Notes on a Writing Life

January 14, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 7

(Duke du Berry, Books of Hours, c. 1410) / Public Domain

(Duke du Berry, Books of Hours, c. 1410) / Public Domain

Dear All,    

I’ve been thinking about crop rotation in medieval England – ( no, not as a topic for literature, but in the context of having to rest and recuperate for at least a month.)  Two fields were planted up each year, and one left to lie fallow.  Then the crops were rotated and a different field lay fallow, in order to build up nutrients in the soil and rest for twelve months without having to produce anything.

The analogy for a writer is clear – but these days in farming, people just pour on fertilizer and chemicals, at least in the west.  No matter what your occupation, you are supposed to get back to work as soon as possible – back to “normal” no matter what has been happening to you, or what life crisis you have passed through lately.  Just add vitamins – oh, and get back to the gym.  I was talking recently with a fellow writer about this, she in the throes of bringing out a new book, being asked to sign up for readings and performances, to write for social media, send photographs, arrange for interviews, answer e-mails right away, after editing and line-editing and having long discussions with her publisher – I in my fallow state, waiting to see what might occur to me next.  We talked about how unavoidable it seems, when you have a new book coming out, how exciting, even compelling – and how hard it is to say No.  It is, after all, everything you have worked for.  You want people to read your book, you want it to be available, you want the reviews and interviews and other public statements of yourself – and yet, you are stressed, tired sometimes to exhaustion, longing for a break.  I remember once running into another writer friend who was on the last leg of a book tour, and who burst into tears when I asked her how she was. “I just want to go home!”  

We sometimes feel that we get our fallow time through being offered residencies, or arranging for writers’ retreats.  Yet in these places, we often feel extra obliged to get on with our work.  We are there as writers, we have been paid for, or we ourselves have paid to be there – to write! This is of course wonderful – what could there be to complain about?  But it isn’t exactly fallow time.  Neither is being on vacation, where you often seem to have less free time than at home, with family, friends, a lover or spouse, and sights to see, the world to explore and notice.  When can we get our down time?  Do we have to be ill to deserve it, to allow ourselves to do nothing, to rest, to daydream, to doze and let ideas float through us untethered to any actual task in hand?  I think that because writing seems like such a privileged occupation and because time to write is so hard to come by when we are young, working at other jobs, raising children, cooking for others, whatever – we feel a particular obligation to be writing all the time.  Or editing. Or proof-reading. Or teaching others to write. Or even just cleaning out our desks, in order to start again on the round of work to be done.  When we are invited to bring our work out into the world, isn’t it churlish to say, we would rather just stay home?

I’m suggesting a rhythm here similar to crop rotation.  Two years’ work, one year fallow.  Two weeks on, one week off. Imagine it.  In this country, the US, doing nothing almost amounts to a sin.  It certainly was when I was growing up in England.  We are all of us programmed to work and keep going, no matter what, and from where I sit this seems to be doing us harm.

So for 2020 – already a year in which instant action on all fronts seems to be necessary -  let’s try to celebrate the benefits of doing nothing.  What can I call it?  Not leisure, as even that conjures up strenuous activity these days, and leisure outfits to match.  There’s a French word “vaquer” suggesting emptiness.  To let things empty out, so that something may eventually come to refill that emptiness.  To give life a chance to show its hand.

“There’s a French word “vaquer” suggesting emptiness.  To let things empty out, so that something may eventually come to refill that emptiness.  To give life a chance to show its hand.”
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So, happy empty times in 2020 to my fellow writers and artists. Happy staring into space – that bugbear of school-teachers.  Happy watching the grass grow and the leaves unfurl and the world go on its way. 

Affectionately, Ros

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New Year

One day after another,
Blue beads strung on a web of time.
Air shifts, moon grows,
Grass inches up.
A new bloom today on the pink hibiscus.

Notes on a Writing Life

December 14, 2019

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 6

Publication Date, January 25, 2020.

