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. 

Life and Times of Michael K

Coetzee writes with precision and clarity but with precious little emotion.  I felt no empathy with Michael K despite the ordeals he survives.  He invites no synpathy because he subverts all who try to understand him and slips below the radar and away whenever he is imprisoned.
This is a cold but compelling read from the master story teller.  Michael K's journey is for nothing and he surmounts numerous hurdles only to return to the place and life he left at the beginning.  The meaning of Michael K's life slides away on all sides, and we are left to question the meaning of our own lives in the light of it.

Unless...

I've just reread Carol Shield's 'Unless', a meditation on the invisible gender. Is it a little out of date with our female prime minister and governor-general in Australia? Not quite. Gender seems to be the main marker of women like Julia Gillard who are in the public eye, rather than her credentials, character or politics. When these latter are discussed it is in comparison to how a male might have or has performed.
And in my professional and writing life I still feel the steely scepticism of males in my ability to do anything substantial or well - and half believe it myself. That is the dangerous corollary and the hardest to change. The discourse that disregards female concerns and preoccupations as less important, and occupations and discourses dominated by women as inferior.