L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 13

Book Review: The Spare Room by Helen Garner

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Reading The Spare Room by Helen Garner reminded me very much of reading Glenice Whitting’s Something Missing. Not because of their stories or characters but because I know Glenice and when I read her book, I realised that it was based heavily on and drew extensively from her own life. I don’t know Helen Garner personally at all but I’m starting to wonder how much of her fiction is actually fiction. Almost everything she’s written that is classified as such seems to have a real life twin.

Helen (yes, the main character’s name is Helen – more evidence of a thinly veiled story) has agreed to host her Sydney friend, Nicola, in the spare room of her Melbourne home while she undergoes three weeks of cancer treatments. Nicola has always been a bit flighty and end-stage bowel cancer isn’t going to change that. She’s already done the chemo, the radiation; it hasn’t worked. So now she’s placing her faith in the Theodore Institute where they intravenously pump her full of Vitamin C, have her hold electrodes while in an ozone sauna and perform cupping, all to force the “toxins” out. Nicola’s immense pain is proof that it’s working, they say.

Helen is, as most people would be, sceptical. But she wants to be supportive because she knows her friend is dying. So she cooks, chauffeurs, cleans – especially cleans; Nicola goes through multiple sheet and pyjama changes each night as she sweats (profusely) and sometimes pees (unintentionally) in the bed.

However, Nicola’s positivity simply makes it harder for Helen. The burden of death, it would seem, is only marginally more difficult than the burden of watching someone else die. Half way through the three week visit, Helen is nearly broken and something is going to have to give.

The Spare Room is the kind of book you could easily lose a day to, putting your head down to read and not raising it again until there are no more words and no more daylight. It’s a short book, more like a novella, and almost perfect. Perfectly written, perfectly flawed characters, perfectly demonstrating the indignity of this kind of drawn-out death.

Still, why write it as fiction? Garner is widely recognised as the undisputed queen of creative non-fiction. Why not continue on that legacy here? I think it may have been because she needed a space to vent and non-fiction, if the writer wants it to be taken seriously, is not the place to do it. Garner watched her friend dying as well as being given false hope by a charlatan pretending to be a purveyor of medical miracles and needed a safe place to rant and rave and let out everything that the experience had done to both of them. In her creative non-fiction, Garner is usually at least an arm’s length away. Here she was so intimately involved that she could never have hoped to find enough separation to be impartial.

Does it really matter in the end? Perhaps not. Everything Garner writes is lovely. Not necessarily the subject matter but the way she goes about it. She is the epitome of Abraham Lincoln’s advice to not use two words where one will suffice.

So the reason that I haven’t given it 5 stars? I feel like this story, or some very similar version of it, has been told a lot. Everyone going through grief seems to think theirs is different or better or more important than everyone else’s. But it isn’t. I was waiting for that thing that would set this story apart from every other story of dying and death and grief but it never came.

And yet it’s an achievement. It’s the kind of book that I think would work well on a high school reading list or a book club book of the month, lots and lots to talk about. But mostly it’s just further proof of how good a writer Helen Garner is.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 5 November 2017

Co-opting Real-life People to Be Characters in Your Fiction

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While many authors love the freedom that creating a brand new and completely fictional character offers, others want to tell stories that involve people who exist or have existed in real life. It can be a powerful motivation for readers to want to read it but it can also be a minefield if it’s done badly. Here are a few things to think about to help you get it right.

Prepare to Do a Lot of Research

If you’re choosing to use a real-life person as a character, then you’ll have to know them inside and out, as much as is possible at least. And that means research. A lot of it. An awful lot of it to get the details right.

Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder uses several real-life figures in the early 1900s movement of psychoanalysis (which at the time was new, controversial and in competition with neurology) as characters including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones and Abraham Brill. But he didn’t just decide to do it on a whim. He’d been fascinated by Freud for a long time, writing a thesis on the famous psychiatrist during Rubenfeld’s senior undergraduate year at Princeton. In particular, it seemed he’d been intrigued by Freud’s one and only trip to America. Little was known about what had happened while he was there and what, if anything, made him never want to return. It was the perfect gap to fill with a little bit of fiction informed by well-researched assumptions.

The book wove together real and fictional incidents so well that Rubinstein included an essay at the end to separate them out. He didn’t want to pretend that he had any idea what had really happened. He just wanted a vehicle for writing a cracking novel and perhaps to find a few new converts to his longstanding fascination with Sigmund Freud.

The More Famous the Better

The more famous the real-life person you choose to include in your story, the more information you’ll have access to. After all, if you’re going to write about somebody real, part of the reason is that they are already fully developed characters.

And from a marketing perspective, the better known your real-life character is, the wider the automatic audience there will be for your novel. But if part of your motivation is to get a less well-known person some of the recognition you think they deserve, it might be more work but it could be a lot more rewarding, too.

Alternative Histories

If you want to write a “what if?” alternative history, then using real-life people as characters is just a given. But remember all that research I was talking about earlier? Triple it.

