L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 30

Book Review: Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant & Management Jargon by Don Watson

Written in 2004, Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words describes itself as “a serious weapon in the struggle against those whose words kill brain cells and sink hearts”. For those who know me even just a little, it should come as no great surprise that I was drawn to this book.

So what are “weasel words”? They are the language of the politicians, the powerful, the marketers, designed to conceal the truth and often the fact that the politicians, the powerful and the marketers have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s spin. It’s vagueness, fancy words that make them sound smart and reasonable when actually they’re usually talking complete nonsense or trying to cover their butts after having done something they shouldn’t have. The book also contains words that now have meanings completely the opposite of which they initially began life.

A few horrific and hilarious examples:

*“mandate” – described as “The idea that recently elected governments have a right to do what pleases them.”

*“help desk” – accompanied by the following descriptions: “1. A person with some expertise in computers, IT, etc. 2. A person capable of asking, ‘Is it switched on? Have you tried rebooting it?’ 3. Not a desk. Not helpful.”

*“negative patient outcomes” – more commonly known to those outside the healthcare industry as “death”

*“decruitment” – more commonly known by everybody as “being fired”, the opposite of “recruitment”

It came as a bit of a shock to me how many of these words I was and still am surrounded by in everyday life without realising it. Many of them have become so entrenched that we listen to and use them unquestioningly, perhaps because the sheer volume is overwhelming. As a result of reading this book, I was actually able to identify a multitude of weasel words that were used frequently in a previous corporate job including “noise” (complaints), “core competencies” (services), “thought leadership” (research), “value-adds” (free stuff), “harvest” (re-use) and many others.

All writers, especially corporate writers, should have a copy of this book next to the dictionary on their desk. It should be referred to daily and anytime those writers find themselves using the words in this book in any of their ridiculous meanings, they should rewrite quickly before anyone finds out.

This book will make you laugh and cry in equal measure. And if it also makes you re-evaluate the nonsense heard daily from the mouths and press statements of heads of state, business leaders, bureaucrats, celebrities and sports people, then it will have done its job.

5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 23 March 2016

The Whimsy and Wonder of Collective Nouns

Last night I was having dinner with my father and he told me about an incident at his golf game during the previous week. Spotting a group of completely black birds, he pointed and drew the attention of his golfing companions and said, “Look. There’s a murder.” A murder of crows, he meant, “murder” being the collective noun for a group of that particular kind of bird.

“You know,” one of his golfing companions responded, “often in Australia when we think we’re looking at crows, we’re actually looking at Australian ravens.”

“What’s the collective noun for a group of ravens?” another of the group of golfers asked. They all looked at each other blankly.

Knowing my love of the English language, Dad relayed this conversation to me over dinner and asked, “Do you know what the collective noun is for ravens?”

I didn’t. And because I can’t stand an unanswered question, I immediately Googled it on my phone.

“Oh, if that’s right, that’s fantastic!” I cried as I scrolled through the top page of the Google search results.

“What? What is it?” my dad wanted to know.

“Hang on while I make absolutely sure that’s right because if it is, it’s wonderful.” I clicked into the Macquarie Dictionary’s list of collective nouns and scrolled down to the bird in question where it confirmed that the collective noun for ravens (Australian or otherwise) is “unkindness”. An unkindness of ravens.

My dad and I were in linguistic heaven. We both share an appreciation for the English language and we often talk about the now frequent and heart-breaking breaking of the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. (Perhaps a little more surprising is that our mutual appreciation has evolved from two entirely different sources. I attribute his to learning Latin at high school when he was a teenager and I attribute mine to being taught English properly by an old-school and old teacher when I was attending one of the four primary schools I went to as a child. But it was really only when I entered my thirties that my father and I discovered we both have the same love. I think there is an element of genetics to it. We also both hate pineapple on pizza and red meat that isn’t cooked through properly. We love discovering these similarities because I only lived with my father until I was six, when my parents got divorced. So many of the parallels between us therefore can’t be due to nurturing and then must be hereditary. At least I think so.)

As I read down the list of collective nouns, I was struck by how many wonderful and whimsical words there are in this category of the English language. A parliament of owls. A murmuration of starlings. A descension of woodpeckers.

“A dissension?” my father asked.

