Excerpt from 'Zoe and May' - new and unpublished

And then every Saturday, his ex brought around May, his five-year-old daughter. He was getting to know her still, after two years when he and Cathy hadn’t spoken, and the only times he’d seen May were through a parked car window, coming out of Cathy’s place on a blustery winter afternoon in a duffle-coat that made her look like Paddingon Bear, or going into the supermarket and emerging again half an hour later, skipping beside her plastic bag-laden mother. He’d watch the house for hours, nothing changing whatsoever except dark drawing in—this was so unhealthy—while inside, his daughter’s childhood was taking place.

Now at last he had her, and didn’t know what to do with her at all, he’d never felt such an oaf. The car door would slam in the street, and there she’d be at the end of the drive, with her overnight case in one hand and Puss-puss, her stuffed toy, dangling from the other. He’d open his arms, and while she ran to him, his eye would be drawn to the dark head in the car, turned his way. The long pause before she turned the ignition and the car slid off.

This mistrust made him defiant, but still he had no idea. When he lifted her up and spun her round he half expected his big dumb hands to be seared by contact with such loveliness. Mayflower, he said, kissing her cheeks. According to the scales she weighed fourteen kilograms, but he could not believe it. She felt light as a kite, only the pulsing imbalance of her kicking legs indicating she had any weight to her at all. What do you do when a butterfly lands on your shoulder? You hold your breath and wait and try not to move so you won’t damage it.

But holding still, he knew, would not save him from harming her, this serious child whose eyes took in everything, like she was swallowing the world whole. If he was not to damage her he would need to act, to decide, to care and nurture, he knew this, but—fathering? He simply didn’t have a clue. He remembered the first day she came, standing in his empty living room—he’d cleaned and vacuumed for the occasion, thinking he was preparing for her, making an effort, but now as she stood there on the bare carpet, like a sad but polite traveller, he understood he’d got it all wrong again.

Furthering the theme of successive approximations from my last post, I heard someone on the Book Show today talking about the idea of working and working a poem until it stands up and says, "You have found me." The same idea, from a less mathematical perspective! I used to write poetry, was never all that good at it, but I think in my short stories I'm still driven by the poet's yearning for precision and highest refinement. Poetry is apprehended by all the senses: image and cadence of course, but to me the ultimate poetic sense is olfactory. You breathe in a poem, like the subtlest perfume, like a vapour arising between the lines. You could say that, literarily speaking, a novel offers meat: something to fill the belly, whereas a poem offers fragrance only, a very Buddhist sort of pleasure. I am not a poet because I am still too hungry, and then not quite a novelist, because I am too ascetic. So I keep on writing these damn short stories.

I have also reflected recently, like many writers before, on the failure of the realised to attain the perfection of the ideal. So those attracted to perfection, like myself, tend to cut back, to pare away the explicit in favour of the suggested. It truly is an ascetic's impusle, as if the cutting away, the negating of the material, somehow leaves a space in which the ideal can be reflected, can breathe. But the ultimate end of such an impulse, if left unchecked, is the negation of form entirely. It's J.D. Salinger's rumoured room full 0f stories too precious to ever be published, or John Cage's 4'33''. It's silence and anorexia. Poetic writing - by which I mean not just poetry, but all writing with a poetic sensibility, must play its music on a string drawn tight by the tension between the material and the formless, between sound and silence, being and emptiness.

And anyway - final thought - novels can have fragrance too. Some ideas, some images, some thoughts can only breathe in the space given by a whole novel. You have to build a cathedral if you want to make organ music. And yes, I'm mixing my sensory metaphors awfully, but you'll get the gist of the riff...

Eroticising the landscape, and the method of successive approximations

The method of successive approximations is the way to go, I decided last night, as I tried to beat my latest story into shape. Sometimes I think I'm just too much of a scientist to be a writer - always looking for some theory or clever trick to capture or explain the creative process. Well anyway, it's my latest way of thinking about writing. Start with a broad idea, write it out, however it comes out, and then gradually shape it closer and closer to the 'ideal' in one's mind. It's kind of obvious in a way, but I find it a more helpful way of thinking about writing than a linear write-it-from-beginning-to-end type of model, which tends to lead to me obsessively reworking paragraph one to the brink of perfection or extinction.

