck, that’s only two paragraphs! Once I get going I’m usually okay. If not, I repeat as required.
- I remind myself that it doesn’t matter what crap I write because I can always go back and edit later. The one thing I can’t fix is a blank page.
- If I’m stuck with a plot point, I write to myself “if I could solve this problem, what would the solving look like?” and ramble on from there. (Pinched that from another author, can’t remember who.)
It’s been a privilege to be the first blogger here on the Alumni site. Writing the posts and reading the comments and discussions have made me think about writing and why I do it and how I can do it more and better. I can’t wait to read what the next blogger, Susanne Gervay, has to say in the coming month. Until then, Alumni, I’d love to know what your ice axe looks like and what you love most about writing.
Very best wishes,
Katherine.
* George Orwell, Why I Write.
** Peter Carey, /Making Stories – How Ten Australian Novels Were
Written/. Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville, eds.
11 Comments
June 22, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Thank you so much for such a great start to the blog Katherine! Your posts have been really inspiring and stimulated lots of useful conversation. You’re a rock star!
My ice axe(s):
- I write 1000 words a day.
- If I’m having trouble with a scene, I leave it and move on. I can always go back and fix it, and by moving forward I normally discover the elusive answer I was looking for.
- I have a pile of books next to me, and if I get stuck I pick up a book, read a passage from the middle, then get going again. Seeing other people’s words on paper somehow stimulates my own.
- If I’m stuck on a plot point, I ask my husband what he would do. He’s the kind of guy who always knows who the killer is right from the beginning of the film, and has a very logical and pragmatic way of looking at dilemmas.
- If I’m losing energy, I just pop on the dulcit tones of a Marilyn Manson album to get me fired up!
June 22, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I’ve really enjoyed these posts Katherine – so much so that it’s actually made me scroll down and ADD A COMMENT, the first time I’ve EVER done so on a blog, so something must be working.
I like the image of an ice axe and the thought of inching forward on a manuscript, clinging on with crampons, because when I see photos of those mountaineers on the side of K2, snowblind and freezing, complete with local porter lugging up their oxygen tank and gear for the final summit, etc., the same question always strikes me: Why are you DOING this?
That’s the question I have to ask myself, too, when I start feeling a bit overwhelmed and yes, put upon in the middle of writing something – well, then, why do it? What would you rather be doing? And the answer of course, is nothing. There is nothing I’d rather be doing than grabbing every chance I can in my life to escape to that desk and spin that tale out of somewhere. So that short admonishment becomes my ice-pick, I guess. Who’s making me do it? Nobody. Who’s decreed I have to put myself through this? Nobody. I climbed up here voluntarily, so I should stop wasting my time thinking about dying of exposure, and either keep going, or climb down and quietly retire.
Not so much a question of getting over the mountain, maybe, as getting over myself…
June 23, 2009 at 9:34 am
Oh THIS question! The why am I doing this question. Why am I doing this at 36 years of age, still an emerging writer, earning a pittance in a part-time job, wondering how to fit in babies and doing ANOTHER draft of the first novel that I fear may never get published…? THAT question! ‘Getting over myself’, as opposed to the mountain, is such a good way of putting it into perspective! Thanks Cate!
I know it can be done – I read about it here. Thanks Katherine, for bringing all these wonderful voices to the same page.
June 22, 2009 at 4:35 pm
hi,
Echoing Kathy, thank you. This has been a great start to the blog! Writing is generally so solitary. It’s comforting to know we are not alone in our insecurities and small triumphs…
This may sound strange, but I find my writing works best when I keep it kind of undisciplined. It feels more like a creative outlet I enjoy when I approach it that way. I spend a lot of time day dreaming. I tend to write in terms of episodes/scenes, rather than wordcount. So some days I’ll sit down and only write around 250 words, some days I’ll go for pages. If I’m restless/uninspired, I’ll leave the house, garden, walk the dog, see friends, do errands– just do something completely the opposite of concentrating on writing. It all averages out to an OK pace, and I tend to stay inspired when I’m in this kind of free-flow work rhythm (or lack thereof). I’ve tried a more organised routine– didn’t work for me.
June 22, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Ah yes- walking the fur babies is a great way to clear the mind.
June 23, 2009 at 8:53 am
One of the things I have found helpful and that I often tell people in creative writing classes is to stop in the middle of a sentence. Then when you go back the next day part of the work is done and you can pick up where you left off. Walking often stimulates the ideas as well as a number of the others mentioned. I’ve enjoyed your blogs Katherine.
June 23, 2009 at 10:19 am
Thank you, Katherine! You’ve kicked off the blog in fine fashion; it’s been wonderful reading your posts and everyone’s thought-provoking and handy responses. Like many people, I do best at banishing the blank page when I try to stick to a daily minimum word count… depending on how it’s all going, this varies WILDLY.
I’m also a big advocate of thinking time. Some people seem almost suspicious of spending working hours mulling things over in your head, and I think writers are extraordinarily fortunate to be part of a culture that not only requires independent thought but values it. It’s one of those many little things about the privileges of the job keeping me honest – and very grateful.
June 23, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Thanks everyone for your thanks
I laugh at myself – writing a post about how to proceed up the mountain when I’m sitting here at home failing to follow my own advice! But as you said, Di, thinking time is necessary, and Cate, you are so, SO right – we climb up here voluntarily and even when it’s hard this is where we want to be.
Thanks again,
Katherine.
June 24, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Cate
Before I was awarded one of last year’s Varuna Harper Collins Manuscript Assessment Awards, I thought, ‘I need an editor.’