“No, descension, as in descend,” I clarified. A clowder of cats. A business of ferrets. A knot of frogs. A harem of fur seals, because there is usually one male and many, many females. A smack of jellyfish. A mob of kangaroos. A kindle of kittens. A tiding of magpies. An ostentation of peacocks.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary website, many of the collective nouns are archaic and there is doubt that any of them were actually used by the hunters for whom these hunting terms were originally compiled. There have also been some new collective nouns coined more recently, including a crash of rhinoceroses. But to me, it’s the old ones that are the most fabulous of all.

Collective nouns don’t get much of a workout in the English language today and as it evolves, they are a likely candidate for dropping out of usage altogether. It would be a terrible shame considering how creative and joyful their rare use is, especially for word nerds like me and my dad. So if you can work one or two into your writing, not only might it start a discussion amongst lovers of the English language, it might go a short way towards delaying the demise of collective nouns.

By the way, does anyone know what the collective noun for a group of golfers is?

Is there value in keeping a writing journal?

I don’t keep a writing journal. It feels like a waste of words. But back in 2007, a writing journal was the required major assessment piece for the final subject in my master’s degree. And not just any writing journal. A writing journal consisting of “a record in about 3,000 to 5,000 words of your development as a writer with particular emphasis on the period of this unit”. (If you’re a regular follower of my blog, you would have spent the July just gone reading it.)

I really didn’t want to write a writing journal. Why use up the time and effort when I could be writing my novel? That’s certainly what I thought at the time. I wrote:

“Writing journals are a waste of time. Five thousand words spent on something I’d rather not be writing. Five thousand words that could comprise 25% of the last 20,000 words I need to write to finish my novel.”

I requested to be allowed to submit something else. Twice.

The first alternative was to use the weekly 500 word discussion pieces we had to write for each 12 week subject I’d studied over the previous three years (meaning I had 96 of them) as the basis for a how-to book about writing. It would be humorous and witty and it would be called “Everything I Know about Writing: A Short Book”. (Great idea, right? No kidding. That’s actually the earliest genesis of Project December but it’s a story for another time.)

The second alternative was a journalistic article investigating the value of studying writing and whether writing can actually be taught. As someone about to finish a postgraduate degree in that very subject, I thought it would be a perfect way to reflect on my development as a writer throughout the course.

Both requests were approved. Both ideas subsequently failed and I eventually gave in, writing and submitting the writing journal I didn’t want to write. Sort of.

It looked like a journal. It sounded like a journal. But it had more in common with a piece of fiction. Because although in the journal I said that I’d been writing it as a back-up all along in case my other ideas for the major assessment piece didn’t come off, that was a lie. I hadn’t. Instead, as the due date of the project drew closer and I realised my alternative ideas weren’t working, I hastily did some research on the previous three months, trying to remember what I’d been doing, what we’d been talking about in class and what had been happening in my non-writing life and wrote it so it sounded like a journal.

I got a High Distinction, the highest mark you could get.

But apart from allowing me to end my postgraduate studies on a high note, was there any genuine value in that writing journal? Reading it back all these years later, it certainly sounds familiar. I might have fudged the fact that it was a proper journal but the concerns and doubts I had as a writer back then are pretty much the same concerns and doubts I have as a writer now.

I worried about motivation, about not having the deadlines of school work to keep me writing when I might otherwise lose focus.

I worried about not being intellectual enough, because I liked reading and writing commercial fiction.

I worried about the isolation of being a writer, and how hard I had to work at being my own “critical reader”.

I worried about not having enough time to devote to writing, working a full-time job that drained the hours from my day, the energy from my body, and sometimes the will to live from my mind.

And I worried about whether I was actually good enough, whether perhaps I was just fantasising my life away on a pipe dream, whether perhaps I should throw it all in and become an English teacher.

It’s interesting to read it now. But it isn’t anything more than interesting. There weren’t any answers, just questions, questions I still struggle with as a writer.

But the potential value of a writing journal must be investigated by each individual writer. Just because I don’t see the point doesn’t mean that other writers might not get something extremely important out of keeping one. There are two reasons I can see a writing journal being useful:

1. A writing journal has the potential to become a terrific insight into and record of a piece of fiction if it is being kept at the same time as the writing of a book that goes on to be reasonably well known. Then the journal could eventually be published as a book in its own right and leverage off the success of the first piece. This is a long-term long shot though.

