Shut up and Write

It felt like the first day of school for me this morning. Dressed in my Pilates clothes, I was off to my Shut up and Write group, then to Pilates, then to meet Farmdoc for coffee at our regular coffee place. This was my routine last year but I’ve had a long break over the summer holidays. Like my youngest granddaughters today was my first day back.

Have you heard of Shut up and Write? It’s a worldwide movement that began in San Francisco and is particularly popular amongst academic writers, but works for any kind of writing. The idea is to meet in a cafe with a group of people and a timer and just write. There’s opportunity for socialising but it’s amazing how productive you can be in the company of others.

We use the Pomodoro Technique, which breaks the time up into blocks. In the breaks between blocks you’re not supposed to talk about what you’re working on (though sometimes we do). Most people find that when they return after the short break they can get to a deeper level in their writing. That certainly happens for me.

We meet at 9.15, order coffee, chat for 15 minutes, write for 25 minutes, break for a five minute chat and then write for another 25 minutes. There’s usually a bit more chat at the end, sometimes another 25-minute writing session for those who don’t need to rush off.

We’ve experimented with different venues – a couple of different cafes and a meeting room in a hotel – but the café where we meet at the moment suits us best. They know our coffee orders and don’t seem to mind us spending an hour or so taking up precious table space. They’ve also grown used to our bursts of chatter, stretches of silence.

The time we met in a hotel, the young male manager set us up in a room to ourselves around a large boardroom table, but then tried to engage us in conversation about what we were doing when we were clearly wanting to concentrate and write in silence. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have been so intrusive and condescending  (‘We’re all working hard here, aren’t we?’) if we’d been a group of men. Just a thought.

The Pomodoro technique works so well for me that I’ve begun trying to use it at home too. In the five minute breaks I get up, maybe do a few stretches, maybe make a cuppa or get a glass of water, maybe do some chores.

These Monday morning Shut up and Write sessions set me up for the writing week. I use them for all sorts of things. This morning I spent the first block writing this. Sometimes I write in my journal. Mostly I work on my novel, which is what I did in my second block.

Conversations are short, we’re different ages and stages and working on all kinds of projects, but we have in common that writing is important to us. When I spot these people around town I feel connected to them but also to the life of the town. It's the beginning for me of a sense of community here in this new place.

Noah and the Dove in the Year of Reading

Did you know that this year is the Year of the Farmer and The Year of Reading? Got us here at Onemilebridge covered, coming and going.

In the midst of all the excitement about Wombat Ben I just found out that my short story, 'By Night I Swim', took out second prize in the Fellowship of Australian Writers National Short Story Award. How great is that!

Am I allowed to say that I really like that story? Well I do. I've been tinkering with it ever since I began it on a visit to Daughter Number Four in San Francisco four years ago.

I won first prize in this competition in 2004 with a story called 'Signs I Don't Understand' that took me only a few months to write - quick for me. That story is set in Melbourne and starts when my narrator - coincidentally called Vivienne - throws an overcoat on over her pyjamas and sets off on a midnight dash to the corner store to buy a chocolate bar. She is picked up by twin clowns who insist that she accompany them to get a drink or two. Before she finally returns to bed there's a scuffle in a lane involving a gun and she's arrested.

The judges thought that story contained passion and joy and even a little chaos.

This current  story is totally different. It's about a girl, Rosie, whose mother has dumped her at the family farm while she heads back to the city. The farm, run by Rosie's uncle, is a sad place. The grandparents are dead, as is the uncle's baby son, and the aunt has left.

No ghosts or poltergeists inhabit the house. The opposite: when you put something down, it stays there forever, like the rusty tractor cobwebbed in the barn, my grandmother’s jam-making pot pushed to the back of the kitchen range, my grandfather’s felt hat, tide-marked with sweat and shaped to the fit of his head, left on the nail on the porch, above his gaping gumboots. One by one the people of my life have slipped away, leaving behind only their impressions in photographs, and possessions they no longer need.

It will be interesting to read the judges' comments on 'By Night I Swim'. The story was inspired in part by a small farm across the road from us here in Mole Creek. Ian, a nice elderly man, lived alone there in the farm house he'd grown up in. I began to imagine what the rooms of that cottage, inhabited only by that bachelor, would contain. I sent Rosie and her wild mother to find out for me.