The other day, I came up with this:

In the clog of the river, the slow sick froth and stagnation she’s lain for three days, face down and slowly swelling with the stench of the crime. Gone the girl, the beautiful girl, she’s long fled among the reeds, the cicada song, the thrips and the swooping kingfishers, she’s rushed out like a gasp into the starry chill. That is her in the long, elegant step of the heron, her in the silky fall of dusk, her in the crushed breath of eucalypt, the sigh of night breeze.

The thing down there in the river bend is not her, is nothing, only the carcass, the bag: a corrupted sac of virescent meat. The river stings and itches with flies, and plops with gases, and gathers the scum of decay in its teeth of rotted trunks and boughs. The thing-that-was-once-a-girl goes to collect there too, to slowly bloat and stink and simulate life with its sighing and popping and subsiding, as if restless with sad thoughts. It forgets itself and farts and belches and lets itself go completely, gets fat with death, does not even care that the rats tear flakes from its soft, white edges, that the maggots swarm on the water line and fill its skin like a piñata. It embraces decay unreservedly, loses unity and becomes a multitude, a human-shaped colony of crawling and microscopic things, her once fine, splendid flesh softening, loosening, dissolving away, so that soon all that once clothed her in loveliness will break up like suds and the bones will rise out, a reminder that a life cannot so easily be unmade. The bones will rise out, white as stones, severe and fragile, to sing in the twilight of lost and forgotten things, of love unmade and deeds undone.

Somehow it seems unlikely to become a short story, more likely the novel I write while I'm not writing the novel I'm supposed to be writing. Am I really considering some Wolf-Creek-Ivan-Milat-Joanne-Lees suspense thriller here? Hmm, we shall see...

I think I mentioned that I convened a writers' group last year, beginning with writers who have all been published in the Sleepers Almanac, but now expanded beyond that somewhat. I call us the Almaniacs in my mind, but I'm not sure anybody else knows that. Anyway, we are privileged to have some fine writers in our small tribe, and none finer than Jessica Au, whose story 'Leopards' is probably my favourite from last year's Almanac and who, at the age of twenty-very-little, writes absolutely Winton-esque prose. She's been presenting chapters from her novel in development for our delectation in recent meetings. I wish I could post some of the lines here, but that would be presumptuous. I can't however resist the one quote, something about "girls with salt in their hair and bodies struck with sunlight". "Bodies struck with sunlight" - how simple and gorgeous. I read this chapter with a feeling of sick excitement and jealousy. Trust me, you read it here first: this book will win prizes, and if it doesn't sell as well, then you're all crazy you hear me?

I heard David Malouf on the Book Show on Radio National talking about "eroticising the landscape" when he writes, and that is exactly what Jess does so beautifully: she manages to scoop some of the essential and the sensual out of whatever she describes, so that what comes off the page is somehow more vivid and sublime than the real thing.

I went back to my own half-finished offering after the group finished feeling curiously dispirited and inspired (impossible, I know, but true). I just had to get some of that same vividness into it. Writing about erotic love, I realised I was sentimentalising, vaselining my lens. I was missing the irregularity and uniqueness of my subject. Everything was getting emulsified, and in the process actually losing its eroticism. So - the method of successive approximations - I started trying to write in these unexpected, even jarring elements. My perfectionism can be a killer, but it also means I get better, I hope. I'm always seeing the David (Malouf?) in the marble and trying to chip him out.

Update

For the legions reading this blog (hey Luke, did you find it?), at last an update. I finally finished the story that wasn't working back on my 'bad writing day' in July (July! Can't believe it!), and it was just accepted for publication in Meanjin in September next year. Also, my story 'Salt' was just published in New Australian Stories, by Scribe. It didn't, however, get anywhere in the Boroondara Awards. Nothing. Nix. Boo hoo.