2. A writing journal, even a short one like the one I produced for my final master’s degree subject, has the potential to fill a blog schedule when a break is needed.

I undertook another Project October in July. I thought it might be as much of a disaster as it was last year but I gave it another go because I have to learn to be prolific in more than just one month of the year. So while I was trying to stick to a regimen of 1,000 words a day, you were reading my old writing journal in nine parts. I was attempting to complete the final 20,000 words of my debut novel, Enemies Closer, at the time so there were elements of both the above reasons contained in it, although perhaps not enough of the first.

If only I’d known at the time that it could have been a useful historical record. And potentially another book. The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing. Maybe my hindsight can be to your benefit. As long as you don’t think writing journals are a waste of time.

Book Review: Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

“Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style self-conscious and ironic.”

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas, page 331

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Except I would add the words “of literature” after “contemporary writers”. Contemporary writers of literature are a peculiar breed of writer who seem to think certain topics make their writing realistic and gritty. The reality is, however, that readers wonder why it is necessary to include them. Those topics include pooing, peeing and masturbation. Normal, everyday occurrences but also often distasteful, boring and unnecessary to the story being told.

Barracuda contains so many instances of pooing, peeing and masturbation that if they were taken out, the 513-page novel could probably have been reduced to a 213-page novel.

It’s the story of Daniel Kelly, known as Danny as a boy and Dan as an adult. He’s the son of working class parents and a champion swimmer who has won a scholarship to an elite and expensive high school. He feels like a fish out of water (pun intended) and he also feels the judgement of his rich, snobbish classmates. So he just swims. And he beats them. He beats everyone at the regional championships. He beats everyone at the state championships. He beats everyone at the national championships.

But when he places fifth at the Pan Pacific championships in Japan and ruins his chances of swimming at the Sydney Olympics, he throws a massive tantrum and has to be carried from the pool by swimming officials and then drugged up with sedatives. Because if he isn’t a champion swimmer who beats everyone, he doesn’t know who he is.

I actually have a paragraph written on one of my ideas boards that says, “Every time I hear ‘coming of age’, I want to vomit. How many ways are there to explore the whiny, self-indulgent years?” At least one more, I would suggest. Because this is Christos Tsiolkas’s way of exploring his whiny, self-indulgent years. There are obvious parallels between his main character and himself and I suspect if you traded “champion swimmer” for “ambitious writer” in the story, then the veil would be completely lifted. It would certainly explain why Danny, who shows no academic aptitude whatsoever, suddenly becomes a devourer of classic books when his swimming career doesn’t take him where he thought it would.

The novel is structured in a complex way. It starts at the end of the story using first person present tense about a man named Dan. The next chapter reverts to third person past tense twenty years before and tells a story about a boy named Danny on his first day at a private school. The book continues like this, the story of Dan going backwards as the story of Danny goes forwards until they meet in the middle like ships passing in the night and then continue on. The last two chapters are Dan just after the first chapter and Danny as a very young child learning to love the water. It took me a little while to figure this out and it was confusing at times, especially because the author sometimes jumps big periods in the main character’s life because he wants to put particular events in the forward narrative and not the backward narrative.

I sometimes think when disjointed narratives like this are used it is because the story isn’t strong enough to exist in a linear format. I definitely think that was the case here. The confusion it causes helps to mask the defects for a while, but once the reader has figured it out, it’s not enough to cover for what is lacking.

The only triumph of the book is the description and evocation of Melbourne in Australia where the story is primarily set. Anyone who has spent their childhood, teenage or even post-teenage years in Melbourne will recognise the place Tsiolkas describes. But it’s not enough. The characters are tedious and one-dimensional, the plot (if you can even call it that) is boring and banal, and the writing is long-winded, like the author was simply trying to fill pages but not thinking about whether it could have been said in ten sentences instead of ten paragraphs. The amount of swear words is appalling, dominated by the two worst (the c word and the f word – I don’t think you could have gone a page without coming across either one). And the main character is selfish in the extreme. He lacks empathy for everyone and only ever thinks of himself. And he never seems to learn anything.

