Jon Bauer's Blog

Memes The Word

These questions from Anna Hedigan who is writing an incredible, and incredibly ambitious (she looks certain to make it) literary novel. And my tips to some insanely worthy writers.

Answers first:

1) What is the working title of your current/next book?

I have about seventeen, so let's go with Dead Star Shining. Or Winter Solstice. No, At A Dark Distance.

2) Where did the idea come from?

Two and a half years of scratching at my laptop. Inititally, though, someone was talking to me about being at dinner with a vision impaired man, and how good he was at eating. From that anecdote on, I was writing about a man very rapidly losing his sight.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

 Literary, but I always try to walk the line between literary style, and accessible and page-turny. It has a dead body in it, and a plane crash, a car accident, and the potential end of the world. Doesn't sound literary does it.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

 Woody Harrelson would play the tramp. Woody is the one person in the world I'd rather be. For no concrete reason I can think of. The protagonist would be played by, erm, Joaquin Phoenix. Did you see him in The Master? Incredible. The little girls would be played by the same actress, but I'm not really au fait with child actresses, you'll be glad to hear.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

What do you do about your past when you've got no future.

Or: something that actually says something about the book.

Like: How to you solve a crime when it was twenty years ago and you can't see? (Terrible)

Look it's a bit soon to be coming up with snazzy lines when I'm still trying to get the word count lower than the Bible's!

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

 Fingers crossed.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft?

A couple of years, but I wrote another first draft of a book at the same time too.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I really have no idea.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Writing books is what inspires me.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

A snippet of the opening?

Friday night traffic, the first day of Spring. He double parks outside the miniaturised supermarket, a crowd gathered outside. The streets are especially busy tonight, everyone distracted by what’s in the sky -- rush hour exacerbated by heads poking out of windows, faces craning close to windscreens, little sucked fingers pointing up out of pushchairs.

The overhead distraction means double the number of accidents. Suicides take a big jump. Work absenteeism is rife, office buildings all empty swivel chairs and the hum of strip lighting. Stores sell out of basic foods, bars and pubs fill to overflowing. Old flames reignite, often only to burn one another again. Existing relationships break down or rush to registry offices.

Everything has become resignation letters and round-the-world tickets and the dog you’ve always pined for, the novel you always meant to write.

He leaves the car running, the radio bubbling with news that trees are ignoring spring. Most trees are still naked and no signs of budding. That’s in addition to the way they’ve been shedding bark and branches all winter. Even the evergreens are stripping off. 

He lurches onto the pavement, the traffic behind having to indicate, wait, then pull round his double-parked sports car. Nobody complains though, because the extraordinary has loosened the membrane between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour – the city almost united by this untoward event in the sky, the way storms, assassinations or terrorism cause the threads of community to knit themselves a little closer together. There’s more eye contact where usually gazes don’t much meet. Strangers talk on public transport, in check-out lines, at traffic lights.

His car might be one of the most exclusive on the market but it’s dinted, marked and damaged. Many of these little wreckages occurred in the last few weeks, mostly with parked cars. Whenever possible he escaped without leaving his details, so as to better avoid what these accidents signify.

His body is just as punctuated by bruises and scratches.

OK, and now for those I suggest to you are seriously watchable for their current and future greatness.

Pierz Newton John

Ruby J Murray

 

 

Proud:

www.impacdublinaward.ie

By Neruda

The weary one, orphan
of the masses, the self, 
the crushed one, the one made of concrete,
the one without a country in crowded restaurants,
he who wanted to go far away, always farther away,
didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted
or didn't want to leave or remain on the island,
the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself,
had no place here: the straight-angled stone,
the infinite look of the granite prism,
the circular solitude all banished him:
he went somewhere else with his sorrows,
he returned to the agony of his native land,
to his indecisions, of winter and summer.

 

The not blog

Welcome. I used to blog but seem to be sporadic at best. You can read a little about me here though, some old blogs, and about my novel, Rocks in the Belly, as well as sampling some stories and excerpts.

Thank for stopping by. 

The past

I gave a talk at Perth writer's festival and some of the audience asked me to put the words up as a blog. Here you go.

 

The past has never been as unloved as it is now. The past has never been as stigmatised as in today's society. I sense that bygone eras were more shamelessly steeped in story, legend, folklore, and a reverence for ancestry.

Never have we been more obsessed with the future, or struggled so much to abide in the present. Mindfulness is just a quiet wave moving through Western society now, a wave that is up against the technological pace of life.

But the past is not a foreign country. Nor is it passed. It is not yesterday or last week. It is you. Now.

To say you are not the past is to say this building is not brick.

I realised this week that my relationship with the past is not as I thought. I have long held the view that my struggle and my fascination is with the future. Of that paradoxical holy trinity that is time: the past, the present, it's the future that I hold most sacred.

