Marking Stories and Marking Time
Blog Number 12: 26 January 2009
This blog is three days late. I am deep into marking short stories that are part of the assessment for the creative writing summer school set up by Peter Wells. We have over forty students with a wide range of abilities. Some of the students are already working at a professional level.
It is interesting to see a difference between how men and women write. Not so much in terms of technique but in choice of subject matter. The men write more densely plotted stories and they are not afraid to place their work into well defined genres like science fiction or crime. The women tend to write stories about loss of love or betrayal or from the point-of-view of a child.
So this past week has been all about judging the work of others. Meanwhile, my own writing of the novella has stalled. Hannalore and Juno are in limbo, freeze framed, waiting for me to return and rescue them from the little town of Piopio, circa 1920.
I remind myself for the hundredth time that writing long fictional works requires a long period of solitude and peace. I really enjoy teaching, especially creative writing. Each time I go into a teaching situation, I learn (and re-learn) something important about the craft of writing.
But teaching eats up the imagination; it drinks from the same fountain that provides sustenance for the writer’s own work. Sometimes the fountain dries up. It has something to do with the relentlessness of messing about with written language, both yours and the work of others, day in, day out.
Sometimes I become overwhelmed with language; I begin to lose words, or invent new ones. I try to keep a balance in my everyday life by doing boring tasks like cleaning or having banal conversations in chat rooms or on the phone but in the end, the lure, the terror, of language pulls me back.
I look at the lives of my two sisters, one older, one younger than me. They are both retired. They spend their days playing golf, tending to their homes and gardens, reading books and enjoying their friends. Sometimes I envy their freedom from the wretched drive to create a fictional world that invites me into its maw each day in order to chew me up and spit me out.
There’s only one thing worse than writing each day and that’s NOT writing. If it lasts more than a week or two I enter a stage of grief. It is so difficult to put this feeling into words. Grief doesn’t really cut it. It’s more like a complete cancelling out of self.
Writing this blog helps. It forces a nameless dread into the straitjacket of written words, and once that is done, the fear tends to decrease. It works for me and that is all I know.
January 26th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I sometimes wonder with young people whether they have not had enough experience to write creatively. Most reach for television stories and are afraid to look into their own lives. I was incredibly neurotic in my twenties (meanwhile thinking I was escaping the past and creating my life anew.) I couldn’t write creatively in that period, though I kept a diary and in my heart I was determined to be a writer one day. In fact I had a huge reservoir of stories from my childhood. But I had to reach almost 40 before I had enough self possession to turn back to that toxic, powerful, magic, terrifying powerlessness which is childhood. So in the end it is not a question of ‘not enough experience’: it’s really about self possession and distance. Distance makes things take on a different perspective. And you are at long last free to take the look back. And of course what happens is a form of grief. You realise you have left that past behind. Writing about is a way of saying goodbye.
January 28th, 2009 at 12:11 am
then if it’s saying good bye it’s also saying it was real … I once existed, not that it matters a toot to anyone else … my self administered reality ….
February 19th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Wrestling with words is a constant battle against insignificance. Now that the writing school is coming to an end I face going back to writing. The solitary battle of writing at times overwhelms, especially at the beginning - when you face ‘going back in’. Yet I know I will go ‘back in’….even as I realise that the entire world I knew and took for granted is changing. I mean here globally, financially and technologically. It is challenging. Most of all - the big - the huge question - why.
Why bother. Who cares. It’s hard to answer this. But like Beryl I suppose I know I am driven to write. It is the way I know I exist. If I was in a cell, I would trace some pattern on a wall. This sounds bleak. Maybe I am just tired from the school. Yet I’ve also had a break from ‘the page’….which in many ways has been fantastic. I have also been incredibly aided by Beryl. She is alert, sharp, wise - funny. We have shared some truly evil jokes. That’s how you survive in the end. Humour has to be the most human attribute.
So as I go back into the ‘cell’ I’ll remember that - humour is what saves us and keeps us sane.