Mimi Thebo

Readers

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At the university where I teach, we have lovely gardens. In fact, we have listed, conserved gardens. This September, after the lovely summer, they looked absolutely spectacular. ‘Wow,’ I said to one of the gardeners, ‘it looks amazing.’

She sighed and leaned on her spade. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I wish we didn’t have to have to students back.’

I just smiled and kept walking (I frequently hit the gardening staff up for cuttings), but inside i was thinking, ‘You wouldn’t be here without the students. The place might not have survived without the students. The students are the whole point.’ 

And it’s the same with readers. I’ve just had an email from an undergraduate student. Her novel is turning out experimental. She’s horrified that her tutor wants her to think about readership. I hope I can straighten her out on Friday…convince her that the two are not mutually exclusive. 

Some writers never think about their readers, ‘I write what I want to read,’ they say. ‘If I like it, I know they will.’ And that, of course, works…if there are enough people a lot like you. If you are plugged into the zeitgeist in a personal, fundamental way. But it doesn’t work for all of us. It especially doesn’t work if your reader is ten. Or fourteen. Or two. 

Readers aren’t just there to react to your genius. Readers make up half of the book. You don’t write the story world…you write signs that point to it. The reader makes up the rest in his or her mind. You say someone, ‘has a beard, baggy corduroy trousers and a vacant expression’ and they add the rest to make a whole person.

Take a moment to read that description again: What do you see? Is your person’s hair thinning? Do they stoop a little? Do they wear half-moon glasses down on their nose? Mine does. Yours might not. And that shouldn’t matter. 

A good relationship with your readers means that you are both making up much the same book. That you aren’t ruining the book they are making up as they read and they aren’t ruining the book you are making up as you write.

Good agents and editors understand readers so well, that they can often guess where readers might have problems with a writer’s manuscript. They help the writer build little bridges of meaning across the soggy bits. 

I’m going to talk to the Editor O’ My Dreams about my manuscript at the end of the week. I’m going to talk to my agent tomorrow…and I’ve just sent her two new manuscripts. I’m getting several people to read my Adventure Story With Dog – people with Army backgrounds to see if I’ve hit the right note. Lots of new readers, reading lots of new things. 

It’s pretty scary, sometimes. 

But it’s also very satisfying. Because the story doesn’t happen without the reader, the words on the page are not the story. The story only becomes real when the person reading it makes up their own corduroy-clad character, maybe one with bushy hair and a lop-sided bowtie. That’s when it lives, when it stops being ‘your book’ and becomes ‘their book’. 

Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of marks you’ve put on the page. It might be pretty. It might be just like you liked it. But there’s nobody smelling your roses. 

 

On Hiding

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It’s not quite eight am and I’m already at work. My hair is still wet because I spent too much time writing to dry it. I think I might be about to deliver two manuscripts to my agent this week. One she’s seen and I’ve rewritten to her notes. The other is something brand new. 

For years, I’ve hardly given her anything. And now it’s all boom-boom-boom. 

The fact, is, as I finally realised last week, I’ve been hiding.

The writing life can be painful. Writers have lots and lots and lots of ways to hide. My way, for the past few years, has been not finishing anything. If I don’t finish anything, then nobody can publish anything and I don’t have to go through any more publishing pain. That’s been my (totally unacknowledged) strategy. 

My first hiding strategy as a writer was to write texts so entirely unreadable that they defied analysis. They twisted and turned with dizzying complexity. I was showing off, of course. But I was also hiding. 

I see this in my MA students all the time. The most common way to hide is cramming in any number of unnecessary opacities in character and story…usually because the writer is hiding what they fear is an inadequate plot. Then there’s hiding behind characters or a strange point-of-view. Then there is the failure-to-commit-to-one-manuscript. The ‘I won’t write an ending, I’ll let the reader decide what happened,’ is perhaps my least favourite of the many ways writers hide, but it’s hard to say. The ways we hide are endless.

