Happy New Year!

A quick scan of the Internet tells me that 2013 is the Year of the Water Snake (lucky for some, especially the Canadians, it seems!), the Year of the Stem Cell (some great things on the horizon there, with scientists cautiously optimistic), and, for Hollywood, the Year of the Film Sequel (producers also cautiously optimistic).

For me it will be yet another year of finding my feet (right down below my knees) and for surviving the weather.

I'm hoping for great things for the Book Length Project Group - yes, the name is a bit of a mouthful but in its defence, was only ever meant to be temporary until someone could come up with something better.  Nothing yet.

What's in a name anyway? We're lucky to have some excellent writers in the group, and a goodly amount of collective wisdom that will guide us through the joys of hard work ahead, as we spit-polish the manuscripts currently in development.

My predictions for 2013, channelled directly through my crystal ball:

• There will be exciting news regarding members' publications, accompanied by critical acclaim and popular success, spreading across the group like wildflowers after a good rain
• New friendships will be formed and transformative insights gained
• Some of us will become irritating groupies of famous writers travelling to the Perth Writers Festival from far-off lands
• I see inspirational overseas travel for some, resulting in renewed vigour, energy and creativity
• There will be pleasant dinners, morning teas, semi-boozy lunches for those who wish to indulge
• Someone may think about contemplating the possibility of an alternative name for the group, maybe
• Someone will get a radical new hairdo
• On the down side, as in 2012, housework will tend to suffer

Have a happy and safe New Year and I hope to see you in 2013.

Iris

Advice: The Problem with Advice

Gateway to the partially known

Fictional work is not for offering advice. It is to tell a story or explore something, or I'm not quite sure what. My advice to myself is to use it as a diving board. Don't think too much. Jump right in. Swan dive or belly flop. The experience can be transcendent, unpleasant, indifferent, but the exercise is still good for my health.

Writing to offer advice in a work of fiction? I don't think so. There is too much searching in the dark, too much contrivance, and too much intentional ambiguity, too much playing Devil's advocate. Too much uncertainty about the nature of social expectations and individual sensibilities. In any act of explorative communication, meaning slips around. It changes all the time.

In fiction, this slippage of meaning between writer and reader is a good thing. It creates the space for a story to develop beyond the page. Readers bring unique understanding, assumptions, and emotional profile to a story so that certain aspects of a story loom large, while others recede. The story adjusts itself to the reader, for better or worse.  At its best the work stimulates debate. At its worst, silence. Writer and reader are partners in the process of meaning-making.

Where does advice belong? If it belongs anywhere in writing, it seems that it belongs in the realm of Self Help. The contract between writer and reader is clear - the writer wants to give advice and the book-buyer is seeking advice (although possibly for somebody else - we don't often feel that we are in need of instruction on how to live our own lives. I wonder how many self-help books are bought as presents? I might be wrong.) And when it comes to instructing others on the how-tos or the rights and wrongs of something or other, how a person should help themself, flexibility of meaning is usually unintentional.

Giving advice carries with it an assumption regarding certain beliefs that the other person might have, and also carries the assumption that the advisor knows more than the advisee. Sometimes this is justified. Sometimes not. Regardless, a status discrepancy is established. The advisor assumes superior knowledge on a particular matter, and this circumscribes the relationship.  Advice can be respectful, as provided by the advisor to an American President (Sorry, I can't think of a stereotypical English, or Australian, Prime Minister, without thinking Yes Minister). Commonly, advice is proffered within a symbolic adult to child relationship, teacher to student, parent to offspring. To be an advisor is to assume a temporary position of power. The upside for the receiver of wisdom in this relationship is that, if the advice is wrong, he or she is not entirely responsible.

Some of us have an automatic aversion to advice. I know I do. I have an aversion to both giving and receiving. At this point I can't help thinking of Shaun Micallef's 'Wisdom of the Elders.' I'm the elder, in case you're wondering.

So in the spirit of 'playing opposites,' I have proffered some rambling advice here. For the uninitiated, playing opposites is a technique employed in performance rehearsals to help an actor discover hidden things about the character he or she is playing. An angry monologue is delivered with great self control and gentleness, for example; a loving speech with underlying irritability, or disdain. Something there for all of us, I think.

A final word of advice: It's worth remembering when reading or writing a work of fiction - you don't always get what you expect. And a good thing too!

