Writing Process Blog Tour

Before my mother died, Esther Helfgott invited me to join her on a writing process blog tour.

 Two others, Amanda Pearson and Kath Lockett have agreed to join me.

Here's my response to the four questions, Esther raised.   Wade through if you will.

1. What are you working on?

At the moment I have two major projects in my sights.  The first, a book, I have been working on for the past twenty years.  Its first life came in the form of a memoir, which formed the basis of my time in a novel writing class in the early nineties.  In those days it was not the thing to write memoir unless you were a person of some note and so I tried to represent my writing as fiction. 

I never completed the initial memoir but have plucked from it whole chunks that then fitted well into essays I have written over the years in the fields of trauma writing, autobiography and psychoanalysis.  The memoir shifted then into a hybrid form: part essay, part memoir with an academic edge when I began my PhD on the topic, ‘Life writing and the desire for revenge’. 

Despite my PhD, I have neve considered myself an academic.  I want my writing to be accessible beyond the narrow confines of academia and so after I finished my thesis I began this second version of my book, which contrasts my life as a child with an experience I had within the psychoanalytic institute in Melbourne where I once undertook training.  After I completed this memoir I began the process of getting it published.  But after five rejections from mainstream publishers I have decided to seek further editorial help and advice.  Mary Cunnane has read the book and made suggestions about further improving it.

So this is my current aim to get this book as good as I can and eventually published. 

My second project, which I began in June when I was at Varuna on a weeklong writing retreat, is an essay that explores the nature of anorexia.  This work is still percolating in my mind.  I have memoir sections that I might well include but I am also reading more deeply through the analytical literature to add to my theoretical understanding of this state of mind and body, the state we call anorexia.

2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I think of my work as a hybrid form.  It is not simply memoir, but incorporates elements of the essay form, in a struggle to sort out issues that trouble me and of the theoretical, but only with a lower case ‘t’.  I’m not interested in highbrow academia but I am interested in difficult ideas about what makes us tick. 

3. Why do you write what you do?

I write into my internal world when I find myself struggling to make sense of events both from the past and present.  Things that niggle at me: experiences and people who stick in my head and imagination and demand some sort of fleshing out.  I write because it helps me to escape the confines of emotional experiences that can be too much for me.

As soon as I begin to shape experience onto the page it loses some of its sting.  It’s as if the very effort of taking something from my mind, my memory and imagination shifts the event into something new.  Maybe it’s akin to what I’ve heard fiction writers describe as their ability to create whole new worlds and characters who will not so much bend to their will – as much of this is an unconscious process – but characters and events that come alive only through the writing process with this one writer. 

I write to get some sense of power over my life, a life in which I can sometimes feel strangely powerless, as a woman, as a mother, as a wife and as a therapist.  All these roles lend a certain authority to a person but they also constrain.  The writing allows me to transcend some of the boundaries of my day-to-day life.  To play around with my identity even as I seek always to stick to the truth as best I can – whatever the truth is. 

Even as I try at all times to be authentic there is something of the fictional about the process of writing non-fiction for me that becomes the thrill.  Whenever I put words down on a page I’m struck by how many choices I can make in how I position myself in relation to this writing.  I can emphasize the people involved, the setting or my own internal state.  Whatever I decide to emphasize then affects how a reader might interpret my writing. 

The element of the reader and the space between the writing and the reading also adds an unpredictable dimension, including an element of unpredictability, both thrilling and terrifying. What will my reader make of what I have written?  What sense will readers make of the story I tell? 

These things matter to me but they are not primary.  In the first place, I write for myself.  For the pleasure of putting words and spaces onto a page and creating something new for myself and maybe for others to read that will add to the volume of imaginative prompts available. This to me is what makes a writing life worth living.  It adds to the colour of my world.  It bursts open the constraints of the day to day.  That’s why I write what I write.

How does your writing process work?

I write Freefall following in the steps of the writer Barbara Turner Vesselago.  I write into my mind.  I start without any preconceived ideas of where I might go.  I see what comes up for me.  I rarely if ever plan.  Planning for me is a no-no.  I prefer to go into the unexpected.  I prefer to go into places when I have no idea of where I might end up.  I might tell myself that during the week I fiddle with a question that’s niggling at me or a scene that I want to explore, but that’s the extent of my planning.

It makes for unwieldy writing and a need for much shaping and shifting after the event, but initially I need to write without the so-called parachute.  I need to Freefall.  I try to write at least on weekends first thing in the morning during the working weeks.  On holidays, I try to write every day.  It is frustrating because I would enjoy more time to write but I have acclimatised to this life of catching words in the nooks and crannies and it seems to suit my messy nature. 

I write reams and reams of words, images, ideas and thoughts and then if for example I’m working on an essay, I try to pull these disparate pieces together.  I try to find a beginning and I build on that beginning, dipping back inside my compost bin of words until the essay begins to take shape.  It’s a long and slow process but it gives me pleasure.  I like to juxtapose disparate ideas together.  To see how these ideas might connect.  Parataxis they call it.  Chunks of information or ideas can sit together in uncomfortable union.  The gap of white space on the page between each chunk becomes the bridge that readers use to make connections over different themes. 

