Words Unlimited

Book of The Month - September

Actually, two books this month. Why?

I thought it would have to be Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, which I thoroughly enjoyed for the game it plays. It’s a fiction about fiction, it’s clever. But I was talking to writer friend, Australian-born Michelle Lovric, about my new-found enthusiasm for Tim Winton, in particular his Dirt Music. Though I’d admired Winton’s short stories, I told her, I was playing catch-up with his novels. She recommended Breath. 

However enthusiastic I become about a writer I like to pace my reading of their work. Book after book can start to feel like gulping down a case of wine rather than savouring each sip of a large glass. No matter how powerful the vintage, well, suddenly all you want [need?] is water. So I read and enjoyed the game-playing Sweet Tooth before plunging into the deep sea of Breath. What a contrast: the McEwan urban and knowing, the Winton elemental and spare. It’s difficult to say much more about Sweet Tooth without giving the game away - you’ll either love it or hate it.

Breath is a coming-of-age-book. An emergency in the present triggers the main character, Pike, to recall an extraordinary period of his youth.

After the adrenaline rush of the opening the reader is flung back into Pike’s past. These slower paced episodes of boyhood reminiscence at first seem a let down after the highly-charged first chapter. But Winton’s prose is so clean and visual that each episode draws the reader further into the tensions between safe, small-town life in Western Australia and the dangerous allure of the big ocean that is never far away.

Even though I was enjoying Winton’s conjuring up of specific wave forms, and being taken into water I'd never dare enter, by the middle of the book I did begin to wonder if it would turn out to be simply a surfer's log. However, the last third picked up the pace of the opening.

Breath is about far more than surfing. It’s about facing-out fear – fear of the extreme and fear of being ordinary and is, quite simply, breathtaking.

Why not settle for one of these novels? There was something about reading these two books back-to-back that reminded me how important it is to have a varied diet of fiction and how impossible it is to say that ‘good’ fiction is simply one particular sensibility.  Here are two very different writers, two very different books. I appreciated each book more for having read the other.

What the books have in common, though, is the confidence and consistency of a distinctive voice on the page. It is this, as much as story, that holds the reader.

All Change For Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

Big changes this year for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival - it's going to be bigger and will be largely based inland at Snape.

I wonder what will be lost and what will be gained? I've booked my tickets and I'm looking forward to finding out.

This film explains the changes and also why it's time to book tickets if you haven't already done so! More on the programme and booking, here.

 

HappenStance

Talking, as I was last week, of enthusiasm - those individuals who set up and run small poetry presses must have the enthusiasm and stamina of an Olympic marathon runner.

Ten days ago I attended Free Verse, the poetry book fair in London; an event which brought together over fifty small presses and publishers. After a happy day of browsing, I came away with a bag full of books, pamphlets and flyers. For the last ten days I’ve been sifting through the haul. 

Among the smaller imprints that stand out is HappenStance. Founded by poet Helena Nelson seven years ago and based in Scotland, the venture is dedicated to the publication of pamphlets.

HappenStance publications have a satisfying minimalism: creamy paper, with thoughtful and often a witty graphics on the cover. They are a wonderfully uncluttered way to sample 20 + poems by an individual whose work you might not have come across.

 

It’s not surprising that in 2010 HappenStance won the Michael Marks Publishers' Award. As well as the quality of the poetry, and the production, another thing that makes this enterprise stand out is it that, uniquely, it offers a subscription.

For £7.50 a year you get, among other things, a free pamphlet of your choice plus a chapter of the HappenStance story – invaluable insight into this kind of publishing. It seems that Helena Nelson, though she doesn't run a competition as other pamphlet publshers do, is a careful reader of submissions. For more on subscriptions and submissions visit the HappenStance website. 

Other presses that caught my eye include: Templar, Cinnamon, Like This Press, Stairwell Books, Valley Press and Pighog Press. Pighog has just launched, in conjunction with The Poetry School, a new pamphlet competition. Details here.

It was happenstance that I was able to make it to the book fair - I was to have been out of London that Saturday but things changed. If you weren’t able to attend Free Verse, the website is still live with a useful list of all the presses who had stalls that day with links to their websites. With just a click or two you’ll find access to some of the best poetry publishing enthusiasts.

Raising The Game?

How can we keep a connection to the positive energy of the Olympic Summer before it evaporates, fast as the vapour trail from that final Red Arrows fly-past?

While sports clubs everywhere are overrun with new recruits – the inspired generation? – for many of us, certainly me, it’s too late to attempt to run 100m in under 10 seconds. But, aside from sport, how can each of us take inspiration from the Olympic Summer and channel such positive energy into other areas of our everyday lives and, more particularly, our writing lives?

The ‘E’ word

Interviewed before the Paralympics closing ceremony, comedian Jimmy Carr said, ‘I’ve had the summer off – from cynicism.’  Exactly.

