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how to paint a dead man, by sarah hall

Everything that Sarah Hall writes is luminous with genius. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, concerns the intertwining lives of four people, disconnected by place and time. Their stories take place adjacent to one another, are intimately connected, but never share the same temporal geography. For all its vibrancy and currency, its earthy people and gripping stories, this book is essentially a meditation on the nature of art. There is an exuberant and joyful celebration of the inner life of the artist, a basking in the mysteries, a revelling in beauty. It is a book full of love and loving, not at all cynical, alive with feeling.

There is something magical, too, in the way that Sarah Hall traces chains of coincidence and synchronicity: connections that are subtle, too oblique to be noticed, but which exert their power nonetheless on each of the characters’ lives. The people in this book are defiantly, irresistibly alive. Their deaths are tragedies, and yet, as the clever structure of the novel suggests, their deaths are not  the end of them. In the perspective of the novel, art is life, and art survives death.

Hall’s writing in her first novel, Haweswater, put me very much in mind of Alan Garner and, sometimes, Ted Hughes. She understands the landscape intimately, physically, historically, and her people in Haweswater seem to rise out of the land, seem to be hewn from rock themselves. How to Paint a Dead Man is a more polished novel, more sure-footed and wider-ranging, but it still has that same organic, natural magic. There is something wildly exciting about writing that is so confident, so daring, so unafraid of its own themes and emotions. If you want a novel that makes you feel brave about writing, I recommend this one.

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there will be hummus

I might be middle-class now, but I didn’t go to university until I was twenty-four, and up until then I had never eaten an olive. I didn’t even know what hummus was. It was pretty shocking to get to university (actually the former Brighton Poly) and see sports cars in the students’ car park, parked there by witless, entitled, eighteen-year-olds. Their parents were paying their rent, too, whereas I ended up with a full time job on top of a grant and a loan and a massive overdraft that it took me ten years to pay off, just to get by. I thought university was going to be a cross between a tripped-out day at Glastonbury and French cafe society of the 1920s, and that I would therefore fit right in, what with my love of night-long intellectual discussions, my penchant for recreational drugs, and my rapidly worsening mental illness. In fact, those things – along with being fairly old and not knowing what hummus was – pretty much made university life harder than I ever expected it to be.

I didn’t do a creative writing degree. I didn’t even study English. If I had known I was going to be a writer, maybe I would have done, but at that time I believed that I couldn’t be a writer. All writers were middle-class white men who ate olives every day and bathed in hummus. Writers were not people like me – women, women who had grown up eating pot noodles, women who couldn’t speak French. It took me a long time and a big leap in confidence to recognise that those weren’t actual entry requirements (unless you were French, which I wasn’t.)  I could be a writer if I wanted to be. No one was even trying to stop me!

So I did become a writer, and for the past dozen years or so, I have been a writer. But I want to be a better writer, and a more successful writer. And I want writing to be the centre of my life, not just something I do in my spare time. So, in September, I’m going to do an MA in creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University. If you google the course, you’ll see why I want to do it. The focus is on professionalism. There’s no sitting in a circle. It’s all dirty work. And it’s in Edinburgh, which is about as far away from my family as I can get without a passport.

I don’t need a course to learn how to write better. No one does. You learn by reading and writing. But this is an opportunity to make a massive commitment to my writing career, and I’m pretty excited about it. Big change is a big, good thing. Bring it on!

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the rock

When it comes to a choice between moving and staying, taking action or standing still, I have always favoured movement. Some people believe in the value of staying put, of being where you are and appreciating it. Maybe they feel that wherever they are is where they’re meant to be. Some people believe that everything is an illusion, so there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, and one must simply be. In that place where you are, maybe you can write or paint or simply watch and listen. It sounds so wonderful, so perfect. So final.

If everything is an illusion, then it doesn’t matter if you move or stay still. You could spend the next 40 years staring at a rock, or you could walk around the whole world, and there would be no real difference. There is no world, and there is no rock, so what does it matter which illusory thing you focus on? But if there is no difference, perhaps it would be more comfortable and sensible to choose the rock.

But some of us, we just can’t see things that way. We are not content with being. We want to become. Better, different, more. (And some of us get stuck, in cities and houses where we don’t belong, with people who are not our people, and we are seized with urgency: we must go now.) If something isn’t working, then let it go. Don’t stay because you’re stuck. Pull yourself up by the roots, start again.

In writing, though, I’ve been trying to cultivate a different way of being. Sticking with it. Sitting with it, even though the natural urge is to move on. I love to start new things! The feeling of starting a new story is so shiny. Short stories are great because you stay just long enough to get the gist, then you move on. And novels are so long. You have to stay in one place for a long time, and just sit there. Staring at the rock. It’s just a big grey rock. The challenge is to see that it is flecked with silver, that it has faces and shadows, that it has history. The challenge is to see that the rock contains the illusion as completely as anything else, including the whole rest of the world.  And then to just keep sitting, keep writing, and keep hoping you haven’t made a terrible mistake.

