Your questions answered

An interlude Q&A post for August

Aug 14, 2024

It seems August is a wickedly wild and surprising month for me. I’m so glad I decided on this Q&A interlude post because, as well as imminent travel to the Edinburgh International Book Festival followed by some time at Cove Park in Scotland, I lost two whole weeks to one of the more disgusting winter bugs floating around Sydney at present (do not recommend the flu/conjunctivitis combo at all). And then last week, an extravagantly fun and very distracting bombshell hit me in the form of the 2024 Booker Prize long list announcement.

So, in honour of my extremely disrupted train of thought right now, here’s a somewhat fragmented Subtraction post for the month. Thank you for your many excellent questions. Of course I can’t answer them all – mostly for space reasons, but some because I don’t have anything cogent to offer in reply. I’m grouping some here, because while they differ, my thoughts in answer are landing in the same area, and have also edited some for length. Next month we will resume normal service with another essay-style Subtraction post.

Here goes!

Sylvia: Congratulations for being included in the Booker long list! How does it feel?Genevieve: I was just about to ask that question!

It feels like being struck on the arse by a rainbow! I have occasionally shared my general view of prizes and ‘best of’ lists which, like that of most experienced writers I know, is fairly sceptical. But it can be unbelievably joyful when the rainbow does, very rarely, strike from the blue. I am beside myself with happiness and gratitude – in no small part because this list has been chosen by a group of truly esteemed artists and critics. To have judges of this calibre rate my book, in a list full of the finest writers, is an extraordinary honour. This and the many messages of congratulations from my fellow writers and book industry colleagues mean everything.

Kate Mildenhall, The Bowerbird: How do you manage the difference between trusting the novel/material to do its thing as you write it and/or imposing your authorial view on what you want the work to do or be 'about'? … I guess I'm asking how do you get out of your own way while acknowledging that it’s your brain ‘making’ the way???

Ruth Abrams, A right to write: I adored The Luminous Solution so very much, as I've mentioned before. What I loved most was the blend of art, creativity, process, but most of all, your personal reflections and yourself in the writing. I'm curious to know, how do you/ we/ one write and include the self, without an essay becoming about the self?

Michaye: I wonder if you could discuss avoiding self-consciousness in making art, the value of sincerity, listening deeply to one's own feelings and expression?

Emma Hislop: How do you get rid of perfectionism when you're drafting a novel and propel the story forward?

I think these questions might all boil down to the issue of self-consciousness. One needs to lose the self, even while sometimes writing about the self. But how?

It’s easy to say ‘get out of your own way’, but much harder to do, as the great writer Amanda Lohrey once told me:

The trick is to get out of your own way, which is not easy. You have to stop trying to plan everything. Stop trying to be in control. Not be attached, be prepared to fail … I do think you have a deep intuitive knowing that’s always there, but you get in your own way and you obscure it, or you argue with it and you rationalise it. Because we live in a culture which is hyper-rational, and is always trying to teach you to rationalise your intuition. So you keep getting in your own way instead of just, you know, asking the inner voice. But then, it’s not quite that simple. The big question is: how do you know to trust the inner voice? How do you know the inner voice isn’t a rationalisation of your primal drives and desires? It’s a maze, isn’t it?^[1]

So, how does one ‘stop trying to be in control’? Tricky, because as Kate implies, there are certain points at which it seems necessary for one to have some form of control.

Personally, these days I try to hold off the need for any form of control until at least the second draft, because the first draft is where and when the book substantively forms itself. During this (often long and slow) generative phase, surprises are gold. Even if the direction I’m heading seems almost certainly ‘wrong’ I just try to follow the energy as it arises in the prose and emerging shape of the book.

In The Luminous Solution, this is described as ‘heat-seeking’, one of the processes I discovered in my academic study of literary creativity.

