What to write about?

Too often I seek subjects to write about that others have examined before, instead of following my own leanings, the things that fascinate me, that I yearn to know more about. These of course would be too easy to write about. Like a martyr I force myself to write what I think others will want to read instead of trusting my own enthusiasms and writing to kindle a fire of interest in my readers.

Dear Annie Dillard addresses this with her usual bluntness:

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."

Perhaps this is why I find writing prompts a bit of a yawn. They are other writers' enthusiasms. Usually I find nothing that surprises me or breaks down the dam blocking the river of ideas. The trick is to be aware of what triggers my interest, to note on paper what intrigues or astonishes me and then to follow my nose as soon as I have the time and space - or sooner.

Cats intrigue me. I can never have enough of their idiosyncrasies. My camera has had a workout this weekend capturing my sister's two felines in every conceivable crazy situation. Fortunately my real job is working with them and their carers. So I write a blog about cat health and other catty issues. (You haven't read it yet? Here it is!) Writing it is no burden. Every day I find material to work with. My nurses have trouble nailing me down to do the veterinary part of the job because I love writing about my patients and feline friends so much.

Not that the physical act of writing is ever easy for me. Setting down words in sentences that work and that I like is hard slog, even after all these years. But it helps to write about something I love and want to learn more about. I push on through the mire and the mud because I want to reach the green field over the way.

Glissando:a Melodrama By David Musgrave

The semi-formal tone of the narrator of this novel somehow subverts the proclaimed melodrama of this bizarre but witty and hugely enjoyable book. The early twentieth century voice holds the improbable events and bizarre characters we meet in its pages together. We willingly suspend our disbelief as the characters and plot devices of high melodrama are revealed: almost twins abandoned to an aloof guardian who in turn leaves them at a series of isolated farms in western NSW; a lost promissory note; a wealthy grandfather who builds house after improbable house leaving behind a journal of his adventures in architecture and exploration; blood on the boards from protracted theatre wars; a First Critic with a court of Critics-in-waiting, Apprentice Critics, Pages and a Cook buzzing around him.
Musgrave, a critic himself, intersperses the narrator's autobiography with excerpts from the grandfather's journal and, a twist on the theatrical themes in the book, a script of the First Critic's dinner conversation. The grandfather is allowed to present his architectural dreams and their realisations for himself. His grandson stands in for us seeing the physical representations of the journals and following in the steps of his grandfather's peregrinations across the country. We are also able to witness the grandfather's mental collapse from within while we see the effects on his wife through the grandson's eyes.
A brother, who after an accident becomes a musical savant, parallels the mental coning down of his grandfather into architecture, an enormous housekeeper prefigures the gargantuan critic with the comedic name Basil Pilbeam, various sycophants, lost lovers, stolen Aboriginal children, actors and plodding policemen make up an entertaining cast. The script subverts our notions of sanity and normalcy, while inviting us to see how artificial and ridiculous our own societal norms and aspirations are when seen from a distance.
I highly recommend a romp through this book. Spare a few moments afterward to reflect on the truths melodrama and indeed any good comedy expose about our own culture.

Welcome to the Bloggers' ball

Welcome to all the SheWriters dressed in their feathers and finery for the Bloggers' Ball! Hope you enjoy the little knees up on Wordmusic where I celebrate music of words, music in words and everything in between!
Back to the Bloggers Ball

Crafting the personal essay

I read Dinty W. Moore's Crafting the Personal Essay immediately after mailing my honours thesis in last year. Academic writing had wrung me out and left me unable to write anything less than formal prose. Dinty Moore soon turned me around and whet my appetite for more learning and writing. 
Crafting the Personal Essay is a very readable and motivating book on writing the personal essay. Moore covers the nuts and bolts of writing the humorous, nature, travel, lyric, spiritual and food essay, providing numerous examples and tips. This is the first time I have heard essay writing defined as chasing "mental rabbits' but that is exactly what it is: a "hunt, a chase, a ramble through thickets of thought, in pursuit of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth". He exactly describes the essay-writing process, how to work through ideas and feelings and nail them to paper. 
There are plenty of exercises to get the writer's pen to paper and build a fund of ideas and starters. Highly recommended! 

Frost and other wonders

Our first frost for the winter this morning - the merest dusting over the valley.

""Just a minute," said a voice in the weeds.

So I stood still

in the day's exquisite early morning light..."

from Mary Oliver's wonder-full collection, Why I Wake Early

So the dogs and I stood still, let the chill settle on our noses and ears and listened to the birds sing up the day. 