Merry Christmas

Love, peace and happiness this Christmas

So these are ours; faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is Love.
-Corinthians 13:13

"If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace."
Thich Nhat Hanh

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. ~Jean Houston

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. Buddha

“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” Mother Teresa

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

Thomas a Kempis (1380 - 1471)

 

 

The Prophet Muhammad (s) said: “Do not turn away a poor man…even if all you can give is half a date. If you love the poor and bring them near you…God will bring you near Him on the Day of Resurrection.”
——— Al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 1376.

Peace is not in money, estate, bungalows and possessions. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but within the soul. Swami Sivananda

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

“Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contribute the best that they have and all that they are.”
—Hafsat Abiola

 

Peace

With the many sad events reported in the News, and coming up to the Christmas season, it's good to be reminded of the value of peace, and to take heart.

A book on my Christmas list is Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  The publication was released in 2011, but is likely to have a long shelf-life. In this book Pinker traces the the history of humans and apparently brings considerable evidence to bear on his main thesis that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. It appears that, overall, the trend for violence is down, down, down! Things are not perfect, but we are heading in the right direction.

The implication is that now, more than ever before, we should be able to cooperate and use our collective wisdom to address the challenges ahead.

Lisa Appignanesi provides a short, but good, review of the book on the link provided.

Good blog site for writers

In a comment on one of my earlier posts, Glen Hunting mentioned a site called This Itch of Writing.  The site is kept up by Emma Darwin, a novelist and short story writer. It is a good looking site that offers great suggestions for improving writing. Over done, over written and over here is one of the blogs worth checking out on the site.  Thanks Glen!

Review - Trisha Kotai-Ewers "Listen to the talk of Us: People with Dementia Speak Out"

I wrote the following review of Trisha Kotai-Ewers' book Listen to the Talk of Us: People with Dementia Speak Out in 2009 for the FAWWA Newsletter. As I mentioned this beautiful book in an earlier blog, I have included a copy of the review here for those who might be interested in purchasing the book.


Published by Alzheimer’s Australia WA Ltd

$19.95 plus $5.00 postage.

Available Alzheimer’s Assn  (+61 8 9388 2800); or FAWWA.

For anyone the gradual decline of a loved-one’s capacity to communicate is confronting, to say the least. But for a writer and self-confessed wordsmith, witnessing such changes in the vibrant persona of a much-loved mother, must be doubly charged.

Writer and Acting President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (W.A.), Trisha Kotai-Ewers saw her own mother gradually lose expressive language along with other changes that occur with dementia. In such circumstances a person might be forgiven for minimising contact with the places and situations likely to remind her of her mother’s illness. But Ms Kotai-Ewers takes another path, embracing the insights that the experience has given her as she works as Writer in Residence with people who have dementia, talking with them and recording their words.

She does this, not over the period of six months or a year as might be expected, but over many years. And she undertakes the work in such a respectful and ethical manner that the process of forming often profound relationships with the people who tell their stories, figures as a compelling underlying theme in itself. The author has been very careful to gain permission to record the words, from the people with dementia as well as their families, has done the recording in an overt manner, and has checked back with them once the words have been written down.

As might be expected from a person who has spent her life writing, the book is beautifully expressed, something that is not always evident in the non-fiction genre. This makes it ‘a good read’ even for those for whom the subject matter might not initially hold interest. But beyond this, it raises some of the big questions that concern us all – what it is to be a person, what is left when our words and understanding of conventional reality desert us and the place that meaning holds in our life.

The text does not pretend to provide definitive answers, but invites engagement in the questions themselves through reading and re-reading the words of those who are confronting them on a daily basis. The words are accurately recorded and set out in poetic form to encourage the reader to interpret them as one might do with poetry, understanding that much of the meaning lies beneath the surface of the words, in the subtext, and through metaphor.

Beyond the words themselves, Ms Kotai-Ewers contextualizes what has been spoken with her subjective impressions of the emotional intention of the speaker, shown to her through those critical non-verbal aspects of communication that cannot be conveyed through words alone. This depth of communication is made possible because of the close connections that the author has formed with the speakers. Underlying these close connections is time, mutual love and respect between the author and storyteller, and above all a willingness to listen.

This book is a must-read for anyone working with people affected by dementia, or for those directly impacted. It is accessible, carefully written and well-researched. But above all, it is written with genuine empathy in the deepest sense of that word, for its subjects.