Publication Date, January 25, 2020.

Dear all,

Well, life as John Lennon said, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans… But I’m getting back after a brief excursion into unexpected illness, to thinking once again about the writing life, with my first novel due to be re-issued early in the new year. The second one, A Virtual Image is to follow. I’m delighted that the English novelist and literary critic Margaret Drabble has written an enthusiastic and generous introduction to A Day To Remember To Forget, 50 years old now, and that it is about to start a new life – in Australia, under the imprint of Michael Walmer. It’s a strange feeling, to revisit these early works. I had to reread them, to make sure that they weren’t too embarrassing, and found that I was reading them as if they were written by somebody else. Well, I was 27. I was, in many ways, somebody else.

“ But there are stories in all of us, most probably, that are like recurrent dreams. They come up, and demand to be told. A Virtual Image is one of those – and although I am glad it is about to see a new life in print, I’m a little perplexed by how it came to exist, and prefigure in so many ways a novel of 50 years later, that I thought I had made up from scratch.”

But I began thinking about the themes our books present, first to us writers, then to the world. My first novel has fairly straightforward origins, in my in-laws’ family (although at the time I swore blind it was not) and in the general bolshiness of privileged youth in the late 1960’s. In my second novel I found an almost uncanny foreshadowing of my most recent novel, Without Her. There’s a missing friend, a search in France, a man with whom each of the protagonists gets involved in turn. To say I’d forgotten the plot of this novel sounds disingenuous perhaps – but it was true. I remembered writing it and it being published, but not what it was about. Where did this story come from, and how has it persisted over 50 years, somewhere in the back of my head? I have never had a disappearing female friend, searched for her in France, shared her with a wandering American (in this case) or a flirtatious Frenchman (in Without Her). Some stories just seem to tell themselves through us, leaving us as spectators as well as authors. I wonder if others have this experience – of course they must – and how it comes about. The other thing about this second novel of mine is that it reads like a hallucination. No, I was not writing while on drugs. In fact I was the busy mother of a small child, up to my ears in domestic activities, as far as I remember. Where did this druggy, dreamy, obsessive story come from? I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but why does one of the women have to die? No answer comes. But there are stories in all of us, most probably, that are like recurrent dreams. They come up, and demand to be told. A Virtual Image is one of those – and although I am glad it is about to see a new life in print, I’m a little perplexed by how it came to exist, and prefigure in so many ways a novel of 50 years later, that I thought I had made up from scratch. Perhaps, probably, there is no “scratch.” Perhaps, like dreams, our stories are linked to us and to each other in mysterious ways, and there’s no figuring out the why or the wherefore. I think I prefer it that way.

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Affectionately, and with many good wishes for 2020
- Ros

Notes on a Writing Life

November 14, 2019
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 5

Reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California. (The store’s name derives from the first line of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”)

Reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California. (The store’s name derives from the first line of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”)

Dear All,     

  I’ve been back a week or two from doing readings in San Francisco and Berkeley, meeting with my agent and editor and generally enjoying an unusually warm and sunny golden week in California, and I’m now back in my little studio in Key West, to hunker down again into actual writing – which also involves dreaming, trying things out, looking out of the window, but essentially being present.  

  I remember once in my early days, someone said to me, rather brutally I thought, “It doesn’t matter what happens to you, you can always use it in your writing.  It’s like having a third leg.”  Third leg?  She meant, that on two legs you can be knocked over more easily than on three, that the third leg – writing, any form of art – creates a stability that most people don’t have.  So, when we writers and artists encounter some of the problems and challenges of life, whether health issues, money problems, family problems or angst about the world, we always have something else going on, on the side.  For a writer, the story runs alongside life, sometimes faltering, sometimes out of reach, yet always somewhere there, waiting to be found.  In the small hours of the night, we can switch our minds to our characters’ problems rather than our own.  We can play around with plot ideas, imagine scenes, fall asleep again and even wake with new ideas.