And yet all of them are ghosts. The future because it never arrives, and the present because it is always, like the past, abandoning us.

Time, I'm sure, is a concept, an abstract. Man made. And like everything man made, like everything that will die when humanity dies: time, money, religion, democracy, folk dancing, it doesn't make sense.

I was asked by a WA paper what I'm good at, my answer was the future. I've always been a pathological daydreamer. And so I suppose I'm in the right profession now. My daydreaming certainly didn't hold me in good stead when I was a marketing executive in partitioned offices. Though daydreaming did help me slip through those grey walls and out over the Thames. Flying away like the swans that passed our lofty office at eye level, their necks undulating elegantly forward, their white wings beating them out across the city. I used to be so jealous of those swans.

I always believed the past is nothing to me, until I sat down to consider what I'd say here. It was then I realised that for several hours of every day I am in the past. When I write. Not my past per se, but since the best writing is writing that achieves authenticity (how else do you make fiction ring true?), my craft necessarily involves the past.

For my fiction to feel real for the reader it must feel emotionally real for me, which means applying my own authentic emotions to a fictitious scenario or character. It means painting fictitious lives with real emotions.

And where are the realest emotions from? You'd think it was the present since this is where we are when feelings happen. But our reaction to the present is never about the present.

If a loved one does something that angers you, where does that anger hark from? The present? Their actions?

No, our reaction to the present comes from previously learnt ideas of right and wrong, of pain and betrayal, of our own remembered shame. Any strong feeling is about you, not the action of the present, or the behaviour of another. You. It is the machinations of ego and of empathy. And ego and empathy come only from your own experience. And where does experience come from? The same place feelings come from.

This trick of time is what makes life so confusing, and interesting. It is what makes us mysteries to ourselves. (routine/feelings story?) Because our reactions to the present are emotional postcards from the past. That's hilarious when you think about it. A bit like having a conversation over a long distance phone call with a thirty year delay. A delay that happens instantaneously. No wonder our feelings perplex us.

Directly translated, nostalgia means return home pain. Writing – meaningful writing – is about returning to pain, regret, loss, love, childhood, ambivalence, fear, is it not? There's those other ones, happiness, hope and all that stuff. They're the flip side of those coins I just mentioned. The existence of sadness relies on the existence of happiness. You can't mention happiness without sadness being in the room.

So in writing about the emotions, we are writing about the past. You can't escape it. Sure, fear is the emotion of the future. Ambivalence belongs to our tendency to travel between the three time zones constantly. You've been doing it the whole time I've been talking.

So our feelings are citizens of that so-called foreign country. We are all citizens of that country. Denizens of the past. And yet we're taught to be ashamed of that. We're taught the past cannot be rectified.

Except. The pain of the past can. And if the past is where the pain is, visiting the past is where the healing is.

I write to entertain, I write to spin wonderful, powerful stories. And yet healing is also why I write – the healing of myself, and, hopefully, of those who read me.

Healing is the hand I want to hold if I am to walk boldly into the future. Or sit comfortably with myself in the present.

But (and I struggle with this) if I want my bright future, if I want to get on with life, to hurry onward, then I have to confront the fact my past is here. That I'm carrying little magpie stashes of emotion. Because I'm betting my fascination with the future is really a search for some recompense for the past.

Isn't our yearning directly proportional to our pain?

Nevertheless, it's a surprise to me that I am here sticking up for the past. But I've realised that without the reverberations of the past, I also don't have writing. And I don't know where I'd be without writing. And reading.

Without the reverberations of the past we don't have the emotions. And it's the emotions, like time travelling messengers, that make the present so abundantly, confusingly, painfully, but beautifully, alive. And it's what brings books alive.

 

Carving Carver

Raymond Carver changed the way I write, but that doesn't mean I approve. Reading his stories those years ago, I couldn't help but rant at him in my head for his half-bakedness as a writer. He claimed not to have the time to invest in a novel, but I know for sure he couldn't have done it. I've read stories where he tries for a more rounded shape and they always come out wonky.

Don't get me wrong. Carver was a master at what he did well. Really. But rather than writing some up-myself dissection of him here, why don't I just share a short caricature I wrote of him for a recent talk I gave:

Friday Night Weather

They were sat up in bed listening to the wind. She was nursing a tall glass of rum, the dead oak tapping on the window pane.

"This wind," she said. "This damn wind."

 "Why d'you have to drink in front of me," he said, "When you know."

"Know what?" she said.

"You know, that thing. Plus what's happening tomorrow."

"Oh," she said, in that way she had of saying oh.

Somewhere in the next apartment a radio was broadcasting the game. He wondered who was winning.

"Who d'you think's winning?" he said.