The Deader the Better

Real-life people who are already dead are much less likely to kick up a fuss if they don’t like your depiction of them. And the longer they’ve been dead, the less likely it is their friends, children, grandchildren, associates and acquaintances will still be alive to take issue with your novel either (and try to sue the pants off you).

It also means if you want to use incidents that have no basis in fact that it’s easier to get away with. Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl was a smash hit and became just the first in a series but academics have pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. Of course, none of the books had to be historically accurate because they were fiction, not non-fiction.

These inaccuracies were probably the result of creative choices but many of them were based on the rumours going round at the time and long since afterwards. So it doesn’t mean you can get out of doing all that intensive research. It just means you can choose the facts that suit the story you want to tell.

People Who Are Still Alive

So what if you want to write about someone who’s still alive? It’s actually quite common to have real-life supporting characters. US presidents and European royalty get a lot of gigs in fiction. The key is usually to put them in stories that have absolutely nothing to do with their real lives. A fantastic example of this is John Birmingham’s Axis of Time trilogy. Colonel Harry Windsor (known more commonly as Prince Harry) is part of a military group that gets sucked back in time to the 1940s. It’s not really crucial that Prince Harry be in the book but it’s certainly a talking point.

Not a Vehicle for Vengeance

If you are going to head down the real-life and still alive route, it’s important to remember that this kind of fiction is not a vehicle for vengeance unless your goal is to hand over to the inspiration for the character all the profits from the book and everything else you own. If vengeance is your goal, then it’s important to do everything you can to disguise the real-life person you want to take your revenge on.

Attorney Lloyd J Jassin recommends the four Ds in order to avoid the fifth D (a defamation lawsuit):

*Disclaim – include a legal statement that the characters are not based on or inspired by real people; everyone knows it’s very rarely true but it’s a common practice.

*Disassociate – that is, change enough about the character to disguise them to everyone who doesn’t know them well.

*Depict (but don’t disparage) – truth is a defence to accusations of defamation so if you include real events without exaggerating their extent or making judgements, it’s hard to claim it’s the writer rather than the perpetrator who is responsible for the bad reputation.

*Wait for death – okay, so it might take a while but it’s the safest option apart from not writing about the real-life person at all.

Writers Who’ve Done It Well

There are plenty of writers who have paved the way in co-opting real-life people to be characters in their fiction but the king and one of the originals is, of course, William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, Edwards, Henrys, Richards, King Duncan in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though, that writers who have co-opted real-life characters into their fiction and done it well are good writers generally. After all, why bother with all that effort if you’re going to do it badly? So treat your real-life characters with the respect they deserve by putting them into a great story written well. It’s the ultimate compliment.

How to Proofread Like a Professional

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You’ve written, you’ve rewritten, you’ve had your manuscript assessed, you’ve rewritten again (and possibly again), you’ve had it edited and it’s finally time for your book to be published. If you’ve already paid a manuscript assessor and editor and you can afford a proofreader as well, then go ahead and do it. A professional will always be able to do a better job than you. But if you’re looking for a way to save a few bucks and you’re confident you have the skills to take on the final stages yourself, then here’s how to proofread like a professional.

Step 1: First you’ll need an electronic proof. A proof is your book laid out in the way it’s going to be printed. You can’t proofread if you don’t have a proof. If you have a publishing contract, your publisher should organise for a proofreader to undertake all the following steps. If you’re paying a publisher to print your book, they should provide the proof to you. If you’re self-publishing, templates are usually available that you can paste your proof into and apply the appropriate styles (headings, opening paragraphs, following paragraphs, etc).

Step 2: Turn on Track Changes.

Step 3: Run the Spelling & Grammar Check (making sure that you’ve first selected and applied the language you want the Spelling & Grammar Check to look for; if you’ve chosen US English, then, for example, –ize endings will be considered correct and –ise endings will be considered incorrect and vice versa if you’ve chosen UK or Australian English). Let’s face it, if there are tools available to make the proofreading process easier, then we’d be fools not to use them. And the Spelling & Grammar Check is one of the greatest technologies ever invented to help speed up that process. Remember, though, that Microsoft Word doesn’t know English as well as we might like it to. So consider all suggested changes and also remember that it’s okay to ignore the ones that don’t make sense or that you know are just plain wrong.

Step 4: Now read the proof for yourself and make corrections on screen as you go.

Step 5: On the Review tab in Microsoft Word, change the Display for Review setting from “Final: Show Markup” to “Final” so you can’t see the changes you’ve made in Step 4. Now repeat Step 4.

Step 6: On the Review tab in Microsoft Word, change the Display for Review setting back from “Final” to “Final: Show Markup” so you can see all the changes you’ve made. Review the changes and if you’re happy with them, accept all changes in the document.

Step 7: Check for widows and orphans. Widows and orphans are where one line at the start of a paragraph is at the bottom of a page or where one line at the end of a paragraph is at the top of page. Publishing etiquette dictates that there must be a minimum of two lines of a paragraph together at the tops and bottoms of pages (not including single line paragraphs). Microsoft Word has a function for automatically ensuring this but sometimes this means the facing pages of a proof are slightly uneven at the bottom. Where this is the case, I like to make slight changes in the text to even it up manually (either by deleting a few words here and there or adding a few in).

