Iris Lavell's Blog, page 9

What Do You Love?

I’ve been reading a book called Story written by Robert McKee. Subtitled: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, while the focus of the advice might be on the film script, the gems contained within its covers are applicable to all writers of fiction. On the cover its claim “Winner, International Moving Image Book Award” is supported by the high quality of the information and writing between the covers.

This morning, on page 99, I read the passage with the sub-heading “The Gift of Endurance” in which he talks about screenwriting as being for long-distance runners rather than sprinters. The same is true for the novel, or any work of length. McKee wrote this:
“Whatever your source of inspiration, beware of this: Long before you finish, the love of self will rot and die, the love of ideas sicken and perish. You’ll become so tired and bored with writing about yourself or your ideas, that you may not finish the race.
So, in addition, ask: What’s my favourite genre? Then write in the genre you love. For although the passion for and idea or experience may wither, the love of the movies is forever.”
He ends the chapter with this: “Be honest in your choice of genre, for all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.”
Hear, hear!
 

Freefall writing

Do you long to connect with your deepest intention in writing, and to write with authority and grace? Book now for the Freefall Writing Retreat with Barbara Turner-Vesselago at Bicton in Perth from 11-16 Nov through Rosemary Stevens ( rosegarv@iinet.net.au  ). Barbara has over twenty-five years of experience in guiding writers to find their authentic voice and attain their highest potential. Many of her past students have been successfully published. I cannot recommend Barbara or the Freefall Writing process highly enough. Also, check out her website:  www.freefallwriting.com

And congratulations Marlish!

One of our Book Length Project Group network members, Marlish Glorie has just published her new book, Sea Dog hotel. It is available as an e-book. Congratulations Marlish! I took the opportunity to ask the author all about her new baby:
Could you tell me a little bit about your background as a writer?        
I came late to writing in that I came late to reading. For me, reading and writing are inexorably linked, but there’s a hierarchy.  Reading comes first.  But before I go any further, I’d like to mention that from early childhood I did have a love of pretending and of storytelling.  It’s just that once I had the necessary skills as a writer, I took the pretending to a whole new level.
 My introduction to the world of books came at around the age of twelve.  When Mum got a car and was able to drive us kids to Bentley library.  Suddenly a whole new world opened up, and I was held enthralled by all the different worlds I could escape into.  I read anything and everything from James Bond by Ian Fleming  to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.   I wanted to be like all these great writers…but that would take several other careers and many decades of reading and writing plays, before I even had the skills and confidence to try and write a novel. My first novel ended up in the proverbial bottom drawer. With my second novel The Bookshop on JacarandaStreet I was fortune in that Fremantle Press published it in 2009.
Your new book is called the Sea Dog Hotel. What can you tell us about it?It’s a book I’m proud of.  Whether or not it’s any good, I don’t know. And it’s not for me to judge, I’ll let others do that.  I’m proud of it because it deals with issues close to my heart, like mental illness, the West Australian wheat-belt and happiness. I tend to brew on different issues, then marry them into what I hope is a seamless narrative. Fictionalising mental illness is extremely difficult, if you’re being honest, i.e.  writing about it, as it is, not playing it for laughs or gimmickry.   There are already enough misconceptions about mental illness without it being portrayed badly in Art.  How did you come to write this particular book?

  I started writing it in 2006 after visiting, in the middle of winter, a speck of a town in the wheat belt.  It was bleak and freezing cold. And I remember thinking there’s a story here. Simple as that.  Something sparked within me, the austere landscape, the people, seemingly not much happening. Perfect ! — a blank canvas for me to fill. The all-important question - where can we get hold of the book?

You can download a copy of Sea Dog Hotel from Amazon eBooks for $7.99
 
And what next for Marlish Glorie?
 Trying to market and sell Sea Dog Hotel  which is no easy thing when you’ve gone down the road of self-publishing!  And working on my next book.

 



 

Congratulations Louise!

Wonderful news. Book Length Project Group member Louise Allan has been awarded a Varuna residency for 2014. This is no small thing. The residencies are highly competitive and there is an involved application process required to even be considered. Read all about it on Louise's blog.

Congratulations Louise! I've had the great privilege to read some of your work, and it is certainly well-deserved. We will expect a blow by blow account of events upon your return. The way this year is speeding by, it won't feel too long.

Next year...

Both teams fought hard but the more experienced Hawks prevailed in the end. Congratulations to both teams - only a couple of goals in it when the final siren sounded. "The Dockers have a future" said Dennis Cometti. They sure do. A young team with a great work ethic and a whole year to get ready for the next Grand Final. Garn the Dockers!