 Reviewed by Iris Lavell

First published Fellowship News Feb 2009List

Brainpickings - a good website



One of our members has sent me a link on the brainpickings website. The site has a lot of good information for writers. And not just for writers. Regular folks too!

I've looked at it a couple of times and found something worth reading both times. The other day there was a comprehensive article on book illustration. There is another blog that summarises some of the research around optimism, and a letter from Amelia Earhart  to her fiance on the eve of their marriage, laying down the conditions of the union (posted on December 11).

Worth checking out. I'd be interested to know what you think.

http://www.brainpickings.org/

A little bit of silliness about left brain, right brain, and the editing problem

At the risk of squandering any tenuous credibility established thus far as a blogger/serious-minded person... here's a little dance I do when nobody's watching:



I put my left brain in

I put my left brain out

 Put my left brain in



And I shake it all about

Shaa...ke it!

What am I trying to say here? What deep message?
Left brain, linear logic. Right brain, holistic creativity. That seems to be the consensus.



And that's what it's all about!

Right brain: honeymoon, romantic love, euphoria, mind blowing, climactic, euphoria. Creativity flows through, as if it is coming from somewhere else. I can't get it down fast enough. When I read it back I am amazed at the lucidity and sheer beauty of what I have. The next day I sit down and realise that this particular word here doesn't quite make sense.  I'll just change that . Everything shifts to the right. Counterbalance. I stumble to the left.

It's like training the almost perfect lover that just needs to remember to pick up his discarded toenails and put them in the wash. If I could just change that bit, he'd be amazing! And then I notice that funny snorting sound he makes when he thinks nobody's listening. Just that and the nails. The toothpicks he leaves in the sink. The obsession with lemons. I work away patiently, making these little corrections. He's responsive, a fast learner, only occasionally backsliding. At the micro level each correction makes perfect sense, but when I step back something seems to be missing. I try harder. My creation is transforming somehow. Me too. I am becoming robotic. Too much left brain?  Hmm... The more I struggle with the detail, the more I Robot. Desperate times. Desperate measures. If at first you don't succeed, try more of the same.

I become quietly obsessive, exploring every corner of the bed I have made for myself, my hermetically sealed, enclosed bed. I rat-like, work over and over on the same little bit, trying to find a way out. I uber-work each paragraph, the same few words, the same word.  One of my brains starts to hurt. I think it's the primitive fish brain part. The last full stop in place. The last dash, dot dot dot eliminated.

Finally I have perfection. My lover sits in the corner like a shiny statue. There's something wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I shouldn't have swapped his left elbow with the right knee. Change it back. Done. Oh yes, and he's not as lively as he used to be. He's not moving.

The next week I stare. He sits.

Chapter one, chapter one, chapter one. Pefect. I hate it. I am heartily sick of chapter one. I decide I need to get something happening. Plus the whole thing just doesn't hang together like it used to. I vascillate.

One day (yet again) I think, I know what I'll do! I'll do a bit of a story board. I'll use the view function  - the one that looks like a little book on my screen and reassures me that I am writing one - and I'll get  an overview of what I have (no editing allowed!), and then I'll get a piece of paper and draw a series of little pictures in boxes with the main points of the scenes, and get my head around the whole thing, draw up a skeleton of the book (should only take the rest of the day at most) and then all I need to do is to fill in the details, and I'll have my first draft. 

Except I just noticed that sentence doesn't scan. That word is just not right. (I'll just pop out of this view function, and change that one). Now that one is not quite right. And that's shifted all of that, so that will need redoing...  I could always borrow back that How to Write a Novel CD I regifted to my mother one Christmas.

Time for a glass of wine.

Somewhere else, in a galaxy far away, or maybe a parallel universe, a writer falls in love with a new idea and can't get the words down fast enough...

Oh yes, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you, dear reader, have any tips for silencing the inner critic?  Leave a comment and it will, more likely than not, appear on the blog within a relatively short period of time.

The Fall of a Sparrow by D.A. Wildsmith - A post from DW

The Fall of a Sparrow – by D.A. Wildsmith

It’s apocalypse season and to get in to the lurch of this, I wrote a similarly themed short story.  That may throw 98% of you off the, “interested readers list” however, I have tried to keep my characters in the foreground.  The darker elements are just those things that go bump in the night.  It’s how we react to them that is, hopefully, more interesting.  So why not, come for a drive…

For the full blog on it go here: http://www.shunnedhouse.net/earth/?s=The+Fall+of+a+Sparrow (Here I mention Hamlet, Javier Marias and Spiderman of all people.)

