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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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making strange

Reading Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet was an incredible experience. I read it in an afternoon, sitting in the kitchen with the dog asleep at my feet, and rain beating against the window. Not that I was aware of my surroundings for long. The voices in those pages spoke directly to me, called me into their world, and I was drawn completely inside – or rather outside, or elsewhere: this beautiful dark rough nature.

This book is an evocation of feeling, it compels the reader to inhabit the language and be overtaken by it. Nothing happens for the sake of show in Garner’s writing, but each image is organic, profoundly simple, dense with meaning, mysterious, and true. His magic is steeped in physical history, in the landscape, in the intimate connection between humans and the land we live from. The knowledge passed down through generations, which encompasses the true nature of the material, and works with it in precise, sympathetic, patient, intuitive ways. Crafting yourself so you can do the work without fear.

Garner’s craft is fluid, natural, timeless. His craft is to find the seam of magic running deep under everything. His infallible mastery of language is necessary in order to bring these old true stories back from the mists of time.

In 1999, Garner gave a brilliant speech in which he talked about what language is for and how it works:

Unless words are metaphor, they are dead. You will find this wherever you come across a jargon, which is a valid construct stripped of ambiguity in order to communicate matters precisely, simply and beyond misunderstanding. The words are not elegant and have no literary value. They serve, but never dictate.

What we need to follow, then, is the ambiguous, the strange, the nonsensical. There is no urgent need to worry about making sense. What we must do is make strange.

A work of art is a dream. For all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous. A dream never says, “You must”, or, “This is truth”. It presents an image. To grasp its meaning, we must let it shape us as it shaped the writer. Then we also understand the nature of his experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the unconscious, where we are not lost in the isolation of consciousness, but where all are caught in a common rhythm that allows the individual to communicate feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole.

This connection to one another, deep in the heart of this dream, where all is strange and obscure — is where we find the hidden magic of our lives. And that’s what art is for, to serve that connection and to increase its vibrancy and power.

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the opposite problem

I’ve neglected this blog a lot recently, and I’m not quite sure why. I enjoy writing posts here and talking to all of you who comment here and on facebook and elsewhere.  I think sometimes I just don’t really want to do the things that I enjoy doing, including writing. Sometimes I just want to feel the way I feel when I don’t do those things. It’s a different way of relating to the world.

Perhaps it is simply that I have grown comfortable with being alone, not really sharing much with others. Many people I know are deathly afraid of their loneliness. But I have relaxed into it as I’ve gotten older, and I have the opposite problem these days, that I sometimes fear connection with others. For me, it is so terribly painful to be misunderstood, to not be known. I guess that is a kind of loneliness, too, now that I think about it.

Of course I like to think that my inner life is more real and full of depth and meaning than any interaction with others.  You have to think like that in order to become a writer, and being a writer, you have to talk about it as though it makes you somehow special, when perhaps any introvert will feel the same way. It becomes more comfortable to be alone, to try to contain yourself and all your worlds inside your own body.

I think that when a way of being becomes safe and comfortable, it is time to change. Perhaps even to destroy, annihilate, devastate and abandon! If not, we get stuck in a ‘safe place’ with our writing, and we fail. We are too scared to throw it all out and start again. But creativity is always yin/yanging with destruction. True artistry does not spring from balanced contentment, but is the phoenix that is born from the flames as the old world burns to ashes. I’d really love to write that sentence in a less pretentious way, but there it is, that’s exactly what I want to say right now. Change or die, people. Change or die.

 

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an end and a beginning

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding

Something I learned about writing this week is that when I write what I love to write, it becomes a much greater and more beautiful thing to do. (Whether it is more beautiful to read is another matter!)

I am – I have come to know – the sort of writer who can spend hours over one sentence, putting everything into balance. T.S. Eliot’s notion of the right sentence is precisely what I am striving for in my writing. It is not a case of writing what you know, or writing from your wildest imagination, but of writing exactly what you mean, or as close as you can get. That is authenticity.

