The Second Day \n<\/strong>We set off fairly early, after coffee at a terrace caf\u00e9, 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 \u201cHeidi, Girl of the Alps\u201d 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\u2026 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.<\/em><\/p>\nMy writing development has been a weird ride, not a linear arc at all. Someone aptly likened it to being on a carousel of the 5 stages of grief. 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, all using the omniscient narrator, all-knowing, standing back from the characters and from the reader.<\/p>\n
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. I began by spewing out bittersweet memories of an emotionally underprivileged childhood. It didn’t matter that no-one else wanted to 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I joined a Life Story Writing class in the early nineties, when my children were a little older. The first time I read aloud 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. I began to think more and more about structure.<\/p>\n
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 sequences of events, structure, characterisation and dialogue. Unlike fiction, the main requirement is to pare back the complexity of events in a life through finding an engaging and relatively narrow focus. It must also relate to universal concerns. \n<\/em><\/p>\nThis chosen pathway of developing creative writing skills is an ongoing journey for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My European travels in a downbeaten French deux chevaux car, shuffling and chugging through 15 countries, is a metaphor for my earliest attempts at self development. During the months’ long trip, I kept a daily journal, developing writing skills that proved a helpful therapeutic resource later on. After I returned to Australia, I engaged a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1679,1734],"tags":[2889,2888,2886,2890,2891],"class_list":["post-7788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel","category-memoir","tag-do-publishers-hate-hybrid-genres","tag-exorcising-emotional-baggage-through-writing","tag-inner-and-outer-journeys-for-emotional-advancement","tag-learning-how-to-write-a-weird-ride","tag-what-are-the-aesthetics-underpinning-creative-writing"],"yoast_head":"\n
My 1968 Travel Journal: a metaphor - The Art of Creative Writing<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n