Another list of books ....

A good list for summer reading! I was delighted to see that my reading crush of the moment figures!

Read all about it!

The Slow reading movement - join today! I suggest you buy a notebook and record what you read, writing out interesting quotes and passages, contemplating the way a novel or story or poem is structured and what that structure means to you as a writer. Get into this habit and improve your own writing in leaps and bounds!

What have we lost?

I've been reading over the past couple of days - beginning with The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Jansson is better known internationally for her children's books chronicling the surprising adventures of the Moomin Family. The Summer Book, however, is regarded as a Scandavian classic - and with good cause. I'm not going to review it because I already have on my personal blog. But what stays with me after reading this book is the way Jansson makes what is unsaid as important as the actual conversations between the two central characters, Sophia and the Grandmother. Their interaction is subtly nuanced, the tensions and tendernesses resonate with their shared loss, but also with the reluctant knowledge that while Sophia is entering her life, the Grandmother is leaving hers.

I've also been re-reading Gerald Durrell's The Bafut Beagles. And while there may not be any immediate similarity between Jansson's quiet exploration of a shared summer and Durrell's far rowdier, crowded and eventful chronicles of animal collecting in West Africa, there actually is. It's a respect for language, a slower pace of writing and detailed observations of the surrounding world that gives both these books their authority.

It makes me wonder whether the contemporary emphasis on minimalism is really working for me as a writer. I'm going to spend some time over the next few months honing my own observation skills, extending my vocabulary and revising to strengthen images.

I suggest you join me in a holiday activity. Spend some time closely observing something you'd normally regard as ordinary - it could be new tulip leaves pushing their way out of the earth, or puppy antics or the way a member of your family concentrates. You might want to go further afield - take yourself on an observing excursion. Make notes. Then write a beautiful, measured page bringing your reader into the event or scene you've described. Revise it until each word is exactly the word you need. Consult your thesaurus. Consult your dictionary. Use at least one word you'd not normally use. Luxuriate in the slower pace.

Ask yourself afterwards whether or not you feel richer for the experience. Don't tell me it was 'awesome' or 'cool' or any other shorthand word!

Reading Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

and so I thought I'd quote some passages over the next few blog posts for you to ponder.

As every novelist has a style, so every novelist has conviction, which is a type of emotion, not an act of reason. It may take draft after draft to achieve a perfectly natural style. It also may take draft after draft to write with sufficient conviction. This conviction can be about anything - a specific theory of human nature, a particular analysis of a single incident, a simple certainty that the writer knows what is true and has to tell it....

The most basic conviction of every novelist from Lady Murasaki on, though, is that things are not as they appear; this conviction can be added to or modified in accordance with the novelist's particular perceptions. Of course, poets and dramatists frequently express the same conviction, but novelists must express it, because narrative point of view inherently delineates the contrast between what one person thinks and what others around him think. Literary artists who are driven by the feeling that appearances are deceiving and that they know what the truth really is are drawn to the novel for this very reason.

To think about: what is your conviction in the novel you are currently writing?

Mid-year blues

I think everyone in my household is suffering from mid-year blues. I feel as though I haven't yet got a handle on balancing my life-with-teenagers, teaching life and writing life. Guess which is suffering? Yes, you got it. The writing - because that has the quietest voice. Well, the quietest voice on a daily basis.

Teenagers are loud and pretty insistent in their demands - drive me here, please. Feed me now, please. Teach me to knit now, please. Come and see this. You'll love it. Let's have a dvd night together. Let's go out. Let's make a chocolate cake. Take me for a driving lesson, please.

These are all good things - and fun things (apart from the driving lessons which are exercises in facing death calmly). Teenagers should be heard - they won't stay teenagers.

My teaching life is equally demanding and loud - mark these assignments, answer the discussion boards, write these emails, participate in this meeting. There are good reasons for teaching which must be respected - and it's not all about the money.

My writing life whispers. You haven't been good to us. You have neglected us. We are sulking. It's easier to ignore this whisper. It's easy to say, well, never mind, you don't make much money, anyway. You didn't get shortlisted this year. You can wait.

But the whisper and the sulk are insistent. If they are ignored for too long, depression sets in. It's like a poison which spreads to everything - the teenagers, the teaching, the cooking - even the dogs. I become snappy and impatient. I become overwhelmed and lost. I lose focus, a sense of who I am, a sense of who I can be, a sense of purpose and most of all, a sense of joy.

