Notes on a Writing Life 31
November 14 2021
Dear All,
What do you do when you are in between books? I asked a writer friend recently.
It’s an uncomfortable time. You have sent off your manuscript, it has left home to try to find its way in the world, and you know you will have to wait weeks, even months to hear of its reception.
Read, my friend told me, and go shopping. I’ve added: wander around town looking at the island where I live, trying to see it through fresh eyes even though I have lived here nearly 30 years. Shopping, yes – buy something that you love. Talk with other artists at work, or during a coffee break. Initiate conversations with your spouse, who in my case is deep in writing his own book anyway. Make soup. Think of people who may need to be asked, how are you doing? Look through old work – although that can lead to confusion. And read, always read – other people’s novels, old favorites, people who usually inspire you, looking for the writer who will show you, sometimes with a brief remark, an insight between sentences: this is where you are going, or need to go.
I was stopped in my tracks this week by a cri de coeur from the writer Ben Okri (Every Leaf a Hallelujah, The Famished Road). He posits a new kind of ‘existential creativity’ to cut through the apathy and denial of our times, to save ‘this most precious and beautiful of worlds, a miracle in all the universe, a home for the evolution of souls…which we are day by day turning into a barren stone in space.’ ‘We have to be strong dreamers’ he writes in the Guardian newspaper. ‘What is called for here is a special kind of love for the world.’
Poets have expressed, over and over, this kind of love. Scientists have told it how it is, and we have not paid enough attention. Painters in love with the beauty of the world – well, they are legion. So what is it that novelists must do, I wonder? Some are already doing it – Richard Powers in his The Overstory – for example. Non-fiction writers too – Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane. Many novelists are writing dystopian fiction – but does imagining dystopia over and over not simply terrify us into a sort of numb paralysis? Should we abandon the traditional problems of the novel – our love for and inability to get on with each other on this earth, our misbehavior and as the end of Casablanca reminds us ‘the problems of three little people’ that ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans’? Can there still be humans in the garden?
I remember Julia Cameron’s insistence in her 1970’s book The Artist’s Way, on the importance of what she calls Artist Dates. An aimless walk, an exhibition, a meal out, a movie, a gift to yourself. It’s so easy to forget that we are even allowed these things, time taken away from the desk, let alone that they are necessary. Especially in what Okri thinks are the end times. But it’s where thought, and creativity, begin.
Affectionately, Ros