Trust covers: Australian (L) and US

A clairvoyant once told me I should be careful what I wish for. This year I wanted to start facilitating panel discussions on the writers’ festival circuit, and look what’s happened – four panels at Sydney Writers Festival in May, and five in three days at the Byron Bay Festival in early August.

For anyone not attending a Bret Easton Ellis or William McInnes event, I’ll be chatting with authors as different as Brenda Walker, Rodney Hall, Hannie Rayson, David Carlin, Kate Veitch*, and Yvonne Louis at the following sessions on Friday 6th, Saturday 7th, Sunday 8th August:

My space: spilling the beans on self – Friday 9am (!)
Voices in my head: writing dialogue that works – Friday 1.30pm
Return journey: stories of triumph over adversity – Saturday 9am (!!)
Secrets and yearnings: the writing of memory and memoir – Saturday 12.15pm
It came from outer space: where writers find their muse – Sunday 4pm (last session time of the Festival; for diehards only)

Please say hello. And to prove that festival-goers can’t get enough of memoirs, I’m even teaching a workshop on approaches to editing memoir (Thursday 5th August 1.30-4.30pm) – because I believe that helping authors develop an editorial perspective on their own work is an important and overlooked skill set.

*I’m particularly thrilled to have my good friend Kate Veitch on a panel with me as I’m very enthusiastic about her latest novel Trust, which has just gone on sale in the US this past week. If you check Amazon.com for the book you’ll even find a potted review by yours truly.

For anyone who ever loved a typewriter. Take a look at this recitation of the sounds of 62 different typewriters made between the 1890s and 1979, which I found over at Meanjin’s blog Spiked. Yes, that’s Michael Winslow performing the astonishing sound effects. It’s like listening to a time capsule. For his next trick, I wonder if he could reproduce the sounds of the diverse computer keyboards I’ve used in the past 20 years?

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

May I point you to the valuable online forum for women writers, She Writes. In just over one year, Kamy Wicoff has established a thriving community for women who write, with over 9,000 members from more than thirty countries.  Since joining I’ve found the live internet radio discussions most helpful – see the (partially obscured) widget on the left column for a list of recent episodes, available for instant download.

I’m not a natural joiner, so online communities are a habit I’m forcing myself to adopt, but She Writes is a rich source of information, services and advice for new and experienced writers. As I write this post – the first in way too long – I’m listening to a fascinating discussion with Francine Prose, celebrated novelist and non-fiction author of works including the helpful Reading Like a Writer. The She Writes community offers regular conversations such as these on topics relevant to writers, about publishing and editing, writing fiction and non-fiction, marketing and publicity, you get the idea.

The best comment I heard in the past hour is Prose on first drafts: “What you’re writing is a book you really want to read.” That makes so much sense.

It’s confirmed: NSW Premier Kristina Keneally will join Stephanie Dowrick at the Sydney Theatre on Saturday May 23rd at 10am to discuss the subject of Forgiveness, as part of this week’s Sydney Writers Festival. This event was “re-engineered” following Elizabeth Gilbert’s sudden cancellation of her SWF appearances, one of which was a conversation with Stephanie Dowrick. Imagine my surprise at being asked to moderate this new discussion. Excited and daunted, all at once. Four sessions now, and much preparation still to do … Please come! And don’t forget to bring your forgiveness with you …

Long time no post, but I’ve finally updated my website with the events I’m facilitating/chairing at the Sydney Writers Festival later this month. While I’m always sorry to leave New York – and never more so than this time – I am thrilled at the opportunity to meet and talk publicly with these interesting and diverse authors.

There’s one more exciting/terrifying event about to be made public but I’ll keep that under wraps for now.

Just found Ronnie Bruce’s wonderful typographical animation of a poem by Taylor Mali over at Meanjin magazine’s Spike blog. As Mali himself says,

I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Sometimes the animation is so compelling I suspect it detracts from the poet’s elegantly crafted lines, but I’m glad that the poem – about contemporary speech being awash in uncertainty and the need to speak precisely and with conviction – is reaching new audiences through technology. Certainly that’s the holy grail for all creative artists, and the fervent wish of arts funders.

The definition of music I learned at 13 – “organised sound” – is still the one I like best. Here’s a clip promoting an installation at London’s Barbican in which a flock of zebra finches go about their daily activities in a purpose-built aviary in which electric guitars and other sound-producing objects have been placed. The birds’ random movements within the acoustic environment result in some impressive music, at least to this pair of ears.

