Other people’s shoes

I had grand ambitions for this blog

I am a grand ambitions kind of person
(secretly, inside my head)

But ambivalence got the better of me and reluctance made me delete what I wrote

I think I thought
(these words are a sort of chorus in my life)
that because I am a writer, and a person whose head is s o f u l l of thoughts,
that words simply would spill out of me
Gush out in arresting articles and striking observations

But maybe my personality is more like that
of those prolific writers who write 800-page master works
but trip over their own words in a simple interview or letter

I do have much to say
But I don’t say it easily

Two other things comes more naturally to me, than writing my thoughts in a blog post:
The first is to listen
(I already know my stories, but I don’t know yours)
The second is to put myself into someone else’s shoes, writing from their point of view and in their voice,
That feels so much easier than staying in my shoes, writing from my point of view and in my voice.

(A little like an actor who readily takes on a character
Breathing life into it, without being shy or timid
But who is, in reality, rather private)

I am too aware of my complexity

Or perhaps I’m just easily perplexed by something that to other people,
really appears quite simple

The Critic

“That he was also capable, not of malice, but of a certain critical ruthlessness amounting in effect to cruelty, took everyone by surprise.”

Oh, read that again will you? Do these words, their rhythm, the contstruction of the sentence, make you as happy as they make me?

It’s a quote from short story I came across today: “Last Man’s Season” by CK Stead. It was the 2010 winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and you can read it in full here (just scroll down to 2010). It is also, by the way, words describing the man in the drawing, if you were curious who he was meant to be. If you want to more, I really do suggest reading the short story. I don’t share its worldview, but as a piece of literature, I thought it was quite amazing.

Reading the sentence again, I wonder what it is about it, that is so pleasing. There is something about the exactness, I think; that words are chosen precisely for their meaning, almost as in an academic paper, rather than as a result of the kind of word diarrhea so common among less proficient writers. Of course, I am not above this myself, but what I mean is the difference between, for example, “terribly painful” and “excruciating”.

Anyway. When I read this sentence today, I wanted to share it with you, whoever you are, whenever you are; whenever it is that you come across this post. Then, predictably, I started to ramble a bit, and was surprised to find that the theme of my thoughts of late, very much go hand in hand with the theme of the quote I started with: critical ruthlessness.

Lately, I’ve desired honesty, maybe as a natural result of feeling very confused and lost in this season of my life. That’s why I’ve written no posts in the last month: when I get overwhelmed like that, I generally can’t condense my thoughts into anything but a random, emotional ramble.

Having gotten this far in the post, I stop and look at what I’ve written. I still doesn’t quite ring true. Let me try again.

Maybe I want to appear better than I am. Maybe I’m falling into the selfie trap too, the very thing I would so hate to be true of me: that I’d be caught up projecting the life I wish I lived, focusing more on a pretty facade than on the actual substance of my life. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, with words.

But I don’t think that’s why I stop myself from being honest, or why I have trouble sharing life when it’s messy. It’s not that I’m a narcissist who wants to appear perfect. It’s that I am an artist who at times feels so riddled with doubt and vulnerability that I become fearful of showing weakness, or exposing a nerve. I start to think that criticism might devastate me. I have enough trouble silencing my own inner critics. I don’t need to add on to that burden.

But I will let you in, anyway. So. Deep breath. Honestly, what is going on in my life?

Besides working a lot, I spend a lot of energy apartment hunting in a different country and in a different language. Being the emotional and introverted person that I am, my mind is continously churning, making mince meat of my ability to focus on seeminly anything. I’m tired constantly, and that, of course, impacts how I feel about my writing. And though I have long since learned not to base my idea of what’s true on my fleeting emotions in the moment, naturally it wears on me, feeling rubbish about something I love so much.

So here I am, currently. I have novel that I love, but that is gathering dust and doubt, and I have a short story which wasn’t good enough to capture the judges’ attention in a competition I entered. I have buckets of questions and frustration, and a banner that reads: “How good am I really?”

It shifts and changes, of course. One moment, the inner critic is eating me up in greedy mouthfuls. The next, I am convinced I am amazing, or, just as often, that I suck, but that I have the potential and the willingness to become amazing, one day, maybe, if I work really hard and don’t give up. And that is a pledge I have made: I will write. Come hail, come storm. I will write. Because I have stories that burn inside my bones, that I am aching to extract, somehow, and turn into words on paper.

Very much an interesting dichotomy.

To finish off, let me tell you about an interesting thought I heard semi-recently: that writer’s arrogance is an intrinsic part of being a writer. Why? Because without some measure of arrogance, you would never have enough confidence to try, or to even think that you could be a writer. Isn’t it funny? I think it is, because for me, this is so true.

Only when I was quite a far way into the pursuit of becoming a writer, did I realize: “Oh wow, I actually suck … and what I know I believed was amazing just a few years ago, I now know is absolute garbage.” And yet some amount of arrogance has to remain. You have to keep thinking you are better than you are – at least for some tiny minority of the time, when you’re not busy thinking you’re a miserable idiot to even set aside time to do something so silly as write on a novel. I know, I know – we writers are like that. Ruthless critics of ourselves. Hopefully we are more sympathetic towards others.

