Shouldn’t I be able to use all my published books as furniture by now?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

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I have recently been on a hunt for Alice Munro.

When I reached the Canadian border the other week, a lady in the passport control booth asked me where I was heading.

Goderich, I told her, grinning ludicrously about my mission.

Why on earth are you going to Goderich? she said.

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You can draw a small triangle between the towns of Wingham, Goderich and Clinton – the first being where Alice grew up, the last where she lives now. I chose Goderich because I read she has a favourite restaurant in the town square. I planned to eat lunch there each day, and keep an eye out for my much-loved writer.

Simples! as the meerkat would say.

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I was originally going to call this post, ‘The world’s greatest way to get a million dollar book deal – true story – works every time!!!!!’ because I’ve been thinking about how much we love a quick fix to our problems.

Follow these steps to an easy life…head to your writer’s favourite restaurant and hey presto!

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When I arrive, I discover Goderich suffered a major tornado in 2011. In the town square, Alice Munro’s favourite restaurant lies blown to the ground.

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I started blogging in the summer of 2012, but I’ve been writing for a lot longer. For some time, I was reluctant to tell people how long, thinking: surely I should have more to show for my efforts than a small collection of anthologies?

I need books with my name on the spine, fanned out on the coffee table, that I can gesture towards at key moments.

I want to be able to build a coffee table out of my books!

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It’s hard to pinpoint a moment of change – the exact second when we switch from one way of thinking to another. But I know that I’ve stopped being a person who looks for quick fixes. I’m no longer ashamed to tell people I’ve been writing for ten years. That’s how long it takes.

This isn’t to say I don’t feel the lure of, ‘Guaranteed publishing deal, no gimmicks!!!!!’ But I’m able to monitor those needs; just as I learnt in Canada that my pilgrimage to find Alice Munro was not about the final goal.

For a lot of us, when climbing a steep mountain to success, there’s a moment we might start to desire that success in a debilitating way. This is when we need to take a short rest.

I’m driven through life by powerful surges of excitement, which look for an outlet. If that outlet doesn’t come, the excitement turns sour and festers, leaving me lethargic and dissatisfied. It’s a loathing of that miserable place that gives my ambition need. Each day, I set off once more up the mountain, but I always have to check how badly I want to reach the top. Do I badly need to reach the top (to save me from a fate I dread)? Or am I climbing, knowing that eventually, if I maintain my course, I’ll get there?

If I begin to feel my unanswered ambition whinging – then I know I have to take a break, shake my hips around, have a good time, before carrying on. It’s like giving an ice-cream to a child who is about to have a fit. Stopping, on a hard course, might seem counterproductive or difficult for any number of reasons, but it’s the act we’re most in need of when we feel tired.

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Before I reached Canada, I took a train from New York to Rochester, Minnesota. It wasn’t just the price, which made me choose that option: the journey would take me thirty hours – I wanted to give myself that experience.

On the train, I spent much of my time, looking out of the window. Boredom is a challenge, but it can provide rich information. Each moment is there to be negotiated. I feel lucky in that act of negotiation, which is always an instructive experience. Rather than force myself to endure a situation – blocking out sensations of discomfort and frustration, which results in an overwhelming need for that quick fix – I’ve become accustomed to my feelings, and can sit with them for some time – even though most of them are lame, tedious, childish or just plain loud.

During this thirty hour journey, I read Natalie Goldberg’s ‘Long Quiet Highway’. It mentions something her Zen teacher said about questioning our life, our purpose:

It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse by itself is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible.

Natalie says that we add that horse when we constantly question ourselves rather than just live out our lives, and be who we are at every moment.

At some moments I have been able to take that extra horse away. I’ve experienced not only the pain and stupidity of trying to ride two horses at once, and the incapacitating self-criticism for finding such a situation hard, but also a moment’s release from that. Self criticism often inhibits me from taking the second horse away. In the face of chastisement, it always feels pathetic to back down. But why is lightening the load, accepting defeat?

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I’m in Goderich, staring at this gap where a restaurant once was, thinking: okay, what now, you complete dumbass?

I wander through the town, probably needing the toilet, and eventually reach the lake where I sit at the top of a child’s slide and watch the sun come down, feeling agonisingly alone. I take a couple of crap photos and sense how close I am to tears. I am also, no doubt, making a martyr of myself in some way.

Wow, I think – observing all this self-castigation and misery. Wow.

Seriously intenso, I say to myself.

Okay, I have to take everything very slowly. I need to find an available exit from this situation, but I also need to give myself the best chance of finding it; I don’t want to take the door that looks like heaven, but actually leads to a really filthy, stinky toilet.

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I head back to my B&B, one foot in front of the other, noticing which is the part of me riding the horse, and which is the part trying to put another horse on top of that. When that extra burden comes, I breathe in so that I can feel it a bit better, and then I breathe out to let it go, because I do not need it. Simples!

I let myself in to the B&B and stand in the porch, observing the pot plants, the view of the street. Aware that I’m behaving in a parody of misery, as well as being miserable. I see a rack filled with leaflets. There’s a booklet on hiking trails, which I pick up, and then I carry on through to my room.

I can feel how every part of me wants to race towards making a decision because this limbo is scary. In this limbo I’m a failure – I’ve wasted my savings on a futile impulse. But making a decision so that I no longer feel a failure, is not the right motivation to make a decision.

I collapse on the bed and at some point that feels like years later, I realise that this feeling of failure is not actually complete agony because it’s not half as painful as, say, a broken arm.

I sit up and slowly flip through the hiking booklet. On page thirteen I read, ‘The Menesetung trail’ and my heart pops.

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‘Meneseteung’ is one of my favourite stories by Alice Munro. There are many online notes and summaries and reading guides for this work. One talks about the title, which is a river in the story. The writer thought the name was made up – they felt it had something to do with menstruation, and how that ties up with the theme. But here I was, actually looking at the trail. I could actually go there.

And I did.

Rather than sitting in a restaurant each day, reading, staring out the window, I spent my time hiking through the snow.

I would wake, feeling the pressure of being alone, of being on a path that had gone awry, and I would sense a nervous energy in my blood as I ate breakfast, gathered my things for the day.

I drove out some place, knowing I had to take care of myself, seek kindly, find the way, and then I began to walk. It was a little like walking in sand, feet sinking into the crunchy white. My butt and lower back felt the effort. Each step I took, thoughts rushed through my head: questions, reproaches, desires, longing. I needed to pee. I was hungry, thirsty. A bird appeared, now the sound of something inexplicable. More thoughts. More concerns: hunger, butt, bird, thirsty, dick-head, tired, futile, bird, pee…

Through all this cacophony, my feet kept going. One step, then another. I was able to keep walking and breathing, and at some point, that progress – slow, determined, dedicated, faithful – allowed everything else to drop away. Because I walked this path, steadily, onward, it became clear that this was all that mattered. The cacophony didn’t stop. It just ceased to bother me.

