Writing Companion

After yesterday’s session, then an evening dinner with the authors, I came to the 10am start of Day 2 with ‘conference lag’, like jet lag.

I was pleased to see that the used book sale attracted many customers. The books were ones I’d weeded out of the library at Varuna Writers’ House. Proceeds will be used to buy modern books, especially reference books and books about writing.

Today’s speakers were John Burnside from Scotland, and Australian writers Charlotte Wood, Jacqueline Kent, Toni Jordan, Vicki Hastrich and Camilla Noli. Again some random comments from the authors that I jotted down during the day. (And I hope I’m accurate!)

John Burnside

John Burnside is a Scottish poet, novelist, short story writer, and memoirist.

• He talked about having worked in a steel mill, his early drinking (starting at 12) and mental illness, for which he was periodically hospitalised and on anti-psychotic drugs. Somehow, he said, he decided to make a responsible, normal life for himself instead of maintaining this ‘wildness’. For him, part of creating this normal life was becoming a computer programmer, but everything changed when he started to write poetry and had his first book published. When he talked at dinner last night, he described the making of gaskets, and how it was divided into women’s work and men’s work in the factory. I’m sure others had the same thought– how many brilliant minds are ‘lost’ because of the lack of opportunities or encouragement.

• Talking about his most recent novel, The Devil’s Footprints, he said he liked to have his stories rooted in some old, simple story. In this case, he had read a story or news item about a seaside town where it had snowed, and the next morning the townspeople found a set of cloven hoof prints coming from the sea and going across the town. In creating this story, John wanted to establish a character who through his own fault ends up with nothing, a character who is not strong or charismatic. This character does something wrong–well, several things–and then exacts a penance upon himself. Through this, he learns to value the small acts in domesticity and work.
  Some audience members became upset when John and his interviewer started telling the whole plot. People yelled out, ‘Don’t tell us!’–but they did. Luckily, I’d already read the book. It seems rather bizarre to give away the whole story minutes before the usual post-talk book buying and signing. When I buy a book at a writers’ festival, it’s often because the author has withheld the mystery of the plot but said enough tantalising things about it that I need to know the whole story.

• Artists should remind the powers that be that life is more complex than they want us to live it. The powers that be want us to see life in simple terms.
• John started writing poetry, then set out to learn more about it. The poets who first made him want to write poetey included Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Octavio Paz.
• You have to work with your personality type, i.e., you’re stuck with it and can’t get out of it. You can’t wear orange robes and chant–and suddenly be someone else. Accept that you’re not going to move on and become something completely different–because as you move on, you carry yourself with you.
• Professionals want to intervene so we never suffer from depression, but it is natural for humans to be depressed.
• His memoir, A Lie About My Father, sounds quite interesting, as John finds out more about his Dad’s difficult childhood.

Charlotte Wood, Australian novelist

Charlotte has written three novels. The ideas below were either Charlotte’s or from her interviewer, Tegan Bennett Daylight.

• Charlotte starts by getting an idea for a character, and then she looks for things to surround and flesh out the character, an accretion of details.
  She also starts by thinking of major goals and minor ones. For her most recent book, her major goal was to write something about grown-up siblings who were raised in a country town. This goal functioned as a ‘back of the room’ theme, based on the question, ‘What are families for’? Then she developed smaller goals within this framework.
• Charlotte is interested in what is not said, how sometimes what is talked about is not what’s important, how you can write a scene that appears to be about one thing but it’s about another.
• She said it’s great to find a novel where someone is writing about the inexpressibility of life, where you read someone who articulates something for you. For example, Australian writer Joan London, Richard Ford (Lay of the Land) and William Maxim(?). Her current ‘good read’ is Wallace Stegner.
• She is researching the issue of the ethics when writers ‘borrow’ or take details from people’s lives. The author, Susie Orbach, calls this ‘robbing a person of the richness of who they are’. Charlotte recounted her experience of talking to a boring man, who lectured her on screw-top wine bottles. She flet she could not use this experience herself because it was too close. Perhaps it felt too much like ‘robbing’ him. But she was happy to give the idea to Tegan, given that for Tegan it was a second-hand scene that she could work on in a fresh way.
• A writer needs resistances in life, things to write against.
• Sometimes the best writing is about the hardest stuff.
• What is fiction? It is getting into that space of things you can’t talk about.
• As you write scenes, as they accumulate, you get to know how your character feels about life.
• Intimate writing is close writing, not just close attention to plot but reliance on the slow accumulation of detail.
• You become a writer because you keep bloody noticing things.

