Writing

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.

October 23, 2019 9 comments

Mythos Writing

Ancient Stories from Childhood

As a child growing up in a valley where diversity was met with suspicion, I learnt, first-hand, about racism. However, I also saw paradoxes within my cocooned world, and turned to STORY to try to understand the conflicted reality surrounding me like a grey pall after bushfires.

One of my favourite uncles, let’s call him ‘Barney’, was the most forthright in expressing overtly, the racism that reigned in our world. Don’t go near them dirty blacks; strange words, falling on deaf childhood ears in my case, since the Aborigines were mostly out of sight in this happy valley. Yet this uncle was kindly, with childlike, cerulean blue eyes, which twinkled when he laughed and played funny tricks on us; and he worked like a dog for my beloved grandmother, who whispered that he was worth his weight in gold and that the Good Lord (who hailed from Northern Ireland in her case) would reward him in the afterlife. He’d been caned by the nuns for his stutter, which turned him off school and, perhaps, away from religion, for good. (The nuns were real cruel to us kids, he told me. Dadda let me stay away from school afterwards.)

Later on, I thought that it was a pity they’d taken Barney out of school—’thrown the baby out with the bathwater’ to quote an apt cliché—since education can be what saves children who are stuck-in-the-mud of poverty or of ignorance.

Strangely, at the end of his long life, Uncle Barney’d requested a Catholic funeral. Was it in reverence to his father’s religion, or was he, perhaps, hedging his bets when it came to the afterlife? For this occasion, I, a lapsed Anglican/Buddhist—and the offspring of a marriage between Catholic and Anglican parents—officiated at the ceremony. The dark-skinned Filippino priest was grateful for my support, given his poor English and lack of acquaintance with the deceased. The funeral went off without a hitch, and I was applauded as a one-time celebrant for the Catholic Church par excellence, much to the chagrin of my atheist brethren who attended the service.

‘You can’t please everyone’ was one of the lessons I’d learnt in childhood from reading Aesop’s Fables: a collection of oral tales credited to a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. It was the story titled ‘The Boy, the Man and the Donkey’ that introduced that idea to me.

There was another supreme paradox, and one that proffered a kind of balm for my heart and eyes. Uncle seemed colour blind when it came to his choice of best friends. They were four brothers from a neighbouring farmhouse that fronted the riverbank, who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages from The Thousand and One Nights; swarthy-skinned Assyrian men with dark hair and Anglicised names—Sammy, Teddy, Dan and Freddy—who we kids idolised for their storytelling prowess.

One of the stories, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, kept us entranced for weeks at a time, we kids and our uncles, sprawled around on the grassy bank of the river beneath the starry sky. The brothers took turns to recount by heart such tales from The Arabian Nights.

They were, I realised much later on, from Assyrian Christian backgrounds.

Not until adulthood did I come to realise the extent to which religious differences had led to many immigrants, such as our Assyrian neighbours, having to leave their homelands, in this case from the Middle East. My reaction to religions has been, as a result of such experiences, to lose trust in dogmatism, and to move towards an appreciation of mythology and of spirituality in the broader sense.

Mystics from all paths, Judaism, Christianity or Islam, seem to be more interested in what unites people of different religions, rather than what separates them. The Sufis were mystics, who may lay claim to being the originators of all of the major human attempts to penetrate beyond the apparent world, to glimpse the reality that lies beneath appearances.

Sufis say that, before you can acquire higher knowledge, you need to look within and rid yourself of psychological and emotional blocks, and to resist following the spiritual herd, which can lead to religious fanaticism.

According to Idries Shah, the last publicly know teacher of Sufism, Sufis have had a major influence upon Western thought, via important individuals such as Roger Bacon, St Francis, Ramon Llull, and many others.

The early Sufis were wanderers throughout Asia and the Middle East, dispensing a form of Islam different from the modern one, and from that of the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle Ages. They connected with spiritual travellers from the West, who were escaping religious persecution, and with traders from the Far East who exchanged wisdom and ideas with them, including Oriental Buddhism.

In the history of Christian mystics, too, the contemplatives have been the ones who reached out beyond the boundaries of institutional religion to embrace the teachings of other faiths.

