Shaun Levin

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Generosity (and Fishing)

In Writing, Writing Workshops on July 12, 2011 at 10:02 am

Writing is a gesture of generosity, a giving of yourself. The best stories are like shrapnel from the writer’s soul, synecdoches of their being. To write well is to rend yourself open. To paint well, too. To do anything well is to give of yourself. The more you refuse to share of yourself the thinner your prose will be, the shallower. There should be nothing that you would not write about, nothing of yourself that you would not explore. Of course, “should” is a blaming word. Of course, we can never share everything. Aim to avoid nothing. Don’t behave yourself.

(I think that was one of Bomberg‘s downfalls… he did not behave himself. He valued integrity in a country that does not value integrity. He was operating in a culture that has perfected, over centuries, ways to hide integrity, to hide it, conceal it, mask it. The way Bomberg worked and thought and behaved was messy. This country does not appreciate messy, the messiness of the soul, the imagination, the internal workings of the psyche.)

How do you encourage writers in a workshop to be generous? To not be afraid. Especially when there are days – you know there are days like this – when all you want to do is shut down. You want to shut down especially when you know what you have to write about, a story that is about both pain and a wonderful freedom (to be precise: Fishing with your father), but there is something about the fact of an audience that paralyses you. As if the thought of an audience no longer makes the writing your own, no longer makes it private. I need to trick myself into believing that what I’m writing is private, that it’s just for me. Speaking of fishing… it’s a bit like the difference between that time when you’re sitting on the boat or standing on the shore with your line in the water and you’re waiting, those glorious moments of anticipation and your mind wonders off, but somehow that line in the water connects you to the world, to the deep waters, to the inner parts of yourself, to your true wishes. And then the fish bites and you let it run with the line a bit and then the fight to reel it in begins and you are no longer in your own head, it’s just you and the fish, a battle with a creature who wants freedom, and that exhilaration and fight and dread are all transmitted to you through the line and you and the fish are together… maybe not “as one”, but definitely connected.

The creative time comes before the bite. You can’t create and fight the fish at the same time. The fish at the end of the line is an intrusion into the writing process. Writing is the waiting time.

In a workshop you want to create a space where everyone can forget about the audience, forget about the fight with the fish, but know that the fish is there, know that the standing there with the line – the fishing line and the line of the page, the squiggly lines our pens make across the page – is for a reason, and there will be a fish and we will have something to eat and something substantial will be created.

Writing the Tribe

In Writing, Writing Workshops on July 4, 2011 at 10:38 am

What happens when you write outside your tribe? No, what I want to ask is, why write outside your tribe, outside of your people, your landscapes, the parts of the world you are familiar with? A Jew writes about a Buddhist monk. No, it’s more simple than that. A Jewish writer writes about a Christian businesswoman, a Muslim skateboarder. No, it’s more simple than that. A Jewish writer writes about a Christian writer. Why? Is that writer’s motivation a desire to stretch the imagination, to see where their imagination will go if they try to put themself in the shoes of someone slightly different, or seemingly slightly different.

This question rose out of an incident recently in a workshop where a Nigerian male writer (I have created a fictional workshop participant to ensure confidentiality) read out a story about a white middle class woman, a mother, an actress. He is none of these things and neither is his girlfriend. The story was okay, but I knew that if he’d made the story’s protagonist a Nigerian woman, that something much more interesting and complex would have happened. Even if she, like in the original version, was called Jennifer. I wasn’t sure what to say to him about these thoughts, so I didn’t say anything. I focused on other elements of the story. But the question has nagged at me. There was the issue of what he thought were legitimate topics for stories. I had a feeling, though I might be wrong, that he didn’t feel it was valid to make his characters, or even just one of them, someone who was deeply familiar to him. The gender question was also there in the mix.

This isn’t just a question about race. I feel like it’s a question more about the range of topics we assume are available to us, that are legitimate. I don’t know if he wanted to write about Nigerian characters, but hadn’t read enough literature by Nigerian writers, come across enough stories with Nigerian characters in them, to realise his choice would have been valid. His decision might also be linked to the fact that he was one of only two people of colour in the class, and to write about characters so close to him would have felt too intimate a thing to share.

