Home thoughts from home

Interesting article about Helen Garner, whose The Spare Room I've recently enjoyed very much http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/truly-helen/story-e6frg8h6-1111115933083 I particularly like this quote "She pushed out small collections of stories before drifting into non-fiction, essays, columns, film reviews, lured by the quick sprint and what writer Janet Malcolm refers to as the stirrings of reportorial desire." This question of invading privacy comes up a lot when reading Garner's autobiographical novel (where she IS the narrator). Janet Malcolm is an interesting journalist who is very aware of how a journalist crosses a line to get on intimate terms with a subject. "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's...

My story is on-line at hhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/mystory/stories/survival/171914/ Nice to see it in print but competition closed and so there are some amendments I would've done to 'him's that aren't very clear - however it does say what I wanted it to.

Hector (Alan Bennett) in The History Boys puts it brilliantly: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours" That's the kind of writing I want to do - so someone out there doesn't feel as isolated and lonely and knows that someone, somewhere, understands.

Interesting article by Lionel Shriver in the Guardian about using your family as a source for your writing (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/17/lionel-shriver-novel-family) I feel that there is a responsibility to protect the privacy of one's relatives but beyond that it is just another stimulus and that's what fiction is - not true!

I've found the quote now: "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison That seems like a noble ambition although a lot of the books I wanted to read have been written by women like Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve and Carol Shields. I hope it will help me find exactly what I want to write about.... The following piece comes from my writing class again and all we were given was the title really and a short summary of what the Ack-Ack girls did, so really an exercise in making an imaginative leap - I'm not sure how successfully I can do this - I feel the character is still essentially me? Ack-Ack girls She’d never been so scared. And not just for a few minutes at a time but all the time- a kind of background hum of anxiety that became almost familiar to her as the weeks went by. It was hard to know how the others really felt – no one spoke of it, and the louder girls like Bessie acted as if their ...

So why do it then? I think if you're a person whose sense of self is not very strong, writing makes things real - that's definitely how my journal works for me, and also I need to write things down to know what I think - the very act is in itself helpful in clarifying and analysing my emotions, thoughts and reactions to life events and interactions with people. Reading other people's writing has always helped me to make sense of my own life and one would have to hope that the reverse would be true.....

I've been reading the most recent post on the Magma blog http://magmapoetry.com/beyond-experience/ about writing on subjects beyond your own experience. I wonder if our imagination is in fact also 'our own experience' as it must come from what we've read, seen, heard, felt and thought. What we are really concerned about is its accuracy - is it also true to other people's experiences? And you can't know that until others read it?