Step 8: If your proof has a table of contents and page numbers, check that the page numbers in the table of contents match up with the page numbers throughout the book. (If you have an automatic table of contents, update it and that should make it accurate. If you have a manual table of contents, first of all, why? Secondly, go through the text and make sure the page numbers in the table of contents match up with the locations in the proof.)

Step 9: Order a printed proof. This should look exactly like what you will be offering readers for sale.

Step 10: Read your printed proof like you would read any other piece of writing for pleasure but have a red pen handy. Circle any final mistakes you find.

Step 11: In the electronic proof, correct those final mistakes you’ve found in the printed proof.

Step 12: Repeat Steps 7 and 8. (You can also repeat Steps 9, 10 and 11 if you want to but if you’ve done this process thoroughly, you shouldn’t need to.)

Step 13: Approve your finalised proof for printing. Approval is a must. No publisher or printer will print your book without the proof being officially signed off. This way, if there are any mistakes, then you are responsible for them and all the copies of your book that are printed with them in it. If you’re printing on demand, then there won’t be any upfront costs and you can always make a few more changes and approve a second proof but if you’re doing a print run, you will be liable for the cost of any printed books. So try to make sure you’re as happy with the book as possible. You don’t want to have to pulp hundreds or even thousands of books. Apart from the costs, it’s a terrible waste.

And that’s it. A final word though: it’s impossible for your book to be perfect. Small errors almost always slip through. (I was at my sister’s house reading out loud part of a chapter in her copy of Project January that referred extensively to my nephews and I was mortified to see a straight apostrophe instead of a curly one when I thought I’d found them all. The horror!) A good rule of thumb is this: if you eliminate enough errors that only professional editors, proofreaders and pedants are able to find the rest, then you’ll have done well. Good luck!

The Continuing Controversy of Same-Sex Relationships in Fiction

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I have a theory that there are two types of writers: those who court controversy and those who avoid it. Controversy can mean many things these days but I was a little surprised to realise that same-sex relationships in fiction are still classified this way. And it has forced me to rethink the number of categories writers can be separated into and add a third: those who are controversial without realising it.

When KK Ness released her debut novel, Messenger, Book 1 in The Shifter War series, I was one of the first in line to read it. I’d followed with anticipation her writing journey through her blog ever since she did me the favour of reading a draft of one of my yet-to-be-published novels and offering some very useful advice. It was even more appreciated since we’d never met before and still haven’t to this day.

You can read my 4-star review of Messenger here. For the purposes of this discussion, this extract was my comment on the way the book had been categorised on Amazon:

“I was a little concerned when I was buying it that its main classifications seemed to be ‘gay fiction’, ‘gay & lesbian fiction’ and ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender fiction’ when the blurb clearly described a story that easily falls into the fantasy genre. Maybe my concern was because so much fiction classified in that way turns out to be erotic fiction. But it’s only because the main character and his love interest are both male. In fact, it was so subtle that I wondered if the ‘gay fiction’ classification might put off some conservative readers when it really shouldn’t. More a marketing consideration than anything to do with the story itself.”

Despite my concerns about the way the book was categorised, I have no problem reading fiction with same-sex relationships and I found Ness’s depiction of the interactions between the two main characters, Danil and Hafryn, quite understated. So much so that I thought it could have been developed a little further, contained a little more depth. Still, I thought maybe she’d achieved something great: a romance written so well that people who are a bit iffy about same-sex relationships and those who find them completely off-putting might be able to look past it to simply see the beauty of love.

Apparently, that was too much to ask for. A couple of weeks after I finished reading the book and had posted my review on Goodreads and Amazon, I went back to those forums to see how the book was going and I was surprised by two later reviews that specifically referred to the same-sex relationship. The first was this:

“The story line was okay and well written. What has put me off is that the author has no respect towards the readers. And giving us the warning that the story involves a same sex romance. I have no objection against same sex couples, but frankly I am not interested to read about them either. So my dear author you have lost me as your potential book buying customer. 2 stars”

And the second was this:

“An enjoyable light read from a new author. Well written. Good story line and characters. I am concerned however regarding the inferred potential ‘gay’ relationship between the two main characters. Should this aspect be allowed to develop or intensify, it would result in my not reading future books in this series which would be a shame as I think this author shows real potential. Perhaps I’m being somewhat conservative but I love reading books which are enjoyable and entertaining to me and that doesn’t include gay and lesbian stories. 5 stars”

Far from being slightly misleading as I had found it, the first reviewer seemed to feel that the book’s categorisation as “gay fiction”, “gay & lesbian fiction” and “lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender fiction” hadn’t been warning enough of the same-sex relationship. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as Jerry Seinfeld would say and which the reviewer seemed to be implying. They had “no objection against same sex couples” but were “not interested to read about them either”. Ness had lost herself a future customer.