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If a green pepper is offered, eat it, Natalie says in her book. If it’s steak, devour it. If it’s something indigestible – a turd, a cement block, a shoe – figure out what to do with it, but don’t back away.

It is the same for writing. Some people write for fifteen years with no success and then decide to quit. If you want writing, write under all circumstances. Success will or will not come, in this lifetime or the next. Success is none of our business. It comes from outside. Our job is to write, to not look up from our notebook and wonder how much money Norman Mailer earns.

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What I experienced in Canada was a profound sense of luck – the idea that everything that was happening to me was happening for a reason. It was as if I was following a trail of breadcrumbs – I didn’t realise they were taking me closer to Alice every day.

The sense of serendipity came because I was able to understand the importance of every small thing around me. My life is made up of endless components, each as relevant as the other. The only thing that makes a component good or bad is how I respond to it. By observing it, and therefore allowing myself the chance to learn from it, every moment becomes charmed. We have all the answers. That advert, offering the secret to a million dollar publishing deal, doesn’t know half of what we can know ourselves, if we allow it.

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Thanks for all your lovely messages this week. So many hard workers out there, but here’s thinking of you Mayumi and Jen! Not to choose favourites, but sometimes comments and support come just at the right moment, or say just the perfect thing.

Posted in Essay, Memoir, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

Don’t let fear keep you tied up

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

My trip is over. It’s hard to return from travelling, shifting from spontaneous movement back into a more fixed routine. But it’s a treat to know how much I’ve been missed. Thank you followers for all your wonderful messages!

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I set off at the beginning of March with a month return to New York; an unusual choice for someone who loves remote places, big countryside, quiet. But something had pulled me to the city. There was a desire to witness streets and buildings I had grown to know through cinema, and also the fact that my mother’s sister lives there.

I have seen Ruthe a handful of times, growing up. There she is, one Christmas when we lived on the farm, putting up my hair in bright clips she’d brought all the way from America. Suddenly, a fuss is being made. It turns out I have nits. Ruthe and my mother are flapping and talking in their wonderful Portuguese.

Some people say it’s an angry-sounding language, but to me it’s the crash and jingle of open expression. I stopped speaking Portuguese when I started school in the UK and began to learn English. This suited my mother because leaving Brazil had been heartbreaking: to only speak English in the home was another way to forget the country she’d left.

I have always seen Ruthe as the one person that can draw out my real mother. I love seeing them together. This is when I catch a glimpse of Sonia – the woman who grew up on Copacabana beach, who says what she thinks and loves to laugh.

Since my father retired from his overseas travelling, I’ve finally been able to discover the real him and, through that, the side to me, which until now has felt alone, without source. I wanted to see Ruthe again to try to understand the other side to me – my mother’s side: Sonia, the part she left in Brazil.

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The wonderful thing about Ruthe is that although I’ve only seen her a handful of times, I love her from my whole body – not just my heart, but in all surrounding blood too. I think of her and feel every cell of oxygen in my veins reply, without condition.

It was the same for my mother when Ruthe first came to live with her and my grandparents. Mum was an only child and my grandmother warned Ruthe about her jealous nature. But the first thing my mother did when she saw Ruthe, was hand over her very best doll.

Sonia has never done anything like that, my grandmother told Ruthe.

New York gave me the chance to see how much Ruthe loves Mum. She forgives her everything in that, for her, Sonia has nothing to forgive. As Ruthe and I sit out on her porch in Queens, we giggle together about how Mum starts laughing, and then cannot stop, and then wets her pants a little, and then starts coughing. It’s the most hilarious display, but one that Ruthe has seen more than anyone else; only with Ruthe does my mother truly forget herself, and her worries, and laugh.

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Ruthe was nine when she came to live with my grandparents. My mother was sixteen.

I ask Ruthe why Mum was different with her – I remember my mother’s stories of how she was always trying to read with her cousins, whining, asking her to come and play with them.

Go away, she would tell them. Stop bothering me and let me get on with my book!

But if Ruthe wanted something, Mum would drop everything. She taught Ruthe to read, put her through college. I love to hear the way Ruthe often says to me: oh my god, I owe Sonia everything!

Mum was a lawyer in Brazil, but when she came to England her degree meant nothing as it was based on the Napoleonic code. Then she fell pregnant and my father knew he had to find a home for them. He took a tenancy on a farm in Salisbury, and then he left for a project in Africa. He was away for two months. My mother hadn’t even got her UK driving license.

Ruthe came to visit us on the farm one year. My father was absent, of course. She told me that Mum had to go out and left her with my brother and I. We were upstairs playing. She was in the kitchen.

My god, Gabriela – the silence! she says, touching my arm. It was unbearable. I had to put the TV on. I don’t know how Sonia coped with it.

As for my brother and I that silence is something we’ve always known, something we love – but we didn’t grow up in Rio de Janeiro; we didn’t give up everything for fields of wheat, blowing in the wind.

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Ruthe told me something about my grandfather one evening as we ate a meal in a Brazilian restaurant in Manhattan. Eurico was a man I never knew. Mum often tells me about the books and chocolates he used to bring her when he came home from work. He once danced with Eva Perón.

I asked Ruthe about when he died and she told me that he had become very afraid, of life almost, so nervous was he of dying. He used to be in his study while Ruthe and Mum were getting ready to go out, saying he was fine, and then suddenly he’d call Ruthe and say, please stay with me here – sit and read to me.

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At times, I think I’ve felt what my grandfather did. A nervousness of something. For me, it doesn’t necessarily come with a foreboding of death, but I feel rigid when I’m in this state – as though I’m looking out at the world from my body, which has become a cage, keeping me held fast in a desperate attempt at safety. But counteracting this fear has been a desire to burst free, travel, perform on the stage. They don’t necessarily work that well together these two forces! In the beginning, one holds the other tight, and neither are very happy – but then the dam breaks.

This time, the water surged as I booked a flight to New York, thinking: I’ll start there and see where I end up.

As I write this, I smile at the places I did end up: on the subway, wondering why these seats aren’t taken until I sit down, realise the stink and watch the estuaries of piss, winding around my feet as the train snakes along the track. Then there was the beauty parlour! Me, with both legs in the air, naked from the waist down, having the best wax I’ve ever had from a gorgeous lady called Fernanda. Or, on a train for over thirty hours, crossing America while a man on his mobile behind me says – listen, you fired your gun, but it’s not like you actually killed anyone…

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And, suddenly, I’m in a carpark in Buffalo, sitting in a hire car.

I’m humming to myself, this nervous, trilling tune because I know I have to drive – even though I only ever really cycle places, and normally in my own country. I’ve driven a car a few times this year, but I think the fact that I’m positioned on the left – hoping I can pick up how to use all the gadgets like headlights – is making me uneasy.

At some point, I just have to start the engine and go.

