My writing space

Lots of people have romantic notions of writers’ studies. I certainly did. But I soon realised that waiting for the perfect environment would mean I’d wait forever to start writing.

So, here’s where I write at the moment:

Kitchen bench

It’s hardly a romantic or conducive spot for great thinking. But, on the positive side, it’s near a power point and the family feels as if I’m around and available. (Hang on, that’s also a negative.)

I prefer to write here:

Writing on the deck

It’s outside in the fresh air, and when I look up from my computer, this is what I see:

View from the deck

The downside is that I have to stretch leads to power my laptop, if it’s raining I can’t safely work out here and, in the afternoon, the sun is too bright to see my screen. But the rest of the day, this is my favourite spot at home.

The joy of writing on a laptop is that I can move around and find more comfortable seats (the bar stools in the kitchen are a killer after a couple of hours) or quieter spots when the kids are home.

And this year I’m going to start making more use of uni. I hope to write there three days a week…Fingers crossed it all works out as planned.

The problem with pedestals

The problem with pedestals is that the higher you place the object of your adoration, the further they have to fall.

I keep learning this the hard way. My New Year’s resolution, which I hope will last me the decade, is to stop placing people up there. After all, it must be hard for them to breathe that rarefied air. I imagine them looking down, feeling dizzy, unable to move because a step in any direction means falling.

When they do eventually fall, and fall they must, I’ve tended to look away. Unable to face the awfulness of their failings when I’d had such dreams and ideals for them. I’m ashamed to say it’s taken me 40 years to realise that human beings don’t belong on pedestals.

With this clearer sight comes curiosity. I want to explore the hero’s body at my feet. It’s dark and bloody and there’s nothing in it that resembles the person I adored, but, somewhere, somehow it is the same.

Did my hero fall or jump? Why did I put him up there in the first place? (Interestingly, they’ve almost all been men. There are only two women I can think of. The first died before she could fall, the second’s splattering didn’t do nearly as much damage as the men I replaced her with.)

The fallen hero is the dark shadow self of the shiny one of my dreams. For the first time, I am fascinated by the shadows. They have the ability to annihilate everything in their path, including me, but the secret is held somewhere in the darkness.

I’m stretching out my hand. I’m feeling for the body. It’s there somewhere and in its contours I might still learn something…

Falling

On Christmas Eve, the earth opened in front of me and I plummeted. It’s two days later and I’m still in freefall. Rocks, stars, branches, ground and sky swirl in a kaleidoscope of meaningless points. I used to know what this meant. This ground used to be firm beneath me. I am filled with rushing air. All grey emptiness inside and this dreadful falling feeling.

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It’s later now. I took my falling thoughts for a swim. Lap after lap and after a kilometre I could feel my arms and legs and the stiffness of exertion. I thought about deleting the paragraph above, but the vertigo is still so close and I feel as if writing about it might help me exorcise it. (Funny how exercise sounds so much like exorcise. Maybe that’s what I was doing with my swim: trying to rid myself of demons.)

I did a play once where I played Sylvia Plath. I remember lines from one of her poems, about the terribleness of being open. She wrote ‘It is a terrible thing/to be so open: it is as if my heart/put on a face and walked into the world.’

How many people have blogs where they peel back their skin and expose their hearts to anyone who happens to stumble on their words? There must be millions. Is it a modern malaise: this compulsion to share intimate details? Do we want to be known? Is it a desperate reaching out for contact or affirmation?

I sought information, even though I knew what curiosity did to the cat. Mea culpa.

Lyall on YouTube

A fascinating old clip of Lyall on YouTube: Talking about the Elliott Light Pen in 1967

He looks so young…

Creative development – part one

This week I spent two days in a creative development for The Kerensky Project. Creative developments can differ wildly in their efficacy and usefulness for a writer. Some are more for the director than the writer. There have been times as a writer when I’ve wondered what I’m doing in the room, and whether the others need me at all in the process. But this one was different.

This creative development has been structured so well and has already been so useful to me that I’d like to share my discoveries with you. Some may seem obvious, but I hope this might be useful to other writers/creative teams considering creative developments.