For the short story go here: http://www.shunnedhouse.net/tfoas.html

Please register and comment on the site, if so inclined.

 

The picture/cover for the story was done by a graphic designer friend of mine, DUST.

Scrivener as mentioned at our last meeting

For those who are interested in the Scrivener program mentioned by Lynn at our last meeting I have included a link here to a website that seems to provide quite a good explanation of what the program does. For those who were unable to attend the meeting, Lynn Allen recommended this program as something that she finds to be quite useful in managing larger writing projects. It looks good.

Book length project group end of year and timetable for meetings in 2013

Stairway to the moon without a tripod

Well folks, we've come to the end of our first year and the group is still here and as vigorous and enthusiastic as ever. At least three of our members have completed manuscripts to the point of submission and many are embarking on new projects. We've had some great discussions over the past year about writing process, and have been privileged to hear presentations by our members and by guests who kindly agreed to come along to share their thoughts. We were able to host critically acclaimed authors Nicholas Hasluck and Amanda Curtin who generously gave up their Sunday morning to speak with us.  Nicholas has written numerous novels, the most recent being Dismissal, so having the opportunity to hear about his writing process was a great gift. Amanda's debut novel The Sinkings has been critically acclaimed and an absorbing read. One of our members and FAWWA president Trisha Kotai-Ewers spoke with us about her beautiful book Listen to the talk of Us: People with Dementia Speak Out. I love this book, which is filled with the poetry of words spoken by people with dementia, and, I think, should be required reading for anyone working in this field. Required, highly enjoyable reading. Today, another of our members, Lynn Allen  author of Illusion gave a wonderful presentation in which she shared her knowlege with regard to the e-publishing field, and a lively discussion ensued. FAWWA Writer in Residence Campbell Jeffreys joined the discussion, and was extremely gracious given that we barged in on him without warning this morning. (Sorry Campbell!)

We have some promises of presentations next year from Maureen-Helen (January) and also Chris McLeod (TBA). It is going to be a  very good year. Yes!

So next year we will meet once a month, as usual on the third Sunday of each month (this month being the exception that proves the rule - we thought we'd go a little wild and have it a week early!)

We start at 10am(ish) and finish at 12.30(ish) and the cost per meeting is $5 for FAWWA members, and $10 for non-members.  We meet at Mattie's House at the FAWWA premises in Swanbourne. There is no expectation that people attend every meeting - the group is for meeting with like minded individualists, and people come along when they can make it. Sometimes the groups are large, and sometimes not so large.  If you are interested in attending contact FAWWA.

To be more specific, dates for 2013 are as follows, all being well (any unexpected changes will be notified by email and on this blog site, so it might be worth checking the day before)

20 January 2013

17 February 2013

17 March 2013

21 April 2013

19 May 2013

16 June 2013

21 July 2013

18 August 2013

15 September 2013

20 October 2013

17 November 2013

15 December 2013

The War of the Worlds and The Handmaid's Tale

I've finally got round to reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It's wonderful!

Having recently finished "The War of the Worlds", I ask myself what it is about Atwood's novel that pulls me along while I had the feeling of having to work quite hard to finish Wells', despite it being quite thin. It's not the complexity of the writing. If anything, Atwood's writing is more complex - certainly more psychologically complex (although Wells shows some lovely flashes of insight) - and Wells created a good story, which should be motivating for the reader.

Both stories are written in the first person. This feels very natural and, in Atwood's book, creates, for me, a real sense of  identification with the central character, but I found Wells' to be more distant, despite the first person point of view and the desperate circumstances in which he finds himself. This sense of identification is not the result of one having been written closer to my time than the other, either. For instance, I almost always found Jane Austen's books as 'compulsively readable' as this one by Atwood.  I was reminded of this when I read a blog this morning by Scott D. Southard (Check it out if you are a Jane Austen fan).

Wells' book was serialised, of course, and this appears to have affected the narrative structure. There was an economic imperative here, and I think this works against the art. Is each chapter intended to be read with an interval between? There's a sense of 'the story so far..' about it. Atwood's feels more like a single sitting narrative, with forced breaks when (my) domestic life intrudes. 

