What Words Can You Use?

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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I’m connecting a few dots here.

1. When I ran a workshop on the Four Elements at York last year, a few writers in the audience at one talk seemed a bit surprised when, in discussing ‘The Colonel’ by Carolyn Forché, I asked them how their work was political. Because, I said, just about all writing has a political dimension. Even if it is ignoring the world around us, that could make it prop up the status quo.

2. On Wednesday morning, I read this news report about Chelsea fans indulging in racial aggression on the Paris métro last night. I know these thugs have nothing in common with me really, but it FILLS ME WITH SHAME. SHAME TO BE ENGLISH. SHAME TO BE WHITE. I know it’s not my fault. I know I am not the person standing on a train hectoring strangers, but. This is little short of monstrous. And it FILLS ME WITH SHAME to see these white English pigs abusing a black man on public transport in the capital city of another European country.

3. I hate the witless (straight male?) cult of banter. (I just realised: I don’t feel the shame of being male, as I really don’t relate to many of what might be regarded as conventions of being male.) I imagine Chelsea fans, at least some of them, must feel VERY VERY ashamed to be associated with such louts.

4. I tend to shy away from such overt opinions on this blog (though not in other places). ‘Opinion is the death of thinking’ – David Malouf. I don’t like to risk offence. This goes beyond opinion into passion (and fire, that element prompting discussion in the workshop of Carolyn Forché’s politics). But sometimes you cannot be silent. Sometimes you have to stop being a pussy.

5. I’ve just finally started reading Alexandra Fuller’s memoir Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, subtitled ‘An African Childhood’. It is FANTASTIC, and I’m only a fraction of the way in. Early on we get a potted history of Rhodesia, where Fuller grew up:

Between 1889 and 1893, British settlers moving up from South Africa, under the steely, acquiring eye of Cecil John Rhodes, had been … What word can I use? I suppose it depends on who you are. I could say: Taking? Stealing? Settling? Homesteading? Appropriating? Whatever the word is, they had been doing it to a swath of country they now called Rhodesia. Before that, the land had been movable, shifting under the feet of whatever victorious tribe now danced on its soil, taking on new names and freshly stolen cattle, absorbing the blood and bodies of whoever was living, breathing, birthing, dying upon it. The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man’s blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman’s birthing with equal thirst. It doesn’t care.

6. I am taken back to a mobile classroom at King Edward VI College in Stourbridge in the early 1980s. A-level history with Mr Peacock. Grey skies, blusters of rain, half a dozen pastel shades of chalk outlining battlefields and tactics. The Falklands War was taking place as we sat lower-sixth exams, writing essays about the Boer Wars and William Gladstone. I learned facts in those two years – facts about the Scramble for Africa, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s, the birth of the welfare state, the Spanish Civil War. A-level history (British and European, 1870-1945) probably forged my political awareness more than anything else. You can interpret, but some of these facts are inarguable.

7. As a sixth-former, I remembered the death of Franco in a headline in the News of the World a few years before. This wasn’t just history.

8. Not all history is well taught. Not all facts are respected. Classrooms should be free of politicians, such as Republicans in Oklahoma, who want to prevent what’s bad about America being taught in advanced-placement classes. Politicians are not often good at nuance in the UK either.

8. Other (nuanced, thoughtful) reads of influence: Exterminate All The Brutes! and Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist. The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Ban En Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil (more on that another time). The Secret River and Searching For The Secret River by Kate Grenville.

9. Yes, the EU might need reforming, and yes, this is a small island, and yes, resources are limited.

But. But but but. It is election season, and there is a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the air. A lot of anti-other, a lot of bullshit, a lot of populist dribble that lacks compassion and is unable to listen or engage, and seems to love to play the victim and talk over and talk down, rather than find complex solutions to complex problems.