But it was the second review that I found more insidious. Despite a five-star rating, instead of bemoaning the lack of an appropriate warning, it seemed to be warning the author against pursuing the same-sex relationship storyline any further. “Should this aspect be allowed to develop or intensify, it would result in my not reading future books in this series…” Ness had already lost one customer and if she pushed her luck, she’d be losing another.

I could understand people having a problem with Messenger if it contained explicit descriptions of sex – I’m not particularly interested in reading books full of straight or gay sex scenes either – but there isn’t a single instance of that. Danil and Hafryn barely touch each other. It seems as though so many of those people who have “no problem with gay people but don’t want to read about them” think that all gay people in fiction do is have sex all day long.

In 2018, I thought we were long past these ridiculous notions of what it is to be same-sex attracted (FYI, in case you didn’t know, apart from the obvious, it’s pretty much the same as being opposite-sex attracted). I’m disappointed that we aren’t long past these ridiculous notions. Especially because it seems to be impacting a book well worth the read.

All I can hope is that it doesn’t impact Messenger too much and that readers like this are a dying breed. If a reader doesn’t like the story of a book with a same-sex relationship, that’s one thing. If a reader doesn’t like the story of a book because of a same-sex relationship, that says more about the reader than it does about the book. I know which I’d choose to avoid.

*Visioner, Book 2 in The Shifter War series, is now also available (buy it here).

Book Review: Visioner (The Shifter War Book 2) by KK Ness

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Danil and Hafryn are back! If you liked Messenger, then you’ll like Visioner as well as they are very similar books. Danil is still a fish out of water, Hafryn is still his devoted lover and protector, and they still don’t know who they can really trust.

After winning the battle at the end of Messenger to save the deadlands from Roldaerian magi and the evil Kaul, Danil is now its custodian. It’s a position that chooses the person, not the other way around. Under his care, the once lifeless area is flourishing with greenery and, more importantly, leylines and kiandrite crystals that speak to him. Danil has just found his first proper kiandrite crystal (instead of the flecks that the magi have been stealing for decades to use in their magic spells) when he is surprised by a Roldaerian emissary and her guards. They wish to be taken to the High Council of Amas to negotiate a peace treaty on orders from King Liam of Roldaer.

Danil is suspicious of their sincerity but escorts them to a nearby camp to meet with Prince Sonnen of Corros, one of the Amasian houses. He agrees to take them but is just as suspicious. Their suspicions build when an assassin tries, unsuccessfully, to kill Danil. But it reveals a talent Danil didn’t know he had, the ability to see the Trueforms of the Amasians even when they haven’t transformed into their spirit animals. Since Amasians from the House of Eyrie don’t reveal their Trueforms to anyone outside of their house, it’s a dangerous skill to have.

Once Danil, Hafryn and Sonnen are in Corros with the emissary, it’s all politics and intrigue and someone clearly doesn’t want peace with Roldaer. Danil is viewed with disdain since he’s technically a Roldaerian and the way things are going, the deadlands won’t have a custodian for long.

KK Ness is wonderful at world building. We still haven’t seen a great deal of Roldaer so we don’t really know what it’s like but Amas, its inhabitants and its history are so immersive that you can lose yourself in them for days. It’s so filmic that I can see the movie version in my head. The best scenes are the ones in which Danil is discovering and using his magical abilities and although there’s an element of “that was convenient” to it, it’s done so well that you don’t really mind.

At the end of the first book, I had an inkling that perhaps the story would switch to the perspective of a different main character (there were certainly enough interesting people to do this) but the author has stuck with Danil and while it has worked this time, there’s still so much more I want to know. There’s no real depth to the villains – all the Roldaerian magi just seem to be greedy and evil and we’ve never gotten to see or know any other Roldaerians – and we’re constantly told that King Liam, the ruler of Roldaer, is behind it all but we’ve never met him either. In fact, Danil is the only not evil Roldaerian we see since the village of Farin was slaughtered at the start of the first book. Surely he can’t be the only one?

The story has what could be perceived as an anti-mining subtext and I kind of like the idea that it’s more than just a fantasy novel but that might be me reading into things that the author didn’t actually intend. It’s also short, a novella rather than a novel but it means you don’t get sick of it like some books that go on and on just for the sake of padding things out.

There were only three things that bothered me:

*Constant references to “officious” robes – I think the author meant “official” and had the two words confused. Either way, it was horribly overused. There certainly didn’t seem to be any other kind of robes.

*All the characters “sketched a bow” instead of just bowing – it became an awfully repetitive phrase but also one that I kept stopping to think about what it really meant.

*Chapters were frequently begun in the same way – “Dawn saw Danil doing this”, “Afternoon saw Hafryn doing that”, “Night saw Sonnen doing something else”. Eventually I was longing for a bit of variety.

Still, they’re minor points. It’s another good book from KK Ness and will only contribute to the development of her reputation in the fantasy genre.

3.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 28 December 2017

Preparing for the First Time You’re Asked for Your Autograph

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Anna Scott: Oh, signed by the author, I see.

William Thatcher: Um, yeah. Couldn’t stop him. If you can find an unsigned one, it’s worth an absolute fortune.

Notting Hill

Rufus: Can I have your autograph?