I can write very fast when I want to. I wrote my first, failed attempt at a novel very fast indeed, in a matter of weeks. I loved writing that way – I felt so productive! It was useful, too. I needed to know what it felt like to write that number of words, to write a story that big. But it was a terrible attempt at a novel. Terrible. Awful. It had no soul, and it didn’t mean anything, or the meaning was so obscured by the dreadful writing that my courage failed at the thought of trying to fix it. So I know that, for me, it takes time and craft to find what’s true and worthwhile in my writing. By craft, I mean only what is quoted above: the balancing of words and sentences and scenes and chapters, one against another, until they are right. For me, that is a slow, careful, thoughtful, insanely difficult business.

Instead of trying to write more! and write faster! I am trying to write less, and write more slowly. It is a strange feeling to be making myself slow down at a time when I feel terribly unproductive. All other writers in the world appear to work faster, harder, and more successfully than I do. But I have learned that comparing myself to other writers is a surefire way to mess my head up. I eschew all writing advice, all rules, all guidelines. The only knowledge you can bank on is that which you learn through your own experience. That which you know to be true, because it is written in blood, tears, scars, years – that is truth you can depend on. No one can help you with that.

 

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don’t listen to the voices

As a child, my creativity was not exactly nurtured and encouraged. Attempts at art were met with laughter (“What is it supposed to be?”) When I tried to learn the violin, I was accused of aural torture (“It sounds like you’re trying to kill a cat.”) When I showed off my ‘ballet’ dancing, it was made clear just how wrong I was about my skill level there (“As graceful as a herd of elephants!”) As a child I didn’t understand that art has to be practised before it gets better. If I was bad at something, then I needed to stop doing it right away.

Literature and art were valued by and important to my family in some ways. But it seemed that the making of art was for other people.  I grew up believing that only geniuses and special people could be painters, dancers, musicians and writers. And since I wasn’t a genius or special, any of my attempts to paint, dance, play or write would be met with laughter and a sort of nervous contempt. Who do you think you are? People are just going to laugh at you. You’re not good enough.

No wonder, then, that it took me a long time to take my writing seriously and call myself a writer. I still reel at the amount of courage needed every time I say, “I’m a writer.”

No wonder, too, that sometimes self-criticism disables or diminishes my ability to write well. It is hard to devote time and energy to writing when in your head the voices are reeling off reasons why you’re so very wrong about everything.

It helps to say to myself, as often as possible, “You are a good writer.” I don’t say it as some kind of affirmation, thinking that if I say it enough times the universe will make it come true. I say it because it IS true. Speaking the truth gives me courage. Without courage, I can’t write.

I am a good writer. I do have talent. I have the ability to move people with my words. That is not a little thing. That is not something that can be discounted or thrown away. It’s a gift, one that I should be proud of. A gift that I should protect and nurture and grow.

To say I am good doesn’t mean that I think I am great, the greatest, a genius, a wonder. Just that I am good enough. Good enough to sit down to work and try to become better. Good enough to try. Good enough to use the gifts I have in order to make the world a better place, even if it’s just a tiny little bit. Good enough to tell myself: keep going. Good enough to shout down the voices that tell me I’m an idiot for trying, that I’m hubristic for wanting to be better, that I’m making a fool of myself.

So what if I make a fool of myself? The alternative is to never risk anything. I think that’s what frightened my family – taking those risks, looking stupid to others, being vulnerable to criticism and rejection. Yes, those things are hard as hell. And sometimes (often) you do get rejected, and you do get criticised, and you do feel stupid. It hurts. But it doesn’t kill you. What kills you is never using your gift, never exploring your talent, never following your heart. What kills you is giving up. So don’t give up.

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the long haul

I was talking on the phone today with a writer I’ve been mates with for a while. We were talking about how we might find ways to work together in the long-term future.  He mentioned how we were both in it for ‘the long haul’, having first met around ten years ago, when he was starting out as a writer, and I had been going for a few years. (And thought I knew it all. Wry smile.)

