writing | Wait until next year

August 4, 2010

I write, but I am not a writer

Upon asking the question, “What do you do, then?” surely the most chilling words us bloggers can hear are:

“I’m a writer.”

This is not going to end well. If they genuinely are, we are consumed by a combination of admiration and envy. If it turns out they write blurbs for catalogues or other such hackery, then we are beyond annoyed.

After all, we write. We write regularly, on all manner of subjects. And we care about what we write.

But does that make us writers? Read the rest of this entry »

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February 4, 2010

What would Joe DiMaggio do? – Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

After this blog’s one moment of international fame, I thought I’d make a brief return to the work of your friend and mine, Ernest Hemingway.

So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.

Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.

My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.

And I used the word ‘story’ rather than ‘book’ quite deliberately.

Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.

The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.

So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?

I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.

I’ll just let the man himself reply:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.

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December 3, 2009

The Great Gatsby – or is he?

More often than not I will lay off the fiction when I’m choosing a book. For faintly ridiculous reasons, really. I like to know what’s really going on in the world, or has gone on in the world in the past. I like reality. I like facts and information I can utilise in a pub quiz (how sad, eh?). I like tidbits I can bore my friends and family with on high days and holidays.

This is, of course, forgetting that you can get all this, and more, from good fiction. I can find out just as much, and be just as moved, as I would be by a true-life story.

This was certainly the case with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. After reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which features Fitzgerald around the time The Great Gatsby was written, the novel itself seemed a sensible next stop. Here I could perhaps flesh out that 1920s world, and see if Hemingway was right about this being Fitzgerald’s best work.

It did also help that the book is my Significant Other’s favourite. She has pretty good taste (well, she lives with me, right? OK, apart from living with me, she has good taste) and I doubted she’s recommend a book I wouldn’t go for.

You’ll be pleased to hear, dear reader, I wasn’t disappointed.

Here is a wonderful snapshot of 1920s decadence. Here was that sense of freedom and abandon after the First World War. Here was the truly modern(ist?) world, with its pleasures and its pitfalls. The book chronicles the recklessness of the age, which would eventually lead to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression (although obviously Fitzgerald was not to know of this when he was writing the book). People wallow in excess, on money that appears from nowhere, with no foundation, a modern Gomorrah, heading for disaster. Sounds familiar, eh?

Money is no object, and with Gatsby, he appears to have magicked it from thin air. The allusion is that he has gained his fortune by nefarious means (perhaps he is a con artist, perhaps a bootlegger, perhaps a fixer of the World Series). But the great and good are more than happy to accept his charming self, and more importantly are happy to see his money spent on their own enjoyment, at his countless parties. No questions asked.

I found Gatsby such a fascinating character as he does not seem of this (that?) world. He is a mirage. He seems to have appeared from nowhere, and can disappear just as quickly.

In the early passages of the book, Gatsby is but a mythical presence. The narrator, Nick Carraway, hears of him but does not meet him, despite living next-door. When he first catches sight of him, he vanishes. When they first meet face-to-face, Nick does not immediately realise who he is talking to.

Here is a character who is dropped into the ‘normal’ world and seems to unsettle everything. Yet, by the end, on the surface, normality has returned, or at least the unrest has been suppressed. This lends Gatsby an almost ghostly,dream-like air. For the main characters, to the outside world at least, it is as if nothing has ever happened. The status quo is restored.

He is soon forgotten by high society. They move on. Those who he genuinely touched will at least pretend to forget him, or wish that they could. Only Nick remains to mark and remember Gatsby. And so, Gatsby starts and ends a myth. He lives only in Nick’s words and memory.

Was Gatsby an illusion? Just as all that surrounded him was, and as the riches of that time were? It seems that way.

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November 30, 2009

Where do you find the time?

I worry about blogging about blogging. I fear that the blog might collapse in itself, unable to stand the introspection and navel-gazing. And then I realise that blogging is all about the navel-gazing, and there’s a whole swathe of blogs that do nothing but talk about blogging.

Hmm. So, on with the post. And I really don’t understand why I’m rambling and procrastinating as my problem is…I just don’t have enough time to write and to blog. Don’t worry readers, this isn’t some bizarre farewell, or unnecessary moan (hopefully not, anyway, but it is Monday…) but I thought it was something worth addressing, as I’m sure it is something that affects many of us from time to time.

In that ideal world we all dream of, I’d have hours to while away, honing sentences, crafting punctuation and creating works of literary art. I love the Oscar Wilde quote, “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Oh, to have the luxury of that time!