Anna Scott: Sure. What’s your name?

Rufus: Rufus. [She writes on a scrap of paper and hands it to him.] What’s it say?

Anna Scott: That’s my signature and below it it says, “Dear Rufus, you belong in jail.”

Rufus: Right. Good one.

Notting Hill

There is nothing quite so humbling for an author as the first time you are asked for your autograph. I distinctly remember my first time. It was just a few weeks after I’d released my debut novel and it was a guy who worked with my mum. But since I’d released Enemies Closer as an ebook only, I couldn’t sign a copy of my book for him. Instead, I printed a copy of my one and only professional head shot, wrote a message about how this was the best I could do until I did publish the book physically, autographed it and emailed it to my mum so she could forward it on to him.

For some, though, being asked for an autograph can also be a little bit frightening. After all, if you haven’t prepared for that moment, it can be flustering. Why? Here are a few reasons.

Your Autograph Is Not Your Signature

Unless you want every unscrupulous fan out there to attempt to steal your identity, your autograph must not be the same as your signature. You know that scribble that got you your credit card, your home loan and went on the contract for your house when you finally bought it? Yeah, that one. It’s the power to be you officially (and usually has money and assets attached to it). The fewer people who know what your signature looks like, the better.

So You Need to Prepare a Different Scribble to Be Your Autograph

In 2017, I took my nephew to a football clinic run by his chosen AFL club and after about 200 kids were put through their paces by the players, they all lined up to get hats, jumpers and autograph books signed by their favourites. Predictably, the well-known players were swamped and the more junior or slightly less feted players stood around awkwardly waiting. My nephew wanted every player’s autograph (he even got autographs from the few women players who were there – in the first year of the AFLW, so even though he doesn’t know it, he’s got a significant piece of history there) so when we got to those junior and slightly less feted players, there was a little bit more time to chat.

“Do they send you to some sort of class to work on developing your autograph?” I asked one of them, tongue firmly in cheek.

“No, it just sort of happens.” And to demonstrate the unthinking ease with which the autographs flowed from their hands, he pointed to the teammate standing next to him, a recent transfer from another club, and continued, “For a while, Caleb kept signing his old number.” (Many AFL players include their number so that the kids can remember whose autograph was whose.)

Mine has evolved over time from my entire name (a sort of lightning strike for a joined together “L” and “T” and then “ouise” on top and “ruscott” on the bottom) to now just my first name in a very cursive, loopy, easy-sign-over-and-over-again script. I’m a doodler from way back and I was always scribbling loops so it makes some sense that the “L” in my autograph is very loopy. And apart from the dot on the “i”, my autograph is also one quick and continuous line. I could sign it a hundred times and barely break a sweat or need to shake a cramp out of my hand.

It’s an important consideration, especially if you’re planning to hold book signings where people don’t want to be kept waiting forever for their mini moment with you.

You Might Also Want to Think About Your Handwriting

Some people don’t just want an autograph, they also want a personalised message. I can’t say I do a lot of handwriting anymore (unless you count scribbled reminders and shopping lists that end up going into the recycling). But when I published Project January and gave a few copies to family and the designer who did the cover, I wanted to personalise each one and to say, “Thanks.”

You would not believe the stress I went through trying to decide which version of my handwriting I should use. I practised and practised and practised and decided on one. But after using it on the inside of the first book, I changed my mind because even after that practising, I didn’t like how it looked. All the inscriptions in the books after that were in a different handwriting.

You might think I’m just a bit of weirdo but I know I’m not alone in spending all this time worrying about my handwriting. When my sister proudly handed out copies of her thesis to family members, she didn’t autograph them. And when I asked why, she said she wanted to keep them pristine, not desecrate them with her terrible scrawl.

And Don’t Forget You Need Copies of Your Book to Sign

Unless you’ve broken into the stratosphere of uber-famous authors (and by that stage, you’ve probably already worked your way through all your autograph uncertainties), most people are going to ask for you to sign a copy of your book, not an autograph book or a random piece of paper. For this you are going to need copies of your book. Lots and lots and lots of copies of your book. You can direct people to online places to purchase but by the time they’ve ordered and received their copy, either you’re long gone or their interest in having you sign their copy is. And you can’t sign an ebook, can you? Or can you?

There is software available that allows authors to electronically sign an ebook but it’s not quite the same thing. And since I’m writing this in the same week that Albert Einstein’s scribbled note to a Tokyo bellboy (in lieu of a tip for which he had no cash at the time and which read, “A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it”) sold for $1.7 million, I’m thinking about both the immediate joy that the recipient of a physical autograph has as well as the potential financial benefits in the future of some lucky inheritor of it. (We can dream, can’t we?)

*****

If you prepare a little (and if you’re not a weirdo worryhead like me), being asked for your autograph can be a lovely experience. I wish you all many autograph seekers now and in the future.

The Insult of Being Called an Amateur Writer

Amongst writers it is a well-known fact that the majority of us can’t earn enough just from our writing to give up all other forms of employment. There are a lucky few but not nearly as many as those of us wanting to join those few would like. It doesn’t mean we give up on writing. It just means we supplement our incomes with other work like editing, teaching and more often than not jobs that have absolutely no link to what it is we’d much rather be doing.