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“Now, I’m back in my studio, the room I inherited from Robert Stone that sometimes seems to me to hold some of his charisma in the old furnishings that are still there, along with his box of paper clips and a few empty notebooks and defunct pens.  The desk I work at when at home was bought in a garage sale from Annie Dillard when she moved house decades ago.  Who knows what we writers pass on to each other?  ”

  Now, I’m back in my studio, the room I inherited from Robert Stone that sometimes seems to me to hold some of his charisma in the old furnishings that are still there, along with his box of paper clips and a few empty notebooks and defunct pens.  The desk I work at when at home was bought in a garage sale from Annie Dillard when she moved house decades ago.  Who knows what we writers pass on to each other?  But most of all, it’s in the books, the words, the pages of the books that I take out from my shelf here – Bob’s, Annie’s, Michael Ondaatje’s, my Scottish friend Andrew Greig, the poets Jane Hirshfield and Harvey Shapiro, the essays of John Berger…  We sustain and nurture each other, across distance, defying death, passing over illness, talking to each other in the language of beauty and hope, exactness and inspiration.  Sometimes to read a page is enough, and I return to my own, restored and set alight again. 

  People ask, “Isn’t writing a very lonely occupation?” I’m always surprised by this. Not only do I write with all these other writers in my head and on my shelves, but with other artists in the same house, a writer and a painter. We greet each other, wave hello, sometimes meet for coffee, but usually acknowledge that we’re here to work, so – keep it short.  I go home at lunchtime, it’s only a five-minute walk, and usually eat with my husband.  I return to meet up with him again in the evening.  Friends call, visit, write, meet me in town.  So no – hardly lonely, rather the reverse; but I can’t emphasize enough the delight of aloneness when you have an idea to pursue, a story to net and develop, a poem to write, a new idea to put on the page or screen.  Then, to be alone is wonderful. It is what you have longed for and tried for all your busy life.  Gleeful, you begin again and know that some new thing is emerging, something will exist by evening that was only a flicker of idea in the early morning, and you have time to see it on its way. Nothing else matters. Nothing else intrudes. During this time, no interruption is bearable, you are outside of time until – yes, time to move on, stretch, eat, talk.  In my room in the studio house we share, I don’t have a phone, internet access, or any other distraction except books.  It feels like an inviolate space.  It feels like the one place I most want to be, with the door shut, my two sentinel gumbo limbo trees outside the window, and if not exactly silence – Key West is full of leaf-blowers, home-renovators, tree-cutters, garbage trucks, planes and sirens – then at least the inner silence of the uninterrupted mind. 

  So yes, the third leg helps. The story running alongside our own lives keeps up its own momentum even when we falter.  For some reasonI come up with the image of the stopped train in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” Arab horsemen galloping up to pillage it and let imprisoned horses free, and Peter O’Toole in his white robes striding along the roof of the train. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s all those beautiful horses of the imagination, galloping free. 

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life

October 14, 2019
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 4

 Dear All,     

As I set off to do a series of readings in bookstores of Without Her, in Miami and Key West and in San Francisco and Berkeley, I’m thinking about the difference that writers experience between the private and the public in a writing life.  

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     You start off shut in a room with a typewriter or a computer and probably a stack of notebooks and ideas scribbled on pieces of paper.  You have a small idea, just the gleam in the eye of an idea, and you almost dread to write it down.  You are wearing clothes you threw on in a hurry – in my case old shorts or jeans and a shirt I think of as my “work shirt” bought in a New Mexico thrift shop and now full of holes.  You sit at a desk, or table, you stare out of a window, you drink coffee, or tea, you may walk up and down the room; but the important thing is, nobody sees you, you are invisible, completely private – unless there is a CCTV camera somewhere outside your window, that is – and you are alone with this small germ of an idea that may or may not grow into a story, poem or even novel. It all feels intensely private.  You begin to write, and you are immediately outside of time.  You only move back into time when you begin to feel tired, or hungry, and your back starts to ache, and you need to move.  If you run into somebody after a morning, afternoon or day such as this, you look at him or her with surprise, as if at an alien. You almost don’t exist as a person.  Sometimes people have knocked on my door when I’m writing, barefoot and disheveled and probably wild-eyed, and ask me, “Did I wake you up?”

