writing

Things I’ve learned about writing from a labrador puppy

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This is Foyle. He may be a bit shaky on such subjects as where it’s okay to pee, but he knows a lot about writing.

He tells me to do the stuff I want, without being afraid of looking silly. He does this by loving the lightweight plastic pots that are used to package young plants. He frequently gets his head stuck in one and runs all around the garden until he falls over and fights it off, but it never stops him from rejoicing when he finds another.

He tells me to do what I need to do when I need to do it, even if I’m not in the mood. He shows me that if you’d really rather squeeze out the front gate and chase traffic, but you know you need to ‘come’ and ‘sit’, you’d better come and sit. Quickly. And get it over with.

He tells me to set realistic targets. He’ll chase a stick until he dies of exhaustion, if I ask him to. But after a few minutes of work, he’ll go to his bed and sleep for hours.

He tells me to dream big. I have no idea what he’s chasing as he sleeps at my feet right now. But his whole body is shaking with the dream of catching it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Doesn’t Look Like Work

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It doesn’t.

And sometimes, it’s not. I have times when I really should be writing, but instead am, say, on Pottermore (SkyNettle11176, Gryffindor, 14 1/2 inch Holly with Phoenix feather reasonably supple).

My husband knows when I’m slacking, and so does my agent and writing group. They’re also the only people who know when I’m working so hard my eyes are bleeding.  The rest of the time…writing is something that people know I do, but they don’t know (or care) when. Only my close friends really understand why I’m such a crap mate. I don’t have time to remember birthdays properly. I hardly have time to remember my shoes. When I’m on a roll, I’m leaving parties just as everyone else arrives. I’m saying goodbye and thanks for dinners when I’m still swallowing my dessert.

For something that doesn’t look like work, and sometimes isn’t, it sure takes up an awful lot of time and thought.

I think, really, that I’m working all the time. But I don’t think, really, that anyone is going to believe me…

Adventures In Data Loss

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It’s not easy, sitting still and not looking while a nine-year-old paints your face. She’s not overly careful around the eye area and she tends to drip a bit… You have to just breathe out, close your eyes and enjoy the ride.

I’m not one of those Americans that thinks ‘it’s all good.’ I think the relentless positivism we’ve been asked to assume over the past few decades is actually harmful. Cancer patients that don’t get better can feel they’ve not been thinking the right way, or praying hard enough…people can be exploited and not have the language in which to express anger with the conditions in which they work… However, I don’t think there’s any point in being miserable, either. Sometimes you just can’t control things, or you let things slip out of your control.

I have a whole little lecture I give about data storage, about how to save daily iterations of your novel and how to back it up weekly both on a data key and by emailing the files to yourself. But, like anyone else, when I get terribly busy, I sometimes get lax. This week I lost 5,ooo words of my new book.

It happens.

It happened before computers. Hemingway’s wife was bringing his stories to him, as a nice surprise, when she left them on the train. Hemingway was still mourning those stories, some twenty years later, as the best things he’d written.

But I’m not so sure. My 5K took me through some very difficult technical things; another shift in time for the entire main section of the novel… a shift in my narrator’s voice, as she recalls things from two years earlier…an explanation as to how and why her community lives the way it does…  I’m dreading trying to write it again. It might very well be worse. But it might be better, too.

And anyway, I didn’t sign up to this kind of life with the idea that I would have everything under my own control. I became a writer, much like I sat down for my face painting, in a spirit of adventure.  I think my face turned out fine, for an evening at home making pizza. I think my writing life is more interesting and exciting than if I’d kept doing jobs I didn’t like. Hang on, we’re still moving, and who knows where we’ll go…

Here’s a soundtrack for the blog, since it’s Friday night. Click to hear it. Hope you like it…

 

For more about positivism and the harm it can do, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Brightsided. 

 

A Bit About Failure and Rejection

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Here I am at my most vulnerable. No, not because it’s the first thing in the morning and I’m not wearing makeup. And not because I haven’t yet got up and found my dressing gown. Because I have a book going out to publishers.

