Between books

"Pick me!"
"No, pick me!"

I’m in a strange place right now. The Mannequin Makers has been and gone. I’m happy with the book I produced. It hasn't sold a lot of copies, but I've had some nice reactions from people who have read it. If I was to write the book again now, I’d do a few things differently and the result would be -- surprise, surprise -- a different book. 

But I’m keen to strike off in different directions. 

In fact, I’m moving in at least three directions at once while standing still (not writing anything).

The projects:

1. Another collection of short stories – this is what I was working towards in Iowa, and it'll include some stories pre-dating The Mannequin Makers. I’m mulling whether one story deserves two companion stories (and how that might be structured within a collection) or whether it becomes a novella (and how that works with shorter stories). And, as always, there are some stories I’d like to write when I have time (ha!). But I’m not in a huge rush to ‘finish’ my collection. I know that not every story will sit comfortably within the final collection, and the longer I wait, the more stories I’ll have, the better the whole coheres and the better the quality of the individual stories. That’s the idea anyway. Then there’s the fact I’m not champing at the bit to have the conversation with my publisher (or any publisher) about the merits and demerits of bringing out another book of stories. A story collection might be leverage in negotiations for my next novel, though it's probably not my leverage (the publisher treat bringing out a story collection as a favour to me).
2. A novel that takes circa 4,000 words of an abandoned novel (referred to as Novel B around these parts) and takes it in a different direction. The “different direction” is actually the natural direction the novel should have always gone. But I couldn’t recognise that at the time as I’d started with the direction and then wrote the first chapter. The chapter works, just not as the first step towards “that” destination. Later I tried to turn that chapter into a standalone short story, but that didn't work either. I tried revising it while in Iowa and realised, "Hey, there is a novel here!" It'll be contemporary and employ multiple perspectives, rather than sticking to the one narrator. It’s concerned with the idea of “narrative politics” that I talked about in this interview with Joan Fleming but I’m not yet in the space where I can write from any of the other character’s perspectives. My research for this involves meeting people, forming relationships, forgetting about the novel for a while, and then coming back to try and tell this story in the boldest, fairest, clearest way.
3. A novel about a family, belief (God, time travel), infidelity, porn and true love (Lets call this Dysfunctional Family Novel). This is the novel I’ve mentioned, obliquely in some interviews and articles re: ‘what’s next?’ While I was in the States the nucleus of the novel (one character, one arc) started to attract other stories (a short story I was going to write about a mysterious school closure in the 1970s - the setting of which I blogged about in 2010; the cloud seeder story!). It’s still growing. I think about it when I’m plucking laterals off my tomato plants and sitting up with my sick daughter (ear infection, she’ll survive). The other day while mowing the lawn I realised that something I thought might be a big part of my next novel but dismissed almost the next day could actually be useful. All this thinking time is necessary and I can feel the momentum building. But I’m not at the point where I can start writing yet.

There’s a fourth project (another novel), which I have clear ideas about but don’t feel like pursuing at the moment (let’s call it Genre Novel).

It’s funny to have so much work ahead of me. It’s somehow calming. I know that one or all of these books mightn’t make a dent on the big wide world (or ever get written). But maybe something clicks.

One of the things I’m most pleased with about The Mannequin Makers is the fact I actually went through the process of researching and writing a historical novel (with all the angst that entails). Even though I don’t fancy going back to the past in any of the books above (except maybe a bit in c) I’m a better writer for having tackled history. The same concerns (veracity, telling detail, a sense of responsibility for your characters) are carrying over to my next projects. I’m hopefully more awake to language than I was before, though each novel (and each perspective) is a process of finding a new language, the right language.

My plan for this year is to keep thinking the novels into shape, while sitting down to write for two hours every morning before heading to work. To begin with I’ll be working on short stories (my extended Christmas break is well and truly over), but at some point this year I’ll probably start working on Dysfunctional Family Novel...

