(M1energysolutions.com)You know that feeling when you just make it to a socket at the last moment before your laptop dies? That’s how I felt crossing the threshold of the Irish Writers’ Centre on Monday. It’s going to be OK.
This novel that provided its own fuel for the first year has been draining me since then and needs to be switched to sustainable energy. What better source than the positive energy of fellow writers? I want to get the manuscript into the best possible shape and send it on its way to make room for the next book. This course is the boost I’ve been looking for.
Somewhat dishevelled from the blustery walk up O’Connell Street, I held my paper cup of tea and looked around in excitement and wonder. These people, I realised, are just like me and finally we have come out of the woodwork. We’ve been squirrelling away words for months or years, storing up the stories we want to tell. Now is our chance.
I had the experience of reading out the opening of the book to a group for the first time and it went well. My relationship to the work is different now that it’s been exposed a little. That feeling of working in a vacuum is gone and I can see more clearly now what needs to be done. The feedback was encouraging and useful, under the kind and expert guidance of Conor Kostick.
Even though I didn’t have to use my one-line pitch last night, here is what I have come with. I realise I have two lines here but surely the concept is not that literal? It’s also possible that I have veered towards writing the blurb rather than the pitch. Do they necessarily have to differ?
Set in boom-time Ireland, this is a story about people, what they bring to our lives and what they take away. Haunted by the disappearance of her brother years before, when Laura is caught up in an emotional and professional disaster, she has to find new faith in family, friendship and love.
I may have to go back to the drawing board on this one.
In a fit of irrational exuberance just before I left Switzerland I booked tickets for three events at the Dun Laoghaire book festival Mountains to Sea. I took one look at the line-up and lost the plot, so to speak. Margaret Atwood (exclamation mark, exclamation mark), I cried. Téa Obreht (exclamation mark, exclamation mark), I added breathlessly. Oh and look Jennifer Johnston at lunchtime (click on two more tickets).
A while later back in Dun Laoghaire and real life, it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t spend week two of my big trip to Ireland waltzing from literary event to literary event. There were other things to consider, not least of which was settling the children into their new school and temporary new home.
In the end all I can boast is that these writers I admire were just down the road from me, a mere eight-minute cycle or 24-minute walk away.
But every bookshelf has a silver lining. On Saturday afternoon, miraculously and unexpectedly, I did manage to attend a festival talk called New Voices – with my three year old. We had to hop in and out of the room a bit to keep the peace but I came home motivated and encouraged, mainly by the contributions of Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, author of Back to Blackbrick, and agent Caroline Walsh from David Higham Associates. My daughter was equally happy with her blue Mountains to Sea balloon.
It’s the first time I’ve heard a real live agent speak and it was reassuring to see that she was no big bad wolf. What struck me about Walsh’s submission advice was that it was all familiar. There is no secret formula for getting published. Agents are just looking for good work and a professional attitude. Walsh’s agency gets 60 submissions a week and they take on 12 new authors a year! Anyone who goes up against those odds has to be an optimist.
Moore Fitzgerald spoke about self-belief and how to hang on to it. A successful academic, what put her off writing fiction for so long was the perceived impossibility of the challenge. She warned against sharing too soon and reminded the audience that ragged first drafts are not meant to be compared to award-winning published works.
Next Monday I will be making my way to the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin city centre to start the Finish Your Novel writing course. By hook or by crook I will have my one-line killer pitch ready by then!
In Orwell’s Burmese Days you will get as close as humanly possible to observing the behaviour of the ruling British class in the waning days of the Indian Empire. Here is everything you need to know about colonialism and racism in one cracking story. You can pull up a bamboo chair in the European club and listen in on the casual contempt, and in many cases outright loathing, the English feel for the local population.
There was always a minority among making a living in the empire who respected the culture and people, spoke the language and were appalled by the system. People like Orwell who, under his real name Eric Arthur Blair, spent five years working as an imperial policeman in Burma (then a province of the Indian Empire, now Myanmar).
The book was written based on his experiences in different parts of the country and he had trouble getting it published, partly over fears it could be libellous, a clear indication of its autobiographical context.