Ian moved into a nursing home and the farm was sold, the house renovated. It looks adorable now but I'm glad I saw it before, so I could feed my imagination with it.

I used to consider myself a short story writer, but over the last eight years I've written and rewritten and rewritten three book-length projects. There've been several articles too, but it's been mainly those books: my memoir, a young adult novel and an adult novel.

Writing a novel can feel endless, and very isolating. There's no real way to check your progress. You're there alone, adrift in a frail craft on a choppy sea. I'm finally nearing the end of work on my adult novel, By the Book, now. I sent out  'By Night I Swim' like Noah's dove  — to see if there was anyone out there.

Turns out there was, and my dove has flown back to me not with a twig, but a prize of a different and very welcome kind.

Doing It

Do you listen to podcasts? I do. I listen to them every chance I get - while I walk to pilates or to the market, while I'm on the tram, while I'm watering the vegetable garden.

One of my favourites is Radiolab, a podcast that sets out to explore the boundary between science, philosophy and the human experience. The episode I just listened to is called 'Help!' and it looks at how we might control those forces inside us that are so strong that they seem to come from outside. Some of these are bad, like addictions, others are good, like creative insights, but what they all have in common is that they feel uncontrollable.

What particularly interests me in the programme is the way people manage these forces as they apply to writing, both negative elements, such as procrastination or being stuck or blocked, and also positive elements, like inspiration.

The problem seems to be that one part of you knows what it wants to do but another stronger part is resistant. The answer the programme offers is to make a deal with yourself that forces you into the behaviour you need, arranging things so you can't compromise. The question that then arises is what kind of deal could you make with yourself when the words don't want to come? How would you force your own back against the wall?

It seems to be about now versus later, with the now part of the brain being much stronger. About tying the long term plan into a present tense battle, thus giving it an emotional prominence. I guess that's what people mean when they say they work better with a deadline.

The neurologist and prolific author, Oliver Sacks, says that when he couldn't start writing his first book because he was so stuck, he gave himself the ultimatum that if he hadn't written the book in ten days he would commit suicide.The result of this was that after months of stewing and not doing anything he suddenly felt he had a 'wonderful engine' inside him that was pulling things out of him and putting them on the page, as though the book was being dictated, and he managed to finish the book a day early.

That's a bit extreme for most of us though.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, talks about speaking directly - bargaining even - with the muse. In order to live a lifetime of creativity without cutting your ear off (or threatening yourself with suicide) she recommends learning to talk to Inspiration, as though the source is outside you, to establish negotiating distance, to set terms and boundaries.

She refers to that old saying, 'Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.' If you consistently show up at the page, sooner or later Inspiration will join you.

All this has great resonance for me. I'm naturally very lazy. To force myself to work I mainly use a mixture of some pretty strong self-talk ('If you don't write you're not a writer, and that's all there is to it.' 'You're not getting any younger and you may develop Alzheimer's.') and the deadline of my regular workshop group meetings. 

I also talk to my book, write it letters, beg it to help me. I always feel that the work exists somewhere and it's up to me to persist until I make contact with it. It's nice to know I'm not crazy - or at least not alone in my craziness.

How about you? Are you naturally self-disciplined? Is any of this even a problem for you? What methods work for you in getting yourself to sit down and write?

Whatever your work habits, the podcast is well worth listening to, I think.

Room With a View

I've turned my desk around so that instead of facing this:

it now faces this:

I know. Crazy, eh. But the trouble with a passive solar house is that in winter the sun comes in the north-facing windows and I had to keep my blind pulled down all the time. So there was no point in having a view I couldn't see anyway.

I quite like this set up, with nothing to distract me. I'll see how it works. Maybe in summer, when the eaves shade the house, I might move the desk back to where it was.

Where do you work? Do you prefer a view, or do you find it distracting?

Most visual artists I know listen to music - sometimes quite loudly - while they work. When I'm at home I need silence but when I write in coffee shops I like the music and the buzz of sound. I find that somehow it helps me concentrate. Often I'll listen to something to get me in the mood and then turn it off. Or I'll listen to the same piece of music over and over again. What about you? What do you prefer, or doesn't it make any difference to you?