A little over an hour later, I’m watching the water crash down Niagara Falls as the sky begins to darken and snow falls gently. I am alone. The wind is icy and I can see the spray from the waterfall turning to slush in the air. At moments like this, I’m grateful that my fear of life cannot keep me tied up – that something greater pulls me out, draws me onwards. I have a bed for tonight, and tomorrow I’m going over the border into Canada where I’m going to drive until I hit Lake Huron. Like the thoughts of sitting with Ruthe, having my life opened up a little more, Huron County calls to me. This is Alice Munro territory. Her writing kept me going over the years I struggled to find my own voice, and now it’s time to see where her stories came from. I know Alice still lives in the area, close to where she grew up. I’ve read about her favourite restaurant in Goderich, the wonderful secondhand bookshop there. Who knows, perhaps I’ll run into her…

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For now, though, it’s time to get back to work, and another year of my workshops. Currently, I’m busy with the students at City University, preparing for City Nights. The third Monday of each month they will be reading to agents at the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell.

I am also running a 5 night residential writer’s workshop on 15th July with the gorgeous Anita Lewis, providing fresh, exciting food and an accepting space to explore creativity. Anita and I will be looking at how to guide your ideas from those first, messy feelings of inspiration to a tangible form that others will enjoy. We will be exploring creativity through movement, breath, food, conversation, laughter, silence, fun, rest and writing. Please feel free to email if you have any questions.

Have a look at my day workshops in Oxford, which are going to be a lot of fun this year. These include: sorry, but remind me why I’m following my breath, and it’s a writer’s life, don’t we know it!

My mentoring work with freelancers and writers continues, whilst I prepare for the Guided Retreat on the Masters programme at Oxford University where I will be teaching this year’s writers about public speaking.

I am also opening up a ‘library’ on my blog where, with help from a very accomplished colleague, you can browse ebooks. At the end of each month we’ll be discussing a new title, looking at what works with the writing, what doesn’t, and seeing what we can learn. It is part of my philosophy that a writer needs to read in order to learn to write, and also that the advice of a good editor is invaluable. Do please let me know if you are interested in having your ebook put under the microscope!

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I’ve come back with new eyes, new feelings and a greater sense of my own history. The rest is up to Spring. Let’s see what grows in the coming weeks!

Worth checking out

A huge thanks to Laura’s Mess for nominating me for an award. As you know, I don’t quite follow the rules when it comes to these, but it always gives me a good opportunity to mention other lovely bloggers. This site is particularly gorgeous with it’s lush recipes and stunning photos.

Also have a look at the wonderful Nina – with words that flow like water. Her enthusiasm is unboundless and her blog a real pleasure – full of treats from super quotes to great short stories!

Posted in Memoir, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 49 Comments

It’s an anxious job, pulling out of the comfort zone

Posted on March 11, 2013 by

I’m in the bedroom, packing – two days until my flight. I’m filling with familiar sensations. As my body is about to be relocated, it grips the life I’ve been living and through this act I see everything close up: indistinguishable days, become lovable for tiny details. It becomes impossible to believe I’m leaving for a month.

How’s it going? I hear Dan ask from the doorway. I have no idea how long he’s been standing there.

I think it’s all going to fit, I say, taking in his eyes.

We stare at the rucksack. I lay my hand on the folded clothes. Dan shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I try to imagine opening the front door, heading down the street with my belongings on my back, arriving at the bus stop and waiting for the coach to the airport.

Where do you want to say goodbye? I ask Dan.

He looks at me and says: on my bike, chasing after the coach.

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I was seventeen when I took my first trip. I went to Paris with my brother and a lad we’d both grown up with, who was another brother of sorts. This was nothing like the family holidays I’d been on as a child. We stayed in the halls of residence with two other friends I was at school with and ate chocolate for breakfast. It was the first time a boy saw me naked, standing up with the light on – a small tabletop fan blowing on my nervous flesh.

We drank beer every afternoon and one night sat around the table in the communal kitchen, doing shots. The lad I’d grown up with was the only one doing vodka – the rest of us were secretly drinking water. He kept downing more and more, trying to keep up. At first, we had to pretend to be drunk, but then he became so bombed that it didn’t matter. I took photos as he threw up out of the fourth floor window onto a car below. This was life, surely?

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Dan asks me what I want for my final supper at home.

I tell him lamb steaks and parmesan potatoes. This is a meal Dan and I constructed when we were living in Denmark, WA – our last trip together.

One of the things I’ve noticed about living abroad is that there’s a point I stop looking in the supermarket for all the things I can buy back home, and I start to really see what’s around me and cook for the country I’m in. One of the dishes to come out of the eighteen months Dan and I spent in Mexico was slender chicken fillets coated in coarse ground peanuts and chopped garlic, which I then cooked on a griddle and served sliced in tortillas with a salsa made from finely chopped green chilli, orange and onion.

I don’t know where the idea came from, but it epitomises what it is to give yourself over to another life – suddenly it begins to inform you in a way you don’t notice. It permeates your skin and changes the way you think, until one day you notice that you are moving in a way you’ve never done before. With this realisation comes a powerful, momentous rush. This is the sense of freedom that comes when we are being who we truly are, and we discover that it’s okay – more than okay. Frankly, it’s better than anything.

I’ve tried making my peanut chicken in the UK, but it’s not the same.

In Denmark, WA, Dan and I began a cook-off. I made a table in my diary where we could record who cooked what and score each other. Mostly, we were fair about the points we gave.

I made swordfish, mulberry and apricot crumble, pasta with lemon, courgette and chilli, squash and orange soup. Dan made pad thai, pad thai, pad thai and pad thai…

(We had just returned from a ‘visa run’ to Bali where we’d spent a lot of time eating in a tiny and delightful Thai cafe.)

Each attempt of Dan’s was better than the last and he was slowly making his way to a perfect 10, but then he had a lapse in concentration and undercooked the noodles. He tried to persuade me not to mark him with a 4, because he felt he’d finally found a perfect balance between the tamarind, fish sauce, lime and sugar. I pointed out that despite the flavour, the dish was inedible due to the consistency of the noodles. He accepted 4 as generous. That was when he decided to try a new dish.

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The lamb steaks are soft and flavoursome, the parmesan potatoes crispy.

Not as good as in Denmark, Dan says and I smile – I remember giving him a ten for this dish.

How are you feeling? he asks.

This final day, my blood feels as though it’s been invaded, rushing through me, giving an intense feeling of restlessness. And like something you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, which isn’t there when you turn to look, I’ve had a profound sense there is something I have forgotten, which won’t reveal itself. When I think of leaving Dan for over a month, I get a sharp shooting behind my eyes and the world goes blurry until I blink several times and bring it back – the room in front of me, the house I’m abandoning. Sometimes the tears don’t all go back to where they came and one escapes, rolls down my cheek.

We are creatures of habit, Dan and I agree. It’s an anxious job to pull out of the routine, the comfort zone. But something always makes me get on a plane, even though the first few steps – taking my rucksack out of the cupboard, organising my affairs so that I don’t return to a landslide – are a wrench.