Writing reveals the limitations of your intellect. It reveals what we used to be comfortable with calling ‘your soul’. It reveals how you think and feel. If you do it properly, there’s really no hiding place. 

That’s what critics mean when they say a narrative is ‘honest’. It’s not that it’s non-fiction. It’s honest because the writer is not trying to hide.

Hiding is a pointless exercise. It’s like a big neon sign showing the way to your imperfections…and you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to do the best you can. If that was good enough for Homer and Milton and Austen and Byatt (who are all imperfect, too) it’s also good enough for you. 

And me.

Afore Ye Go

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At railway stations, there used to be large signs advertising Bells Whisky. ‘Afore Ye Go’ was their slogan – in WWI, they gave away drams of whisky to disembarking troops.

The last time I wrote this blog, I thought I might be about to die. I’m not.

I also wrote about considering giving up writing. I’m not doing that, either.

But to be honest, I’ve considered giving up writing for years now. It’s been a hard time for me. I’ve had some rotten luck with publishers; good editors leaving or being forcibly retired and then me and my books pushed onto editors who didn’t want or like them, a publicity director getting sacked just when one of my books came out – so no review copies sent out – and then being pulled into a meeting for poor sales… I know I shouldn’t moan, but it does get to you, eventually.

I’ve done extraordinary things in order to write. I was engaged to a man who left me because I ‘spent too much time writing’. I used to wake up at four a.m. to write before cycling into Oxford Circus from Stoke Newington and working a ten hour day. I cycled because it was quicker and I could write longer. When we lived with my in-laws and I was trying to rewrite my first novel, I’d get up at five and get a lift with my father-in-law to a condemned house, which had been owned by friends. I had a small paraffin heater, and I’d take a flask of tea. Toilet facilities were a bit grim.

I used to be passionate about my writing. But I’d taken so many punches (at work and in publishing) that all the passion had been punched out of me.  I kept on writing in fits and starts, but I had no confidence, so I had no passion. It certainly didn’t seem more important than, say, the laundry, or a pile of marking. Nobody seemed to value it, so I didn’t either.

When I thought I might be about to die, I really had to ask myself: do you want to keep doing this? If you only have a few years left, do you want to spend any of it alone in a room, typing?

Something extraordinary has happened as a result. I’ve rediscovered my passion. I’m saying, ‘No, I can’t make breakfast, sweetie, I have to write.’ I’m saying, ‘I can’t finish this marking in the time I’ve got because I can’t work ten hours a day unpaid.’ I’m saying, ‘Mummy loves you very much, darling. Now go and do something else for another hour.’

And I’m writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and writing.

Afore I go.

So Little Time

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I’m sorry not to write lately. I haven’t wanted to write much of anything. 

I’ve evidently got a heart condition – who knew? I’ve felt breathless most of my life, but I’ve been a bit extra breathless lately. Then I phoned my doctor to say I had some chest pain and the next thing I knew I was in the back of an ambulance. I have angina…and on Monday I’ll find out if it’s take-a-few-tablets angina or open-heart-surgery angina or something in between. They told me the finding out procedure kills one in 1000 people who have it. It starts heart attacks in 20 more. And in some, it causes strokes. 

I’m waiting for this procedure. I’m also waiting to find out if Editor O’ My Dreams likes my latest manuscript. 

I hate waiting.  I’ve already died once, in a car accident when I was fourteen. I constantly feel time ticking away. And Monday seems to be rushing towards me. 

So I started wondering – do I really want to spend the time in between writing?

And then I wondered: Do I really want to spend the rest of my life writing at all? My writing life isolates me. To fund it, I work in a stressful environment (doing what I love, teaching other writers, but in the increasingly competitive academy). To really succeed at the combination of them both, it’s not enough to write well enough to be published. I must try and write world-class, award-winning fiction. The whole thing really is quite stressful – I haven’t had that big break-through book and might never have it. It means my place in the academy and in publishing is always uncertain. The whole thing can’t be good for me or my heart. 