When I return to my Happy Valley and pass by the cathedral—with the lead glass window dedicated to my paternal grandmother—I remember the sense of mystery and of awe that enlivened me as I sat, long ago, in the pews there, and I realise that I have carried something of it with me to this very day.

September 8, 2019 0 comment

Publishing Writing

Self publishing a novel as an ebook

What a month it has been! No, make that two—or three…. First a hasty trip to Croatia and to Spain with my husband. I always like to record my travels on my blog, which I did, in between touring around, often alone, (thanks for those cognacs in that foreshore bistro in Cavtat!), as well as in company. Mark’s Symposium was hugely successful due to his great organising skills and untiring workload; that is, along with his colleague Suzana, who also acts as a patriotic diplomat for her beloved country of Croatia. Since the economy rests mainly on tourism, the Symposium is of great benefit to the country.

During the trip I had little time to think about my recently published novel, Karrana, as I was on the go all the time, supporting mon mari, ce heros to look his sartorial best—after all, we were in Europe!—and exploring the foreshore and islands near Cavtat. And blogging about the places, so as not to forget….

Three days spent as tourists in Spain, on the coast, was even more rushed. But we did out best! Eating, eating, eating….

After having succumbed to a nasty virus in March, I had taken advantage of the month spent in bed to edit the manuscript of Karrana: A novel, which certain family members had been urging me to produce. My blog had kept me in practice with general writing skills for years. However, blogging depends on utilising specific genres, more akin to journalism than to long fiction. I still didn’t know if I would be able to pull, out of my bag of tricks, that magic sounding elusive object—a ‘novel’. The members of my critique groups all applauded my efforts and gave me the confidence to continue, and to finish a manuscript.

When I arrived home from Valencia via Madrid and Dubai, last week, I was physically, mentally and culturally jetlagged. In my letterbox was a hardcover book, Skeffington: One-Name Study.

It’s based on a genealogical research project exploring the Skeffington name —my name—far back into past ages. It’s way out of my league, but I was expected to read it and relay to the author, my brother, my impressions, immediately. Impossible!

My heartfelt thanks go to the members of Waverley Writers and to the Randwick Writers Group for their untiring support of my efforts. Thanks also to the manuscript assessment editor from Writing NSW, who provided me with the last piece of the structural puzzle that helped me to finish the work.

A big thank you goes to my sister, Susan, my very first reader, who gave me positive feedback; and to my husband, Mark, who did the same, having recently purchased his first Kindle reader. My friend, Kay, has also helped me with positive input while still reading the novel.

It wasn’t until near the end of writing the novel, that I knew where I was coming from in the beginning!

My novel has, I think, one foot in both genres, literary and commercial fiction.

It is a love story, with a ‘love triangle’ switch towards the end. But it is much much more. I will leave it up to reviewers to say more about the themes and metaphors throughout the book. And about the structure….

Why did I decide to go with Amazon, and to upload it as an ebook, rather than find a publisher? In other words, why did I decide to become an Indie Author? One of the reasons is that I had taught myself to self edit my work, over a long period of trial and error. Keeping a ‘Craft Writing’ blog helped me to research and to iron out many of the structural problems beginning novelists encounter on the path to writing a readable novel.

I felt, at last, one month ago, that I was ready to go.

So I signed in with my Amazon account and studied the guidelines for uploading a manuscript for an ebook. Even for someone technically challenged, I found the KDP directions clear and fairly easy to follow, with a few hitches along the way. Amazon now tells you how many typos and spelling mistakes there are in your initial file. I had 11, which I fixed and re-uploaded the file to their satisfaction. They also provide cover templates to choose from. I could only find one, partially satisfactory, image. In the meantime, my daughter, who is an excellent artist, was creating another one for me. Thanks, Kate.

Now comes the hard phase: marketing and promoting your work. As an excellent editor said at a recent workshop in Sydney:

Firstly, it is immensely helpful to get feedback on your work from trusted beta readers and professional assessors or editors.

Secondly, your ability to continue to develop your work to a publishable standard and to make the most of any feedback you receive relies in part on understanding that you are separate from your words.

Another great advantage of Amazon is that you can make changes to the content and/or the cover and re-upload it afresh.

