Time

[Fiction] Friday comes to you this week from a new home. This week's prompt:

"Drunk on _________.
Fill in the blank, then write a quick description of your character in that state."


I sit down before my legs give way, the magazine clutched in my hand as I half fall, half attempt to sit into the big leather chair. Ahhh … I can’t help but spin around in the chair that hugs me like a large and expensive glove. My head is dizzy, light – wafer thin echoes through my head, in correct Monty Python fashion. Yes, my head is wafer thin. I force myself to focus on the magazine cover. It brings me back to my faculties again. I stare down and two faces grin back at me.

I want to giggle because it seems so absurd, even as I sit here, in this huge office with a river view. We’re on the front cover of the Time Magazine … and we’re laughing, Tony and I, because we couldn’t take the photo shoot seriously. We would have been better off taking ourselves down the road to find a photo-booth. Yeah, a strip of three goofing off photos on the front cover of Time – that’s us, keeping it grassroots - simple.

Neither of us really took the ‘business’ too seriously – we just wanted a place to get ourselves published. Then this happened ….

“Time Magazine!” I exclaim out loud to myself, “I’m on the front cover of Time magazine’ and don’t think it sounds boastful or full of ego. I’m probably deluded though. Honestly, I needed the front cover of Time - to make this success real to me.

And I love the headline “Are these the most dangerous people in publishing?” You bet, I agree, if only to myself. We came, we saw, we conquered. Yeah baby!

I’m tempted to be vain, to look closely to see where Photoshop has touched me up. It reminds me of the days, eons ago, when I would get up close in a nightclub toilet mirror and attempt to touch up smeared or missing lipstick. At least Photoshop got my lipstick right. As for Tony he didn’t need to worry about a good hair day or a good lippy day. I should ask him what he was looking for in the front cover – wrinkles, a grey hair?

I grab my mobile and I send a rapid, slightly illogical SMS to ask Tony. There’s plenty of words that make no sense, but I don’t waste time fixing them. I want to get up and dance on the leather couch over the other side of my office, with a bottle of expensive French champagne in hand, swigging from it.

“MUM! Share the glue.”
“Huh?”
“Share the glue. Co-oper-ation,” he exaggerates, looking at me seriously from underneath his long golden brown fringe.
“Sure love,” I mumble and pass the glue stick over.

I look down at the magazine cover on the table.
“What’s this called again?”
“Collage?” I reply and stick the head down.
“Why is there a clock?”
“The magazine is called Time Magazine.”
“That’s a silly name for a magazine.”
“You think so?”

I run my finger over the cover, neatly torn off an old magazine. The date has been changed, now neatly handwritten as July 2008. My head is glued to one body and Tony’s to the other. I have Mike from Monsters Inc on repeat loop in my head .. “I’m on the cover of a magazine!” Next I pick up the first of two words, publishing, cut ransom note style from the newspaper, and stick it down. As I stick down the second word, I begin to hum.

“What’s that song?”
“From little things big things grow,” I reply absently.
“That’s a silly name for a song.”
“No sweetheart it’s not a silly name for a song,”

And I stare at the second word …. revolution!

When did you know you were a writer?

Janie over at Write Stuff proposed the following questions to us this week:

"When did you know you were a writer? Was there a moment or period in your life when you realized that you were meant to write? Did a specific event or occurrence compel you to write? Or, like me, have you just always considered yourself a writer?"

My answer is both simple and complex. I remember when I first felt the love for writing. It was 1984, the year of the Los Angeles Olympics. The year that Willy was our Australian Olympic mascot. I was in my second last year of primary school and I must have been 10. We were writing small stories about the exploits of Willy in LA. I wrote one, then another and still another. From there I began writing at home, on one of my mothers cheap lined note pads (used predominately for writing the weekly shopping list) a story about a dog, a golden labrador that lived on a farm. He wasn't like Charlie the Wonder Dog (for those Aussies old enough to remember the D Gen's The Late Show from the early 90's) he was just a dog and it was just a farm. I must have written 10 or 11 pages before I stopped writing.

I found an alternate escape from the world - an escape where I could play God ... which I never really got over (he reminds me of the scene in Overboard where Goldie Hawn's husband says 'At Sea I am a God' and the psychiatrist who happens to be aboard offers to give him a couple of his own valium!) Writing is the ultimate escape hatch - you create the world, the characters and the scenarios that are played out - you choose who wins and who loses (which was big for me as a serial victim of bullying at high school), who is the hero, the heroine, the evil mastemind.

In the summer of 1985 I was staying with my cousin and read my first (and only) Sweet Valley high novel (and I use that term exceedingly loosely). I was appalled at how pathetically it was written and how it really wasn't what life was like. I went back to my Nanna and Pa's and began writing what would be my first novel ... about life and loves of a 13 year old. Over that summer I wrote about 130 A4 pages. I loved every minutes of it and in 1988 when we moved to Queensland I rewrote the novel. I would take the dog and my writing folder down to the beac and we'd hang out there writing (Oakey chewing on coconut husks) until it was time to go home for dinner. In that novel was my safe space while I went about creating a new social space among new friends in a new high school. I still have both handwritten manuscripts downstairs.

Even though I have always known that I loved writing, and have wanted to have it as a 'career' - it took 15 years after finishing highschool to make the big decision to 'just write.' It was last year on the full solar eclipse of the Virgo moon (my natal moon) when it occurred to me that I didn't need to decide whether to return to paid work or not, if I wanted to study and what I wanted to study, plus how all of that would fit around having a child ... I could write. It made such sense for the first time ever. So I did ... and I haven't stopped since.

