Excerpts from a Reading Journal, 2009
May 3rd
You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance. Anne Lamott I write in my bedroom. My desk is on an angle in front of the windows and if I stand up at my desk, which I must do, apparently, at regular intervals when working, in order to protect my miserable sagging spine, I can see the Wharekopae River across the fence line at the edge of the driveway and beside that the curve of the gravel road and the one way bridge. I can also hear if a car is coming up or down the gravel road; get to see which of the neighbours is having a town day.
Monday 20 July
It’s a beautiful sunny day today. We had so much rain on the weekend that we were cut off up here in the hills for a few hours. Not so bad really, except that I had seven ten year olds waiting at various points along the gravel road beyond our two water crossings to be ferried into the bright city lights of Gizzy to kick their heels up. We got there. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories — and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of. What could be more interesting as a life’s occupation? One of the ways we do this, I think, is by trying to look at what memory does (different tricks at different stages of our lives) and at the way people’s different memories deal with the same (shared) experience. The more disconcerting the differences are, the more the writer in me feels an odd exhilaration.
Monday 17 August
Talked to Kathryn last week about the way that Munro ‘does’ tenses and flashbacks. In my writing, I often feel that this is my ‘problem’ a technical difficulty. But part of me, believes, that it is also just the way my characters want to behave and I think I want to hang onto that somewhere in the background of my writing in this MA year. I realise that I’ve not got the skills developed to pull it off. As Kathryn said, it’s a very advanced sort of style. I think it’s just the way that people in reality think and behave. I think that’s what Munro captures in her writing.
Tuesday 18 August
I’ve got my folio workshop this week. Feeling a mixture of excitement and gut wrenching fear at the prospect of it. Spent hours and hours on it in the last couple of days I have before hand-in. Only once it was photocopied though, stapled and handed out, still warm from the photocopier even, only then did I see the first of my monumental errors. The last page of my first story I have slipped into the incorrect tense. Why does this happen? I hand a copy to Damien where he stands at the whiteboard, have a little bleat to him about my mistakes. It just happens, he says.
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