Here’s a timely reminder for those of us scribbling away for no money, little money, or in between earning money by doing jobs we like slightly less than writing.

Lapham’s Quarterly has published this subscription-teaser on their website today, revealing a handful of diverse paid occupations of well-known writers over the past three centuries. While it’s hardly a representative sample, I was relieved to find that none of them held down jobs as a writing instructor, content developer, freelance journalist or book reviewer. The perks and hazards attributed to each role remind me that observing human behaviour is an enduring perk (and sometimes trial) of most work environments. My favourite item from the chart is learning of Faulkner’s penchant for Mah-Jongg, which I last played as a kid with my happy-clappy neighbour with what I’m certain was no heed to the rules of the game. Possibly a useful lesson after all, given the eclectic roads to publication mapped below.

Laphams Qtly: Writers' Day Jobs

This indiereader.com article is a really useful survey of published authors’ thoughts about revision and editing their own work. How encouraging to read that the bestselling Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air) regards his first drafts as “almost always wretched”, and that Jacqueline Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean) “approaches [revisions] with great joy, as I would a Red Cross truck in a disaster.”

For many years I self-censored my own ideas for stories and articles in the erroneous and irrational belief that a writer needed only inspiration to translate their ideas into beautifully formed sentences and paragraphs on their very first pages. This I now attribute to a terrible perfectionism coupled with forced attendance at lectures on the Romantic poets at the University of Sydney. Keats and Co left us a legacy of some wonderful poems but also an unhelpful cultural trope of the writer as tortured genius. Even as I wrote my PhD and followed that up by years of working with other authors on their manuscripts, I could not connect the practical and creative work of revising drafts with my unreasonably strict idea of what constituted “writing”. I’m a very slow learner at times, but the process of writing my memoir fixed all that.

By the way, while the Indie Reader website appears to cater to a readership of self-published authors, the long list of – how shall I put it? – traditionally published authors quoted in this piece makes it a valuable resource for everyone.

Ruined-piano connoisseur Ross Bolleter plays in his garden. Courtesy World Association for Ruined Piano Studies WARPS.com

Further to some comments I made on the Meanjin blog Spiked a few days ago in response to happy endings, which took the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a recent example, I wanted to write about the fleeting appearance and disappearance of the piano which turns up at odd moments in the film.

Regular readers might be aware that the piano’s shifting cultural role is something that fascinates me. Aside from a childhood spent learning to play and (mostly) enjoying the experience, I am intrigued as to how often pianos tend to pop up in contemporary culture. In recent years they have appeared in some unlikely places; see this limited edition Karl Lagerfeld Steinway, my earlier post about the Audi car company-designed grand, and this Swedish piano staircase classic on YouTube. The piano is a rather unstable sign of technological advancement and decline; of domesticity and public performance; of fun (playing) and hard work (learning and practicing); of virtue and virtuosity (think of the piano in Jane Austen’s Emma – a site of sexual intrigue between the accomplished musician Jane Fairfax and  Frank Churchill).

In the film adaptation of The Road, the piano – which does not appear in the book – functions as an emblem of family life and of a lost world perfect in its imperfection. In flashbacks we see the mother playing as father and son look on admiringly, then later we see them destroying the instrument to keep the home’s fire literally burning. Inevitably the woman is the pianist, and inevitably it’s the woman who dies so that the father and son can travel the road. When the father remembers their old life, he does so by picturing his wife at the piano; and it is not until he discovers an old piano in a house off the road, functional but horribly out of tune, that he breaks down in front of his son for the first time. I was struck particularly by this scene because the piano stands out as one piece of technology that still ‘works’ in the film’s post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic world.

Raymond Carver (l) and his editor, Gordon Lish

The Australian Literary Review has published this review of Raymond Carver’s short stories in their unedited, pre-Gordon Lish versions, which has been released under Carver’s original title, Beginnings. The article uses the new book to explore the relationship between editors and authors in contemporary publishing.

May I start by congratulating The Australian on providing space and time for intelligent reflection on an aspect of book publishing that is usually treated with undue reverence due solely to its invisibility. It’s wonderful to read quotes from authors and editors alike on the subject. The author-editor relationship is so various and complex in its dynamics, and usually so irrelevant to those not directly involved, that it mostly occurs behind closed doors, like a marriage. Text’s Michael Heyward likens it to a confessor and priest.

