I must admit that yesterday I cheated. Or I could say that today I cheated.
The posting that appears in my blog today, Friday, wasn't actually posted today. It was written yesterday and I arranged for it to be posted automatically on Friday using a special new feature of Blogspot that allows you to schedule postings for future dates.
But because I'm doing the same thing today, Friday, you won't be able to read this posting until at least Saturday. So when I called today 'Friday', that wasn't strictly accurate, as today is now Saturday. And yesterday isn't really yesterday, it's Friday. Or is that today?
Confused? You're not the only one!
I've been playing tricks with time. But then, isn't that what writers often do?
Take Vanishing Acts, for example, the book I was discussing yesterday - or was it two days ago.....? The central character, Delia, thinks she can make sense of her life so far until one day the police turn up at her house and arrest her father. What she learns after that completely turns her family history upside down. History is, in effect, rewritten, as far as she is concerned. The life that she thought she had is overwritten by another version, like a new version of a computer file replacing an existing one.
Then there's the way that Audrey Niffenegger played with time in her magnificent Richard and Judy Book Club read, The Time Traveler's Wife. The central character of the book, Henry, has a disorder which causes him to time-travel, spontaneously, against his will. It brings a new meaning to the phrase, 'If I knew then what I know now'. Would we want to know what the future had in store for us, for example, that this is the last time you and your wife will ever be together?
Then, of course, there are the usual sci-fi time travel adventures, including Dr. Who. I was particularly moved by an episode in an earlier series in which the adult Rose finds herself at the moment in her childhood when her father is about to be killed in a road accident. She is tortured by the inevitability of what is going to happen to him and her desire to prevent his death, even though saving him would mean her changing the course of history.
In real life, our future unfolds second by second, minute by minute, day by day. We don't have the luxury of knowing what the future will hold for us. Sometimes this is frustrating, when it means we have to wait and see how things will turn out. If we've lost our job, it would be nice to know that we won't be unemployed forever - this is just a little break, some time off before we get an even better job. It would be nice to know that our dad will recover from his heart attack, even though he's in Intensive Care and it's touch and go. It would be nice to know that the two-year old who is driving us mad with her temper tantrums will eventually turn into a pleasant, calm grown-up.
But if we did know everything that lay in store for us, all the downs as well as the ups, the things that don't turn out the way we hoped, we would find that knowledge unbearable. Like drivers on a dark night, we see just as far as the headlight beam allows us to. We can plan, we can hope, but we can never know exactly what the future has in store for us.
Perhaps that's one of the attractions of being a writer. The future of our characters is in our hands. We can know every detail of it, plan every detail of it, as well as every moment of their past. Talk about being a control freak!
Some writers carry this to the nth degree, planning every twist and turn of their plot before they write a single word. Others prefer to let their characters surprise them. I was amazed when one of my characters, a feisty shock-jock, ended up having a baby. When I started writing the play I never for one moment imagined that she would. But then I didn't know her so well in those days...
We have other brushes with time in our working life. Perhaps we are doing the sort of writing where we are assailed by deadlines at every turn, shooting schedules, rewrites, producers yelling for redrafts. Perhaps time is dragging for us because we have writer's block and can't motivate ourselves. But then there are other moments when we are 'in the zone', when time becomes irrelevant and we appear to be outside of it because we are so lost in the creative process.
For some of us, these occasions are few and far between, unexpected, uncontrollable gifts. Others have managed to develop the knack of creating this sort of 'flow', creating our own timelessness within time. Susan K. Perry's 'Writing in Flow' is a fascinating look at how some writers manage to make this happen with many suggestions to help us acquire this emotionally satisfying state.
It's great when you are so absorbed in your writing so much that you completely lose track of how long you've been working. In fact, I think it's just happened to me. Is it that time already?
It's later than I thought, but there's no need to worry. You're not reading this in real time, so I'm ahead of myself. At least I think I am! How did that time shift work again....?
Saturday 31 May 2008
Friday 30 May 2008
A Change is as Good as a Rest
The Spring Bank Holiday has been and gone and, like many families, we enjoyed simply having a change from our usual routine: the chance to be together at home as a family, without the hectic schedules and demands of work and school, the chance to have meals together, the chance to try out some new recipes instead of sticking to the old favourites.
