Exciting new times for the Book Length Project Group and a name change for this blog

Well the time is right for a changing of the guard for the Book Length Project Group. A lovely new team (old friends and members of BLPG) will be taking over the coordination of the group, which will continue to run as usual on the third Sunday of each month at Mattie Furphy's House in Swanbourne, Perth, Western Australia. The new coordination team consists of three wonderfully talented writers, Dr Louise, Emily and Kristen.

Louise

Emily

Unfortunately I don't have a photo of the lovely Kristen. 

To save any name confusion, I'll be changing the title of this blog in the next few days. I still have to think of a good name but it will probably be one that defaults my own name (or I'll be the one defaulting to my own name!). I'll maintain all the old posts for those who want to look back.

A heartfelt thanks to everyone who has attended the Book Length Project Group during my time as Coordinator and a very special thank you to all the generous and talented guest speakers that we have had over that time.

Also thank you to The Fellowship of Australian Writers WA, to Pat, Trisha and Peter for their hospitality and for providing the Book Length Project Group access to the wonderful venue of Mattie Furphy House over the past two years, and into the future.

And my very best to the new team. Exciting, creative, productive times ahead!

The poet and the crime fiction writer

The Book Length Project Group is fortunate is having two wonderful guests along to our next meeting on June 15, 2014. It will be interesting to see what sort of cross-pollination occurs when Poet Rose van Son and Harper-Collins Crime Fiction Writer and Writer in Residence at the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Felicity Young, meet with the group to discuss their writing process and share their knowledge.

A little about these two highly accomplished writers:

Rose van Son’s poems, stories and articles have appeared in The West Australian, Westerly, Landscapes, Cordite, Australian Poetry, Indigo and more.

 

She has won places in the Tom Collins Poetry Awards, the W.H. Treanor Poetry Awards, the Peter Cowan Patron’s Prize, the Fremantle Press Tanka Prize, City of Perth National Haiku Awards, paper wasp haiku and The Heron’s Nest.   She is Creatrix editor for Creatrix online.

 

She won first prize in the KSP Short Fiction Award, 2000.

 

She has read at the Margaret River Writers’ and Readers Festival and has judged the 2009 Julie Lewis Poetry Prize and the ECU Talus Prize.

Her poetry collection (Sandfire) was published by Sunline Press. 

Felicity Young is Writer in Residence at the Fellowship of Writing WA in June. She has seven novels published and is working on another. I am currently reading her latest novel, The Scent of Murder, and finding it engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable. Look out for a review of the book here in the coming weeks.

With her permission I have copied her bio from her website:

Felicity was born in Germany and attended boarding school in the UK while her parents travelled the world with the British army. She thinks the long boring plane trips home played an important part in helping her to develop her creative imagination.

Felicity settled with her parents in Western Australia in 1976, became a nurse, married young and had three children. Not surprisingly, it took ten years to complete an Arts degree (English lit) at UWA.

In 1990 Felicity and her family moved to a small farm 40 kilometers NE of Perth where she established a Suffolk sheep stud, reared orphan kangaroos and embarked upon a life of crime writing.

Felicity will be holding two workshops on writing while she is  at the Fellowship. What a great opportunity for the local writing community!

Writing tip 27 - a cop-out

The truth is that, offhand, I can't think of one for this week, but I did have a quick scan of the Internet to check out other writers' blogs and found this one that provides "21 harsh but eye-opening tips from great writers".

I'd suggest a visit. You'd have to love some of these from the likes of Hemmingway, Twain, Orwell, Vonnegut, Parker, Gaiman and others.

Now I'm going to stop using semi-colons. Again. What are they for anyway? We've always had an uneasy relationship!

Writing tip 26 - Embrace constraints and set limits

Embrace Constraints

If you are not in the habit of seeking out TED Talks, I'd recommend that you do so.

In a talk called "Embrace the Shake" Artist, Phil Hansen, talks about how an unexpected limitation, and what he calls 'thinking inside the box', ultimately freed up his creativity.

 

Sometimes having unlimited choices is not the best for creativity. Imposing constraints on the project might encourage the artist into experimental or problem-solving mode, so that s/he is forced to create within that self-imposed set of rules. The rules provide walls to push against. No form, no freedom.

It's worth considering. If nothing else listen to the talk by clicking on the "Embrace the Shake" link here, or above. Hansen has made some fascinating art by embracing his limitation.

Set limits

Slightly different, but there are a couple of things I want to mention here.

The first I learned when I was researching and writing up my PhD thesis. That is to set limits around the size and scope of the project. You probably have enough ideas for several books. If you stick to one idea at a time, it will help you to keep control of your project.

Another way of setting limits is to try imposing time limits on daily writing. Set yourself an hour, five hours, or half an hour of regular writing time (or any other number that contains the writing as your time allows) and work within the constraints of that limitation.

Writing Prompt

Choose and impose a strict limitation on a small (or large) writing project as an experiment to see how this changes things.

Writing tip 25 - pursue ignorance - ask questions

Does the most interesting writing ask questions, or provide solutions? Or...

Is the sky the limit?

Like this Tip section of the blog, it's possible that too much advice can be quite annoying.  Why? It might be because providing answers generally implies particular assumptions, and closes off other alternatives. It might be that it assumes an uneven distribution of expertise between the giver and receiver of advice.

