Anne Skyvington
  • Writing
    • Craft
      • Structuring a Short Story
      • Alternative Narrative Approaches
      • Genre in Writing
      • A Grain of Folly
        • Novel Writing
          • The Sea Voyage: a metaphor
          • How I Created My Debut Novel
          • What I learnt from writing a novel…
          • Short Story
            • At the Swimming Pool
            • The Night of the Barricades
          • Poetry
            • a funny thing happened …
            • An ancient mystic: Rumi
            • A Window into Poetry
            • The Voice of T.S. Eliot
  • Publishing
    • A Change of Blog Title
    • 5 Further Publishing Facts
    • 5 Facts I Learnt About Self/Publishing
    • Highs and Lows of Self Publishing
    • A Perfect Pitch to a Publisher
    • A Useful Site for Readers and Indie Authors: Books 2 Read
  • Book Reviews
    • A Story of a Special Child
    • Discovering Karrana
    • A Young Adult Novel: My French Barrette
    • Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills
    • The Trouble With Flying: A Review
  • Mythos
    • Ancient Stories from Childhood
    • Births Deaths and Marriages
    • Duality or Onenness: The Moon
    • The Myth of Persephone and Demeter
    • Pandora’s Box
    • 7 ancient artefacts in the British Museum
    • Symbolism of Twins
    • The Agony and the Ecstasy of Change
    • Voices From the Past
  • Australia
    • A Country College Residence
    • A Kit Home Goes Up in Vacy
    • A Sydney Icon or Two
    • 5 things about Coogee
    • Moree and Insistent Voices
    • Things To Do in Sydney
  • Travel
    • A Bird’s Eye View
    • A Tuscan Village Holiday
    • Back to Cavtat in Croatia
    • Travel to Croatia
    • 5 or 6 Things About Valencia
  • Guest Post
    • a father’s tale … by Ian (Harry) Wells
    • A Guest Poem: “First Loves” by Roger Britton
    • A Love Sonnet by Ian Harry Wells
    • “Snakey” by Roger Britton
    • Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills
    • A Story of a Genteel Ghost told by Roger Britton
  • Psychology
    • Creativity and Mental Illness
    • Networking and Emotional Intelligence
    • C.G.Jung’s Active Imagination and the Dead
    • Psychology as a Field of Study
    • Western Influencers Down Through The Ages
  • Life Stories
    • Adriatic Romance … Rijeka to Titograd
    • Always something there to remind me…
    • A Well-Loved Pet
    • Candidly Yours…
    • Memoir Writing
    • River Girl: An Early Chapter of my Memoir in Progress
  • Welcome
  • Contact

Anne Skyvington

The Craft of Writing

  • Writing
    • Craft
      • Structuring a Short Story
      • Alternative Narrative Approaches
      • Genre in Writing
      • A Grain of Folly
        • Novel Writing
          • The Sea Voyage: a metaphor
          • How I Created My Debut Novel
          • What I learnt from writing a novel…
          • Short Story
            • At the Swimming Pool
            • The Night of the Barricades
          • Poetry
            • a funny thing happened …
            • An ancient mystic: Rumi
            • A Window into Poetry
            • The Voice of T.S. Eliot
  • Publishing
    • A Change of Blog Title
    • 5 Further Publishing Facts
    • 5 Facts I Learnt About Self/Publishing
    • Highs and Lows of Self Publishing
    • A Perfect Pitch to a Publisher
    • A Useful Site for Readers and Indie Authors: Books 2 Read
  • Book Reviews
    • A Story of a Special Child
    • Discovering Karrana
    • A Young Adult Novel: My French Barrette
    • Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills
    • The Trouble With Flying: A Review
  • Mythos
    • Ancient Stories from Childhood
    • Births Deaths and Marriages
    • Duality or Onenness: The Moon
    • The Myth of Persephone and Demeter
    • Pandora’s Box
    • 7 ancient artefacts in the British Museum
    • Symbolism of Twins
    • The Agony and the Ecstasy of Change
    • Voices From the Past
  • Australia
    • A Country College Residence
    • A Kit Home Goes Up in Vacy
    • A Sydney Icon or Two
    • 5 things about Coogee
    • Moree and Insistent Voices
    • Things To Do in Sydney
  • Travel
    • A Bird’s Eye View
    • A Tuscan Village Holiday
    • Back to Cavtat in Croatia
    • Travel to Croatia
    • 5 or 6 Things About Valencia
  • Guest Post
    • a father’s tale … by Ian (Harry) Wells
    • A Guest Poem: “First Loves” by Roger Britton
    • A Love Sonnet by Ian Harry Wells
    • “Snakey” by Roger Britton
    • Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills
    • A Story of a Genteel Ghost told by Roger Britton
  • Psychology
    • Creativity and Mental Illness
    • Networking and Emotional Intelligence
    • C.G.Jung’s Active Imagination and the Dead
    • Psychology as a Field of Study
    • Western Influencers Down Through The Ages
  • Life Stories
    • Adriatic Romance … Rijeka to Titograd
    • Always something there to remind me…
    • A Well-Loved Pet
    • Candidly Yours…
    • Memoir Writing
    • River Girl: An Early Chapter of my Memoir in Progress
Category