It’s not that I lack ideas, either (‘then why the tired post about lacking time to blog?’ I hear you cry!). I know I’m really lucky in that sense, in that I’ve yet to suffer from any sort of real writer’s block. In the shower, on my commute, at my desk at work, here, there and everywhere, more often than not I’m mulling over ideas for blog posts, or stories or other things I might write. But where to find the time to actually research and then write the bloomin’ things?

Work is a necessary evil. Home life is lovely, really lovely, but awfully busy. Do I lack the discipline and organisation to find the time to write? Or should I scale back outside commitments? Then again, if you should ‘write what you know’, then you should probably get your share of living in, right?

And when I do cram in some writing time, do I give it enough attention? Blogging makes it easy, nay irresistible, to just throw something together and throw it out there. I might snatch a few minutes at the start or end of the working day, or during my lunch hour, or when I get a sit-down of an evening. But do I really give my best? Is there enough quality control? (‘No!’ cries the last exasperated reader left). If I had more time, would I have cut down on the questions in this post?

What do you reckon? How do you find the time to write?

Photo from Nick Webb via Flickr.

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November 19, 2009

Stationery pleasures

I love stationery. Probably a little too much. There. I said it.

I thought I ought to acknowledge this, particularly as, for the first time, stationery got a few mentions on the blog, in my post on writing.

First, there was the Wall Street Journal article, How to Write a Great Novel. Reading through it, it was clear that stationery is pretty central for many writers. It’s not just about scribbling on any old sheet of paper – each writer has their own needs and wants, when it comes to what to actually write on, and write with.

Orhan Pamuk writes in graph-paper notebooks. Hilary Mantel always carries a notebook. Kazuo Ishiguro collects notes in a binder. Michael Ondaatje has a thing for notebooks from Muji. Dan Chaon writes on colour-coded note cards.

Margaret Atwood is perhaps less fussy, scribbling away on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers. (Interlude: Working that way reminds me of an interview with Elvis Costello I read. He said that despite buying many notebooks with the intention of using them for lyric writing, they would often be left unused, as he would end up scrawling his ideas on whatever pieces of paper came to hand. He clearly can be in my Stationery Fan Club, as his intentions are good, but it is interesting that he and Atwood are not tied to a particular method for physically writing their work.)

I was then delighted to see that the world of WordPress has a few stationery fans too. Frances Bean commented, “There was nothing like a fresh compilation notebook and the possibility it holds.” There is definitely something special about that new notebook, ready to be filled. Sometimes it almost seems a shame to write in a good notebook. Almost.

So why do I love stationery? From a very, very young age I enjoyed having paper and pencils. Apparently, before I could write, I would scribble on page upon page, convinced I had written a story, and would then ‘read’ it back to my parents. When I was a little older I’d spend hours writing in A4 pads. Sometimes I’d write stories, sometimes I’d make up football scores, sometimes I’d make up entire discographies of imaginary bands. Paper and pencil was a means of channelling my imagination. I was as happy with a new exercise book as I would be with a bag of sweets.

As an adult I’ve continued to enjoy using stationery, especially notebooks. I’m a real sucker for Moleskine notebooks and have completely fallen for their marketing and stories of famous writers and artists using them in the past. I find them wonderfully tactile, sturdy and just right for carrying wherever I go. They are a bit of luxury, but hardly an extravagant one.

I can also be quite fussy with pens, although so far I’ve shamefully stuck to the disposable type. One day I’ll find the right ‘proper’ pen. One day.

My Significant Other shares this love, luckily for me. We’ll happily mooch around the huge Staples superstore near where we live, or smaller shops we find, like the pen shop we came across whilst holidaying in Eastbourne. As silly as it sounds, enjoying stationery has been a lovely, fun thing for us to share.

I suppose when it comes to me actually writing, with this blog or whatever else, I’m far more likely to use my laptop than pen and paper. But my notebooks are still really important to me. I enjoy having something to hand to jot an idea in, or write a list, or to simply play around with an idea. And there is something more satisfying for me to use a notebook for this, rather than a laptop, or smart phone (not that I have one), when I’m out and about. I look forward to, many years from now, looking through those notebooks and reading those snatches of my thoughts, those snapshots of a past me.

So, do you covet particular items of stationery? If you use pen and paper, are you fussy about the pen and paper you use? Does it depend on what you’re writing? Or where? Or do you think this is all stuff and nonsense?

Photo from mrbill via Flickr

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Tag: writing