When it came to deciding how many stars to give this book, I found myself comparing it to two other books I’ve read recently, Amnesia by Peter Carey (2 stars) and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (3 stars). I didn’t enjoy Amnesia at all and its portrayal of Australian cities and towns left it completely unrecognisable to someone who has lived in this country her whole life. Barracuda, on the other hand, was set in a Melbourne that I am completely familiar with, that made me wonder if Danny Kelly or Christos Tsiolkas hadn’t been living next door to me my whole life without my realising it. Which clearly made it better than Amnesia and better than two stars. But the book was also filled with characters that I really didn’t like, 513 pages of them, main, supporting and even those who only appeared on one page. Which clearly made it not as good as The Girl on the Train (which was filled with flawed characters I could have read about forever) and therefore not worth three stars.

If I could give it 2.5 stars, I would. Here on my blog I can. Over on Goodreads I can’t, so I gave it two stars there.

This is the second Christos Tsiolkas book I’ve read, the other being The Slap. He found great fame with The Slap. At the time it was one of those word of mouth books that everyone was reading, mostly because of its controversial initial subject, an adult hitting a naughty child that wasn’t his own. The notoriety was increased because it was adapted into a mini-series in Australia and then adapted again for US television. But I didn’t much like that book either.

I don’t think I’ll be reading any more Christos Tsiolkas books. Australian Bookseller & Publisher says of Christos Tsiolkas, “…there is not a more important writer working in Australia today.” I think that’s an insult to a great many Australian writers. And I don’t think it’s in any way justified.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 23 March 2016

2007 Writing Journal – Part 9

I’m taking a blog break to do another Project October. In place of my normal blog posts during July, I will be posting in nine parts a writing journal I completed as the major assessment piece of my final master’s subject called The Writerly Self.

This is Part 9.

*****

3 May 2007

I’ve just been reading back over everything I’ve written in this journal and I’m not sure that it really demonstrates anything about my journey as a writer, except how haphazard and circuitous it is. Probably because I’ve never really thought of it as a journey. It’s not something I do. It’s who I am. That sounds exactly like the stupid platitudes that I hate to hear from other writers, but I don’t know how not to write. I don’t know why or how or when exactly I became so interested in it. I know it’s been a process of evolution. But I don’t really know much more than that. Which, I guess, is why I wanted to write that book about ‘Everything I Know About Writing’ as an exercise in humour, because really I don’t know that much, and if I do, it’s buried deep down inside me, able to be used but unable to be properly explained.

4 May 2007

Due date. It must be a bit like delivering a baby (not that I’d know) because at a crucial and horribly inappropriate moment, I’m suddenly struck with thoughts of not being good enough. How did I ever think I could be a writer? But there’s nothing I can do about it. I am a writer. Now I just have to wait and see if they tell me my baby has ten fingers, ten toes and is in perfect health or if there was nothing that could be done. Unsurprisingly, I’m praying for a big, happy, healthy family.

2007 Writing Journal – Part 8

I’m taking a blog break to do another Project October. In place of my normal blog posts during July, I will be posting in nine parts a writing journal I completed as the major assessment piece of my final master’s subject called The Writerly Self.

This is Part 8.

*****

1 May 2007

Well, I went back to working on my novel. I wrote nearly three thousand words before I realised I didn’t like any of them. I just kept thinking to myself, ‘What is the point of this scene?’ And I knew the answer. It just wasn’t being achieved. It’s not working. So I’m going to throw out the three thousand words I’ve written and start the scene over again.

My approach has always been to find some useless but interesting fact and open with that. When a character needed to go to the Pentagon, I researched the Pentagon and discovered they had over 67 acres of car parking with 8,770 car spaces. So the opening line became, ‘There were sixty-seven acres of parking at the Pentagon capable of housing 8,770 cars, but it wasn’t until Xavier was detained by the parking lot security guards that it occurred to him that he might not be welcome in any of them.’

My useless facts are so wide and varied. I open the novel with Alexander Pope trivia, move onto the requirements for having your own file at the FBI, hover for a moment around a poster on the wall of one character’s office that reads, ‘Sleep is for wimps! Wake me gently’, then arrive at the Pentagon parking lot.

But I can’t think of any useless facts relevant to the scene I’m working on. It usually just takes some thinking but I was so ready to go back to the writing, I thought maybe I could just fake it. Guess not. Another lesson learned. There are no shortcuts when it comes to writing. Well, I guess there are shortcuts but they just don’t work very well.