Back towards the end of the 20th century, I spent a good few years working in-house as the editor of the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan Australia. In that time I had the opportunity of working with some wonderful writers of fiction and non-fiction, and, it must be said, with authors who were published for reasons more complicated than just the quality of their words on the page. My experience was that, no matter whether I loved or loathed any particular manuscript, the process of editing their work – which incorporates everything from structural changes and spell-checking to blurb-writing and liaison with typesetters, publicists, sales reps, your boss and her boss, in addition to time on the phone and in-person with the author (when conveniently co-located) – took about the same amount of time.

Delia Falconer makes the point that editing is a thankless and – when done properly – an invisible task:

When you read a book, you have no idea how much of the editor’s advice the writer used, or how they used it.

As an editor I had the unpleasant experience of sweating blood for weeks over a debut novelist’s manuscript, only to see him reject every single change I had suggested (in pencil). I also had the marvellous experience of working with authors – who were usually not publishing debutants – who responded with openness and imagination to the suggestions I proposed to them. My approach as an editor was always to put myself as much as possible in the author’s shoes, to try to understand what they were trying to achieve, and to help them close any perceived gaps between their vision and the unedited manuscript. And, it must be said, I loved to cut. Even now I can’t stop reading books and thinking, I would have cut that sentence/paragraph/chapter. I for one would have tried to persuade Christos Tsolkias to lose the Manoly chapter of The Slap. But the novel has since won many awards and is a great achievement, so who am I to quibble now?

Ultimately, however, editing other people’s work was not for me. I had chosen to edit other people’s words instead of write my own, and that decision took its toll. My authors generally enjoyed working with me; I ended up with regular migraines and resigned after three years. Authors are best served by editors who love to edit. Thankfully in Australia and elsewhere there are plenty of those. UQP’s Alexandra Payne, who edited my book, is one. She made a relatively small number of highly astute comments, pointed to a few possible solutions, and left me to figure it out.

James Bradley, who was quoted in the ALR article, has since posted these thoughts in response to it. He writes:

I think what’s really interesting though is what our anxiety about editorial standards tells us about our attitudes to writing, and more particularly how difficult we find it break free of Romantic notions of the artist as solitary genius when we’re talking about authors and authorship. Because in the end that’s what this whole conversation is really about: our unease with accepting that literary fiction and non-fiction are not, in many ways, all that different to more collaborative forms such as television or film.

I’m not sure I’d go as far to say that the level of collaboration between author and editor on a book is similar to that which is expected and ‘natural’ in TV/film, but I haven’t worked in those other forms. Without an author’s manuscript, a book’s editor has nothing to go on. An editor revises and makes insightful suggestions, but does not create from scratch. From what I’ve read of the relationship between Lish and Carver, the editor often forgot that he was not the author of those stories.

I think Carver’s widow, who is responsible for the unedited Carver stories (re-)entering the literary marketplace, has done the world of writing and publishing a huge favour. Wannabe editors and teachers of writing can pore over the original and edited versions of Carver’s stories, plainly see what was changed, debate the ethics of editing, and learn to write better. Beginnings will have a long shelf-life as a reference book more than anything else, I think. Carver’s reputation is impermeable at this point. Editing is an imperfect art at best, and due to the commercial context in which it operates, ambivalent: quixotic and practical at the same time, idealistic and also subject to time-constraints. Ultimately, aren’t we all?

The oldest public-domain book in the world is leading the way with interactive electronic publishing formats. Some niche electronic editions of the Bible are so sophisticated compared to what’s available on Kindle, according to this wry and fascinating piece in the Boston Phoenix, they are leaving the usual leaders in advance technology – the porn industry – in their ashes.

If you want to see what a 21st century reading experience should look like — one that enables you to bookmark, notate, listen to, and share passages instantly on Facebook and Twitter — the marketplace you’re looking for is e-Bibles.

At a party on the weekend I was speaking with technologist Deanna Zandt, who is no fan of either the Kindle or the iPhone/iPad. The author of the forthcoming book on social networking, Share This!, explained that the Kindle and Apple’s products, in very different ways, operate as closed shops – limiting or prohibiting online interactivity and conversation. Ironically, the new approach to one of the world’s oldest texts could not be more different:

At the time of this writing, six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles. Likewise, the Washington State–based company Olive Tree’s Bible Reader is consistently one of the most downloaded free books. Users have left thousands of comments praising e-Bible serviceability; one version with a social-networking component even allows believers to search for other folks who want to chat about specific chapters. More so, it can tap a smart phone’s GPS to locate local prayer groups with similar affinities.