Winter Solstice

Today's the shortest day of the year, which is cause for celebration at Onemilebridge. Now the days will gradually grow longer, and the longer the day the more chance we have of absorbing enough solar energy to run our house. We've run the generator a few times already.

I haven't posted on my blog for ages because I've been writing. That's right, I've been too busy writing to write. I've moved back into the novel I completed before I started my memoir. This is actually the third draft and it's definitely improved in this version I think. In the last draft I dispensed with the first five or so chapters and started later in the action. This time around I've kept that structure. It's meant feeding in a lot of earlier events as flashbacks, and that calls for a delicate touch. I have to take care not to overload the story and not to introduce the flashbacks in a clunky fashion. It's hard work and takes a lot of concentration.

As well as that, in this draft I'm telling the story from the first person point of view. I thought I'd try it and then if it didn't work I'd revert back to third person, but in the meantime I'd have learned a lot about my character. As soon as I made the change the novel sprang to life, as though Charlotte, my heroine, had been patiently waiting for me to come and rescue her.

I'm not sure how far I'll get and even if this is the final draft, but I'm obsessed with it for now and that's a lovely feeling. I love it when my writing takes over my life - demanding time and brain room.

Nevertheless life goes on around the farm and there is always work to do there too. One of the first lessons I learned when I moved to the country was that when a tree falls it will always fall across the nearest fence.


After the recent wild weather we went searching for trees that had come down. Fortunately the driveway was clear but we found a tree had landed on the fence between a patch of bush on our land and the holding paddock. Farmdoc has taken his chainsaw in to be sharpened before he begins the repair job.

And this week we begin daily feeding out of hay to the stock. In one paddock we're experimenting with round bales that we buy from our neighbour. Each round bale is the equivalent of 15 square bales and if it works this approach will mean less hay carting in summer and less feeding out in winter.

The trouble is that goats are greedy, and rough feeders too, and so far it looks like they can eat their way through a round bale in ten days, leaving a lot of wasted hay, trampled and excreted on, in their wake. Looks like the easy way out might not work. Pity.

The City of Food, Culture and Writing

One of the pleasures of being in Melbourne for me is helping my daughter Kate and her family at the farmers' markets where they sell their beautiful organic produce. This picture of the Daylesford Organics stall was taken last Saturday morning at the Collingwood Children's Farm market.

This market is held on the second Saturday of every month. The fourth Saturday Bren and Kate take their produce to the Slow Food market at the nearby Abbotsford Convent.

Apart from the food and coffee there's plenty to love about the city. Last Saturday evening I went to the Gala Night of Storytelling that marked the opening of The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. In its own words the Centre is the centrepiece of Melbourne's UNESCO City of Literature initiative. I reckon it's going to be worth moving to Melbourne for.

The storytelling night was held at the Melbourne Town Hall and sold out weeks ago. Twelve writers talked about the power of stories, especially family stories. They were funny, profound, thought provoking, entertaining and moving. Paul Kelly ended the night with a story and a song about how many years ago his aunt's life had been changed by sleeping in. That made me tearful because my father has lately been talking about how a series of chance occurrences led him to meet my mother and how that made all the difference to his life.

Then on Monday night I went along to the first of the Wheeler Centre's Debut Mondays, where every second Monday Melbournians will get the chance to hear new writers read from their work. The four writers were fabulous children's author Andrew McDonald (pictured below); Bob Franklin, whose short stories were extremely well received; Sofie Laguna reading from her first adult novel; and Madeleine Hamilton whose book about pin up girls from the forties and fifties reminded me of seeing hordes of people on the beach to watch Miss Beachgirl contests when I was a kid. How quaint all that seems now.

Then last night I returned yet again to the Wheeler, this time for a party hosted by Scribe to announce the winner of their terrific new prize, the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for writers over the age of 35. (Cheers for us oldies!) The shortlisted authors were Meg Mundell, Jane Sullivan and Maris Morton. The winner was Maris Morton who is in her seventies, with this being her first published work. She made a touching speech about how vindicated she felt as a writer. I'm sure everyone present wished her well and hoped she goes on to write plenty more.

Phew! What a week I've had. I'll be pleased to be back in quiet Mole Creek though, to get some actual writing done, including working on a talk I'll be giving at The Sandybeach Centre on Wednesday March 17th.