The featured image on this page is of Bondi Beach at dusk.
You can find it – if you wish to buy a framed picture – on Aquabumps: “Iluka”
https://www.aquabumps.com

June 5, 2019 0 comment

Travel Writing

Return to Cavtat…uvijek!

We’re here in Cavtat on the southern coast of Croatia, for the 4^th International Symposium on Stuttering that my husband convenes. Participants come from more than a dozen countries, from Europe, Asia, the UK, America and the Pacific region. We are a going to visit Zagreb where the Croatian convenor, Suzana lives, and stay one night in her country getaway near Samebor. After Croatia we plan on spending a few days relaxing on the Spanish coast at Valencia.

Coming back to Cavtat is like waking up in Paradise all over again. It’s the Mediterranean like it once was many years ago. It’s the light, the wavy sea, the village stones and ancient buildings, the hotel that Tito built nestling on the cliffs like a sparkling cruise ship, the seagulls gliding outside the glass. It’s everything about this magical place. If it’s not heaven, then it’s a little piece of it. (A little bit of paradise: ‘malo raja’ in Croatian).

The first site for this hotel was further back from the edge of the cliffs. Once work began on the original building, it was discovered that Roman ruins lay beneath the ground and the plans had to be revised. The hotel is now perched like one of the huge seagulls from this area, and looks out over the Adriatic Sea. It can accommodate up to 1200 guests. The seagulls like to hover over the waters on the winds outside our top floor unit. I think of the arms of the cliffs that mark the entrance to the harbour as being like the claws of crustaceans, so prolific in this region.

The colours and the weather change very quickly here. We went to bed with clouds over our unit that fitted in perfectly with the grey/olives of the hilly landscape, and awoke early to a full moon in a blue sky over blue blue waters.

George Bernard Shaw, when he visited Croatia at the turn of the century, said ‘those who seek paradise on Earth should come to Dubrovnik,’ which he called ‘the pearl of the Adriatic’. That city is truly spectacular, with its magical Old City, its ancient ramparts, modern shops and restaurants; it has rightly become a tourist’s dream destination.

However, Cavtat, which was many years ago overtaken by Dubrovnik as a cultural and commercial centre, is today a haven of peace and beauty.

The monastic-looking building at the top of the village is actually the Racic Family Mausoleum, ‘Our Lady of the Angels’, from 1922. An inscription in the cupola states: ‘Know the mystery of love, and thou shall solve the mystery of death and believe that life is eternal.’

Down below is the Monastery of ‘the Lady of the Snow’ dating back to the 15th century. One of the items inside that has always morbidly fascinated me is the wall pulpit with an arm bearing a cross hanging out of it.

The Alter: Our Lady of the Snow Monastery

May 25, 2019 0 comment

Writing

Genre in Writing

This post from December 2016, has been re-edited and re-published in April, 2019.

Broad and Narrow Genres

Since the proliferation of Creative Writing courses in universities in the Anglo world, much has been written and said about “genre” in writing.

Creative Writing contrasts with Nonfiction Writing in the broader sense. The former is the sort of writing that novelists, short story writers and poets employ. Nonfiction includes traditional biographical works, academic texts, journalism, and books on a diverse range of subjects, such as food (recipes), self-help and memoir.

Within fiction, there is a breakdown into specific genres: science fiction, romance, historical fiction, mystery, horror, detective stories, action, fantasy and adventure.

Literary Fiction and Commercial Fiction

Literary fiction can be distinguished from commercial fiction, the latter referring to popular “genre” writing that publishers hope to sell to a wide readership. Literary fiction is best defined by contrast with commercial fiction. In the book trade, it is seen as having greater literary merit, focusing on depth of character and a concern with style.

Many writers today are writing for commercial reasons, to be published or self-published in books, eBooks, or online, as quickly as possible. Literary fiction attracts writers who are experimenting with form and interested in lyrical expression and often dark and emotive themes.

The term “creative writing” is more appropriate as an umbrella term for writing that employs fictional devices. This distinguishes it from academic writing, which endeavours to present factual or argumentative texts in an objective framework. Journalistic writing, too, is based on the principal goal of providing factual information to the public, although there will be some overlap with fiction in its use of devices, such as dialogue and narration.