And it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward, by allowing users to seamlessly flip between scanning on an iPhone and reading on a laptop (without losing their page). Ditto the ability to switch, mid-stream, between Standard English and dozens of translations, or jump to an audio-book version, while keeping place to the sentence. Learned readers can even teleport from one particular chapter/verse in the King James Version to the same place in the New International Version.

For the secular, this reads like a telescopic view of the future – at least when it comes to works of non-fiction long in the public domain. Perhaps the Epic of Gilgamesh or the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian tombs will be eligible for this e-treatment (if they are not already). I can imagine spontaneous book clubs forming around individual titles, maps of cyberspace connecting the dots where users are all reading the same work/s, and the endless possibilities for teaching texts using this interactivity. I’m yet to see how fiction could benefit from a similar treatment, however, other than to connect readers who are interested in specific themes or authors … something that is already happening to a great extent online. As ever, the commercial potential of this technology seems largely skewed to the business, research and education sectors, though I might be missing something.

What do you think?

Roads less traveled - in winter

By now The Guardian’s Ten rules of writing fiction has been well distributed virally – I stumbled across it over at City of Tongues, in which James Bradley also confesses to having neglected his blog lately. Well James, not as much as I have neglected mine …

So as of ten days ago I’m back in self-imposed isolation in my second home, Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, working on my manuscript. The proximity of the snow-covered Prospect Park (pictured) to my Brooklyn ‘closet’ is one of the most attractive parts of this neighborhood for me (btw my spelling changes depending on which country I’m in).

I was happy to see that many of the writers included going for a walk as one of their ‘rules’ to write by. I used to be a walking snob, refusing the possibility that moving more quickly would be any better for me than my fast-paced walking style. (Some friends call me ‘the greyhound’). My opinion has changed completely since beginning to run regularly, and boy have I toned up. As a late starter to running, I don’t run quickly or terribly far, but I do know that it clears my head like little else. Running in zero degrees in Prospect Park is quite wonderful, compared to the sickly stickiness of a Sydney summer run, spectacular waterside views notwithstanding. Dressing for the occasion takes me almost as much time as the run itself, although after my fourth run I’m getting quicker at preparing, and I’m now taking a longer route to see if I can increase my stamina. Reading that Malcolm Gladwell is a lifelong distance runner, and learning about Haruki Murakami’s late-starter status as both a runner and a novelist, has been very encouraging.

Still, running is not writing, and a lot of writing I must do. The other snippets from the Guardian list that spoke loudest to me were these from Rose Tremain:

In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

Damn, that’s exactly what’s happened to me on the weekend. My plan? Well, my plan is now to create a new plan. The old plan bears only a tangential relationship to what’s evolved. I have decided not to panic about that. Happily I decided long ago not to worry about the ending. There are too many other things to decide and worry about before I approach the end.

And from the remarkable Jeannette Winterson:

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Discipline generates freedom – I love that. I love it because it’s true. It’s so much easier to talk about writing, to blog about it (!) and to complain about how hard it is, when the simple but difficult thing to do is to write. Which is what I will do now I’m about to finish this post.

Christopher Hitchens’s piece on Gore Vidal in the February issue of Vanity Fair, “Vidal Loco”, is a fair if sad account of the decline into irrelevance of a once-influential and provocative American voice (Vidal was occasionally referred to as a contemporary Oscar Wilde). Before recounting the ways in which Vidal has become an unreliable and possibly slightly unhinged public intellectual, Hitchens pays Vidal sufficient respect to first relate some choice quotes from his subject that Hitchens admits were “things one wished one had said oneself”:

Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.”

Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.”

Of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.”

I discovered this piece thanks to Stephen Romei over at the Pair of Ragged Claws blog, who said no matter what one thought of Vidal, you had to love his line about Joyce Carol Oates. Intrigued, I clicked across (up? down? over?) to find out what Vidal had said about the woman whose writing output is so prodigous I am filled not with envy but concern. (Okay, a little envy.) Hitchens writes:

Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?