I'll also be reading an extract from my book at a Debut Monday at the Wheeler Centre on March 15th. My fellow debutants on the night will be poet Ezra Bix, and writers, Christine Darcas and Damon Young. Never heard of them? That's the point. Here's your opportunity. Debut Mondays are free and include a glass of wine. Come along down and say hi.

In the Beginning

Now that Alzheimer's:a love story is published, it feels - even to me - that it wrote itself. I've had lots of calls and emails from readers telling me they couldn't put it down and that they read it in one or two sessions. I know that I worked hard to achieve that effect, but I can't remember now what I spent all that time on.

Yesterday I found a journal from the summer of 2007-2008, which is when I began the book. At that time I didn't really know what I was writing and what it would look like when it was finished. It's fascinating to me now to read about my struggle. I'd completely forgotten those early days.

29th Jan '08

Today I printed out the first instalment of the book I'm beginning to write about my parents. I don't know even if I'll keep any of this in the first draft but I have to start somewhere.

Yesterday I read an article in Island magazine by Kevin Brophy and Sue Woolf about the mind's role in creativity - an attempt to look scientifically at the process with which I am familiar. You need to start writing and then the mind will give you what you need. But you need to get going first.

1st Feb '08

I want to include all those letters I wrote to my mother that I knew she'd never read. Today I made a chapter out of them so for now they're all in the same place. One thing I could do is write the whole book in that way, as letters to her. Another thing would be to keep all the sections separate, and a third would be to interweave the letters with my journal entries and emails.

For the moment I'm just collecting everything I've got in separate files and when it's all there I'll perhaps experiment.

4th Feb '08

I feel a bit stuck on my Lucy book. I've got a lot of my material transcribed and together and now I'm just waiting for the structure to leap out and hit me over the head.

I think I have to begin the book with a letter that explains what the letters are for. Then move to the eating, then to a beginning and so on.

5th Feb '08

In the end, Chapter One of my new book went so quickly I felt as though I'd cheated, even though it's taken two months of work to get to this point.

I'm nervous about how I'll go on but at the same time so excited. I think I've begun the impossible - the synthesising of a book about my mother, my father and me.

It feels odd to know more or less where this book is headed. Usually I begin by stepping off into the unknown.

11th March '09

Now I've written two chapters about Mum for my book I want to turn to some of the old stuff. Like their backgrounds and how they met. And then I have to turn to Dad's career. I feel pregnant with it - it's all in there, weighing me down, but I need to see it because I can't imagine what it looks like.

7th April '09

It's difficult, but thrilling too, to watch it take shape. I pick up the dropped stitches, change my mind about whether I'm knitting a jacket or a coat or maybe even a rug to cover the bed.

There's masses more. It's good for me now to see how back then I was pushing ahead in the dark with no firm idea of what exactly it was that I was writing. A finished book can be a daunting thing because it seems so inevitable and effortless.

I'm glad I found this diary, so I can see that it wasn't magic: I got there with courage, belief in myself and my project, and sheer bloody hard work. It wasn't easy but I did it and I think anyone else could too. I hope I'll be able to do it again.

Celebration

Yesterday I went to four sessions of the Melbourne Writers Festival, beginning at 10 am with Emily Ballou, Philip McLaren and Steven Amsterdam (pictured, from left to right, with apologies for my poor quality photo) reading from their work and talking a little about it.

The previous night Steven had discovered he'd won the Age Book of the Year with his first novel, Things We Didn't See Coming, so it made the morning extra special. I was so happy for him. My family had spent the morning emailing celebratory messages about it.

I have a story about Steven, who is a good friend of one of my daughters, that I'm not sure I have ever told him. Because that daughter stays with me when she is in town, Steven has my phone number in his mobile. One day I came home to find one of those accidental messages on my machine that you get when someone bumps their mobile while it's in their pocket. I listened to see if I could recognise the voice. It turned out to be Steven chatting in a gentle and caring way with an elderly female patient. He was a student nurse at the time. Because a lot of the nurses who looked after my mother when she was ill were not so gentle or caring, this overheard conversation made a great impression on me. It was such a lovely window into his nature.

I think Steven's novel is well deserving of this award but as a person so is he. Congratulations, Steven, on a great achievement! I hope there are many more to come.

