My absence has been noted

And I apologise to people who emailed me and asked if I was dead (no, but thanks for your generous enquiries anyway) or had writer’s block. Do I detect a touch of schadenfreude in those questions? Anyway, it’s not exactly writer’s block either.

It’s workshop season.

For some reason my unique blend of hard-headed cynicism and muppet-like enthusiasm does get people into the room. Usually they don’t leave (although one did, yesterday) and usually they seem to enjoy themselves, even though I make them do high-risk, high-exposure things they weren’t banking on when they turned up. Believe me, as somebody who’s done both, it’s a lot easier to take your clothes off in public than pitch your novel to a roomful of your peers. But they do, bless ‘em.

For me, teaching, or workshop leading (which we don’t call teaching because we’re not qualified to teach, are we? Only to exhort and nag and tell anecdotes and share gossip and so on) stops me writing for about a week. Stops me dead. I could never be a teacher (good thing really, see previous parentheses) because I’d never write another word except in the summer hols.

But one of yesterday’s lovely workshoppers emailed to say he’d found my blog. So I feel obligated to update it, even if only with whittering.

I've whittered.

Minor neurosis emerging

Today has been pen quest day. Pen quest is one of those slight but aggravating signs of obsessive/compulsive behaviour that I try to hide from people, especially other writers. My neuroses are—as you know—rare. You might think I’m protesting a bit too much. You’d be right. I am a touch neurotic about pens.

The problem with pen quest is that it comes around with monotonous regularity. Some writers know how many words they write in a week or month or year, I don’t, mainly because I’m innumerate. What I do know is that I am a fifteen pen per annum woman, and as my pen of choice comes in a five pack, I make three trips a year to find them.

Yes actually, before you email me to tell me I’m witless, I have thought of buying them in one annual jamboree of penitude. There is a problem with that approach, which is that by the end of the year, only two of the five pens in the ultimate pack work. Or so it was for me. And there are few things as frustrating as picking up a new pen and finding it doesn’t function, not to mention the frantic scribbling, the rolling of the pen between the palms of the hands, the running it under a hot tap to soften its ink and all the other completely ineffective ways of resuscitating a defunct pen that you can find out by googling the subject. Actually there is one thing more frustrating – it’s the moment after you throw the uncooperative new pen in the bin and pick up the last new pen, only to find it is as non-functioning as its immediate predecessor.

My chosen implement is the Papermate flexgrip ultra in medium, with blue ink. As pens go, it’s not quite as ubiquitous as a Bic, but certainly more so than many another. And yet whenever I go hunting for it, the Papermate flexgrip ultra in medium, with blue ink is hard to find. I can locate individual blue pens, at exhorbitant prices, (by the way, Collins online says exhorbitant is archaic, which suddenly makes me feel ancient, but that’s how I was taught to spell it and leaving the h out looks wrong to me) or black pens in fives. Neither will serve. A gum-chewing shop assistant offers me a gel pen. I scowl and travel to another shop. In another shop, the sales assistant has a pierced eyebrow which looks septic, or he has green brows, which is not as elven and fey as it sounds. I watch him scratch said brow with the pen he is about to try and sell me and leave another shop for yet a third shop.

Third shop has my pens. I calculate the working hours lost to this exercise with one of my new pens, on the back of my (exhorbitant) parking receipt and decide I have to work unceasingly until midnight to make up for lost time.

And that explains why I’m sitting here blogging … or perhaps it doesn’t.

Pens courtesy of Jose C Silva at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Reading, performing or appearing?

What do you do if you have to read your work aloud? I am a performer, rather than a reader, but I know many writers (possibly more self-confident and well-balanced writers) who simply read. And there are those few, those stunning souls of coruscating intellect, charm or whatever, who ‘appear’.

What I mean by reading is that there are people who can turn up in their street clothes, not tell anecdotes, speak in their normal voices and still hold an audience. I am not one of them. For me to read in public, I have to put on a persona, and ‘special’ clothes and have a couple of little stories to tell to try and win people over before I launch into actually sharing my world with them face to face, as it were.