I am a messy writer.  I create chaos in the first instance and refuse structuring until late in the piece.  I have the greatest difficulty with structure because I prefer the image of the moment, which is why I might require more of my readers than some are prepared to give.  I might put too many disparate things together but other times they work. 

Not for me cold tea. I much prefer it hot.

I'm out of whack.  This morning when I started to make my usual cup of tea I found myself making coffee instead - the whole coffee shebang, complete with frothy milk.  I usually drink coffee later in the day and start off my waking hours with Earl Grey tea. 

Before I realised I was making coffee instead of tea, I had been lost in my thoughts, which is easy to do on a Sunday morning early before any one else is up, including my husband who likes to leave his tea until it gets cold.  Not for me, cold tea, I much prefer it hot. 

Life is feeling too hot at the moment and my head is full.  I wondered as I fiddled with water from the kettle and milk from the fridge, why I did not know the reason behind one of my daughters being up early this morning well before me.  Unheard of on a Sunday morning.  Perhaps she had told me.  And that’s the thing, I can’t remember. 

I can’t remember either what was the question that Helen Garner asked at a conference yesterday, not a writing conference, mind you, but the famous Freud conference, one in which psychoanalytic ideas get thrown around. 

I have gone every year for the last several years to the Freud conference and each time it is a thrilling event, for me at least, not only the topics discussed, but the audience interaction.  The audience interaction is the most amazing of all.  It is one of those conferences where half at least of the audience of around two hundred people know one another, a small conference by some people’s standards but by the standards of the psychoanalytic community in Melbourne it is huge. 

I expect Helen Garner was there for ideas that might filter into her book on the Farquharson case.  The Farquharson affair is the sad story of a man who killed his three sons on Fathers day ostensibly as an act of revenge against his estranged wife. He pleaded innocent, saying that he had lost control of his car through a coughing fit as he approached the water into which he drove with his sons.  He managed to free himself, but not the sons.  The jury would not buy his defense.  Farquharson, as I understand it, after an unsuccessful appeal, is now in prison. 

I write about it all here dispassionately, but it has rattled me, all this talk of homicide and madness.  I could write about it with my academic hat on, but my point here is more related to the behind the scenes experience of being at such a conference, the shiver of anxiety I felt in a room filled with people many of whom I know, some of whom I'm fond of, some with whom I have deeply personal connections, mostly via my work, and others with whom I have no connection at all, and the odd person – I stress odd – towards whom I feel downright hostile.

I’m writing this in short hand and leave you to read between the lines.  It is one of those situations where I cannot be more specific, though I can be specific about this amazing section of the conference where the writer, lawyer and psychoanalytically trained professor, Elyn Saks, who also happens to be schizophrenic, spoke about her life and her wonderful book, The Centre Cannot Hold – also the title of the conference. 

The topic was unsettling but more so the fact that it was delivered via satellite link-up.  Elyn Saks sat facing the screen and what to her must have looked like an audience of bobbing heads and clapping hands.  She sat at a dark desk which was centred in what looked like a conference room or large office.  We, the audience, could see only her and the chair in which she sat, the table/desk in front of her, all in dark office colours, against a huge white board on a white wall. 

It must have been evening time for Elyn Saks at eleven am Melbourne time but she did not seem so much tired as surreal.  That was until she spoke, at which time she came alive, especially during question time. 

Hers was a plea to recognise that people with schizophrenia and other sharply defined mental illness can and do lead successful lives.  One difficulty among many, seems to be that people with severe mental illness are often told to lower their expectations: Go get a job in Safeway or something, once you get over the hurdle of a psychotic episode.  Don’t try to do too much.

When I asked a question of Elyn Saks during discussion time, I felt this weird collision of worlds.  I held the microphone in my hands and faced the screen where she sat.  It was like one gigantic skype session, only with a audience of two hundred people and Elyn Saks alone at the other end. 

My question, more a comment dealt with the issue of separation, which she describes in her book.  How unbearable she had found it when her first therapist in London left her, because she and her husband were moving elsewhere as I recall.  They had to pry Elyn loose.  I know this feeling well and she spoke to it well.

A family gathering from my mother's day, when she was one of the little girls in the front row.  For some weird and surreal reason this photo reminds me of the Freud conference, another gathering of sorts, where the ghosts from the past settle on our shoulders and our futures are as yet unimaginable.   

And here’s a quote from Samuel Beckett, to help you on your way: 

‘You must go on.

            I can't go on.

            You must go on.

            I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

            It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.

            You must go on.

            I can't go on.

            I'll go on.’ 

Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Before I stop I must acknowledge my good blog friend, Kath Lockett from the Blurb from the burbs blog, and Goofing off in Geneva, who graced me with a Liebster award.  With many thanks, Kath.