I had really only gone to that session to hear Steven but I was thrilled to discover Emily Ballou, who read a few poems from her book, The Darwin Poems, which is an imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin's life. I have an interest in Charles Darwin to begin with, but hearing those evocative and beautiful poems read sent me straight out to the festival bookshop to buy myself an autographed copy of the book. It was still only 11 am, and I had the whole day ahead of me, but I felt I'd already had the true festival experience - that discovery by chance of a writer who quite takes your breath away.

This is the festival's second year at Federation Square. I don't like change, so last year I didn't enjoy the new venue because I was too busy looking back at the good old days of everyone being crammed into the Malthouse. I missed the intimacy.

But this year I loved the venue. The atrium is bustly, and all over Fed Square I saw people reading, or at least leafing through books, and talking with their mouths full about sessions and writers. It was nice to see books, reading and writing take so central a position in the city, even if it is only for a few days.

The Contract

It's an odd experience to read a book written by someone you know. You look for traces of them in the writing - their personality, the person you're familiar with. And it's scary too. I'm not talking about characters being chased and shot at and other assorted thrills. I mean real danger - what if you don't like the book? It's one thing in a workshop situation, but I'm talking about a published book here. What are you going to tell the author?

Fortunately for me I loved Brett Hoffmann's The Contract.Couldn't put it down in fact.

The book's two main characters, Stella Sartori and Jack Rogers, are Australians living and working in America. They've only met once but now their lives are about to be entwined in ways they couldn't imagine.

Stella has stumbled on a forty-year-old contract that should be of no interest to anyone, but instead leads her into a murky world of deceit and death, where nobody can be trusted and no-one is exactly who or what they seem. When fellow Wall Street banker, Jack, is sent in by their company to exercise some damage control, he discovers more than he bargained for, and soon his life too is on the line. The action moves from place to place and involves, amongst other elements: the FBI, the Mafia, plots old and new, old and new love, a poem written in code, and vast amounts of money.

The writing in a thriller has to be transparent, like a window, not drawing attention to itself but instead getting out of the way of the action. Hoffmann's writing is exactly that. The detail is authentic; the settings obviously well researched. The characters' Australianness gives them a connection with each other (and with me as an Australian reader) but also an outsider status that allows them a sharper view of the society they find themselves in. This added another dimension for me.

Brett Hoffmann is a fresh new voice in international thriller writing. I recommend The Contract. Lucky for me, it's a real page turner. Phew, I don't know about Jack and Stella, but I at least am out of danger!

Becoming a Writer

I have a collection of writing books that I return to whenever I need inspiration. One of my favourites is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, published in 1934.

I've got a lot out of this book over the years, but the advice that has most helped me is Brande's suggestion of early morning writing. She says the purpose of this is to derive 'the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious'. I look at it as getting up before the policeman who censors your work is on duty.

The idea is to wake up and, without talking, reading or drinking coffee, begin to write, allowing yourself to just fall onto the page. Then stand back and watch what you produce.

Throughout your writing life, whenever you are in danger of the spiritual drought that comes to the most facile writer from time to time, put the pencil and paper on the bedside table, and wake and write in the morning.

Another of her suggestions is to make an appointment with yourself to write at a given time of day and then, come what may, write for fifteen minutes at that time. Each day make such an appointment but at a different time, again for fifteen minutes.

There is a deep inner resistance to writing...The unconscious does not like these rules and regulations until it is well broken in to them; it is incorrigibly lazy...and given to finding the easiest way of satisfying itself. It prefers to find its own occasions and to emerge as it likes...you must learn to disregard every loophole the wily unconscious points out to you. If you consistently, doggedly, refuse to be beguiled, you will have your reward. The unconscious will suddenly give in charmingly, and begin to write gracefully and well.

Brande has other advice, for example:

Decide for yourself which friends and social activites are good for your writing, and which are not

Discover the reading matter that stimulates your writing, eg poetry, fiction, non fiction

and

Because old habits are strong and jealous, teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing.

All of this is helpful, but the early morning writing is vital I think. It really is a net to catch the unconscious.

Back to Front

I haven't yet read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, though I will as soon as it's published in Australia. There was an interview with Toibin byRobert McCrum in this morning's Age.

McCrum reckons Brooklyn gets its 'incredible narrative charge' from its author's immersion in 19th-century fiction.