So, this week I'm returning to the kind of schedule I used to keep when the kids were young and it was seemingly impossible to do anything that didn't involve strict routines. I'm returning to carving out an hour or an hour and a half, or even half an hour from my working day in which to honour writing self.

I'll begin by doing my morning pages a la Julia Cameron.

I suggest, if you have the mid-year blues, or are feeling overwhelmed by life and work, or underwhelmed by joy, you think about honouring your writing self.

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is an okay place to start. Or pick up a copy of Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. Set aside your writing time as strictly as you'd set aside eating or exercising time. Think of it as food for your soul or exercise for your writing muscles. Honour yourself as an artist. It's quite possibly less time that you'd spend watching television, or ironing, or checking out Facebook. You can do it. You're worth it.

Holiday exercies! - better late than never?

A standard plot introduces an outsider to a community - each shakes up the other. The community can be as small as a family or as large as a small town. Introduce a stranger to your community. What impact will they have, who will they influence - and will it be beneficial or detrimental?

This is as true for life writing, of course, as it is for fiction. What has happened in your own family when strangers have come into it. The strangers could be birth parents, in-laws, spouses, adopted children or foster children. For some people the stranger could even be a new baby.

Go on an artist's day - or do something new this holiday. Something you have never done. This could be as simple as eating a food you've never eaten, or learning a new skill. Even going to a new place can be refreshing and energising. Make a firm decision to refresh your writing self!

This holidays I made glass beads with my son - he bought a beginner's lampworking kit after watching people use them on YouTube. We went to my mother's place - she has the largest shed in the world - and learnt how to melt the glass around a thin steel rod coated with bead release. We learnt how to roll the glass in fritt (spelling?) and roll the bead on a graphite pad to shape it. It was so much fun doing something completely different. And, of course, it's a skill I can pass on to a character!

When you've done your new thing - write it up. If it's something new you've eaten, write about what it tasted like, what it smelt like and the texture. Think about the colour. How did you eat it and who, if anyone, was with you? Describe the setting. If you go somewhere new, do the same thing.

If you learnt a new skill, write it up twice - first notes on the skill - technical notes, so that if you ever do give it to a character, you're speaking with authority. Then write it up imaginatively - again, using all your senses. You might choose to do this by passing it on to a character.

Happy holidays. Oh, and check this out!

Isabel Allende

Has just published a new book - Island Beneath the Sea. 'With the violence, the mad wife and the torrid sex, the ingredients are all in place for a bosom-heaving blockbuster, but Isabel Allende brings to her storytelling another dimension altogether.' Dianne Dempsey, The Age.

Note if for your holiday reading if you enjoyed The Sum of Our Days!

new book

I've just read Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream: the Process of Writing Fiction. He's got great chapters on writing from the cinema of the mind and sensory detail, one of which I'll photocopy for next semester's resource book. Terrific book if you happen to see it on your local library system. I'd particularly recommend it to anyone contemplating novel writing or the advanced writing project.

Limited Third Person explained (hopefully!)

A lot of students managed to establish their limited third person viewpoint without taking advantage of that. Once you’ve established a viewpoint character, even if you’re going to alternate viewpoint character from chapter to chapter, you can give your reader direct access to their thoughts and feelings. This avoids unnecessary repetition of pronouns or your character’s name. It also leads you to less telling and more showing.

Here’s an extract from Christos Tsiolkas’ Slap. It’s told from the viewpoint of Rosie, the mother of the child who has been slapped. See how Tsiolkas establishes the viewpoint character and then speaks directly from her voice. Can you also please notice that this is told in the simple past but we it read as the fictional present. The immediacy is created in the writing, not by the tense.

…Hugo had already watched it [Finding Nemo] right through earlier in the day. It had become his favourite over the last few weeks and now she too almost knew it by heart. Sometimes she would pretend to be Dory to his Nemo. She wished he could be in the bath with her (except it would be too hot for him, the little fella). They could pretend to be Dory and Nemo, under the water, in the pretty sapphire world underneath the sea. She’d pretend to be Dory, forgetting everything he told her, trying not to giggle as Hugo got more and ore excited and frustrated.

Her eyes flung open. Damn. It was around lunchtime that she received the letter, just after she had come back from the park with Hugo. Rosie had gone pale as she read the dry words stating the date and time for the hearing to be held at the Magistrates Court in Heidelberg.