After all, I don’t just live for me – I have an eleven-year old child and a husband and an elderly mother. It might be actually selfish to keep writing. 

Since I had time to think, I’ve thought. I’ve thought about the great relief it would be just to live – to go to work and come home and make dinner. To see my friends lots and keep my house nice and have parties…to GO to parties. And then I thought the parties I really want to go to are usually other writers’ book launches. And that I’ll still be reading. And that I doubt very much if I could actually stop writing altogether. 

Then I went to breakfast with a friend who talked about one of my books with such fondness that it made me cry. And I read a few fan letters. And I read this article from Science. And I thought some more, about why I really write and how if it helps just one person, just a little bit, it will all have been worth it.

My life will all have been worth it. 

So I started writing again. 

 

 

Don’t Listen To Anybody – For David and Susan

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Photo on 2013-09-20 at 15.28

 

Writers make millions of decisions. Some are easy…should I use double quotation marks or single?… but some are tough. One of the toughest is about listening to advice.

Advice on the single or double quotation mark question might be very useful, especially if your publisher has a house style. Advice on whether or not anyone is picking up on a subtle plot hint is useful, too.  And if everyone who sees your book hates the main character or the narrative voice or the way you’ve used third person, it’s time to rethink.

But when someone tells you what to write or what not to write, you really shouldn’t listen.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, ‘Oh, don’t write X. Nobody wants to read X anymore,’ to an emerging writer. Sometimes it’s an agent or a publisher, who really believes that the X form is dead. Sometimes it’s a next door neighbour, who heard someone say it on Radio Four. Sometimes it’s someone who couldn’t sell their own X project.

It doesn’t matter. What’s nearly guaranteed is that sometime in the next five years, someone will have a big hit with X. And if that poor writer actually listened, they’ll be gnashing their teeth in the wilderness, looking at their abandoned manuscript and moaning that it could have been them.

We have to write what’s in our hearts and write it the best we can. The next big thing might be X or Y or even Z. Nobody really knows.

But we do know it will be really good. It will have meant everything to the person who wrote it. He or she will have been unable to stop themselves from telling that particular story. And it’s absolutely certain that someone, sometime, somewhere, will have told the next big writer not to bother, that nobody wanted that kind of book, that they should write something else.

But they won’t have listened.

Being Nice

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Photo on 2013-06-27 at 10.45

 

I worked with Fay Weldon on Monday (sometimes, I really do have a glamorous literary life). As usual, La Weldon said a lot of interesting things. But one of the most interesting, for me, anyway, was, ‘A lot of women writers are held back by wanting to be nice in their fiction, because they want to be good girls and please everyone.’

Just like many young women don’t think that there’s any need for feminism anymore, many new female writers think that their fiction will be a gender-free zone, where their womanliness has no impact on how they are read. Of course, both are sadly mistaken. There is still a 10% gender pay gap in the UK, women pensioners are, according to the government, ‘significantly more impoverished’ than male pensioners. 1 in 10 men will be treated for mental illness and it’s 1 in 4 women… And, despite Hilary Mantel’s recent successes, the vast majority of literary prize winners, grant awardees, Visiting Professors, etc, etc, etc are men, even though, on any given post-graduate course in Creative Writing, women predominate.

‘Girls will read about boys,’ my first children’s editor told me. ‘But boys won’t read about girls.’ I thought boys grew out of that, but an editor interested in the book that became The Saint Who Loved Me thought differently. ‘No man is going to read this,’ she told me sternly. ‘It’s got things about tampons in it.’

I hadn’t realised that. I hadn’t realised that because I wrote about a woman’s experience of the world, and wrote about marital problems, spirituality and life choices from a woman’s perspective, I was alienating 48% of my potential readers from the get-go. Male readers very much liked Welcome to Eudora from the various reviews and letters I got from them. How they got their hands on it remains a mystery, though…it was often shelved under ‘Romance’.