Some thoughts on The Hut Builder by Laurence Fearnley

One reason I keep this blog is to open the door (however slightly) on my own writing process. So this is not a review of The Hut Builder. A review would take a more rounded, less personal approach to the reading experience. What I hope to do here is capture a few of my thoughts upon reading Fearnley’s novel and how this relates to my own writing.

Spoiler alert: The Hut Builder isn’t exactly a thriller or a mystery, but I do disclose certain elements of the plot in the following discussion which are kind of surprises at the time. You’ve been warned.

A brief summary

The novel is divided into four sections: ‘Fairlie’, ‘The Hut Builder’, ‘The Poet’ and 'Boden'. The first section covers the childhood of Boden Black in the early fifties. Boden’s twin brothers died in the war and his mother is forever diminished; his father, the town’s butcher, is also affected but powers on. The key scene in this section involves Boden’s first trip to the Mackenzie Country with his neighbour; inspired by the landscape, Boden is prompted to compose his first poem.

‘The Hut Builder’ section focuses on the time Boden spent constructing a hut on the slopes of Aoraki/Mt Cook in his early twenties, in particular his relationship with fellow hut builder and former conscientious objector, Walter. By this time, Boden is working with his father at the butcher’s shop and still harbours dreams of being a poet.

In ‘The Poet’, we mostly follow Boden in late-middle age. One of the poems he wrote after his hut building expedition, ‘Three Days At Least’, has become New Zealand’s “the third most widely read poem” after ‘The Magpies’ (Glover) and ‘Rain’ (Tuwhare). Boden’s poetic output (and success) since then is limited and he continues to work as a butcher, taking over the shop after his father’s death. He finds love with Stella, a historian, though they never live together in the same town, and meets his long lost birth sister (spoiler: he was adopted). After finally publishing a new collection of poems, Kindred Spirits, Boden is commissioned to write a new poem to commemorate the opening of a new museum at Mt Cook, bringing the story back in the final brief section, if not quite full-circle, at least to its centre.

A voice never raised

The novel is narrated throughout by Boden, the emotionally reticent butcher-poet. His language is very restrained: formal in its construction and cadence. A couple of illustrative sentences selected almost at random:

"I could see the woman but I was too embarrassed to intervene. On the one hand I wanted to disown my father, but I also didn't want to deny him this small pleasure." p2

"Determined to make one last-ditch effort I went at my tunnel with renewed vigour, and after another twenty minutes or so of back-breaking work I felt a faint breath of air against my face..." p97

"If I stand back a little, however, I can credit the poem with bringing me to the attention of my future partner, Stella." p174

The voice is clearly not the sort you'd hear in spoken conversation. It's much more considered, almost stuffy (he hardly sounds impassioned when talking about the love of his life!), which goes a long way to describing Boden Black.

It was on the level of language that I had my first strong reaction to The Hut Builder. I saw many similarities in the voice to the narrator in the novel I have been working on (off and on) for the last two years. On this blog I have referred to this project as Novel B. In part, it was to be the story of the narrator finding his way in the world of visual/mixed media arts rather than poetry. Boden is writing his story from an older age (sixty something) and a significant chunk of the novel is set in the fifties, while the narrator of Novel B is writing at the age of about thirty and the events are mostly contemporary, though they seem to share that sense of stuffiness when it comes to language.

The net result in reading the first eighty or so pages of Boden’s/Fearnely’s crisp, thoughtful, carefully constructed sentences — that were very much what I was trying to perform with my narrator in Novel B — was a sense of dissatisfaction. The words were not lifeless, exactly, but there was a distinct lack of vigour.

And while Boden Black becomes a believable character by the end of the novel — one of the lingering-in-your-thoughts variety — his emotional reticence kneecaps his ability as a narrator to engage the reader’s (or this reader’s) emotions. The language does not leap off the page, nor does the action, nor does the emotion. What we get is a well told story which flirts with being interesting, flirts with being sad, flirts with being poetic, but never quite follows through on its promises.

