September 14 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 17
Dear All,
September, and we come towards the end of a strange season - summer for some of us, winter for others. I’m somewhere mentally stuck in about April/May… The pandemic keeps us at home still and each day resembles the one before. So, what has been the protocol for writers? I’m still keeping to my rather rigid writing routine – hours in my studio before anything else – and I’m finding it works. Showing up, as someone wrote, at the page. It seems to be a time for revising, revisiting, repairing, re-doing at all levels. I – and maybe many others – dig out old pieces of work, review them, discard or re-work – and edit the ones we are currently working on. Everything seems to be up for review – our way of life, assumptions, occupations, relationships, plans if we have any, our diets and spending habits and received ideas. How we actually stay alive. It’s a time for re-visiting almost everything we do and questioning it; it’s also a time – still – for hunkering down and doing what we can do, here and now.
I remember summers in my teens, revising for exams. That was more about cramming information into our heads to be regurgitated later, than of radically questioning anything. I sat outside, working on my tan along with my historical dates and treaties. The exam came, and you passed or failed, were welcomed into glory or cast into disgrace. I discovered a way of passing exams by memorizing a lot of obscure quotations and peppering my essays with them. I also turned questions I didn’t like on their heads, challenging their very existence and answered the questions I wanted to answer instead. It got me only so far – I’m sure examiners become used to such ruses. But it gave me a taste for invention, and a sense of independence. Yes, there was always a better question to be asked, and a more incisive response. I had fun with exams, from then on, even though I only got mediocre results. 5 out of 10 for imagination, perhaps.
“While California burns and Florida waits through hurricane season and election season with bated breath, I want to write about the world we’re losing – no, not a golden age, just an age of relative balance and sanity. I think of my dear friend, Roger Deakin, and his life and books dedicated to wild swimming and exploring woods. What question would he be asking, if he were still here? And Mary Oliver, with her famous question, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?””
The question of a book, whether novel, memoir or biography is anyway one you set yourself. A question comes to mind and you spend time, energy and all your spare thoughts, trying to answer it. On the way you may forget about it – or maybe it wasn’t the right question after all. Or someone else asks the question, and you make it your own. A writer friend of mine gave me the suggestion, decades ago: if there is a problem, make it your topic. So, if you can’t write the story you want to write, start writing about the problem, make it central. I’ve found this a useful way to proceed. Before starting to try to leap over obstacles as in a steeple-chase, have a long look at the obstacle you want to leap over. Perhaps it is the subject of the book, the raison d’être of the race?
At present, several people I know are writing dystopian, futuristic novels. Perhaps it’s to scare them about the future so that the present doesn’t seem too bad – I don’t know. I’d love to read a novel about a better future, these days, but perhaps that is pie in the sky. So I go back to the past, for my reading: Hamnet, the beautiful new novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the plague in England in the 16th century and Shakespeare’s young son; The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton, with all those prissy New Yorkers with no real cares in the world and only her own sharp pen to tell us how off-beam they were. While California burns and Florida waits through hurricane season and election season with bated breath, I want to write about the world we’re losing – no, not a golden age, just an age of relative balance and sanity. I think of my dear friend, Roger Deakin, and his life and books dedicated to wild swimming and exploring woods. What question would he be asking, if he were still here? And Mary Oliver, with her famous question, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” We’ve time to think about this now, perhaps as never before.
Meanwhile, here is a lovely video I call ‘The Blue Hive’ that my daughter Miranda in Scotland made, about her bees. The bees are busy, working hard, and they know exactly what to do.
Be well, stay safe – and thoughts to my friends in California, especially.
Affectionately, Ros