Love, Randi

PS: If you have any recommendations for really well-writen short stories, please let me know!

Deep Dives & Realism

A little while ago, I put down “The Guest Cat” by Takashi Hiraide, which I was reading, and asked myself: What does Hiraide do particularly well?

“The Guest Cat”, if you don’t know it, is a lovely, quiet book, originally written in Japanese, the cover of which was so bedazzled with reviewer’s flattery that I actually did my best not to read it. It’s like those youtube videoes that have in their title “you won’t be able to stop laughing”.

But I’d been wanting to read it for a long time, and once I was able to push away all the insisting voices shouting at me how wonderful it was, I did find that I liked it. But then, this isn’t a review. This is just me talking about something I think Hiraide does well in it.

The characters in “The Guest Cat” are few, and provided with hardly any backstory at all. They just are. A married couple. How they met was perhaps mentioned with five words. No description of their appearance. And the story is told from a vantage point sometime in the future, which makes the way memory works influence the way the story is told. Rather than giving an overload of detail, as one might when describing a character presently (or in the historical present) in a specific room, this story is told from memory. Several times, phrases such as “as I remember it” come up, and most of the story takes place in little episodes, where the things that haven’t stuck to the narrator’s memory,  have been omitted.

All the same, the book is rich with specific detail and at times, it dives deep into this or that topic. This struck me as especially significant to the overall impact of the story.

These little “deep dives” include passages on, to name three examples: the story of the building where most of the story takes place, the intricacies of the current housing market in Japan (where the story takes place), and in a particular, unusual form of painting. Now why is this important?

I think, with a subdued, minimalist writing style, it is easy to go too far, thus ending up with a story that is not so much “gentle strokes” as it is too brittle to fly .Mind you, the minimalism is brilliant, thanks in part to the specific details. In a way, I think it is a kind of minimalism that things are specific – because if they really happened, as is what you’re asking the reader to believe, why go through the trouble of generalizing? For the actual narrator, it would be just as easy to say that the cat ate dried mackerels, or whatever it was, than, vaguely, “food”.

Anyway, moving on to the deep dives. They provide, I think, necessary ballast and realism, providing counter-measures when the reader is at risk of becoming lost or distracted, either because the topic/situation/setting/place the narrator is discussing or finding himself in, is too unfamiliar and vague. After all, even a stylistically elegant, aloof reference can risk giving the impression that the writer doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

Maybe the main reason why this occurs to me, is because I’ve done just that. Constantly delving into the exciting and unknown with my stories, I often found myself out of my depth when it came to my ability to pull it off convincingly. I could not convincingly write about the specifics (since they were unknown to me) nor about the generics (since it became obvious that I was just trying to avoid something I didn’t know anything about; this was especially evident in dialogue).

The crucial point is this: You have to be pretty amazing at this writing thing, to write a story well, which contains major plot elements which you know nothing about, have no personal experience with and/or have not researched. You may get away with it at times, but especially in story told in a minimalist writing style, you’ll occasionally have to do deep dives.

Some reasons why, that I can think of:

A, to create interest. A story which only contains elements I’m thoroughly familiar with, won’t interest me. There has to be something interesting. A place, a concept, an idea, a context. Preferably more. And to introduce something unfamiliar to the reader, you simply have to take a bit more than half a sentence.

B, to create realism. Rather than risk being lost of confused by the unfamiliar element, you are made to understand, and so you follow along further into the world of the story, more than before since you have now taken steps away from your own familiar world, and dived into the world of the story, which has other elements as well as those you’re familiar with.

C, to build trust. When the reader discovers that the writer has done his job thoroughly in specific, carefully chosen deep dives, he or she will, I suspect, be willing to suspend disbelief in a different way from that point onwers. The writer may then approach other topics and barely explain them at all, even if they too are confusing, because the reader now won’t think “oh, he’s trying to cover up that he doesn’t know too much about this” (like I would if reading a shortstory about a lawyer, written by a teenager), but rather might think “the narrator for some reason doesn’t find this worth explaining too much”, allowing that to inform his or her view of the narrator’s chracter, or something like that.

That’s all for now. Musings and thoughts about something I thought Takashi Hiraide, writer of “The Guest Cat”, does well.

If you haven’t read the book yet, then please do. And if you are passionate about the book industry, please pay actual money for it. If you, like me, wish the book industry was doing better – then put your money where your mouth is.

All the best,

Randi

The Panther & the Almond Tree

About a year ago, I came across a fantastic podcast called “A Writer’s Life”. I would recommend it to any serious writer, especially if you have a sarcastic sense of humour and don’t mind being offended at times. This podcast is actually so good I’ve listened to several of the episodes twice, some even three times, and I’ve actually cried with laughter listening to podcast host Dan Black’s fantastic rants and ramblings.