“I like reading to real people in bookstores and libraries: they are our public, the readers, the ones we all need, and a writer can see in their faces and hear from their murmurs or laughter what they enjoy about the book. It all happens in the present moment, it’s spontaneous, it’s unpredictable and real. ”

     At the other end of this process, months or years later, there is the public face of the work on view, and you are in a bookstore, holding a book in your hand, presenting it to the world.  In between, the writing, the waiting, the angst, the sending out, the waiting again, the plans with publishers (you hope) and the eventual sending out of a printed book into the reading world.  All this can happen while you are still in your old clothes, your hair unbrushed, your face in its natural state.  It happens out of sight, online these days, on the telephone: somewhere else.  And then there are the readings, that you are glad to have, that you even look forward to – and fear.  Because now there is just you and the book, out there, with an audience of two or twenty or more, it doesn’t matter.  You have had to think about your clothes, even buy new ones – I think of Virginia Woolf and her anxiety about “dresses.”  You have to look presentable, because people will take photographs and there you will be for years to come, visible at this or that event, preserved online.  You worry about this more than you worry about the book. Because at this point, the book has grown up and left home.  It is a separate thing, an artifact, something that you and your agent and your publisher have made together, with an attractive jacket design and kind remarks made by other writers – its godparents – to send it out dressed and ready into the world.  The book has no worries.  It’s you that wakes up at three in the morning to worry about whether this jacket goes with those pants and if you should have your hair colored and some new lipstick and what about shoes, elegant or comfortable, new or old?  Or should you have some kind of “reading uniform” that involves no decisions at all?

     Once upon a time, writers did not appear in public with their books. Now, we go around with them on show, or even without them, ourselves on show.  I like reading to real people in bookstores and libraries: they are our public, the readers, the ones we all need, and a writer can see in their faces and hear from their murmurs or laughter what they enjoy about the book. It all happens in the present moment, it’s spontaneous, it’s unpredictable and real.  This, in an era of the fake, the remote, the inhuman, is valuable in itself.  

     I like book clubs too, especially if they invite me to meet with them: last winter a book club in Key West made up of 18 men invited me to talk about my novel The Lost Love Letters Of Henri Fournier and invited me to lunch afterwards, and it was huge fun. That was a first for me, and knocked out any assumption that book clubs are mainly for women.    

     So, I’m looking forward to being out in public, however briefly, with my new novel.  I like the fact that my book is a real, solid artifact, to be held in the hand or read in bed or on the bus or on the beach – (yes, it’s available on Kindle and Audiobook too, but for me the book is the real thing ) - and that we’ll be together again, out in public, it wearing its fancy jacket, I wearing mine.  

Affectionately, Ros

UPCOMING EVENTS

WITHOUT HER, BOOK SIGNING & READING

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 @ 6:30 PM // Books & Books, Coral Gables

265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, Florida

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 @ 7PM // Book Passage, Corte Madera, California

Corte Madera Book Passage, San Francisco,
in conversation with Delphinium fiction editor, Joseph Olshan.

51 Tamal Vista Boulevard, Corte Madera, California

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 @ 7:30PM // Mrs. Dalloway's, Berkeley, California

2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, California

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 @ 6PM // Books & Books, KEY WEST

533 Eaton Street, Key West, Florida

Notes on a Writing Life

September 14, 2019
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 3

 Dear All,     

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Having been grounded by a fall from a horse in Dorset (not the horse’s fault – entirely my own) and landed flat on my back, I’ve had time to think about my early writing life, and the publication of my first book “A Day To Remember To Forget,” as my latest, “Without Her” makes its own way in the US.  

