Tag: Hamilton

2017 Writing Round-Up

Tomorrow We Will Run Faster…

Above anything else we are curators of people’s responses to us. I have a fine collection of reactions British people make when they learn I’m American. Students I worked with focused on food: ‘Do you like peanut butter then, Miss? Did you eat MacDonalds every day? Do you always have pancakes for breakfast?’

Adults generally look for the story: ‘What brings you here, then?’ It’s similar to the question I sometimes get asked at work when people find I’m a writer, as if there are certain boxes Americans and writers must fit in, and somehow I’m not in them.

But for writers, people most want to know if we’re successful. Have you found that? As with the kids asking about food, adults ask about the money. ‘So have you been published? Going to be as rich as JK Rowling?’

They’re not interested in what a story’s about, so long as they have a tangible way to compare our successes.

Nothing wrong with that; we totally do that to ourselves, especially at the end of another year. What have we got to show for it? How are we measuring up?

Before such introspection runs amok, I’m trying to tether my self-assessment to specific criteria (you can tell I’ve survived a few OFSTED inspections). Here they are, as reminders that it’s not all about money and publication:

Did we start new projects?
I ran with a few different ideas this year, from a Dissatisfied Relatively Privileged Middle Aged Person story (one could argue that pretty much defines contemporary literature), to a dystopian short story about detention camps for anyone foreign-born. I have two novel concepts to plot and write, and other unfinished bits and bobs, mostly in the literary genre but some historical and even science fiction. I’ll move further with these in the new year, but I’m glad I haven’t finished everything; it’s nice to start afresh with a few already-begun stories kicking around.

Noticeboard with assorted images for inspiration.
One of the Noticeboards of Wonder in my Room Where It Happens

 

Did we maintain (or, let’s be honest, start) good habits?
After getting some fantastic Twitter motivation a few weeks ago in a discussion about keeping the imagination fresh, I started getting up even earlier in the morning so I could scribble for fifteen minutes before my daily hike. By the end of the second week, branches of a new novel shot through my brain. Fifteen or even ten minutes without stopping can yield two or three notebook pages. If, like me, your will to write has dwindled while life is busy, try writing a little every day. Before you know it, you’ll be hooked again and you will find more time, because you’ll be hungry for it.

Did we explore new sources of motivation?
I discovered Writers HQ this year, and went to one of their workshops. This fabulous organisation, while never glossing over how hard writing can be, encourages participants relentlessly and ensures you keep going. I definitely will be using their services more in 2018, and I recommend checking out their website, if just for a giggle at their cheekiness.

Every year I seem to discover a new anthem to get me psyched to create. In 2017 it was pretty much the whole soundtrack of Hamilton. ‘I wrote my way out of Hell…I was louder than the crack in the bell.’ The crannies where we write are The Room Where It Happens, people.

Did we cultivate wonder?
We writers often find ourselves serving as essential conduits for the

Cam Peak in bluebell season.
Or, if you don’t live near mountains as such, climbing a bluebell-robed hill at sunset should do the trick.

suffering of the world. Sometimes it’s up to us to draw attention to it, and we risk getting cynical (even the Relatively Privileged Middle Aged among us). We can’t let negativity taint our writing. Whether it’s climbing a mountain, absorbing the camaraderie that develops among strangers on a bus commute, or revelling in a fellow writer’s impromptu recitation of Tennyson, we must remind ourselves of the beauty in the world.

Did we take in lots of voices?
This year I loved broadening my reading list following Women’s Writer School discussions on Women in Translation month and LGBTQ writers. Listening to panels on diversity at various literature festivals introduced me to the work of Reni Eddo-Lodge and Jess Hiles, as well as sign language poetry. I look forward to learning more, and supporting more diverse writers by purchasing their work in 2018. For anyone else interested, this reading challenge checklist from the Reading Women discussion group on Goodreads looks amazing.

Did we gulp our pride down and send our work into the world?
This might be the hardest part. I had a few successes this year—winning the Gloucestershire Writers Network prose prize and reading my story at the Cheltenham Literature Festival was a highlight—but with it have come a number of rejections as well.

And I’m proud of those rejections. I’m proud of the courage they represent. Rejections test us, tempt us to give up—but I’m certainly not going to, and I hope none of you will either.

How many people can do what we do? How many can haul an entire novel out of a brain already taxed by work, family, chores, life—and then ceaselessly chisel and gouge that vast, beloved creative work  into something even better? How many can bravely place their art before the world, pace through weeks or months awaiting the results, only to meet with utter disappointment? And how many, after all that, will do the whole thing again—and again?

We are amazing.

You may recognise the quote in this post’s subtitle, from the end of The Great Gatsby. ‘It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current…’

I’m using it because of a passage in another book which quotes it, The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. The young writer character in this book says, ‘There’s no point in writing a book if you don’t think it can be as good as The Great Gatsby. I mean, it’s all right if you fail—if the finished book just isn’t, somehow, very good—but you have to believe it can be very good before you start.’