In 2014, I was lucky enough to be able to begin three years in which I spent the majority of my time writing my own work full-time. During the times I wasn’t writing my own work, I was employed as a writer writing for others (six months here, six weeks there but for less than a year of those three years). Prior to that, I spent six-and-a-half years as a corporate writer and before that, I was a textbook editor for three years. I even have two postgraduate writing degrees.

And in the past five years, I’ve published three books, written two more, ghost-written another, written and published over 400 blog posts, and written and published about two dozen articles, one of which had over 10,000 views on LinkedIn. I was even shortlisted for the 2016 Text Prize for my upcoming novel, Black Spot, and it was a point of pride for me when one of Text Publishing’s employees told me my book wouldn’t need an editor because I’d done such a good job.

So imagine my surprise when, as I sat right beside him, my father told a group of his friends and acquaintances that I was an “amateur writer”.

We were having dinner, catching up after not having seen each other for a while, when someone I was meeting for the first time asked what I did and when I replied, “I’m a writer,” he added, “An amateur writer.”

“No,” I challenged him, a little bit stunned in light of all of my achievements, “I’m a professional writer.”

I know why he said it. Because this year, I went back to full-time work that has nothing to do with writing because I couldn’t afford not to anymore and because I didn’t want to expend my writing energy on projects I didn’t care about (not my own) so I chose not to take on a writing job.

I’ve found it refreshing. It’s easy, the people are lovely and the pay is steady. But it has meant that I haven’t done nearly as much writing as I’ve been able to in previous years. But does it make me any less of a writer? Any less of a professional? With three more books coming out in the next three years, I don’t think so. But apparently my father does. And I suspect it is entirely to do with the financial aspect.

I have sales here and there and royalties are constantly trickling in but apart from those heady first few weeks after one of my books is released, it’s never more than a trickle, certainly not enough for someone paying a home loan to live off. I always think even that trickle is amazing considering I do little to no marketing (telling those people at that dinner party that I was a writer was the most marketing I’d done in six months).

It’s funny that so much of what we think of ourselves is filtered through what our family thinks of us. But in most cases, families have no real understanding of what we do on a day-to-day basis or how we are perceived in our careers, regardless of whatever it is we do. Even now that I’m working a full-time job again, I still run my own business after hours. That includes my writing (both fiction and non-fiction), and writing, editing, proofreading and project managing primarily marketing materials for others. I don’t really talk about my freelance work with my family, mostly because I don’t think it’s all that interesting.

But I get paid for it. Maybe I should talk about it more. Or maybe that’s just self-indulgent. Maybe it shouldn’t matter how much I earn or what my father thinks. But for someone reason, it does. The part about what my father thinks anyway. I want him to be proud of me. And more importantly, I want him to understand that I’m actually doing well at this. Sure, I’m not in the realms of JK Rowling and it’s not likely I ever will be, but that’s not really the goal I’ve set for myself, probably because I’m not a big picture or big goal kind of person.

I started out just wanting to write a book. And when I achieved that, I set a goal to publish it. After I published, my new goal was to write another book. And when it was finished, my next goal was to publish it. I think you can see the pattern. Nowhere in my goal-setting did getting paid huge sums of money for my writing ever become a goal. That’s probably because I’m a realist and because I know it’s unlikely. If it ever happens, it will be a bonus.

If it doesn’t, that won’t make me any less of a writer or any less of a professional. I guess my next goal is to help my father see it, too.

The Insidious Side of Perfectionism

My little sister has a lot going for her. She’s model beautiful, thin, smart, socially aware, vegan (so much commitment required to do this – I know because I’m vegan as well when I dine with her, which is a fair bit), loves animals and children, hates injustice and generally wants to make the world a better place and herself a better person. All of this is more amazing when you find out she suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis (at the age of twenty, mind you), clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, endometriosis and a multitude of allergies. But she still managed to finish Year 12, complete a Certificate IV in Youth Work and is now studying a Bachelor of Social Work with aspirations of eventually doing a master’s degree.

She’s also a perfectionist. I shouldn’t be surprised it runs in the family since I’m a perfectionist, too, although our nineteen-year age gap has given me the time she hasn’t had yet to work through my perfectionism and settle on a more reasonable goal of extremely good. Mostly I meet that goal; sometimes no matter how hard I work, I don’t. Results can range from good, just okay, not good and complete failure, depending on what it is I’m doing. (Housework is a complete failure more often than not; I just can’t be bothered.)

In the couple of years since she finished secondary school and began her tertiary studies, I’ve acted as both an unofficial sounding board and official paid tutor (thanks, Mum) to help her out. University hasn’t always been the easiest of things for her (she has actually had to switch twice, the first time because the campus wasn’t disability friendly, meaning she had trouble getting around, and the second time because the compulsory work placements were only offered on a full-time basis, which her disability prevented her from being able to undertake). She’s also a self-doubter. If she can’t comprehend something, she assumes it must be because she’s not smart enough to. Often it’s because her lecturers and tutors aren’t teaching well but the self-doubt always means her default position is to assume there’s something wrong with her. A chat with me or Mum or our other sister with a PhD or her boyfriend usually gets her to a place of understanding and the ability to move forward.