Chutzpah, or the lack thereof

Related to the muted voice of the narrator is the amount of work left up to the reader in terms of Boden’s poetry. We do not get to read any poems, or even a single stanza. The total evidence of our hero’s poetry comes to: a rhyming couplet from his first, childish poem, the title and a couple of rhymes from his ‘greatest hit’, the fact he had been writing sonnets at one point then decided to abandon the form but keep the content, and a couple more titles. The reader is left to construct Boden’s poetry from these hints, his discussion of other poets (Charles Brasch, Ursula Bethell, Byron) and the language of his narration.

As Lawrence Jones puts it in his review for the Otago Daily Times, there is, “a hidden Boden expressed only in his poetry.”  Even in his memoir, which The Hut Builder is on one level, Boden does not delve too deeply into emotion. He never writes much about his love for Stella, for example, though we hear he once wrote her a love poem (which he wasn’t that fond of). Where’s the poem? Where’s the love?

It is one thing to read about art, another thing to experience it. Poetry is one of the few art forms that lends itself to presentation in fiction. And yet the reader of The Hut Builder is left empty handed.

I was forced to draw an unfavourable comparison between this book and Nabokov’s last (and greatest) work in Russian before turning to English, The Gift. Nabokov’s novel focuses on the literary ambitions and artistic development of the poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Fyodor’s poetry is a central part of both the narrative and the characterisation, and we get to read it! As Nabokov says in another novel, Bend Sinister, when talking about his philosopher protagonist:

"It was much the same as is liable to happen in novels when the author and his yes-characters assert that here is a ‘great artist’ or a ‘great poet’ without, however, bringing any proofs (reproductions of his paintings, samples of his poetry); indeed, taking care not to bring such proofs since any sample would be sure to fall short of the reader’s expectations and fancy."

Later, Nabokov would take the poetry-in-novel conceit to its extreme in Pale Fire which centres around a 999 line poem and the excessive, mad footnotes from (ostensibly at least) the poet’s neighbour.

I can understand Fearnley’s reticence to hand the reader a poem such as ‘Three Days at Least’, which is held up as Boden’s biggest achievement, the one studied by two generations of high school students. For a novelist, to write a self-proclaimed ‘great NZ poem’ takes some chutzpah, and chances are it would fail in some way.

It’s like the uncanny valley in robotics, which describes the fact that the closer to human appearance a robot becomes, the more disconcerting it is, because we are almost fooled but then notice those little quirks, the slightly unhuman movement of the eyelids, or the too-regular complexion. So too, a slight misstep in a ‘droid’ poem (one that resides in a work of fiction, but is supposed to read as something taken from the outside world) is likely to irk readers more than a piece of doggerel (which would then throw the novel into a satirical space, prompting the reader to reassess the seriousness with which Boden pursues his poetry and the kind of general public who would hold up a poem as a national treasure).

So basically, the droid poem must be flawless to succeed. But without it, we are left at such a distance from the narrator-poet and even the version of New Zealand it presents. It is easy to write the words "one of the most famous poems in recent New Zealand literature" (p174) — that’s the kind of notebook entry a writer makes all the time. The challenge of the novelist is to convince the reader of this fact and I was not convinced by the evidence provided in the novel.

The Shanghai Knights effect

The third issue I had with The Hut Builder was the plot’s relationship with history. I have come to think of this as The Shanghai Knights effect, which is named after the entirely forgettable action movie starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson (the movie was a sequel, which should tell you something about its quality off the bat). In Shanghai Knights, Chan and Wilson’s characters travel to London and by the end of the movie it seems everyone they’ve met turns out to be some kind of historical figure. ‘Artie’, the inspector from Scotland Yard, turns out to be Arthur Conan Doyle (despite the fact Doyle never worked as a coppa). The young street urchin will grow up to be Charlie Chaplin. Rather than adding to the effect of the story, these contrivances are a kind of literary outsourcing and reduce the imaginative power of a work for me.

So it was, to a lesser extent it must be said, in The Hut Builder. When Boden’s mother takes a train trip up to Auckland to visit her ailing mother in December 1953, sure enough the Tangiwai disaster rushes into the story and prompts Boden’s father to tell him he was adopted.