Maybe that’s the difference between good writers and bad writers (or good writing and bad writing, because I’m pretty sure Oscar Wilde said there are no bad writers, only bad writing). There are shortcuts but the use of them is pretty obvious in bad writing and non-existent in good writing.

2 May 2007

Okay, so writer’s block is over. I went back over the scene that wasn’t working and realised that the character from whose perspective it was being written was venturing into a place he had been offered a job at many times previously looking like he’d just come out of the boxing ring. That was my opening hook and after I got that out of the way it all just seemed to flow. Yay!

I’ve now written 86,000 words and I’m approaching the climax. I think I will definitely finish the book this month and it’s another of those exciting but scary moments. Yeah, I will have written a book but what the hell do I do with it? Try to get an agent? Try to get it published? How? Where is the class that teaches you how to do that?

This is the problem with being a writer. I try to write this without ego, but I’m a great writer, not a great salesperson. If I’d been a great salesperson, I probably would have headed in a different direction (and I’d probably be a lot wealthier than I am now). But it’s a necessary quality in order to be a successful writer. I know because I’ve seen less talented writers get publishing contracts simply because they know how to sell themselves and have no qualms about using each and every contact they have, no matter how minute.

I think I’m going to have to swallow my ideals and impose on everyone I know who knows agents and publishers. It will be hard because I hate asking for things. I just prefer to go out and get them for myself. But I suppose it would be harder to never be published after all the years of hard work I have put into becoming a writer. Gulp! That’s me swallowing my pride.

Book Review: The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis

This book was on the English reading list when I was in Year 12 but it wasn’t one of the texts my school selected for us. I’m almost glad because so many of the books we did read have gone on to become my least favourite – maybe it was the books themselves, maybe it was the way they were taught to us but I can’t deny the pattern.

The Wife of Martin Guerre could have been called “The Husbands of Betrande de Rols”. Based on a true story in sixteenth century France, Bertrande is married off at a very early age to the son of a well-to-do local peasant family. She’s too young to take on the duties of a wife so she returns to live with her own family. She’s fourteen when her mother dies and it is deemed an appropriate time to rejoin her husband and take up the role she has long been destined for.

Bertrande and Martin’s relationship develops gradually and they learn to love each other (what other choice do they have?) but it seems only because it is expected of them. The story is set in a time when love had little to do with marriage and neither Bertrande or Martin question this. They have a child when they are twenty and a short time after that Martin steals some seeds from his father’s granary and plants a field without his permission, knowing his father would not have approved the action. He tells Bertrande he is going to go away for about a week to let his father’s temper abate and then will return.

Eight years later, Martin finally comes back. Everybody is thrilled, except for Bertrande. Because she suspects that another man has taken the place of her husband, an imposter. However, he is kind and gentle and respectful, things Martin never was, and she allows him back into her life and into her bed. They have a child. Three years pass. But by this time her suspicions are driving Bertrande into a kind of madness. If they are correct, then she has been a party to her own dishonourable downfall, accepting a man that in her heart of hearts she knew not to be her husband.

Bertrande accuses him publicly and there is a trial to determine whether the man is Martin Guerre or just a strikingly similar looking man taking advantage of a grieving family.

First published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre is a novella, 90 pages long (or short as the case may be). I read it in an afternoon. What really struck me was how Bertrande was tormented by the kindness of the man claiming to be her husband. Ultimately, it was how she came to decide he wasn’t her husband at all. But instead of embracing the kindness, she focuses on the sin she has been forced into – adultery – and how it will endanger her immortal soul. It’s a reflection of a very different time. In 1941, such thoughts might still have been around. Now, I suspect, few people would think of it the same way.

Even back then, there were some who questioned where the blame lay. In the afterword that discusses the real life basis for the novella, Etienne Pasquier, who was a contemporary of the main players, wrote, “But I would willingly ask you if this Monsieur Martin Guerre who was so harsh towards his wife, did not deserve a punishment as severe as that of Arnaut Tillier (the man convicted of being the imposter), for having been by his absence the cause of this wrongdoing?”