Jacqueline Kent, Australian biographer

Jacqueline is the author of two social histories and six books of YA fiction. Her biography about Beatrice Davis won the National Biography Award.

Her latest biography is about the life of Hephzibah Menuhin, the sister of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Hephzibah married an Australian and lived here after WWI for a time, before leaving her husband and moving to England. Jacqueline is an enchanting speaker who tells a good yarn about her subject. The hour allotted to her talk passed quickly. During the discussion, two unrelated members of the audience indicated that they had attended the final Australian concert of the Menuhins in Australia in the late 1970s. One audience member could top that–she’d visited Hephzibah in London in 1975 and met Yehudi–but didn’t know who he was. Small world!

• You need to like your subject at least a little because the person will be in your head for five years.

Toni Jordan, Vicki Hastrich, and Camilla Noli

The last session was called, Writing Obsessions: New Australian Fiction. It was an interesting and unified discussion because all three authors had created obsessed characters.

• Toni Jordan’s first novel, the recently published Addition, has been sold into 10 countries. The story is about a character who adds up everything as a way of living in the everyday world and keeping the demons at bay. Given that description, it was a surprise to find that the novel is hilarious–or at least the part that Toni read out. Toni says that when she speaks about her book at literary events, members of the audience tell her about their own obsession with numbers. I’m more numbers-adverse so it’s hard to imagine counting things for fun or for peace of mind.
• Vicki Hastrich’s recent second novel is about someone obsessed with the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I could not get into her first novel, Swimming with Jellyfish, but the discussion about this one, The Great Arch, makes me want to read it. Her starting point in wanting to write the story was when she discovered a book that a clergyman had written about the Harbour Bridge–an eccentric account of engineering details, such as the composition of all the bolts used. The book Vicki found was volume 1, but no volume 2 was ever published. She was intrigued with the story of the kind of person who would amass and record so much information. But she wanted to write a fictional account, not a biography. And so she did. This is the second time I’ve heard Vicki speak and she always impresses with her practical, but in-depth thinking about her writing choices.
• Camilla Noli’s first novel, Still Waters, concerns a woman whose impulses war against the commonplace view that mothers naturally take care of their helpless children. Instead, she finds motherhood ‘devouring’. It sounds like a thoughtful but confronting read.
• It’s valuable to write from the point of being interested in ordinariness–but bring out the extraordinariness contained in this ordinariness.

The trio discussed point of view. Toni said her book was short because it would have been hard to sustain anything longer when writing in first person and present tense. Camilla’s book is written in first person as well, which adds to the story’s intimate and repressive quality. The interviewer talked about how readers are ‘locked’ inside her character’s world, in part by the first-person POV. Vicki used third-person, which enabled her to create a well-rounded sense of the main character, given that others could comment on him

With that session over, the Katoomba part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival ended. As we filed out, the hotel staff were already stacking up the chairs and dismantling the stage. All in all, it was a delightful two days, with a pleasant variety of speakers, much wit and humour, and some insights in the mysteries of the writing process. Congratulations to Varuna Writers’ House, one of the sponsors, for organising a thought-provoking and entertaining program.

A two-day regional segment of the Sydney Writers’ Festival is being held at Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, today and tomorrw. The venue is the turn-of-the-century Carrington Hotel, which perches at the top of Katoomba’s main street.

Today’s speakers included Forrest Gander (USA), Steve Toltz and Trevor Shearston (Australia) and Hermione Lee (England). Here are some of their random comments that I jotted down when I could.

Forrest Gander: American poet, novelist, essayist and translator

When I looked up Forrest’s website, I jumped to the unkind conclusion that he would come across as a sophisticate, dropping esoteric terminology as a literature academic. Instead, he took time and care with his ideas rather than trotting out a canned talk. (But It’s easy to understand why speakers try to save their mental energy and sanity when they hit the publicity circuit to talk up their latest book.)

• Forrest studied geology, but a life-changing health issue, melanoma, turned his focus to poetry. In many of his poems, he draws on his scientific background. He talked about the special attraction of the desert country, mentioning Mary Hunter Austin’s writings in the 1930s, which concern the desert landscape and culture. He talked about the different way of seeing in the desert, compared to other areas, where your sight lines are screened because you are looking through living forms (eg bushes, trees).
• To live in the world, one must develop a ‘callus’. But a poet [and any writer?] also needs to remain open to the world. He likens this need to an alligator snapping turtle. The poet ‘opens self to profound listening’, like the turtle opens himself to stillness at the bottom of a pool, in order to attract its prey.
• I was amused at the description in one of his poems, about someone who has ‘lost the consolation of faith but not the ambition to worship’.
• He and his wife started the Lost Road Press to help writers who may not otherwise be published. Perhaps it’s his publishing background that has made him interested in ‘the whole hog of the art of writing’. How pleasant to hear this view in an age of increasing specialisation.
• He does not believe in the idea of a ‘lone genius’, instead emphasising community and other cultures, saying that his own writing is ‘full of the voices of other writers’. Part of his views must come from his translation work with Spanish poets. He thinks we need to ‘wake up’ and be ‘vigilant’ about using these differences/nuances, and he mentioned Robert Creeley’s title, I Know as I Write, as providing a sense of what writing does for us.