She looked at her rum, the ice tinkling. The drink sweating in the heat, condensation dripping down the glass and on to the bedspread. She wondered what country the wet patch looked like.

"Bet it's the damn Yankees," he said.

France, she decided. It looked like France. He'd promised to take her, but that was back when there hadn't been this wind.

"Now it's raining," he said. "First this damn wind and now rain. Maybe we'll get cool now though. Maybe we'll get some rest."

She thought about her washing on the line, her knees pulled up under the blankets like an impenetrable range of mountains, her sweating drink spreading a darkness across them.

"I wish they'd turn that damn radio down!" he said.

"You oughta go knock," she said.

"You think?" he said.

"Yes," she said, in that way she had of saying yes. The 'y' sound at the front, that 'e' after, then that 's' sound, right at the end. The finality of it.

"Oh," he said.

"Yes," she said, in a different way. She'd never had that way of saying it before.

He looked at her.

She looked away.

That dead oak tapped on the window.

She looked at him.

He looked away.

Then he got up. His body looked like his. He looked like him.

She gazed at him and thought, he looks like him.

He put on his dressing gown. He lifted a leg to put on a slipper, some knick-knacks rattling on the chest of drawers from his balancing. They rattled again for the other slipper.

Now he looks like him but in a dressing gown and slippers, she thought.

"I don't see why I have to go do it," he said. "Especially with what I have to do tomorrow –

that thing. Why can't you go knock?"

"Remind me again about tomorrow?" she said.

"You know I can't tell you. You know it won't be nearly as good as forcing you to imagine all manner of ominous things I have to do tomorrow. Why do I have to make stuff up all the damn time! What am I, a writer?"

She looked at the wall. In the lamp light she could see his shadow looming over her, breathing. The breathing quicker now.

"You should go knock," she said eventually.

"Right," he said.

He went.

He's gone, she thought.

She heard voices in the hall. She lay there thinking about yesterday, when she'd hung her washing out there clean and fresh and bright. It seemed like only yesterday.

He came back.

"What'd they say?" she said.

"They said they'd turn it off."

He took off his dressing gown. Now he looked like him taking off his dressing gown.

He got into bed.

"These sheets are awful drenched," he said.

"Sorry," she said and put her drink down on the side. It still dripped. She lay there waiting for him to touch her. She could tell by his breathing. He put a hand on her leg but just then the sound of the radio stopped.

"There," she said.

"Yes," he said and turned away, the bed sheets squelching when he moved.

She put a wet hand on him.

"Big day tomorrow," he said. "Best get some sleep."

She lay there shivering in the wet. She lay there listening to the rain on her white sheets. She lay there waiting to take her hand back, and wondering, what did he have on tomorrow?

 "Goodnight," she said. But his breathing was already leading him away, carrying him out across those rolling prairies of sleep.

Going underground

Ever since the miners were trapped I've been thinking about them. Worrying. Following the saga. And taken over by the idea of an experience like that, of indeterminate length or outcome. In those conditions.

For seventeen days after the collapse they were lost, eking out light, food, air, water. Hope. Unsure if they were already in their graves.

In some ways that would certainly have been the hardest time – those hours waiting to see if they would be found, or slowly starve or asphyxiate. But I'm sure being found would have added its own new urgency. A new terror that having been found, the rescue might fail and they would have to be buried all over again.

I've imagined what it must be like to lay in the dark all those feet under ground. So much rock above. The idea that it could collapse at any moment. The constant heat. The abject black. A rocky bubble at the bottom of the sea.

When I was hit by a car on my bike I remember the sense of post-trauma, lying in bed directly under a wall-mounted air conditioner that had stayed put for years but suddenly felt to me as if it could fall and crush me at any moment.

And so I've pictured those thirty-three men laying in the dark at night, with all that potential energy of rock above them, all that dark uncertainty.

I'm writing about blindness these days and the trapped miners and blindness are holding hands in my mind. It feels to me that both are a deep submersion inside your own body. Vision-impaired readers may be shaking their heads now. But as a new and ignorant visitor to their world, I'll allow myself my dramatic misinterpretations as my research progresses.

It strikes me that those miners have been buried inside their own bodies. That they were subject, in that dark (it must surely have had to be dark from time to time) to an immersion into their feelings, their worries, their corporeal ebbs and flows. Nothing to distract them from it. They were at the coal-face of themselves. More of a submersion than an immersion.

Nothing but them and the cruelty of consciousness.

Which is how, to me, a new severe vision-impairment would feel. Until you adapt, and there are many full adaptations, you would be in the coffin of your own experience. Almost certainly an opportunity for emancipation or destruction. Or both.