If you happen to, or make up your mind to, write in accepted literary models and if you write, in a way, specifically for men, you don’t seem to be ghettoised. But if you are a female writing primarily for women, you can pretty much forget being taken seriously by the literary establishment. Even today.

How much of that problem is about the writers being too ‘nice’ in their fiction and how much is about marketing, cover design and titling (the working title for The Saint Who Loved Me was  St Rock) still remains a mystery.

But I know one thing – nobody is going to take my books seriously if I don’t. If I don’t stop being nice and wanting to please everybody.

I’m writing in the café today, because my new cleaner is in my house and my shed is still on order. While I was madly typing away (the tea here is strong enough to be a Class A drug), an acquaintance approached, smiling.

‘May I join you?’ she asked.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I’m working.’

She raised her eyebrows and looked hurt as she turned away. I fought the instinct to run after her…to abandon my manuscript and explain. But I didn’t.

It’s a start.

Writer on a Train: Home

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Photo on 2013-06-18 at 09.30

 

Well, I’m home. I’m charging my bike’s battery in the other room. I charged mine last night. I slept all the way through until seven o’clock.

I haven’t written a word.

I’ve swept the floor, done the dishes, printed off a few things for my daughter. I’ve answered over forty emails and talked to the nice  man who is going to make us a new front door. I’ve also read Matt Haig’s The Humans (if you haven’t, get  it as soon as possible). I’ve had three glasses of good Californian Cabernet Sauvignon (my husband tends to express his emotions through wine) and made a rather tasty tomato and basil risotto.

But I haven’t written anything. And I won’t today.

All that careful organisation of my time that I wrote about yesterday hasn’t happened. And I feel, although I’ve done all the above, that I’ve failed. I’ve had too many times like this lately, too many days when I fail to write. There is a reason all my writing heroes, when I was a child, were men. I’d read The Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer, but I still found myself, once my daughter began attending school, trying to cram a ten hour working day (as lecturer and writer) into five or six hours.

That hasn’t been good for me or my work, or my writing. It hasn’t been good for my husband (who actually does a great deal of the housework). It was good for my daughter, who strenuously resisted any form of after-school care that wasn’t mine, but she is old enough now to understand.

I’m home. But home has to change.

The academic year is ending. I have a month to get systems in place before my mother comes for a visit. Cleaner, someone to do the ironing. Shed built. It’s been easy to be me on the road, now I have to do the hardest thing of all – learn to be me as a mother and a wife.

I won’t be blogging every day. But I’ll let you know how it goes.

Writer on a Train: You Can’t Do Everything 2

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I’ve always done too much. I died when I was 14 and, since then, I’ve tried to cram as much as I can into every day. I go for weeks, months, not getting enough sleep and then collapse into illness that goes to my throat and lungs. Every time I get an illness in my throat and lungs, I think it might be the one that will eventually carry me off. And so, once I’m well, I throw myself back into life with the same urgency.

 That’s why I have not one, but four books on the go. It’s why I have several research interests. It’s why I grew my own vegetables, baked my own bread, have a dog and a cat, became a school governor and a children’s liturgist, external at three universities, etc, etc, etc.

But there are a lot of things I don’t do. I don’t go out much at night. Most writers either don’t go out much at night or don’t get up in the mornings. (There is no earthly use in scheduling a poetry class at nine a.m.)

I don’t do birthday and anniversaries, except for my very, very closest friends and family. I don’t iron. I don’t have beige carpets (in fact, I don’t have carpets at all – I have wooden floors). I don’t follow fashion. I don’t go shopping much. I don’t go to fairs or festivals (except literary ones when I’m working for the university or for myself).

Two writing friends recently admitted that they don’t even dust. I’m not quite that bad, yet.