Now the sky is clear and the sun mellow on my face. How I love winter in my part of the world! I suspect I would not be so enthusiastic if I lived in harsher climes. Here frost and snow are a surprise, an unexpected gift; for others they are a trial, something they barricade their houses and minds against.
A friend of mine who spent a couple of winters in Germany finished many cross stitch masterpieces despite bearing two babies in that time. Perhaps I should adopt the mental state of being snowbound, stay still at my keyboard and write a masterpiece or two...
I have a full day ahead to fill my mind with beauty and translate it into words, or better, sentences (thank you Stanley Fish for drawing to my attention that words mean nothing unless ordered into sentences and related to other words!).

More wisdom from Annie Dillard

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days."
Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

Beauty Itself

"What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, ... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; ... would that be a life to disregard?"
Plato


Recognising beauty brings us close to God, close to that that is untainted by decay, and gives us a taste of immortality, of what is precious and eternal, of a life worth living.
As I copied out this quote that I discovered in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, I uncovered words that I hadn't noticed on first reading. When people (not just men!) recognise beauty they come close to God (the perfect, the eternal) too. When writers see and share something beautiful or, amazingly, write something that takes a reader's breath away with its beauty, then their lives and works are surely worth respect, honour and attention.
So read to find that beauty; pay attention to the environment;  notice and perhaps communicate that rare thing or moment of beauty; come close to the eternal.

Thoughts for writers...

Observation, conscious attention to detail and delight fuel my writing. I find I only understand what is in my life when I crystallise it in words. Paying attention is critical to my writing, thinking and to living my life well.
Mary Oliver so neatly captures the precious in the ordinary, the sacred nature of the everyday, the joy we should grasp in our short time in the world.  

"Every day

  I see or I hear

    something

      that more or less

kills me with delight,

  that leaves me

    like a needle

in the haystack of light.

   It is what I was born for -"

Mary Oliver Mindful

Time to do what we love

On her wonderful blog about the writing life (and other things) Miss Good on Paper quotes John Dufresne who says that we always find time to do what we love - and they are probably right. However, I find that I need to moodle around at my desk for a while before I finally settle to what really gives me a lot of pleasure: writing tanka or haiku, adding to my novel or tinkering away on here. I need to settle in like a hen scratching the straw around, fluffing out her feathers, calling her chicks and flopping into exactly the right spot.
A quiet and clean house helps. Barring myself from Gmail and Facebook is mandatory. A good night's sleep and a gritty coffee put me on fast forward. Today has been a good day for writing. My story for The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is well on its way. I gathered a few haiku for Creatrix, the WA Poets online poetry mag and I even worked out how to do web links on this blog!
The Limestone Tanka poets met at the National Botanic Gardens in Canberra on Sunday and discussed our writing processes. Although we all carry scruffy notebooks we each use them differently. One composes on one page and writes the finished tanka in a fair hand on the opposite page. Another scribbles phrases, words or skeleton ideas in a spiral bound pad. Some showed A4 pages full of crossings out, part poems, full ones, pressed flowers, crumpled newspaper articles and theatre programmes.
After the talk we wandered up the mountain or down onto the lawns among the eucalypts and penned a few ideas and tanka. My mind erupted with ideas and connections. Today I captured them and worked an hour or so on them. Tomorrow I work a 10 hour shift and will sink into bed without a backward glance at pen or computer, much as I love them.
I agree with Miss Good on Paper but sometimes doing things we love is not as easy as it sounds. I aim to keep my eye on the goal and work towards it without despairing of reaching it. Goethe sums my writing life up: "Do not hurry; do not rest."

Writing sentences

Stanley Fish argues that sentences rather than words are the material that writers work with. Piles of words mean nothing until they slide into their ordained places, until they relate to each other in particular and logical ways, until they combine with other words to make meaning. If we want to write well and clearly then he insists we must focus on forms. Fortunately for most younger Australians he doesn't mean old fashioned grammatical forms but a logical sequence of linkages between actor, action and the object of the action.
He gives some wonderful examples from the greats of what he calls the subordinating style, the additive style and the satiric style and encourages us to copy them by substituting words that perform the same function within a sentence. His comments on the function and importance of first and final sentences cut straight to the marrow and made me reconsider the economy and efficiency of my leading sentences.
In the final pages he turns his attention to the actual content of sentences - and this is where he comes unstuck. In the earlier chapters he uses modern and contemporary examples. The last chapter dwells on examples from centuries well past, alluding to ancient and biblical knowledge and using archaic language that many readers might struggle with.
Although I read the early chapters hungrily I became bogged down towards the end and found it difficult to finish. However I have added to my armoury of knowledge about writing and now have a better understanding of how words function within sentences without having to revise all the grammatical jargon of my school days.

