Tell me wry

They say ’show, don’t tell’. Writing Lilly was angry only tells the reader what’s happening, whereas Lilly slammed her fist against her thigh lets the reader ’see’ the action.

I get that. Happy people smile and laugh, angry people frown and grit their teeth, worried people chew their bottom lip and sad people cry, but what do puzzled people do? What is the action or facial expression of someone faced with a momentary setback, a curious circumstance, a difficult question?

There’ s a face I make when I’m puzzled by something or feeling a bit baffled, perhaps rueful. My chin pushes up and my bottom lip presses against my top lip. My chin gets very wrinkled; the more the wrinkle, the more puzzled I am. It’s almost a cross between a pout and a grimace.

My problem is this. ‘Frown’ is one word that describes a very complicated facial expression, as does ‘grin’,  ’smile’, ‘pout’, ‘grimace’, ’scowl’, ‘glower’, ‘glare’ and ’stare’. Where is the one eloquent word to describe the face I’m making right now, the ‘damn-me-but-I-don’t-know-how-to-show-this-emotion-without-telling-the-reader-my-character-is-confused’ face?

Word Dissociation

You know that thing that happens you say or read or write a word too many times and it becomes nonsense?

Editing means having to read your own work. It’s an analytical process, which means you have plenty of opportunity to be self-critical. Perhaps too much.

When I read a book for the first time (and sometimes the second), I am filled with excitement. I’m curious and intrigued. I’m full of questions. I catch my breath as little details of the character or world are revealed. I marvel at the words, the way they make me feel, the images they put in my head. The author becomes my new favourite hero.

When I read my own work, I see only letters strung together with full stops and commas and colons. There’s no mystery for me in a phrase, no wondering what that half-veiled reference to a secret means. They are my words, too familiar, too ordinary. I can’t see if they will thrill or intrigue a reader. I can’t be impressed.

If the work is one I haven’t seen for a while, I can be surprised. ‘I wrote this? This is…good.’ But I don’t have that luxury just now. I’m editing WiP#2 and these first few chapters are ones I know so well I can quote sentences from memory (and, as TB will tell you, I’m pretty bad at remembering quotes). I read the prologue to TB the other day; he told me it sounds great – what else can he say? – whereas I felt nothing but a terrible sense of uncertainty. Have I made this book better or worse? Have I filled it with dull, meaningless detail? Have I written the life right out of the page?

I realised today that it’s just like the phenomenon of the oft-repeated word. Familiarity breeds contempt, or, in this case, failure to excite. I wish I could erase my memory of this story so I could read it now like a first-time reader.

I might really like it.

Speaking of setbacks…

Unpleasant surprises for the week:

#1: Bashed my dodgy knee doing something stupid.*

#2: Received a $120 parking fine for the three seconds it took for me to get out of our car to attend a Christmas party in town (Merry Christmas Brisbane City Council).

#3: Realised this morning I’ve lost a piece of jewellery that took me two attempts and four months to make, a piece of which I was both proud and fond and will now never see again.

#4: Discovered my motivation tanks can go from brimming over to beyond empty in only three damn weeks!

Net success for this week = +100%.

Wait – how can the balance be positive?

Easy – I have amazing friends who do really nice things for me, like make my breakfast every morning, talk up my book to a potential publisher, enjoy my photos, tell me they’re glad to see me, comment on my blog; the list goes on.

Yep – I’m way ahead.

*Note: 41 year old arthritic, unfit women should never try to use a wheelie bin to climb into a roof space no matter how cranky they are about a persistent leak in the ceiling of their house every time it rains. They should buy a ladder.

Success as a side order

Sometimes, small setbacks turn into opportunities for success. I could, at this point, use a profound and moving anecdote to make my point, but will instead relate a trivial incident that I think has more immediate meaning for us all.

What's wrong with this breakfast?

We went into town on Saturday to do our Christmas shopping. To get a decent park in town at this time of year, you need to arrive before the shops open, so we went to a favoured cafe for breakfast. TB ordered bacon and eggs with a side order of chipolata sausages. To his enormous disappointment, his breakfast arrived complete with eggs and sausages, but no bacon.  

Disaster.

The waiter dashed away once the mistake was made plain and returned in the flip of a pancake with a side order of bacon. What had been a terrible setback was now a glorious abundance, for a side order of sausages would have given TB only two of the porky delights, whereas his breakfast arrived with three. Even better, the side plate of bacon was perhaps more generous than is usual. TB launched into a day of Christmas shopping full of meaty goodness and cheer.

When life steals your bacon, don’t despair; a better, bigger serve of bacon may be on the way.