Toibin himself says: 'It's all about keeping the line clear. Look at Austin. In her novels you get a dance followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more backstory. Can we please have no more "I'd like to know more about..."?'

Uh oh. I wrote the first draft of my novel, By the Book, in that direct line way and I didn't feel it worked. In this draft, I've tossed out the first five chapters and now I'm trying to reintroduce a lot of the deleted stuff by way of flashback. My intention was that backstory would be woven into the structure of the book.

I wanted to reveal the past gradually as I pushed the action of the present along. Now I'm not so sure.

I'm going to persevere with this version for a while and see what it looks like. Where the book starts now is the beginning of a change in my heroine's life. I like the idea of jumping in there, seeing her for the first time as this person on the cusp of change, and learning more about her background as she reveals it and as she moves forward in her new life .

But Toibin's words have made me think about what I'm doing, and that's not a bad thing. I'll bear them in mind as I work.

Stuffing the Chook

One of my favourite things to do is write and cook at the same time. Like companion plants, for me these are companion activities. I find that where doing each one separately can leave me feeling frustrated in some way or exhausted, doing them together raises both my energy and creativity levels and helps me see connections I otherwise may have missed.

Today I am preparing shabbat dinner for my daughter E, my father, my aunt, my older brother and his wife. At the same time I am revising an adult novel that has sat in first draft form untouched on my hard drive for nearly a year while I concentrated on my memoir.

I'm finding the time away from the novel has given me the distance I required, so I can see a little more clearly what it needs and I'm quite excited by my new approach. I only hope I can pull it off.

I began my cooking with the challah dough.

First I mixed three cups of bread flour with a teaspoon of salt, a scoop of sugar, and a tablespoon of yeast. Then I added two eggs, a slurp of oil and about two-thirds of a cup of water.

I kneaded this - always the best part - and let it stand till it doubled in size. Then I weighed the dough and divided it into three equal portions. I rolled these into ropes, which I then plaited and laid on a baking sheet to rest.

When the loaf had doubled in size it was time to brush it with beaten egg and sprinkle it with sesame seeds

and bung it in the oven for about 40 minutes. At this stage the aroma made it difficult to concentrate on my work.

As a nineteen-year-old bride, one of the first things I learned to cook was traditional stuffing. My mother-in-law, who was an excellent cook, taught me, and I used to turn up to my university lectures with hands smelling of onion and garlic. I've been making it the same way ever since. Today I'm experimenting with a new method.

Before I began I squeezed my hands into rubber gloves so my skin wouldn't stink for the rest of the day- especially as I typed! I chopped half an onion, a stick of celery and a small garlic clove and softened them in a little margarine.

Then I whirled some stale bread in the food processor and added to this the cooked onion mixture, together with salt and pepper, parsley, sage and rosemary to taste, an egg and a little of my chicken soup to moisten. Then I squished it all together with my hands and stuffed it into the cavity of the waiting chook.

Along with chicken soup, challah, roast vegies and salad we should have a delicious meal. The pleasures of the company are of course assured.

Shabbat shalom to all.

Writing as Therapy

When people learn that I have written a memoir about dealing with my mother's Alzheimer's they often ask me if the writing was therapeutic. It probably shouldn't, but the question makes me angry. I find it insulting. For me writing is both a creative endeavour and work; it certainly is not therapy.

Maybe it's the semantics I object to. If you say something is therapeutic, don't you mean it makes you better? Cures you of some symptom? Maybe all these people want to know is whether writing my memoir helped me cope with my mother's illness and death. And yes, it did, but not for the reason they think.

I recently read an interview with a writer who did say that writing her memoir about her mother's death was therapeutic for her. She even went on to add that she didn't need to see a counsellor because she'd written her book. Good for her.

For me, the writing process was engrossing and technically difficult, so it helped me in the way that work is often helpful: doing it kept me engaged and transported me to the place where I am most myself. But as far as being therapeutic, that is helping me to come to terms with losing my mother to Alzheimer's, it wasn't at all. I still found the journey heart breaking and it still hurts now three months after her death. It was an awful way to go and that's all there is to it.

Stage Fright

Late last Thursday night I finally hit the key to send my manuscript to my editor. What a scary, scary moment. It was such a hard thing to do.