Memoir

lady-climbing-rock
Life StoriesMemoir

Candidly Yours…

In search of a voice…

My writing started out as therapy for a polarised — to be explained later on — childhood.  My own background had been stamped indelibly by my not having had a voice within the extended family I was born into. En famille, others had gorged themselves on yackety-yak, thereby filling the void left by my poor little mute tongue….

I wasn’t born without a tongue, so why couldn’t I waggle it?

She’s just shy, they said. There was no ear to lambaste in retort; clever rhetoric evaded my still larynx.

As soon as adolescence got off to its self-loathing, sex obsessed start, I naturally turned to psychology for answers. My elder brother had claimed for himself the super intelligence niche; the second brother was our cowboy clown; my little sisters were clever and pretty. I continued to hide my light under a bushel, which I thought had something to do with native flora; I shared a love of nature with my funny brother Donny.

I’d begun to read Gothic novels about spooks and mysteries, like Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and others. Mum chided me for terrorising myself at night, but I persisted. My scorpionic temperament was pulling me  into dark places. But it was the elder James brother, William, one of the early brand of modern psychologists, whom I would ultimately emulate in my search for a raison d’être. Freud, Carl Jung and Fritz Perle also became friendly mentors.

There were many circumferences, I learned, but only one centre. I needed to explore the netherlands of the psyche in my search for self.

Psychology calling…

Out of the blue, having escaped my family home, a miracle occurred: I started to talk. But friends in the outside world blocked their ears to the tales of woe that poured forth. They couldn’t empathise with my “Experiences of an Empath in an Uncanny Urban Jungle“. In any case, they all came from diametrically opposed, maybe just as difficult, perhaps even more so, backgrounds.

I was on my own, like a snail carrying a tightly curled shell of horrors on its back.

Eventually, I would seek professional help, find someone who would listen to me. At a price. The obvious answer was, for now, to write about it.

Writing about self…

Starting out from this point of view, my writing naturally lent itself to autobiographical-type genres.  I did courses on Life Story Writing, on Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction, all of which helped me a little with grammar, style and structure, if nothing else.

Another problem with writing about the past, is that it can turn out to be as boring as possum piss on a picnic. All those I’s, me’s and my’s can sound a tad narcissistic. Okay, I own up to possessing, like all around me, a dash of self-loving, but it boils down to a question of aesthetics and degree.

Like Sisyphus, I found myself on my own, once again. Researching creative non-fiction and memoir; practising writing it.

Life gets in the way…

Full-time studies, teaching, getting married and having children, these put writing on the back-burner. Of course, all of that is excuses. If I’d really wanted to, and had faced my fears of failure early on, who knows….