1. Decide what you want to achieve from this development and communicate it to everyone involved. Sounds obvious but this is often overlooked. For instance, is this development to help the writer work on a draft of the script? Perhaps it’s for the director to trial some new ways of working with the script? Or perhaps it’s for a group to collaborate together to come up with a new script? All perfectly valid – as long as everyone involved has signed up for the same process.
2. Don’t confuse a creative development with a showing or rehearsed reading. Too often, we tack these on the end of creative developments and end up spending more time preparing for the reading than doing the developmental work we all signed up for.
3. If the development has the aim of helping a writer complete a draft of a play, then talk to the writer about the best ways of going about this.
4. You might like to split the development over several weeks (as we’re doing this time) to enable the writer to write new scenes.
5. Use some of the resources for the writer to work with the director/dramaturg before the workshops with actors begin.
6. Don’t feel constrained to stay sitting down reading words from a page all day: Let the actors act.

On day two of our creative development, director Michael Futcher split the actors into pairs and gave them scenes from the first draft to explore. They decided what they thought the drama of each scene was and then improvised the heart of the scenes back to me, the writer. This was incredibly useful for me. It showed me that the essence of the scene could often be shown in three lines – it didn’t need the five pages I’d written. An actor lives and breathes life into your characters. You don’t have to labour points because a good actor will convey your message with the minimum words.

I’m taking the red pen to everything I’ve done so far. The three-hour opus I’ve written can easily be half the length.

On writing and self

The lovely people at Queensland Writers Centre contacted me to ask if I’d write a post to go on their blog tour.

They set me some questions about writing and here are my answers…

Where do your words come from?

I was about to be flippant and say, ‘from my brain, of course!’ and then I started to think about it. I think they come from my unconscious. I’m unable to write creatively to a plan. Lots of good writers do, but I’m clearly missing the necessary gene for it. I try to follow an outline and, within the first paragraph, I’ve veered wildly off course. The only way I can write is to put the words down and follow where they take me.

Essays and non-fiction pieces are different. They can be plotted and worked out analytically. But my creative writing is as loose as finger painting. I only know the story I’m writing once I’ve written it. Sometimes it’s frustrating, wondering where on earth I’m going with something. Sometimes I worry that I’m heading the wrong way and wasting precious writing time.

When I do reach the end and am able to say, ‘Ah! So that’s what it’s about’, there are often big chunks that don’t belong and that have to be cut. But I’m happy to do this. I don’t ever think of them as being discarded. They’re waiting for me to write the piece they do belong in. Which is a nicely fuzzy concept. Chances are I’ll never use them, but at least I don’t feel as if I’m murdering my darlings. Instead, they’re wrapped in cottonwool, waiting for the play or story that’s right for them.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I was born and grew up in South Africa before moving to England at 10. We came to Australia when I was 15 and I now live in the leafy hills of Toowong, on the outskirts of Brisbane. Moving so much as a child – 7 schools and at least 13 different homes and towns – made me desperate to put down roots as an adult. I’ve never felt I belong anywhere, which can be liberating but also lonely.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

I pushed open the door and the cheery hello fell from my lips. It cracked into a hundred pieces as it hit the floor. It was never going to bounce. Moods change in a heartbeat, faster than words can be said.

(I was going to use the first line from my latest play, but it starts with a stage direction, which is a bit dull!)

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I find several new ones to add to the list every year.

Tim Winton Cloudstreet and pretty much all his books
Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex
Janette Turner Hospital Due Preparations for the Plague
Barbara Kinsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Sue Woolfe The Secret Cure
Cormac McCarthy The Road
Pers Petterson Out Stealing Horses
and on and on and on it goes…

What are you currently working towards?

I’m on the second draft of my new play, The Kerensky Project, and I’m playing around with ideas for a memoir/biography, which will also be a play but may be prose as well. The first line earlier is from this experimenting.

Complete this sentence…

The future of the book is…Exciting. It may change shape and form and not be the physical book we hold in our hands now, but people will always want stories. They’re part of our identity. And reading is the most intimate and personal way of engaging with a story. From the writer’s brain, straight to yours.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

One foot in the grave

- thankfully not. But that’s the first thing I thought last week when I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. What an unfortunate name for an illness. It sounds horribly terminal when, in fact, it responds well to treatment. It’s a disease related to the thyroid.

The diagnosis shocked me but also made sense of the many symptoms plaguing me for the last couple of months. What I found really disturbing though was that I’d never heard of Graves, when it is incredibly common. In America, apparently, two women in every hundred suffer from it. This isn’t rare, so why hadn’t I heard of it? Why did I brush off all my symptoms without alarm bells ringing?