So, why do I travel? There is something inside me that wants to search. I feel fear, but at the same time a keen desire to explore the sensation – and in identifying it, understanding more of myself. By travelling the globe I travel my own arteries. Continents are organs. I explore the outer world to know more of within, and in doing so the two become closer until one day I will simply be part of the world – not separate, alone, but the same as whatever is around me.

Planning a trip all works beneath the surface – the fact that I’ve been taking bookings for my workshops, but for some reason not fixing anything in March. Suddenly, this free month is a week away, asking. I take off on my bike and arrive at Trailfinders, sit down at a desk, take a deep breath.

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Dan and I walk to the bus stop. It’s drizzling gently. The last two days have been the sunniest of the year. The sudden emergence of Spring has intensified my feelings of leaving. Smells and sounds, which have lain dormant during winter, have provided a sensory banquet – shortcuts to memories, a profound sense of hope so that I have to ask: do I really want to go? But the ticket is booked, and I know that such asking is the body, fearing change. So, I move into the fear, to know it better, waiting for it to become familiar and no longer frightening.

I look up – the sky has closed over again. Spring has had second thoughts. The rain is like a whimpering as Dan and I wait at the bus stop. We think we have ten minutes to amble in our talk, tock the ball of our feelings to and fro, but then the coach appears round the corner. Although it’s indicating to pull in, it’s not slowing down. We’re at the wrong stop.

The two of us gather my bags and run down the street.

The coach pulls in and I make it on board, buy my ticket and have just a moment to jump back down to the pavement to hold Dan for one last time this Winter.

I love you g, he says over and over in my ear.

He holds his hand over his heart as the coach drives away and I watch him through the window, knowing my smile must look peculiar – all twitchy with grief. The world goes blurry, though this time I let the tears come.

But there’s something else too: as I wipe my cheeks, I feel it – this lifting of whatever it was that has been weighing my blood down these last few days.

America, I think. America. Places I’ve never been.

By the time I get to the airport, I am light, alert. My senses – the really keen ones that are put away during every day life – are coming back to me. Now, I’m walking to the gate. I put my headphones in my ears and select D for artists. There are three songs here that Dan has spent the last few days recording – even though he’s had a cold. I press play and after a second of silence I hear him sniff, which makes me laugh. The chords begin softly on the guitar. I can see his long fingers strumming, his wrist relaxed as his hand moves up and down. Here comes his voice: I hear you whispering just out of view…

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Worth Checking out

I couldn’t talk about food without mentioning the lovely Sugarness who is kind enough to feature some of my recipes, along with her own wonderful creations.

A huge thank you to Chalkdust Fairy for nominating me for the Sunshine Award. Rebecca’s blog truly is sunshine.

This week I’m reading Paul Auster ‘True tales of American life’, which is stunning. It’s worth buying the book just for the first story!

Posted in Memoir | Tagged , , , , , | 41 Comments

Playful child and iron teacher: the two halves of the writer

Posted on March 1, 2013 by

I was nine when a new games mistress arrived at my school. She was a grey-haired woman, although she wasn’t old; I could tell because her eyebrows were black. Her bum was boxlike, giving an impression of very little waist. She wore glasses that had a jaundiced tint to them. Perhaps she wasn’t as tall as she seemed, but standing beneath her, I always felt in the shadow of a mountain, afraid of some volatility.

It seems to me that if there are two halves of the writing personality, one of them is the playful, innocent, exploratory child; and the other is the iron teacher, unremitting in her ambitious expectations.

When it is time to write, the iron teacher must step aside, but something I remember is that my games mistress – The Mountain – was such a fearful presence that even in her absence I felt crippled by the thought of her.

Dorothea Brand says that when the two persons of the writer are at war we get the unhappy artist – ‘the artist who is working against the grain, or against his sober judgement, or, saddest of all, is unable to work.’

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I know something isn’t right the moment my mother parks outside the school gates. The street is deserted. I race towards the girls’ changing rooms. They are silent. A shoe, kicked across the room, sits like an island on the tiles. I think of not going out, of hiding in the toilet, but then I snatch up my games kit and begin to dress.

Now, I rush out of the changing rooms and down the tarmac slope towards the playing fields. I cannot see beyond the pavilion – a thick row of pines hides the girls’ rounders pitch – so, I hurry on, my arms flailing.

Second deep comes into view first, the red of her polo shirt startling against the grass. I hear a tock. A ball flies through the air. Someone begins to sprint. Already, a few of the opposition are sitting at the edge of the pitch, run or caught out.

The Mountain has drafted in our reserve player who cannot catch, and throws the ball by spinning round, faster and faster, until she decides to let go. You can only pray she will let go at the right moment. Usually, it launches in entirely the wrong direction. Instead of shifting the players round so that the reserve goes in at first deep – the least crucial spot – The Mountain has put her in at first base, which is my position.

This is the sort of thing The Mountain does in order to teach a lesson.

Some of the girls are waving at me now. I’m heading towards first base. The Mountain comes striding over. Her face is taut.

When I’m closer, I say: sorry – sorry I’m late.

The Mountain is motionless. She says: you’ll have to wait until the second half. Her voice is deadly.

I see a dark depth in the blue of her eyes, but I will not give up my shame to that. Even though I’ve let my teammates down, I will not yield; even though the feeling of upset is like my guts have been scorched.
Okay, whatever, I say, and stroll towards my mother, knowing the worst is still to come.

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I was at war with The Mountain for many years. Even though I was her best squash player, I signed up for cross-country one season, and ran up hills all winter.

The state I was in reminds me of that tense muteness, which can come down over a writer overwhelmed by the judge of his other half. The Mountain was the critic, sitting at my ear, shouting so that my eardrums ached. I was desperate to be free of her.

When we write, there is nothing more unpleasant than to have the excessively scrupulous, fault-finding voice at the front of our mind. Sometimes, the only way we can be free of it is to not write – just as I felt the only way I could be free of The Mountain was to forego my position as captain of the girls’ squash team. But if our two halves – the creator and the editor – are at war, our mind is the battlefield: every blow we deliver is to ourselves. I hated running up hills – each time I would dream of how much I loved to hit a black rubbery ball up and down the wall. My lungs burned and my soul wept and the hills never cared.

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When I was thirteen, I decided to get drunk with a friend.

The Mountain has by now become my housemistress.

My friend and I hide in the woods and drink a concoction made from small amounts of every bottle in my parents’ drinks cupboard. On the way back to our boarding house, my friend has to prop me up. She keeps telling me to shut up. I don’t know what she’s so worried about.

We reach the house and run for cover in the dormitory, flopping onto our beds and laughing. Whenever I try to stand up, I fall over.

There is no critical voice now.

My friend hits her head on the wall and a mauve blotch appears on her flesh like a stain. It’s too hilarious and I wet myself a tiny bit.

I’m aware of someone coming into the room. My friend is at my side, telling me to get up. I look over and see The Mountain, standing in the doorway, but I stay on the ground. I have enough clarity to think, this is strange, but not enough to be able to do anything about it. My friend is reaching under her pillow for her pyjamas. Now, she unhooks her towel from the pegs above the radiator. It is a pretence at being very busy.