Orwell explains the rot at the heart of the ex-pat society, a society whose whole existence was based on a lie – not just the lie of superiority which is well illustrated in the story but the lie of the grand theft of colonialism. Development was promoted purely to facilitate the massive system of stealing from the country, the true and only reason for the British presence.
But Burmese Days is much more than a vehicle for social commentary. It is first and foremost a novel, a beautiful, heart-breaking story of one lost soul, John Flory, and the empty life he is condemned to live as a timber merchant in a small regional outpost of the empire. Flory’s destiny shows that we can bear almost any degree of loneliness, degradation and ennui, until we get a glimpse of something more. If our hopes are raised – and then dashed – by the possibility of something better, in Flory’s case love, the disappointment is more than we can bear.
There is humour here too, in the quirks and catchphrases of the other characters, the viewpoint of the servants and the scenes of social agony known to anyone who has had to endure repetitive conversation with a small group of people locked in other’s company day after day for years.
Myanmar is opening up at last after many decades of repression. The 1934 novel is eagerly sold to tourists in Yangon, according to my father-in-law who was chased around a market in Yangon earlier this year until he bought the copy I ended up reading. I flew through the book, deeply impressed by the evocation of the climate, the wildlife, the countyside, the culture.
The next book based in Myanmar I would like to read is The Lizard Cage by Karen Connolly about a political prisoner. It is one of the books featured in the lovely memoir by Will Schwalbe The End of Your Life Book Club.
Just to finish off, here are George Orwell’s – or Eric Arthur Blair’s – six rules for writers from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, courtesy of Wikipedia:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a work out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I’m sure I broke some of Orwell’s rules in this blogpost but I will try to be more vigiliant!
It was all so simple last year. Whenever I had time to spare I would whip out the laptop and write a bit more of my novel. I was able to use my writing slots so productively. It was just like mowing the lawn, keep going until you get to the end.
Now I’m out the other side of that process and can see what a rush I was in to get to the finish line. The words that I flung onto the page now have to stand up to scrutiny and carry the story.
These days when I sit down to revise the manuscript, more often than not I stray into other writing tasks. Revising is not a straightforward process. The grass is cut but now I have to finish the garden. I need to pull up bushes that are not thriving, plant new trees, create flower beds, trim the hedge, put in a patio and weed, weed, weed.
Where to start? It’s so much easier to procrastinate. In my case this involves dabbling a little in flash fiction, teasing out new book ideas or bashing out a post for this blog. Could I really be writing about writing as a way to avoid actually writing?
All is not lost. I have my writing course coming up in the Irish Writers’ Centre and in the meantime I will read up on revising so that I can tackle this job with the right tools.
If you have any good revising tips that have worked for you, please share!
These days when I want to make an arrangement with someone they take out their phone and start finger skating on the screen. Meanwhile I’m leafing through my little appointments diary, pen poised, looking terribly 20th century.
But this lady is not for modernising. The scribbled notes of today are my memory bank for the future. Unlike the data entered into a device, one day I will be able to find that diary at the back of a drawer and step into my everyday life in a given year. It will all come back to me – the old car that kept breaking down, my brief flirtation with jogging, a friendship that has since lapsed. In among the mundane details I might find a little gem like the day the baby took her first steps.
For me a small appointments diary is sufficient to keep a basic narrative and it helps me feel things are not slipping away from me – funny things my kids say, what I planted in the garden, friends invited for dinner. Space is limited but the fact of keeping a record is important. There’s also the memorabilia hiding between the pages, ticket stubs and to do lists that are treasure for a nostalgia nut like me.
At the moment my diary is punctuated with notes on writing submissions and rejections. For the past year or so, I’ve always had at least one piece of work out there, keeping the thread of optimism unbroken. When a response comes with the word ‘unfortunately’ in the first line, I sigh a few times and then make a note of it. This little action allows me to claim the result and draw a line under it – or through it if I’m feeling peevish.
Not to worry, there’s another open submission in the diary somewhere, and anything is possible.
Oliver amazed at Dodger’s mode of ‘going to work’ – George Cruickshank
The first draft of a story is just the raw material, right? It will need to be revised, reworked, perhaps even radically overhauled, word by word, plot hole by plot hole. This is the fall back that makes writing a slightly less daunting endeavour. Thankfully everything you put down can later be improved, reordered or deleted.