The exception to this holding-off of control for me is in voice – I can’t really proceed much in the first draft until I have a strong sense of the book’s voice (that concept which is so hard to define, but this essay by Kate Rossmanith is the best thing I’ve ever read on it.) So for me, this means a lot of playing around with different possibilities for voice (including tenses, point of view and so forth) until I land on the voice, all of which means I have to be prepared to waste a lot of creative resources in the first draft.

Here are a few suggestions that might help us to get out of the way.

Choose curiosity over control. Go to your work with the aim of exploration, curiosity, discovery rather than control. I keep things loose rather than polished - if I’m open to surprises and offshoots and what-ifs, you allow for greater originality and freshness. And the excitement of a surprise discovery can make you forget yourself entirely – one of the hallmarks of the elusive ‘flow state’.

Take quality out of the equation. So much self-consciousness in art-making comes from worrying about whether the work is any good. So why not decide in advance that until you have a very stable draft (which you can then revise and improve), quality is an irrelevance? I have spent my entire writing life producing 80 to 90 per cent rubbish, which I throw out when something good finally comes along. But I can’t get to the good stuff without writing the bad stuff – it’s the actual pathway. As art critic Jerry Saltz says, go make your bad art, you big baby!’

Listen to your doubt, but don’t second-guess. This comes from award-winning writer and teacher Emily Perkins ^[2], with whom I shared this terrific ‘Shitty First Drafts’ panel at this year’s Newcastle Writers’ Festival alongside Christos Tsiolkas. During the conversation Emily made what was for me a revelatory distinction between creative self-doubt – an essential tool for all artists – and destructive second-guessing. If I’m recalling correctly, Emily defined the former as listening to the inner voice of the artist, the instinctive little alarm bell telling you something is wrong with the work. This is an essential part of the creative curiosity I mentioned above. It arises from deep inside the work itself, and listening to it will lead you toward solutions. But second-guessing, by contrast, arises from people and forces outside the work. It is that sneering, mocking voice you imagine – the one you can hear in your head from critics, from your teacher or writing frenemy, the voice saying ‘who do you think you are?’ or ‘nobody’s going to buy this idea/style/book’, the one saying ‘Rachel Cusk / Hilary Mantel / Alexis Wright doesn’t work like this, what gives you the right!?’ This form of doubt must be eradicated from your consciousness. It does nothing but make you afraid, and no good art comes from fear.

Find a touchstone sentence/phrase/book. All this trusting and blind groping in the dark can be anxiety-provoking, for sure. Which is why, fairly early on in the process, I will often find a touchstone sentence or phrase, or model book, to turn to whenever I’m feeling lost. This is a kind of anchor or lifebuoy. Sometimes it’s that one paragraph of my own work in which the voice feels strong and natural. Sometimes it’s a statement from another writer (for Stone Yard Devotional I returned again and again to this W.B. Yeats remark: ‘Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’). And all the time, it is the specific books of other writers I keep nearby, to give me sustenance or ballast when I’m feeling wobbly. Right now Anne Enright and Emily Perkins are my special guides – a couple of particular books of theirs – to help me re-find my voice and my vantage point, I guess, for the novel in progress.

Bri Lee: Were you ever tempted to move away from Australia and to one of the more 'literary-intense' cities like New York or London? Do you ever feel frustrated or somehow small-pond here?

No, I’m way too much of a sooky homebody to live elsewhere. But early in my publishing life I was tempted to find an agent overseas instead of Australia, as a couple of my more successful writing friends had. I met with some agents in London and there I met with a severe reality check. One was out-and-out vile, condescending and insulting to the point I don’t know why on earth she agreed to meet me. Another was wishy-washy in her advice. But a third – the one who represented my friend - was incredibly helpful. She liked my work but didn’t feel confident she would be able to sell it in the UK. She recommended I try Jenny Darling & Associates here in Australia, with whom she often worked as a sub-agent (as you know, most agents have these relationships internationally). She said, ‘Your first and major market will always be Australian, so you should have an agent in your own country.’ I took her advice, approached Jenny, and this year marks the 20^th anniversary of the start of my treasured partnership with her.