I had been trying to get my novel ready for publication, on and off, for quite a while. The writing had improved greatly over time, but the goal of finding an agent or a publisher had remained elusive. Recently, I had come to the realisation that what I needed was a good editor. This was what my writers group buddies were doing. Another failed move on my part. In retrospect, how do you find that peculiar beast—a good editor?

Fear of exposure…

My first attempts to create a readable structure that fitted in with the needs of publishing houses were a dismal failure. Later on I completed a degree in Professional Writing at university and I learnt about narrative structure and creative features, point of view, dialogue and voice. Through feedback sessions in student groups, my writing improved bit by bit. Some of my teachers and tutors were well established writers, and gave me invaluable insights into the craft.

However, I came to realise one day, just as I was about to send in my memoir to an agent, that I might not want my family and self exposed in this way.

So I set about turning the memoir into fiction. There were already some fictional elements, but I wanted to fictionalise the work even more. And to include, in line with creative non-fiction dictums, credible dialogue; this, I found, difficult to do within a memoir.

Turning the memoir into fiction meant that it became a different beast: a hybrid structure, retaining parts of the memoir, with more fictional pieces; these did not always fit in, unfortunately, with the events and actions of the storyline. I was on my own, once again.

A novel in search of a plot…

According to one editor, the writing was good, but it lacked a consistent point of view and a solid plot line. So this is where I was at: going back to the drawing board to re-fashion the whole mess, and to recreate an authentic narrative out of the ashes. This meant changing setting, disguising characters, omitting the more obvious and sometimes boring ‘real bits’ behind the story, and creating natural sounding dialogue.

And finding an authentic voice.

What I discovered was that, in writing a fictional work based on my background, the story had been transformed into a very different narrative. In my case, it became a similar, yet polarised version of the real story. In psychological terms, this would have been viewed by, say Freud or by Carl Jung, as a sort of  ‘sublimation’ of the author’s narrative.

Finding a new word for what I needed…

What I didn’t know at the time, was that a ‘manuscript assessor’, who just looks at a few pages and a synopsis, and chats with you, would be much more valuable and less costly for me, than a full-blown editor. I was only just up to the second draft and still had no idea where I was going with this work. I was lucky enough to find a good one. I was on my way….

Now I’m back to exploring memoir writing once again.

Candidly Yours… was last modified: February 23rd, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
October 23, 2019 9 comments
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in-the-moree-pool
AustraliaMemoirWriting

Moree and Insistent Voices

Moree, with a population of about 8,000, is situated in the north-west of NSW on the Mehi River and at the junction of the Gwydir and Newell Highways. It is famous for its Artesian Spa waters, which were discovered accidentally in 1895 when a bore was sunk in search of irrigation waters. Instead, mineral water heated naturally to 45 degrees spurted upwards flooding the area. For years I had wanted to return to this town, so loved by my father.

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Moree and Insistent Voices was last modified: February 20th, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
January 24, 2018 1 comment
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Life StoriesMemoirWriting

A Well-Loved Pet

Zac followed my partner along the footpath near our home, one afternoon when Mark was walking towards the gym. An Aussie Terrier, starving and weary. These gym sessions were daily events and sacrosanct at the time. This day, instead of continuing on his route, Mark bent down, picked the skinny runt up in his arms and proceeded to knock on dozens of doors up and down the hills, asking: “Does anyone know this dog?” No-one answered in the affirmative. We rang several vets in the area, looked out for ads and put up notices; nothing.  zac-thirteen

Once the two children saw him, his white coat shot over by a splattering of deep grey and a dash of beige round the eyes and ears, they fell in love. Fast. Two weeks later and our daughter had fallen so madly in love with the little mutt, it started to look as if he was ours to keep. And we had finally settled on ‘Zac’ for a name.

Like many adoptive parents, we dreaded, during the days that followed, the knock on the door, or the phone call that might announce the arrival of the ‘natural’ parent or parents of this undernourished, but otherwise perfect, little fellow. Luckily that never happened, and he fitted into our household like another family member.

He was the gentlest little creature. He put on weight quickly so that I didn’t have to carry him on long walks anymore. He loved chasing the ball that my husband threw almost to the moon.