In more evidence that mine own worst enemy is mine self, I met up with Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame the other day (hey Lou, did you find it?), and gloomily recited to her the plot outline of my novel-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question. She seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and what's more, that it might even sell! (I felt a bit bad about this possibility. If it's likely to sell, doesn't that mean that it's kind of crap? :) ) Well anyway, I left this meeting with a spring in my step. Maybe I really do know what I'm doing! I still feel unready to really get stuck into the writing of it, but it has been congealing in my mind since then...

I'm not giving the game away here, but the book is based on my grandfather Osmar White, who wrote Green Armour, a classic first hand account of the war in New Guinea in 1942. I have about 100,000 words of letters he wrote to my grandmother over the course of WWII, a veritable gold-mine. The difficulties are numerous - not least is the problem of fictionalisation: too much, too little? I can't rewrite Green Armour, his own marvellous account of the experiences that left him scarred, transformed and deepened. But I am starting to see a way forward...

Years ago, before I was a writer, I dreamed he gave me a manuscript to complete. Perhaps it was just about continuing the line of writers, writing on the unfinished family story as it were, but I had the sense there was something he regretted having left unsaid. So I choose to take the dream more literally, to try to finish something he failed to complete. As I have no idea what that is, I can only trust that something will lead me to get it right in the end. Perhaps that sense of an imposed mission is the only thing that will give me the confidence to actually write a damn book.

Well, it's been a while. Guess I'm not so good at the daily blog thing. Last week my story 'This Old Man' was published in Award Winning Australian Writing and I spoke at the launch. I talked about the autobiographical nature of the story, or at least its autobiographical basis, and I suggested rather sweepingly that all stories are autobiographical, even if they are in costume, so to speak. Perhaps it was a statement that needed more explanation, since subsequent contributors got up to talk about how their stories had nothing to do with their own lives. Perhaps my original statement was a little extreme, a little provocatively put. But I think there's a defensible point there. All stories must come from our own inner life, whether or not they follow the factual details of our life story. Perhaps it might have been better to say that autobiography is the richest source of stories we have available, and that even the stories we tell that have no superficial relation to our own lives are informed at a hidden level by the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. Enough said.

Thanks owing to my writing group - a little band of former contributors to the Sleepers Almanac who have taken to meeting monthly to workshop our stuff. They gave me some incredibly valuable help with the story that eventually became 'Salt' and which I have now submitted to the Boroondara Literary Awards. I'm not expecting first prize again, but it might rate a commendation or something, who knows?

I've made something of a discovery this weekend - writing freehand is a far better way for me to develop a first draft that writing on a computer. It has something to do with the messy imperfection of my handwriting - mine more than most, let me tell you! - and the fact that there is no capacity to cut and paste, or go back to obsessively 'refine' what I just wrote. My notebooks are turning out to be a far richer source of ore for stories than the innumerable fragments I have in the 'abandoned' and 'in progress' folders on my hard drive. I often love the stuff I stumble on in my notebooks, but frequently find the computer stuff to be lifeless.

Something else I have learned is that meditation helps my writing. It is not only the ability to focus in on the core of one's experience tat meditation teaches, but the discipline of staying with. I find there is a moment (well, in fact, many moments) in writing at which there is an impulse to spring away, to make a cup of tea, tidy my room, check my emails, whatever - anything to escape the discipline of staying with the work. This occurs even when I am on a roll. There is a part that kicks in saying, 'Okay, well done, that's enough for now.' The precise same impulse occurs in meditation - a restless desire to jump up, or at least to escape from the discipline of concentration into some line of fantasy or meandering thought. Meditation is teaching me the importance of pushing through these impulses, going deeper, staying inside the discipline of writing.

Yesterday was a good writing day - I riffed on the theme of a lost lover and found myself moving into a state of poetic intensity, a sort of rhapsodic, hypnotic lyricism. I stand by my statement about autobiography - our personal experiences of loss and love must be the well from which such creative outpourings come. Our writing always reflects the state of mind it was written in. We cannot write with life and passion and originality about things that we cannot experience from the inside.