And it’s not a question about whether writers with difference – Jewish writers, writers of African descent, Asian writers, queer writers, blind or deaf writers – should only write about characters from their worlds. It is, though, a question of distance, and a question of connectedness, and a question of depth. How deep can we go into a character that is fundamentally different from us. But then, writing is also about pretending. Don’t we have the capacity to go anywhere with it? Aren’t we – now I risk sounding like a liberal – all in this world together?

Which reminded me of this…

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https://ted.com/talks/view/id/652

The Voice You Choose Is Not Your Own

In Writing on June 20, 2011 at 1:10 pm

Teaching writing is an opportunity to articulate your understanding of the craft and its aspects: point of view, character, plot. That sort of thing. Recently I said to a student that point of view – or voice, because they are almost the same thing – is the most fundamental aspect of writing fiction. Then I came across a playful but serious piece by Chuck Wendig about character, where he says that character is the be and end all of the undertaking that is the novel. But no matter how interesting or complex or dramatic a character is, the way a story is told, the point of view from which it is told, the voice in which it is told, is what will keep us reading. For us as the writer, being clear about the point of view will keep us focused and clearly positioned in the world of the novel. Point of view will be our shock-proof shit-detector. The clearer we are about the point of view, the better we will be able to see when we slip out of it.

First person, second person, third person, omniscient, whatever you want to call them, none of these POVs are actually monolithic points of view. There is not one type of first person, or one type of omniscient. It’s about a relationship and a distance to the narrative. Where is the voice situated vis-a-vis the story. The point of view is something we create; it doesn’t just happen. Point of view is a decision. Bomberg’s decision to leave his mark on the world through teaching – after he’d become disillusioned with the painting world and his non-acceptance into it – was what gave his voice the authority it had. The strange thing, though, is that he is now known for his paintings, and his writings about art are all but forgotten, ignored. Only a few extracts are published in William Lipke’s book.

It’s hard to explain point of view, because what you’re telling the writer is to step out of themselves, to understand that the voice they are telling the story in is not them. Voice is not just whatever comes out when you put the pen on the page, not just whatever gets put paper. Voice is something you have to feel. It’s a character in itself. It is, like Chuck says in his piece, a skin you put on. The process of writing a novel and working out how to tell the story is a process of forgetting the self, of stepping out of what you know, of disappearing. It can be terrifying and it can be liberating, and I think there are moments early on in the project when we get glimpses of that voice, that slipping out of ourselves, but then we retreat, we step back into the familiar, which is a bit more amorphous.

Writing is about disappearing. Into other characters, other worlds, other voices. And if we’re going to do it well, we have to be prepared for that. And at the end – right at the end of writing the novel – you come out and you don’t really know that you’ve been away, or where you’ve been. It’s like a dreamspace, like being hypnotised. I think men find it harder to grasp what voice is. Women are taught, for example, to read as men. Men (and I probably mean white, Christian, Western, middle class, straight men) often assume that whatever they say is monolithic, correct, that where they are standing is everywhere, as if to stand everywhere were possible.

Writing as Home

In Writing on June 17, 2011 at 11:42 am

Sometimes even twenty minutes is too much. You plan and decide and think it will be manageable, but then you miss a day – life gets in the way, a class to prepare, dinner with a friend who’s in town for one night only, a general overwhelmedness with things – and it gets harder to come back to it, easier to skip another day. There is always the pull towards silence, towards walking away. And it begins to feel like work, something that needs to be avoided, resisted, rebelled against. So what at the start felt like a project that would bring you great pleasure and would (in this case) be a good way to consolidate what you’ve been doing for over fifteen years – all that consolidating became a bit of a chore. You start with a high level of enthusiasm and you do the first days as if they are summer and you are swimming, running on the beach, everything’s flowing and you are convinced, almost, that you can keep going like this every day. But then you can’t. Five days in, a week in, and you’ve run out of things to say, you feel like you’ve said everything there is to say. And you wonder if this is it, if this, after fifteen years of engaging and preparing and running and thinking and doing and whatever, it has come to this. A week of writing and then you are silent. Doubt creeps in, a horrible nagging gagging mean voice that says you have run out, that your time is up, that what you thought would be possible, no longer is.