When I look back on those early days as a writer, I see a trajectory like that of a roller coaster (a thing I detest, in fact, and did even as a child – who wants to be swooped up and down till they feel sick?)  Early success, even relative success, tends to go to your head, you think to yourself – ah, I’m off to the races now – and assume you’re going to have one book published after another in smooth succession.  Wrong.  

It may have been something to do with the notion that appeared in the seventies that women could do anything and everything. We can, of course, but not all at the same time.  When I began to be published, there were the role models all around: the Margarets Drabble, Forster and Atwood for a start; they all had families, didn’t they, they all wrote successful books, they did it what’s more with an apparently effortless grace. I think now that it’s nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else when you have small children to attend to, especially writing a half-way decent novel. Perhaps these icons of women’s writing think this too.  But in the early seventies I lived in a sort of commune – a very small one, basically two couples and two children – so I could hand my baby to someone else and at least go for a walk, or into town. We were committed to self-sufficiency, which meant getting up early to dig the earth and root out the persistent thistles that thrived in our rich black midlands-of-England soil.  We ordered the Whole Earth Catalog from California and set ourselves to be home-growers of everything that would take root.  The digging at dawn now seems to me a form of masochism, but anyone who was around in the 1970’s will recognize the theme.

“I lived a kind of double life at that time – digging, child-minding, making beer, wine, pate, bread and anything else I could think of from scratch, then dressing up in my boots, hat and maxi-coat from Biba and setting off to London by train.”

I lived a kind of double life at that time – digging, child-minding, making beer, wine, pate, bread and anything else I could think of from scratch, then dressing up in my boots, hat and maxi-coat from Biba and setting off to London by train. There, I visited my editor at Macmillan, the wonderful Caro Hobhouse of many books and parties fame, drinking too much wine along with her illustrious dinner guests at her flat in Camden. I pranced around London feeling like the bee’s knees, as we say in England, and went home with a hangover to take care of my children, vegetable garden and half-finished house.  

In those days, I could only justify shutting myself in the room we called the library to work if I knew everyone could hear me typing.  (I’d read somewhere, though, that on Israeli kibbutzim members who were writers were given time to write, once they had done their chores; I claimed the same right). So I typed, hard, rarely stopping to think, until it was time to fetch my daughter from her play school and retrieve my son from whoever was looking after him.  Eventually, I realized that if I was to continue as a writer I would have to pay someone to come in the mornings and do all the things I would otherwise be doing – give the baby his bath, wash a pile of dishes, clean the house and make lunch.  She – Mrs. Bedford, a woman older than me, who appeared like a beacon of sanity in our disordered hippyish lives – was my salvation.  I owe her, more than anybody, for my writing career at that time.

So yes, women can do everything, but we don’t have to. I wasn’t even going out to work, I had other adults around, I was relatively privileged in this respect. But writing does take time, and when I read somebody’s remark about prayer, that you need several hours of silence and meditation in order to pray for a couple of minutes, then the same has to be said for writing. My early books suffered from that fevered rush, that obligation to be heard typing. I didn’t think much about what I wanted to say, I was so relieved to have said at least something. After two more novels, Macmillan dropped me, even though Caro had generously offered me her house in Majorca so that I would have more time to write.  Guilt, small children and an acre of thistles kept me from accepting her offer, and I was out on my own again, with my agent Richard Simon trying to find me another home.

The reward of getting older is that you have time. You don’t know how much, in terms of length.  Life may end next week, or in twenty years. You may have lost that fast, furious, desperate urge to write. But you can at least spend time thinking, or what passes for thinking as you stroll, swim, look at the sky or lie in the bath-tub, and take gently the time you have. Or as you lie around with an ice-pack to your back, waiting for recovery, that comes slowly these days after a yet another fall to earth. 

Affectionately, Ros