Antarctic vortex

I bought the dog a coat this year to help him with the cold.  Other years it hasn’t felt necessary, at least not in terms of my identification with him. 

And here, I think about how, on a cold day when I was a child who refused to wear her jumper, my mother said to me; ‘It makes me cold to look at you’. 

The roots of empathy perhaps?  My mother sympathising, only, I did not feel cold at the time.  She felt cold looking at me.

These last several weeks I felt cold looking at the dog. And so I bought him the best coat I could find at a reasonable price, one that fitted well and one that was easy enough to put on him. 

Now every morning before his first visit to the garden, I struggle to get him to cooperate in the wearing of this coat.  He needs to lift one leg at a time to fit into the separate holes in the front, then I bring up the two sides to join the fabric across his back and slide in the zip joins. 

This is tricky. 

If I accidentally drop one side and the dog drags a foot out of its hole, I need to start all over again.

Who’d have thought it would be so hard to dress a dog?  I had wanted something I could slip over his head, jumper style, something that did not need as much cooperation from him.  But this was the only one that fitted. 

Although the dog has adjusted to the wearing of this coat by day when he’s outside in the cold, I suspect he’d rather do with out, though he seems now to appreciate the warmth it generates.

Or is that me again, me being like my mother, me responding to my sense of the cold, not his?

My husband says, ‘He’s a dog.  Dogs can manage all weathers.’  Maybe on the farm when my husband was a boy they could.

My daughter says, ‘Small dogs can die when it gets too cold.  They need protection.’ 

In several months time, I will be going off on a short freefall writing retreat with the wonderful Barbara Turner Vesselago.  I’m looking forward to this time but also fearful that I will not write to her specifications.  Not as I write for this blog, with its mix of the ‘show, don’t tell’ variety and a heavy dose of telling, as in authorial intrusion. 

I’m forever telling you what I think.  It’s a no-no in most writing circles. 

The rule is: keep yourself out of the writing, unless in disguise.  It’s boring for readers, the saying goes, ‘Show, don’t tell’.  Let readers make up their own minds. 

I agree, up to a point.  But I reckon there’s merit in the other style of writing too, the so-called ‘diegetic’. 

Don’t be put of by the word.  It’s a writing style in which the writer speaks to you about what goes on. WG Sebald for instance, and many others write this way.

Even wonderful writers of the show-don’t-tell variety have sections wherein the writer paraphrases the action to move the story along.  It helps with pace.  It’s also necessary because every single detail cannot be shown.  There are some things readers need to know if they are to enjoy the action.

Anyhow, I’m fearful of the freefall because it will require I concentrate hard on the show-don’t-tell stuff, otherwise known as the ‘mimetic’. Again, don’t be put off by the word. 

These are things I’ve learned about writing over the years.  That they fascinate me is no guarantee they’ll fascinate you, rather like my mother’s view: Just because she was cold without a jumper, there’s no guarantee I was.

I had a higher metabolic rate at the time.  I’d have been bouncing around in the garden not noticing.  But my mother, looking out on me from the windows of the kitchen where she’d have had the fire on high, would have been more aware of the contrast between the warmth inside and the temperature outside.  

When my mother entered her last year of life, she kept her heater at full bore all day long in winter. To enter her room was to enter a sauna. She found it pleasant and every time I came in with only a cardigan and no coat she would tell me off for not dressing warmly enough. 

But I came prepared for her room.

These days, and this winter particularly, I feel the cold in my own right. 

I’m not alone here. Everyone throughout certain parts of Australia is complaining of and rejoicing in the fact that we have snow in Queensland. 

Not for something like fifty years has there been snow in Queensland. 

They call it the Antarctic vortex.  Which puts me in mind of a comment that JeniMawter made when she handed the fiction prize in the Lane Cove competition last year to Marjorie Lewis-Jones, ‘Don't start your story with the weather.’  

I hadn’t realised that. To me, the weather in my story was simply that, weather at the opposite extreme of what we have now, a hot stinking summer. 

There you have it.  When writers talk about the rules of writing they can develop any number of rules to justify what to do and what not to do. 

I say, ‘do it anyhow’ and see how it works.  If it sounds lumpy and clunky and does not invite your reader in, then think again.  Maybe some of these rules – better named guidelines – might help. Bearing in mind, what works for you might not work for the other.  

Still your ‘feel’ for things is probably a good place to start.

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.