I do think it is important to find ways to talk about race, and gender, and sexuality, and many other issues – and ways that don’t just get contrary positions dismissed as racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or rely too much on terms such as ‘micro-aggressions’, which can feel aggressive in their own accusation and create unhelpful victimologies. Because things are rarely black and white, and knee-jerk claims can be just as unlistening or disengaged. Sometimes we really do have to locate our senses of humour, or not let ourselves be offended. Dwelling on ‘micro-aggressions’ really can feel like engaging with excuses for resentment. Sometimes it is better to laugh things off, don’t you think?

10. But but but. History lessons. Consequences. Do As You Would Be Done By. This post was written in a state of emotion, or passion, and our old English teacher Mrs Blakemore always told us never to post letters written in emotion or passion. Leave it overnight. So I shall. (And I did. And I didn’t change anything.)

11. How can writing make us listen? Make us think? Again, David Malouf: ‘Opinion is the death of thinking’. One of my favourite aphorisms.

12. Too much of the way we are taught writing forces us to value opining. Thesis statements in freshman compositions and positions defended in debate club are just a hop from columns written by hacks in tabloid newspapers. And slagging off immigrants in one of those columns is just a skip from proudly announcing your own racism as you push a man off a train on the métro in Paris.

13. The Buddhist idea of Right Speech.

14. Frank Bruni’s column this week, which makes a case for studying poetry as a bulwark against ‘rushed thinking and glibness’. Let’s devote ourselves to developing the ‘muscle of thoughtfulness’.

15. How will you use your own muscle of thoughtfulness to remove the shame, and restore pride in yourself? How are you going to find ways to write about things that matter to you?

16. What does matter to you?

17. Poetry, fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, biography: these are forms that often embrace and explore complexities, and in doing so help to make the world a better place.

18. What word can I use? asks Alexandra Fuller before naming colonialism for what it is. Taking. Stealing.

19. What words can you use?

Let It Come In

by Andrew | Leave a comment

A lovely interview with Anne Tyler in today’s Observer. I liked this observation:

On the wall are printed a few lines from Richard Wilbur’s poem Walking to Sleep:

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

“I see those words as about getting an idea and making a book,” says Tyler. “I don’t get anxious. It will come to you, let it come in.”

Friday Writing Experiment No. 56: Fanmail

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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Inspired by Joanna Rakoff typing replies to fanmail for J.D. Salinger, described in My Salinger Year (and my own review), do one of the following:

* Write a letter to a writer whose work has left an everlasting impression upon you.

* Write a letter to one of your readers.

* Write a fan letter to yourself.

* Reply to fanmail sent to you.

* Write a letter in which you give advice back to yourself on writing (or any other matter) in the manner of a worldwise author with a fanbase.

If you really want to get into the spirit of Joanna Rakoff’s book, type your letter on a typewriter, or pen it on Hello Kitty stationery (or paper of your own craziness/choosing).

My Salinger Year, By Joanna Rakoff

by Andrew | 3 Comments

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I have to admit I was originally a little put off reading My Salinger Year for thinking it might be a literary exposé hanging on someone else’s coat-tails, but a couple of publishing friends insisted on how good it is, and I am really glad they did. My Salinger Year is a well-written and heartfelt memoir, subtly crafted – well characterised, with deft transitions you don’t notice in your reading, and insights into the worlds you enter when you set out on adult life.

The publisher’s bound proof uses one of those Hollywood hybrids (yes, one of those very pitches that writers are often told to avoid in their own submissions! but publishers can get away with shorthand): ‘The Devil Wears Prada with a whiff of Mad Men and Girls’. It has a simple premise: a (now) successful novelist looks back on the year in the 1990s when she moved to New York and worked as an assistant at a prominent literary agency whose star client was the reclusive and hugely popular novelist J.D. Salinger.

I worked in house for a publisher at this time too, and I relate to much that is described. Our filing systems were not quite so arcane, but I had a colleague who printed out a copy of every email she received, and then filed it away in one of the hefty cabinets that lined one end of her office. She then deleted the email.

But at least we had computers. This agency did not; the cutting edges of technology were a Selectric typewriter and a Dictaphone operated by foot pedals, and they’d only recently acquired a photocopier.