Joyce Carol Oates by Opale/Retna Ltd

Vidal’s quote perfectly captures the enervating effect of Oates’s relentless wordsmithing. I am simply at a loss to understand how anyone could produce so many novels (more than 50) and short-story collections (30). Her latest 165-page novel took her precisely two months to write. But I am in awe of Oates for another reason, too: at the age of 71, she has fallen in love and married for the second time, following the death of her husband of 35 years less than two years ago. I’ve been widowed now for about five years and haven’t dated anyone I would come close to marrying! Now that’s the book of hers I’d like to read. Instead, she has whipped up a 400-page memoir of her grief, and has a collection of short stories dealing with loss coming out later in the year. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this interesting profile of Oates.

Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing houses daily – has taken on something of a nostalgic glow in recent years, with stories of slush-pile discoveries of luminaries such as Phillip Roth. But as a refugee from book publishing, I can attest that the slush pile was the bane of editors’ lives before the internet changed … well, very little, when it comes to getting published. But that’s for another post.

I worked at a major Australian trade publisher for three years in the mid-1990s. Hardly the dark ages, I know, but still, it was a previous century. By that time, literary agents had already become influential, but their power and the publishers’ reliance on their gatekeeping role had not assumed the default status it enjoys today. Even then, we all assumed that the vast majority of unsolicited submissions – meaning those manuscripts which had not already been vetted by an agent and deemed worthy of representing before a publisher – were likely to contain few hidden gems. So the revolving door of receptionists were trained to respond to telephone inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to submit manuscripts, by first suggesting they find an agent; and if they still wanted to submit their manuscript, to send it in marked to the attention of Margaret Rogers. Anything that arrived for Margaret Rogers was destined straight for the slush pile – because Margaret did not exist. Her initials were simply code for Manuscript Rejection. Editors took a rushed look through the slush pile when they had a spare couple of hours – maybe once every three months, in other words.

The slush pile has never been the best way to getting published. My advice to anyone working on a manuscript is to get out from behind your desk once in a while and attend events, courses, workshops and other networking activities where you will eventually bump into someone who either works in the publishing industry, has been published already, or who used to work for such-and-such a publisher but now does something else. In all of those cases, these people will have friends or acquaintances at other publishing houses, and they will be willing to give you some advice or, if you’re really lucky, to suggest the name of someone you should contact. Your job is to listen to the advice they give you. Listen to it very carefully. These people will be speaking the truth but they will also speak a little bit in code, because they don’t want to crush your hopes with the brutal statistics of the slush pile and agents and publishing meetings that focus on everything but narrative style and structure.

The fact I used to work in publishing certainly helped me to get published – but only because I had an insider’s knowledge of how the process of publication works. As a former editor, I knew my manuscript was in sufficiently polished shape to submit it for consideration because I had read so many unsolicited and agent-submitted manuscripts, and I had helped authors to develop their own manuscripts – those that had been accepted by a publisher – through to publication. I therefore also acknowledged that there would probably be further work required on my manuscript, because publishers do have valuable knowledge and insight into making a book the best version of itself it can be.

Editors and publishers are always horrified by the arms-length pile of unread manuscripts from friends of friends, from former colleagues and so on. It’s impossible for them to avoid manuscripts from people they know, however distantly. And whether they know or know of a manuscript’s author, reading manuscripts is a time-consuming and fraught endeavour. Invariably the reading experience is split into parallel thought lines: Does this speak to me, do I want to keep reading it? and Could I sell this? The straight-out no’s are easy to call after years of assessing manuscripts. A yes/no split is not uncommon, and will result in an eventual rejection of the manuscript, causing distress to editor and author alike. Occasionally, very occasionally it’s a yes. Which is what we’re all aiming for. I like this quote from Samuel Beckett:

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson.  In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter Quintana’s memorial service. “What was I supposed to do?” he writes. “Ask her how she felt?” He also remembers trying to talk to Phillip Roth about his writing, on the author’s strict condition that the interviewer not ask him any questions about his personal life – when his is a life mined for fiction more overtly than most writers.

The writers festival circuit in Australia runs from late May through mid-September. This year I’m working towards participating in a couple of them by chairing sessions, moderating panel discussions and so forth. Thompson’s exhortation to ask writers about writing – about their experience of writing this particular book (the one they’re spruiking) and how it differed from what they had written before - seems like a reliable rule of thumb to follow, whatever the venue. Without this ‘Didion Rule’, as he calls it, we’re in danger of falling back on the tired tropes of book-related story-telling: writer overcomes struggle to enjoy success with latest book, novelty in book marketing, or the size of a writer’s advance.