Trevor Shearston: Australian novelist of many books set in Papua New Guinea

Trevor is a passionate and good-humoured writer about New Guinea, where he lived for many years. His latest novel, Dead Birds, is set in 1800s pre-colonial Papua. The narrator is an utamu, the spirit of a tribesman who has been beheaded. The Italian naturalist, Luigi D’Alberti, who is exploring the Fly River, has the man’s head pickled and kept in a jar aboard his ship. The spirit tries to understand what it is seeing and hearing as it goes with the expedition.

• Trevor says, ‘We all write from our obsessions.’ His obsession is New Guinea, in part because very few others are taking this up as a subject. And although some Papuans are writing about their culture, he says it is a futile exercise because they have no avenues to publish their work.
• Because Dead Birds has a Papuan narrator, Trevor said he wanted to capture an authentic Papuan voice. For example, Papuans expect a level of detail that non-Papuans may find odd or boring. Non-Papuan readers may find the style difficult, but they should persevere, ‘do battle with it’.
• In the days of exploration and colonisation, ‘who were really the savages?’ His book provides some answers. D’Alberti, the naturalist, unleashed fireworks when he came to a longhouse/village, which made the people run away. Then he plundered the longhouse for items he could sell in Europe, e.g. the bodies of the birds-of-paradise.
• Trevor at first could not find a publisher. Then, through a personal connection, he got a publishing deal with ABC Books. To reduce the costs, the book has been printed in a small format, and the typeface is also small. Trevor laughingly said that the small format and close type has the happy result of providing an oppressive sense that matches the plot. I found the type much too small to read comfortably.
• His biggest challenge was writing about commonplace things that the spirit-narrator would not know or understand in the same way. He uses the example of the spirit seeing the crew make water hot then throw leaves in it. The modern reader suddenly thinks, ‘They’re making tea.’ As he wrote, he had to keep in mind what the spirit knows, and what the spirit can pick up through observation.

Hermione Lee: British writer, best known for her well-researched biographies

Hermione has a formidable, academic reputation. Many in the audience were expecting a brilliant but rather overly detailed talk. After all, her new biography of novelist Edith Wharton is so thick!

Her lecture was the highlight of the day, as she mixed fact and conjecture, information about Wharton with her views about writing biographies, and her personal experience in going on the Whartonian ‘hunt’.

• She talked about how you get obsessed with your subject, to the point of suffering from ‘biographer’s lunacy’. This happens when biographers become so involved that the subject seems to be living again and close at hand. For example, if they are in the subject’s former home, it may feel that their subject is about to walk into the room. Lee talks about being a museum where Wharton had set one of her fictional scenes, and feeling as if the two characters from that novel were about to come around the corner.
• She says that a biographer should not make things up, no matter how tempting. Biographers need to be able to say that they do not know about some areas, that the evidence is not there. Of course they can conjecture.
• She said it’s worthwhile for biographers to ask whether they see their subject as younger or older than themselves. Eg, Hermione first took the conventional view of Wharton as the older grande dame, but then worked with the fact that Wharton had started writing when young and had a long literary career.
• When I asked her about Wharton’s literary legacy, she said that she would describe her as the ‘American Balzac’, with the same kind of penetrating social analysis and description of the upper class. But, she did not have a significant impact on the next generation of writers, because her popularity waned in her later career.
• Her favourite Wharton novel is Custom of the Country.

Steve Toltz: Australian writer with exciting first novel

His newly released first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, is a 700-page epic that is being released in the US, UK and Australia. Steve came across as an engaging, self-deprecating author. He also had a greater interviewer, Malcolm Knox, who thought up unusual questions, interacted with the audience, and presented himself as a strong fan of the book.