I don’t watch television series. I don’t keep my nails painted. My skin care regime is skimpy and faulty and, when I’m working, I don’t even know what I’ve eaten…I just see the pile of plates when I’m done. I also don’t get to the hairdresser often enough – something regular readers of this blog will have noted.

I don’t see my friends as often as I should. I don’t write or Skype my cousins as often as I’d like. I don’t go to morning Mass, even though I theoretically could and actually would like to. I don’t pick my daughter up from school. I don’t take her, either. I don’t schedule her into a variety of activities (she has two dance classes a week). I don’t arrange a lot of playdates and sleepovers for her and I often forget when she’s due to do something special at school. I am the parent who is always late in with her permission slip and fee for the field trip.

Because I am writing a lot and reading a lot and I can’t do everything.

Writing is part of every aspect of my life. From the time my alarm goes off and whether or not I can walk the dog to if I can have another glass of wine and how much fervour I put into my goodnight kiss. To do this thing – which includes so many false starts and reworkings and blind alleys it’s an absolutely ridiculous eater of time – it has to be my life’s priority. To remain in a relationship with me requires patience and fortitude I myself do not possess. I am absurdly grateful for how much love there is in my life.

Those who love me, who truly love me, leave me alone to get on with it.

I wish I could show them how much I appreciate it. But you can’t do everything. 

Writer On A Train: Being a ‘Real’ Writer

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I went to a posh girls’ school last month, with a team from my university’s outreach programme. I put a bit of effort into how I dressed, trying to fit in. But when I arrived, the receptionist looked me up and down and then said, ‘Oh, you must be the writer.’

It made me wonder. Was it just because my clothes weren’t crisply ironed? Was it that my hair had blown about a bit in the wind and got too curly? Was my lipstick too bright? Or did I actually look…in some way…arty? Writery? 

Today is my day off from my mammoth train journey. I’m at my in-laws’ house. I’ve written here quite a lot over the last 30 years, but now that they’ve both died, I’m finding it hard. 

Not being able to stop noticing things is what made me start writing to begin with, but it’s getting in the way today. It’s not like I can turn it off, though. It’s not like I can’t see that the bird feeder still has the cup for toast crumbs that my father-in-law went out in the snow to provide. It must have made him gasp for air…he was dying, even then, though we didn’t know it. I can’t keep myself from imagining him reaching, bracing himself on his stick, flopping down breathless and satisfied on the sofa when he was done. I can see just how his face would have looked. 

Not only can I not stop noticing things, I also can’t always stop imagining things.

My imagination has been strengthened by my writing practice.  I may not want to think about my mother-in-law, but every time I see the copper jelly moulds on the wall, I can see her standing back and regarding them with satisfaction. I can hear her say, in my mind, ‘I think that looks effective.’ And it breaks my heart. 

It’s my dreams, too. Since I started writing seriously, my dreams are no longer random silly images and vignettes. My dreams are well-structured and very three-dimensional. Sometimes they carry on from each other over several weeks, expanding into a huge coherent narrative. They’ve very convincing. The one about the rather large kitten I brought home that turned out to be a tigress was particularly disturbing. In it, my poor family kept trying to tell me that we were in danger from the rapidly growing cat…

There’s this concept that artists are driven to create – that ‘real’ writers ‘have’ to write. I’m not so sure about that. However, I do think, as in my previous post, we choose. And I also think that once we’ve chosen, there’s really no going back. 

In adolescence, humans begin to make huge, largely unconscious decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. We chose what is most valuable to us from our own brain structure. The brain, which has up to that point overdeveloped its synaptic functions, then begins to prune itself. This process lasts, according to a recent article in The New Scientist, well into our late 20s, but is largely irreversible. 

I think this is the basis for all of our Romantic assumptions about ‘genius’, or our ideas about some people ‘having’ to write (or paint or whatever). Once you develop your brain in a certain direction, to do certain things, it’s very difficult not to do those things. Part of your pleasure in life, and your comfort with your own existence, is to utilise those carefully constructed synaptic patterns. 