On that last one, I’m always irritated when I come across news items about writers’ advances. They usually present figures which seem to be large, outside of any context of the complex business environment  in which those advances are made. Following this logic, such items should appear in the business section of newspapers.  There’s hardly ever an explanation of how advances work, or often don’t work, and the pluses/minuses for authors of accepting such advances. What rights has the author signed away, knowingly or not, for example, in return for an up-front sum? Then there’s the underlying assumption of intrinsic worth attached to a “large” advance for a book, when in the music industry the opposite seems to be the case. How many times do you read of some singer-songwriter who produces a record for $1,000 or thereabouts in their cousin’s garage, and it becomes – in another reporting trope – “an overnight sensation”? For me the story of the path to publication is always the most interesting, as there seem to be as many variations as there are books in the world.

Many people I know have had something of a struggle in 2009. Here are some wonderful new year wishes from the remarkable writer Neil Gaiman that are too good not to share:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope it’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman’s website

Just came across this ode to rewriting from A L Kennedy of The Guardian. She wishes, as I do, that there were a more appetising word for what she describes as the “glorious” work involved in rewriting your prose.

No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better – they can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances. This gives you – slowly – an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to. And by making a mental commitment to believe that you are not as good as you could be, you allow yourself to move forward, to mature as writer.

I love what she says here. My experience is that rewriting is much more enjoyable – though incredibly difficult at times – than the process of piecing together the first-draft scenes, chapters, sections, what-have-you. Perhaps that’s because I’m trying to figure out what I want to say; I don’t have a perfectly formed vision in my head before I set pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. Or perhaps it’s because, coming from an editorial background, my natural preference is to work with ”the whole” because I can see “the holes”. It’s probably a combination of the two. Once you’ve got something to work with, then you can start treating it like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, moving things around, removing and adding material, as it takes on – hopefully – its own shape and life.

There is such enormous pleasure to be had in knowing that you’ve produced your very best work. As Kennedy says,

Don’t mistake me: I’m not saying that my own attempts at better than best are the best, or everyone’s cup of tea, or anything other than a failure to live up to my hopes. But it seems only fair to do what we can for the reader.

Doing what we can: that’s what I’m hoping for in a holiday season of writing, as I have miles to go before I have the pleasure of rewriting. May all writers have a peaceful and productive holiday period.

This post was prompted by a piece by James Bradley over at City of Tongues in which he considers why he enjoys reading blogs by women more than those by men. His post alerted me to Rachel Cusk’s piece in the Guardian last weekend, “Shakespeare’s daughters”, on the nature of “women’s writing”.

While it’s now 50 years since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and 80 years since Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Cusk says the challenges and compromises of women’s lives – “babies, domesticity, mediocrity” – remain the same as ever, and those challenges are also those of women writers. And so the project, for Cusk, is for women writers to own the differences that distinguish their lives, to express rather than deny a distinction between the lives of women and men: “Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man,’ she concludes.

I like this idea, even though I suspect I am one of the women writers Cusk refers to in her piece who ‘might … nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of women’s writing’. I am sufficiently well educated to know that I am the beneficiary of advances hard-won by preceding generations of feminists, and proudly call myself a feminist despite the contested cul-de-sac in which that term now resides. I also call myself a writer (among other things), although I tend not to think of myself as a ‘woman writer’, and certainly not when I’m writing. It’s not hostility but ambivalence that I feel about the concept of “women’s writing”. If I am to give voice to the great and complex silences of women’s lives, then I do so by writing about what interests me, which by definition will be filtered through a woman’s consciousness. I can’t claim to be interested in the same things as “woman” en masse, and my media consumption tends to be quite different from what the majority of women seem to want to read or watch. I want to write about things I haven’t read about – or things that I have read about, but disagree with what’s been written (whether by a male or female writer). But I don’t feel that chick lit or self-help or memoir (including my own) could be called attempts as assimilation with “man”, as Cusk suggests, unless you decide that the entire book publishing industry is designed for men. It cannot be so, because the overwhelming majority of fiction readers – as evinced by attendance at writers’ festivals – are women.