All writing is like that. There is the beginning of a project and after a short while the work wants you to shift gear, to go deeper, the trajectory of a narrative is always to go deeper and broader. Auto pilot is not an option, not until you are much further into the work, when the work is bigger than you and you can let go into it. Until then, it’s a constant battle between trust and abandonment.

And then you come home. You write and it is like home, the place where you are listened to. The place where the core of you is accepted and loved and necessary. Writing is home, the ideal home, everything we think home ought to be. There is relief when you come back to it. Relief and all the other emotions and dramas that relate to home. Writing is home, a place to rest, a safe place, a place where you are known. Writing is something early, primal, that moment in your life when you realised you could make everything clear and understandable. Writing is a place where you can choose your secrets and your revelations. Writing is a place to hide and be seen. Writing is the spider scrawl on a page, the thread that makes the web, that web you keep longing to be entangled in and held by like a hammock.

Light & Landscape

In Writing on June 13, 2011 at 10:12 am

Writing depends on light. A story depends on light. Each story we write comes out of a certain type of light. Like a painting. A shift in the landscape, in the type of light, and the story changes. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Sometimes we need a different light to see what we’re doing. To shed light. Light, in this case, is, I suppose, a kind of perspective. A couple of years ago I went to Australia to spend a few weeks there, intending to finish my novel about Mark Gertler. The novel, amongst other things, was about the artist’s dying, his TB, his suicide. About a week into my time in the sunshine, on the farm, in the vast open spaces of New South Wales, I realised I couldn’t keep going with that novel, that it would have to wait till I got back to the duller light, the greyness and the built landscape of London. I wrote other things instead. Not necessarily sunny things, but things with open spaces, and things  – stories, essays, fragments – that had a deep engagement with nature. For four weeks I lived in a house where the only sounds were birds and wombats and the occasional thud of a kangaroo jumping outside my window. I think we get used to a certain type of landscape, a certain type of light, and it’s that light and those surroundings that we need in order to write. I was going to say: in order to do our best work, but I’m not sure I mean that.

We have our places for thinking and our places for writing, different places, perhaps, for different types of writing. Writing in cafes, writing in the garden, writing in a park, on a train, in an art gallery or in the cinema while waiting for the film to start, in a corner in a pub, drinking, even though we never drink before and while we write (those of us who’ve adopted Hemingway’s rule). And each of those places has an impact on what we say. On the other hand, there are people who are able to be so intensely in the zone, that no matter where they are, no matter what the light or the landscape, they inhabit the fictional world of their novel and nothing can distract them from that. I know that because I have been with writers in places that are so different from the places they usually write in and yet they stick to their project, their novel.

I am easily distracted, and on the whole I like to be distracted. That’s why I probably will never write a proper novel, whatever a proper novel is. My work is made up of fragments, pieced together bursts of writing, of inspiration and struggle and bewilderment and glee, but maybe that’s how proper novels get put together. Order is a myth. Nothing unfolds smoothly. My fascination with painting has something to do with this, the way a painter is confined to and by their canvas. The canvas that is one page. One landscape. Evidence of one type of light. Can one grow tired of the same light, the same landscape? Do we have to be on the move – always looking for the perfect light, the way Bomberg did – in order to keep our subject matter, or technique, our voice alive?