What’s my problem? Many people were affected by the disaster, and it could make for interesting reading. The problem: there is so much evident engineering to get Boden’s mother on a train to Auckland (they barely ever leave Fairlie). It felt like Tangiwai was being used to add oomph to the novel rather than generating that oomph — and the prompt for Boden’s father to open up — from something internal to the story. It is true that events such as Tangiwai and more recently the Christchurch earthquake or Pike River impact on a lot of people (and shake the headspace of people who haven’t suffered any real loss) in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, but there are ways such events can be incorporated into fiction in satisfying, subtle and believable ways. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel this was the case in The Hut Builder.

Perhaps it was because of the Tangiwai affair, but when Sir Edmund Hillary popped up in the novel for the second time (we already know Boden climbed Mt Cook with Hillary from the photo in his father’s shop in the prologue) he felt a bit perfunctory. I didn’t actually have any issue with Sir Ed as a character, what he said or did. It’s the fact that he just happened to come along the one time Boden helped construct a hut. And lo, our timid narrator gets the chance to climb our greatest peak with our greatest mountaineer. It could have been any mountaineer who took Boden up Mt Cook, and the fact it was Hillary can either be viewed as serendipitous or cynicism on the part of the writer (I don’t trust myself to make a ficitional mountaineer  interesting enough…).

(I’m conscious that I am coming down quite harshly on this book and I am about to heap more doubts upon it, so it is worth re-iterating that I thought it was a decent book and would not be surprised or disappointed to see it nominated for the NZ Post Book Awards next year. For what it’s worth, I found The Hut Builder to be a more accomplished and far more pleasurable read than this year’s NZPBA fiction winner, As the Earth Turns Silver. Other readers will have no problem with The Hut Builder’s celebrity cameos or the articulate-yet-reserved voice of the narrator — indeed, many would point to these as a strength (or selling point) of the book…)

There are also a number of other historical connections, such Walter’s chums from prison including Hillary’s brother and Charles Brasch, the poet and editor of Landfall. I didn’t mind these so much, but then when it was revealed that Boden’s birth parents were close friends of Brasch’s, the network of historical connections felt just too tight, too perfect.

It’s an interesting question: when a story is set in the past, how much historical reference is too much? Clearly, the small stuff is important: the type of climbing equipment they would have used, the fashions of the time. That’s all crucial. And there needs to be historical touchstones for the reader. But when the number of characters and events in the book that are taken from the real world starts to dwarf those dreamed up by the author, it starts to bring the ‘reality’ of the fictional world into question. Do we really know that many people in our real lives who will be remembered in fifty year’s time? How likely is it that a poet-butcher will have multiple connections with the founder of one of our most important literary journals? Etc.

Bringing it all back home

The three factors I’ve discussed – my unfavourable reaction to the stuffy voice, the lack of chutzpah (not taking the risk of showing us poems), and the Shanghai Knights effect – prompted me to reassess what I’m doing with Novel B. The first two complaints, voice and chutzpah, I can also level at my completed chapters (while I make much more of an effort to show reader’s the narrator’s artistic output, good and bad, there’s a lingering lack of ambition, eg contemporary first person male narrator in lower North Island…). The third, the use of historical figures and research, and my views on what works and what doesn’t, is something I’m eager to demonstrate, but Novel B is not the place to do it.

Everything, it seems, is pointing me to the project I have kept on the back burner while struggling with Novel B. It is set around the turn of the last century (it opens on New Years Day 1903 and goes forward and back in time from there), so there’s scope to include historical personages. This project, by its nature, would also satisfy my issues with voice (third person semi-intrusive narrator in the mould of Dumas or Dostoyevsky, who is looking back on historical events from the reader’s present) and chutzpah (which I’ll need up the yingyang to pull it off). For the last week and a half I’ve been devoting my time to research and plot development (which includes coming up with character names). I love this part of writing — playing Maquet to my future Dumas — which isn’t technically writing at all.

What will happen to Novel B? This isn’t the first time I’ve abandoned it. I’ll come back to it in some form, some day. It did start out as a sequel to a short story and the chapters I’ve completed may be better served as a short story or two themselves. We shall see.

