Almost another teaching year!

Well - it's almost the beginning of a new teaching year and I'm making my teaching resolutions.

1. Anything done on line, from emails to facebook statuses and IMs can lead to communication misunderstandings. I'm going to try harder than ever this year to make all my communications with students crystal clear.

2. Students - like everyone - suffer anxiety about submitted work. This year I'm trying harder than ever to complete marking within a fortnight from submission date. This, of course, only works with assignments that are submitted on time.

3. I'm always urging students to read widely, attend writing and reading events, take themselves on artist's dates and generally immerse themselves in a reading and writing world. This year I'm urging myself to do all these extra curricula activities as well. It's very easy to feel swamped by work - particularly online work as it oozes over to evenings and weekends - you don't close the office door at 5.00 pm and go home. Sometimes, however, that swamped feeling is actually relieved by going off and doing something for your writing self - and that's what I intend to do this year.

4. Use the audio facilities on the Blackboard more - it's fabulous being able to leave voiceboards and podcasts and I was delighted when I discovered how easy they were to set up and use. But my enthusiasm waned as the year got underway and time seemed to vanish. This year I hope to post voiceboards and podcasts more regularly.

5. Explain more clearly how I teach - and how that teaching might change throughout the year as I expect more from students - this is related to Resolution One but I think it needs a separate resolution as it's an area that I don't think is always clear in the online environment.

6. Keep up my own writing! All teachers in the Professional Writing and Editing worlds struggle for a balance between their teaching profession and their writing profession. It's very easy to lose the writing self in the teaching self, but I'm working on two major projects this year and I can't afford to lose sight of them.

7. Keep up with blogging - I'd like to use this blog and the picture book blog to post extra exercises for you, as well as alert you to events, books or information about writers you might find interesting. Again, the year starts off with great intentions, but during crucial times - usually the marking season - the blogs tend to drop off. I hope this year is a little different.

Welcome brand new teaching year - and here's to making it an uber one!

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!