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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.

Call Me Elle

The story goes that when Elle Macpherson was asked in an interview what she likes to read, she replied that she never reads anything she hasn’t written herself.

It’s probably not even true, but it’s a great story, so in our family whenever one of us is reading something they wrote themselves, we call them Elle.

For the last few days I’ve been revising my book, using some enormously useful comments by my wise and generous friend Jane, a dictionary and the Style Manual. When I’m done I’ll send it out to another reader and then when it comes back, I’ll do another Elle.

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.

Managing Fear

I still don’t know what the fear of facing my novel was. Maybe I was afraid that it’d be terrible, or that I wouldn’t be able to read it objectively; or maybe it was just that my heart now lies with my non-fiction book. Piecing a new story together, discovering new terrain is so exciting compared with the dull slog of revision.

I work a lot with fear and anxiety it seems to me. Fear that I won’t do justice to my material, or that I won’t be able to enter it fully. Fear of facing work I have done when I haven’t seen it for a while. I have developed techniques for dealing with some of my fears, such as the empty page – or screen – but I’ve still got a long way to go.

How I handled the problem this time was to give myself plenty of opportunity to make excuses, and then I stood firm: NO MORE DELAYS ALLOWED. I made myself a cup of peppermint tea, broke off a couple of squares of chocolate and then I forced myself to sit down and start reading.

It was hard for half a page and then I was in and away.

I knew before I started one problem in particular I needed to solve. I had to show why two of my characters had married. The reader had to understand what was at stake. This was my friend Christine’s excellent advice and I had no idea how I was going to do it. But by the time I’d reached the end of the first page the material had inserted itself in the simplest and most natural way.

All that fuss over nothing.

Fear

For days I’ve wanted to begin rereading my novel, By the Book. I’ve tried. Every day it’s top of my to-do list. I just can’t. It’s too scary. I don’t know exactly what it is I’m afraid of. I know once I’ve begun I’ll be fine but still I can’t break the barrier.

I’ve done anything I possibly can to avoid it. I’ve written part of a chapter of my nonfiction book; I've even composed a pitch for the novel; I’ve scribbled in my journal; I’ve checked my email and surfed the net. I’ve swept the floor and washed dishes.

OK, enough is enough. I can do this. Tonight after dinner while Farmdoc is at fire brigade training I’m going to take a cup of peppermint tea and a square or two of dark chocolate and yes, I’m going to read my own work.

I can do this.

Revising

I'm just about to sit down and start work on my revision of By the Book. I'm as nervous as if it were a first date, scared stiff I won't be up to the job or that I'll hate it now. All those anxieties lined up like bitchy high school girls looking me up and down.