Never Let Me Go

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting Never Let Me Go years ago. What stayed with me was the sombre mood, the feeling that the children had no control over their lives or futures. Their fates were so gradually revealed that they seemed irrevocable and somehow natural.
The movie recreated the darkness but interjected some themes that I don't recall from the book. At the end of the movie Kathy knows that she is on the road to "completion" and contrasts herself positively with others who do not know when they are going to die. She is one of the special children who have been farmed and brainwashed with stories and rumors to expect an early death - sorry, completion - and to expect it sooner than ordinary people, who because of them expect to live for a century or more.
I reread the end of the book when I got home yesterday and found it even bleaker than the end of the movie: in the book she mourned all whom she'd lost, the childhood she'd misunderstood and her purpose in a hopeless and altogether fatalistic way. She looked for no bright sides, no wisdom from knowledge of her fate, just accepted that that is the way of the world - and that is what I find so bleak about the book and the movie.
When I extend her fatalism to us all, our gullibility is revealed. We accept the stories we are told; we hand control of our lives and futures over to others, to society, with hardly a murmur; we fail to question or reflect on the discourses and trends of thinking and ideas that sweep us along on the tide of societal expectations. We are trapped by the time, place and society in which we are born.

Not quite the truth...

When I say my writing has been languishing because of work and study I am not quite telling the truth. Since I acquired an iPad - strictly for e-reading while travelling, you understand - and a faster more efficient computer, I have been frittering hours away adding apps, reading pages and sites (about writing, I promise) and playing games I did not even know about 12 months ago. As soon as I finished one game I started the next, buoyed on by a win, determined to overcome a loss. At the end of a session I would emerge exhausted and drained, barely able to sleep because I was so tense.
Instead of snuggling down in bed with a book or e-book, I played Scrabble on the iPad. The dogs went cabin crazy while I skipped from blog to blog or kept up with my Facebook friends. I skim read pages and pages on the web but was unable to recount much beyond the headings afterwards. Gmail alerted me to every email; Twitter let me know every twist of everyone's day.
About 2 weeks ago I pulled myself up: not only was I not writing, I was not walking or gardening or drawing or doing any of those things that require senses other than the visual. I was distracted and unable to concentrate on anything for very long. Frequent interruptions from Gmail and Facebook scattered my thoughts. I was anxious and tense all the time and unable to immerse myself in the books I love or to sustain deep thinking.
What was going on? Surfing the net, heavy computer use and playing electronic games cause dopamine release. It makes us feel good and we become addicted to those little bursts of excitement. It also trains our brains to be distracted, inhibits deep thought and causes anxiety. We become unable to pay attention and attention is the crux of our consciousness and memories. Creativity also suffers because we are unable to relax or concentrate on a problem for long enough to solve it.

Because of my mindless addiction to electronics I was not writing or even living in my own skin. I forced myself to delete the games from my iPad, only turn the computer on at work, check my emails once a day and resign from Facebook and Twitter. The dogs and I hit the path through the woods. I didn't even take my iPod with me. My rewards were the magpies' morning song, the quilt of autumn leaves, the sun's caress and the scent of the last roses of summer. The dogs danced with joy and I felt refreshed, not drained.

So here I am writing again at last and truly savouring these days I have on this beautiful part of the earth!  

Writing path/s

I am back blogging after a long break writing a thesis and working too hard! Writing the blog might loosen me up for writing some stories and perhaps even getting back into my embryonic novel...
John Fowles expresses a sentiment not dissimilar to that of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken in his comment on the writing journey:


"Behind every path and every form of expression one does finally choose,lie the ghosts of all those that one did not.  I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.  I am quite sure this is not some kind of rationalization, or irrationalization, after the fact; that having discovered I write fiction in a disgracefully haphazard sort of way, I now hit on the passage through an unknown wood as an analogy."

The paths not taken, the stories and characters not elaborated on, haunt the final draft but a year on I have forgotten they even existed except as grist for a new work. I cannot plan my work except in the most general way.  Mostly I learn about my characters, my thoughts, the world, as I go and so cannot predict how the work will progress. 

For me the writing way seems scattered and dark until the moment that it all comes together and the light suddenly comes on. I follow one line of thought, one character, one scene, and then another. Sometimes they are related, often there is little connection, most of the time a thread holds them together. Finally one day I survey the reams of paper and computer files and realise that I was moving in one direction after all.