Sydney Writers' Festival offers liberation

Last week I was very busy rushing my ass around to various events at the Sydney Writers' Festival, where I saw some wonderful and wonderfully entertaining speakers like Maya Angelou - who said that one is not born with courage but instead one develops it, and Edmund White, who said that he thinks of sex to calm himself down when he's feeling anxious. I bought his memoirs, My Lives, which should be interesting, since he is someone who went almost overnight from being the most reviled man in America to being the almost-genteel father of gay liberation.

At his book signing afterwards, he asked if I was a writer, and I said a few pathetic words about my novel aspirations, and he gave me his email address, and said that I should "keep in touch". Which I've now done; a long lengthy chatty email. I'm under no illusion. It's my masculine beauty at work here. Any odds on whether he responds, readers? I think he will.

Also went to panel discussions on 'how to breathe life into characters' and 'fact into fiction'. I was gobsmacked; most authors said they didn't give the utmost priority to factual historical accuracy. Rather, they placed the fictional needs of the story first. One much-lauded author named Gail Jones said her research was very hit and miss, and she wrote a book with bioluminescence as a key image but set it before they even started to use that term. And a well received author named Aleksander Hemon said that if the historical character was dead, he felt absolutely free to make up whatever he wanted about him or her. Another wonderful Canadian author named Camilla Gibb said it was important to write from the 'authenticity of feeling, not fact'. Utter liberation for me! Down with the tyranny of the inconvenient or unknown fact!

Nonetheless, I still feel I need to do more research, particularly to get inside the head of my aboriginal boy, but at least I now feel I can write the stoy without being paralyzed by what I don't know.

I also went to my character and genre short story course at the Writers Studio and wrote a little short story, ever so quickly, on love (one of the four genres that we have to write in over the next month). For your delight or boredom - I don't really care which - it's reproduced in all its glory below:

“Alan, it’s your wife on the phone” squawked Natasha down through the speaker phone. She is the guardian to my office, my loyal secretary, my Cerberus. I’m the Davis in Mocatta, Johnson, Parker and Davis. Hence my spacious corner office on the 51^st floor with beautiful views of both the East and the Hudson Rivers, sparkling in that blue autumn sunshine. I felt my spinus erectus stiffen, and a hot sour bile rose in my throat. I still hadn’t returned The Cow’s two calls from earlier that morning.

“Tell her I’m busy” I responded, and clicked off the speaker, but not before she managed to squeeze in a deep theatrical sigh. It really was unfair of me to set Cerberus against The Cow. The Cow had the trump card of status, and she always won. I fished the last Zantac out of my drawer. I buzzed Cerberus back. “Please go buy me some more Zantac. And something for back spasm. And tell Groenveld I want the Folsom brief on my desk in half an hour or he’s in deep stinking shit. And use those exact words when you speak to him!” I turned and looked out my window. The day reminded me of the weather on 9/11. From my office I could see Ground Zero. I still sometimes dream about the jumpers.

The squash court was booked for 6.15 and so at 6.14 so I rapped the glass of the court with my racquet to get the other players off. The air was filled with the sounds of little black balls being walloped and thumped, the huffs and grunts of sweaty men, the awful screech of rubber soles on varnished wood during sudden lunges, and the occasional cry of JESUS!, NO! or more commonly FUUUUUUUCK!

I began to warm up, stroking the ball down the wall in a steady rhythm, when I saw my usual squash partner George enter the gangway at the back of the courts, still in his fucking pinstripe suit, talking with some other guy I’d never seen before. “Can’t play!” shouted George through the glass. “Fucked my knee up, banging the wife on the kitchen floor!” He laughed. “She says she’s dead bored of the bedroom.” George has a great marriage. Ten years and they still go at it like rabbits, and she comes to all the ball games, as long as he takes her out to an equal number of chick-flick movies. They chose not to have kids. They are the envy of everyone in the firm who is married.

“I brought Robert along to play with you” he said. “He’s good. Interested in joining your firm, too” Robert shook my hand and smiled, and in that instant, entirely unexpectedly, I felt something crack inside me.