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A Well-Loved Pet was last modified: February 23rd, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
December 7, 2016 0 comment
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a-camel-train
MemoirWriting

My 1968 Travel Journal: a metaphor

 I think of my European travels by plane and by car, as  being a metaphor for my earliest attempts at emotional development. These also enabled me to practise journalling skills, a helpful therapeutic resource later on. After I returned to Australia, I engaged a therapist and began utilising active imagination strategies, creative writing and dream analysis in order to access the deepest recesses of my mind.  This seemed to me to represent another sort of journeying, the converse of the outer journeys I’d already undertaken.
I’ve found it difficult, almost impossible, to write creatively while working full-time. My first writings were, therefore, straight journal postings.  While travelling around Europe in the sixties,  my journal entries ended up being novel length, but would have required skillful editing to be publishable. I lacked the time and know-how to be able to do this back then.
european-road-trip

A European Road Trip

From Paris to Russia and Back
I was living in Amiens, in the north of France at the time. I’d spent the previous twelve months in Paris, working as a clerk at the Australian Embassy, the Air Attaché section, handling secret files labelled “Mirage Jets”. It was boring work, but I’d earned enough money to move on to a more interesting job as a teacher’s assistant in a provincial  lycée for primary school teachers. I was also enrolled in the university there: first year of an Arts degree. During my time at the Embassy, I’d made some good friends, in particular, two girls from Melbourne. Liz was studying Linguistics at the Sorbonne, while Kay was writing a thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre. I was an ex-primary school teacher from Sydney with no degree under my belt. At the end of the twelve month Embassy position, instead of saving my money, I’d acted impulsively, as usual, and lashed out on a second-hand car.grave-of-sartre-and-de-beauvoir

It was the start of the summer vacation. I’d just lived through the student and workers’ strike in France, which turned into a near-revolution, with the threat of General de Gaulle’s troops hanging over our heads.

We three friends decided, over a map and a bottle of rough red Moroccan wine, to leave on a voyage in my car, setting out from Paris and heading for Northern Italy, thence southward to the warm Mediterranean countries, then eastward as far as Turkey, and onwards to the Ukraine, behind the Iron Curtain. It was the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. Luckily, Liz spoke a spattering of Russian and we were French/Australians, not Americans. We would travel in a 1960 model French Citroen—a “deux chevaux” (two horse-power) car—through fifteen countries, and get caught up in Soviet troops en route to Prague to quell the uprising there. The car looked like a battered jam tin on wheels, until it moved into action, when it resembled a dazed beetle with the hiccups. It bumped and tottered along. This was the first car I had ever owned.

The First Day
Left on trip at 1.30 p.m. We travelled practically non-stop, without eating, until midnight, when we arrived at Pontarlier, near the Swiss border in France, and were directed to the Youth Hostel. The woman kindly let us in. It was wonderful to wash and collapse on to our bunks.

The Second Day
We set off fairly early, after coffee at a terrace café, and crossed the Swiss border about lunch time. It was exciting to be in our first foreign country, after France, and we noticed the signs in different languages, Italian, German and French. By then, well into mountainous countryside. We were following the route to Lausanne, and the scenery was charming, but the going became harder and harder, the car straining in first gear. Driving along Lake Leman was breathtaking. We stopped about 4p.m. in “Heidi, Girl of the Alps” countryside, flowery and hilly, to give the car a rest; and we drank freezing water from a flowing stream. I picked some flowers and put them in a book. After more climbing and dust, it was like a magic moment to hear the melodious Italian voice at the border, and to find that the mountainous road was over. We made very good time once on the autostrada and were in Milan and at my Sydney friend, Julie’s place by 11p.m. We had to ring for the concierge to let us in, but soon we were in the apartment, talking, eating Italian fruit cake and drinking champagne… That night, we three interlopers slept seven storeys above Milan on a small balcony, side by side in our sleeping bags. I dozed off with the worrying idea that I might sleep-walk, but slept like a log.