So, sorry about that, and a caveat - I know nothing! Next to nothing. Moving on...

I listened to a couple of TED talks on science this week, and they both suggested that opening up, rather than closing off, was the way to go. Science is not so much about proving what you know, as discovering what you don't know. It's not so much the pursuit of information as the pursuit of ignorance. As I listened, I thought that the same could apply to storytelling.

The pursuit of ignorance could well be another way of growing intelligence. Check out the links. In this model, entropy is useful. Chaos is productive. Certainty might well be less  productive - at least if there is too much of it. It can slow down discovery and close off possible responses to difficulties.

Is this why advice is so stultifying - because it closes off possibilities and attempts to provide a single solution to a problem that we might have created precisely so that we can explore the possibilities? That's just one idea, and like all these 'tips', everything written here is simply an idea which may or may not be useful. It can be taken, or leaven (that is to say, inflated like bread!). From a pragmatic point of view the more we learn, the more we understand that we don't know. And I guess this is a good thing.

Maybe one of the reasons I like storytelling is because it presupposes that, even with the same characters, there are countless alternative stories possible - different choices and circumstances create different stories. Maybe the whole idea of fiction is about asking 'what if?' And 'what if' might be an even better question than 'why'.

The best question, if we want to really learn something, is an open question - one that does not lead to an absolute conclusion, a 'because', or a 'yes/no' type of answer. At its best, a good question - or a good story - opens up the space for even more interesting questions to be asked.

Feel free to comment and disagree.

Prompt: Read through what you have done and remove all solutions replacing them with questions.

Writing tip 24 - take whatever time you need, or have

While not everyone will agree with this, I am increasingly convinced that it is important to take all the time that is needed to write a book. Depending on the project, the time needed might be six months or it might be several years. Occasionally it might be decades.

At the Book Length Project Group yesterday Author, Ian Reid, talked about the value of writing slowly. He mentioned that he tends to edit as he proceeds, and that he is constantly reviewing the structure and the texture of the writing.

We have a slow food movement, with slow cooking arguably producing a more enjoyable and ultimately satisfying experience all round. I want to add my voice to the slow reading and writing movement.

My slow-cooked marmalade

To this end, Ian recommended a book called Reading like a Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books, And For Those Who Want To Write Them by Francine Prose. I haven't read it yet, but it is on the list.

I think there is something important in this idea of taking time and care to consider different ideas and words.  If we want to enjoy a meal we might eat mindfully, savouring each mouthful and enjoying the context of our meal, the company and the setting. If we want to enjoy reading and writing, perhaps we could approach it in a similar way. When writing a book we might work carefully on a small section at a time, and finish that before moving on. Better to choose carefully than try to include every possible idea.

I wonder, is there a link between the way writing is changing, and the speed and superficiality that seems to be overwhelming modern societies? I don't know, but it is worth considering.

A tangential, but possibly linked phenomenon, was discussed in a recent episode of Radio National's All in the Mind. The program focussed on the increase in narcissism, and I have included a link here. It's well-worth listening to this program which also comments on the way in which point of view in novels has changed over time.

There is something about the phenomenon of focussing attention on the individual rather than the community that seems to encourage superficial, rather than more meaningful relationships. How does this relate to writing? The best books, I believe, are those which invite a deep engagement with the reader. For writers this means taking care to communicate as well as we can, and it means valuing the quality of the reading/writing experience over volume. It takes time.

Writing prompt

Try this as an experiment:

Allow an entire day to work intermittently on a single scene. Take time to let the mind wander around the scene. Write slowly and savour the process.

That Untravelled World - Ian Reid

I have just finished reading Ian Reid's most recent novel, That Untravelled World. For those interested in getting a feel for new settler, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Western Australian society in the first half of the Twentieth Century, this novel is a great place to start. It is beautifully written and eminently readable, a book in which the protagonist Harry begins the new century full of hope and excitement about a future which he believes is going to see the world transformed with flying machines and wireless communication, bringing people together across the world. As a young, skilled wireless engineer, he is full of optimistic anticipation about his own prospects in this imagined new world. As the story unfolds in the context of two World Wars and the Great Depression, we are guided through a single lifetime in which our hero's plans are progressively frustrated.

From the perspective of a reader/writer currently going through the joys and struggles of writing a second novel, there were a number of things that impressed me about this book. From the beginning it was evident that as reader, I was in good hands. I enjoyed the finely balanced structure of the story, its accuracy, restrained telling, and the way in which the era, age and physicality of the character, at various stages of his life, was so clearly evoked. Not once was Harry dropped out of character, or did the author flinch from portraying the less desirable mainstream social values of the time. At the same time, seen through Harry's eyes, there was compassion for each of the characters, damaged and flawed as they were, providing a way into what could otherwise have been difficult material.

Besides enviable fiction and non-fiction writing credentials, Ian Reid has the advantage of being a poet, a historian and a highly skilled researcher, and the depth of understanding is evident in the telling of this story. It's a satisfying read, and at the end I felt I had learned something about the early Eurocentric history and psychology of this part of the world.

Ian Reid will be meeting with the Book Length Project Group this coming Sunday to discuss his writing process with us. All welcome.

10am, Fellowship of Australian Writers WA premises, Allen Park Precinct, Swanbourne. Mattie's House.