We’ve watched athletes compete and co-operate. We’ve marvelled as ordinary people performed extraordinary feats of grace and endurance. We’ve talked about excellence and having fun; we’ve cared and shared. The Games Makers have shown it’s possible to get a buzz out of doing something without getting paid. If one word can sum all of this up, it’s ENTHUSIASM.

There, I’ve said it – the ‘E’ word. It tends not to be cool to be enthusiastic but, in the face of such amazing events, our bottled up enthusiasm couldn’t help but surface. 

It’s probably not simply British reserve or Metro cool that keeps us wary of overt displays of excitement. The word derives from the Greek entheos - ‘the god within.’ When enthusiasm entered the English language c1600 it meant to be possessed by God or deluded that one had a direct channel to God. Enthusiasm was close to an unhealthy fanaticism.

Over the centuries the word has lost its religious connotations. Now, it refers to having great excitement for or interest in anything, but I suppose that could include extreme right wing politics.  Just as the Olympics have created new associations around the Union Jack might the idea of being overtly enthusiastic gain a new respectability?

What might this mean in terms of writing?

The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson on this subject:

‘Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it

nothing great was ever achieved.’

How often do we writers talk about the fears and setbacks rather than the founding enthusiasms that get us tapping at the keyboard in the first place?  How often do we own up to our excitement about our current project?  Could it be that the worst aspects of the effort start to dominate because we detach that effort from the founding enthusiasm?

Medal or Personal Best?

Over the summer I jotted down phrases that came up repeatedly from the athletes or their coaches, phrases that spoke of the effort born of enthusiasm. Some of these could be reframed and applied to the process of developing as a writer:

 ‘it’s about putting in the hours of training’

‘it all came together on the day’

‘I look to get the best from each individual’

‘that’s a new Personal Best’

‘I’ll review my speeds then make a plan for Rio’

‘it’s all about making steps to improve’

I was struck by the number of athletes who didn’t get a medal, even came last, but still had a smile on their face. Pitting themselves against the medal winners they’d produced a Personal Best. Taking part had got the best out of that individual. 

Each time you submit work – poem, short story or novel – you enter the race. The competitive world of publishing is altogether more chaotic and quixotic than the world of elite sports. But each submission is an opportunity to raise your game by giving that piece one more tweak to make it a Personal Best, at that time. The feedback may not be what you’d hoped for but from it, how can you make steps to improve the work?

It’s part of the writing process to follow through on rejection by reviewing and making a plan for the next submission. As one swimmer said, ‘I’ll review my speeds and make a plan for Rio.’ You have no chance of getting a medal if you don’t take the training seriously with your eye on the next race.  

The Art & The Graft

Achievements - in sport or in writing - begin with some natural aptitude plus vision and imagination. As Stephen Hawking put during the Paralympic Opening Ceremony,   "Look at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious."  Curiosity, enthusiasm and a facility with words – the art – get a writing project off to a good start. Next comes the craft, or should I say graft. 

Jessica Ennis has a natural talent for the hurdling but less talent for throwing the javelin. To get her heptathlon gold medal meant putting in extra hours in on javelin training, breaking down the technique into stages, improving each so that ‘it all came together on the day.’

When a piece of writing isn’t working it’s the graft of re-drafting that brings success. You take the novel apart and put it back in a way so that it will all come together. Or, having tried it, you might decide that this particular ‘sport’ isn’t for you. It might be time to try a different genre. 

It’s all too easy to focus on the exhaustion and frustration of the writing process but watching the Olympics has reminded me how important it is to stay in touch with the enjoyment and enthusiasm that made me want to write in the first place.

If you’re struggling too much at the graft why not return to the authors who inspire you, or go back to an image or a character that made you want to start that project in the first place. In short – reconnect the effort to the vision, the enthusiasm, and declare it to yourself and others. 

What excited many of us over the summer was not simply the medal ceremonies but the stories behind each athlete – the process that led them either to a medal or Personal Best.

With writing you are in charge of what Personal Best means for you. As to the medals – I reckon if you’ve had something published by a reputable publisher – be it mainstream or small press, poetry, fiction or non-fiction – you are a medal winner. Congratulations! I’ll leave you to rank yourself gold, silver or bronze.

Meanwhile, if you've been inspired by the Olympics and Paralympics do leave a comment, I'd love to hear how it affected you. Let's keep that energy going ...

'You can't rush inspiration'

"Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. … Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, 'Only you understand me.'"

This is from a recent New York times piece by Colson Whitehead, How to Write, in which he offers his 6 Rules for writing. The above is rule No 2. The piece is witty and wise - well worth reading in full.

As with all such 'rules' some will chime with what you're doing, some, inevitably, are key to that particular writer. Whitehead's No 2 spoke to me about the project I'm working on at the moment - the subject really won't leave me alone!

I'm also reminded that each writer drafts their own rules and that all rules are made to be broken, sometimes. 

It's also worth a look for the sharp illustrations by Joon Mo Kang that catch those moments in the writing day that I think many would recognise.