 

My writing development has been a weird ride,  not a linear arc at all. In the sixties and seventies, I found little time to write, apart from in journals. I had no idea about genre, apart from “short story”, “novel”, and “autobiography”.  I’d read the great classics in English and French, with the omniscient narrator,  all-knowing, standing back from the characters and from the reader.

On returning to Australia, I was still carrying emotional baggage from the past that I wanted to exorcise.  Pouring out my feelings on the page was one of the methods I used for this.  Apart from depth therapy, that is.  I began  by spewing out bittersweet memories of an emotionally  underprivileged childhood. It didn’t matter that no-one else could access my writing.  It was something I needed to do at the time. Later on, I was seduced by the aesthetics underpinning creative writing: narrative structure, features such as voice, point of view and metaphorical usage. I wanted to learn more, to become better at it. This would become an obsession for me.

In the eighties, starting a family put paid to  any ambitions of mine.  My desire to be a good parent, to nurture emotional intelligence in my children, something I felt that I had missed out on and lacked, took precedence over the other “selfish” passion of writing.

I joined a Life Story Writing class in the early nineties, when my children were a little older. The first time I read from my therapeutic outpourings in class, it ended in tears.  I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was too close to the writing.

My first attempt at what I thought was a novel, “Frogs and Other Creatures”,  based on childhood memories, was little different from the journal writing.  I was still just narrating events, rather than dramatising them.  And it was structured like a collection of short stories, with titles at the head of each chapter.  It didn’t matter that my classmates were enthralled by some of the stories, the manuscript didn’t fit into any genre, and I was dissatisfied with it.  Publishers and booksellers hate these hybrid genres, as they don’t know where to place them. I was beginning to want more from my writing.

Studying writing at the UTS, Sydney, in the late nineties helped me get a handle on the features of creative writing, and to gain valuable feedback from classmates and tutors. I started learning about, and practising, narrative form through writing short stories, which is a great way to gain knowledge of structure in general. We read “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. I began to think more and more about structure.

When I retired in 2008, I had more time to practise writing. By that time, I’d learnt about the relatively modern genre of “memoir”. This is defined as “a part of a life”, as distinct from autobiography. At its best, it utilises the same features as fiction, including sequence of events, structure, characterisation and dialogue.  Unlike fiction, the main requirement is to pare back the complexity of events in a life through finding a relatively narrow focus.

This chosen pathway of developing  creative writing skills  is an ongoing journey for me.

board-writing

 

My 1968 Travel Journal: a metaphor was last modified: February 17th, 2020 by Anne Skyvington
August 27, 2016 0 comment
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Life StoriesMemoirWriting

Memoir Writing

According to American author Marian Roach Smith’s definition, “Memoirs are selections from your life story, shaped by theme, driven by a few burning questions.  So the question the reader brings is: why these bits of your life? The answer to that question will lead you to your opening.”

See her website for more gems about this genre that I love to read and strive to write well.

One part of my life that  I enjoyed was the post-adolescent period of adventure, spent in Paris, France, and travelling throughout Europe and into the USSR during the “Cold War” years. However it was the Inner Journeying that I had to set out on after I returned to Australia that forms the important part of my memoir. I now wonder if these two journeys are too much to include in one memoir?

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Memoir Writing was last modified: February 23rd, 2021 by Anne Skyvington
August 23, 2016 2 comments
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About The Author

About The Author

Anne Skyvington

Anne Skyvington is a writer based in Sydney who has been practising and teaching creative writing skills for many years. You can learn here about structuring a short story and how to go about creating a longer work, such as a novel or a memoir. Subscribe to this blog and receive a monthly newsletter on creative writing topics and events.

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  • The Night of the Barricades

    February 15, 2021
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About The Author

About The Author

Anne Skyvington is a Sydney-based writer and blogger. <a href="http://anneskyvington.com.au She has self-published a novel, 'Karrana' and is currently writing a creative memoir based on her life and childhood with a spiritual/mystical dimension.

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