Tag: writing

Letters From Tove

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by Fiona McFarlane There’s been a bit of heated discussion, recently, about the public role of a writer, some of it in response to an essay in the Atlantic: Meghan Tifft’s ‘An Introverted Writer’s Lament.’[1] Tifft’s piece questions the pressure writers feel to participate in writing and reading communities in order to promote their work – public readings! Festivals! Q&As! Book tours! Conferences! Social media! Interviews! And all the other, less easily classifiable commitments that arise from the very good fortune of having been published. Tifft’s essay hovers somewhere between confession and complaint, and I admire her honesty. She approaches…

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What’s my name?

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by Sunil Badami When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name! Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now. Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation…

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Who am I? My Life as a Writer

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by Sunil Badami Who am I? Reading the excellent, eloquent, engaging entries on this blog before me by much better writers and performers, you’d be forgiven for asking the question. I’m always surprised when people recognise me and my work; the most common response when I admit I’m a writer is ‘have I read anything you’ve written?’—which, I suppose, is a question that answers itself, much like asking a bouncer turfing you out of a nightclub ‘do you know who I am??’ For years, I never actually said I was a writer; given how little I actually wrote in comparison…

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And now for something completely (well, maybe not completely) different

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by Nicolette Stasko Interviewer: Well, hello Nicolette, glad you could make it. NS: Thanks, happy to be here. Interviewer: Just a few straightforward questions to get started. NS: Fire away. Interviewer: Is your nationality American? NS: No, I’m Australian. Interviewer: What are you reading at the moment? NS: I had dinner with my Inspector Maigret supplier last week and now have a new stock of Simenon. I chose A Crime in Holland to read first, as it sounded the least ‘dark’, hoping not to get too excited or addicted because I have to finish this post. But I’m already halfway…

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‘Apologia’ with Rave

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by Nicolette Stasko Writing A blog (short for weblog)[i] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries or ‘posts’. It’s interesting that Blog is also be used as a verb, meaning ‘to maintain or add content to a blog’. ‘The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users’ (Wikipedia). I hope I’m not stating the obvious. I’m not normally a blogger nor a bloggee. (BLOG is such an ugly word!) This is a…

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Text

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by Angela Rockel Salient: [— L. saliens, –ent-, pr. pple. of salire leap] 1. Leaping, jumping … of animals … of water … 3. Salient point: in old medical use, the heart as it first appears in an embryo; hence, the first beginning of life or motion; the starting-point of anything (OED) The waning moon rises later and later, nearer and nearer to dawn, ever thinner, until, lined up between earth and the sun, only its unlit face is turned our way. Then after a pause it reappears, a shining filament on the evening horizon. High pressure systems flatten the…

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Riddle

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by Angela Rockel Rogue intensities roam the streets of the ordinary. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects There’s a memory I carried as a series of sensations, wordless, all through my childhood: I’m looking at something that fills my visual field. It’s a surface, squarish, textured and undulating, patterned with lines. Around its edge it separates into projections – I discover that I can move the thing, turn it and find another side, a different texture. Eventually words attached themselves to this experience – surface, line, projections, move – but it was twenty years or more before I put them together to…

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Notes on metaphor and storytelling

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by Gretchen Shirm While I was writing my first book Having Cried Wolf, a collection of interwoven short stories, I had the acute sense of having ‘got’ something, of having understood a concept fundamental to storytelling. At the time, I thought what I had understood was the form of the short story, that after many years of practising by writing short pieces of writing that had no structure, I had learnt how to ‘turn’ a story around a small incident or event. Now, looking back on what I learnt, I think what I came to understand was something broader and…

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Embracing the chaos

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by Claire Scobie Trust the process. If I learned anything writing The Pagoda Tree, it is that. Except, like with any lessons, it’s easy to forget. Over the past three weeks I’ve written about the fun stuff: planning, dreaming and researching a novel. The actual writing is much thornier. From the start I knew I needed to get the scenes down, however rough. Louis de Bernieres confirmed that approach after telling me how bogged down he became researching his epic Birds without Wings. If you research first and write later there’s a danger of getting lost in the morass of…

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The Novel

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by Aashish Kaul There is a line in Alberto Manguel’s With Borges where, reminiscing about his childhood, Borges reveals how in those days he would regularly accompany his father to the National Library in Buenos Aires and, too timid to ask for a book, would often simply pull out a volume of the Britannica and read at random. This is how he said he learned in one day about ‘the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.’ The brief statement is delivered by the ageing writer in his typical casual manner, but its intent is clear: a reader can derive all of…

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Blood and Loss

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by Stephen Sewell I suppose I’ve been a writer all my life, and it’s always been getting me into trouble. I was nearly expelled from school when I was thirteen when the school paper I was editing began an investigation of the local parish priest, and my relationship with authority has been fraught ever since. It’s not that I’m a natural rebel, I don’t think, though most children are, but that I just can’t stand being pushed around. Fundamentally, that’s what it is. So maybe I just never grew up. Of course, I don’t like hypocrisy and can’t stand inconsistency,…

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Ambition

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by Anthony Lawrence I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. – from The Ambition Bird, Anne Sexton Ambition is normal. It’s the fuse we light when we begin. We want our poems to succeed, whatever that means. When we start out, it’s a good thing we don’t know how to file all the burrs down. Our early work, with its deep flaws and inconsistencies, is all we have. Self belief. Ambition. Faith. Trying to second-guess ourselves in the early stages kills the pilot light. Self-consciousness is the last thing…

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