Finding Write Stuff in late September last year and Fiction Friday opened up creative avenues that bypassed all the hurdles I regularly threw up for myself, so I wouldn't write - lack of ideas, inspiration - blah blah blah. I discovered a great love for short stories that was probably lost through creating them in high school english class for marking. I stopped trying to write the best selling novel, or finding the perfect plot ... I just sat down to write each Friday night and waited to see what magic flew from my fingers ... good magic and crap magic alike. One short story at a a time.

I spent 15 years making up excuses why I couldn't write - and after a certain amount of time you either give up totally, buying into the delusion that you have created for yourself or you stop making excuses and create a writing reality for yourself. The end of the excuses came in December last year - when I made the decision to give up my editorship of Down to Birth magazine - the end of my shadow artist. I would now only invest in me, my writing and whatever the future held for both of us. I stopped running, I looked myself square in the eye and believed that I had the tenacity and the talent to suceed.

Say it on Saturday

I have posted a short airing of my thoughts on the subject of failure over at Write Stuff, if any of you care of mosey on over and have a read. If not I will post it below tomorrow evening.

And yes - there will be holiday snaps and stories up here shortly.

Writers Shame

This is the full length version of the short article posted on 'Say it on Saturday'.

I have finally got around to reading Stephen King's On Writing:a memoir of the craft. Not far into it I discovered a rather honest and confronting example of ‘writer’s shame’, something that I had to finally work through last year.

King writes:
“I have spent a good many years … too many, I think – being ashamed about what I write. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my talent, why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk …. I think I was forty before I realised that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.”

By 1987, when King was forty, he had written 17 novels under his own name, another five under the assumed name of Richard Bachman, 3 collections of short fiction and had collaborated on a number of film adaptations of his novels. King is the most financially successful horror writer in history. It would be incomprehensible to believe that such an author would ever have doubted or been ashamed of his talent, if we hadn’t experienced the exact same type of shame and doubt ourselves.

We all have them, a monster or perhaps a whole crew of them, who hang out in the recesses of our memories, on the periphery of our creativity. They load us up with shame about our writing, dishing out their own versions of ‘how could you?’ that block us.

My Miss Hisler was a Writer in Residence at uni, whose name I’ve chosen to forget. I was really excited. It felt that being part of what this Writer in Residence was creating, was my next step on my path to being a published writer. I took a short story along entitled ‘And Juliet Met Romeo in Hell’ that I felt really good about. It was the first short story that I had written since leaving high school and writing for the pure pleasure of writing. The story was more mature in construction and content (I thought!) than anything I’d written at high school, and it had a definite dark edge.

He quickly read over my work, and then point blank told me, in front of others that were waiting, that I needed to go out and get a life, I had no idea of what living in the real world was like. And that was it. No comment on style or structure, no suggestions on imagery or dialogue. I was mortified and shattered. I remember taking my story and leaving the room, unable to look anyone else in the eye. And I never went back.

I don’t deny that I was naïve – I’d spent almost all of my education in a Catholic high school and I hadn’t been adventurous as a teenager. This was probably why I so willing to took his words as gospel on my fledgling talent. I didn’t know in those days how to deconstruct criticism – especially bad criticism that does nothing to help a writer learn and grow. He hadn’t actually given any feedback on my writing.

His criticism I took both personally and creatively. It was like being told I was an imbecile, and that I had had the audacity to write. What’s more, his words were instant creative castration for my vulnerable muse. From that moment onwards, my passion for writing waxed and waned. I created projects that could never be completed. In my garage I have a box of first chapters and other snippets of work that I half heartedly worked on. In eight years I completed one piece of work, a short story called ‘A Few Stolen Moments’ which was almost lost all together on a corrupted floppy disc.

I felt a fraud – I was waiting tables and working crap jobs because the only career I had ever wanted was writing, but I couldn’t turn up to the page. Everyone knew that I wanted to be a writer. Friends often asked if they could read something of mine, but I was resolute in never showing anyone my work. I had learnt my lesson.

In the end, I focused so long and hard on ‘going out and living in the real world’ that I never made time for writing. What little I did write I was terrified to show anyone. Sadly I never thought to get a second opinion or even better, a mentor. I didn’t go and seek out a writer’s group. I just stayed frustrated and creatively impotent.

It was almost ten year later, in 2000, that I finally took myself off to do a TAFE writing course. The two courses I did there were beginning of a very long hard fight to put myself back on the path and to believe in myself as a writer. I am glad that I did.

When I ousted this monster last year, after working through the section on shame and monsters in The Artists Way, I didn’t feel the need to pay homage to his legacy any more. And good riddance I say. I’ve let go of the notions that I’m not smart enough, nor worldly enough to write. I have the audacity to write badly sometimes, and feel OK about it. I have the confidence to try new things and experiment with my boundaries. And I’ve reclaimed the thrill; the pure, unadulterated love of being encapsulated in the fiction I create.

We all have our Miss Hislers. Naming them and sharing the damage that they have caused us, goes a long way to healing the festering wounds left in our self confidence and creativity.

Who are your shame monsters – today is your opportunity to oust them.

What was the shaming charge/s levelled at you? How has it fashioned the way in which you perceive yourself as a writer and your ability create?