Publication outside Australia took me a long time, but that time was well spent in honing my craft, steeling my spine, clarifying what was important to me about this life, and learning, learning, learning how to write a better book.

I don’t feel frustrated or small-pond here in Australia, because I really have my doubts that it is any less difficult anywhere else. In fact, in a much larger population it might be even easier to be lost and overlooked. And, as discussed in this post, there are many advantages to being ignored, especially early in one’s writing life.

I also think regional specificity is good for art. I think sometimes ambition leads newish writers to try to write deliberately for an international audience by flattening out any references that they fear an overseas reader might find too ‘local’. I’ve seen more than one Australian writer set very autobiographical material in another country, for example, in hope of securing an international book deal. And I have seen that punt fail miserably – the prose blandly emptied of the very particular details that paradoxically make a work universal, and nobody picked it up internationally anyway.

I have long thought that tenacity is more important than talent in an artist’s life. Now I would specifically add ‘patience’ to those essential qualities.

Nikita Vanderbyl, Slow Looking: What’s the best piece of writing OR life advice you ever received? What piece of advice do you regularly impart?

Julie Bail: Do you have any suggestions for how to re-engage with and progress a draft novel that has been in a drawer for quite a while?

Amanda Curtin: Have you ever abandoned a novel in progress? Not just an idea, but a draft reasonably well advanced. (And if you have, why? And have you ever thought of going back to it?)

I have never been forced to leave a book in a drawer for a very long time, nor totally abandoned a book (though I have taken a long break from one) – so perhaps the following won’t help. But I think if I were in this position, I would return to a statement that has helped me time and again, and which, Nikita, could constitute the best advice I’ve come across.

It’s from the American painter Jasper Johns, who wrote this note to himself in his sketchbook:

“Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]”

Often, when I’m stuck, it’s the search for and discovery of this ‘something else’ that breaks open a problem and leads to solutions.

I wrote in the last newsletter about the benefit of turning the painting to the wall, but it is also true that books left alone for too long can develop a very tough skin, and be all but impossible to work into again. I have heard one editor talk of the dangers of work left to ‘atrophy’, or wither on the vine. But I have also known of books left alone for a long time that eventually come good – usually by the author’s taking some sort of radical action to bring them back to life.

I’m the kind of writer who likes to chuck things out, sometimes a little recklessly. I need fresh water constantly running through my writing stream. So if this were me, I think I would start by opening up the book in a spirit of risk and wilful destruction – a willingness to take the whole thing apart, blow it up completely – and then read it carefully to see where I had been lying, or trying to impress, where I was forcing things, where I might be holding on to a section or character or storyline simply because it had been so hard won.

In her classic book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says this about the importance of letting go.

‘Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw work away. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart; they will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will retain them. He may retain those pages if they possess some virtues, such as power in themselves, though they lack the cardinal virtue, which is pertinence to, and unity with, the book’s thrust. Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared – relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no.^[3]

So. I would open the draft and try to read ruthlessly, keeping only those passages that retain a true living pulse, the thrum of new possibility.

Once I’d found them I’d separate them from the rest and start again, allowing myself to dream and drift, waiting and searching for Johns’ ‘something else’ – the new strand, structure, idea, character, setting. A new interruption, voice, time frame, anything that might once again light me up with excitement and urgency.

And if I failed to find the breath of life, either in the existing work or the new ‘something else’ on the horizon, I like to think I would put the novel away – for good. I would seek to liberate myself from the albatross of that work, look to the world, start something different and entirely new.

^[1] The Writer’s Room, Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin 2016

^[2] A side note: Emily Perkins and I hope next year to run a masterclass series together on some of the more amorphous elements of writing, including voice.

^[3] The Writing Life, Annie Dillard, HarperCollins 2013