The entire book is a commentary on how people are so often victims of themselves, how in seeking to do the “right” thing, we bring down upon ourselves terrible consequences. It is also a commentary on trust. We want so much to trust in this world and we are let down so often when we do.

The writing is lovely, also a reflection of a different time. It is unhurried (something of an achievement in a book that is only 90 pages long) but it uses no more words than is absolutely necessary to convey the story, a genuine skill that I wish more writers – myself included – had today.

Selfishly, I almost wish there were a little more of this book. Perhaps I’ll just have to content myself with reading some of Janet Lewis’s other works, although as far as I know none of them have endured the way this one has.

If you read The Wife of Martin Guerre in high school and were underwhelmed, I’d encourage you to read it again with the hindsight of having lived a little. If you’re still in high school, I hope you have an English teacher who isn’t draining the enthusiasm out of you and you can appreciate it now. If you’ve never read it, it’s the kind of book you won’t regret reading, even if it isn’t really your thing.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 9 March 2016

2007 Writing Journal – Part 7

I’m taking a blog break to do another Project October. In place of my normal blog posts during July, I will be posting in nine parts a writing journal I completed as the major assessment piece of my final master’s subject called The Writerly Self.

This is Part 7.

*****

26 April 2007

I spoke to my father today and he asked me, as he periodically does, what the latest was on the big screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger. When I checked the website, which had previously said they were working towards a 2009 release to coincide with the 75th anniversary, it said that plans for the movie had been shelved. Dad was devastated.

A little idea started forming in my mind that maybe I should have a go at writing the screenplay for it. I have all of Dad’s old Lone Ranger comics and I know the stories so well, especially the foundation stories of how he became the Lone Ranger. It’s a great story, too, a real hero’s journey, and there is lots of potential to give the old story some new life. I’m not sure I understand why they’ve shelved the plans to make the movie.

Writers always say that it’s important to have a lot of projects going all at once. I think it was Carmel Bird who said she usually has fifteen things she juggles at one time. I’m starting to feel a little like that. I’m 80% of the way through writing my novel, I’ve written 12 episodes of one television show, I’ve developed a detailed concept for another, I’ve got two or three ideas for film screenplays already on the boil and now here’s another one. But my limitations in being able to bring them all to fruition frustrate me a lot. Sometimes I feel that I’m losing focus. Or not focusing on the right project, the one that will catapult me up the ladder a little, the one that will be my foot in the door.

A novel seems like the most obvious choice for someone as unpublished as I am, but my best work is in my television and film script writing. That makes sense when dialogue is my strong point. I’m not great at prose and necessarily a novel is full of it. I think when people read my novel they are going to find it very filmic.

Anyway, that frustration I wrote of is at quite high levels at the moment so even though I said I was going to put my novel aside while I was doing this subject, I just need to go back to working on it. It’s like receiving chocolate at Easter and deciding not to eat it until Christmas. I probably should have known I was never going to make it. Writing and chocolate are good analogies for me. Two things I can’t do without for very long.

30 April 2007

Ironically, since this is the last subject I will be undertaking in the master’s degree, this week’s discussion thread question is about the difference between writing a thesis and a film or novel. I met Josie Arnold once at a book launch last year and when I told her how much I was enjoying the course, she said I should think about doing a PhD after I was finished. I’ve given it some thought. My understanding is that I would be able to submit 80,000 words of fiction and 20,000 words on a related thesis style issue. Considering I am writing action, an appropriate corollary might be an exploration of the portrayal of women in Australian action fiction. I’ll always remember a lady named Rosemary in one of my very first classes talking about Clive Cussler, an American action writer, and one of his female characters whipping off her bra to bind the wounds of the hero. We both agreed it would hardly be practical, considering underwire and fabrics. But that seems to be the sort of thing women written by men do in this genre.

But it seems like a lot of work, a lot more work, and I think I’d really rather just focus on finishing my novel and possibly starting work on a sequel, because it seems like you always have to be working on a second novel before a publisher will consider giving you a contract, just to prove that you’re more than a one book wonder. And really the portrayal of women in Australian action fiction would hardly be an important contribution to the field. I think I’ll leave the title of Dr to those in the medical and scientific fields.

2007 Writing Journal – Part 6

I’m taking a blog break to do another Project October. In place of my normal blog posts during July, I will be posting in nine parts a writing journal I completed as the major assessment piece of my final master’s subject called The Writerly Self.