Creative Nonfiction

Non-Fiction includes traditional biographical works, academic texts, journalism, and books on a diverse range of subjects, such as food (recipes), self help and memoir.

Truman Capote’s nonfiction work In Cold Blood (1966 ) is looked on as the forerunner of this genre in modern times. It is also the ultimate true crime novel. Based on painstaking research and interviews, Capote used the story of the cold-blooded killing of a family in rural Kansas, and his investigation of the crime, as the plot for his novel. It is written brilliantly, employing all the techniques of the best fictional writing: strong characterisation, realistic sounding dialogue, vivid imagery, and narrative suspense, without wavering from the facts. Apart, perhaps from the ending, where he improvises a little; endings are often difficult for this type of factually based writing.

One of the first attempts at a creative nonfiction novel in Australia was Poppy by Drusilla Modjeska (Penguin 1990), in which the author recounts her mother’s life. It is well told but lacks the dramatic, page-turning aspect of plot-driven fiction. A past master at this subjective type of writing is Helen Garner, whose The First Stone is now a classic, as well as a cause of ongoing controversy for student discussion in Creative Writing Courses in Australian universities.

Memoir

Modern Memoir has taken on a slightly different aspect within this recent context. It refers to first person narration that focuses on a particular aspect or period of a person’s life. Memoir “sticks to the facts” but employs creative devices, such as narrative drive, strong characterisation, vivid dialogue, and dramatised events.

The best memoirs focus on a universal issue or concern that the author illustrates via personal experience.

It differs from fiction, wherein connections are concealed behind invented characters, settings and names. Many writers are wary of “treading on the toes” of living relatives and friends when they recount true events. It is easier and less constricting to create, rather than to recount the facts.

Lee Gutkind, an American author, is looked on as the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction today. He is the editor of a Creative Non-fiction journal and the author of Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction.

Specific Genres

Of course, with fiction, there is a breakdown of genres within the broad genre: science fiction, romance, historical fiction, mystery, horror, detective stories, action, fantasy and adventure.

Crime, Romance and Fantasy are popular genres in Australia today. Romance, in particular, attracts a large readership, perhaps because it represents hope in a threatening world.

love-eiffel-tower-pigeons

Here is a more exhaustive list of possible genres from Cathy Yardley’s blog: Rock Your Writing.

Action/Adventure — stories including epic journeys, lots of conflict, high stakes, some violence.
Erotica — stories of sexual exploration.
Fantasy — stories usually involving magic, other worlds, mythological/mystical figures.
Horror — stories that invoke fear.
Literary Fiction — stories with a focus on the quality of the prose over the narrative arc.
Mystery — stories that involve solving a crime, usually a murder.
Thriller/Suspense — stories of high tension that can involve either action or mystery.
Romance — stories about love/intimacy.
Sci-fi — stories usually involving technology, aliens, science-related alternative worlds.
Westerns — stories taking place in America’s “Old West,” often with focus on justice.
Women’s fiction — stories about women experiencing emotional growth. Primary emotion: hope.

The Rise of the Monomyth: The Hero’s Journey:

the-hero-with-a-thousand-faces I had attended a seminar on “The Hero’s Journey” and could not see how this theory, first elaborated by the American scholar Joseph Campbell “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” (1949), could be applied in a helpful sense to my writing. George Lucas used it in the “Star Wars” movies and it is very relevant for screen writers in the film industry today in the United States and elsewhere. It is based on the idea of the “monomyth”, that all stories can be conflated into one: the hero’s journey. This starts with the Call to Adventure, continues through Initiation, and ends with the Return. Each of the three stages can be broken up into sub-sections linked to certain archetypes. I feel that this theory can be applied more readily to commercial mass media genres, such as the “Star Wars” screenplays, than to literary writing, at least in terms of plot. However, even here, I could be challenged by those who know. Finally, I can see that the archetypes are invaluable as guides for creating character types in fiction. Just as the debate on genres changes in response to commercial interests, this is true with relevance to movies on the big screen as well.

Are stories all ultimately conflated into the hero’s journey?

April 25, 2019 0 comment