Over the weekend we tried out two new recipes from one of our lovely vegetarian cook books -Vegetable and Rice Tian and Spaghetti with Courgettes, Lemon and Pistachio Nuts. Not only did we enjoy the food - trying something outwith our normal habits seemed to rejuvenate our spirits as well.
Sunday dinners don't have to consist of roast meat and two veg. They can be anything we fancy, as long as we organise ourselves enough to plan them and buy the necessary ingredients. Even the humble spud took on a new lease of life by being baked in its jacket instead of roasted, steamed or mashed.
Combine that with the fact that for the first time in weeks we actually had a day where none of us had appointments to keep, deadlines to meet, places to be and you can see how life opened up before our very eyes. Three whole days to spend exactly as we wanted, where we wanted, doing whatever we wanted.
For once, the treadmill had stopped long enough for us to step off it, stop and admire the scenery, and ask ourselves whether we really wanted to be on the blessed thing after all.
Fortunately, I think for all of us the answer was 'Yes'. Having a bit of breathing space can help you to realise that your lot in life isn't that bad - in fact, it's pretty damned good, and given the chance, you'd choose to spend your time in the same places, doing the same things, with the same people.
I'd still teach my class creative writing; my husband would still work with maths; my son would carry on playing the saxophone at his world-famous music school. I'd still go for Reiki treatments with my wonderful Reiki master, Chris, still play the clarinet in my quartet, still have lunches at Table 2 in my favourite cafe, the Oak Rooms.
OK, there are some things I would like to change. It would be nice if Huddersfield were on the coast, but I can't see that happening in the near future, not even with global warming. It would be nice if it were nearer Scotland, so I could see more of my friends and family, go to all the plays at Dundee Rep, and listen to Radio Scotland in the bathroom. But I wouldn't want Northumberland and Cumbria to disappear from the face of the earth, so maybe it's best to leave things as they are.
Some things are easy to change though. Like feeling bored. Feeling as if you're stuck in a rut. You don't need to make any grand gestures - chuck your job in, swap your wife for a lapdancer, move to Outer Mongolia. Sometimes little things can make all the difference.
One of the little things that brightened up my holiday weekend was sitting down at my dining room table with three sets of pliars, some bits of metal and a box of lovely shiny beads.
During the past couple of months I'd been to a couple of jewellery-making workshops run by a lovely young lady called Maria Lau. Even though I've never really thought of myself as 'crafty' or 'artistic', it had been really enjoyable to spend an afternoon designing and making a piece of jewellery. OK, I did come close to swearing several times when I had been trying to fasten the same jump ring for fifteen minutes and the darned thing seemed to spend more time on the floor than in my hands. But it was fun.
It was OK making jewellery in the workshop, though. It was a controlled environment. The expert Maria was on hand to check that our pieces weren't going to fall to bits, tidy up messy joints, recommend using a new jump ring when the other one was clearly no longer fit for anything.
But at home.....how would I cope with no one to rescue me if things went wrong?
I'd been down to our local market and bought tools, beads, bits and pieces. They'd been sitting on the table for weeks. Every so often I'd open the box, pick up the beads, admire them, savour the texture in my hands, decide which was my favourite colour. I'd do everything with those beads except make jewellery with them.
On Sunday, everything suddenly changed. I'd just finished my breakfast and I was all set to go for my shower, but I felt the call of the beads, there and then. Before I knew it, the tools were out of their packets, the beads were being assembled on head pins, and I was making earrings. One pair, then another, then another. My thirteen year old son even came and joined in. He turned out to be much better than me at closing jump rings, but my coiled wires were better.....
Suddenly, it was twenty past two, and there was my husband wondering why I was still sitting there in my dressing gown, unwashed. I knew what had happened. I'd got the creative bug.
I may never become a professional jewellery-maker, but I certainly enjoy wearing my creations. I still can't quite believe that the earrings I am wearing used to be just individual beads and bits of metal. To me, it's like magic, alchemy. Take a base substance and turn it into gold.
I suppose as writers that's what we do all the time. Words are nothing special. We're surrounded by them everywhere we turn. They're on take-away menus, TV adverts, cornflake packets. We take them for granted. Taken one by one, they seem insignificant.
But sit down and put them together, play with them, become lost in them and you end up with something special: a story, a book, a drama. You end up with people who didn't exist except as shadowy figures in your mind. Emotions which spring from God knows where.
You have the wherewithal to fascinate, to make people laugh and cry.
'Behold! I make all things new!'