Since then I've been reading reviews of other books on similar themes. Some of the reviews are not so favourable and now, although I'm desperate for my book to be published, I'm also dreading its reception. Will it get poor reviews or, worse still really, no reviews at all? Will it sink unnoticed into what's increasingly looking like an overcrowded field? What's so special about my book anyway? Isn't it sentimental and self indulgent? Why would anyone want to read about my specific experience? The publisher accepted the manuscript on the basis of the first ten chapters, which were all I'd written at that time. That was exciting then. Now I worry that they'll hate the rest of the book.

All this has taken me by surprise. I stupidly believed all my self doubt would be gone by now. First there's the worry that you can actually finish your project, then the worry that it'll be accepted for publication. I thought that those would be the big ones and that afterwards I'd be full of confidence, but it's not like that at all. And still to come, I'm sure, are concerns I haven't even thought of yet.

I don't know how long it will be till I receive the marked up manuscript. Meanwhile I remain in limbo, worrying.

Dear Diary

Journal keeping is such a weird practice when you examine it. I mean, who cares what I did today or how I felt about it?

Actually, I met with my editor for the first time this morning. I was nervous about it; she was lovely. She gave me the publishing schedule for my book. I gave her a jar of my End of Draft jam.

I recorded all this in my journal.

Why did I do this? No one else will read it. Mostly I can’t even bear to reread it myself.

It’s a habit: I’ve been keeping a journal for over twenty years now.

It’s a way of catching my thoughts, or capturing story ideas or dreams before they disappear. Sometimes, like when I can’t sleep at night, I use my journal to get rid of the kind of thoughts that buzz around my head like wasps trapped in a bottle.

I use it to make sense of whatever’s happening in my world. To let off steam. To practise writing when I don’t have an ongoing project, or as a safe place to try out things that I may end up using in a current project. Even to record events.

They say there’s a chip of ice in every writer’s heart. Sixteen months ago, in July 2007, my mother looked as though she was going to die. I sat every day for hours in her hospital room and wept as she refused food and struggled for breath. And I recorded it all in my notebook. Sometimes I sat by her side and took down her words like dictation as she spoke them.

It’s as though there are two parts of me that co-exist: the doer and the recorder. I watch myself as much as I watch everyone else (What’s she doing now? Why is she doing that?), only with myself I have access to my inner life – feelings, thoughts, dreams and memories – whereas with others I have only the externals. It's no wonder I was drawn to writing a memoir.

When would-be writers ask me for advice, I tell them to keep a journal. It’s not always what they want to hear and I often can’t explain what journal keeping gives you that’s so important to a writer, but I know I could never have written either of my novels without that habit of mine. And of course Alzheimer’s: A Love Story owes its entire existence to that pile of spiral-bound notebooks that document it all – my mother’s decline and my ongoing reactions to it, every painful, happy, sad, funny moment.

Pollyanna

Earlier this week I went to Hobart. I discovered when I got there that I had left the power cord of my laptop back home in Mole Creek, neatly wound – I had a clear memory of rolling it – on my desk. My first reaction was to sulk. When I’d done that I realised there was no pressing work I had to do, so I could just enjoy myself, drinking coffee and reading. Making the most of the situation – and the mild autumnal weather – I suppose.

I sat all day the first day reading the latest Meanjin (Volume 68 Number 1 2009). It was a great companion and just what I needed.

This from an interview of Nam Le by Sophie Cunningham:

How do you judge others’ work?
…For me something has got to keep me wanting to turn the pages, not necessarily in a cheap charged way but just in a sense that I feel as though there’s an authority or a confidence or a strangeness that’s at work in the pages that makes me want to submit myself or relinquish some part of myself. Beyond that, I define it in negative relief, honestly. I define it by stuff that doesn’t jolt me out, stuff that doesn’t make amateur mistakes, by stuff that obviously takes care and doesn’t take easy outs.

Like your approach to your own work?
It’s so easy to hedge and to worry about sentimentality or melodramatic prose, but if you haven’t got the guts to risk sentimentality then you risk losing sentiment altogether. [As an editor] I’d always go for the raw and the strange over the polished and competent.

Nice words to have in my mind as I approach the revision of my book.

Yeeha!