 

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my god they’re alive i tell you

Some of my characters have started talking to me, in my head. This has never happened to me before. In fact, I used to think this was a totally made-up thing that writers claimed happened to them as a way of trying to explain how they gave their characters words and stories. All a bit silly, I thought. But it turns out, I was the silly one, because here they are. Talking. In my head.

Having voices in your head is not something to shout about, unless you’re a writer or can become a writer in the time between admitting to the voices and your concerned friends and family staging an intervention. It’s actually a fairly odd experience. I’ve heard voices before, but they’ve always been some variation of mine; even the disturbing or distressing voices have always been recognisably mine. Having someone else’s voice in your head, telling you their story – well, that’s just weird.

I know that these characters are my creations, and that what they think is what I’ve created them to think, so their voices are really my voices, after all. But they’re not! Both things are true at once. Silly to try to understand it. Better to just listen and write it all down.

 

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bliss

The internet is depressing. I know so much stuff right now that I really wish I didn’t. Every morning I wake up to stories of economic disaster, poverty, death, systemic violence against females, war, injustice… It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world, more that I don’t want to be immersed in the worst of it from morning til night. A part of me actually feels guilty for not spending 100% of my time staring this stuff in the face, as if that would change any part of it, or help me, or anyone. It just makes me bloody miserable, that’s all.

The other depressing thing about the internet is the fact that it provides an infinitely deep pool of mindless distractions, perhaps to counterbalance the constant stream of bad news and misery. So you read the news and blogs about what terrible things are happening, and it’s so awful you have to go and stare at pictures of cute kittens for half an hour, just to give you the energy to face the rest of the day.

Before I had broadband internet access, I never once went to the library to look at pictures of cats. If you had told me then that I would one day spend literal hours of my life reading articles about films I had no intention of ever seeing, or that I’d seek out and watch a video about how pencils are made, I would have laughed in your face. Actually, that pencil video is pretty interesting. But the point remains.

A while ago, I paid money for a program (Freedom) which enables me to turn off my internet and stops me from turning it back on until I’ve finished my work. That is a great program, but seriously? What kind of weak-minded person has to be physically restrained from checking facebook? When she’s supposed to be doing her life’s work? There is clearly something wrong with me.

So I’ve decided to take drastic measures, and ditch broadband. I’m moving cities soon, and whatever kind of new place I find myself living in, it’s not going to have constant internet access. I reckon that if I have to buy a cup of coffee every time I want to check my emails, my internet use is going to become a lot more focused and efficient. Either that, or I will become a caffeine-crazed, broke, non-writing writer, who spends all her time in cafes looking at lolcats and having palpitations. I’m willing to take my chances.

 

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oddments

1. Last night, a silvery-blue Labrador was running through my dreams. I told his person, “I love all your dogs, but him! He wrenches at my heart.” I made a motion, like I was wringing out a towel. I really loved that dog.

2. Grief never goes away. You just push it deeper into your heart. I think that’s the human condition. Until we find a cure for death, we’ll carry on with this doomed loving.

3. I’m writing every day. It’s hard to make a routine work. It’s natural for people to avoid routines, especially when their days are timetabled and there’s hardly any time left over for people and trees and dogs. But I’m writing every day.

4. Once upon a time, about seven years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought a terrible and confusing thought. This afternoon, I finally realised what it really meant, and how my mistaken understanding had led me so far away from where I was supposed to be. I saw it all clearly, in a flash of inspiration… and I laughed. What else can you do?

 

 

 

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the beautiful ones

I haven’t written for a while. I haven’t done much at all. I get up in the morning, when it’s just about still the morning, and sit for a while. My head hurts and I feel so tired, like I could sleep for a thousand years. After a while, maybe an hour or so, I decide I could make breakfast. So I make breakfast, and I eat breakfast, and I cry. I cry because it is awful to be able to eat breakfast without my dog sitting by my side, looking up at me with hopeful eyes, drooling onto my knee. I don’t know how to get through the days without him.

He wasn’t ever my dog, really, but he needed me. I wasn’t his owner, but his owner wouldn’t walk him, play with him, fuss him, love him – and I would. I did. We had so many games together. I taught him to leap up six feet in the air. He could do backflips and long jumps. We would play hide and seek – I’d hide in the kitchen, and he’d come looking for me, then I’d leap out and chase him. We would walk five or six miles a day in the woods or the park. He liked to walk in the long grass, gently nosing his way through. He was a little nervous, very greedy, a bit too keen on muddy puddles. He was a good dog.

Over the years, we grew more and more attached to one another. He became my dog, and I became his person. It fell to me to decide the hour of his death. That was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, and I’m pretty sure I got it wrong. It was too soon. It was traumatic.