It was a reminder of just what it takes to be a writer. It’s a lifetime commitment. When you first start out, you think you’re going to get somewhere quickly. When you sell your first story or make your first film, you think, this is it! I’m on my way! But the reality is that it’s just a first step in your career, and it takes many many such steps to build a viable life around writing.

Often it’s a case of one step forward, two steps back. You can’t always maintain the momentum you build up with sales and stories and progress. Sometimes a big project can consume months and years. Sometimes you make a wrong turn, get involved with something that’s not right for you, have to backtrack and start all over again. There are periods of time when nothing seems to move at all, when you feel like you’re back at the beginning again, when you can’t see the progress you’ve made.  It’s possible to lose faith, to lose confidence, to lose support from people around you.

Through all of this, you just keep going. I don’t know why. Maybe, sometimes, you keep going just because you’ve got too much invested in it to stop. Maybe, other times, you feel this is what gives your life meaning. Sometimes there is joy in it. Often, you feel you are doing it in order to process hard lessons in life. When you stop and think about it, you realise that you do it because you have a passion or a compulsion to move people, the same way you were moved by words and books and images. You don’t do it for money, because there isn’t any. You don’t do it for fame. You don’t do it to see your name in print. The external rewards are too fleeting, too arbitrarily given, to be motivating in the long term. You do it because it’s who you are.

No writer worth their salt needs to be told not to give up. But we do need support. We need support from other writers who are also in it for the long haul; to be reminded that it is a long haul; that it is, in fact, a lifetime commitment that probably won’t ever bring massive worldwide success, but will keep giving all the secret, little, brilliant things it gives, for as long as we keep paying our dues.

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food for writers

Recently I’ve been preoccupied with a number of things that only tangentially relate to fiction writing. Except when in full inspired flow, I am not someone who does nothing but live and breathe writing day after day,  although sometimes I feel an almost irresistable pressure to be that person, as if only a perfect dedication to writing at the exclusion of all else could enable me to produce good fiction.

Despite this self-inflicted pressure, I actually believe the opposite is true. People who do nothing but write (if there are such people) are living in a very limited kind of a way. Intense experiences, such as having a job, a relationship, travelling, learning a skill deeply, grieving, loving, playing – all these are food to the soul. Being outside in nature, being in the endlessness of a moment where you completely forget yourself – this is the kind of nourishment every being requires in order to be creative and honest in the world.

As writers, we cannot allow ourselves to sit comfortably still for long. We must agitate our inner lives, else our writing will stagnate and become rotten. It is easy to become stuck in a phase of writing which once felt fresh and new, watching as the bright phrases and lovely sentences gradually harden and hollow out, until they are empty models of something that was once real. It is easy to pretend that you are still speaking with your true voice. Maybe you can fool others, too. But if that is your voice, why is it so hard to write? Why don’t you ever feel like you are flying anymore?

It is hard to break free from that rut and dig for something deeper and truer. What if no one likes it? No one buys it? What if it is not as good as what you’ve done before? What if you uncover truths that change your life, that disrupt your peace of mind? So you carry on playing with the dead. You become blocked. You can’t rewrite the old stories, and you can’t write the new ones either. You know you can’t go back and you haven’t found the courage to go forward.

It’s a place I have been a few times, that nowhere place of being ‘blocked’. I don’t think there is any way to force a passage through it. It takes as long as it takes. It takes whatever it takes. For me, that is usually a big change. Something wrenched from my heart. Knowing something that is hard to know. Burying something I have been trying to keep alive. It takes a certain amount of forgetting about writing, of walking in the woods, of playing, of grieving, of watching the colour of the sky, feeling the sting of snow on your face, being swept up and moved by waves of music.

Whatever you do to enrich your soul will enrich your writing. Sometimes your writing practice itself will nourish your soul. But sometimes your soul needs other deep and urgent care before you can write again.

 

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never say never

How do you know when it’s time to stop writing something? Is it when the very thought of it fills you with a sense of paralysing ennui? When you can’t imagine ever being interested in the characters? When the plot makes no real sense? When, after writing several drafts, you still have nothing more than one or two images that seem powerful to you – and no story, no emotion, no thrills?