One of the things I have to thank Dan Black for, was that he did something to rekindle my interest in the classics. I’ve struggled for a long time with overcoming the notion “old books are boring”, because for so many of them, that’s absolutely not the case. Besides, as I’ve matured and gotten a bit older, my own tastes have changed to, and I’ve grown used to styles that I found too dry when I was fourteen.

The list of classical authors I had never read, goes on for miles. Even the most famous ones I had barely touched, certainly not since reading simplified excerpts at school. Authors like Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway. A favourite of Dan Black’s was Gabriel García Márquez.

And so it was with great joy that I, a couple of months ago, discovered my parents actually owned a García Márquez novel, namely the famed “Love in the Time of Cholera” (“El amor en los tiempos del cólera”) from 1985.

Life got a bit busy after that, as life does, but now I’ve finished it, and oh my. What a wordsmith.

We’re all unique, of course, and we prefer different things. I have a distinct weakness for rich details and imagery, and striking metaphors, such as the quote in the post “wounded panther”, which uses exactly this as a most striking metaphor. It’s used nowhere else in the book, and yet it is so clear, so striking, exactly what is meant. I went around for days after reading that line, chewing on the words, tasting them.

Oh, the beauty. Oh, that I might learn to write like that. Oh, that more people would strive to write like that, employing precise and original imagery to convey their meaning – not getting caught up in cliches, nor in sugary “literary” language which is so caught up in being literary, that it becomes exhausting or even boring to read. (Will I be mauled by trolls for saying something like that? Oh, come on. We’re writers. We can we should we must do better!)

I did wonder for a while what to draw for this post. I realized that drawing a panther here would work against the very thing that I think the metaphor does so brilliantly – that that thing is something which really can’t be done with imagery. Metaphores are a treasure of writing and storytelling, communicating on a different level than lines drawn with a pencil. So I drew some blossoming almond tree branches; the almond tree being another, but much more concrete, image in the book.
PS: The last episode of “A Writer’s Life” was put up on November 11th, 2015, but nonetheless, the 34 that are up are amazing. You can find them here: http://awlshow.com/ or wherever you get your podcasts (probably).

Internationality

A few years back, my accent was very posh and very British. Since then, it’s been Americanised, and it’s taken on a funny Australian twang that comes and goes. It’s quite common for people to guess at where I’m from, and quite rare that they get it right.

I’m familiar in the role of “international”. I was cast in that role long before I ever identified with the word. In the beginning it was my olive skin that did it, and my dark hair, and my eyes – my brown eyes that were so dark when I was a kid, that the doctor couldn’t check if my pupils were expanding or not. Living with Americans in college, I heard a number of stories about the environment in which they grew up; stories of racism, white people and black people. By comparison, the environment I grew up in seems almost surreal. I was the minority, true, but because my eyes were not blue, and my hair not blonde.

But what I want to share right now has nothing to do with looks. I want to talk about the English language, and about accents and even spelling, in the context of being an international person. (By “international” I mean a person who has been moulded by more than one culture and place).

When I had English in school, I was given the choice between British and American English. Either one was fine, so long as I was consistent with it. For example, if I chose British, my teachers asked that I spelled words “colour”, “humour”, “defence” and “centre” rather than “color”, “humor”, “defense” and “center”, and that I would say “pavement” rather than “sidewalk” and so forth.

But why is it, actually, that I should choose British or American, when I am neither of those things? This question goes along the lines of a subject I had in school when I was about 18, called “International English”. In it, we were exposed to the idea that English, being the world language that it is, no longer really abides to the rules that it used to. A language doesn’t live inside grammar books – its rules are only those that are recognised by its speakers. And English speakers are phenomenally diverse. So shouldn’t accents be allowed to be, too?

As I said in the beginning, I used to have a very British accent (think Lucy Pevensie going “We could play hide and seek?”). But it isn’t anymore. Other influences has moulded and shaped it into something else, something that confuses people and makes them wonder where I’m from.

I no longer see why my accent should be this or that – I am not an actress pretending I’m from a certain place, nor am I very skilled with imitating accents. My accent actually holds within it some of the beauty of language. It tells a story; my story.

It tells you that I am not just where I was born. Nor am I American or English or Australian, or any other specific nation. I am international, and I cannot hide it. It’s reflected in my words, my interests, my thoughts, the food I cook and the drinks I prefer. It’s reflected in the way I pronounce my A’s and R’s and in the melody of my sentences.

Likewise, your language and accent reflects who you are and what your story is.

If you are an English speaker who speaks no other language, don’t worry – that’s a story too, as valuable as mine. But don’t tell me you don’t have an accent. You do. No word can ever be spoken without an accent. “Standard American” is an accent too, just as Georgian or Russian or Swedish or Cantonese. And if you, like me, are an ESL person (ESL = English Second Language) and feel awkward about your accent: don’t. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having an accent (although, you know, work at being able to communicate well).

I will not bring this to a neat conclusion. All this is meant to be, is me sharing some ideas that have been tumbling around in my brain.

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The picture is a drawing I made of a random picture of a guy. I didn’t know where he was from, and really, I don’t think I could have guessed, which I thought illustrated my thoughts in this post quite well.