At the moment I’m working on a story of two women musicians from different historical periods. I am trying to position each character within the social and economic forces which shape their respective lives, because as a woman I am intensely conscious of the ways in which those forces – including class, financial security, sexuality, professional independence – often work against women. This is not to say that my characters are passively blown about by circumstance; rather that they make life choices from the options available to them, which, depending on the year and country they were respectively born in, are plentiful (though not limitless) or very small indeed. So I am trying to write about love, about work, about motherhood, about artists, from the point of view of a woman. I think it will be for readers to decide whether or not what I write could have been written by a man.

Just as girls grow up learning to “read like a man” – and by so doing, learning to normalise the male point of view that dominates the majority of fiction narratives – perhaps there is a challenge for male readers to consciously choose to read more writing by women. Surely there is incremental value for men to read about female desire (whatever the object) from the woman’s point of view, unfiltered by the male gaze that women have come to view (I use the word deliberately) as normal.

Cusk laments the loss of “public unity among women”, arguing that these days, marriage and motherhood are seen as “choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain,” leading to a loss of “political caste” even as we have gained individual freedom. “Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing,” she says. I find this a rather twee notion, though Cusk might suggest I’m in denial and have simply dissociated myself from my gender in my desperate attempt to “assimilate … with man”. I can’t understand how “chick-lit” or self-help books (mostly written by women) or memoir (including my own) could be considered attempts at such alleged assimilation. Certainly the novel seems broad and deep enough to accommodate profound variety of form and content – what else do Zadie Smith and Alice Munro have in common as writers other than their gender? Here I take issue with Cusk’s idea of the necessity of women writing the “book of repetition” – “fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life” – and her suggestion that these subjects are not tolerated in contemporary fiction. In fiction I’m always kept engaged by the writing, more than by than the subject – the most mundane scenario can be made utterly compelling by the sheer skill of the writer. And yet I would be loathe to think I had to conform, simply because of my gender, to writing about subjects which do not interest me.

Like any form of public address, the most powerful points are often made through storytelling and anecdotes, by using the indirect lighting of a well-chosen narrative – scenario, character, plot, style, tone, wit – to better illuminate the darker recesses of actual experience that are common to most women at one moment or another in their lives. Surely a sense of “public unity among women” will be the gradual and cumulative result of many women writing and publishing stories about all aspects of their lives, over a number of generations.

There I will stop. There are presents to buy, cards to write, bills to pay. There are so many more topics relating to women and blogging and the economics of writing – perhaps the stuff of future posts – but I will now push this one into cyberspace, thank you for reading, and invite your comments.

I’ve recently come across this fascinating interview with Umberto Eco on the occasion of a new exhibition he has curated at the Louvre in Paris. The exhibition is about the nature of lists, poets who list things in their work, and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. As a list-maker from wayback, to hear Eco state that “the list is the origin of culture” was music to my ears.

I don’t know that the lists that mushroom around me bear much relationship to the sort Eco would write or invent, but I’ve put his new book, The Vertigo of Lists, on one of them: my ‘must-read’ list.

A few highlights from the interview:

The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.

We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous – not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

In the latest issue of The Monthly, Kirsten Tranter writes about the novels of Stieg Larsson, whose Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been recommended regularly to me by friends and family members with reliable taste. I clearly have commitment issues when it comes to books in series - the last trilogy I read was The Lord of the Rings at the age of 11, I’ve only read the eponymous first (though marvellous) novel of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and I am still to open a Harry Potter – but Tranter’s piece, “Stockholm Syndrome”, was the final nudge I needed to embark on the late writer’s trilogy of crime fiction.

I stopped reading crime fiction a long time ago, but I’m not sure why. Goodness knows I’m a sucker for a page-turning story. Maybe I just wanted to keep my body count to a minimum in the fiction I chose to read. But while I no longer take my fill of mutilated and murdered women’s bodies on the page, there are endless numbers of them on television and film for me to “consume” at my leisure, if not pleasure. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed at the number of gruesome crime stories that begin with an act of violence against a woman. It’s almost as if these stories cannot get a toehold on the viewer’s (reader’s?) imagination unless a dead female body arrests their attention. What does that say about our culture?

Tranter writes that misogyny is Larsson’s “most cherished theme”, and his heroine Lisbeth Salander its “avenging angel”. Very late in the piece Tranter draws attention to this conundrum of crime fiction:

Salander’s admirable strength as an avenger is predicated on her own horrific victimisation; she has to be raped and abused before the story of her revenge can be set in motion. This is the conundrum Larsson has confronted: how might it be possible to condemn men’s hatred of women without telling stories that illustrate it?