The Subject Matter that Is Your Life

In Writing, Writing Exercises on June 3, 2011 at 10:43 pm

Take stock. Make a list of all the things you have to write about. Keep a little notebook of these subjects, these moments, these memories, these experiences, these people. Make a list of all your cousins, the things you remember doing with them, things people told you about them. Make a list of all the jobs you’ve had, even if it was only for a few hours, that job you walked out of pretty much immediately. The job you’ve had for twenty years. Make a list of your aunts and uncles. All the houses you’ve lived in, the people you’ve lived with. Make a list of everyone you’ve had sex with, even if just for a few minutes, even if just the one. Make a list of all the celebrities you fancy. All the movies you love and would want to see again, and the books. Make a list of all the writers you’d like to be. To meet. To love. Make a list of all the things you know, and the things you know how to do. Realise that you carry around with you a vast resource, a bottomless treasure chest. You never have to worry about not having something to write about. The only thing you need to worry about is the voice that tells you what you should be writing about, and what you should be writing about, it says, is something that has nothing to do with your life. If you want to write fiction, the mean voice says, you have to go as far away as possible from your experience. Nonsense. That is the voice that doesn’t want you to tell the story that means the most to you, the story that will challenge you and offer the most surprises and satisfaction. Make a list of all the windows you’ve looked out of, all the cakes you’ve baked, and eaten, all the strangers you’ve spoken to on a train, even if it’s just one, write about her. All this is your resource for fiction, too. Write about yourself, write about what you know, write to discover what you don’t know in the things you think you know. Don’t ignore the subject matter that is your life.

Fiction is make-believe, it’s pretending, it’s inventing characters and situations. Make a list of the places you’d like to go to. Research them and write about them as if you’ve been there. Make a list of the experiences you’ve never had and pick the ones that intrigue you, the ones you hope you’ll never have and the ones that you want to have and research them, interview people who’ve had them, then write about them as if they’re yours. Write about torture and intimate contentment and walking barefoot for miles and crossing oceans on sea-liners and surviving a war and famine and tea at the Ritz. You don’t have to go there to know there, though you will have to find a place in you that has been there, that has experienced something that is an echo of the experience you want to write about, no matter how much it might seem alien to your world. And that, too, is part of the soul work.

Writer-Friends

In Writing, Writing Exercises on May 27, 2011 at 10:40 am

It’s important to have friends to whom you can talk about writing, with whom writing-talk is part of the ebb and flow of all conversations. One friend is enough. One friend with whom it feels natural and right to talk about writing. And I don’t mean someone who you can moan with about how you’re blocked or can’t write or whatever (though this is important, too), but really a friend with whom you can talk about a story, or your characters in a novel, or an issue you’re having with one of your chapters and the friend wants you to go into detail. They will listen and talk to you about your characters as if they were your own family. This friend will know that these characters are as important to us as your own family.

A friend to write with is also a good thing. A friend with whom you meet up and sit down and spend twenty or thirty minutes writing and then read to each other. Sometimes the prompt to writing can be something you’ve been talking about or you can read to each other or you can look through books of writing exercises for an exercise to follow. Sometimes, too, just being together with that friend is prompt enough to start writing. That moment of stillness when you say that it’s time to write and you turn to your notebook and bow your head to the page and follow the movement of your pen.

It is also good to have a writer-friend to talk to whose issues with writing are interesting to you, whose thoughts about writing engage you and challenge you and excite you. You want a writer-friend who’s going to stretch you, who will introduce you to new writers, who’ll make you think about your own writing, a writer-friend who is both a companion and a guide. And the conversation with them will not be just about writing, but about relationships, too, and theatre, and their other friends, and your friends, and families, and food, and lovers, everything that feeds your writing and that strengthens a friendship and trust, because to talk about writing one needs to trust. It is not possible to talk to a person about writing if you don’t trust them. All of us have tried that, and sometimes we get burnt. Talking to just anyone about writing can be dangerous for the muse, even detrimental. New lovers are the wrong people to talk to about writing. And family, they often are the wrong people to talk to, although if you have a psychologist in the family (which I do), they can be a good person to have around. They will be a good person to talk to about your characters. Often they will ask good questions, they will treat your characters like the human beings they are.

Just because someone is a friend doesn’t mean you should talk to them about writing. Not many people understand the need to sit alone in a room with your imaginary companions. A writer-lover can be a good thing. Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne used to read to each other at the end of each day.

There was nothing I did not discuss with John.

Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way “competitive”, that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage.

from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking

The Kind of Writer

In Writing on May 17, 2011 at 9:17 am

At some point you decide what kind of writer you want to be, and by that I mean how you want to live as a writer. Not necessarily what you want to write, but rather how you want to be in the world, how you want to be seen as a writer. Will you be the reclusive type, or the one who enjoys the attention, seeks out interviews, writes for different periodicals, comments on people’s blogs, writes letters to the editor? To what degree will you be out there? Will you be the kind of writer who initiates things? Do you see yourself as part of a community of peers, or are your peers all the great dead writers you admire? Are you the kind of writer who writes in the morning and then gets drunk in the afternoon, parties at night, but still manages to wake up at 8am and be at your desk by 9? Do you write late at night? Do you share your work with others before you publish, or do you grapple with the work on your own until you are pleased with it, or at least pleased enough to let it out into the world. Are you the kind of writer who editors like working with, or don’t you care about being liked? Do you make sure your work is published exactly how you want it to appear? Are you the kind of writer who has a partner who is also a writer and you read to each other at the end of every day? Do you prefer to live alone and put your energy into your work? Is your commitment to your work? To love? To family? To politics? Do you believe a writer has to commit to one thing, one project? Are you a generous writer? Do you like nurturing and engaging with others? Are you envious of other writers’ successes? Do you revel in your own? Do you read reviews of your work?

Every choice has its consequences, its pros and cons.

The kind of writer we are is not a constant, although the kernel of the writer we will become – and by that I probably mean the kind of writer we’ll be remembered as (if we are remembered at all) – is there from the start. Will you write fiction or autobiography or both, or will you be the kind of writer who isn’t interested in genre distinctions? Will you be the kind of writer who likes working with other writers but is also reclusive, and you move between the two poles – are they poles? – and get to a point where you don’t worry too much what people think. Are you the kind of writer who repeats herself?

Life often dictates, or does it always dictate the kind of writer you will be. I have had a chronic illness for the past twenty-five years, a condition that forces me to stay indoors for the first 4 or 5 hours of the day. I am – maybe because of that – a writer who writes (mostly) in the mornings. I say to people that I am not available for the first half of the day. I don’t always like leaving the house or travelling too far on a daily basis, so I have tried to fashion a writerly life that accommodates this. Being out in the world is an adventure. It’s a precarious place, and people are endlessly fascinating to me. I am a deeply social person and also a recovering victim of bullying and homophobia, so I am cautious. I am a skilled people watcher and also mistrustful of people. Most of the time, all this is enough to go on. Just being outside is material enough for a story, so I tend to use a lot of my own experience in my work. As a fairly anxious person who often thinks “What if…” I am constantly being provided with fictional scenarios. What if the driver had knocked me over… What if that gang of kids had beaten me up… What if I’d gone back… What if we’d gone on a second date… And on and on. My fiction, too, is often a result of the questioning that comes out of my personal experience. I am the kind of writer who engages with the world with great wonder, who sees everything as potential story, who likes to push my boundaries every now and again, try new things, new ways of writing, of working. I am the kind fo writer who likes cafes and park benches.

Integrity and Trust

In Writing, Writing Workshops on May 10, 2011 at 10:24 am

I like to write at home. I can go for days – maybe three – without talking to anyone, just immersing myself in the world of what I’m writing. I do go out. I go to the gym, to the supermarket, to the greasy spoon down the road for a cheese omelette and chips. But I don’t speak much to people. I like being around people without having to talk to them, and when I do talk, I like the exchange to be light. “I like your coat,” I said to the woman next to me the other night at the Barbican. That was enough. She said thank you. I’m glad we didn’t talk more, because then I might have heard that she liked the play, which I thought was homophobic, unforgivably so, but the audience seemed to find it all quite amusing.

I like to feel immersed in the work I’m doing and if I’m feeling angry about something, I want to bring that anger to the novel, to the page, to my notebooks. I want that anger to be mine for a while. I don’t want to dilute it with conversation. Writing is an expression of the things we hold onto, the things that won’t let us go. The danger is that we keep repeating a story, compulsively repeating a narrative that clings to us, probably because of trauma. I’m not just talking about autobiographical writing, or at least not only of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m repeating the same story, from story to story… Sometimes I feel that from story to story I’m repeating the same story. That’s why I think therapy is a great thing for a writer.