(God, this makes me feel old. The very first publisher I worked for did not even have a fax machine. We had to walk ten minutes round the corner to another office to send or collect faxes. We had a telex machine on the ground floor, though.)

The agency in My Salinger Year belonged to another era in other ways: colleagues smoked, and heavily. I certainly related to that too. Our editorial meetings used to take place on Wednesday mornings, and every Wednesday evening I’d return home stinking of smoke. I took to removing my sweater before I entered the meeting room, to stop smelly wool from polluting our airwaves at home, as I’d been told. My smoking colleagues were, however, thoughtful enough to ventilate the room for the non-smokers. Wide-open windows in February in an office overlooking the Thames: imagine the cold, and double it, and sitting there freezing your tits off for up to four hours at a time. And I still went home stinking of smoke! (This was back in the days when I had more hair on my head.) At least the books were interesting.

Rakoff’s boss is always ‘my boss’ or ‘your boss’ (a device that works with ease), and another big-name author is the Other Client. Various names are changed, but I don’t think it’s hard to identify people, and in fact colleagues are sympathetically drawn, whether hotshots selling books for millions of dollars, or New Yorker editors, or dusty souls at desks stacked high with paper. You do meet egos in publishing, but underlying histories soon surface, or are guessed at, and some sad ones appear in this book. The reason people go into such a low-paying long-hours industry is that they love books, and book people usually have easy access to the world of the imagination. You meet genuine kindness and real characters.

This all helps to bring publishing to life. It might be eccentric, even unprofessional to some outsiders, but the workplace drawn in this book is one that most of us can relate to in some way, with egos and decisions about which sandwich to choose for lunch, and thus Rakoff helps to demystify the business. She also provides practical insights for writers. For example, at one point an agent discusses a manuscript he’s thinking of representing:

‘I think this is the kind of novel where an editor is either going to love his style or’ – he grimaced – ‘not love it. There are changes he could make, but I think I may as well just get it out there, find an editor who loves it, and let him direct [the writer] in a rewrite. There are a lot of directions you could go with an edit. I don’t want to send him in the wrong direction. I want someone to fall in love with his writing.’

This raises something I often stress with writers during later stages of revising: though we do, of course, want to submit to agents or editors the absolute best draft we can imagine, and the one that is closest to the version that lurks in our dream of dreams, we can also allow for a little give and take in the process. With some manuscripts, you can aim to get maybe 90% or 95% or 99% of the way there (the place where it might eventually be published), but it’s healthy to leave the work open to further input down the line. This could involve anything from revisiting the genre or category in which a book is sold, to gaining a fresh viewpoint on matters of craft, such as whether it really works in the present tense, or whether a particular scene adds or detracts, or whether a final sentence is really necessary. Such editorial conversations with your professional collaborators could lead to further tweaks or subtle shifts in emphasis in the manuscript. These changes are, of course, ideally ones that the writer is happy with. It’s useful to think about this idea of the direction a draft could take. Little needs to be immutable in writing and publishing.

Back to this book. Rakoff sells stories, and takes on a new writer. She also tussles in contract negotiations over these newfangled things called ‘electronic rights’; back then, we had little idea of what they were, either – something to go on a CD-ROM, probably – but the rights director told us editors to grab them just in case. In most cases they’d languish unused for a long time until someone woke up to their possibility. (And that possibility, when it came, probably came from Amazon, it should be noted. Publishers were hardly bursting with inspiration and application when it came to digital formats that were about to show themselves over the horizon.)

Another strand of the book involves Rakoff’s home life in Brooklyn on the cusp of it becoming pricey and hipster. She seems to financially support a boyfriend who is both a writer and a sponger, which shows something of the hardship and agonies that writers can put themselves (and others) through in the name of Art. There are stories about the changing landscapes of friendship and the need for decent heating: everyday matters, but the things that our lives are carved of, and sincerely captured.