Knit It

So; given I excused my non-blogging period by saying I was busy, busy, busy writing my book might lead you to ask if, now that I’m blogging again, whether the writing has taken a back seat. Short answer: no.

Long answer: What I’m doing now isn’t so much writing as editing, and it feels like I’m tearing my manuscript into tiny shreds, then trying to stick them back together again. This sounds drastic – it feels awful – but it is absolutely necessary. As Dr Kim told us during Year of the Edit, editing needs a detached and methodical eye*. When I am Editor, rather than Writer, the process feels destructive rather than constructive, at least at first. You have a scene, a paragraph, a sentence, and after considering it awhile, you know there are changes you must make. A paragraph needs to be moved, rearranged. A sentence needs to be re-written or cut, burned and never spoken of again.

Eventually, the little pieces come together again. Like the scattered pieces of the T-1000, they melt, migrate and fuse back into one murderous – no, bad simile. Think of it this way; if you’ve ever tried your hand at knitting, you know what it’s like to spend an hour knitting and purling and cabling only to find, fifty rows back, you dropped a stitch. You spend a little while poking at the hole, wondering if you can fix it in some quick, painless way – embroider over it, or make a knot that will conceal the error - then realise that won’t work. You try to convince yourself you can live with the hole; it’s not so big. But it is. It’s huge and horrible and the whole work is ruined while that one stitch remains unmended. So, with a sigh, you pull the needles out and strip back the yarn, watching your fifty rows of fabric transform back into an untidy pile of string your cat now wants to play with. You curse and swear as you pick up all the stitches on one needle and wish you’d never thought how wonderful it would be to make a piece out of angora or feathered-yarn or some other impossibly stupid wool. You get it all back on the needle and you start again. You finish it and you love it and you wish winter came twice a year just so you could wear it.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah – when knitting a book, avoid fluffy or feathery yarns as it’s easy to drop stitches and end up with a woolly plot full of holes.

*If you don’t know Dr Kim’s ‘puppy autopsy’ analogy, read this post.

Sweet

Some sweet news for fellow Brisbane writers:

Angela Slatter had an extra dollop of jam on the golden toast that is her writing.

Rebecca Bloomer handed out proper old-school lollipops at her recent book signing for Willow Farrington Bites Back.

I passed the 10% mark in my revision of WiP#2 and celebrated by having a slice of banana cake for lunch today instead of just a banana. Yay!*

*That’s a genuine, high-voiced and happy ‘yay’, not a cynical, monotone expression of disenchantment.

Farewell Metro Arts

Tutor and student, plotting...

As part of the QWC Christmas Party on Thursday night, we said ‘farewell’ to the Metro Arts building in Edward Street. The building itself isn’t going anywhere, of course; it’s QWC that’s moving across the river and into the future that is the State Library in Brisbane’s cultural precinct at Southbank. I’m doing my best not to equate warped, timber floorboards, brick walls made softer by thick white paint and scary stairs with the Centre. It’s the people that make it special, not an old building.
 
The Metro Arts iteration of QWC is the only one I’ve ever known and I feel revoltingly nostalgic. Charm is relative. I only visited the Centre, attending workshops and seminars; I didn’t have to work there. The first time I hauled my sorry ass up those stairs, it took me a full minute to catch my breath. A very patient woman waited, pen poised over a list of names, wondering when I’d get around to speaking mine aloud instead of hanging on the door, panting.

I learned to have food and drink with me so I didn’t have to leave the building during the lunch break. Then I learned to get off my sorry ass and get fit enough the stairs didn’t nearly kill me every time I was there.    

The QWC offices were refurbished in a way that dispelled any sense of neglect; smart glass doors, the multi-coloured spread of packed bookshelves around a lounge, a homely rug on the unpainted, unpolished floorboards. I always felt welcome. I always wondered, too, who was just behind the drooping curtain between the teaching space and the office area. Did our chatting and raucous laughter disturb an important train of thought, or was someone listening in, enjoying the sounds of writers getting to know and love their craft?    

So, last night, I walked the floorboards one last time, breathed the warehouse-smell emanating from the old bricks and beams, and said goodbye. I’ll have fond memories: the way the Story Bridge was reduced to a beautiful abstract by the malformed panes of glass in the classroom window; the gentle silence that fell on the whole space as people wrote, pens making sticky noises on foolscap, laptop keys clicking, the sound of Minties being unwrapped and quietly masticated. Yeah…good times.     

I’m looking forward to the new hotness that will be QWC 2010.    

Merry Christmas QWC and a Shiny New Year.    