Right now, people will be reading my work and deciding if they ‘love it enough’ to read the rest. Some will but some, inevitably, will decide they don’t…

Writers have to deal with rejection. If you write seriously, you have to come to terms with failure. You will, nearly always, and almost completely guaranteed, fail with your writing. You may start something and not finish it. You may finish it but not like it. You might like it, but not get an agent to like it. Your agent might like it, but no publishers do. One publisher might like it and give you a measly advance or maybe several publishers will like it and you’ll get a large advance…but not get good reviews. Or maybe you’ll get great reviews, but not win that year’s big prize. Or maybe you WILL win that year’s big prize, but you don’t get a movie deal. Or the movie never gets made. Or it does get made, but it doesn’t get good reviews. Or the movie gets great reviews but it doesn’t win an Oscar. Or it wins an Oscar but everyone says that the book it was based on was rubbish…

There is no end to the ways in which writers can fail.

Right now, in the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, students are competing for the Janklow-Nesbit prize. It’s a prestigious award that can start a writer’s career with a catapult. And the ones who haven’t been shortlisted feel as if they’ve failed. They haven’t even BEGUN to truly fail as writers…that takes years…

And what if all this failure makes you stop writing fiction? Rachael Bloom was on the MA a few years ago, writing about a subject very close to her heart. Her novel never did do what she’d hoped, and, eventually, she founded a charity about the subject; the Rhett Syndrome Research Trust UK. It’s an amazing charity that has raised money for ground-breaking research. Rachael uses her writing skills in fundraising, pr, marketing, etc. There may soon be a cure for this dehabilitating disease that strikes women and girls, thanks to Rachael. Some failure, eh?

 

 

Getting Out There

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Well, it’s been an exciting week!

  1. My wonderful agent, Sophie Gorell-Barnes, is sending Hospital High  out to publishers,
  2. I met with my new writing group and it wasn’t nearly as scary as I feared, and
  3. I’m recording with BBC Radio Four this afternoon…something about writers and their love of stationery.

It feels like a proper writer’s week… Of course, I’m most comfortable in my dressing gown, typing away in my room. But that’s no way to run a whole career. Fine for a hobby, but not for a life…

I used to teach a class for my second years about how to get published. For a year, it was made compulsory, and as I was walking up the stairs I overheard one boy say to another, ‘I don’t want to learn this sh*t. I just want to write.’

When we got into class, I announced that I had overheard this conversation. The class was shocked and silent, rather fearful of my reaction. I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you something. I don’t want to do this sh*t, either. I want to live in my room, write whatever I want and have money and food slid to me under the door. But that’s not going to happen for me and it’s not going to happen for you. So let’s get our pads and pencils out and learn how it really works.’

No matter what your creative endeavour, I urge you to get out and about a little this week. Go to a workshop or a fair. Talk to people about it a bit more. The rewards can be absolutely amazing, once you manage to get over the threshold of your room…

…even if it’s just to go over to someone else’s room!  (Thanks to Peter and his cat! For more about Peter’s wonderful nature and environmental writing, click on the photo.)

Sharing Work

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I had a bath before noon. That means it’s not a writing day – but I’m still working on my book… I’m going to my new writing group.

One of the great things about teaching is that you tend to grow your own friends. This group is, at its core, an extraordinarily good workshop class I taught a few years ago. Since I’m really having to stretch myself with this narrative voice, I’m eager to get ongoing feedback…the kind I can’t get from colleagues or my wonderful agent. So, I’m joining the group…taking advantage of the skills I helped them to learn.

Showing your work is always a bit frightening. What if you’ve fooled yourself, and it’s completely pants? So it’s good to work with people you trust. That trust is only built up over time…you can only tell if you can work with people once you’ve worked with them. The most important thing, I think, is finding people with whom you can communicate well. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing the same kind of thing, but it matters that you can understand each other and understand what each writer is trying to do.

You need to be fairly certain what you ARE trying to do, in the cut and thrust of workshopping. You have to be ready to learn whose advice is sound on what kinds of issues. You have to be prepared to continually evaluate what people say, and what you feel.

But the sense of camaraderie, the great relief of having someone to talk to about your daily work, the opportunity to have other people helping you with craft ideas…well, that’s such a great relief and benefit that I can’t wait to see them today.

I’d better go and dress.

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.

 

 

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.