writing – SANDERLINGS

Write your diary as a writer, he said. I read the extract from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. Much of it contains her analysis of Ulysses. She doesn’t think much of it, although she promises to read it again. I wish I had her fortitude.

Sept 6^th ‘I finished Ulysses and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water.’

I have never finished Ulysses. Every five years or so I pick it up and try again. It’s a book that I imagine other people imagine I have read. I have it my hands now. It’s a paperback edition, a Penguin Modern Classic. It smells of fade and stain and heavy use. The smell is a lie. I’m sure I bought it new. According to the publishing details, it must have been around 1985 in Edinburgh. I was a student, but I was not studying literature. I was a heavy reader. With no television and no sporting skills and no Internet, that’s what I did. We read and we drank and we played records and we went to gigs and we shouted Can’t Pay Won’t Pay on anti-poll tax marches.

I have packed up and carried that book to three flats in Edinburgh in the 1980s. To four houses in New Zealand in the 1990s. To five flats this century in the UK. In each of those moves I decided to keep that book. My fingers would have danced around the cover. I would have opened a random page while I stood in front of several half-filled cardboard boxes. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float.

The words said nothing to me then and they don’t now. I didn’t care about Buck Mulligan or Stephen Dedalus. Sometimes I prefer my literature spare, at other times resplendent. But whatever the style, I scorn the lavish use of adverbs and similes. You may smart at my use of lavish. Give him a break you may say. At least James Joyce finished and published the damned book. A masterpiece, one of the most famous and celebrated works in modern literature. Look in your draft folder. Ah, but I respond. Check it out yourself. The following adverbs appear on the first page: solemnly, coldly, smartly, sternly, briskly, gravely, and quietly.

I can’t believe I have just gone through Joyce’s most famous work looking for adverbs. I am beyond petty. I am also cold and I need to go outside and oil my wretched knee with an hour’s cycle.

Why haven’t I taken Ulysses to a charity shop? The same reason I still have shoes and boots I could wear before I was run over by a truck eleven years ago. I am waiting for the new improved me. The person that reads the classics and enjoys them. The person that finishes writing the dozen or so half-arsed short stories sitting in her draft file. The person who has a life plan and delivers it. There is nothing to suggest this new me will ever materialise. My writing flits between fragments and oddments and remnants and lost buttons and broken zips. It conjures wisps but never consummates.

I’ll put Ulysses back on the glass shelf in my bedroom. Later I’ll pick up Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. It’s a perfect day for the fact that.

I am not a lover of similes, homilies, courtesies. Metaphors are my thing. Metaphors and tragedies and magic. Not card tricks or scandalised women climbed into boxes who aren’t cut in half by saws or even swords. No, the magic of marvellous realism. The art of the impossibly strange invading the lustrous detail of the ordinary. And while I have read many of the translated Latin American works of this genre, I don’t set out to fumble with the surreal. Rather, the surreal emerges through my lack of ability to story as I struggle for a fitting end to an unravelling or a spoiling that will leave both the reader and the author pondering. Did that woman really just turn into a crow or was it simply an extended metaphor for her apogee?

Why metaphors and not similes? Perhaps it’s their assertive nature. Written on a yellow post-it pinned to my desk. Never use the word perhaps. ‘Love sieved out of me and I brushed it up with a pan.’ How much neater and more assured this is without the fuss of a like or an as. Why use a metaphor at all? I could write ‘I stopped loving him.’ But who would pause even for a moment to care about that? And, as a writer, why waste time on the anodyne?

I write because I can. Beyond that, I’m not sure. But I know how I like to write. It’s all about the craft. Crafting sentences, rhymes and alliterations. Subverting structures. Twirling words into the whimsy of the where-will-it-go wound-up toy. A contumacious of clichés. Spinning paragraphs like tops. (See what I did there?). Rhythm rhythm I cheat to its beat. I once had a best friend, a cinematographer and film maker, who insisted that he wasn’t a creative. What he achieved, he used to say, was simply a result of being diligent in his craft. He’d be even more insistent after two pints of Burnside and a packet of salt and vinegar. He’s dead now, his bowel cancer too canny for the finest of our white coats and my name is badges. But his words are survivors. And so am I.

I’ve had my share of grief. So I’d expected to write about it. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, without conscious deliberation, I’ve turned my attention to repression, suppression, and auto-suggestion. I write resistance with a lower case r. Catriona plants seeds in a shed in a kingdom that has banned gardening. Samuel buys a clapping machine to save his family’s palms from the blistering of obligated applause. I write the absurd. Tetraplegic Maisie has a healthy leg removed from her pet dog Peg. Elderly Janet, having murdered her two brothers fifty years ago, buys a pet cloud and keeps it in her bathroom. I’m on episode 51 of that one.

I dig deep on motivation. Why did Jeremy become a flat earther after his brother died in a car crash? Why did ten year old Scaredy Mary participate in the vicious assault of her classmate Speccy Four Eyes? Silver filaments of mental illness vein through most of this geology. Lorna, who doesn’t speak after the break-up with her partner, is saved by a beaver resplendent in a red turban. Geoffrey, a Home Office Minister, is banished to a remote island in the Arctic Circle and is forced to shack up with his conscience, a walrus called Brenda.

If a stranger were to read all of these pieces, could they determine they were from the one author? Do I have an authoritative voice? That is for the reader to judge. I suspect I am more of a shapeshifter. A changeling with magpie gilt. I peck at whatever I’ve just read that beckons and glitters. I write in the first person or the third. I write in the past or the present. Sometimes I pour the words out with such breathlessness that a sentence ends up a paragraph long. At other times I use one-word sentences to haul the reader backwards into a juddering screeching full stop.

I read Ducks, Newbury Port (2019) and produce a piece called Marmalade, liberally flavoured with ‘the fact is.’ Cormac McCarthy sends me off on a moody filmic binge. Raymond Carver pares me down, scraping the flesh off until I get to the marble chill of the elementals. John Cheever has me spying on my neighbours. Tim Winton coaxes me into the characterisation of landscape. And Liz Lochhead, with her lyrical and lol Scots, brings me to my knees with ‘I wiggled tapselteerie, my heels were that peerie’ in Almost Miss Scotland (1991).

Covid_19 has closed my writing in and boxed it up into claustrophobic angst that rails against the state and seeks redemption in chrysalids, or crocus buds, or the dandelion softness of a young dunnock chick. The virus has also exploited and exposed the weaknesses in my writing. Where I must and can do better. I can murder a darling with the best of them. Edit out the superfluous without a twinge of dismay. I can spot a point of view inconsistency from thirty paces. What I cannot do, and this a pathological cannot, is complete a work that is more than around 4000 words.

Jeremy is 70,000 words in, but still on the ice-breaker, slicing through the Antarctic in search of The Edge. Geoffrey is 5000 words in, but still on the beach, waving at a boat that may or may not stop to rescue him. Sometimes my problem is plot in these longer pieces, but more often it is structure and my struggle to choose the most appropriate tense.

When writing in the past tense I loop endlessly between the simple past, the past perfect and the past perfect progressive if my story is not linear. That looping eventually results in a mid-air stall and I hang there, the blood rushing to my head, until I’m forced to pull down on the stick and coast back to safety. And abandonment. My obsessive attention to detail that doesn’t matter is to the detriment of detail that does. I write because I can never finish.