Writing, and any artistic pursuit, demand we surround ourselves with a supportive network that fortifies our hearts to believe, while feeding our minds to expand so our self-belief will not be unfounded. This checklist is designed to maintain that balance. Have you got anything to add?

Satisfaction: Friend or Foe?

This Week’s Bit of String: A plugless bath and cellophaned TVs

‘We only bought this place a month ago, so we’re just starting renovations,’ the inn owner tells us, through an American accent so thick it sounds as if she’s chewing something. The three-storey building smells of paint and the rooms we’ve booked have nothing apart from mismatched beds and dressers and a sole, tiny framed picture of the inn on the wall.

She points out the smart TV, and the whisper-thin curtain around the claw-foot bathtub with shower fixture. After we’ve wandered up the sparse street to the general store for a dinner of grinders, and eaten whoopie pies over a travel-sized game of Trouble, we unwrap the telly’s protective plastic to find there’s no antenna or cable so we can’t watch anything but YouTube. We can’t use the bathtub because there’s no plug or drain cover, anywhere.

White Mountains down the road, beyond the trees.
The White Mountains

But we are on an adventure; we’ve just driven through New Hampshire’s White Mountains in a thunderstorm, watching lightning pounce from black clouds, attempting to pierce a slope’s heavy leafy coat.

We’ve been wondering as we travel: What were these bedrooms used for before last month? Who forged the paths through these mountains and started it all? As my husband pondered, ‘Did they think the rest of New Hampshire was too crowded?’

As a species we require a certain amount of dissatisfaction to spur us on. As writers we need to be perpetually on our toes, slow to satisfaction with what we create. Perhaps it’s a gift to get no satisfaction. What sort of goal is satisfaction, anyway?

‘A Toast to the Groom…’

We’re visiting slightly off-season time because my brother got married at the weekend. We’ve partied and I’ve delivered one of the most important things I have ever written: a wedding toast. It was a huge honour. But how do you make a wish for two people that will apply to the rest of their hopefully very long lives?

Our Adventure Begins, wedding sign
‘To marry would be an awfully big adventure…’

In Hamilton, a wedding toast song wishes that the couple may always be satisfied. But I’m not sure about that. It seems simultaneously a low bar and an unrealistically high one. Maybe I’m scarred by the term satisfactory, which thanks to OFSTED school inspection standards sinks year by year from a backhanded compliment to an ever closer neighbour of ‘Needs Improvement.’

Recent Education Ministers clearly haven’t noticed the Latin root of the word. Satis means enough, a fact which Dickens trolled in Great Expectations when he named Miss Havisham’s home Satis House. While blessed with enough materially speaking, Miss Havisham suffered a severe deficiency in her love life. After all, while dissatisfaction sometimes motivates us to seek something better, at other times it slithers into hopelessness, enticing us to curl up and let the cobwebs take over.

Staying Hungry

Sated means an appetite has been filled. It’s supposed to be a good thing, but I associate it with the stupor following midday Sunday roasts. The sun might shine outside, my child would run around wanting to play, and everyone would just slump in front of a Formula One race. Sated but deeply unsatisfied at spending a day thus, I often ended up walking a long, three-mile circuit with my son instead.

This is Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the daytime hours. Other religions use fasting too. When we willingly deprive our bodies, it can help direct our souls and minds to seek deeper fulfillment. (Willingness is key; Maslow was on to something with his Hierarchy of Needs. If physical needs are completely disregarded, one can’t truly develop other aspects of his or her being).

A prick of hunger, a germ of dissatisfaction, may motivate us to improve, seek, experiment. How often do we feel moved to create a great work out of contentment? It’s usually need that drives us.

Writing While Hungry
The happy couple, surrounded by forest
A big world to explore.

In my latest Twitter poll, I asked writers if they’re ever truly satisfied with their work. Forty-one percent responded with Never, twenty-six percent said Not quite, and twenty-nine percent ticked the box for It’ll do. Only four percent—I think that’s just one person—chose the option Sure, why wouldn’t I be?

I’m currently pushing on through edits on a novel. There are parts I’m not sure I’ll ever be satisfied with. But instead of discouraging me, it usually thrills me to know it’ll get better. Ideas will keep popping up, characters will continue to speak, to scratch their heads and change their minds and pivot in their paths.

It would be anticlimactic to write a perfect first draft. Where’s the adventure and rewarding effort in that? There’s a line I love in Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto, about a Renaissance artist who laments his work as being soulless despite its unblemished form. ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’

I think relationships are similar. Being satisfied by someone is great. But we don’t always have to be satisfied with them. We’re allowed to want more, to explore our partner further, to grab their hand and haul them out to explore with us. I paraphrased a line from my novel The Wrong Ten Seconds in my wedding toast: ‘May your love be at once a shelter and a quest, a safe place from which to journey forth and discover more great things.’

We need hope in our lives, and choice, and inspiration. If they’re around, I’ll take adventure over satisfaction; stormy mountains over baths with drain covers. How about you?