Seven Enviable Lines

A speech to the Emerging Writers’ Festival Roadshow, NSW Writers’ Centre 3 November 2012 - a panel called Seven Enviable Lines with fellow writers Jane Gleeson-White & Mark Dapin.

Here are seven contradictions I wish I’d known about early in my career - seven lessons I wish I’d learned sooner, or at all. 

1. Conceit about your work is childish; complacency will kill your writing. The Italian writer Cesare Pavese said this: “Complacency is a deficiency whose penalty is a special perennial adolescence of the spirit. It is doubt which alone can make us probe and glimpse the depth of consciousness.” 

On the other hand, stop romanticising self-doubt. Confidence is  a decision. You will never earn it. It won’t come from publication, or awards, or sales, or reviews. It will come when you decide to have it. 


2. Take the risk of telling the truth. Be honest about who you are, not who you want to be. Don’t give your character the name or brain or apartment or body or job you wish you had. Sharp-tongued, glamorous lighting designers with New York loft apartments and affairs with married men are just wooden dolls. So are world-weary musicians with skinny jeans and views on Nietzsche. This is all just self-protection. Allow your writing to expose your shameful ordinariness, your dull suburban heart, your fear, your humanity. Write truthfully into your frailties, not away from them.

On the other hand, stop looking at yourself! Look out, at the world - be adventurous, push past the limits of what you think you can do, break out of the cage of your own style. Pay attention to the heart of the truth about yourself - but transform it into something fresh, something bigger and bolder and more beautiful than you. Reach out towards the things you want to understand.


3. Pay attention to your body.  It is dangerous to live too much inside your head. Be physical – eat, ride a bike, grow a garden, build a wall. Exercise forces you out into the world, and it will protect  your brain and your back through all those years at the desk. 

On the other hand, there is no other hand. Use your body, be grateful for it, live in it. 


4. Listen – closely and carefully - to criticism of your work. Writing is exposure; get used to it. If you ask for a response to work in progress, don’t argue with it. Just take a deep breath, listen, and think carefully, over time, about what you have heard. Don’t justify or explain or defend – listen. Criticism can force you to clarify your intentions, try harder to convince, or simply stand your ground. You don’t have to accept what is said - go away and cry into your pillow, curse your reader, make a voodoo doll, do as you wish - but listen, and weigh up the worth of this opinion. If it really hurts, it’s hit a nerve and there is probably something in it. Right up until the book goes to the printer – while ever you have the time and energy for revision - all responses are useful. 

On the other hand, don’t expose your work to outsiders too early. A book is a balloon, slowly filling with air. A glance or compliment or question or raised eyebrow at the wrong time can be the fatal prick. Be patient, wait until you are ready to hear what you need to hear. Ask yourself – do I need encouragement or the truth? If it’s the former, wait, and keep working.  

At a certain point, you must finish the book, and let it go. And when it is done – once it’s sent into the world – try your best to forget it. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. 

Be judicious about reviews.  Very, very occasionally you might learn something from one. More often they will hurt your feelings, bore or depress you – or worse, give you a vastly inflated sense of your own importance.  Mostly, the thing you truly love about your book, its beating heart, the thing that cleaved you to this work all through its long and difficult genesis – this thing will go unnoticed, by everyone. But that’s all right, because the  book is no longer yours. You have a new one to write.

When you think about reviews and prizes and accolades or the lack of them, remember your wise friend’s words:  the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. 


5. Find work that brings money, and start paying superannuation.  Trust me, you will thank me for this when you are older. Your strategy of expecting to die young like your parents did is not a reliable financial plan. Don’t romanticise poverty; that can work when you’re young, but being old and poor is terrible.

On the other hand, understand that the desperate pursuit of money, especially through writing, will simply make you unhappy. Understand that enough money always turns up. You will manage. You are educated, you have resources and friends. It is unlikely that you will ever be really poor, so stop dramatising.


6. Use your senses. You always forget this. How can you possibly keep forgetting this?? Use your sight, your sense of smell, your hearing, your sense of touch, of taste. Your physical senses will keep you grounded, and anchor you to the true, real world beyond your own thoughts. Nicholson Baker says: “Very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.”  Your senses will guide you to this messy corrective.

On the other hand, don’t rely on your senses. A perfectly described green ceramic bowl with light falling on it will only get you so far. You need to be braver about your intellect. Relying only on the concrete and sensory is cowardly.  Find out what you want to say, and then say it – firmly, clearly, without shame. 


7. Stay connected to a world that values writing, or more importantly, values reading – in this world you will make friends who help keep you going, who teach you crucial lessons, remember who you are, make you a better writer, send you to life-changing books. 

On the other hand, detach from the business of writing, from the literary scene. The machinations of the publishing world are not really any of your business. Fretting about the state of publishing is a waste of your talent and your mind. Use them instead to write a good sentence, and then another one. To write a good book, and then another one.