A bad day at the office

Oh crap writing day! Yesterday was supposed to be a writing day, but instead it got frittered away on nothing, because I could sense in myself that I was empty. So today I tried again, determined to make a better fist of it. I took a notebook down to the Green Grocer in North Fitzroy (where the granola is the best on Earth) and sat in front of the fire, not writing but reading. Two glorious short stories from the Best Australian Short Stories 2007. The first was 'Speak to Me' by Paddy O'Reilly. If you haven't read this story, it's worth the price of the whole book, I swear it. Of course this is a personal thing, but I haven't been so thrilled by a short story in a long time. Forget Nabokov (I've been labouring through his collection) - read this! The other one was Cate Kennedy's 'Tender', as beautifully observed and simply written as all her short stories, and on any other day I would have been wowed. But Paddy O'Reilly's alien in the underwear drawer made it almost pale by comparison.

So after two lattes and two stories I went home again, having written zilch, and then decided to sit in front of my computer and have a go at something equally brilliant as 'Speak to Me'. Yes of course! I realised. All the possibilities that the surreal has to cast light on the human condition! Why hadn't I realised it before? Why was I so earth-bound? Everything is possible in fiction, so go for it...

Nothing, of course. A horrible emptiness. I'm brimming with the sense of everything that's possible, but I got nothing. I open up a story I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It's terrible. Some nice passages, but each nice paragraph, instead of adding up with all the others to something great, cancels out the others, so at the end when I try to deliver a punch line of sorts it's got nothing whatsoever behind it. It's pitiful, laughable. So the protagonist discovers that he cares. Pity that I, the reader, don't.

Still, there's gotta be something that I can salvage from all those fine words. Okay, so how's this bit:

It was the year I first got drunk, up there in that empty space full of echoes and moonlight and scraps of electrical wiring. I suggested an experiment. We would see how far it was possible to mentally resist the effects of alcohol. I’d read books and I believed the mind could do anything. I forced down gulp after gulp of the cold wine until my face went numb and my words slurred. The moonlight sloshed over us and I sprawled out on the bare floor and watched the trees through the window spin without ever completing a rotation. The wine bottle got knocked over and glugged out a great purple stain.

Where will you go? I asked him.

I dunno, I don’t care, he said. His cigarette end moved like a firefly. He was saying that a lot now, about not caring. He didn’t care about school, about the future, about his mum and dad. Anyway what was to care about? Nuclear war was bound to come sooner or later. We’d been expecting it for years. When we were younger we’d made plans to bury tins of food up on the Black Spur. We’d have mountain bikes and leave food on the doorsteps of people with less foresight than ourselves. Even now we still thought a little wistfully about the possibility of nuclear holocaust. At least it would be dramatic.

He opened the second bottle and I guzzled straight from the neck. Yes, hell, who cared? Through the window I could see the house I’d grown up in. It was as familiar as a face, like a big square head with windows for eyes, a head full of memories. But the last lights had gone out, its lids were drawn down. It slept unaware that I was out in the construction site next door, watching it with cold, unsympathetic eyes.

I kind of like that. Gotta be able to take it somewhere. Somehow I've got to make the thing cohere, got to bind the whole narrative together into something tight and compelling, the way those three paragraphs are. So I try starting again, but after two sentences I hit the little red x at top right. Do you wish to save? No thanks. (Which reminds me of something irrelevant but amusing. My nine-year-old son downloaded a picture of Everest from the internet. When he went to save it, he got a message saying 'Mt Everest already exists. Do you wish to replace it?' He found that hilarious, and of course I then had thirty minutes of variations: your arm already exists, do you wish to replace it? etc etc)

I'm labouring against a headwind today. So then I opened up my story 'White Summer' (due to be published in Sleepers Almanac 2009. Pre-order your copy today! Oh. You can't. Never mind.) Love that story! My mother tells me it is miserable, which is sort of true, but it is beautiful too, and ends with redemption of sorts. I have no aversion to sadness in my stories. I opened it to remind myself that I can write, and also because I'm thinking of using the character as part of my novel. I got to the end and thought Yes! I love it! and immediately opened up a blank document and started to write the first chapter of my novel, for the second time. One paragraph before all inspiration had haemorrhaged out of me onto the page and I was left staring at the blinking cursor. It was mocking me so I closed the page.