At our most recent meeting, however, when she was struggling with an essay question that I considered poorly written and difficult to interpret (so it was hardly surprising that she was struggling), she said this: “I’d rather not submit anything and just fail than submit something that isn’t perfect.”

I was disturbed. Firstly, because it was like having a mirror of my own ridiculously perfection-obsessed twenty-year-old self pointed straight at me. And secondly, because preferring not trying and failing completely to trying and achieving something – however imperfect – is a dangerous route to take. The sooner everyone can realise that perfection is an impossible goal, the happier their lives will be. Unfortunately, it is a process. You can be told over and over – and I was, frequently – about the impossibility of it but it is something that must be learned, not simply accepted and it can take years. It took me at least ten, probably closer to fifteen.

The difference between us, though, was that I was always willing to have a go. I struggled in my first year of university, too. I seriously considered dropping out in the first semester. I was only seventeen and although I loved learning and thought I was intellectually capable enough, I didn’t have the emotional maturity that would have made that transition from high school to university a bit easier. But I didn’t drop out. I stayed. I pushed through. I studied a bunch of subjects that sounded interesting when I signed up but suffered from boring content delivered badly by unengaged lecturers and tutors. My grades often reflected that. But eventually I stumbled into American history, fell in love, finished with a high distinction average in that major and was offered the chance to do honours. I declined and simply graduated with my bachelor’s degree without honours because I’d already figured out that the underlying problem was the fact that I wasn’t studying writing and had enrolled in a writing and editing course somewhere else.

There are plenty of people more famous than me and my little sister (which is to say actually famous) who failed time and time again before eventually succeeding. Thomas Edison is probably the most famous example of all. Accounts differ about the number of failures he had – 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 – while attempting to perfect the light bulb but his response to these suggested failures is reported pretty consistently: he didn’t fail; he just figured out 1,000 [or 2,000 or 10,000] ways not to make a light bulb. Another way it has been put: the process for developing the light bulb had 1,000 [or 2,000 or 10,000] steps.

Imagine if Thomas Edison had decided to give up after the tenth failure. Imagine if he’d decided not to try at all because he couldn’t do it perfectly the first time around. We would have been sitting around reading by candlelight for a lot longer than we did. If it were necessary now rather than just nostalgic, we’d have missed out on an awful lot.

That’s what I hope my little sister will be able to see, the large number of things that she’d be missing out on if she doesn’t give it a go, whatever “it” is. Despite her self-doubt, all of her assignments so far have come back with high distinction grades of 90% or higher. No, it’s not perfection but it’s pretty damn good. It’s certainly a lot better than many other students can claim. And if she considers that as the basis for improvement, then she’s going to get very close to excellence.

It’s a good lesson for us all. We can allow ourselves to be side-tracked or overwhelmed by the unattainable pursuit of whatever it is we wish we were able to do perfectly or we can give it a red hot go regardless and see where it takes us. It might be even more wonderful than the tediousness of perfection.

*****

Happy new year! May it be full of fun and happiness and reaching for the stars… so long as you realise you’ll always be a few fingertips shy of that stars goal and that reaching for the moon might be just as good.

The Moral of the Story

In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in US history, I was listening to a segment on the radio about research into gun owners in Australia. Rather than reinforcing the idea that weapons were more likely in rural areas where they are necessarily used for farming and predator control purposes, it found that a small number of urban gun enthusiasts and sports shooters were amassing huge arsenals. One owner had 283 guns. All legal, of course, otherwise the researchers would never have known about them.

There are plenty of illegal guns in Australia as well, estimated at about 10,000, but the strict gun control laws in this country mean that gun ownership is seen as unusual, abnormal even. We don’t have the gun culture that the US has, I suspect partly because of the different ways in which the countries established their independence from their shared colonial master.

The reason this segment on the radio resonated with me is because the main character in my debut novel is a small weapons engineer, a gun designer with a large arsenal of her own, although primarily comprised of historically significant pieces worth a lot of money. In the as-yet incomplete sequel, the novel begins with the opening night of an exhibition of her collection at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.

I began writing the character and her story in 2004. There’d been plenty of mass shootings by that time (Port Arthur, Dunblane, Beslan and Columbine just to name a few within my lifetime) and yet I didn’t give any thought to making her someone with a passion and a skill for such deadly machinery. I just thought it made her unique, intelligent and determined. She must have been to have made it in such a male-dominated industry. In fact, part of the storyline was that her employer kept rolling her out to be the public face of the business to demonstrate how progressive they were.