Why don't you make your life fresher this weekend? Go somewhere new, try a new hobby, even shove a potato in the oven instead of peeling the film off a microwave tray? See if life seems different when you give yourself a change, no matter how tiny?
Me? I'm sorted. I've got a necklace to make!
Over the weekend we tried out two new recipes from one of our lovely vegetarian cook books -Vegetable and Rice Tian and Spaghetti with Courgettes, Lemon and Pistachio Nuts. Not only did we enjoy the food - trying something outwith our normal habits seemed to rejuvenate our spirits as well.
Sunday dinners don't have to consist of roast meat and two veg. They can be anything we fancy, as long as we organise ourselves enough to plan them and buy the necessary ingredients. Even the humble spud took on a new lease of life by being baked in its jacket instead of roasted, steamed or mashed.
Combine that with the fact that for the first time in weeks we actually had a day where none of us had appointments to keep, deadlines to meet, places to be and you can see how life opened up before our very eyes. Three whole days to spend exactly as we wanted, where we wanted, doing whatever we wanted.
For once, the treadmill had stopped long enough for us to step off it, stop and admire the scenery, and ask ourselves whether we really wanted to be on the blessed thing after all.
Fortunately, I think for all of us the answer was 'Yes'. Having a bit of breathing space can help you to realise that your lot in life isn't that bad - in fact, it's pretty damned good, and given the chance, you'd choose to spend your time in the same places, doing the same things, with the same people.
I'd still teach my class creative writing; my husband would still work with maths; my son would carry on playing the saxophone at his world-famous music school. I'd still go for Reiki treatments with my wonderful Reiki master, Chris, still play the clarinet in my quartet, still have lunches at Table 2 in my favourite cafe, the Oak Rooms.
OK, there are some things I would like to change. It would be nice if Huddersfield were on the coast, but I can't see that happening in the near future, not even with global warming. It would be nice if it were nearer Scotland, so I could see more of my friends and family, go to all the plays at Dundee Rep, and listen to Radio Scotland in the bathroom. But I wouldn't want Northumberland and Cumbria to disappear from the face of the earth, so maybe it's best to leave things as they are.
Some things are easy to change though. Like feeling bored. Feeling as if you're stuck in a rut. You don't need to make any grand gestures - chuck your job in, swap your wife for a lapdancer, move to Outer Mongolia. Sometimes little things can make all the difference.
One of the little things that brightened up my holiday weekend was sitting down at my dining room table with three sets of pliars, some bits of metal and a box of lovely shiny beads.
During the past couple of months I'd been to a couple of jewellery-making workshops run by a lovely young lady called Maria Lau. Even though I've never really thought of myself as 'crafty' or 'artistic', it had been really enjoyable to spend an afternoon designing and making a piece of jewellery. OK, I did come close to swearing several times when I had been trying to fasten the same jump ring for fifteen minutes and the darned thing seemed to spend more time on the floor than in my hands. But it was fun.
It was OK making jewellery in the workshop, though. It was a controlled environment. The expert Maria was on hand to check that our pieces weren't going to fall to bits, tidy up messy joints, recommend using a new jump ring when the other one was clearly no longer fit for anything.
But at home.....how would I cope with no one to rescue me if things went wrong?
I'd been down to our local market and bought tools, beads, bits and pieces. They'd been sitting on the table for weeks. Every so often I'd open the box, pick up the beads, admire them, savour the texture in my hands, decide which was my favourite colour. I'd do everything with those beads except make jewellery with them.
On Sunday, everything suddenly changed. I'd just finished my breakfast and I was all set to go for my shower, but I felt the call of the beads, there and then. Before I knew it, the tools were out of their packets, the beads were being assembled on head pins, and I was making earrings. One pair, then another, then another. My thirteen year old son even came and joined in. He turned out to be much better than me at closing jump rings, but my coiled wires were better.....
Suddenly, it was twenty past two, and there was my husband wondering why I was still sitting there in my dressing gown, unwashed. I knew what had happened. I'd got the creative bug.
I may never become a professional jewellery-maker, but I certainly enjoy wearing my creations. I still can't quite believe that the earrings I am wearing used to be just individual beads and bits of metal. To me, it's like magic, alchemy. Take a base substance and turn it into gold.
I suppose as writers that's what we do all the time. Words are nothing special. We're surrounded by them everywhere we turn. They're on take-away menus, TV adverts, cornflake packets. We take them for granted. Taken one by one, they seem insignificant.