And so today, as the miners climb up out of that pressing experience and see the sky again and see the agony of love on their family's faces again, I'm shedding happiness for them. But also thinking about those blinded or suffering other submersions into something difficult and unavoidable, because today they are not climbing up out of that to greet the sky. They are still underground.

Here's to the miners, then. And here's to those still buried. They have nobody but themselves to dig them out.

The bluntest Ian McEwan review, ever.

Years and years ago my sister bought me Enduring Love and Atonement for Christmas. I tried Enduring Love and quickly wrote McEwan off as melodramatic. Since then I've eschewed his work.

Until a friend recommended Saturday to me recently, which I read and enjoyed. And since Saturday, I've read On Chesil Beach.

What both books do is take a very elongated look at something rather short. Saturday is set over one day, On Chesil Beach, a novella, is set over one evening. But both narratives then sandwich in so much detail and history which, whilst being an expert, almost forensic rendering of character, seem to make the pace and impetus of the book pool and eddy.

McEwan prides himself, I think, on rendering detail onto slim narratives. So that when reading a character of his walking down the street, I find myself wondering if McEwan will describe the day the lampposts were put in, too. What the workmen installing them ate for lunch, and how their marriages were going. When really, I want to know what is at the end of the street.

McEwan has no end of detail to slap onto his characters. So much so, that we aren't left really to invoke any of our imagination. (My belief is that you engage and move a reader most when you harness their own imagination – give them the saliency, and let them populate it with their own experience).

Luckily his prose is slick; his atmospherics effective (even if the sense of promise fails to surface); and his inexhaustible rendering is generally interesting (if irrelevant -- certainly credible). But true to the promise of bluntness, here is a summary of what this reader least admires in McEwan's style.

1)   His handling of emotion is robotic. 'He writes like a scientist', someone said to me. I say he writes emotion the way I would describe being on the moon. I can give you the weightlessness, the dust, the light, the footprints, the view of Earth. But something hollow will resonate from the way I describe it. McEwan writes from his head. Rarely is his heart, and therefore mine, invoked. Nor my gut.

2)   His plotting and narrative is lacking. In Saturday we are waiting for the ramifications of an altercation the well-to-do neurologist has had with a thug. We know the thug is going to show up at the family home. We know the family in immense detail (most of it historic to the current narrative). But when this thug device shows up, it is disappointing. McEwan's books remind me of a long, long drum roll, the drummer holding a hundred sticks, but no cymbal crash. With Saturday and the lauded On Chesil Beach, I found myself disappointed at or discrediting the ending, and given a sense that there was a hard sell all the way through, but no delivery. He promises you things, but only so that he can give you the bits he wants to give. Bits that are often ancillary to story.

3)   Ian McEwan writes in a style I call storytelling (I know, I know). It is where the writing often tells you what is happening, even gives detail, but due to the style and the choice of detail, you remain, almost always, at a step removed. Again, there is this cold, forensic feeling to the writing. He rarely writes a SCENE--something immersive. Always he is interspersing the narration between reader and action. Always he is choreographing you, so that you never get involved. It is to be spoon-fed rather than to eat with your hands.

What McEwan has done for me though, is to mark a moment in time when I can read again. I'm not sure what's happened, but I can read novels now. For a while I was too critical of them to read. But, perhaps because McEwan does write very well; is such an intelligent, observant and diligent writer, or perhaps because my book is out now, I can read again. And what a great thing that is. 

Bali!

I'm tempted to write in the style of an American high school student. Oh. My. God. I love travel. So many flights these last few years have been long haul, but this one short and so I was out late last night and hungover on the plane. I slept for hours, and reckon I probably drowned out the engines. It's so hard to tell from peoples' faces when you wake, whether you've been snoring. Although waking up with the the passenger in front's hair extensions in your mouth might be a clue.

And then suddenly it's tropically warm and frenetic and the sound of horns and the smell of two-stroke and trees that are ostentatiously extravagant -- bursting with fruits most trees can only aspire to. The sea. The smiling temperament of the locals. Questions questions questions. I'm like a 2month old in a pusher, trying to take it all in.

Shorts on and ready to hit the beach. New people to meet all week. Writers from all over the world and new friends already met on the plane. One who runs retreats here. Others coming just to attend or volunteer at the festival.

Travel. Change. Newness. Exploration. I'm seven again and bedtimes and baths have been cancelled (what about bed-baths?). So that it occurs to me, if you don't have your intrigue in life, you don't have life in your life.

Another First Novel

Writing the second novel is supposed to be hard, because you write into expectation.

What bollocks. Writing a second novel is hard because writing any novel is hard. With a first novel there is so much uncertainty. And if there's problems associated with a second, they are made up of uncertainty too.

The problem is always uncertainty. And also, the problem is certainty. The certainty that this second novel will not do all the things you dreamt of to get you through your first. All the hopes...