• He doesn’t believe in not reading others’ work while writing. Seeing what published writers were doing helped him work out where he ‘fit’. Some seminal influences on his writing include authors John Fontaine (not sure about who this is–the pioneer writer about deserts?), Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Raymond Chandler, Knut Hamsen (Hunger) and the Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, whose ‘extreme pessimism is extremely funny’.
• He enjoyed using the label of writer in countries other than Australia. In some countries, calling yourself a writer is taken as a given, with no follow-up questions, such as ‘where have you published?’ It made life much easier, but after telling so many people that he was a writer, he decided he had to write something. He had written stories and other works for competitions.
• While writing, he lived in different countries and undertook a number of dead-end jobs, i.e., ‘moving from the bottom rung of one ladder to the bottom rung of another’. One job was as a movie extra, which he called being a ‘warm prop’.
• He gave a quote from someone: Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
• If you’re telling the story of a shark, your point of view differs depending on if you’re a marine biologist or a person whose leg has been bitten off by a shark.
• Vonnegut talks about writing as jumping off a cliff and growing wings on the way down. Steve had written two stories, which he thought would make a good beginning and a good end to a novel. Then he spent 4 years writing the middle, learning how to write as he went.
• He got nowhere when he sent his manuscript to the agents/publishers of the authors he liked. Through a friend of a friend, he managed to get an author and a publisher. The process took 6 months.
• In exploring his characters, he thought the main point is not so much how we should live, but how we should not live. He said we get to this answer by questioning.

Poetry Outloud: Forrest Gander, John Burnside, Deb Westbury, Mark O’Flynn, and Craig Billingham

Unfortunately, I missed this last session. Later, I had dinner with the writers who were staying at Varuna Writers’ House and by all accounts, it sounded like it had been a great finale to Day 1, reading and hearing poetry for an hour.

Some of the audience have commented that the Sydney Writers’ Festival has too much poetry in it this year. Although I currently do not write poems, I have always found poetry–at least good poetry–especially potent when read out loud. And poets get so few venues for their work to be noticed, compared with novelists, that I don’t begrudge them having more space on the festival program.

Janet Evanovich is the best-selling author of the humorous Stephanie Plum mystery-crime-adventure series. Even if you haven’t read the series, you may have seen the books—13 of them now–with their lollipop-coloured covers and numbered titles, e.g., One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly, Four to Score, High Five.

Her recent how-to book is titled: How I Write: Secrets of a bestselling author (St Martin’s Griffin, 2006). Co-author is Ina Yalof, a non-fiction writer.

I was attracted to the book because I like her breezy writing style in the Stephanie Plum series. Evanovich’s plots and characters are humorous. She also writes well about sexual attraction–not surprising for someone who started her writing life churning out romances. I enjoyed the first few books in the series but confess that I eventually lost interest–although I can see myself returning to them when I need something to read while on holiday. The books are a fun read, and sometimes, that’s just what we’re after. For me, they are the reading equivalent of popcorn, my number 1 comfort food. That’s not a put-down–popcorn rates quite high on my list!

Chapters cover the usual writing areas: characters, nuts and bolts of writing, structure, revision, getting published, advice and encouragement, and the writing life. Most of the information is provided as answers to questions that her fans sent to her website. Snippets of practical material are included, from how to write a synopsis to learning about point-of-view.

Why I enjoyed the book:

• It’s an entertaining read. Evanovich uses the same breezy style found in her fiction.
• She shows her business-like, practical approach to writing, which seems to have worked for her. She’s not only one of the most well-known writers in the mystery/crime genre but is her own successful company, which employs her husband and two children.
  
  
• She addresses the important elements to create a popular novel and a series.
  
  
• Unlike many popular writers, she demystifies the writing and publishing process. She also gives what seems to be a realistic account of her own development as a writer. And I like that she comes across as practical and encouraging.

The book is pitched to beginning writers, but experienced writers will find some new ideas or a new slant on some aspect of writing. It helps if you are familiar with the characters in the Plum series because Evanovich draws on her books for her examples. If you are not interested in writing popular novels, this is not the book for you.

Some quotes to give you an idea of her style and substance:

• What can I say about rejection other than “It’s awful”? But if you want to be a writer, you must understand that no matter who you are or what you’ve done, you are always fair game for rejection. Get over it.
• I prefer mystery for structural reasons. I like writing in the first person, and it’s more accepted in mystery. I write with a lot of humor, but humor can get tiresome fast, so I prefer a short book, and again, this is more accepted in mystery. I prefer writing action to relationships, because I suck at internal narrative. I also have more freedom of language with mystery. Okay, so I have a trashmouth. I’m from Jersey, what can I say?
• Many writers prefer to do anything other than face that empty page day after day, knowing that they have to be halfway decent. The truth is, we all, at some time or other, fear we’re going to run out of things to say. Don’t get caught spending your writing time talking about writing, thinking about writing, planning your writing studio, shopping for comfortable writing clothes. Just do it. Write the book.