Novel B Playlist #2

Subtitle: Songs that have struck a chord while working on Novel B this past fortnight...
Explanatory note: Links are to youtube.

Playlist #2

Hope in the air - Laura Marling
Afterglow (of your love) - The Small Faces
Bittersweet me - REM
What do I get? - The Buzzcocks
The snow leopard - Shearwater
Handshake drugs - Wilco
Anyone's ghost - The National
In hiding - Pearl Jam
Basta de llamarme asi - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
No. 13 baby - Pixies
Surf's Up (demo) - Brian Wilson (I could write 16,000 words about how this demo is not only better than any 'finished' version but probably the fourth best track ever... but I won't)
Days/This Time Tomorrow - Mumford & Sons with Ray Davies (below)

Novel B Playlist #1

Twelve songs that have rung my bell while working on my novel this last fortnight. This may become a regular feature. We'll see.  Links are to YouTube unless otherwise stated...

1. 'Running out of angels' - Elvis Costello (not on YouTube, general info here)
2. 'I couldn't say it to your face' - Arthur Russell
3. 'Ahead by a century' - The Tragically Hip
4. 'Strangers' - The Kinks
5. 'Winter song' - Screaming Trees
6. 'Rene' - The Small Faces
7. 'For you' - Bruce Springsteen
8. 'Weighty ghost' - Wintersleep
9. 'Fashion show' - Eels
10. 'Taster' - Grandaddy
11. 'Sleeping sickness' - City and Colour
12. 'Studebaker' - Warren Zevon (Jordon Zevon's cover here)

Forecast: grey with occasional cloud-bursts

Back in February I wrote about those cloud-bursting moments writers have every so often that show you the way forward and give you an energy boost to push on with a story or novel. At the time I’d had a small revelation in relation to the novel I'm working on (a.k.a. Novel B).

Well, it was a long time between drinks, but I had my next cloud-burst today. That's seven months between revelations for those of you playing along at home, which partially explains my snail's progress on Novel B.

Status report, Dr Spock

I'm still mired in Chapter Three. I've had problems with how to make the transition from the first two chapters which take the narrator down to the bottom of the well (so to speak; this isn't another Wind-up Bird), to the more positive, more active section that follows. I did my best Sisyphus impression, pushing and pushing the narrative up hill each evening, only for it to roll back down overnight so that I felt as if I was always sitting down to write with my toes crushed.

But like I said, the clouds cleared momentarily today and I will take this chance to examine once more this cerebro-meteorological phenomenon.

Conditions for a Cloud-burst

You need three things for a cloud-bursting moment.

One: A problem.

Two: A build up.

Three: An idea.

In practice, you identify the build up first. You have to be writing (or at least sitting down with the intention to write but giving up soon after because it's all too hard) for the build up to occur. You then have to spend several days mooching around feeling lost and frustrated and blaming things like your day job and your new keyboard for your inability to finish the chapter. (If I could figure out how to skip this mooching period it would make several people's lives easier, but alas.)

You can then either:

A) identify the problem and the idea follows instantaneously and voila, the clouds have split.

Or

B) on occasion, you'll have an idea and then find out that in order for it to work, you'll have to change something, and in figuring out the changes you realise what the problem was that was causing the build up in the first place.

A Worked Example

You're writing a story about a boy who wants to go sky diving. In your current draft he dreams and dreams of sky diving, then one day wins a free sky dive. Ugh. You know there's something wrong. Think. Think.

Aha! You realise the problem is that the boy gets what he wants with too little effort. People don't believe life works this way. This means readers may view your story as unrealistic, which is another way of saying they see can see the writer at work in the story. So you have the idea that the boy pesters people who can help him achieve his aim of sky diving. His parents, his grandparents, a family friend who works at the airport… Not only does this make the boy getting to sky dive more realist (he's earnt it, at least in story-logic terms), but it makes him an active participant in the narrative rather than a passive one.
This is scenario A above.