You’re to come to my flat, The Mountain says – both of you.

My friend puts all the things that are in her arms carefully on her bed.

The Mountain looks at me and I hiccup.

She comes over, hauls me to my feet and marches me down the corridor. Girls come out of their dormitories to look.

Woo hoo! I shout.

In The Mountain’s flat, I drape myself on her couch.

My friend sits upright on one of the highbacked wooden chairs that are arranged around a small oval table. Suddenly, her head jerks forward and she looks alarmed. A sound comes from her belly and she throws up in her hand.

I glance at The Mountain who is standing in the doorway to her cramped kitchen. The expression on her face makes me burst out laughing.

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I’ve read a lot of writers that liked to get drunk before they worked. I certainly would have never been able to behave that way in front of The Mountain if I hadn’t been plastered. I switched my fear off.

The trouble is, the lights always come back on at some point.

The moment arrives when you have to go into your editor’s study and face the shame, just like I did when I woke up the following morning and received the message that The Mountain wanted to see me. My fear came back, gushing, unstoppable.

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The playful child and the iron teacher must find their place together.

After the rounders match, I watched The Mountain’s slow, ominous approach. I knew the weight of her presence would force my explanation out of me, in the way a punch to the stomach brings a sharp gasp.

I told that I thought the game started at three thirty.

Her eyes widened behind the sickly tint of her glasses. She licked her lips and said: I would like to know why, when every other match you’ve played at this school starts at two forty five, you would decide this one was different.

Decide.

I felt a familiar a sucking in my chest at this word, which said: there’s no trust here, no cooperation. It was this very lack of understanding between us, which kept me locked in a frenzy: I couldn’t do anything without being afraid I’d be wrong in some way.

I tried to tell her that I read the time on the notice board.

Show me, she said.

I remember that walk from the playing field towards the main building – the sense of her fury, which I endured all the way. And there we were, standing in front of the notice board. My heart was thumping. I scanned the scraps of paper with lists of names, tennis pairs, cross country runners…there, three thirty. I pointed.

The Mountain leaned forward. It was a while before she spoke.

The annual meeting of the A and B cricket captains? she said, each word clear and separate.

She began to shout. The more her face stormed, the more I felt the surface of my own, stilled, almost slackened by a sense that whatever it is she thought I’d done, I hadn’t. But only I could know that – the fact that I lived in such terror of her, I couldn’t even read a noticeboard accurately.

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If the two persons of the writer are at war, they will seek to punish each other, and the surest way to do that is to not write. They will fight for complete, uncollaborative ascendancy. If the iron teacher criticises the other into submission, the result is prose, which resembles the dregs of some tube that has become so caked with self-consciousness that only an emaciated maggot can squeeze out. If the playful child becomes oblivious and over-intoxicated by creativity, the result is pages of indecipherable manure, which is so embarrassing to read your chest aches. Neither writing is worthless – there is always something that can be salvaged – but the rescue mission is often agonizing.

Instead of war, try submission – but both sides must consent. When each agrees to its place, the writing ball tocks endlessly back and forth.

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Eventually, the woman who had overshadowed so much of my school life, stood down as housemistress. It wasn’t my fault – it wasn’t any one individual’s fault – though, I suspect I was a contribution. The day I heard of her resignation, I went into her study. I didn’t intend to be stealthlike, but there was a moment where I caught a glimpse of her, slumped and wilting at her desk, before she saw me and straightened up. She gave something of a sigh.

What is it, Gabriela? she asked.

This was the day we became friends.

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Successful writing is about being able to observe your playful child and iron teacher and, through that process, move between them in a collaborative way.

It’s an aim, a process. There will be times when you sense a war coming, or find yourself in the midst of one; the trick is to realise that you’re both on the same side.

 

Good Links

Hear ‘you are boring’ as distant white laundry flapping in the breeze – a truly wonderful book on writing: Writing down the bones by Natalie Goldberg

Please read Chalkdust Fairy. This is a post that has stayed in my mind as a great example of ‘collaborative’ writing where there is freedom, but control.

And a belated thank you to Anthony for nominating me for a very inspiring blogger award. His is a brilliantly diverse blog – here is one of my favourite posts by Anthony on skeleton bubbles…

 

 

 

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What happens when a character’s skirt gets hitched in her knickers?

Posted on February 20, 2013 by

Character is arguably the single most important component of the novel…nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. David Lodge

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When I was ten, I had a Latin teacher with skin like pallid, set jelly, so that she shone beneath the striplights in a clammy way. If I were to touch her with my finger – which I would never have done – there would be none of the firmness of bone, but a squashy, disappearing sensation.

Read the Classics and you’ll find the most common way to introduce a character is to give a physical description, and perhaps a biographical summary. The modern writer tends not to fill the first five pages of a novel with a character’s family tree, their multitude of ailments, the pitiable condition of their barouche, and the fact that they like their reading glasses perched low down on their nose to press at their nostrils in a way that alleviates their breathing trouble.

Modern novelists allow the facts about a character to emerge gradually. They’ve also diversified their technique beyond physical description, to convey character through action or speech. Rather than: Emily was eighty years old, we might read: Emily found the effort of stooping tired her; after taking a cup and saucer from the cupboard, she had to sit for a few minutes before making the tea.

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My Latin teacher was convinced I was perfect for an all girls’ school in Dorset. On the rare occasion that I was able to answer a question correctly in class, she would beam at me. I could hear the crackle of her sticky mouth parting when she smiled. Her large teeth had a shell-like gleam to them.

A perfect Sherborne girl! she’d say.

As the words came out, I saw her dark gums.

I’M NOT! I would shout at her.

But it only made her smile broader.

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What do we hope to derive from reading novels? Perhaps some knowledge of the human heart or mind? I often have a sense, when I’m reading a piece of fiction, that it must have happened. It isn’t because I find the story so convincing, but rather the characters. They’re unique, autonomous individuals – wholly responsible for their acts – operating as they do not because it serves the plot, but because they exist.

A few years ago, I wanted to write a story about a mistress who walks out on a relationship. The final scene happens at a greyhound track – amongst the heat and dust, and the sickly, foul stench of shit. It was the image of a woman, staring at a man who had suddenly become unknown to her – as he shouts and swears – tearing up his betting slip and walking up the steps to the exit, that made me write the rest of the story. Every scene was geared towards this denouement, but first I had to have the man, turning up on her doorstep at a little before midnight with a suitcase, saying: she’s thrown me out; the mistress wondering why he assumed this would be the place to come.

I took the story to my writing group, feeling very pleased with myself. ‘Mrs Mistress’ it was called.

We don’t believe it, they said.

There was nothing implausible about the plot: a woman ends a relationship that has become claustrophobic. It was the characters they didn’t trust.

Why is she with him in the first place? they wanted to know.

I’d been so focused on making her lover into a man she’d want to leave, I’d forgotten the side she fell in love with. I’d been focusing on plot – the fact that my mistress decides to be a mistress no more. Other than this one detail, I knew nothing about her.

