I was very excited to see the cover for the NZ Writer’s Handbook this week. Bateman have done a brilliant job with the design of both this cover and the typesetting. Am looking forward to seeing the finished product in 2013. I spent several months earlier this year editing and revising the latest edition of this classic directory.
*The image here is actually crunched, so the pointing hand which should be at the top is missing.
I was sent a copy of a poem from the memorial service for Margaret Mahy who passed away last week. Doesn’t it really make you think of her writing?
THE FAIRY CHILD
The very hour that I was born
I rode upon the unicorn.
When boys put tadpoles in their jars
I overflowed my tins with stars.
Because I sing to see the sun
The little children point and run.
Because I set the caged birds free
The people close their doors to me.
Goodbye, goodbye you world of men,
I shall not visit you again.
Having recently finished a major project (yes, it was a novel), my mind automatically starts thinking, ‘What next?’ The funny thing about being a writer is that sometimes you have to remind yourself (or have somebody else remind you) that it’s good to give the creative juices a break – a chance to refuel. Here is what Margo Lanagan has to say on the subject:
“Sometimes you’re not the kind of person who can get useful material from writing every day—I’m certainly not, not month in, month out. Sometimes you have to lie fallow for a while, remove yourself far enough from your own words, your own style, that you can come at them afresh later. Sometimes there’s a good story waiting, but your subconscious hasn’t worked out how you’ll approach it yet. Leave it alone; let it grow, unforced, un-angsted-over.”
Lanagan is my favourite author. Her latest novel is called The Brides of Rollrock Island – based on the Selkie mythology, seals into humans. 
At an event with Paul Thomas – the NZ crime (and sports) writer – I was interested to hear his thoughts on how he first came to write crime fiction. Having read a lot of crime novels, Thomas felt he understood the mechanics and structure of this genre. As a writer, it involved setting up a mystery and then solving it, so it’s a matter of taking the next step until you finish writing.
Thomas considers the genre to have universal appeal and that it is a self-contained process – a crime will be solved. Crime fiction has an enduring appeal, even though it can be formulaic. The trick, I guess, is to take that ‘formula’ and make it fresh.
And, like many crime authors, he was a big Agatha Christie fan as a kid. I loved Christie novels myself, gobbling them up. I wonder if kids still find them such good reading, or whether they might now seem too old-fashioned …
My latest project has been the revision of this classic publication, going into its 6th edition. What an excellent resource it has been for years. I remember, as a starting-out writer, proudly buying my first copy. The revised Handbook is due out early next year.
Recently I was privileged to be one of the judges for the National Flash Fiction competition, and what an excellent selection of stories I read. Amazing what can be achieved in only 300 words. If you’d like to read the shortlisted entries, here’s where you can see them: http://nationalflash.wordpress.com/competition/
At my book group the other night, somebody asked if any contemporary novels would one day become ‘classics’, in the way that Dickens’ or Jane Austen’s novels are classic literature. I’ve just read the re-release of Tim Winton’s 2001 novel Dirt Music and I think that could easily be a classic – a novel that would endure.
Set in Western Australia, an area Winton knows very well, the novel is redolent with the beautiful though unforgiving landscape, and the people who live in it.
In her essay about Winton’s writing, Bron Sibree writes: ‘For Tim Winton stories are like splinters. Slivers of the surrounding terrain that lodge themselves under his skin, nagging him forward, until he’s given them life and form.’
This is certainly true of Dirt Music. Sibree quotes Winton himself, who explains that ‘the novel has existed only as a series of handwritten notebooks. I was going to work every day and I was working on them, and they were the book, but they weren’t a story. I started travelling in the North because I could just smell something. Like the smell of rain.’
Eventually, the story came together. It’s a magnificent novel.
My story, Sunhat, is featured in the New Zealand edition of this online literary magazine. You can read the story – and work by other NZ writers – here.
Am currently reading the collection of essays and reviews by Joyce Carol Oates called In Rough Country (2010), and was delighted to read that her first ‘mentor’ was her grandmother.
“If I had a single mentor who guided me into my writing life – or at any rate encouraged me – it wasn’t any of my teachers, wonderful though they were, or any of my university colleagues in the years to come, but my grandmother … Along with articles of clothing she’d sewed or knitted for me, my grandmother gave me books for Christmas and my birthday, year after year …’
Without comparing myself in any way to JCO, it took me straight back to my own childhood and my grandmother who used to give me books. Nana loved going to auctions and having the odd bid (a bit like the Queen Mother having a flutter at the track), and one of the things she used to bid on were lots of old books – for me. And not any kind of weary old books, but books bound in leather, books with embossed spines and faded ribbon markers, and classics such as The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (which still has tucked among its pages a very bad poem written by myself in turquoise ink in 1980).
Unlike JCO who grew up with hardly books to speak of in the farmhouse of her early childhood (not even a Bible), my own farm home had a modest shelf of books. My mother, who is a very practical woman, always believed that it was better to borrow books from the library than buy them.
So it was with enormous delight that, at about age 13, when my aunt and uncle Margaret and Daniel Curlett were moving overseas for an indefinite period, they left several boxes of books at our house – and I was allowed to read any of them I wanted. The excitement!
Like my sensible mother, I get my books from the library these days, mainly because books are so expensive to buy new; yet also, there are so many wonderful books being published all the time that it would simply be too difficult to choose only one to buy when I’ve got the choice of thousands in our new Auckland Supercity system – 55 libraries, as the literature boasts.
“A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”
from Burning the Days, by James Salter.
