Wendy’s Newsletter No. 3 Thursday March 5 2015A
Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.If this is your first time, welcome.
The unwilled creation and destruction of original ideas and creativity./The
over-self-conscious writer/Writers’ Superstitions.
So! How we you begin? Where do we find those
seeds of inspiration? Those notions? Those themes? Those preoccupations which
will end up as a ten page story or a four hundred page novel.
Where are they? They are there inside us welded
together, layered in our memory, our experience, our study, our genes and our
souls ready to surface – often without us realising it - in the voice of a
character, a description of a place, or
the violent turn of an incident.
It is not always obvious. I was thinking that this truth
emerges very clearly in the field of literary biography, where, years later. the biographers link ‘the Works’ to the subconscious
and conscious lives of their subjects. They often know more about their
subjects’ pre-occupation than the writer’s knew themselves.
Think of the
elliptical Daphne du Maurier as seen by the brilliant Margaret Forster.
Consider the bold and insividual Kathleen Mansfield brought to life by the
insightful Kathleen Jones.
We might think that poking into the soul of a writer
might seem a bit invasive but I suppose that is the penalty of literary fame
which makes all of us curious about the writer’s themes, icons and inspirations.
Those of us less eminent have no such worries but I
have come to realised that anyone who has read half a dozen of my own novels
will suss out a list of my inspirations an icons perhaps better than I can.
I have now
realised that only on reflection, because for me the primacy of the story holds the centre of my fiction.
I now realise that my list would
include: the autonomy of women, the unequal dynamics of the British class
system, twentieth century history, and the possibility of personal
transformation through education, writing and painting.
(And then there is France, always
France. Deep down somewhere I always feel I lived in France in quite another
time.)
I spent years writing the novels, always loving my stories
and my characters as they danced across my page off into the bookshops and the
libraries, I rarely thought about what was happening at a deep level. I just wrote
on as my stories and characters charged
my head and powered my hand. Reviewers would sometimes spot the recurring
themes but I thought that was their business.
The time I began to discover just what had been
happening at that deep level was when I set about re-reading my novels to
prepare for the writing write my rather unconventional literary memoir The Romancer. See it HERE
I had always considered my stories to be very
different from each other.
I prided myself on that notion!. But, as I wrote
this memoir. I discovered these recurring preoccupations, themes and icons
buried in my work They had indeed been there inside me all mixed up, layered in
in memory, and grounded in my experiences,
in my studies, my genes and my soul.
I realised that all I’d had to do was to write these
novels and short stories to allow the themes and preoccupations to find breath
on the surface of my life.
This is clearly an unconscious or a subconscious process.
If I had thought deeply about these things as I wrote I probably would never
had reach page five in any story. (See my
point below* about over-self-conscious writing encouraged by courses in ‘creative
writing)
We come to a
question: Is writing therapeutic?
There are courses and sources on this. I choose to
think differently. I do think that a lifetime of writing can have a therapeutic
bi-product. It can also raise nightmares that can be very difficult for an
individual to process on his or her own. But I suppose even such nightmares can
be processed in the unselfconscious writing process. Perhaps that’s where the
cult of misery memoirs may come from.
* A Personal Note
on the Danger of over- Self-conscious Writing.
Having more than once sifted and judged major
national fiction competitions I have noted a troubling tendency for writers –
in their requested rationale enclosed with their entries – to go on at length about
their motivation, their themes, their genre and their market, even while their
fragile novels are unfinished or in process.
I can just hear earnest, well intentioned tutors
hammering these points out with anxious writing students on these proliferating
Creative Writing Degrees as though it were a critical analysis of the Tempest
For me this is like taking and axe to a block of
wood which might just have a delicate island landscape buried within it,
waiting to be written.
Writer’s
Superstitions.
I have a few superstitions which keep
me going as a writer. I (nearly always) write in ink-pen. I draft in
perfect-bound notebooks. I play instrumental music (no voice) to create ‘white
noise’ as I write. I wrap myself in a glazed tent…
I found this great article on the wonderful
Brainpickings site. You might like it - see it HERE - which outlines the extraordinarily arcane writing
superstitions of some famous writers. For example ‘James Joyce wrote lying on his stomach in bed, with a large
blue pencil, clad in a white coat, and composed most of Finnegans Wake with crayon pieces on cardboard…’
In
My Next Newsletter.
That precious notebooo=k: Thoughts on the notebook and the screen
That precious notebooo=k: Thoughts on the notebook and the screen
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