In the meantime, I was running my 'Word Learner' program in the margin, a little application I've written that helps me to learn, you guessed it, words. For some reason I believe I can multitask while writing the great Australian novel. I stare at the procession of obscure four-letter words that are all worth four points in scrabble.

leat inro neal rial aune raun trin sean ...

Then I go to see if anyone has made a move on scrabulous or chess pro...

There's a guy in my writing group who's written 70,000 words since November or something. He loves it. I hate him.

I check my emails. There's one from a friend I've never met whose life consists of following her diplomat husband across the far continents of the globe, playing scrabble and penning prettily written short stories about her gardeners and the diplomatic parties she has attended with self-important dignitaries where she'd wanted to dance naked on the cream cake. She's a great critic, and I'd asked her to read a couple of my stories, including the bad one that I hadn't realised was bad at that point. I'd then sent her a follow up email begging her not to read it after all, in fact to destroy it all costs, knowing that this was futile, and she was only going to be all the more likely to read the damn thing. She'd sent me a harried email from what I'd imagined was some windswept hut in the rain shadow of the Andes, but which turned out to be a local library in Northern Ireland, where she was having a holiday from her taxing schedule of horseriding in Uruguay. The email said she'd get to the stories when she had a moment, and informed she'd been paid twenty pounds for a story that had been accepted on an internet writing site.

Twenty pounds! Ah this is the life eh, writing? The glamour, the women! The twenty pound notes to throw around like petals at a wedding. The fast cars. The dizzying social calendar. The awards.

Which reminds me. Those champions of fine literature over at the National Jazz Writing Awards rejected my entry! A grand total of 57 entries, and mine failed to reach the short list of ten. The email of doom kindly informed me that this failure didn't necessarily mean my work was no good. It might just not be the right piece at the right time. You don't win the award, but please accept this condescension prize. Ah well, such is life...

It's dark now and raining. My bad writing day has come to an end. And look! Someone's made a move on scrabulous!

Excerpt from 'The Wasps' Nest'

The following is a short extract from my story 'The Wasps Nest', currently unpublished.

In the visits centre Alan was sitting hunched at the plastic table, so shrunken she hardly recognized him when she scanned the room. She was looking for the big strong mechanic she’d married, who’d so often boasted about the dodgy parts dealers he’d bested at the garage — not this frightened old man with his unshaven cheeks and edgy, fast-moving eyes. It was noisy and heckling in there, the kids bored and screaming while their parents huddled, bracketing their snatched intimacy with their backs and trying to grope one another out of sight of the officers. Alan stood and pulled out a chair for her — that was him all over, always polite, knew how to treat a lady. It was why she married him, that old-fashioned courtesy. A true gentleman, she always said. A gentleman at a time when her body and soul thirsted for gentleness like water. The bruises had faded, the bones mended, but after she escaped her first marriage she still suffered a terrible tenderness in her skin. A harsh word made her shake, the abrasion of a doorway hurt like a blow, even the hard light of summer assaulted her and had her wearing her dark glasses again, hiding in them like a shellfish. She had thought she could never bear to let a man touch her again. But then there had been Alan, courting her with flowers, the old-fashioned way.

And she’d told him. She’d said to him that if his intentions weren’t honourable then he could forget it right away; she wasn’t like that. Of course she knew she was damaged goods and was lucky to have him at all, someone to take her to the pokies on a Saturday night, or drive her to Target when she needed a new pair of shoes. But it had given her such pleasure playing the role of someone she wished she’d had the chance to be. Forty-two and acting like a schoolgirl who’d never been kissed. It was such silliness yet such dizzy pretence. And Alan opening doors and kissing her hand, for goodness sake. She shouldn’t have been shocked at the proposal, when it came. Alan was a man and even the sweetest of men won’t wait forever. She’d just hoped to play the game a little longer. Of course she said yes, and then she wept, and Alan thought it was happiness. She let him believe it; how could she ever have explained her grief?