My Salinger Year is most of all a great read for anyone who loves reading and its immersive pleasures. Its depiction of the reclusive author and his devoted fans will stand on its own terms even for the uninitiated, but it will be of special interest to Salinger fans, who must be counted in their millions – hardly a narrow interest group. Sacks of fanmail arrived at Rakoff’s agency every week, from war veterans, grieving parents, schoolgirls professing love for Holden Caulfield. The high school student who wants an A, the teenager who writes of The Catcher in the Rye: ‘It’s a masterpiece, and I hope that you’re proud of it.’ Decades after it was written, it still strikes a chord. So many readers have staked a claim on this novel.

Rakoff’s duties included sending a standard reply, based on a carbon copy from 1963, explaining the author’s preference not to have any contact, though as time goes on she takes it upon herself to write personal replies. We also see some of the negotiations for the publication of a small-press edition of a Salinger novella called Hapworth that had been published in the New Yorker in 1965, but had never made it into a book. (Another account of that can be read here.)

Ironically, Rakoff seems to have been one of those few serious readers in the English-speaking world who’d never read Salinger, and we share her joy when she finally succumbs to the fragile magic of Holden and the Glass family. I was reminded of reading (and rereading) ‘Salinger’s fairy tales of New York’ in my own twenties, lying on my single bed in a tiny room on the top floor of a shared flat in London.

We do, perhaps, outgrow writers such as Salinger – but only for a while. Sometimes we have to let that tenderness and sentiment back in. And writers perhaps can take another look at the craft an author uses to weave such wonders in prose.

My Salinger Year is a really charming book that goes to the heart of the relationships between books and writers and readers. Read and enjoy. And maybe you too will dig out your old paperback editions of Salinger for a reread.

* Do a writing experiment based on this book and review.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 55: Dear Diaries

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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Back in December I started to keep a diary again. I’m using Day One, which is a very handy app. It lets me sync entries in the cloud straightaway across my computer, phone and iPad, so it’s easy to update while I’m on the hoof, at my desk, sitting on a train. I can even dictate something while I’m walking the dog. I can also add photos, a record of the temperature, and my geolocation, if I wish, and tag entries, and, e.g., organise specific gardening records as a separate group of entries, and it can even provide prompts if you desire them. I can also set a daily reminder; given it is 10 p.m. right now, this might explain why various entries of late involve Celebrity Big Brother.

(You can read a full review of Day One here.)

One thing that perhaps has halted diary-keeping at other times of my life has been the fact that I made it into too much of a duty: recording everything that I did became a chore. I was always playing catch-up. Now I just let myself add a few lines about whatever: a moment, a sequence of events, an image, a thought. If I forget, I can add something late at night as I’m going to bed – just a couple of lines are sufficient, and sometimes sufficient is all that is necessary, and even preferable.

Sometimes I hear people talk about ‘journaling’, which can seem a bit precious. I want to say that ‘journal’ is not a verb. The process can get a bit self-consciously introspective, particularly when we get lots of ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’. Which is fine if that rocks your boat, I guess. But I cringe at the idea of rereading the gutspillings in old journals from, e.g., the year I lived in Albuquerque as an undergraduate, or the era (nay, epoch) of my coming out (eek!). But when I am brave enough to reread, I do find myself surprised from time to time, and wistful about my former self (that person I still am).

In my current diary writing, I’m inspired by an entry from the diary of Audrey Bright (great name!), mother of writer and teacher Elaine Kingett:

Had hair done, Japanese surrendered.

I guess 1945 had plenty to record! And maybe that unconscious mix of the global and the introspective and the everyday is what makes the diary an exciting form. Writing on the fly.

A few further random thinkings.

* Blogging is a contemporary variation on keeping a diary. I guess what is avowedly different about blogging is its public dimension. The public persona we create. But some bloggers achieve great transparency in their blogs, even a confessional quality. I think of the frankness of perception in Bhanu Kapil’s blog, where she (among other things) has shared many of the forays into the writing of her new book Ban En Banlieue, alongside which her blog sits as a sister project.

* The entry that came up when I looked up Bhanu’s blog is, ironically, about losing one of her notebooks. Eek! Guess that is a disadvantage of paper and pen, as I once found out myself when I left one on a British Airways plane that flew us from Denver to London.