Robert sat on the edge of my desk and twirled his squash raquet. "You've lost all five of our matches, Alan. Are you sure you want another lesson from the master of the drop shot?" He laughed and smiled.
"I've been practicing the past two weeks. You're reign is over" I said. "We should make it worth something."
"Something besides your pride?" That same laugh again.
"Yeah, how about a bottle of Chateau Lafitte from a good vintage year?"
"Ok, but only if you promise to drink it with me when you lose. Anyway, it's always a pleasure to watch you lunge around the court."
"Fine, tomorrow then. Now, onto more serious things. The Folsom brief is a fucking disaster. Groenveld is totally out of his depth. I want to give it to you instead. It’s high profile. If you win, it will make your career here.” Robert smiled and nodded, sitting on the corner of my desk.

“No problem. I have some ideas already,” he said. His blue sleeves were rolled up, revealing thick golden hair on his forearms which glistened like honey in the late afternoon sun streaming through my window. I looked at his square wrists, his big hands resting on my desk and felt a quickening of my pulse. I remembered the heat and heft of his hand when he clapped me on the shoulder after I won a hard fought point, with a brilliant drop shot. How he left his hand there on my shoulder just a fraction longer than necessary. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“Are you married Robert? Or girlfriend?” He laughed, and I noticed how his blond hair darkened at the nape of his neck.

“No” he said, smiling. “Do I seem to you like the marrying type?”

I buzzed Cerberus. “Tell Robert to come see me. Please.” My eyes felt red and itchy, with a hot thumb of pressure behind them. I hated being hung over. Outside, this vertical city of granite and steel and concrete and glass continued unabashed. “Close the door” I said, maybe a bit more coldly than I intended, when he entered the room. “Listen, what happened last night was, well, it was an aberration. Too much red wine. It can’t happen again.”

Robert looked angry. “An aberration?”

“Yes. Robert, I’m married. Twelve years.”

“Yeah, to a woman you call The Cow. And I can’t help but notice that you didn’t say ‘happily married’. By the way, Natasha says The Cow is actually very nice, all things considered.” He said these last three words slowly, letting each fall with a thud of unspoken import into the space between us.

The tension crept up my spine and into my neck; I could feel every muscle in my back seize my spine in a death grasp. I shook two Robaxacets out of their little white plastic bottle and swallowed them dry. “Robert, we need to keep our relationship professional. What do you want from me?”

Robert looked out my window into the blue sky. “Fine, it’s a one-off. I’ll never mention it to anyone. But I know what I saw when I was inside you last night. You can’t hide forever. One thing, though. Don’t come knocking at my door when you just have to get ‘aberrant’ again.”

I put the picture of my wife in the drawer with my pens and calculator and stapler and other office stuff. I twisted off my wedding ring and put it in the drawer too. Her lawyers had served papers. She called that morning to tell me it was nothing personal, she still loved me, but I’d put her into a deep freeze years ago and leaving me was the only way she could get warm again. She cried. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her cry. She told me to get help. I should have been angry, and on one level I suppose I was, a little. But I also recognized a deeper level in me that felt a sense of relief, of imminent movement and flow, similar to a frozen river in the early days of spring. Sitting at my desk, talking to my wife, listening to her cry, I could feel the heat of the winter sun on my back. “It will be ok” I said, to her, over and over.

After I shut the drawer, I heard a familiar laughter in the hallway outside my office and looked up through the glass to see Robert walking past with one of the paralegals on the Folsom brief. His head was thrown back, shaggy blond hair spilling over his collar, white teeth shining. I was struck by the sudden searing thought that I’d never before seen anything so beautiful. They walked on and Robert didn’t look in my office. In fact, he had studiously avoided all but the most necessary contact with me for the past seven weeks. I sat down and typed an email “You were right. You did see something real that night. I am more sorry than I can properly say. But I’d like to try to say how sorry I am in person, if you will see me.”

He sent me a smiley emoticon back, and a few words of text. “Squash court number 2, 6:15. Prepare to get your ass whipped.”

Our weekend intensive session: I am more confident

I have just come out of the weekend intensive workshop in the Novel and Script First Draft course - a weekend during which we writing students were supposed to figure out the "spines" of our stories. The weekend could have been a disaster. Saturday night I was invited to a great party. I set myself a curfew of midnight. I got home at 3am, off my head. But I pulled myself together for Sunday session nonetheless. And in general, I was wracked with worry before the weekend, but happily less so now, for a variety of reasons.