Description in fiction is highly selective, choosing appropriate parts to stand for the whole. This was a short story – there was no place for the lengthy manner in which these characters had fallen into each other’s lives, but there needed to be a suggestion of something, which would allow the reader to imagine the rest.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them…A writer who omits things because he does not know only makes hollow places in his writing. Hemmingway

Characterisation is more than description and voice and mannerism, all of which my story had, it’s a suggestion of everything that has gone before; it is the glimpse of the breakfast laid out on the table with a hint of burning in the air, the fact that the toast has been scraped back from black.

A smile hides a grimace; pain lies beneath flippancy. There is a way to infer motive and also ways in which characters conceal their true motives from themselves. Details can tell more than a character might want. This woman, who originally chose self-sufficiency the moment she walked out of the races, is now revealing that beneath her mysterious mistress persona lies someone afraid of rejection. Now that she has her man, she asks herself if she could ever trust someone who cheated on his wife.

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One morning at school, I was walking down to breakfast with some of the girls from my boarding house. Several meters in front was a prefect. The back of her skirt had caught in the top of her knickers. I pointed this out to my friends and for a minute we walked behind her, sniggering into our sleeves. Eventually, I called out the prefect’s name.

If this was fiction, the next part of the scene could be written in any number of ways:

Perhaps Gabriela is malicious enough to decide not to help. When she calls out Felicity’s name, and the prefect turns (and the reader thinks they know what’s going to happen) Gabriela might say: have you got the time?

A quarter past seven, Felicity says, turning and going on her merry, exposed way.

Or perhaps Gabriela is a good person – Felicity? she calls and the prefect stops and glares at her.

And then Gabriela sees the numerous times Felicity has given her detention for talking during prep. She wants to tell Felicity about her knickers, but a part of her, hungry for revenge, floats up and takes over.

Conflict is important to create interesting characters. It isn’t enough for Felicity to be a power-hungry prefect. If she was, then Gabriela’s decision would be easy, and the story would be a ‘saw it a mile off’ revenge piece. It goes back to what we hope to derive from reading novels – this deeper knowledge of the human heart or mind, and why character is the most important thing. The outcome of this situation is that either I tell Felicity, or I don’t. What makes it interesting is determined by why I choose to tell her, or why I don’t.

Character can also help you move plot in a way that you might not have seen.

Hey, Felicity! Your skirt’s hitched up at the back, Gabriela tells her.

The prefect stares at her for a second before winking and saying: I know – the boys love it.

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We can have characters viewed from the outside by others, characters rendered from their acts, but these characters must be called something. David Lodge wrote about his experience of naming his female protagonist in Nice Work:

I hesitated for some time, however, about the choice of her first name, vacillating between Rachel, Rebecca and Roberta, and I remember that this held up progress on Chapter Two considerably, because I couldn’t imaginatively inhabit this character until her name was fixed.  

I had similar difficulty inhabiting my Latin teacher as I was trying to put her in my book.

My Latin teacher’s hair was bristly. It sat like a triangle. There were clusters of wiry white hairs dotted about her head. Some of them floated, like the last few threads of a spider’s web enticed by the breeze.

We used to call her Medusa.

It was when I remembered this nickname that things began to work loose.

I’d hated her because of that line she always gave me about being a Sherborne girl. Because of that hatred I saw her mouth, her teeth – everything about her – from an extreme perspective.

I wasn’t a Sherborne girl. Medusa didn’t understand me – she was nothing like me. I was due to go to a mixed school – the same one as many of my friends. But my place depended on a scholarship and suddenly in the sixth form I felt under too much pressure. I stepped down from the scholarship class, forfeiting my place. As a result, I had to go to Sherborne.

Medusa had been right all along.

My Latin teacher became less of an archetype as I thought about the person behind the nickname. She must have been aware of what we called her, it was carved into most of the desks. I suddenly saw her going home each evening with that knowledge. And then I began to wonder if there was anyone at home, waiting for her.

I had begun writing that chapter in my book from the point of view of someone seeking revenge. Medusa began life as a character serving plot: the story of the sad schoolgirl and her vile teacher. But neither of those characters were real. It was only when I thought about actions and motives and everything going on beneath the surface that I saw us – Medusa and Sherborne Girl – for who we really were.

We were both labelled, both forced to live out that label against our will. This woman who I’d thought was completely different to me, was not so very different after all.

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Interesting Articles

Read Anne Woodman’s brilliant portrayal of her daughter here – and I’m not saying this just because Anne happens to mention that I can do no wrong!

Characters are defined by how they react to certain situations: read Amy Knapp’s wonderful cheese story here.

And for some good solid tips for writers click here.

Posted in Essay, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 49 Comments

Try to get ahead too fast and you might end up with your trousers round your ankles

Posted on February 12, 2013 by

When I left drama school, I expected to become a successful actress immediately. I sent my headshot to directors and agents. Every time the phone rang, my heart convulsed, but usually it was my mother, wanting to know about my latest audition.

Finally, I was cast in a production of Everywoman where I played the teenage daughter of a woman dying of cancer. I have sex with the plumber in the bath in order to grow up. Fortunately, we manage to do this without removing our clothes.

One night, there was a casting director in the audience and I wrote to her the following day. She called to thank me for getting in touch, saying she’d enjoyed my performance – it had shown depth. I was glad because my mother had thought I was trying too much in the play: you were doing that thing when you stick your chin out, she’d told me.

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I asked the casting director if she had any advice, or perhaps knew of any auditions I might be suitable for.

There was a pause.

This business is hard, she said. Then she told me it was important to get an agent. They’re the ones to find the auditions.

Right, I said, realising that her job was to cast shows – not simply look for any parts, calling for a 5’6” twenty-two year old, with a tendency to overact with her chin.

I said that I’d written to agents, but hadn’t found anyone prepared to take me on.

She suggested I get the up-to-date Actor’s Yearbook.

Do you know any specific agents who are looking for clients?

Go for a big agency, she said, not giving any specific names.

I got more headshots. Sent letters. Heard nothing back. I knew it was important to chase everything up, but I wasn’t good at that. I thought about phoning the casting director again, but she would only tell me to send out more enquiries, make as many phonecalls as possible. Did I want her to come and hold my hand? Probably.

That’s when I decided to go on a quiz show.

Afterwards, I told people I did it for the car.

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The first round of auditions had a group of us seated at a large table. We talked about ourselves. I said I’d recently finished a history degree, loved squash and that I’d grown up on a farm.

All the time, I wondered why I wasn’t mentioning the fact that I was an actress.

We had to perform a party stunt. I’d been up late the night before, learning a magic trick, but the whole thing had made me so nervous I decided to do something simple that wasn’t going to make me sweat. I put someone’s cigarettes on the floor, laid my feet out as wide as I could, and then bent at the waist and picked the pack up in my teeth. It was enough to get me on the show.