Last Friday afternoon I printed out the chapter of my memoir that I was working on and took it with me down to the Laurel Berry, Mole Creek, which is where I’ve written so much of this book. There, while I shared an iced coffee with Farmdoc (they know exactly how we like it) I revised the chapter. And that was it for the first draft. Done! Finished!

On the way home we picked blackberries and a few apples from a street tree and fed our neighbours’ dogs because they were away.

In my inbox, when I checked, was a message from my editor, asking me when I might be ready to deliver the manuscript. A nice coincidence.

Over the weekend I read through the manuscript and made some changes. One or two chapters stood out as needing a fair bit of tightening but I decided to leave those for my workshopping crew, to give them something to do.

I knew there was still a long way to go with this book and a lot of hard work, but I felt freer then than I had in a long time so I celebrated by making blackberry and apple jam.

The wood for the cooking stove came from a blackwood that fell across the fence into our home paddock a few years ago; it’s dry now and caught quickly.

I couldn’t resist giving this batch of jam a special label.

Writing As Therapy

People often make a sympathetic face when they learn I am writing a book about my mother's Alzheimer's. 'That must be therapeutic for you,' they say.

I find that condescending and insulting. How would they like it if I said to them, 'Oh, plumbing/social work/law/medicine, eh? That must be therapeutic for you,' as though all their training, experience and professionalism was cast aside in the drive to make themselves feel better.

I like writing or I wouldn't do it, but it's work to take my own particular experience and shape and form it so that a fragment gives the impression of being my whole life in a way that illuminates for the reader their own.

Lying on the sofa this cold wet Saturday afternoon, I read this in Robyn Rowland's essay in the current Meanjin:

The writing of poetry is lived. It is not something we do, but something we are. It requires a life of observation, an openness to experience, an ability to empathise, an engagement with the transforming power of image and metaphor. It requires a moment when the self is put aside, akin to meditation: an absenting of the self, so that the poem may appear...It also requires technique....Then comes the real work - the shaping, the editing.

If writing is personal, is it cathartic? When people say, 'it must have been really cathartic to write that', it irritates me. It's a statement that casts poetry into the realms of therapy and creative writing is not therapy. It's an art. One that requires practice and patience and skill. Yes, the writing might be therapeutic in that it might uncover for us our own understanding of what we feel or believe. But that individual experience needs to be made universal so that it reaches out to the next person.

Doldrums

I was in the doldrums for the last couple of weeks with my current book.

The doldrums are a belt of very still air near the equator that in olden times stalled sailing ships. I felt stalled too. The job was too big for me. It was too daunting. I was too far into the journey to turn around and go back but I couldn’t see the distant shore line either.

I was in about the middle of the book when I got stuck: I’d written around 35,000 words.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to go on. I had it mapped out in my head and even on paper. And I had lots of stuff drafted. It was just that each chapter was so bloody hard and I still wasn’t positive that the idea was even going to work out in the end. For a while I felt as though the wind had gone out of my sails permanently. It was hard to believe I’d ever get moving again.

I knew the cure: push ahead. And I knew that once I got this next chapter done I’d see how close I was to the end and I’d pick up speed again. But the strength and courage I needed seemed to have deserted me.

I kept going somehow. I revised a lot, and plodded ahead a little, and now the breeze is picking up and the book is moving once more. Phew. I’m out of the doldrums I think, but it was scary there for a while.

A steady hand on the tiller, some courage and persistence and I should make it. Wish me luck.

First Drafts

I wrote a lot in the last couple of weeks. Just about all day every day when I wasn’t busy with farm chores or walking to the post office to collect the mail or cooking.

And what I discovered yet again is the importance of first drafts. Of dumping any old rubbish down on the page – or screen. The quicker, the messier, the stupider, the better. Once something’s down I can fix it up, but I can’t fix a blank page.

Pausing to find the exact word or phrase or simile is counterproductive at this stage. I can do that later. In fact, the less censoring at this point, the richer the material will be. It’s hard. There’s such a strong urge to get it right, or at least neat and tidy or at least reasonable, first time around. It’s like unlearning all those lessons I learnt in school.

This is my experience anyway. I know some writers whose first drafts sit in their brains for ages and then by the time they see daylight they are pretty close to something decent. That’s not me. If I worked like that I’d find it would stifle the life out of my material.