Writing in Isolation

As mentioned in my previous post, I recently spent five days taking part in the QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Program. We were taken to one of my favourite places in this little corner of the world we call South East Queensland; Lamington National Park. I’ve been to the O’Reilly’s site many times, camping for a few days or just spending an afternoon, but I’d never before stayed at the O’Reilly’s Guesthouse and I’d certainly never imagined I would have my toast prepared by a member of the O’Reilly family, but these and many other exciting things happened during the retreat.

Of course, the idea of a retreat is to be somewhere both inspiring and separated from the distractions of normal life. I’d always imagined a retreat would be a monastic experience, tucked away in a small, plain room with just a desk and a power point, a blank wall and a furious determination to write until my fingers bled. When I write at home, I have to shut the door of my office, excluding husband and cats and ignoring their piteous cries (the cats, you understand). I did try to share my writing time, but I’m too willing to procrastinate. TB laughs at a joke on the telly and I want to know why. A furtive rustling beneath my table is just a cat finding mischief, but I have to make sure they aren’t about to eat something dangerous, or valuable. This breaks into my thoughts, dispels momentum.

Isolation works for me.

In learning to love being alone then, I was surprised to find the retreat wasn’t about isolation at all. It was about being part of a community, a network. It was having friends to share your misgivings with, and your excitement; of realising you’re not alone at all. I discovered the pleasure of sitting in a room with other writers, working quietly but in company. We were all so very different and all amazingly familiar, instant friends. It’s been a week since I’ve seen them and I miss them, but, as in the shared room, I feel like we still have a connection. We’re sitting in the remembered room, with its shiny, timber tables and crazy cold air conditioner, bowls of sweets and bottles of water as sustenence, working quietly but in company.

That’s ‘Fronkensteen’

Yes, it been almost a year since I blogged, but it’s not dead, I tells ya; it lives. I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been writing and editing, and re-writing and re-editing (and playing some cool computer games) and writing some more (and watching a bit of telly) and editing some more.

OK – I have let the blog down. I see that now.

Something really big happened, something too big to tell in just one post, and it’s the bolt of lightning needed to reanimate this near-corpse of a blog. I sent my current manuscript off to an agent – hugely ambitious move on my part that resulted in a form rejection BUT I immediately sent the m/s off to a competition.

I won.

Check it out: QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Program 2009. There’s my name on the list of winners, one of eight who were selected from a longlist of 40 who were chosen from about 130 applications to the program from all over the country.

Over six life-transforming days at a beautiful rainforest retreat, we happy eight had the opportunity to meet with Hachette publishers (Bernadette Foley, Rachael Donovan and Kate Ballard), a literary agent (Sophie Hamley of Cameron Cresswell Agency) and two generous, inspirational, ‘keeping-it-real’ authors, Rebecca Sparrow and Angela Slatter (our QWC guide). The experience has been profound and I’ll blog about it more in future posts. Here, now, I just want to say thank-you (again) to Kate Eltham and the Queensland Writers Centre, Hachette, Bec, Angela and my fellow winners for giving so much and helping me in so many ways.

Watch this blog.

Pessimists: Saviours of Civilization

I’ve been intending to write this post for awhile; again, my excuse for being so crap at blogging is that I’ve been very, very dedicated to writing my book. More on that some other time. Right now, I want to talk about the soul-destroying monster that is optimism.

I was talking to The Beholder about my previous post – how I derived comfort from Bill Bailey’s thoughts on the futility of all human endeavour – and TB made an interesting observation. He said he felt the real difference between optimists and pessimists was in how they each look at life. It’s a twist on the old glass is half-full or half-empty thing I’ve not considered before. Optimists look at their life (or their glass) and think how much worse things could be, while pessimists yearn for more, for better things. It made me wonder; are optimists complacent? Could they be the downfall of civilisation?

A few years ago, some scientists went looking for the happiest people on earth. Sounds like a quest from a novel, I know, but it’s true. According to their methodology, Buddhist monks are the happiest, most content, least stressed members of the human race. As I understand it, they achieve this glorious state by yearning for nothing. Longing for material things, for the love or adulation of others, for fame, for power; all these things just make you sad. If you can put these desires aside, you can be happy.

But can you be joyous?

I think not. I think to know real joy, you have to also know real despair. Creativity is unlikely to spring from the mind that yearns for nothing. Contentment may be the death of striving. It is the pessimist, unhappy and longing for a better world, who drives invention, revolution, change. Optimists may be too darn happy with things the way they are.

Fifty percent capacity is not half-full; it’s half-empty, and if you want better things in life, go find the other fifty percent. Want more. Yearn for change. The world isn’t ready for everyone to sit back and give a contented sigh at a job well done