Normally, I wouldn’t have entered a quiz show because I would have been worried about not knowing any of the answers. But the point of the show was that the questions were easy – the hard part was the amount the contestants were ‘distracted’ when they were trying to answer.

Even though I didn’t believe it at the time, I was lucky. Later shows had contestants, sitting on perspex cubes with a hole in the top for their bare bottom, which had been smeared with peanut butter. There were dogs in the cubes.

What’s seven times three? the host would ask as the dogs licked.

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The show was filmed in front of a live audience. We were brought into the studio, shown the stage and then taken back to a small room where we could get ready and meet the ‘stand-ins’.

In case someone has an accident, the producer said.

We were all talking about the brand new, canary yellow Volkswagen that was up for grabs. The week before I’d smashed into the back of someone who had pulled out in front of me on the dual carriageway without indicating.  The producer of the quiz show was very interested in this crash, and the fact that the repairs were deemed more than what the car was worth. He took me into a separate room and questioned me about it. Then he brought me back with the others. I was certain they were going to rig the show so that I would win the car. My life was falling into place!

Drink plenty of water, the producer kept saying. The studio is really dry, and nerves can make your throat parched.

I knew about water. We’d spent a year at drama school, learning the importance of water. Nerves were something I could handle. What I didn’t want was to be answering questions in front of a live audience, having to pee. I took the kind of sips I’d been trained to take, and kept doing throat and tongue exercises to keep the muscles supple.

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When we finally got out onto the stage, I couldn’t believe it. The applause was raucous. It felt wonderful to be hearing that crash of hands, standing beneath the bright lights.

The host began to question us. There had been dozens of forms to fill in during the audition process, asking about embarrassing moments, strange habits, things we regretted.

So, the host said to me. I hear that you once threw yourself down the stairs at work just to get out of your shift? The audience laughed.

Yeah, I said, feeling popular and hilarious.

Don’t you have any grandparents? the host said.

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

What’s wrong with phoning up your boss and saying that you can’t come into work because it’s your granny’s funeral?

The audience laughed again. I began to feel uneasy – though I couldn’t place it.

Yeah, I guess that would have been a better idea, I told him. The studio was quiet – too quiet.

Now, I hear you’re half Brazilian, the host said.

I am! I told him, swinging my hips a little, feeling better as I sensed the energy of the audience begin to rise again.

Okay, the host said, winking and gesturing to his body. Which half would that be?

There was laughter again, too loud for me to bother answering the question – not that it wanted answering. I was standing with one of the funniest men on TV. What did I think? That I would steal the show; have people chanting my name and land a super-sonic agent?

The host was now questioning one of the other contestants. This was a camp chap who wanted to get into musicals. There was nothing secretive about his desire to act. He was now singing the opening lines to a musical he was writing. Again, I felt that sense of disquiet.

Then there was the policewoman whose ex-boyfriend pays her for sex every now and then, and finally the other guy – who I hadn’t really got an opinion on, other than to think he was the last person I’d imagine wanting to come on a TV show: he’d looked annoyed every time I tried to speak to him.

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The audience is charged up now. The host has them mesmerised. He announces the first round of questions will begin.

But first, he says, rubbing his hands together – we need to bring on the toilets!

I’m certain I’ve misheard him, but the audience are cheering about something.

I glance at the policewoman who looks like she sucked on a lemon. The side of the stage opens and a four cubicle, toilet block slides towards us. I remember how desperate the producer had been to make us drink. I think of the two stand-ins, and I understand now: it’s not that one of us might break our arm, it’s that we might refuse to take part.

The stand-ins had had this desperate, obsequious air about them, while the rest of us had acted like celebrities: we were the ones who’d been chosen. I pictured them in the wings, waiting for an opening. I know what it’s like when you don’t get chosen, and then suddenly an opportunity comes. They’d be out here, sitting on these toilets, happy to leave the door open, if it meant they had a chance.

I finally realise how shameful all this is, and why I was never able to tell them I wanted to be an actress. I would have been admitting I was prepared to do anything to make it. There’s no Steven Spielberg, sitting in the audience, thinking: wow, that girl has talent! Besides, the talented ones are at home, learning monologues, putting genuine work in.

Each toilet has been fitted with a sensor, the host explains. Pee if you know the answer and a red light will come on above your cubicle. It’s that simple!

We’re led around the front of the toilet block. Each cubicle has a pair of swing doors set in the middle, about a foot high. I can feel my bladder, gripping, saying: even if you did need to pee, there’s absolutely no way it’s going to happen in front of a live studio audience. We have to pull our trousers and pants down to our ankles. Everyone cheers when my red, lace knickers come down. I rest my arms on top of the door and bury my head.

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There’s no express train to success. How can we hope to make admirable achievements without putting in the work? I’ve begun to learn the difference between the short stories I send out that get published and those, which barely even get a reply; and the fact that I’m the only person responsible – not the editor, for being unable to see my visionary style, or the magazine, for publishing crap anyway.

These days, when I sit down to write, I try to be honest about what I hope to achieve. If I just want to make some money with this one, get my name in neon lights, I know it’s time to back off – otherwise I’ll end up with my pants down again, full of regret. The days I work for the love of it, knowing that all I’ve ever wanted is to tell stories to people, it’s safe to continue. It’s better not to focus on the canary yellow Volkswagen, but to simply think about the next word.

Worth checking out

An agent’s view on short stories: http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/short-stories/articles/an-agents-view-luck/

Blogging as virtual love-making: http://deborahbrasket.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/blogging-as-virtual-love-making/

Language is for articulating how we feel now:  http://alisonchandlerwriter.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/can-you-feel-it/

Posted in Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 68 Comments

First drafts: allowing the worm to navigate the soils of your mind

Posted on February 5, 2013 by

I decided to go on a retreat a few years ago. When people asked me why, I tried to explain, but always got a sense I’d left something out; I circled back to the beginning, tried again. Words followed words, my voice grew shrill. I felt there was one piece of information that would clarify it all, but I didn’t know what it was. I kept searching, talking; overcrowding my thoughts with exhausting analysis.

It’s rather like the beginning of a story.

At first, I feel a gentle sense of pressure. I wonder if I imagined it, but no, there it comes again – a jab now. It’s driving me on, but I can’t explain it. I keep searching for answers, starting, having to go back – certain I’ve overlooked the most important detail. But now it’s too crowded – I can’t find my way through.

That’s when I know I need space.

How can writing grow into something if it doesn’t have that?

If we fuss with an idea too soon, then all we have are layers of anxious flapping – all sense of story squashed.

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Before I went on the retreat, my writer’s head was solid earth. All I was able to do was make a slow worm’s path through it. I was often worried about missing something in this dense terrain. How could I be certain I was crawling the right path? The story might be over there! But no openings offered themselves, just dark black earth.

I didn’t realise I was jamming my stories up with unnecessary thought. I needed to make space – throw out some earth. But how?