That is the stage I am at now, trying to enhance my novel to the best of my abilities – and there’s a lot more work to do. But once in a while, a writer of genius come along who breaks all the rules, someone like the giant of 19th century English fiction Charles Dickens.
Last year being the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth there was a lot of Dickens talk and I happened to hear a radio discussion about the great writer in which one of the experts named Our Mutual Friend as the author’s best book. It had been years since I’d picked up a Dickens novel but he’s always been close to my heart. My grandmother, who shared my childhood home, was a lifelong Dickens fan and was always willing to read to us.
So I got my hands on a copy and tackled the near 800-page opus. At the back I was delighted to discover Dickens’ plot plans and notes included. It’s a fascinating insight into his working method and brain. He had worked out (monthly) number by number how the action would unfold, weaving all the storylines together and leading his characters on a merry dance through to conclusion.
Courtesy of Claire Tomalin’s suberb biography – Charles Dickens A Life – which I’m currently reading, I have discovered a lot more about Dickens. From the very beginning Dickens did not have the luxury of letting his stories evolve organically as they were serialised in monthly or weekly issues. Tomlin quotes Dickens as saying: “My friends told me it was a low cheap form of publication, by which I should ruin all my rising hopes”. He triumphantly proved them wrong.
For ten months in 1837 two of his serial stories, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, ran simultaneously. Dickens was producing the chapters for two different publishers and coordinating with two illustrators – an incredible juggling act, on top of which he was also editing and contributing to a monthly magazine Bentley’s Miscellany.
“Managing this double feat was an unprecedented and amazing achievement. Everything had to be planned in his head in advance. Pickwick had started as a series of loosely rambling episodes, but he was now introducing plot … and Oliver was tightly plotted and shaped from the start. There was no going back to change or adjust once a number was printed; everything had to be right the first time. … Each number of Pickwick and Oliver consisted of about 7,500 words, and in theory he simply divided every month, allotting a fortnight to each new section of each book. In practice this did not always work out as well as he hoped, and although he sometimes got ahead, there were many months when he only just managed to get his copy to the printer in time.”
Just four years earlier, aged 21, his first piece of non-journalistic writing was published – a ‘sketch’ or short story, published anonymously and for no fee in a very small circulation magazine called the Monthly. He remembered dropped in his offering “stealthily one evening at twilight” after the place had closed. The sketch was followed by many more and led to fame within months and a 30-year stellar career.
We cannot watch fly-on-the-wall documentaries about life in Victorian England but we do have Dickens, who transposed so many of the characters and everyday scenes around him into his work. The people loved him for his crusade against the appalling social injustice of the day and we still have the privilege of learning from the great master of storytelling.
In the author description of Douglas Kennedy’s latest book Five Days, we are told that the writer divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and Montreal. Is he serious? You have to wonder what kind of lifestyle that involves. A lot of fridges to clear and restock.
Most of us are confined to one geographical base at a time but that doesn’t mean we don’t dream of other possibilities. Last year I met an Eritrean refugee who risked his life crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean, mournfully reconciled to living in Switzerland, while longing to go back home.
A lucky few have holiday homes and can shuttle between two different lifestyles and even climates. Wealthy Northern Europeans love to buy up properties in Spain, France and Italy. You can only admire their good sense.
This year I will be ‘dividing my time’ between Switzerland and Ireland, leaving Switzerland in August, ten years to the day since I arrived here to live, and staying on in Dublin until Christmas. The germ for this idea came around a year ago and the trip has come together thanks to a little serendipity and perseverance.
Last summer I had a conversation with my sister about my wish to live in Ireland again someday. Working out when my youngest child would be independent, I reckoned I could possibly arrange something around the age of sixty. This reflection shocked me to the core and started me thinking.
A short time before that on a flight from Dublin to Geneva I met an Irish woman who had lived in France for 20 years. She was married to a Frenchman and they had four daughters together. She told me she had twice moved with the children to Ireland for a school year, staying in her old family home. She was able to keep up her small travel business from Dublin and her husband, a teacher, used all his holiday time to visit them.