I don’t think I really understood how much we belonged to each other until I had to let him go. I am bereft, I’m grieving. I’m angry, because I didn’t choose to have a dog at all – I felt I had no choice. His owner should have been the one to love him, care for him, in the end to make the decision to let him go. They should have the responsibility, the pain and guilt, not me. But I am the one who loved him – so it had to be me. He was mine, not because I bought him, rescued him, owned him, but because I loved him. I don’t think I ever experienced unconditional love in my whole life, except with a dog. He didn’t care what I looked like, if I could write, if I had holes in my shoes, or a bad attitude. He wanted to hang out with me all the time, play games and have fun. It was simple. (It was love.)

After he died, I went for a walk to our usual places. It was pouring with rain. I was crying so hard that I couldn’t get my breath. I pretended he was with me, walking next to me. I spoke to him, how I had always spoken to him, calling him back to me, telling him I was there next to him. (“It’s all right, I’ve got you.”) My heart was breaking, splintering into pieces. It was all an accident, me and my dog – we weren’t meant to belong to one another at all. This should have been somebody else’s story. But I’m glad it was me. It hurts, and I am so lonely, but only because I loved him so. For all my heart is broken, I’m glad it was me.

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no cigarillo

Happy to report that the short story I entered for the mslexia short story competition was one of fifty that were shortlisted this year. It didn’t get placed. But given that there were over 2000 entries, and that this is mslexia we’re talking about – one of the biggest writing magazines with some of the highest standards – it’s not too shabby.

It’s not good enough, though. It’s encouraging, and tells me I’m getting closer to achieving some of my goals – but I am impatient. And competitive. I want to win. And I want it to happen NOW.

I guess the trick is to let those feelings motivate me to improve, work harder, reach more of my potential as a writer. I feel like I’m on the edge of making a leap forward, leveling up somehow, but then I’ve felt that way for a while. For a while I got frustrated about it, wondering what was holding me back, or what I was holding back from my work. But that way of thinking is too self-critical; it just makes everything harder. I prefer to think that things take the time they take. My writing will get better, but I can’t force it. All I can do is stay willing, and keep working.

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disturbed by her song

I am currently reading ‘Disturbed by Her Song’ by Tanith Lee ‘writing as and with Esther and Judas Garbah’. Beautiful, beautiful, as is so much of Lee’s writing. Why this woman doesn’t have a deal with a major publishing house is a total mystery. Thank goodness for small presses such as Lethe Press, who are publishing some of Lee’s considerable back catalogue.

This is the first work of Lee’s I’ve read where she claims to be channelling the stories of two other writers, who in fact are creations of her own imagination. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I’m wondering if I could steal it for my own writing.

What interests me is whether I could imagine or create a writer who is better than me. A writer who is more disciplined, more rigorous, more poetic, more talented than I am. A writer who never gets blocked would be good; someone who thinks nothing of churning out a thousand brilliant words every day. If I could create such a writer in my own imagination, could I then become that writer whenever I needed to? And if I could do that, would I be that writer all the time? Would I ever want to be the writer I am now?

Essentially, I’m wondering if I can create a brilliant writer to murder me and take my place.

Maybe I’m just having a weird day. You should go and buy all Tanith Lee’s books now.

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wild things in suits

When Max grew up he became a Financial Consultant, a rather astute and clever one, and he made a lot of money and bought a bloody nice house.

Now, when he shut his bedroom door and the forest grew, and he sailed through a day and through a night, and in and out of weeks, to the place… to that place, he found it all a little bit infra dig. He was King of the Wild Things, and a King can rule, so Max said: “All of you! Be quiet! I have a headache.”

And the Wild Things tiptoed clumsily around him, and grunted quietly, and all the while Max thought Kingly thoughts until finally he said: “There is to be no more Wild Rumpus! You Wild Things must Grow Up and Get a Job!”

Because Max was the King of the Wild Things, and they loved him so, they all sat down on the deck of Max’s white yacht, and sailed in and out of weeks to Max’s bedroom.

When they got there, Max had his Savile Row Tailor come over and set up the Wild Things with nice suits. The Wild Things complained and said the suits were itchy, and the Savile Row Tailor complained and said the Wild Things were bitey, but eventually the job was done and the Wild Things looked a lot less rude. Haircuts and manicures followed, and by the end of the day, Max felt satisfied and gave all the Wild Things a job. Mostly they worked as salesthings for Max’s Financial Consultancy.

It should have been a good life, but the Wild Things weren’t happy. They missed the Wild Rumpus. They missed their juicy jungle home. One night they got drunk and totalled Max’s BMW, and left childish messages on his girlfriend’s answering machine.

Max punished the Wild Things with a strong telling off, but things only got worse. Now when potential customers turned them away from their doorsteps, the Wild Things wrenched their front doors off the hinges and smashed up their houses. They roared instead of whispered, let their hair and their claws grow, chased dogs and ate whole raw chickens in the supermarket aisles.

Max’s life was totally ruined.

Even the Wild Things said he was no longer fit to be King. And the next time Max sailed, through a day and a night, and in and out of weeks, to the place where the Wild Things were, they showed him their terrible claws and rolled their terrible eyes and gnashed their terrible teeth, and Max felt scared and could not look them in the eyes.