• First, I am not alone. Four out of the 12 or so students in the course apparently contacted Roland and Kathleen begging not to have to come to the weekend intensive, because they felt that they had no story whatsoever.
• Second, people (i.e. other students) keep saying how much they like my stuff. (I refer you to earlier entries, in which I detail how I live and breathe for the external validation of my writing. I so need professional help.)
• Third, Roland says it's not a bad approach to find my story now, and fill in the historical stuff with research later, that too much research too early can paralyze the writer of fiction. (Well, he didn't actually say this, but this is my interpretation of his mumblings.)
• Fourth, Roland said that he thinks I have a good grasp of my story, of dramatic possibility. And that I have talent in spotting it in others' stories too.
  

So all is well in my writing world. Thank God, coz the slump wasn't pretty. And I don't hate Roland anymore. In fact, I think he's rather fine. He amused me greatly during the weekend intensive, entirely unintentionally, when he leant back in his chair and absentmindedly pulled up his shirt to scratch his hairy belly, as it pressed against the table edge.

The student with all the silver skull jewelry who's writing a novel about biker gangs is a steward for Quantas. Go figure.

Another student revealed he's also writing a novel set in the pearling industry in Broome, although his novel is quite different in plot and era. But if he uses my pearl metaphor - which I never would have disclosed to the class had I known of his novel beforehand - I shall kill him.

Peter gets his mojo back

The muse comes. And she goes. And she comes again, but only for a day. And then she goes, and you can't even reach her on the telephone. In fact the number seems to be disconnected.

I'm happy to report she's back. The muse, I mean. After 7 days of deep, deep, deep despair over my novel - during which I took up Extreme Napping as a hobby - I decided to force the situation. If I couldn't get inspired to write any scenes for my novel (because I'm terrified of not getting into my characters' heads or the historical situation creditably enough), I would do something different. I would finish a short story I started years ago, called Divine Applesauce, about a struggling writer, to whom God appears as a talking apple. It's a humourous piece. God turns out to be not very nice, kind of petulant and childish really, and He's thinking of revoking mankind's free will.

And that seemed to unblock the block, because when I forcibly squeeeeeeeeeezed out the concluding quarter of the story - it was the psychological and creative equivalent of being on the loo when you're seriously constipated - I was not unhappy with some little bits and pieces in my ending. (Although I've since thought of other brilliant things to do to it, and the other writers in my little writing group say it's not finished.) Anyway, the point is that the next day I wrote a lovely scene for my novel, easily, smoothly, as though I'd take a lot of literary-psycho-creative Exlax. Lisa, from my writing group, (who has the most awesome novel about carnival folk inside her) loved my novel scenes which I sent her and told me, essentially, that I was neurotic. She is absolutely correct. Still, it doesn't help in the moment.

Two weeks wasted

Lesson number 1 in how to avoid writing: It’s easy: simply don’t do it. I have written one or two prospective scenes from my novel over the past two weeks, but generally I’ve really wasted my time (although I did manage to watch a relevant documentary called Sisters, Pearls and Mission Girls, about the Sisters of St John of God in the Kimberly). And today I’m lunching with Susan Harben who actually worked with the Sisters of St John of God! She will hopefully be able to give me insights that will help me get into the head of my nun.

Why have I shied away from writing? I’m a mystery, even to myself most of the time. Still, I would hazard a guess that it’s partly laziness, but also partly fear of committing, of trying something and failing. It bothers me a lot, this feeling I have that the challenge of getting inside my characters’ heads is beyond my capabilities. I wish I had more frequent classes to keep my motivation up. Still, I seem to have found motivation today, long may it live!

A few days ago Roland sent an email saying “don’t focus on writing perfect scenes, just play with your characters”. I wonder if the email was sent to everyone or if it was meant for me personally. Regardless, I’ll try to take his advice, and get some scenes written and posted to the board. Next weekend is the intensive session at the Writers’ Studio, where we are supposed to uncover the “spine” of our novel. I feel I have not done nearly enough preparatory work.