I’m including my symptoms here so that other people who may be suffering as I was might stumble on them and take themselves off for a blood test.

My symptoms

• Insomnia – for two months I slept no more than three hours a night, frequently not at all.
• Racing heart – one of the reasons I couldn’t sleep was because my heart was beating so fast. It turned out my resting heart rate was 126 and walking the five minutes it took to get from the bus stop to work brought it up to 220.
• Impervious to cold – I normally have the coldest hands and feet. In previous winters I’d be bundled up in all my clothes and sleeping with a hot water bottle. This winter I kicked the blankets off and bared my skin to the night air. When I couldn’t sleep and got up at night to write, I didn’t even put on a dressing gown or slippers. Our house drops down to about 5 degrees Celsius on winter nights.
• Red, starey eyes – my eyes were so red and sore that I saw two doctors for them. One gave me drops for allergic eyes, the other thought it was conjunctivitis. I thought it was the lack of sleep.
• Shaking hands – I attributed this to lack of sleep and the constant feeling of anxiety I was experiencing.
• Trouble swallowing – I frequently choked on bread and it took about ten swallows to get some mouthfuls of food down.
• Swollen neck – to be honest I didn’t even notice this. The only time it troubled me was when I put on a polo-neck top and thought I was going to suffocate.
• Manic behaviour – not being able to stop for more than a few minutes at a time. Constantly on the go, writing, re-writing and researching. My family was worried by this, but I thought I was being highly efficient and productive.
• Increased appetite – I was constantly starving and eating, but didn’t put on any weight.

Put them all together, as I’ve just done, and it’s ridiculous that I didn’t take myself to the doctor earlier. My only excuse is that so many of the symptoms seemed to be related to the lack of sleep and the pressure I was under with work, a PhD and play deadlines.

The good news with Hyperthyroidism and Graves Disease, is that it is treatable. If the medications don’t work then taking the thyroid out can fix things up. The bad news is that it can mean a life time of medication. But that’s not so bad. It’s certainly not the end of the world.

I’m concerned that, as we get the medication right, I might be dopey, sleepy, uninspired, uncreative and fat. Putting on weight doesn’t worry me nearly as much as losing my mental sharpness. Hmm – shouldn’t that be acuity? Is it starting already?

By going public with this disease, instead of hiding it as if it’s something shameful, I hope to find other people who’ve suffered from thyroid problems and who can reassure me with how easy it is to treat. I also hope that what I’ve described might help someone else make an early diagnosis. As I’ve discovered, a simple blood test reveals thyroid over-function or under-function.

Photos of Lyall

When I arrived home from South Africa, there was a parcel waiting for me. A parcel of photos of Lyall.

Many thanks to Annie who took most of these, kept them safely and then gave them to me. This is Lyall as I remember him from the first time I met him at Hwange Game Reserve in the mid 1970s.

Lots of writing – but not here

I’ve been back from Africa for almost two months and haven’t managed a single post about the experience.

Several reasons for this. One is that I came back to looming deadlines for the PhD. I had a literature review and draft prospectus both due within a couple of weeks of my return. As soon as I’d finished these I went straight into creative developments for two of my plays (Rosie Little and The Kerensky Project).

It’s been a wonderfully creative and inspiring last month – but this blog has suffered.

Another factor in not writing here is that I write a blog for work. Each week I write a new post on theatre in Brisbane for a Performing Arts blog on ourbrisbane.com. My latest post describes a recent playwriting experience and talks about the benefits and otherwise of feedback early in the creative process.

But I will write about South Africa and talk about where I’m at with my research into Lyall’s life soon. I promise.

Lyall

It’s only five days until I go to South Africa to try to piece together some of my uncle’s earlier years … it’s immensely exciting but I’m also very nervous about what I will and won’t find.

I’ve set up a page on this blog dedicated to Lyall and I’m hoping it will help some other people who knew him to find me …

At the pyramids for my 18th birthday

The above photo of Lyall and me was taken on my 18th birthday when he took me to Egypt to celebrate. That’s a whole story on its own and I may share it here one day.

When I come back from South Africe, I hope that I’ll have new photos and information to add to the ‘Lyall Watson’ page. That’s the plan at any rate. Let’s see how it all unfolds.