Garn the mighty Dockers...!

Freo, way to go, hit 'em with the old heave ho - we are the Freo Dockers.

All this to be sung with a hint of inebriation and just the one note - pick any.

Joking aside, nineteen years without a grand final makes the competition this year all the sweeter.

Go Freo!

Progressing the manuscript - confessions of a suburban writer

I have taken to handwriting, however clumsily, every morning when I get up, to simply progress the
plot of my new novel manuscript. In my pyjamas, in my dressing gown and old socks. With a cup of coffee at my side, usually growing cold as the stream of consciousness takes hold.

This stops me -
overthinking thingsgetting stuck in editing mode on my computerlosing the plotovercomplicating the plotfeeling those self-defeating emotions that accompany the process of writing a novel when inspiration is not forthcomingIt's still slow. I type it up and edit over the course of the day, between more cups of coffee and suddenly pressing tasks.

Yes it's working and the plot twists and turns still take me by surprise. I guess the trick now is knowing which paths to follow, and where I need to backtrack.

I wish you all the best, fellow writers, with your own endeavours. Keep writing.

Defending the Domestic Drama

The teacups in the roomA recent episode of Jennifer Byrnes Presents called "Pens and Prejudice" was filmed at the Sydney Writers Festival and featured a panel of writers and critics discussing the issue of whether women's writing, fiction in particular, was being unfairly overlooked by the big literary prizes, and whether there was a need for special women's prizes such as the Orange and the Stella. As always, it was a worthwhile talk with an excellent panel, although in the half-hour time slot allocated for the television program, much of the original discussion would have been edited out, I imagine.
 
The issue of subject matter made the cut though, with the consensus being that anything to do with the tiny details of domestic life, so-called 'misery' fiction, and 'thinly veiled autobiography' made the (female) arbiters of such taste, want to 'slit their wrists'.
 
Now I'm not in favour of pumping out fiction as a cynical exercise to jerk tears from voyeuristic readers and I'm not a fan of angst for its own sake, but I do wonder about the assumptions behind the literary denigration of such stories. Humour, lightness, and optimism doesn't seem to come in for quite the same level of criticism, although often these too, tend not to make the cut for literary consideration, being seen as somehow less, when I’ve always thought it would be quite difficult to pull off humour well.

A particular brand of female suffering tends to come in for the biggest hit though, and I am wondering why. Is the expression of issues of suffering through storytelling seen as unseemly perhaps, especially if the sufferer (the central character) is drawn as ill-equipped to rise above it? In reality, preventable and unnecessary suffering does exist, often exists behind closed doors, and is not always 'handled' with the stoicism or aplomb that we imagine it should be. Unselfconscious neuroticism and self-examination are ubiquitous; could be the defining feature of our age, in fact, and is not all bad, in that it - well - encourages self-examination. Isn't this, in itself, a fit and proper subject for storytelling? 
 
The flowers in the room
Effectively, what we are being told is that, if you are a serious writer and want to be considered as such, there are some subjects that you write about at your peril. And yet, these are, to my mind, valid subjects for literary exploration precisely because they are resisted. And they are meaningful, because what happens in the domestic sphere translates to good health, or ill, in the society at large. 
 
The now clichéd and pejorative term 'thinly veiled autobiography' seems particularly inaccurate, because anyone who has given the process of writing any thought at all understands that whatever emerges from an author's pen or keyboard is going to be both autobiographical and fictional; autobiographical in the sense that it is filtered through their particular world view and honed by their peculiar imagination (unless it is heavily plagiarised). Works marketed as autobiography are largely fictional, for the same reason. Perhaps we also need to be reminded that whatever is traditionally published is going to be filtered through a number of sensibilities before it reaches print. To imagine that any book that is accepted for publication is anything other than highly constructed is to ignore what goes on in the lengthy editorial process. 
 
And doesn't 'thinly veiled' autobiographical content (as distinct from the more respectful 'semi-autobiographical' content) imply that there is such a thing as 'heavily veiled' autobiographical content? Is this more commonly called realism, that brand of fiction that reinforces the existing social structures and power relationships of the private and the public, of what is acceptable (non-confronting) to bring into the public sphere and what is not acceptable (inconvenient to talk about)? It is assumed that in realism there will be some borrowing from reality - setting and so forth - but it seems that borrowing needs to be of a kind that does not challenge the reader’s existing world view too much.
 