Under scenario B it would be more like this: You think, 'What if the person who offers the boy the chance to sky dive knew the boy somehow?' Then, 'What if, the father past away or was in a wheelchair or something, so the man felt sorry for the boy.' So you begin to formulate a reason, or a set of reasons, why the boy gets his wish, based on this first idea. In playing around with things in your head, you can tell straight away this makes the story more compelling, and realise that the problem that had plagued your story was that the boy got what he wanted too easily.

You'll notice that both solutions started with the same problem, but in option A, the boy earns his reward through action, and in option B he earns his reward through suffering.

More action. More suffering. These are two pretty standard ways of fixing stories.

You'll also notice that neither of these solutions sew up the end of the story. In fact, for me, the heart of this story (which I just made up on the fly here) is the experience the boy has when he actually goes sky diving. That would be the idea that makes you think: I want to write this story. The image of the boy falling through the sky (either loving it or hating it, you decide) would always be in your mind as you sat down to work on the story. But you hit the road block while trying to write yourself to this point. Cue mooching. Cue cloud burst. Cue finish the story, submit it to a literary magazine your read, respect and subscribe to. Cue literary success.

One final point for those of you wondering how you could get stuck with such a silly conceit as the boy winning a sky dive in some competition in the first place. It is often the case that you’re in such a hurry to get to the heart of the story – the boy falling through the air – that you take an expedient route to get there. Prizes are won. Offers are made out of the blue. Dei ex machina swoop in from the wings.

The more I write, the more I find the expedient route is the surest path to a rooted story.




---

Bonus FAQ

Why do you call it a cloud-burst? It sounds like a rain event. Surely you see blue skies and sunshine when you have your revelation?

Sometimes. Other times it feels like a bucket of ice cold water has been tipped over you. Other times you feel as if you’ve been caught in a sudden, unpredicted storm – that moment just after the two minute downpour stops is as magical as any sudden burst of sun. And you can’t forget the feeling that comes right after the eureka moment when you realise the foolish assumptions you’ve been labouring under. It feels very much like being caught in a downpour without a coat.

When is your ‘sky diving boy’ story coming out?

I told you, I just came up with the idea on the spot to help illustrate my point. I wouldn’t be surprised it someone has already written it. It seems like a good idea. Very traditional structure. If I were to write it (I’ve said these words before) I’d be mindful of making it too perfect.

This was all very interesting, but shouldn’t you be capitalising on the boost of energy that came with your latest cloud-burst and actually work on your novel?

Uh, true. Excuse me for a moment...

On Novel B: A Love Story

When discussing the theme for this month -- a window into my novel in progress -- I said I would look at:

• those cloud-burst moments when an idea arrives perfectly formed (check)
• the issue of point of view and narrative voice (check); and
• why I keep falling out of love with this manuscript.

Some of the answers to the final question are contained in the previous two discussions. There are other answers, or at least, other discussions I could have about this subject, but I won't.

Talking about falling out of love, relationship breakdowns or break-ups, is something you only do when you're down/out/broken. We've all played dutiful friend for someone who needs to unload during or after a relationship meltdown. But try talking to that friend after they've decided to get back together with their ex: you'll get a rather different, rather more general story. The friend has not forgotten the irksome things about their partner, or the wedge that drove them apart in the first place, but they have attempted to move past them: there's no benefit to be had from dwelling on his/her chewed down nails or a drunken kiss at a work Xmas party.

Same goes for me and Novel B. We've made up. It helped to talked things through this month, to see what I've got, and what lies ahead of us. We've decided it's worth another go, worth sticking it out. Sure, I could bad-mouth Novel B, and there’s plenty it could say about me. But where would that get us?

In the spirit of renewed vows, growing optimism and ever-present generosity, I will instead point the budding (and blossomed) writers among us to a piece from the Guardian Online. To commemorate-slash-spruik Elmore Lenard's new book, Ten Rules of Writing, the Guardian asked a number of successful writers for their own rules.

Novel B and I like Margaret Atwood's ninth rule:

Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

The two of us can have a good chuckle about this now.

