NaNo: the idea

So November is here and despite only having written 535 words, I’ve actually begun NaNoWriMo for the fourth year running. And for the first time with a very full on baby taking up all my time!

But I’m pretty pleased with myself because, unlike the other years, I’ve got myself a very clear novel idea! I actually know what I’m writing for once!

Wanna know what it is? I feel a bit odd divulging my plan on such a public forum, but who am I kidding, no one reads my blog anyway so I may as well indulge in some crapping on about my idea.

This one has been in the pipeline for a couple of years now. It’s nothing that spectacular when I describe it but I think it could be freaking awesome. The story is about London and the rite of passage for most antipodeans that is going there to work and live and get perspective. Or whatever reason seems feasible. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.  I think I’ve actually written about some stuff on this blog, stuff that actually happened, but my NaNo novel is a fictionalised account.  I’ve got ideas for about half a dozen key characters and some storylines, but I’m not sure how they all fit together yet.  Because it’s NaNo, I’m just going to write whatever and see what emerges – no time for editing!

The ‘tooff’ and the truth

Replicated from my SheWrites blog, 23 January 2011.

One of the first stories I remember writing was called ‘The Tooth’ or in my then-childish scrawl, ‘The Tooff’.  I think I would have been about six.  I still have the story, written in green crayon, with my own corrections in pencil a few years later.  As you can probably guess, it was about losing my first tooth.  It was a bottom tooth, and had been wobbly for some time.  Around the time, I had tried my first ever piece of chicken, having been brought up a vegetarian, and so had just discovered chicken drumsticks and eating meat off a bone.  The story, all true, went that I was sitting eating a banana during morning tea and my tooth came out and stuck in the banana.  I mistook it for a bone, or something not edible in my banana, and, being the impulsive mess-maker I was, I picked it out and threw it across the classroom!  As I looked across at my flying tooth’s trajectory, I realised what it was, but too late – plop, it fell straight into the bowl of soup that a boy in my class was eating.  Upon finishing my banana, I asked the boy if he’d found my tooth in his soup, and he showed me an empty bowl, saying he must have eaten it!  So I didn’t have anything to leave out for the tooth fairy.  My mum wrote her a note which we left on my dressing table, and lo and behold the next morning there was a shiny 50 cent piece waiting for me in its place.  After the tooth came a contribution from my granddad – ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’…

This was my first story, and it was a true story.  I didn’t know it then, but I would struggle forever with the concept of the truth in my writing.  Can you tell the truth?  Can you write about other people?  Surely even if you change their names it’s pretty obvious who you’re writing about.  What if they’re offended?  What if they sue you?  Doesn’t truth depend on perspective/perception anyway?  All these questions continue to plague me, but I realise that there isn’t a piece of writing out there that doesn’t have some sort of autobiographical element in it.  I think I’m interesting in people, interactions between them, and concepts around this are explored by way of rehashing the truth.  And after all, it’s my truth, it’s what I think is real and interesting.  I wonder though, would I get offended if someone wrote about me and I felt I was misrepresented?  Even if they changed my name so as not to identify me?  I think I might.  My most recent conclusion about how to combat this problem is to write about dead people.  The longer someone has been dead, the less possibility there is of someone getting upset about the representation.  And the more opportunity there is to make things up!  Fiction is an odd thing; on the one hand, it’s defined as ‘make believe’, yet on the other fiction writers are doing their best to make their writing ‘believable’.  So what is it, true or not?  Is all fiction true?  What is truth?  How can we establish a clear line between fiction and non-fiction?  And is there the same between truth and fairy stories?

The great history versus fiction debate

I’ve just finally read Kate Grenville’s The Secret River – I say ‘finally’ because it’s been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for months now, and been on my list for much longer.  I can’t believe I left it so long!  It was such a great book, I devoured it in a week (which, for me, is a short amount of time to read even a small book).

It’s just the kind of writing I like and want to explore further, just fantastic.

Since finishing, I thought I’d look Kate up and see what background reading might be online about the book and her other work.  I came across her official site which has some great info on it about all her work.  It also contains some retorts from Kate on a couple of critical essays from historians.  I can’t believe they accused her of writing history when clearly the book is not intended as a work of history but more historical fiction.  One doesn’t have to glean this, it’s pretty clearly spelled out.

Anyway, rather than blab on about how unfair I think these historians have been to a clearly wonderful writer, I wanted to say that what I’d love to read about is the elements of the book that these historians consider fiction, rather than historical fact.  So of course we know the characters are fiction based on some historical characters, what we can’t be clear about is whether the sorts of environments, tools, weather, and general hardships experienced by the characters are true to history.  For example, did convicts’ wives really make the voyage with them?  And if so, were said convicts ‘assigned’ to their wives, as Thornhill was to Sal in The Secret River?  What about the places back in London that Grenville names – are they real?  Did convicts really get given their own bark hut as the Thornhill’s did?  And did it actually take a day to sail from Sydney to the Hawkesbury back in 1815?  These are the kinds of questions I’d love to hear historians answer.  I fully accept Kate has written a fiction based on historical events, so that’s all the more reason why I’d like to read essays from those ‘in the know’ (ie. colonial historians) discussing the truths and fictions of this book and more like it.