I wonder about the internalised sexism that underlies the idea that the domestic sphere is somehow not worth writing about, if it is written about by a female writer. Strangely, when men write about the domestic as it impacts them (as is right and proper - men live there too), the result can be considered exemplary (if it is well -written, of course, and the well-written part is understood here - I am talking purely of a subject matter hierarchy). The Great Gatsbywas a domestic kind of book, and so was Women in Love. Weren't they? Wonderful books from a male sensibility.
 

The elephant in the roomIt would be interesting to look at why female writers have their own hierarchy as far as it comes to subject matter, and why epic is considered so much more valuable than the intimate, why violence is considered to be a better subject to write about than love, and why those who decide prizes for women's literature appear to feel that they must use the very same criteria to judge women's literature as those which have been developed over time to privilege those power structures that made it necessary to have the prizes in the first place. To be considered as good as the Man Booker, do the Orange and the Stella need to be the same?
 
At the beginning of the program Jennifer Byrne mentioned the elephant in the room. My feeling is that the elephant is still there. I think it will take some shifting.
 

The final of Tales from the Dark Mountain by Patricia Johnson - at least for now perhaps...

This is the last of the series of modern fairy tales by Patricia Johnson from her Dark Mountain series. The others have been posted on this blog here, here and here. All stories copyright Patricia Johnson.
Bendy Boys
Far away on the other side of the world a village rests on the face of a dark mountain. Early every morning when the villagers awake from their night time dreams they hurry out into the sunlight. Dressed for a day of work, they walk together to their fields.
The mountain is so high that its highest peaks disappear in the clouds. If anyone was to want to go to the village, they would have to walk for days up from the foothills below. The people who live there have their houses and their fields on a little plain that is level and fertile with a mountain spring running through it. They think they are lucky to live there.       
The villagers plant their crops and water and wait and one day the heads of little boys pop up out of the earth.  The villagers are surprised; they didn’t plant little boys. They already have their own children. The little boys are different to the village children. These boys are growing out of their fields. Their little heads wear  caps of a brilliant blue that fall softly over their eyes, and their eyes are  bright.          
The villagers are so happy and so proud, but the boys are buried in the fields and they must grow  before they can walk. Their bodies are unformed below the surface of the ground, but above ground their bright eyes are very bright indeed. They are almost popping out of their heads, always watching, learning and wondering.
One day when they go to the fields to see if the children have grown, the villagers  find their shoulders have popped out of the ground and growing from the shoulders are very long bendy arms. The little shoulders and long bendy arms wear little blue jackets that match their caps -  their caps which, because the boys have grown, no longer fall over their bright eyes. The villagers stand on the edge of the fields, pointing and admiring the children.   
Whack! One of those long bendy arms has reached out and grabbed a man. The child turns the man upside down and shakes him.  One two three, like someone shaking salt onto his dinner he shakes him and on three the long bendy arm bangs the man’s head onto the ground. He goes in up to the shoulders and his body stands up like stick pushed into the ground.         
The villagers all begin to run in different directions but they are too late. They hope the young monsters will just go away but long bendy arms are scooping them up everywhere, turning them upside down  and shaking them. Bright eyes are brimming with laughter as the villagers are banged like nails into the ground. There is uproar, there is mayhem in the fields. And then it is quiet.                                                                                                                
The  children erupt out of the ground like olives being squeezed out of a narrow bottle top, laughing and calling to each other in excited voices, ‘we won! we won!’ They dance and throw their blue caps in the air and fall about laughing at the way they land. They gather together in the centre of the field and dance a mad dance. The go faster and faster until they are out of breath and their long bendy arms are intricately entangled with each other. They pat their friends on the back but their arms are so long they don’t know who they are patting.
‘Bendy Boys! Bendy Boys!’ they cry. ‘We are the Bendy Boys.’ They begin to dance again. But there is trouble this time. Their arms are so entangled that boys keep falling down. They begin to cry. Boys turn red. They try to punch other boys, but their fists are a long way away; they cannot hit the boy they intend to. Instead they hit other boys. Those boys hit back. Long bendy arms are throwing punches everywhere., Little blue jackets are covered in dirt. There are split lips and bloody noses. There are all sorts of wounds.                                                
Blood starts to flow. It is everywhere. Blood, blood, blood. It mingles with the tears of the boys who are just caught up in the long bendy arms. The boys turn pale, their blue jackets covered in red, as their blood pours into the field. This does not stop them fighting. They go on and on until they have no blood left and fall onto the ground. They are a blue mountain of legs and heads and long bendy arms, silent, motionless. The boys cannot be separated as they are so entwined; they are all one mountain of blue.                                                                    