This is Part 6.

*****

10 April 2007

The rhizomatic text. Ugh! Why do academics refuse to construct concepts and sentences in plain English? I suppose it helps to keep the academic club free of people like me with commercial sensibilities and a complete lack of deference. They probably wouldn’t be happy to know that Wikipedia is my first stop in trying to break down their complex ideas and structures into something moderately understandable.

But Jacqui says that despite my conviction that I haven’t understood the concept, I’ve managed it pretty well. I never would have thought The Simpsons would end up being the answer to anything in a writing course as theory dense as this one is. But drawing a link between the theoretical and the empirical is usually the best way for me to understand anything. I envy people who don’t find it necessary to do that, who can look at abstract concepts and understand their intrinsic meaning immediately. But then again, I’ve always found that, with writing, understanding the theory doesn’t necessarily put you anywhere near being a good writer. Theories tend to be about rules and patterns and good writing is about breaking the rules and originality.

I guess it’s a matter of simply doing what works. I’ll be over there, breaking the rules!

16 April 2007

This week’s topic was business writing and no matter how many times someone tries to convince me that business writing can be fun and exciting and creative, I still drown in bad examples of it at work and as a consumer in general. Does advertising count as business writing? Not sure. I wrote some advertisements for a newspaper marketing campaign we ran earlier in the year, giving the marketing manager three options and, of course, she chose the least creative one. I’m sure there’s a level of professionalism that needs to be shown and I know I’m not an expert in marketing, but surely the eye is going to be drawn more effectively to a heading that screams, ‘Are you a know-it-all?’ more than it will be drawn to one that reads, ‘Want recognition for all your years of hard work?’

I don’t think it would come as any great surprise to anyone to learn that I’m not really business minded. I have all these silly ideas about making it own my own merits and not riding on other people’s coat tails, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the world works, especially not when it comes to writing. It’s so much easier to get a look in if you know somebody. I saw on a television program a few weeks ago that the Australian actress Sophie Lee has signed a book deal with Random House to write a novel about a young Australian actress trying to make it in Hollywood. Vomit. I’m so sick of these people who succeed without trying, especially actors and actresses landing book deals. I suppose it’s great for the ghost writing industry, but for those of us who struggle to land book deals for years, it’s a real punch in the face. I know publishing houses are businesses, but they’re in the business of books. Why do so many of them seem to be run by marketers who don’t care about what’s good, only what they can sell? Arrrgghhh!

23 April 2007

Finally, we get to look at an actual author. I’m surprised, considering that this is a writing course, that we don’t look at much writing or many specific writers. I’m a big believer in learning from those who have proven they know how to do it, especially when it comes to screenplays, but novels as well.

Then again, I’m not sure whether Helen Demidenko or Darville or whatever she’s calling herself at the moment should be classified as an actual author. The biggest lesson we can probably learn from her is what not to do.

Book Review: The Blue Day Book: A Lesson in Cheering Yourself Up by Bradley Trevor Greive

Published in 2000, The Blue Day Book might have been the early genesis of lolcats and funny goat videos. It is a collection of black-and-white animal photographs that have managed to capture a range of human emotions and Greive has arranged them and composed accompanying short sentences to evoke how we all feel this way sometimes, even those of us who aren’t human.

As the title suggests, the book is aimed at perking up anyone experiencing a “blue day”. For those experiencing a succession of them (and really struggling with depression and other mental health issues), it’s not going to be able to do much. But if it brings a smile to the general reader’s face, then it has done its job.

It’s hard to go past the zebras singing karaoke, if I have to pick a favourite image, although the bad hair day dog and the rhino blowing raspberries are a close second and third.

This was Greive’s first book and it was the beginning of a now multi-book career. It really goes to show that there is an appetite for variety in publishing. Sometimes we don’t want life-changing tomes spilling over the 100,000 words mark. Sometimes 1,000 words or even 500 words are enough, as long as you are using the right ones.

A succession of imitations followed this book but it is the original and I think still the best. As Greive acknowledges in the introduction, “A tiny book like this appears deceptively simple. It is not.” Read it and marvel at its elegance, its brilliance and its underlying message worth remembering over and over again each day.

4 stars

First published on Goodreads 8 March 2016