Wet Ink

A Writer's Symbolism

"Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful."

From Valentine, by Carol Ann Duffy

You don't have to be a writer to think of things symbolically, but I'm sure it can help. For me, the more engrossed I am in a project, the more the world around me feels poised to take on meaning. I don't like flowers wilting on my desk. When my chair collapsed the other day, it made me think about structure. Strangely enough, for the umpteenth time, my study has a view of a church (I'm not religious, but was raised so -- a fact I can't forget?).

Symbols have always run deep for us. I could witter on about Jung, of course, but I've done that fairly recently! Instead, I'll mention Anglo-Saxon England, where stories were told to the whole community, and symbols were used carefully to challenge but not exclude. Later, in Middle England, with a largely illiterate society, pictorial symbols thrived. A woman in blue -- the Virgin. A woman in red -- Mary Magdalene (who, as you may well know, prefigured our femme fatale). Everyone knew Jonah's Whale symbolised Noah's Ark. A highly "literary" world where reading books was rare.

When I was writing in Cambridge UK, my office overlooked several gardens. This felt symbolic: the idea of "looking beyond myself". Next door, they had a rabbit, which they kept in a cage. One morning, whilst working, I looked out and saw it -- it was burrowing through the earth in the corner by the bars. It had made quite a tunnel and was ready to escape: a flight its owner soon thwarted. That same day, at work, I was on examination shift. The paper I was handing out was for someone else's class. In the poem*, a rabbit had dug its way to (relative) freedom. According to the piece, this was the last rabbit in England.

Thanks to these events, in my writer's way, I began to wonder if I'd been hemming myself in.

*I've found a cheeky copy of Alan Brownjohn's "We Are Going to See the Rabbit" here. But I'm also giving the Amazon link, so we can buy the book!

Quote for Today

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Nin

Thanks, Anais. Good reminder.

How We Mix It Up

"For a generous girl, a girl who took off her clothes with abandon, she was remarkably close-mouthed about some things."

From Water Off A Black Dog's Back, by Kelly Link

It goes without saying that we humans are full of near opposites: strange contradictions we mightn't expect. The story above is told from the boyfriend's point-of-view, and I love his surprise that his girlfriend's sexual openness doesn't make her more personally revealing. As a character, the girlfriend is nicely complex, but though she's intriguing, we never truly get to know her.

Conflicting characteristics are surely part of us all. I myself am capable of both confidence and shyness; can be messy, can be neat; longwinded or precise. In literature and film, we've seen many mixed-up protagonists: Shakespeare's Cleopatra, who's gutsy yet insecure; Fanny Price, who's so shy yet unyielding; Drusilla, who nurtures yet kills. And of course, these mixes make for rounder characters -- as Jung reminds us, everything exists in its opposite; the question is how much the 'opposite' is suppressed.

Naturally, it's the same for us, as writers. We can be confident enough to express ourselves on paper, to read to others or send to editors; yet shy enough to be winded by rejection, or to feel shaken when writers' block hits. I don't know what the answer is, except to be aware that one bad day doesn't equal several more. The work can isolate us, and make us forget that writing itself is also a mix -- and there's comfort in that.

Here's a thing: the more I accept there's a mix in us all, the clearer I feel in myself.

The Book Snoop

Bookshelves are my weakness. I lose all my scruples. Put me in a friend's home and I'm thumbing pages faster than a shot. Not polite. Perhaps a tadge bullish. Can no one have their privacy, once I'm around?

Last time I was in New York, we stayed at the book-themed Library Hotel. Each room holds a different genre (and dewy decimal number!), and the dining room, where there's cheese and wine in the early evenings, is lined with stacked bookshelves. On arrival, the receptionist asked me what I was reading, and I rifled through tomes like the snoop that I am. But it was all invited. Oh, the joy!

In all seriousness, I'm not going to judge myself too harshly for my snooping. We writers are meant to be obsessed with books. As a teacher, I spent much time trying to encourage: "The more you read," I'd cry, "the better you'll be at literacy! And not just in terms of reading, but of writing too." When students started to read outside of class, you saw their skills rocket. Oh, how thrilled I'd have been to find a struggling reader leafing through my private stash of books! And not just for their literacy, but for their happiness: Loving books is a way of loving oneself.

Besides, isn't snooping rather literary in nature? Sherlock? Mma Ramotswe? Scout and Jem? I tell myself I'm in good company. Come on. Don't you snoop just a little?

See you at Grub Gone Guilty, tonight? (They have bookshelves, you know...).

Loving Gesture

"My baby stirred, / suckled the empty air for milk, / till I knelt / and the black Queen scooped out my breast, / the left, guiding it down / to the infant's mouth. / No man, I swore, / will make her shed one tear."

From Queen Herod by Carol Ann Duffy

The other day, in the Starbucks queue, the woman in front of me appeared to be holding a baby. When she ordered her coffee, she slammed the child's head on the counter. It was then and only then that I saw it was a doll. The man who was serving gave a gasp. "Woah," he said, "I thought that was really a baby." Both he and the woman laughed. But I couldn't get the incident out of my head. I'd believed the child was real and so had the barista. What makes such a scene so vivid and convincing?

Perhaps it was to do with expectation. We don't presume an adult woman will be holding a plastic baby. (And we are talking plastic here. The doll was not realistic. Laid on the counter it was shiny and stiff.) On the other hand, she was holding the doll with the gestures of a mother: slightly on the hip, in the nest of her arm. And perhaps I processed this automatically -- the suggestive power of stance.