* I also think of the Rogue Notebooks (at least 33 of them?!) in which Bhanu created Ban along the way.

* I mostly use it for sharing links to stories I find interesting, but Twitter could be another variation on the form of keeping a diary, though I find that a lot of the content tends towards the, um, reactive rather than observational, and we often encounter a certain, um, unregulated and opining (even hysterical) quality of showing off to some people’s outpourings. Shut up already. (Though maybe some diaries really do amount to opining hysteria more than anything else?! And I guess this is all justifiable expression too. Just don’t be surprised when people unfollow you.) What can be more interesting to me are tweets that follow a more consistent pace, though off hand I’m struggling to come up with someone who’s tweets really feel like a diary – do suggest if you know of someone. I do like the compression of 140 characters, for sure.

* I’m thinking of Bobbie Louise Hawkins’s overheard dialogue exercises, in which we record snatches of overheard dialogue we capture unexpectedly in everyday life and bring them to our fiction workshop every week.

* Alan Bennett’s diaries are very entertaining and insightful. (But then Alan Bennett is very entertaining and insightful.)

* Virginia Woolf’s diaries are fantastic. They have this direct and energetic wit. Though I love the sentences in her novels, I find her diaries (and letters) much more interesting than most of her fiction. However much I try, Clarissa Dalloway, you are a bore. Orlando is more fun, but nothing beats the nuggets about T.S. Eliot coming to dinner in April 1919.

* I guess diaries can enjoy a gossipy quality that is a lot of fun.

* I like thinking about what we call these things we write in. Composition notebooks invite us to compose. Exercise books emphasise the fact that everything is just an exercise, an attempt, and we don’t need to goal ourselves on final-draft excellence – not least as that simply doesn’t exist. Notebooks collect notes, and notes can be as random as what we want. (But feel free to compose in an exercise book, should you prefer.) So: diaries as spaces for composition, exercises, notes.

* I’m thinking of Lynda Barry’s sensational book Syllabus, which describes the diary exercises she tasks her classes with. See the photo above. She adds on a facing page:

Intentionally keeping a daily diary is difficult and usually a drag to write and a drag to read. A more interesting diary of a very different sort will spontaneously show itself if we begin to put bits and pieces of everything that concerns us through the day in one place: the composition notebook.

I love Lynda’s Quick Diary Format, not least as I love its focus on sense events in the outside world, rather than interior musings, and I love lists: seven to ten things that you did; seven to ten things that you saw; something you heard said; a picture of something you saw. To help with this, on the page of a notebook she draws daily diary frames that prompt invite their filling in.

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(More on Syllabus and St Lynda another time. This book requires a review. In particular, we need to look at her use of spirals.)

For this week’s writing experiment (or this year’s? this lifetime’s?): start a diary. Go for at least a month, though really it might be good to go for a longer span: a season (three months), a year, maybe longer?

(And okay, this is the end of January, rather than the start of the year. But January is the month of failed resolutions, so maybe February is maybe a better place to begin?)

(And time is an imaginary construct, right, isn’t it?!)

The important part of this exercise: choosing a form, then sticking with it for a block of time. It mustn’t be a drag. It must be as spontaneous and easy and instinctive as possible. Some suggestions:

* Day One: Start using it yourself.

* Buy yourself a composition notebook or an exercise book or decomposition book, and fill it. Maybe, though, give yourself a target: write on a page every day (you don’t even have to fill it), or create your own frames for your own Quick Diary Format.

* As a variation of that: buy yourself an appointment calendar or diary or five-year diary, and fill the inch or so it gives you every day.

* Write a haiku a day. Again, we find that concrete target: seventeen syllables, observations of nature and the seasons – or create your own focus and constraints, e.g., life in Santa Fe, as observed by my friend Mary Kite.

* Instagram a photo a day. (Without the exhibitionist hashtags. Sorry, am being too prescriptive. I just dislike showing off. Do what you want.)

* Maybe don’t do Twitter, unless you’re really good at it. Just saying, though rise to the challenge of the form, e.g., not showing off.