Working Author

Why Write?

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Why do we do it?

No, I’m serious, here. Why write full length fiction?

The drawbacks are immense… Unless you are very fortunate you will be underpaid and have to balance your writing life with another professional life, so you are working two jobs. Your entire life revolves around making things with words…so when you sleep/what you eat/what you drink etc., are all governed by your writing time. Your family must either be trained or escaped, and it puts a strain on all relationships…it takes very understanding friends to know that when you disappear for months on end, you still care for them but are only on a roll.  And then, at the end of all that, two words from a publisher or reviewer can make you feel it’s all been a waste of time and effort.

Life is a whole lot easier if you don’t write books.

Last week, I ran my ‘big ideas’ workshop for the redoubtable Alex and Jude’s Writing Events Bath. And as we talked about what a novel actually was, I felt the whole room’s desire to make one themselves. That desire hasn’t gone away in me, either. If anything, it’s gotten stronger with all the years and ups and downs.

Why write? Because you have to. Because you can’t stop. Because it’s the whole point of life.

 

 

Too Busy For Words

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Hi. How are you? Miss talking to you.

Book’s going okay. Shared it with my workshop group. Got some good feedback. Feel a lot more confident.

Still got 40K marking/second marking to do. House is filthy. Friend from Prague still with us, bless him. Going to Chicago soon and taking daughter. Got meetings almost every night this week and a todo list as long as my inseam.

Real busy. Crazy busy. Insanely, stupidly busy.

But I’m writing. Some days not showering (see side of hair, above). But writing.

I mean, we’re all here to do something, right? And that’s what I’m here to do. So I’m doing it. Hope you’re doing what you’re here to do, too.

Look, I gotta go. We must have a proper chat soon. I’ll ping you.

Big hug. Big kiss.

Mimi

 

 

 

 

Working Out

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Well, today I went to the coffee shop to write. It went well. I’ve always been able to ignore people, so that was okay, and I soon lost myself in my story. And I must not have been pulling too many funny faces, because nobody pointed or laughed.

My book has so many layers…it’s very complex. There’s the letter my heroine is writing to the bishop. There’s the traumatic memories that intrude on her concentration. There’s her own thoughts and purposeful recollections. And then there are the day to day interactions she has with her people, while she is working on this very important letter.

Fuelled by pots of tea and bananas, I’m negotiating how all of these will be signalled and formed so that the reader passes effortlessly from one to the other and can tell the difference between them all.

It’s terribly difficult to write – which is, of course, why I’m interested in writing it. And I don’t know if it was all the caffeine, or the fact that it seems to be working that made me rather dance out of the cafe in a feeling of heady excitement.

I bought an amazing dress right out of a second-hand shop’s window on the way home. It’s a bit short, but I decided I didn’t care. I’ll wear silver tights. I’ll dance in it all night. I’ll be able to write this book.

I will. I will.

Into the Wild

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A new year. Here, it’s a gale-force rain storm. I’d thought about writing in a local cafe today, but, after venturing forth to take my daughter’s huge homework project to school, ended up back on my bed.

As a family, our new year resolution is to get outside our comfort zone. Even our priest used those words in his New Year’s homily, urging us to become more saintly. Get out of your comfort zone. We seem to be hearing it everywhere.

There’s nothing comfortable about trying to write as well as you can. It doesn’t matter if I’m on my bed, on a  train, or in a car on the Palestine/Israel border (where I once wrote a very good poem)…I’m still taking risks.

A narrative is very revealing. It shows the limitations of your thoughts and your courage. It allows others to see the limitations of your character, of your very self.

And that’s only if you’ve done it WELL. If you’ve made a mess of it, it’s excruciatingly embarrassing.

Too, as Annie Dillard says, when you leave a manuscript alone for too long, it grows feral and wild. You have to ‘hack your way back into it.’

I have left my heroine like Sleeping Beauty; all alone in a tower over Christmas. Now, I’m going into the jungly brambles, to hack my way back to her. Yes, I’m working in bed. AGAIN. But it’s not exactly comfortable.

I wish you all the best fortune in the New Year. May it bring you happiness, wealth and lots and lots of discomfort.