So why now, more than a decade after I created her and five years after I published the novel, was I suddenly having a crisis of conscience? The Las Vegas shooting was still very raw, so there was that. My longest non-familial relationship had also just ended in a not unexpected but still devastating death. Grief was at the forefront of everything. And since I’d gone back to a non-writing job four months ago that left little spare time and meant I’d written nothing new in just as long, I was doing a lot of reflecting on things I’d already written.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But, despite the many terrible things he experienced as a man who was well ahead of his time, he could never have imagined the world in which we live today, in which something we tweet or post on Facebook can go around the globe multiple times in mere seconds. He could also never have imagined the terrible weapons we have at our immediate disposal, particularly in a place like the US where guns in their many and deadly forms are seen as a right and not a privilege.

I’m not arrogant enough to assume that anything I write has influenced or will influence anyone to do anything more than buy my books (or not buy my books, as the case may be) or buy someone else’s books (in the case of my book reviews). But I suspect that any writer who doesn’t understand the inclination to go on a shooting spree and kill dozens of people will at one point or another in their writing career question their decision to write about the things they write about, especially if the things they write about encompass the horror of things like murder, rape, paedophilia and war.

But the reality is that fiction is more often influenced by people who choose to do terrible things than people who choose to do terrible things are influenced by fiction. And the fact that we writers wonder about the morality of the things we choose to write tends to suggest we fall into the camp of the traditional “good guys” because the “bad guys” perpetrating terrible crimes spend very little time on morality beforehand or remorse afterwards.

And yet none of this makes us feel much better when terrible things happen. Another sign of being a “good guy”. So what can we as writers do?

The answer, to this question and to so many others we ask ourselves in the writing caper, is simply to write. Write what you must. Write what you can. Write whatever it is in your heart to write. If it is faith that inspires you, then write it. If it is the good deeds of others that inspires you, then write it. If it is an exploration of the darker side of human nature that really gets your creative juices flowing, then you must follow where it leads. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t get any of us anywhere closer to a better world. But there have been plenty of books that focus on difficult subjects that have changed the world. If you’re brave enough, yours could end up being one of them. And if your writing is honest, then morality will take care of itself.

Book Review: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

The problem with satire these days is that it looks and feels so much like the real world, particularly when it comes to politics, that it’s hard to tell what’s parody and what’s not. Ten years after Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was first published, that is the book’s primary problem.

Dr Alfred Jones is a fisheries scientist who works for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence in the UK. When he’s approached by the representatives of a Yemeni sheikh who wants to introduce salmon fishing into his hot, dry, dusty, Middle Eastern country, he dismisses the idea of out of hand. After all, salmon require cool, well-oxygenated water, something not found in abundance on the Arabian peninsula. But the sheikh has seemingly endless amounts of money to throw around, so the NCFE figures why not funnel some of it into their coffers in exchange for Alfred’s services and he’s ordered to do everything he can to get the project off the ground (and therefore the money to come rolling in).

When word of the project gets around in political circles, it suddenly becomes an example of Anglo-Yemeni relations. Only informally, of course, because Britain could never be seen as providing official endorsement but Peter Maxwell, the Prime Minister’s director of communications, thinks that if he can get the PM an invite to the opening once it succeeds, then the photographs of him catching a salmon could equal a million votes from anglers across the UK. And if it doesn’t succeed, then it’s not as if the government was ever officially involved.

Slowly, gradually, Alfred begins to share the sheikh’s vision of salmon fishing in the Yemen. Not because it’s a great idea but because of the sheikh’s faith that whatever happens is meant to happen. He’s not afraid of failure in the way that Alfred seems to be, he’s only afraid of not trying to leave behind a better world than the one he started out in. He thinks salmon fishing is a calming influence. Others in the region think it’s yet another Western practice that the Middle East could do without. The outcome seems inevitable.

The book uses a series of emails, diary entries, interviews, Hansard and other non-prose forms to tell the story and it’s almost immediately an annoying type of narrative, mostly because there is no real reason for it to be done that way. The diary entries go on and on, so much so it would take the whole day to write it and leave no time for the things being written about to actually be done. And the interviews meander so much that the interviewer would have been so frustrated at the roundabout way the questions get answered. Sometimes they never seem to be.

The novel won a prize for comic fiction, which I’m surprised by because it’s not a funny book at all. It’s not mildly amusing or darkly droll or laugh-out-loud hilarious. There is one character who’s a bit of a buffoon but he works in politics and they all seem like that these days, hard to be taken seriously, so he comes off as one of those typically self-involved and out-of-touch people who work for parliamentarians.

For such a lighthearted subject, the novel is surprisingly dreary. In the end, everybody either dies, gets fired or breaks up – certainly it doesn’t have the ending that anyone in the book would have wished for themselves and it wasn’t the kind of ending I always like to read. There was no hope, no justice, no poetry. It was just the end.

Funnily enough, everything that is wrong with this book is fixed in the movie version. To me that means that the book could have been better with just a bit more thought and some judicious editing. Still, it’s conceptually charming, easy enough to read and certainly different from the usual storylines that get churned out repeatedly. It’s probably also a reflection of a version of the Yemen that no longer exists because of the civil war happening there now so there’s a kind of nostalgia to it.

This is a one-of-a-kind book, not in a good way and not in a bad way, just in its own way.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 14 October 2017