Guard your solitude. You’ll need it to keep piling up those fragments. Take yourself away somewhere quiet, if you can, when you have a book to finish. But let yourself be interrupted at your work. Sometimes. Mostly when you least want to be. In my experi- ence, that’s when the child comes in with the poem; that’s when you were ruining your work and needed a break but didn’t know you were or did; that’s when the man comes to the door with your new boots with a story standing up in them already.
Hermes (messenger of the gods)—like all Greek gods, only more so—was perverse. Perhaps he still is. Expect him to deliver godly messages and shapely lines disguised as unwanted phonecalls and overdue bills. Don’t carry on too much and rail against these things. Notice them and wonder. And write them down somewhere, and get back to work on the sentence in front of you.
Do you know that just as I wrote ‘was perverse’ five minutes ago, my laptop delivered me a message that read ‘Word has encoun- tered a problem and had to shut down. You may have lost some of your work’. That Hermes, I tell you what! All I had lost was the Hermes sentence ...
‘You’re writing about the process of composing, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Are you writing anything about interruption?’ She was the photographer, the artist in residence, who had come up to introduce herself last night and who tonight was cooking me dinner in Kate House, by the river. ‘Sometimes you need to be taken from your work’, she said,‘though I know I just barged in on you up there. But you need to be interrupted sometimes so the work can catch its breath and decide if this is what it wants to be’.
She’s right. And the soup she made was the best food I’d eaten in two weeks.
T RY T H I S
1 Have you ever found what you needed to say, or had some revelation about your work, because of an interruption? Write about it.
2 ‘There I was sitting there trying to work when ...’ Write for fifteen minutes from that beginning.
On strangeness
There’s something strange about the best writing. No one, you think at first, ever spoke like this. But soon, in what is odd, you recognise the sound of authenticity; soon you hear the sound of someone being who they are, of someone working hard to say exactly what it is they hear and what it is they think. What may strike you is the sound of someone doing more than merely muttering what first comes to mind.What sounds strange is what is true. It is a voice at its vernacular wondering work.
Think Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Annie Dillard, Cormac McCarthy, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Karen Blixen, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Shirley Hazzard, Joan Didion, Barry Lopez, James Agee, Raymond Chandler, Patrick White, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner ... to make a random list. You’ll find the strangeness in the syntax and the word choice and the rhythm that ensues. You’ll find it in the images and figures. The prose is accomplished but more than merely conven- tional. It refuses easy, regular solutions:
Hell is like this. It’s this cowering in the bottom of the cellar far from the smouldering trapdoor, between pumpkins and tubs of apples. It’s the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this.Trees go off like bombs out in the light ... —Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable.Tuesday follows Monday, then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with an increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow.We float, we float ...
This quality, the texture of personality, flows from the deep instinct to say the thing freshly, to resist every cliché. It is the daemon of the artist that you hear; and you hear it not because she tries hard to let you, but because she knows no other way to write than to stand outside every norm and yet write with brilliant discipline.
But don’t strain for strangeness. Don’t copy it from someone else.Yours will be there in your own voice when you find your subject and get down to the hard work of uttering it fresh. Strangeness is personality laid unself consciously bare by work, in words.
And if your writing sounds not quite like anything you’ve ever heard before, it could be a very good sign. (Or not, depending.) It will put you in some fine and strange company.
T RY T H I S
1 Who are you favourite ‘strange’ writers? What’s strange about them? What have they taught you?
2 Write two paragraphs about your father; write like you’ve never written before; write like you’ve never heard writing go before.
3 ‘Hell is like this.’ Begin like that. Write three hundred words or so.