Essays
On Being a Writer (of fiction)
Every time an old person dies, a library burns to the ground. (Old proverb)
All of life is a narration. Things happen to us or around us and we convert them into ‘stories’ and file them away as memories. When the writer in me recalls a story, I embellish it, add to it, and change it. Fiction writers are liars you see, we ‘make things up’, but always, at the core of our work is something ‘real’.
I am often asked what IT is that makes a writer. Is a writer born, or made? Can writing be taught? While the craving to write might be born in us, there is much that we need to learn. Like any other profession, authorship has an apprenticeship. For some this is long, for others, short, but it is a time that we need to serve to attain our full potential.
Earning a living from writing fiction is almost an oxymoron. There are only a handful of fiction writers in Australia who command high advances for their books, and usually only know writers have short stories published in full volumes.
If your tastes run more to beer than champagne, you can earn a living writing articles. It’s hard, time-consuming work – researching, writing and finding a newspaper or magazine to publish your work – but one piece can earn you up to $500; more if you include quality photographs.
Most writers console themselves with the thought that many famous writers almost didn’t make it, that luck has a large part to play, like landing on the right desk at the right time, or knowing the right person.
If my current works-in-progress are published, I’ll be ecstatic. If not, then they’ll go into my box of rejected manuscripts and I’ll write on. One day, maybe, you’ll see my name in a bookstore, on a novel, preferably larger than the title of the work!
A Reading Life
I have no memory of how or when I learned to write, nor do I remember anyone reading to me. My mother told me that she found me with a book when I was barely five, turning the pages one by one, looking for all the world as if I was reading. Many months would pass before she thought to test me. Much to her surprise, I read the passage she pointed out.
Unlike other children, I never read out loud, apart from those times my mother had me read to family and friends to prove that I could. I do not remember sounding out words, although I must have. I watched my own children learn to read; they struggled through the words to form sentences and built sentence upon sentence to finally arrive at a meaning. I do not remember this progression; it is as if I had always had the key that opened the door into those other worlds, allowing me to enter the story.
My earliest memory is of an old couch on the front verandah of my home, of rain beating a tattoo on the old tin roof and waterfalling through the rusty guttering. There is a lumpy cushion under my head and a prickly blanket tucked about my body but I am warm and cosy. My nose inhales wet earth and woodsmoke. My physical self curls up on the couch while the me who existed on some other plane fell down the hole with Alice.
When the weather turned warmer, I climbed the old apple tree and sat astride a wide branch. With my back to the trunk and my young legs anchoring me to the physical world, I munched on apples and toppled into the water with Tom, the chimney sweep. I vowed to live my life as a Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Later, I searched my palm for A Star in the Hand, wanting to be the next Hans Christian Andersen.
I progressed through countless books, trying out different characters to see how they fit; I roamed the green world of the Jungle Book, and was shipwrecked with the Swiss Family Robinson, discovered Jane Austen and the Bronte Sisters, and became a cross between Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables, before Captain Marryat imprisoned me with the Children of the New Forest.
Friends and family never had to wonder what to give me for birthday or Christmas, but my mother worried about me and my obsession with books. ‘Your eyes will fall out of your head,’ she warned. She despaired of me when she found me under the covers, reading by torchlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. So much reading had to be unhealthy, she said.
Books and words were as much a part of my life as breathing and eating, and as I grew older and began to read more serious books, I thought about the process of reading. What exactly was it? When desperate for material, I turned to non-fiction but mostly I read works of fiction. I often didn’t understand all that I read but I persevered in the belief that if I read as if it did make sense, then perhaps it would.
Storytelling is an elaborate form of lying. The words ‘fiction’ and ‘story’ are euphemisms for lies. A liar works hard to give their lies the semblance of truth and nowhere is this truer than in the world of fictional books. The writers of the books I read seek to convince in order to deceive. They also deceive in order to convince. They establish fictional realities that imitate real life and which contain the semblance of truth. Many of the characters I read about walk off the page and become real people, people I care about, whose lives extend beyond the last page of the book. Characters like Elizabeth and Darcy, Miss Brooke, Madame Bovary, Jane and Rochester and Cathy and Heathcliffe, all these and the many other loved characters of our literary fiction live beyond the pages of the books that gave birth to them.
When I was in my early teens, I realised that much of what I retained from my reading was not the text – I was not blessed with a good memory – but something I, as a reader, created by putting together those parts that seemed to matter to me personally. Books made their mark on me, and I made my mark on them. Through them I gained knowledge and a way of understanding myself and my position in the world.
At the same time, I came to realise that books were my escape; they were windows and doors and after passing through them I could forget my working class family life. In the world of the book I was no longer the eldest of twelve children, and the ever present noise that fills every crevasse of a crowded house faded, to become the sighing of the wind in the trees, or the swell of the oceans in that book world. I could ignore the hunger in my stomach as I fed the hunger in my soul.
No long ago someone I admire – another like me, who reads voraciously – asked me an astonishing question. ‘Do you feel that life has passed us by, while we were absent from the world?’ When pressed, she admitted that she was sorry she had spent so much of her time living in her books, that she felt well-read but not well-lived. ‘It worries me that I have spent my life thinking about what life experiences mean, without ever having actually experienced them,’ she added.
I thought about what she had said for some time. After more than 50 years of reading I still love the feeling of being at home in the fictional world, where I know the characters and care about what is going to happen to them. Much of my experience of life may have been vicarious, yet I would not trade my reading life for that of any other and will finish my journey as I began it – reading – and at the end will judge it a life well spent, a life well read.
(“A Reading Life” won First Place in the Personal Essay Section of Toowoomba Eisteddfod Literary Competition 2002, and was published in A Different View; Toowoomba 2003)