For a while, I tried ranting, splurging on the page – but the writing made me despair. I stopped it coming. Then I felt clogged up again. Finally, I packed up my bike, got on a train and found myself at a house in Somerset with good people who understood the importance of space.

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The first time I sat in silence, I had no idea what I was doing. This wasn’t a course, there were no other retreatees, only the ‘family’ who ran the house.

I woke up at 6am and joined them in a large room, which had several pictures of gurus over an alter, including the founder of the house who was an elderly woman I thought of as Mata, because I couldn’t remember her more convoluted name. I sat on a wooden stool with a rug over my lap and spent an hour trying not to fall asleep, move or cough. And then I got so hungry I went in search of a banana I’d seen in the sitting room the night before.

What if that had been a first attempt at a story? Sitting at my desk, fighting everything that tried to come, trying to fit in.

No, I can’t fall asleep!

Doesn’t it make sense that the first time I sit and look inward all I pick up is exhaustion, when I’ve been pushing myself non-stop for years, surrounded by people doing the same? The first attempt at a story will be hard – we’ve not done it before; perhaps others, but not this one.

And what’s wrong with moving or coughing – writing an unsuitable word, or starting with a plotline that splits down the middle?

When I think of a room of monks, I don’t see them fidgeting and spluttering: they’re still and perfectly calm. But even monks were boys once: running around, shouting, wetting their pants.

Does Hilary Mantel’s precise prose make me fear my clumsy first attempts?

‘Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety?’ Hilary asks in her memoir. She’s had her times of spluttering and fidgeting; the difference is that, over a dozen books, she’s learnt her anxieties to the point of familiarity.

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How can we progress as writers if we hold ourselves like a statue and allow nothing to come for fear that it isn’t the very best? How do we think the very best is got to? By exploration, surely. How can the worm navigate the soils of our mind if we turn those soils to stone?

I felt like a failure the first time I sat in silence on my retreat. I thought I’d never be able to do it. The trouble was, I didn’t know what ‘it’ was, and therefore didn’t realise I’d just done it.

‘It’ is the act: the act of sitting, the act of writing.

Because I held greatness up as my model – great literature, great enlightened souls – my expectations were far ahead of myself. I wanted to open my eyes and discover I was levitating.

All we can do with a first attempt is allow ourselves the chance to see what happens. A first draft is a quest. How can we hope to improve, if we reject every clue that comes to us?

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There was a church near the house where I was on retreat. I was grateful for the clock, which chimed on the quarter. Otherwise, I’d have felt as though I was staring into never-ending time. It was strange to me that when faced with something endless, without perimeter, the feeling was often one of claustrophobia.

Sometimes I’d wait for the chiming, counting the moment I could leave. Other times, I’d spend each 15 minutes lost in contemplation, jumping from one idea to the other: going over troubles, problems, arguments, concerns, thinking about my writing, working stories out, going over dreams, going over past events, thinking about recipes, food, exercise, clothes; aware of my body – feeling my hips tense, my back hurting, my feet beginning to go numb, my ankles stiffening up, desperately needing to move, but thinking, no, no, I shouldn’t make a noise. I was aware of all the other sounds in the room, every time someone moved, sneezed; every time someone left, someone arrived. Aware of it all and thinking that I shouldn’t be, thinking that what I should be was in a state of absolute unknowing, unaware of everything that was going on around me: not able to hear the chimes of the clock, not thinking: I wonder who that is? when they come in the room; not inclining my head and slightly opening my eyes when someone sits next to me. And certainly not – on one particular morning when I’d come to sit, listening to everyone leave the room, suddenly knowing I was alone, and saying: it’s just me and you, babe! to the image of Mata above the altar.

By this point I thought I was a very bad retreatee.

I found a map in a cupboard and went for a fourteen mile walk. I wished I wasn’t me. Then I wondered who I could blame for the fact that I was me. Then I felt angry and pathetic because all I wanted to do was cry.

This was how I used to feel about my writing.

Why? I would wail at a calamitous first draft. How could I have written something that makes no sense?

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‘Work out what it is you want to say,’ Hilary Mantel says.

But how can we work that out if we’re too busy berating ourselves?

Later in the retreat, I was sitting in the evening. Something had shifted – though I didn’t realise. I was now in total despair. I thought I’d gone backwards, but actually this was progress: I was giving my feelings attention. Rather than trying to ‘behave’ by staying awake and not squirming on my stool, I was simply sitting there in total desolation. It felt horrible – terrifying – but there wasn’t anything else I could do. There’d been this large deep black pit, tagging along behind me, and I was too tired to dodge it anymore. I wanted the chase to end, so I threw myself in.

At some point, I noticed the strange feeling of claustrophobia had left me. I was no longer holding myself in. This black pit was dark, but spacious – frightening, but not constricting. The feeling of being hemmed in had been replaced by endless sadness. Suddenly, I didn’t want to criticise myself anymore.

In my mind, I saw Princess Leia.

I have no idea where she came from. I liked Star Wars as a child, but I’m not a fanatic. It’s the moment where Luke finds the recording of her in R2D2. He plays it over and over, fascinated. At the end of the recording, she bends over – to press a button on R2D2. That was the moment she came into my mind, bending like that – to me it seemed to represent compassion. But there’s also her message: help me, Obi Wan Kanobi, you’re my only hope, she says – although I didn’t remember that when I first saw the image in my head. That evening at the retreat, when I saw Princess Leia, she was standing behind me, bending over to my ear. She said two words. With Love.

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How do you create space? For me, the task has been a dissolving. I started with a head full of earth. Everything was coming at once, and I wasn’t listening to any of it. But slowly I began to pay attention – with love. I took a handful of earth, held it in the palm of my hand, watched it – asked for help.

You’re finding this story hard, it told me.

I continued to watch. Asking, why? would only pile on more soil.

I comforted the person who found the story hard, rather than criticised them. I continued to watch the clump of soil; see if there was anything else it wanted to say. After a few days, it began to crumble. This lump began to break up into fragments, which became specks. They got to the point that they became so tiny they were just air.

These days my head is far less dense. My stories have a lot more room. The process is the same, but now I recognise the fear – my tendency to constrict myself when I’m embarking on a new piece. It even happened with this post, but its familiar now – a feeling of being overwhelmed, out of my depth, wanting to run.

With love, I always remember.

I treat myself how I would treat my favourite author if they told me they were trying to get a first draft out, but finding it hard. I’d make them comfortable and safe. I’d cook them lovely things. Tell them to rest, to take a moment to get outside and look at the sky. I’d reassure them.

The next time you want to wail, put that thought in your hand and look at it. Don’t question it, don’t criticise. Speak it to yourself, whatever it is. At some point, you’ll feel comfort and you’ll have the strength to explore a little further and allow that first draft to come – messy and scrappy but infinitely beautiful for the clues it holds for you to continue your quest.

Interesting articles

Helen Mackinven on Freefall Writing

http://helenmackinven.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/freefall-writing/

Chris Barnham on Mining Loneliness

http://chrisbarnhamwriter.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/mining-loneliness/

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