Novel B also likes the advice from Jonathan Franzen (“Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”) and the even more succinct Colm Tóibín (“Finish everything you start.”)

Zadie Smith offers sage advice (“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the –internet”) but on the topic of distractions, Phillip Pullman’s entire response says it best:

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

I’m going to try to use this in a work email one day, you know, when I feel like burning bridges.

“I've been guilty of taking myself too seriously for years at a time”: An Interview With A Manqué Novelist

Reprinted by permission

Lily Decker: How's progress on your, uh, novel-in-progress?

Craig Cliff: Novel B? Let's just say we aren't on speaking terms at the moment.

LD: What's the problem?

CC: It's hard to explain without going into too much detail.

LD: Go for it.

CC: But I don't want to say too much. So much is still moving around. I might never finish. It would be foolhardy to throw too much out into the open at this stage.

LD: Maybe if you talk it through, the path will become clearer?

CC: Maybe.

LD: It's worth a shot.

CC: Okay, but if I get final call about what you can print.

LD: Sure.

On Novel B: Black Holes and Revelations

The single most exhilarating thing about being a writer is also the most infuriating. I’m talking about those moments when the clouds clear and you see that significant aspect your story needs which has hitherto been obscured.

It's exhilarating because with this new knowledge, everything seems to fit. You feel a burst of incredible energy, and perhaps even affection, for this story which until now has niggled with its not-quite-right-ness.

It's infuriating because when that cloud-parting moment begins to fade, you realise how long you've been labouring under false assumptions, and how much quicker the whole process would have been if you knew from the outset what you now know.

My example d’jour is actually from October. My account sticks closely to what I drafted at the time, but never posted. It refers, of course, to Novel B.

***

Hopes and Hobbies: February Begins

The Month That Was

January was a strange one. About five days of summer here in Wellington, the rest an admixture of autumn and winter. Perhaps I'm being unkind. After all, I managed to get to Kapiti Island, Karori Wildlife Sanctuary and roam the South Coast in search of native birds and trees. I cooked on the barbeque four times (I can't use it in a northerly as the wind blows the flames out). I even swam in Lyall Bay (but only once, on Saturday). And it didn't rain as much as my last full summer (in Edinburgh), but now I sound like I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

A Design For Life?

I look out my window on a day like today (high of 15 degrees, drizzle, strong southerly, and can't help but think those kite surfers are on to something. Back on Saturday when it was calm and 26 degrees, Lyall Bay was left to the tanners, sand-castlers, and bathers. Today, the bay belongs to wet-suited daredevils. And where are the tanners, sand-castlers, and bathers: at home watching Campbell Live, clipping their toenails and nursing a severe bout of Mondayitis.

The kite surfers have managed to find a way to turn a bad day into a good one. Isn't that the secret of a good hobby?

The same goes when the wind is slightly different and the bay belongs to the wind surfers (sometimes they try to share with the kite surfers, but one form of wind-propulsion generally prospers). When the swell is up, the plain old surfers don't care if it's raining or blowing a gale…

When it still and sunny, the -surfers can laze around with the rest of us. A sunny day is the day we least need hobbies. Am I right?

I used to be into Fantasy Football, as in American Football. Most of the games are played on a Sunday afternoon in the States, which corresponds to the early hours of Monday morning in New Zealand. I would wake each Monday during the football season, eager to find out how my players had performed. After a scanning the box scores, I would head to work, my head filled with calculations of points scored and players left to play. The Sunday evening games would take place on Monday afternoon my time, and I'd hurry home from work to check the latest developments in my match-up and watch the highlights on ESPN. During the sixteen week fantasy football season, Mondays were one of my favourite days.

But like everything pre-empted with the word 'fantasy', my attention eventually waned. This year, I didn't have a fantasy football team, haven’t watched the box scores, nor trekked down to the nearest sports bar to watch a prime time contest. My Mondays have reverted once more to the first day of the working week and nothing more.

