Ok, so the last entry was supposed to be the last for the year, but then Simon emailed and said that my interview with Kate Cawley (referred to on these pages as La Spin... damn, there goes the alias) is up on Sleepy Brain.
Yes, probably. I'm on holiday until Jan 5th and I don't think I'll be blogging in the meantime.
Any New Year's Resolutions?
I'm going to try to chew more slowly.
What?
I eat too fast . I'm going to try to slow down by chewing more slowly.
Ok... Anything else?
I'm going to ride my bike at least once a month.
Once a month isn't very much.
I believe in setting realistic goals.
So that's it? Chewing and bike riding?
Pretty much. My other resolutions are really maintenance ones- keep writing, keep doing the blog, press on with the MA, continue not drinking coffee. What about you? Do you have any resolutions?
Oh, just the usual stuff I say every year; cut back on sugar, give up smoking.
I didn't know you smoke.
I only do it socially, or when I'm really stressed.
I hope I don't stress you.
No, you don't. Not really.
Hey and thanks, by the way.
For what?
Oh, for all the chats and advice over the year. I might not show it, but I actually appreciate it. Not all of the time, but quite a lot of the time.
That's my pleasure. I enjoy it.
Ok, then. Well, have a great break and I'll see you next year.
I feel strangely soothed after reading this interview with Alice Munro. I particularly like this:
I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way--what happens to somebody--but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing--not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens.
and also this is reassuring, somehow:
A story might be done in two months, beginning to end, and ready to go, but that's rare. More likely six to eight months, many changes, some false directions, much fiddling and some despair. I write everyday unless it's impossible and start writing as soon as I get up and have made coffee and try to get two to three hours in before real life hauls me away.
A couple of months ago I sent a story off to a literary magazine, with a stamped, self addressed envelope included so they could send it back to me when they rejected it. And sure enough, there it was Yesterday, poking out of the letterbox. Excellent. I know that rejection is all part of it, but it's very boring, all the same.
The editor had written a message at the bottom of the standard form letter saying "Nice and original, but seems like it could go further." I'm happy about the 'original' (less happy about the 'nice') and completely flummoxed about the "could go further." The problem is that I am unsure of how to make it go further, or even if I want it to go further. It's not a mustang of a story, designed to drive around the world, it's a volkswagon, and an old one at that, designed to make it down to the main street and back. If you're lucky.
It sent me off into a brood about writing and practice and learning. Can you get better at writing? How much better? And when you get a rejection slip do you abandon the story or try sending it to someone else or try re-writing it? I tried re-reading it myself last night, and couldn't really get a sense of it at all. Bad? Terrible? Nice? Dunno. Impossible to say.
I know I need to work at the writing, and it makes sense that the only way to get better is to do lots of it. But surely you could write endless pages every day and never get any better if you are repeating the same mistakes? So how do you learn what the weaknesses of your writing are so that you can improve? The obvious answer is that you get other people to read it, I guess, with the ultimate aim of learning to recognise strengths and weaknesses in your work yourself.
I also pondered on whether keeping a blog has helped with writing and I'm really not sure about the answer. I've definitely written a lot more since I've kept a blog, and it's good to have a habit of daily writing. But I'm not sure how much keeping a blog has "improved my craft" (although this is difficult to judge, I suppose.)
In someways, the fractured nature of blog writing is potentially detrimental to someone wanting to write longer pieces. I initially thought that I might be able to take posts from the blog and work them up into longer pieces, but I'm no longer sure if this would work. While in someways the blog is like a scrapbook and a place to record rough ideas, in another sense it is a mode of publishing, and even scrappy, half-baked posts feel a little like things that have been signed off on. It can be difficult, I'm realising, to reactivate them enough to turn them into something else.
But I suppose I know that ultimately all I can do is push on with it. I thought last night that I might give myself five years at this writing thing, and if I still seem to be crap at it at the end of this time I will bow out gracefully.
Now I'm off to look at the CAE website to see what summer writing courses they have on offer. And I'm also going to read this article about Alice Munro, because I like this bit from the first paragraph:
While the usual mystery story might be said to be a kind of comedy of manners, moving from disorder to order, Munro's endings are not tidy. They resist closure. Her pieces might be called tragi-comedies of manners, because they certainly do present the manner of small-town and rural Ontario, most especially in their way of speaking and not-speaking, of telling and not-telling stories, half-stories, hidden stories of the light and darkness which are people's lives.
Since I've finished my essay I've had more time for other things, such as staring at people in the street and then drawing pictures of them. I've seen this woman before (or someone very like her wearing the same t-shirt. I can't quite work the shirt out. Could it really be that she's mocking dyslexic people? It seems like such an unkind thing to do. It's such old school mocking, too. I've made her look younger in the drawing than she was (the trick is all in the puffiness of the cheeks, I've realised), as she was in her mid-to-late thirties, which made the mocking of dyslexic people all the more unusual, I thought. But then, perhaps she actually is dyslexic - the t-shirt did have a home-made aesthetic. Dunno. Odd, I thought.