Submitting work

I am amazed at the number of students who don't actually read the assignment submission information and are still submitting work as .docx rather than .doc. If this was a magazine requesting submissions, you do realise that no matter how good your work was, it would simply not be opened by the editor and therefore not looked at, let alone considered, for publication.

I can't begin to emphasise how important it is for new, emerging and established writers to be able to read simple instructions. If you were applying for grants, for example, you would need to read the submission information very carefully - maybe twice. If you were unsure of any detail in that information, you would have to go to the grant website and see if it was available in a more comprehensible form. As a last resort, you might decide to phone the grants officer - but only as a last resort because you wouldn't want to look unprofessional.

If you are still unsure of how to submit .doc, rather than a .docx do what you would have to do as a professional writer - read the instructions and then, if all else fails, use an internet search engine so you can solve your problem!

Common errors made by new writers.

Sentences that begin with gerunds are often weak sentences as they are frequently in the passive voice:
check out this lesson in gerunds:
Check out dialogue tips and punctuation here.
Repeating monotonous sentence structures - there's a good example here of Stephanie Meyer's monotonous sentence structure.
Joining two independent clauses without using correct punctuation or sentence modifiers - here.
Over-reliance on adjectives and adverbs rather than verbs, which are the muscles of writing - this is simply a matter of going through your own work and highlighting adverbs and adjectives and seeing which ones you need.

Do go through your work with these problems in mind. Happy Easter!

Patrick Ness

I've just got back from hearing Patrick Ness talk at the local library. He is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy which has won such great acclaim, particularly in the world of young adult fiction. The first book of the Trilogy is The Knife of Never Letting Go.

There's a great review of the book here. Interesting, too, what Boyce says about cross-over fiction.

Thoroughly enjoyed watching another author strut his stuff. There were two school groups there and Ness engaged them with an easy, laid-back talk on writing and a clever demonstration on just how much life experience we all have that can be turned into fiction.

This reminded me of my Great Big List of Everything I Know exercise. Grab your writer's journal and begin a list of everything you know - start with at least fifty things:
I know how to be a daughter, a mother, an only child, a wife, a girlfriend. I know how to be betrayed and how to betray. I know how to ride a horse and a bike, and how to ride pillion on a motorbike. I know how to spin yarn, knit and crochet. I know how to sew. I can darn socks. I can make soup, bread and pasta. I can throw a pot on a wheel. I can say I love you in French and sweetheart in Spanish. I know how to train a dog and how to look after tropical fish. I know how to get my own way, most of the time. I know how to go camping, if I have to. I know how to mix a good cocktail. I know how to make risotto. I know how to make a pizza from scratch and how to make a pizza oven. I know how to send a child overseas without crying at the airport. I know how to say goodbye to someone who is dying. I know how to be a step-mother. I know how to give birth and how to sit in a hospital with a sick, maybe dying child. I know how to argue - with lovers, husbands, children as well as people I don't know. I know how to surrender. I know how to write a haiku. I know how to juggle finances and overspend. I know how to pack books for a move. I know how to pack up an entire house for a move, but I never do it properly. I know how to price secondhand books and how to sell them. I know how to put together a rare book catalogue. I know how to research and all that entails - footnotes, bibliographies, tumbling piles of books on the library desk and hours spent chasing tails down the rabbit hole that is Google. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a bad friend. I know how to end a friendship. I know how to be loyal. I know how to tell a lie that will go undetected.

Wow! What a lot of material I have that I could use in my own writing! (Pity I'm not doing any at the moment...)

The Word Tree

flowers again! This Saturday, 6th March @ 3.00pm, $3.00/5.00. Our featured reader is David Gibley from Wagga Wagga. Should be a treat. Burrinja Cafe, Burrinja Gallery, cnr Matson Drive and Glenferm Road, Upwey.

Found a great article on memoir writing

Or rather my mother did. So I snaffled it and photocopied it. Here's a quote:

Style is one way to corral unruly memories and, at the same time, acknowledge that the most interesting thing about them may be that they do not cohere. In the 20th century, Marcel Proust provides the model for this way of writing an autobiography, so that many of the best memoirs read as much like modernist novels as acts of self-revelation. Nabokov's Speak, Memory is among his most intricately patterned and deceptive books. Its motifs recur with exquisite tact and timing; a particular slant of summer light, a child holding his father's hand in the park. But despite its perfection, the pattern fails to reconcile the author's idyllic Russian childhood and his exiled adult self. Or take Roland Barthes's peculiar critical study of his own life and career, entitled Roland Barthes, in which he reflects on fragments of his past: family photographs, medical records from his time in a TB sanatorium, lists of his likes and dislikes. 'It must all be considered,' he writes, 'as if spoken by a character in a novel.'