Moving forward to the end of last summer, one of my colleagues went to Florence for six weeks to do an Italian course, thanks to a creativity fund in work. I found out more about the fund that supports employees wishing to pursue various projects.
Now it just so happened that I had a very active creative project in progress – writing my first novel. I looked at courses in the Irish Writers’ Centre and found one that would be ideal for me. Everything was telling me to seize the moment.
My funding application was finally approved last week and I went ahead and booked the flights. What I have gained is the most precious thing of all – time. Time to write, time to spend with friends and family, time for my children to get to know their origins and time off from being a foreigner.
I’m not just a late adopter, I’m a reluctant one. If I’d been around in the 1920s, I probably would only have only learned the steps for the Charleston in 1931. It took a social media course at work for me to finally ‘join the conversation’ through gritted teeth last May. Turns out, like many arranged marriages, it was a good match after all.
Some see the service only as a glorified link-sharing platform or a place to let off steam, but it is much more than that. Twitter is a fantastic shortcut to good quality information. Through Twitter you borrow the eyes and ears of the people you find most interesting, important or fun. I think of it as a never-ending group discussion, like sitting around with a bunch of people making scrapbooks from a pile of global content. They’re pasting news reports, research findings, events, reviews, blog posts, videos, photos, personal observations and witty one-liners into their scrapbooks, pointing out each item to you as they go along. It’s a way of sharing passions and you can join or leave the feast at any time. For me that’s been invigorating, it has fed into my work on the journalism side as well as my creative writing.
Without Twitter I would not have:
1. Entered a flash fiction story for the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology yesterday because I wouldn’t have heard of it without following Irish writer @NualaNiC (Nuala Ní Chonchúir)
2. Interviewed @AlaindeBotton in Basel on Wednesday (all arranged last minute on Twitter, more about that next week)
3. Written articles about women’s issues in Switzerland in response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s @SlaughterAM having-it-all essay.
Twitter is all things to all (wo)men. The Twitterati I follow fall into three broad categories – news, countries and writing.
Twitter is a fabulous resource for people interested in a particular region or country. It has helped me feel much more present in Ireland. From small things, like hearing a pub I used to work in burned down, to big things like the current abortion debate, I get a sense of being around again. Don’t worry there’s lots of good stuff too, like the pictures of sunrises in Sandycove posted by @blathnaidhealy.
On the ground
There’s a thrill to be had following a dynamic developing story on Twitter. You don’t have to wait for the reporter to come out of the court for his or her piece to camera. Follow the right person (like BBC Africa Correspondent Andrew Harding @BBCAndrewH at the Pistorius trial) and you can get the action line by line as it happens.
Of course with an unfolding story, information has to be handled with care. One tweet during the Boston manhunt said it all (I’m paraphrasing here): “Faced with this barrage of confusing and conflicting information, I just wish there was a printed summary of all the verified facts available the next day.”
There’s so much to say about the writing community on Twitter that I’ll have to put it in another post. For emerging writers Twitter is Open University meets support group. Check it out for yourself!
It is one hundred years since French mathematician Émile Borel first coined the metaphor of the typing monkeys. Finally, a mathematical theorem everyone could remember and broadly understand, even without a proper grasp of the concepts of infinity, probability and time.
(Quick reminder – an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters given an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.)
Here’s another one to ponder, more historical pattern than a theorem. Isolate a group of people for long enough and they will make up their own religion. In Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin has done a masterful job of illustrating this human phenomenon.
From the Old Gods of the Forest to the Faith of the Seven, the Drowned God to the Lord of Light, there’s something for everyone in Martin’s brilliant array of belief systems. Fire, water, sand, horse blood, ancient trees – anything can be ascribed sacred properties in his fantasy kingdoms, as in the real world.
Of course not all religions evolve over countless generations, some enterprising folk fast forward the whole process by putting together their own faith package either from scratch or rehashing a new version of what’s gone before. If Martin has the imagination to create a dozen religions, clearly there are enough creative individuals out there with the ability to produce one.