It’s a very good question, and this is why I need to read the books in order to find out whether I agree Larsson has confronted or even attempted to resolve the dilemma. Surely it is possible to write engaging novels about women characters whose fictional journeys are not predicated upon some act of violence or abuse?

I like to think Tranter is right; that “the success of Larsson’s novels proves the role that imaginative literature … has to play in generating critical debate about the most serious social and political issues.”

My first short story has just been published in the third issue of extempore, a journal of writing, music, art, and improvisation published by Melbourne-based music-lover and writer Miriam Zolin. Miriam developed the idea for the journal from her passions for writing and music, and the recognition that there was no journal devoted to the interdependence between these art forms. The November 2009 issue was launched at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz over the weekend, by none other than pianist Mike Nock, one of my favourite musicians and an all-round marvellous human being.

I wrote the story, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, as a way of getting into the head of one of the characters I am developing for my current project. In the story young Tilda is finishing high school and has decided to audition for the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Jazz Course. During the course of waiting, and waiting, outside the audition room, the reader learns many things about her musicianship and what has led her to this moment.

If you see extempore around the independent bookstores or in your library, take a look. You will find a diverse selection of poems, interviews, essays and photographs all responding in some way to the passion for music (and improvisation in particular). I was a little surprised to see mine is the only fiction published in this issue. Miriam’s always on the lookout for interesting submissions, so don’t be shy.

For anyone who has felt a little bruised by our world’s insistence on specialisation, here’s a powerful antidote in the current issue of More Intelligent Life (a sibling of The Economist), celebrating those of us who like to spread ourselves around, intellectually speaking. Despite its doomsday title (“The Last Days of the Polymath”), the article extolls the benefits to cultural history of those thinkers who are bored by a career-long focus on one field. Playwright/scientist/Paul Klee collector Carl Djerassi puts it this way:

I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity. To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important.

I’ve often felt like a freak because of my diverse interests, but I’m convinced it keeps my brain engaged with my environment (social, political, cultural) and helps me connect otherwise disparate or discrete ideas. Writing and editing, philanthropy projects, jazz music reviewer/aficionado, competitive tennis player, pianist; these hardly strike me as an especially eclectic, impressive or unusual collection of interests. At best, I’m told I’m a Renaissance woman; at worst, I continually fail to answer the question that’s most often posed to me: “So what is it that you do?” In Djerassi’s scheme I would be considered more of a dabbler, I guess, but even in my professional life I am always wearing at least two hats - literary and philanthropic – and that causes enough confusion as it is.

The article ends with Isaiah Berlin’s famous quote about the thinkers of the world, which he divided into foxes and hedgehogs:

Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

The article in More Intelligent Life led me to Project Polymath, which is a not-for-profit aiming to train a new generation of Renaissance thinkers. I would love to hear from foxes and hedgehogs alike.

Here are the winners in The Washington Post’s annual neologism contest. I am having trouble choosing a favourite from this witty bunch:

1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs. 
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained. 
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk. 
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent. 
6. Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown. 
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp. 
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash. 
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller. 
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline. 
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam. 
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists. 
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist. 
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. 
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there. 
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

In another contest, the newspaper asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The winners are:

1. Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. 
2. Cashtration (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
3. Giraffiti (n) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4. Sarchasm* (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
5. Inoculatte (v) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6. Hipatitis (n) Terminal coolness.
7. Osteopornosis (n) A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
8. Karmageddon (n) It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
9. Decafalon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
10. Glibido (v) All talk and no action.
11. Dopeler effect (n) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
12. Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
13. Beelzebug (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
14. Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.

*To broaden this beyond sarcastic wit, I suggest ironiclastic/ironiclasm would work well.

Here’s a beautiful Pablo Neruda poem I heard for the first time this weekend at a friend’s literary gathering in Sydney. It’s an untitled work from the volume Absence and Presence, translated by Alastair Reid and featuring photographs by Luis Poirot, which was published by Norton in 1990.

I love the audacity of this poem, its challenge for those who live with loss to cast off melancholy, and its suggestion that the suffering of the living is like a second death for the one who is absent. A timely reminder for all of us, certainly for me. For those readers of my book who have written to me recently, perhaps this poem will help. I thank you for sharing your thoughts and wish you well.

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.