'In Memoriam' by Brian Dillon, in 1000 Books to Change Your Life, Time Out.

Today - just those phrases - a particular slant of summer light, a child holding his father's hand in the park - made me tumble back to some of my first memories.

Tell me a story - who held your hand in sunlight? How old were you? Where were you? What were you wearing? What were you called and who called you? How did you feel?

500 - 1000 words - post your stories as doc attachments to:
catherinebATgippstafeDOTvicDOTeduDOTau
Best entry wins a small prize! (This will not be money, don't get too excited!)
This competition is open to all blog readers, not just gippstafe students. Make sure your entry is your own original work, has your name and address on it and does not exceed the word limit. Closing date: 25th March 2010. Good luck everyone!style="font-weight:bold;">

A new year begins -

Well, okay - we've had the New Year and the Chinese New Year and now it's the Teaching New Year - I think some celebration should mark this beginning - fireworks? champagne? No? Writing resolutions! Yes!

A number of students, a great number of students, have listed procrastination as one of the bad habits they have, time to write as something they lack - or will to write when there is a little time. What are ways to combat these very much self-inflicted but nonetheless real problems all of us grapple with?

Let's start with procrastination. There's a great tendency among all the writers I know to do anything other than the writing itself. We find ourselves making pickles, ironing the sheets and tea towels or cleaning the bath with a toothbrush - anything rather than sit down to a day's writing work. Deadlines speed some people up, but paralyse others.

One way I've found useful in stalling my habit of procrastination is to actually reward myself when I sit down to write. So, for example, I'll select a stack of cds to listen to - but only when I'm sitting at my desk writing. That can be incentive enough some days.

Timing your writing to coincide with the completion of a different task or event can work, too - I used to write while my children, then toddlers, watched Playschool. To this day, the music from Playschool makes my fingers twitch! For a long time I wrote every day after I walked the dogs - and that produced a definite start time for me. It was a good habit to form because the act of walking the dogs, allowed me to do a lot of pre-writing thinking and that meant that by the time I arrived home, I already had ideas about what I wanted to write.

Sometimes it's just simply making writing the first thing you do every day. Julia Cameron recommends this in her book, The Artist's Way - she calls this writing 'morning pages'. This can be difficult, particularly if you have small children, but the extra effort can reap benefits.

If it's simply too hard to write every day, you can try designating a particular day of the week your writing day - many people teaching within Professional Writing and Editing try to do this - it may seem hard to stick to this, particularly if you're working or parenting full-time, but to carve out even a regular afternoon a week is something. Then, for the rest of the week, you can make quick notes, jottings that will keep you on track when your writing day comes around.

It can help to have a writing buddy - you can make a writing date. Go somewhere together to write - a cafe, gallery or a park. You don't even need to share your writing at the end, if you don't choose to - though sometimes having someone's instant feedback can be gratifying.

If you live somewhere more remote, you could make an online writing buddy - maybe someone from this course. At the end of a writing session, you simply email your writing buddy - a message could be as short as 'I've done it! How about you?'

Creating a writing date for yourself can also be useful - again, this need not be anywhere special - sitting down in a park for half an hour, or a food hall, or even on a train, providing you use that time to write and observe can present you with interesting and unusual material - sometimes simply because you're out of your normal place of working. Local libraries often have desks for people to work on - and some (this could be a trap!) even offer wifi.

Try to treat your writing time as a joyful job. Don't answer the phone, if you can avoid it. Don't answer emails. Don't log onto the TAFE blackboard. Tell children, partners, parents and friends that you will be available only after you've done your work. Usually people are pretty good about this, particularly if you give them an actual time you'll be finished. Some writers I know offer visual clues to their families - they wear industrial earmuffs or work behind a closed door with a Keep Out sign.

All these might sound difficult but what you need to remember is that you won't ever be a writer without writing! So - writing resolutions, anyone?

I'm planning to work on short material this semester - just play around with some ideas I have, revise some material as well. My writing life will be curtailed by the hours I'm teaching but I'm carving two regular writing times out of my teaching week - I'm putting aside Thursday afternoons and Fridays for writing - or at least a part of each of these days. I'm also planning a regular artist's date with myself - whether that's catching up with fellow writers or visiting the gallery or a market - all with my notebook in hand.

Write on!