Working Hard

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Here I am, hard at work. I know it doesn’t look like work. My work very seldom does.

I lay in bed,  my computer propped up on my knees, and write. Today, I’m writing about my narrator remembering something; a horrible memory of a time when her small community was starving and suffering from dysentery. I’m all cosy in bed and thinking about what I’ll eat for breakfast at 10:30. She’s haunted by the memory of trying to feed a dead person. I’m getting up soon…I can’t write this book for too long at a stretch.

I’ve been up once. I’ve made a party plate for my daughter to take to school, helped her style her hair, said goodbye to my husband and waved my daughter off to school on the taxi she shares with six other children. I’m sure, as I’m waving goodbye in my dressing gown, everyone in the street thinks I’m a terribly lazy mum. But I was working before six a.m.

At some point today, I may read a book or watch a film. That’s my work, too. I need to keep up with the narratives other people build. I need to have some concept of the context in which I work.  So, lying in bed and typing is work. Lying on the sofa and reading a novel is work. Sitting in the cineplex, watching a matinee is work.  Sitting on a plastic bag, watching the river rise in the rain; that’s work, too.

Sometimes (in fact, surprisingly often)  I even get paid.

Losing Everything…Except the Plot

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I don’t know where my house keys are. I’ve lost the pin number for the card I need to pay my hairdresser. I messed up my own haircolour (see above) and also need the pin number so I can go to the chemist/pharmacy and buy more stuff to sort it out. It’d be nice to be able to lock the door when I do that…I went to the hairdresser with it unlocked.

I don’t even want to talk about work – I think I’m on top of everything, but I have a nasty feeling that’s a fairy tale I’m telling myself.

But the new book is going great.

I need to call Sophie to make sure she got Hospital High. I need to write this blog. I need to clean my kitchen and my bathroom and sort out a hundred other things. And Christmas is coming (aaaargh!) and I’m sure I’m late to post my lovely mommy’s presents again.

But the new book is going great.

And as usual, there’s a correlation between those things. I could be a much better mum, friend, teacher, co-worker, wife, housekeeper, etc, if I actually used the whole of my brain. But I don’t. Oh, yes, part of me is trying to do her best for everyone. But part of me is in another world entirely, with a whole other set of people. Part of me is working out just how I’m going to introduce various plot strands into the complicated structure and voice of this novel. Part of me is in a tower today, scratching a letter to the bishop on homemade paper with a rusty pen.

People who value my writing understand. And people who don’t   …well…    I say the words, ‘I’m sorry,’ an awful, awful lot…

What’s Your Book About???

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I ask my MA in Creative Writing students to come up with an ‘elevator pitch’ for their novels. ‘Tell us, in a few words,’ I say, ‘what your book is about.’ The problem is, of course, that a lot of them don’t know.

They might know they don’t know or they might think they know. But they really don’t. You don’t know what a book is about until you’ve written the first draft. And sometimes you don’t know even after it’s been published.

Take the amazing story my PhD student, Louise Johncox, is writing about her family’s teashop. Her family come from Poschiavo, in Switzerland (click here for a live web cam of the village), and have been patisserie chefs for literally hundreds of years. For the last one hundred years, they’ve run teashops in Britain, where they’ve made cakes, pies and their own chocolates. Louise’s generation did not continue the family tradition. It  all ended with Louise and her siblings. When she started to write her book, she thought that was the story. But the real story was about conserving the family recipes, many of which were only in her ailing father’s mind, and about coming to terms with the inevitable loss of her handsome, talented, dynamic, larger-than-life father in the only way journalist Louise could…by writing him into immortality.

So this week, I’ve discovered what Hospital High is really about. It was obvious, actually. I’m surprised I didn’t see it in the first place. I think I was just too close to the story to notice that it needed to be explained.

I wanted to be a singer when I was younger. It was everything to me. And I was good. When I died in the car accident, one aspect of me, the singer, never came back. But I learned to sing with paper and pen, instead. Obvious, really, especially when you consider that for the majority of the years covered in the memoir I couldn’t speak at all, but could only write in order to communicate. But I managed to overlook that element. I left it out altogether.