The villagers are still stuck upside down in the ground. They are like stiff pegs that stand tall and straight, that circle the mountain of blue. The wind blows, the mountain of blue shifts and sinks a little. Days pass and then one morning ‘Bluuurk!’ Straight up, high in the sky, pops one of the villagers and when he comes down, he is upright and smiling. He is alive. ‘Bluuurk!’ Another villager pops up, and then another and another. ‘Bluuurk! Bluuurk! Bluuurk!’ It is happening everywhere and soon the air is filled with flying villagers, somersaulting in the air and landing right side up and smiling.                                               
The villagers are so happy to be back. They look at each other, laughing over the pile of blue and begin to walk in a circle around and around the Bendy Boys. Around and around, tramping, swinging their arms in unison, they march. And as they march, they make a trench in the ground. They wear down a path and the ground where they walk gets lower and lower, and soon the blue pile of Bendy Boys is high above their heads. The villagers keep walking in a circle, round and round. Suddenly they hear a noisy scraping sound.
With difficulty they climb and clamber out of the deep trench. The circle of blue in the middle, looking like a cake that has risen in the oven, slowly turns and falls to one side. It stands on its curved edge and like a wheel begins to roll down the mountainside. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, it careers downward, a giant blue coin slicing through the thick forest of trees and right out of sight.        
When it is really gone and can be seen no more, the villagers look at the middle ground, underneath where that blue pile had been. What they see there is a great mound of gold coins, hundreds and thousands of them. They rush to the center and sink amongst them, each holding a coin up to the light to examine it, showing the coins to their neighbours and wondering at their good fortune.                                                                                         
It is a pool, a pond of gold. As the sunlight bounces off it, the light changes and a soft glow settles over everything. The villagers  are enjoying the feeling that they are swimming in gold, when they are startled to hear a great rattle like a huge bucket of nails being tipped out. The coins are falling away, and there is a rustle and a shaking of scales as a great head emerges from the centre of the pool of gold. A dragon’s head!! Silver head shining against the gold, it’s evil eyes heavy-lidded and unblinking, the dragon swivels round and with a great jerk the head darts skyward on a long neck.                                                                
The villagers panic and run up into the hills. The huge eyes of the dragon watch them until they are all gone, all hidden by the trees. The eyes flash malevolently as the head moves around the edge of the pool, gathering in the gold. The villagers are very afraid. They understand that they have disturbed something that they had no right to disturb. They pray the dragon will not attack them for their foolishness.                                                                 
The silver head glints in the sun. The eyes bore into the eyes of each of the villagers, sending a warning of unmistakable intent. Then very slowly the head spins, the neck begins to be swallowed by the earth, the gold pours  into a cavern of enormous size below, and the dragon and all of the gold sinks below the surface of the ground. There is no trace left of all that gold, of all that has happened. Not one coin shimmers in the sunshine.                             
The villagers are safe. And they have much to say to each other. But they have had enough; they are sick of adventures. They are ready to go into the mountain. They walk along gloomy tunnels, resting and travelling, and resting again. When they have gone far enough they lay down and cover themselves in furs deep in the earth where it is dark and quiet. For years the seasons come and go. They are part of the mountain that does not change and as they sleep the strength of the mountain enters their minds and anchors their dreams.
 

Book Length Project Member Profile Reg Parnell

I have four major writing projects on the go – two fiction, two non-fiction.

Last December I got an editorial critique on a novel I had been working on for years. Amongst much else, it let me identify some gaps in my writing skills. The work that had been critiqued, named Dunceis in the genre of literary nonsense; as such, it was not a good place to address the gaps in my skill set. I decided to do two things – undertake a major reading exercise in all things writing, and write a ‘training wheels’ novel where I could apply a more standard set of writers tools. I reasoned that this would let me separate the special problems of writing literary nonsense from the broader deficits in my knowledge and craft. I intend to return to Duncewith my enhanced writers superpowers. Linsay, my trainer novel, is about a 26 y/o woman who has problems with commitment and acceptance; her goal in life is to be a great painter. I have written 80,000 odd words in seven months, and plan to be finished by the end of August. Linsayhas taken on a life way beyond my original intentions: my goal of developing and demonstrating a competent fiction writer’s skill set has been achieved, at least well enough for this story.

Marsupial moleMy non-fiction works are a WA travelogue with a difference, and a book on the marsupial mole, based on an original journal from the beginning of last century that reports a study of the mole.