I'm in two minds whether writing counts as a smart hobby or not. It's certainly well suited to dodgy weather (and is less attractive on the beaut days). And it can fill your head with distracting thoughts on the bus to work on a Monday morning. If you could siphon off this aspect from any ambition, if you just wrote for fun, then sure, it's a great hobby.

If, on the other hand, you want people you've never met before to read your writing (a strange desire when you think about it, but most writers are strange people), then you can't help but let your writing thoughts seep into your working day. Your sunny days spent at the beach are tinged with guilt. You're never writing enough, or well enough. There's never enough time.

The perfect hobby should better fill your time, but the writing bug is insatiable. It demands you spend days writing when you are better off earning a crust, playing sport or socialising with friends. No wonder so much literature is obsessed with lost time. With looking backwards. Writing is a deliberate slow-down of life, because to be a writer comes with sacrifices.

No more fantasy football. No kite surfing lessons. I want random people to read my stories.

The Month That Will Be

So what will February have in store?

I can't control the weather, but I do have some control over what I do here at my desk. My head still isn't back into Novel B, but it needs to be. My theme for this month, therefore, is Writing a Novel. Not: How To Write A Novel, because although I have completed two, neither were published, and this third one sure isn't writing itself. Rather, I hope to open a few windows on the living, breathing process of writing a difficult manuscript.

I will look at those cloud-burst moments when an idea arrives perfectly formed; the issue of point of view and narrative voice; and why I keep falling out of love with this manuscript.

In navel-gazing once a week, I hope to finally get my head right, address a few lingering issues, and return my full focus to the novel. For the contemporary reader, I make no promises. My only hope is that the novel gets finished (soon) and published… perhaps then these February fumbles will be of interest.

An Interlude

It's amazing how consuming this 100-word story process is. It doesn't take that long to write the things, but I'm forever mulling over the story of my next Marumaru inhabitant. I'll probably talk about it more at the end of the month, but today I want to talk about the other things I have on the go.

[I feel pulled in several directions at the moment, and hope this post will clarify my priorities and shunt me
onwards. Details after the jump.]

***

Things I'll Take Away From Reading The Count Of Monte Cristo This Month

(rockin' the bullet points this week... can you tell I've returned to the workforce?)

• I really want to see the film version starring Jim Caviezel again. I suspect they melded the 3 baddies into one (Guy Pierce) but maybe that's just what seven years of brain cell decay will do to one's memory of a film.
• The book was too long. I know, how can anyone level such a claim at a 1,200+ page book? I enjoyed the first 200 or so pages and selected chapters near the end, but I wanted excitement and intrigue the whole way through. Didn't happen.
  
  
• Linked to the length: I liked the narrator to begin with, but found his shifts and conceits irksome as the novel progressed. Like when we first meet Franz and see things from his perspective for chapters without having any idea who he is or why he's important… then we meet the Count of Monte Cristo, who we all know is Edmund Dantes, but the narrator daren't mention this fact…. Irksome.
• The chapter where Bertuccio describes his oath of vengeance against Villefort and it's (semi)fulfilment is just as vivid in my memory as Monte Cristo's quest for revenge. Again, length and complexity doesn't necessarily equal riveting revenge saga.
  
  
• I'm actually quite surprised how nonplussed I was by the middle section of the book, which is essentially a novel of aristocratic matchmaking. I may not have liked these sorts of stories as a younger male reader, but these days I see the artistry in Jane Austen and the humour is P.G. Wodehouse. Adding a revenge plot into a tea-table novel should be awesome. Think Howard's End with Leonard Bast secretly plotting to poison, disgrace or defile the Wilcoxes/Schlegels. But then again, Howard's End is only 340 pages…

As I stated at the beginning of this journey, I had the embryo of an idea for my own revenge saga. From time to time my thoughts drifted from Dumas' story to my own. I'm not sure I know anything more about what will happen than I did at the start of the month, but I feel like there's enough sustenance there to leave it gestating and move on to something else.

That something else is another novel - quite different from 'The Count of Monte Cristo meets A Good Keen Man'. In fact, this novel, which I tried writing last year ('Novel B' for those familiar with my old blog) is more like Tim Winton meets Awakenings.