Limbering Up
Two more little gems from Microhorror, both by Tim Ouellette:
I’ve gone back to writing practice, as outlined by Natalie Goldberg in her incomparable book Writing Down the Bones. If you’ve got writers’ block, you need this book. Along with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer, it helped me burst through a decade-long block. Natalie Goldberg is a Zen Buddhist and a poet, but don’t let that put you off. She teaches you to trust your instincts, to write in an automatic, unconscious way, before your conscious mind can censor it.
Writing Practice requires that you buy a notebook and write in it a list of subjects, anything which interests, even obsesses you. Then, each day, you write about one topic for a length of time which you determine yourself- ten minutes at first, maybe, until you get used to it, then increasing to fifteen, twenty minutes. And if you sense that something is painful is coming is coming up, keep writing anyway; because where there is pain, there is also energy.
This is all by way of limbering up to write a novel. I’ve been thinking about this, on and off, for a little while now. Something contemporary. I hesitate to use the term literary, because that makes it sound like I’m trying to emulate Hanif Kureishi or Salman Rushdie, which I’m not. The kind of story I’m trying to write is something like Stan Barstow’s A Kind Of Loving, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Where likeable characters makes messes of their own lives.
I’ve been reading newspapers and watching the news, which I normally shirk away from. It winds me up. Often, though, when you find yourself disagreeing with a politician- and I disagree with them practically all the time, these days- you might be onto something. My wife watches those political shows on Sunday mornings, but I can’t stand them. It makes my blood boil to see politicians lying. And although debate is healthy, I feel so strongly about things such as freedom of the press (I support it wholeheartedly, even if the current mob of journalists are little better than gossip columnists) that debating the issue is abhorrent to me- especially when it seems that freedom of the press is about to vanish.
Anyway, what can I say about the freedom of the press? I’ve never been a journalist, so I couldn’t write an accurate satire. I’m looking for something within the range of my own experience.
But there’s the danger. I don’t want to be autobiographical. I don’t want to base the protagonist on myself (John Braine, in his stern book Writing A Novel, says that your novel is not about you; that you have to try to lose yourself during the writing; and above all, never write a novel about a novelist writing a novel).
I’ve started listening to pop music again. The tracks I used to listen to as a teenager, when I thought I knew everything. Especially The Jam.
It’s one of the problems I find as I get older: I don’t feel like I know everything. In fact, I don’t feel like I know anything. I don’t known how to solve the world’s problems, as I ‘knew’ back then. In a word, I’m confused.
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