Some time ago, my reaction to the thought of that was a sinking-of-the-heart feeling, a brick wall feeling, a dismal sort of feeling like the smell of wet cement, at the thought of sending a manuscript to someone who would read it and say “but you made up that word”, and “that sentence is too long”, and “that sentence that you use as a stand-alone is actually a phrase.”
So I thought, ‘On second thoughts, I don’t need an editor, I need an architect.’
I read an editor called Barry Oakley quoting D.H. Lawrence and talking about “voice” and “mysterious qualities.” About the lyrical properties of writing. About people with a “sensitivity to language”.
Yes!
Yes, that is what I want to drive my writing. I believe the written word has a taste of its own, a rhythm, a flow. There are a certain number of beats in a line, be they many or one. There are rises and falls in the voice speaking the words. Writing surges, rips, flows or stutters. Writing sizzles and hisses as in “The winter evening settles down / with smell of steaks in passageways / six o’clock.” Writing is a living thing, with a life of its own and its own pulse. Writing is what Dickens, Samuel Beckett and F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us and Virginia Woolfe and T.S. Eliot and Raymond Carver and the sparse prose of Ernest Hemingway and the gentle, soaring spirit of Gerald Manley Hopkins: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” “Voice” is everything. I read the ravings of a Russian madman, the dark fantasy of Salman Rushdie, Mrs. Dalloway remembering “the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave” or the Archbishop being told that in his absence his people have been “living, living and partly living.” These were the voices that touched me. Not only what they say, but how they say it.
In another article, Philip Witts says “I write because I have to” and instructs people who don’t “have to” to refrain.
So here’s another dilemma. I write because I have to. And I write because I want to do it well. If it means sitting in the study eight hours a day, and if that’s what it takes—eight hours a day—I’ll do it. If it means combing through every sentence and every paragraph over and over to get it right, I’ll do it. I don’t want a careful set of cautious index-cards with notes on plot and charts listing the genetic properties of a character, or maps of fictitious places affixed to the walls with drawing-pins (with all due respect to William Faulkner.) I want the thing to write itself through me. I don’t want a best-selling novel (well, that would be nice) but I do want to write something that people will read and that will have been worth their while to have read.
I want my readers to love my language for its own sake – the subtleties of it, its potential to exist in a dimension beyond the ordinary. I want anyone reading my work to find themselves in another world – a complete world as I have created it, without having to stop and take stock or settle little nagging doubts along the way. I want to write me a river. And I want to take you with me.
Someone like Barry Oakley knows what it’s about – how you can sit at the keyboard and something flows out onto the screen and you watch it creating itself and when you tell people this, they think you are rather odd or insane.
But this is what happens. It begins with you thinking you are going to say something and suddenly it is speaking for you, and you watch with wonder as a paragraph unfolds on wings of its own will and it speaks through you, as though it has already been born somewhere else to reveal itself as you write. You wonder, “Did I hear that bit correctly? Did I stop too long to check for spelling errors and did I miss a word or beat?”
So why do I want to write? I always wrote. (I might mention that my grandfather said when I was a child that he was grateful there was no writing on toilet paper as no one but me would get to use the bathroom.)
I just found out that I am dyslexic, something I didn’t know before, so writing must have been battle, but a battle I was going to win. I may not have written a best-seller, but my writing earned me scholarships to special schools every year of my student life from primary school on. Other kids hated me and I had no friends. So I studied instead of hanging out. I got them back by coming to school with twenty page essays on the Peloponnesian War when they handed in two. At 14, I was reading and appreciating T.S.Eliot and discussing the Love song of J Alfred Prufrock with the teacher, to the disgust of the other kids who got me back in turn by covering me in flour and dumping me in the lake. In Italy, I began learning Italian with Dante and read all the greats. In Belgium, I read all the French stuff. In the States I started writing for real and had most of my stories published. Felt good to have the ice-pick in my hands.
So why write? Why spend the past four years dedicated to this novel?
“Oh well,” I said when I started it, “pity it has to be in Pakistan. Who gives a damn about Pakistan?”
Ha! They do now. I want to write a book about the ordinary foibles of people who happen to be Pakistani. I want to show westerners that Islam is a way of life and not a plot to kill. I want them to see that people were getting blown up in the streets long before the Taliban made a tool of it. Afghanis have been entrenched in Peshawar for decades, thanks to the US backed war against the Russians in Afghanistan. Pakistan has been carved up, shaken out, relegated to the past and dragged back again. Pakistan is full of Pakistanis, who have breakfast, get cranky, love their children and their wives, who arrange marriages because it’s worked that way for centuries. They are kind and nasty, selfish and selfless. I know, because I’ve lived among them.
My husband has entrusted me with his absolutely amazing life-story and I am using that as the framework to write the very best book I possibly can. I owe him that, and I will succeed.
And with the help of my time at Varuna and the wonderful relationship I had with my Harper Collins editor, I’m going to climb the mountain.
But I’m afraid of heights, so even though I’ve seen it, climbing K2 is out of the question.
I’ll climb my own mountain, thanks. It’s even scarier.
m
June 26, 2009 at 1:00 am
Thanks Katherine, I have enjoyed reading your blog posts. I just had my first short story published yesterday online and I have been honoured by the generous comments of all sorts of readers which made me truly experience first hand for the first time what a privilege and a responsibility it is to be a writer. It feels great to have reached the other side of the mountain for the first time, it’s adddictive and makes me want to get to the ice axe again asap.
Thanks Simonne for all your efforts at moderating this blog. It is a blessing to be part of a community of writers such as Varuna Alumni. I hope to be a more active participant now.
June 26, 2009 at 9:58 am
Congrats on your published story Roanna! Can you give us a link to it so we can read it too?
This is a pretty special community and I’m so pleased that so many alumni are enjoying and using the blog