Once the basic stuff is established – the back story of the religion, who or what to worship and a description of the afterlife – there is the option to make up a set of rules for everyday life. It doesn’t matter how silly these rules are, people will lap it up.
Baseball caps must be worn at all times by anyone over the age of ten, breakfast must be eaten within four minutes of waking up, no drinks may be consumed cold, brush you hair only with your left hand, no sex on Mondays, no work on Tuesdays, hop on one leg on Wednesdays. Throw in something about women being simple minded, dangerous, or in some way tainted with evil and you are onto a winner.
My own religion Clarism involves a lot of tea lights and a special devotion to butterflies and tomato plants. I’ll spare you the complicated story linking these elements. Followers are marked with chalk on their foreheads and always carry pepper on their person. Each new convert is allowed to add one line to our holy book in the quest for the one true story. And we’ll all live forever in the eternal lake of dreams.
There it was, the scrape of the curtain pulley. Rosemarie braced herself as the unkind morning light pounced on her closed eyes. Why did the day have to start so early? You would think the old folk with empty diaries would have earned their rest. Now was her chance to say she didn’t feel well and ask for breakfast in bed; Ronnie had encouraged her to get his money’s worth. But she felt her customary shyness clamp down on her throat and the attendant was gone. Rosemarie didn’t like to think of how much that reticence had cost her over the years. By a happy twist of genetics her daughter Melissa turned out to be brash and demanding, a fact which never ceased to please Rosemarie.
Taking it nice and slowly, she got up and used the en suite bathroom. Then she tackled getting dressed. The tricky bit was getting anything onto her feet. If she could just go barelegged, it would save a whole lot of effort. Finally, with her tights on, hair brushed and glasses ready on a chain for the morning crossword, Rosemarie made her way to the mirror by the door. Fuchsia had always been a good colour on her, today she wasn’t so sure. When did her hair get so white? A dab of lipstick brought her face back into focus.
Breakfast was the best meal the place offered and Rosemarie was pleased to still have a good appetite. She was having diplomatic trouble choosing a table though, with two groups vying for her company. People with good hearing were in demand. Coming into the dining room was always a tense moment. The best thing was to be first there and let the others play musical chairs. This morning the Crowleys had made it down first. They beckoned to her and she took a seat between them. The dining room had the appearance of an English B&B, the kind of place she would have stayed in with Maurice thirty years before. Look what you’re missing out on darling, she thought. Bert and Tess looked at her with matching what-did-you-say expressions. Luckily they were distracted by the morning girl, Rosemarie’s favourite, come to pour their tea.
Conversation ran out as breakfast finished. Rosemarie looked despairingly at the scattered crumbs and spots of jam on the tablecloth. It was too blowy again for a walk; three-and-a-half hours until lunch. She excused herself and trundled over to reception with her walker to pick up the newspaper. Mr Farley beamed in his ingratiating way and handed her a letter. Letters were like gold dust these days. Rosemarie tried not to look at it, almost snatching the envelope out of his hand. She laid it face down on her walker tray and hurried to the conservatory, where she plonked herself down in an armchair half turned away from the rest of the room.
It was from Loretta, postmarked London. Her handwriting hadn’t changed since boarding school, bold and artistic even then. The three years they overlapped at the Ursuline Convent had been the happiest of Rosemarie’s life. Despite the age gap they had spent most of their free time together nattering and laughing, celebrating their joint relief at having escaped the stifling atmosphere at home. Since then they had never lived in the same country, and after Loretta took off with her husband on a succession of postings abroad there were years between visits.
The words danced in front of Rosemarie’s eyes – coming home, got the brochure, room for me. She blinked away the tears and reread from the beginning. Loretta wanted to come and live in Glengoran Lodge. She was selling her house, under pressure from the children to move somewhere supervised. The time has come to return to Dublin sis, if you’ll have me. Always so careful to be thankful for the small comforts and pleasures left to her, Rosemarie had tried hard to stay positive since she moved to the lodge. Now she sank back in her armchair to bask in the long lost feeling of happiness. A laugh bubbled to the surface and Rosemarie covered her mouth like a schoolgirl. The Cully sisters, together again.
Clare O'Dea 