Or should you never give up? Should you always finish what you started? Should you power on through, ignoring those feelings, ignoring the problems, just fighting to get to the end of it?

A lot of writers say you must ALWAYS finish what you start. I am not so sure. With this current project, I feel that when I started it, I had a particular idea in mind, and that idea has failed on a number of levels. It just wasn’t a good enough idea to sustain a whole novel. Plus, it was too directly autobiographical – writing it well means writing about myself in a way that no longer feels relevant or important to me. And at the same time I can’t get enough distance to see what I might change or how I could make it work better.

I have learned a hell of a lot from trying to write this story. But now I think it is time to put it away. Maybe next year, or the year after, I will dig it out again. Maybe then I will be able to see exactly where I went wrong and how I can put it right. But for now… it’s Sayonara baby.

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the time it takes

There’s this moment in the writing of a story, when you’ve written and rewritten, revised, edited, taken out all the extra words, and given your characters a few more things to do other than nodding their heads, shaking their heads, smiling and shrugging; there’s this moment where you think you have finished. Yay, you wrote a story! So you give it one more go over, correct your spellings, and send it off into the world.

About a year and a half later, you read your story again, and see all your clumsy sentences and all your mistakes. You realise that there is a way to resolve that nagging plot problem. You suddenly understand why that character does what she does. You see how easy it would be to rewrite that section of prose and make it say exactly what you failed to say the first time around.

Unfortunately, by this point, it’s very likely that you are reading your story in some magazine or book, which you have also encouraged all your friends and family to buy. Cringe-a-rama!

If you’re still holding on to that story – perhaps you couldn’t sell it, or maybe something didn’t feel quite right, and you never tried – you are now the luckiest writing piglet in the world. You get to revise the hell out of it, make it beautiful, and correct all those terrible mistakes you had no idea you were making at the time.

As much as we want to get published NOW and have people reading our stories RIGHT NOW, patience and slowness make stories better. I suspect this goes double or triple for novels, where there are so many more elements to fuck up, and so much more impatience to get the damn thing over and done with.

It’s reassuring to know how much we improve as writers, simply by continuing to turn up and write as often as we can. Even when you feel completely stuck, you are processing all that experience into wisdom, so that one day you can say to yourself, wow that is really a crappy story I wrote. I could write it so much better now.

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death and taxes and death

I really want to moan about doing my tax return: how hard it was; how utterly clueless I am; how I berate myself for not keeping neat and tidy records; and generally BOO HOO HOW I HATE MY LIFE YOU INLAND REVENUE OINKS. But I suppose complaining about doing your tax return is the same sort of thing that makes people laugh/spit when writers talk about ‘hard work’ and ‘labour’ and ‘toiling in the hot sun for hours on end with no water and just a crust of stale bread to chew on’. Which is more or less what I put under the earnings column.

I’d love to get an accountant to look after my tax return for me, but given the paltry amount of money I earn as ‘Georgina Bruce: Writer’, an accountant’s fee would probably sink me into some kind of reverse negative income debt spiral which ends with me, ten years down the line, arrested for outstanding payments of thousands of pounds, and carted off to the clink in tears whilst cardboard cut-out faces of tax accountants spin around my head in a hallucinatory circle, mocking smiles on their faces, the sound of their fiscally competent laughter ringing in my ears.

I did my tax return online. Every time I entered a number in one of the little boxes, no matter how I had checked and calculated and added it up, my heart was in my mouth. It seems eminently possible that one could commit some kind of grand fraud simply by clicking the wrong button. Really, they ought to add some extra options – as well as ‘yes’ and ‘no’, there should be ’50:50′ and ‘phone a friend’.

Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue makes the process just that bit more terrifying by providing ‘help’ pop-ups which are written by the same people who do the instruction booklets for self-assembly furniture. On Betelgeuse. When space-beings from another dimension recover the remains of our civilisation sometime in the distant/parallel future, the ‘help’ information from HMRC online filing will be used as evidence for some smug space-historian’s thesis that human beings were MONSTERS who completely deserved the terrible fiery destruction of their planet.