Now, I’m charging ahead on the manuscript, making all this clear. I have that heady, heedless feeling that only comes at the end, when you know where the manuscript is going and you don’t really care if the house burns down, as long as you can sit somewhere warm and comfortable and keep writing, perhaps a cozy place by a burning rafter… For the first time, I think I might actually be done with this book, if not this Thursday, than surely by the next. And I mean it this time, because this time I know what I’m doing.

Hospital High – Have I Sent It??

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I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how hard it was to let manuscripts go. Since then, everyone keeps asking me if I’ve sent off the manuscript for Hospital High. Even my nine year old asks every day when she comes home from school.

No. I’m still working on it. I know I’ve been writing it for three years. I know my agent has mentioned it to editors and would like to send it out while they remember. I know I need a sale for my family and a bit of published research for my university.

But no. It’s not ready yet. There’s no point rushing out work that can still be made better. I need at least one more week. And maybe two.

My grandfather would sit in the living room, watching television, and then suddenly get up, go to the kitchen, and take a cake out of the oven. He said he could ‘smell it was done.’ He never burned a thing. Not like my lovely grandmother, who was teased about things being ‘Crowley brown’ (i.e. black) all her life. Now, I have that knack, too. I can smell when sauces have cooked, when bread is ready.

And I’ll know, too, when Hospital High is finished. It’s still cooking, right now…but it’s starting to smell nearly ready.

Today is Thanksgiving, back in America. I’m rather thankful for that instinct and that stubbornness that makes artists unsatisfied with anything but the best they can possibly achieve. Even though it does drive everyone else insane…

 

Teaching and the Writing Life

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Here I am in my office at Bath Spa University, and in the background, you can just see my office mate; the performance poet Lucy English. I also share the office with poet Carrie Etter and novelist Celia Brayfield.  They’re all wonderful writers, teachers and friends…it gets quite silly in here on the infrequent days when we’re all in.

Like us, most writers also do other paid work. And like us, many writers teach as that paid work. Not all of them should. My colleagues and I put our hearts and our souls into the work we do with developing writers. We constantly try and improve our modules and our delivery. We keep in touch with students long after graduation (it’s my chief way of making new friends), and we are delighted with our students’ successes.

Even if I didn’t ‘have’ to teach, I would. I get so much from it. I’m always being made to think properly about what good writing is, issues of craft, issues of ethics and morality. I’m always discovering something new about form. I’m always learning in class…far more than my students are learning from me (though, when I tell them that, they never believe it).

But more than this, I live in a world where writing is valued. I don’t have to explain to my colleagues about my writing life. ‘How’s it going?’ we say, by the photocopier. And the answer is always about our latest writing projects. Writing is ‘it’ to us; the Alpha and the Omega – the whole of the thing of life. Some of my colleagues are being shortlisted for the highest prizes in the literary world. Some of my adjunct colleagues are just starting out; just placing stories and poems. That doesn’t matter to us that much. We all know what does matter to us that much.

The craft.

By the way, another Thursday has come and gone and I’ve still got Hospital High… I’m still making it better, you see. When I can’t do that any more, I’ll send it. That’s the craft, too…

 

Letting Go

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When I was fourteen, I died in a car accident. That was traumatic. Three years ago, I started to write about it. That was traumatic, too. But letting go of the ms for Hospital High seems to be even more traumatic.

I’ve rewritten it for my amazing agent Sophie and have tweaked the rewrite the way she asked. There’s more sex. More clear story line. And for the last few weeks, I’ve been telling myself that on Thursday, I’ll have a final read through and send it off. But every Thursday, I do something else to it, something that needs finishing up through the week.

Sometimes, it’s hard to let go; both of the past and also of all the various potentials for a manuscript. Once it’s out to publishers, all the books it might have been die and it is now and forever only the book it was today. But of course, until I do commit to this version, it will never live, never become a book. It will only be a file on my computer…with potential.

So that’s why I’ll send it  off today. Or no, maybe next Thursday, so I can finish adding in that little plot strand. But definitely before the Thursday after that…