It reminds me of when, shortly after I ended my well-paid career to write seriously, the bank took away my Gold Visa card. I was on hold while the lady in the bank’s call centre looked up the procedure for me to return the card. Thinking I was inaudible, I sighed and said to myself, ‘Why did I ever want to be a writer in the first place?’ The lady answered. She said, ‘Well, dear, I suppose you always felt a bit special.’

We aren’t, of course, special. But we are a bit different, in the same kind of way. I imagine if you put two chess strategists in a room with a hundred other people, they would find each other…or two linguists…or two dancers…or two farmers. I can certainly find writers. Even when I’m on a panel of media practitioners or at a slimming club or a church barbecue or at my daughter’s school, I find I’ve made new friends with…yet another writer. It’s gotten so that when I meet someone at a wedding or a pub and we chat for more than five minutes, I just go ahead and ask, ‘So, what kinds of things do you write?’ And they answer. They say, ‘Poetry,’ or ‘Fan fiction.’ Before I even know their names. 

When I was young, I thought that real writers lived in Paris. They were solitary, like polar bears. Or they had country houses and big shining walnut desks. They were nearly always men, or slim, unattainable women. They never had children needing to be picked up and taken to tap dancing class. They never had jobs, or worries about the damp in the extension. 

Every since my first publishing deal, I’ve been trying to find this ‘real’ writer in the mirror. I never could. I found her in other people’s eyes, instead, because of my rumpled clothes and my untidy hair. But really, I found her inside me, long ago. And I loved her so much that when the time came to prune her away, I couldn’t do it. 

And that, as the poet said, has made all the difference. 

 

Writer on a Train: Taking Pains

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Photo on 2013-06-13 at 15.03

 

It’s a hard thing for students to understand: ‘Work may be technically correct and tell a coherent narrative and still not achieve a first class mark.’

You can write perfectly nicely and tell a story perfectly well and still not be any good.

Finding out whether or not you are any good is the main reason people do higher degrees in Creative Writing. In fact, talking about whether or not something is any good is the main reason Creative Writing exists as an academic subject. In the early 1980s/late 1970s English Literature became supremely uninterested in whether or not writing was any good. I can remember it vividly, because it happened to me in such a personal way. In the early 1980s, I was such a good BA Eng Lit student that I was urged to take classes at graduate level.

I got on well with the New Critics (who were Old Critics by then). In particular, I loved Cleanth Brooks. I felt he had my back and I had his. But suddenly, I was confronted by a whole different language. It was a WWI – WWII American Fiction seminar. We were reading A Farewell to Arms. And suddenly, instead of talking about narrative structure or characterisation or anything else I was prepared to discuss, we started talking about patriarchy, hegemonist masculinity. With effort, this became of tepid interest. But truly, all the fun of English Literature  had gone. I ended up taking far more distributive hours than I needed and inadvertently graduated with a minor in Geography.

So the ‘is in any good’ness is important, not just to my subject, but to me, personally. It’s the whole of my life that is in question: I am mostly, really, made up of text. When I die, I would like this question to be in some way answered.

At times i have thought, ‘Hell, yes, I’m brilliant.’ At times I have thought, ‘The reason you are obscure, Mimi, is that you are no damn good.’ I have rushed some work in the past. I have written quickly in order to feed my family and pay my mortgage. But I’ve written some really good stuff, too. Life is short and I’m over 50. I’m  not going write anything but my best ever, ever again.

A friend is submitting work to agents and getting rejections. And it hurts. I have realised I need to rewrite, not revise Hospital High, a memoir, into Losing My Voice, a fictionalised account of my death in a car accident at 14.  That hurts, too. I didn’t want to have to do it…there are other things I want to write, too, and I really want to have a new book out next year. But its not enough to write nicely and tell a compelling story. You have to take pains, if you want to be any damn good.

You have to take the pains.