If a writer wants to change and grow, really wants to evolve, then their writing will keep evolving. I think there is often the fear that if one goes into therapy there’ll be nothing left to write about, as if all that writing is is a sublimation of unresolved issues, the acting out of repressed dramas – because really that is what writing is about – as if all those things were finite, as if it were possible to get to the bottom of one’s self. It isn’t. But it is possible to get stuck on one narrative.

At some point I want to say more on why I don’t like English writers. This is a culture that uses language as a thing to hide behind, not as a tool to express one’s honesty, to try and put into words what one is feeling. There are very few English writers whom I read, if any. English writers use language to entertain, to humour, to mock, to show off. They use language to be fake. There is no attempt to be honest. In the years that I edited Chroma magazine I came across voices that were using language in an honest way, raw and brutal and lyrical. The way American writers do, and French writers. What drives them is integrity.

How do you teach integrity? How do you encourage people to be open and honest and vulnerable in a workshop? Sometimes I think it would be easier if people read my work before they came to a workshop, so that they could see that I am trying to do just that in my own work, to be vulnerable and honest, and yet still give a sense that I have control over what I do, that there is aesthetic judgement going on, that the work has been crafted. But most people don’t read the work of their teachers when they come to a workshop, at least not if the person isn’t a mainstream writer with a novel on the bestseller list. I don’t think people realise what kind of damage a writing teacher can do to one’s desire to write, or to the faith, however fragile, one has in one’s own work. And yet people are willing to trust their writing to people they know nothing about.

Plotting and Letting Go

In Writing, Writing Exercises on May 6, 2011 at 8:24 pm

How do we learn to follow a story, to follow a trail, to follow a scent? We can map and plan and plot, but we have to learn to let go. To plan. And then let go. Flex. Release. (Real ease.) Flex. Release. And again. Draw a map of all your character’s friends (or your own friends from a specific time in your life). Notice the different types of friends they have. Is there a certain type of friend that might be missing? A friend who gives good advice (even if they don’t listen to it)? A friend who irritates them? A friend who was a lover? A story needs a range of types, a diversity of types, even if they’re just small roles. A cameo is often enough. It’s important to bring the unexpected into your story, the character that even you weren’t planning to put there. Make the story a challenge for yourself, too. Make the story something you don’t quite know how to deal with, don’t quite know how it will pan out. But keep planning. Then releasing yourself into it. Planning, then releasing.

Draw maps of your story. Orient yourself in it, then let go. If you see an alleyway that you fancy, go down it, because once you know the lay of the land around you, you know where you have to come back to, you know in which direction the main thoroughfare is and at some point soon you’ll be back on it. How many of these sidestreets should you follow, and if there’s a flight of stairs going down, leading to something – a bar? A drinking den? a secret something or other – should you follow that? And what if there’s some big fight going on down there, or a late-night jazz jam session? Should you follow that? Follow it and see where it takes you and it might or might not be a dead end, but if the entrance appears to you, it’s your job to follow it and see what happens. You can always get back onto the main thoroughfare. And maybe there’s a stairway going up, too, and you can get onto the roof and see what the world of your story looks like from that perspective. That view might be important to your story.

Write and write and write, then take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Accept guidance or an outsider’s eye, listen to ways of opening up your story. There might be doors and alleyways you haven’t noticed – doors that are often staring at us, a sentence that wants to keep going, an emotion that wants to be explored, a view that wants to be seen in greater details. How do we learn to open those places up, to open the story. It’s about following the story. Often the clues are there before us in the story and we don’t trust ourselves, or are too controlling, too committed to the belief that we must be in command of the story, that the story goes where we tell it to go. Trust your intuition, follow the tangent; often, that’s where the treasure lies. When there’s something you actively don’t want to write about, or resist writing about, that’s the thing that you need to write, maybe not for itself, but for what’s hiding behind it.