But sit down and put them together, play with them, become lost in them and you end up with something special: a story, a book, a drama. You end up with people who didn't exist except as shadowy figures in your mind. Emotions which spring from God knows where.
You have the wherewithal to fascinate, to make people laugh and cry.
'Behold! I make all things new!'
Why don't you make your life fresher this weekend? Go somewhere new, try a new hobby, even shove a potato in the oven instead of peeling the film off a microwave tray? See if life seems different when you give yourself a change, no matter how tiny?
Me? I'm sorted. I've got a necklace to make!
Thursday 29 May 2008
Vanishing Acts
Now you see her, now you don't.....I expect you might have been thinking that if you've logged into my blog over the past couple of weeks expecting to find a new posting! Sorry about that! But I'm back and raring to go, after a bit of a break to look after myself (I wasn't feeling so well) and to devote my time to scrutinising my class's portfolios - a very enjoyable and engrossing experience as they have produced a mountain of excellent writing: short stories, non-fiction, drama, analyses of markets and writing. Well done them!
Oh, and I also paid a trip to Huddersfield Town Hall for the Kirklees Community Learning Awards Ceremony to see my class win an award for Learning Group of the Year and one member of the class, Charlotte Thorpe, win an individual award for Best Returner. We had a fantastic evening and it was a fitting conclusion to a year in which my class has constantly amazed me with their enthusiasm, persistence and imagination.
I'm about to join yet another new group for writers - a novel-reading group where the emphasis is on spending each meeting analysing one novel in depth, to help us with our own writing. We are due to meet in a couple of weeks' time for our first discussion and the chosen novel is Jodi Picoult's Vanishing Acts. It's the first Picoult book I have read, although my writing partner Kimm is a great fan of hers and had read virtually all her books.
I avoided Picoult's books for ages thinking that they would be terribly depressing, but I was pleasantly surprised by Vanishing Acts. Yes, it does deal with extreme human predicaments, but the writing is absolutely beautiful and it really sweeps you along. In my class, we discussed similes and metaphors a few weeks ago. I pointed out how important it is to choose a simile that is fresh rather than trotting out old cliches. Vanishing Acts is stuffed fuller than a horsehair sofa with lively and original similes - for example, she says the wrapped-up bales of hay in a field are like giant marshmallows. I think that once I have got to the end of the book, I shall have to go back and re-read it with a notebook in my hand, recording her fantastic use of language so that I can share it with my classes next year.
I hope that you have been enjoying your reading and writing while I've been off-line. Do please e-mail me and let me know what you've been working on. I would be especially interested in knowing which novels you would recommend to my new reading/novel-writing study group and what lessons we could learn from them.
Happy reading!
Oh, and I also paid a trip to Huddersfield Town Hall for the Kirklees Community Learning Awards Ceremony to see my class win an award for Learning Group of the Year and one member of the class, Charlotte Thorpe, win an individual award for Best Returner. We had a fantastic evening and it was a fitting conclusion to a year in which my class has constantly amazed me with their enthusiasm, persistence and imagination.
I'm about to join yet another new group for writers - a novel-reading group where the emphasis is on spending each meeting analysing one novel in depth, to help us with our own writing. We are due to meet in a couple of weeks' time for our first discussion and the chosen novel is Jodi Picoult's Vanishing Acts. It's the first Picoult book I have read, although my writing partner Kimm is a great fan of hers and had read virtually all her books.
I avoided Picoult's books for ages thinking that they would be terribly depressing, but I was pleasantly surprised by Vanishing Acts. Yes, it does deal with extreme human predicaments, but the writing is absolutely beautiful and it really sweeps you along. In my class, we discussed similes and metaphors a few weeks ago. I pointed out how important it is to choose a simile that is fresh rather than trotting out old cliches. Vanishing Acts is stuffed fuller than a horsehair sofa with lively and original similes - for example, she says the wrapped-up bales of hay in a field are like giant marshmallows. I think that once I have got to the end of the book, I shall have to go back and re-read it with a notebook in my hand, recording her fantastic use of language so that I can share it with my classes next year.
I hope that you have been enjoying your reading and writing while I've been off-line. Do please e-mail me and let me know what you've been working on. I would be especially interested in knowing which novels you would recommend to my new reading/novel-writing study group and what lessons we could learn from them.
Happy reading!
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