I read this book because I’m a) interested in good writing, b) interested in Australia, c) interested in historical fiction and d) interested in history; so I want to hear both the fictional and non-fictional account.  I think Kate has gone about things the right way, stating up from just what she wanted to achieve with the book and giving us a wonderful story with some historical elements woven in.  Where’s the criticism of books that try to pull the wool over our eyes – Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is a good example.  Is it because he didn’t write about long-ago history and more his own ‘story’ that no one bothered to criticise in the same way?  His was more of a work of fiction, only very loosely based on fact, yet he didn’t even bother to clarify his intent, instead just letting us naive readers be drawn into the story, only to find out (after some research) that it was all just a silly story…

Nice work Kate – can’t wait to read more!

True or false: the ethics of writing reality as fiction

Just reading an article from the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/books/review/Gates-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss about Janet Frame (NZ author, subject of Jane Campion’s film An Angel At My Table) and her book Towards Another Summer, which has been published posthumasly.  It’s not arbitrary that the book came out after Frame’s death in 2004; she deliberately witheld it, saying it was ‘too personal’ to release during her life.  I think this must have been done to protect the other subjects of the book, who are based closely on real people, as if you’re ever read Frame’s autobiography, you’ll know that she isn’t concerned in the least about being open and honest about her life.

So reading this article (which is brilliant, by the way, check it out), got me thinking about something I very often worry about.  My English teacher in year 11 (second last year of highschool before university, if any non-Aussies are reading this) was instrumental in giving me confidence with my writing and showing me the correct path to follow to improve it.  For some reason, I wrote a short piece about my grandparents and handed it in to Mr P (should I use his real name?  Read on…)  It was about visiting my grandparents, various conversations we had, just giving a snapshot of their life and surroundings, and I remember describing their ‘nicotine-stained hallway’ which I thought was nothing special (they were chain smokers) but which Mr P thought was fantastic.  I said to him that I’d always wanted to write fantasy for young adults, but was always criticised for being to ‘cliche’.  He said I should follow this lead, write from life, as exemplified in the story about my grandparents.  Suddenly I realised, that’s it!  Write about what you know!  Why didn’t I take in that piece of wisdom when I watched that episode of Degrassi Junior High when Michelle has to make a presentation and she’s afraid, so Mr Raditch says, ‘just talk about what you know’.  Genius advice!

I thought I was free and clear and would be a published novelist in no time… but sadly, another more fundamental problem arose.  How do I write about what I know and the people I find fascinating without offending them?  At first I thought the solution might be simply to change people’s names.  But I realised very quickly that the detail with which I wanted to write about people was such that they would be identifiable without their names.  I constantly struggle with this idea of how to make these characters known to others, how to show them for how interesting and entertaining they are, without defaming or exposing the living individuals.  Even dead people are a struggle – I couldn’t write everything about, say, my grandmother, without a member of my family reading it and getting upset; the truth is painful, even if it’s not your own truth.  Most people are more private than me, I’ve discovered, and everyone has their own truth which usually differs from mine – truth, after all, is often heavily influenced by perception.  I toyed with this idea of just using bits and pieces from different characters to create new people, new lives, fictional ones.  But the fact remains, at least in my head, that truth, reality is deeper, more interesting, more relevant and rather more entertaining than fiction.  Why write about a fluffy, cliched fictional creature when the real one is right there in front of you for you to describe in complete detail, whose story you can tell in full, not having to make sloppy assumptions and guesses.

‘Interesting?  Yes, of course, people LOVE interesting writing!’ exclaims Elaine Benes (Seinfeld), upon her sudden realisation that she can write product descriptions without help from her boss.  As funny as it is, it’s so true: so many basic things are realised too late.  So it’s the realisation that makes the impact, provides the impetus to act.  Things are always there, have been there all along, it’s just up to us creators to realise them.  I realised something just as obvious in deciding to write from my own life.  Yet, as I say, I’m still at something of a standstill.

It’s odd though, now I think about it – I’ve been writing from life my entire life.  From the age of 10, I’ve kept a diary.  Not an everyday, ‘Dear Diary, Today I did something incredibly mundane which is of no interest even to me let alone others…’  No, it began as ‘Dear Diary…’ of course, because, at 10, you think this is how it’s supposed to be written, and I had this sort of obsessive idea in my head that made me want to organise my life, record every moment, no matter how seemingly mundane.  I always knew at some level that I’d want to know when I got older, like a sociological experiment.  That’s why I’d make so many different time capsules, write letters to myself in the future, include tiny fragments of my life at that point – a plastic Kinder Surprise toy, an old Yugoslav postage stamp, a silk scarf that used to sit around the neck of one of my small teddies, random keys for long lost locks… In my first year of uni, at art school, we were asked to complete a ‘cultural nexus’ project – something that represented our own personal culture, whatever that was.  I made a life size bust with a long hooped skirt, all thin strands of metal wire welded together, and then the ‘dress’ itself consisted of layers of clear sticky tape running down the contours of the frame with various small objects embedded.  Our old front door key made an appearance there, dwarfing everything else with it’s thick, four inch long body.

So the point is, I want to capture lives, people, how life unfolds through time and circumstance.  I think it’s some sort of desire to prove that nothing is arbitrary, everything is connected and relevant.  But without exposing people’s bare bones, I cannot really do this.  Maybe I’ll write everything and, like Janet Frame, prevent its publication until after my death.