One of the horrible aspects of writing is that you’re never quite sure (or at least I’m not) whether something written to be read from the page will then become that bewildering beast, a creature to be read aloud to an audience. So it was with The Price of Freedom, which was commissioned for the Macmillan Cancer Trust Burlesque anthology – in my mind, when I wrote it, were the following facts:

1. It was being written as erotica, but for a cancer charity anthology, so it had to balance burlesque, sex and something more
2. Lots of writers were being commissioned to write for the antho, so the story needed to have a different edge, something that would distinguish it
3. I needed to feel that I’d done my best for a good cause.

What wasn’t in my mind was the idea that I might end up reading it aloud. So I chose to write about a London burlesque club on the eve of VJ day in 1945. And while that was a great subject to write about, it wasn’t such an easy thing to tackle in public. Let alone in Komedia, on a Friday night, as part of a burlesque spectacular.

But I did it. I wore the 1947 crepe de chine dress and some very silly shoes that I had to take off half way along Gardner Street after the show and hail a taxi barefoot. It was fun, but …

Reading as Carmel Lockyer is very difficult. Carmel is only a bit of me, as I see it. She’s not a whole person. Her subject, erotica, is fun, but it’s also only a bit of what I do. So reading as Carmel feels very strange – like being pared down to a small part of myself, put on a very big stage and left to get on with it.

It was lovely. I’m glad it’s over. I hope never to do it again!

How do you feel about easy money?

I know that your immediate answer is ‘fine’ or even ‘where can I get me some?’ but seriously, if you’re a writer, stop and think.

Do you really believe in easy money? Do you genuinely, deep down, think that if it only took an hour to write, you should get paid a hundred quid for it?

Do you?

Or do you feel that something would be wrong with that picture? Does your innermost being whimper that there’s something nasty about the idea of getting paid so much for an hour’s literary doodling, when you’ve sweated blood and expelled tears over much better work that’s never found a home, let alone a home with a nice return payment attached.

Hmmm.

I suspect that at least half the writers reading this are confronting an inner myth right now, and I suspect this because whenever I lead a workshop this myth, and a couple of others, will seep into the room, or – more likely – will seep through later email communications with participants.

Myths are prevalent. Literary myths are particularly so, because they are beautifully couched in language that works for writers and so they slither into us while we’re still admiring the quality of the syntax. And if you’re a writer who’s never been anything else, myth comparison is not going to be your strong suit.

Consider these famous words: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith and Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. Virginia Woolf. Neither is particularly positive about our craft and neither offers much sense of self-esteem, or self-fulfilment through writing. This is the kind of myth I’m talking about.

Now compare and contrast: when Auguste Escoffier created Peach Melba to honour opera star Dame Nellie Melba, he didn’t feel wracked by failure that it only took him an hour to create a new dish good enough to bear the name of one of opera’s most exacting stars, instead he said something along the lines of ‘This great dessert is my compliment to a great lady’. Because what Auguste knew, and what people in almost every other industry know, is that it’s not the hour that matters – it’s the years it took to get there. Vidal Sassoon cut hair like an angel, and when you’d been in his hands for an hour, you looked and felt like a different person. But it wasn’t that hour that counted, it was the years he spent learning his trade that allowed him to know what your hair wanted better than you did.

The time it takes to create something is not generally indicative of its value. I know many a writer who’s been working on a novel for a decade - and all those novels are mediocre. It’s the writers who’ve got on with many projects, who’ve bashed their egos against the publishing industry until the prickly bits have been knocked off or smoothed over, who’ve spent time exploring what fiction is, and why it gets published, who’ve produced good work.

And, dear writer, until you accept that you’re good enough to produce, in an hour, fiction worth hundreds of pounds, you will struggle with an inferiority complex that will make you bitter, twisted and quite possibly, poorer than necessary.

Easy money courtesy of Joe Shlabotnik at Flickr