Both stories engage the intellect, although Atwood's does this more smoothly, without distancing the reader from the narrative. Wells' writing feels more cerebral. Atwood's is able to create a real sense of being trapped in a society that is structured for restraint, self-sustaining, dispersed, and where the enemy seems amorphous, embedded, even carried within, causing paths to escape to dissolve, even as they open up. Wells' enemy is more discrete and there is always the possibility of defeat and a return to 'normality' of a kind, albeit with an altered sense of the possible. Plus Wells' central character is a man of education and privilege, and restoration of his position is ultimately restoration of the status quo of English society at that time. I suppose women - and Atwell's book might be labelled a feminist novel - have never really been able to relax into their tenuous emancipation. It seems to be constantly under challenge. This can be exhausting. The alternative of giving up the ongoing work to  simply maintain a level of social and economic equality can occasionally seem quite attractive. The imaginative journey to the end result of this temptation, is undertaken in the book. I found it interesting that the book was copyrighted 1985, with the historical period in gender politics and economics providing another level of meaning to the text. So the novel pre-empts the return to a fundamentalist religious conservatism as a political force that is, even now, working from the top down to change society through lobbied legislative changes. Perhaps all this is what provides the high stakes, for this reader at least.

Ultimately the pulling power of the novel is the engine that drives the narrative. The engine is fueled by what is at stake for the reader, and not just for the novel's protagonists. The stakes are high in "The War of the Worlds." Those in "The Handmaid's Tale" are both high and credible in our contemporary world. This, I believe, makes it compulsive, if not compulsory reading.

Take it All at the Spare Parts Puppet Theatre

I find that one of the best things I can do to nourish my own writing creativity is to place myself in a position to enjoy other art forms. This is my rationale for mentioning theatre in this particular blog.

A friend recently received an email from a performance duo known as Red the Nosepaper. They appear to be operating on a shoestring, needing the word to get out there, so I thought I'd give them a plug. They are bringing a show to Perth called Take it All. It looks like this could be a show worth seeing if you are in Western Australia at the moment.

The spokesperson for the group wrote that "Red the Nosepaper is a Catalan/Swedish not for profit  that does playful silent, poetic and chaplinesque clown, using innovative and magical technology."  Take it All won the best show award at the Festival Pro-contra (Poland).

It is suitable for all ages.

Red the Nosepaper will be performing at the Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, 1 Short Street, Fremantle on Sunday December 9th 2012. There are two shows: 1pm and 5pm. Tickets are available at the door at a cost of $20/$15 or the special concession price for a family group (2 adults and 2 children) of $50.

The Martians are Coming!

I've been putting my toe into the water of speculative and science fiction lately (I think Margaret Atwood describes a distinction between these two quite well). I'm in the middle of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in 1898. When  a radio play based on this little book was broadcast in 1938 (on Halloween) produced by Orson Welles as if it were a News broadcast, the word was that people were convinced that the Martians really were coming, and a panic occurred.

Not so in the book itself, which describes a world in denial, slow to come to its senses, a world confident in its own ability to continue as usual,  and trust that everything will be all right in the end. In the process the Martians are wiping out everything in their path and people are dropping left, right and centre.

The book is spooky in its ability to describe scenes that might have been borrowed from descriptions of what was to occur just sixteen years after its publication - the horror of the First World War. And he makes some astute observations about the almost desperate desire to remain apathetic in the face of a force that seems too big to comprehend, and this could hold a mirror not only to the future back then (think the rise of the Nazis, and the sluggish response of the world to that) but also to our imminent future. The book made me think of our current response (our apparent inability to respond) to global climate change, or a desire to respond only to those events as they begin to directly impact our personal lives.

The other thing that occurred to me is that reading this book at the end of 2012 provides the present-day reader with an opportunity that the first readers didn't have - a Martian view of the Earth and its inhabitants. How strange time and space on Earth was back then. You don't really get the sense of it in a contemporary period piece movie. 

It's worth reading old books, if only for this - as a kind of amateur anthropologist. Such are the benefits of the temporary psychological displacement that reading an old novel can provide. While we're at it, if we were to project ourselves forward to 2112, I wonder how current technology, actions, lives, beliefs, will be experienced? Someone should write about it.

Books are great, aren't they!  Old and new.  Let's keep them coming.

Happy writing.