The incident reminded me of the importance of detail: a couple of apt little movements from a woman with a doll, and I was convinced. Above, in Duffy's poem, Queen Herod's baby suckles "the empty air for milk". Just that tiny gesture and the baby's real for me.

Voices from the Other Side

How does it work when we're writing as a character who thinks completely differently to us? Is it possible to skin-shift? Of course it is. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for example, is written from the point-of-view of a young, autistic boy. What a novel! I know I've raved before. According to an interview in the Guardian (find the text here) Mark Haddon has always been fascinated with the minds of those who think differently to him. He worked with people who would now be considered autistic, not so he'd write a novel, but because he liked the work. And this perhaps is part of the answer. I almost hear you cry, "We must write what we love!"

Such experience is valuable, for sure, but are there other ways? Jung theorised that we often repress whole sides of our psyche. If, for instance, we tend to be emotive, we still have an impartial side -- it's simply kept down. Thus all sorts of aspects can be brought to mind if we simply connect enough. How many times have you been in a high-pressure moment and drawn on reserves you never knew existed? The sudden calm? Or the sudden passion? Or the linear, the spider's web? Whatever we need. We humans are extraordinary. The depths we carry seem ceaseless. And maybe, as writers, we become more aware of this.

Might it actually be beneficial to write from our other side? The part we tend to discount? I believe so. And I know many writing therapies encourage this. Also, I often think it's our job to connect with those who are different to us. And maybe, by so doing, we encourage a tolerant world.

But there's another argument: given some research and a rich imagination, you can create almost anyone you wish. Marlowe's Faustus? Austen's Mr. Wickham? Milton's Eve? Were these great writers anything like their characters? Mind you, who can say? Is there darkness in us all?

Omen?

Tonight there is a blood-orange moon: a deep red-gold. I can see it through the window. What a sight!

A portent? Hmm. Or maybe just pollution. In any case, I had to share. You know how I feel about moons.

A Rose, By Any Other Name

'You must call me "Kitty",' she said early on, 'and I shall call you - what? Not "Nancy", for that is what everyone calls you. What do they call you at home? "Nance", is it? Or "Nan"?

"Nance", I said.

"Then I shall call you "Nan" - if I might?' If she might! I nodded and smiled like an idiot: for the thrill of being addressed by her I would gladly have lost all of my old name, and taken a new one, or gone nameless entirely.'

From Tipping the Velvet, ch.2, by Sarah Waters

My real name's Susanna. It's nice enough, but it doesn't feel like me. A while back, I actually asked someone to stop calling me it -- whenever they did, it was as if they were talking to someone else. In fact, it's my child name, the one I grew up with; but it's there in my passport, and that still makes it mine. To be honest, I can see why some spells can be broken by using the sorcerer's name: when a teacher, for instance, knows what their students are called it empowers all concerned.

Naming characters is an interesting business. Some names just feel right, and once we've got them it's like gold. Today, I found out that my character was Martha, and her whole demeanour took on extra vigour. Suddenly I felt her, and she burst from the page in her specs and cherry T-bars.

I like it when names take on a deeper significance. When Dickens called the hero of Great Expectations Pip, it was ideal given the character's need for growth, and Mrs. Havisham certainly "has her shame" during the course of the novel. As for Nancy in the excerpt above, from "Tipping the Velvet", the use of this name for a lesbian heroine is beautifully gutsy. Also, the wish of a lover to be bestowed a name by their loved-one brings us back to the oldies. But in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, it's easy to wish their claims were true: that names when they restrict us matter little.

Things I Do When I Can't

"On the other hand - the James Joyce hand - there is Harper Lee who wrote only one book (the brilliant "To Kill a Mockingbird"). Any number of others, including James Agee, Malcolm Lowry... Which is okay, but I always wonder two things about these folks: how long did it take them to write the books they did write, and what did they do the rest of their time? Knit afghans? Organize church bazaars? Deify plums? I'm probably being snotty here, but I am also, believe me, honestly curious. If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?"

From Stephen King's On Writing, p. 147

My answer: the cold voice.

This last week, my cold voice has been saying "Everything you try is terrible. You're losing your talent." The cold voice is wrong, but it's there and it's persistent, and I sometimes let it win. Time to take a break, do something else. Something else? I hear you cry. Apart from writing and running? Uhuh. There's a life outside, and baby, we know it.

Thanks to my cold voice (aka my writer's block), I've done the following things:

Read. A lot. In a coffee shop, with chocolate.

Chatted with friends, consumed some wine.

Wandered through graveyards. The sun falling on gravestones, the wildlife, the grass... There's peace out there, I swear.

Walked past my old home and found it's being taken to bits. The outer shell's removed and the inner boards are exposed. They're dark, pretty solemn. It looks like an empty box. Quite a metaphor. Should come in handy.

Collected a load of pictures for my monster course; broke the scanner, tried to fix the scanner, then resorted to glue and scissors.

Written to a mate I haven't spoken to in ages.

Lain on my back, staring at the sky, trying to work stuff out.

So I respond to the wonderful Stephen King with the following opinion: If the gods have given you a thing you can do, perhaps they've given you several.

When Writing's Like Running

Why does running make me think of writing? Here are a few thoughts I've had of late, jogging up a hill early in the morning:

Flow:

As a writer, finding flow is absolute bliss. The idea's there, it's growing and alive, the momentum needs no forcing and we're gone. Csikszentmihalyi, specialist on the psychology of flow, claims this state of being requires less energy. We're so involved in the task, it almost fires itself; and this can arise from any activity, not just writing or running, as long as it's one we connect with. Such work, he says, can also bring about a deep learning. Ram Dass apparently gave a lecture on this kind of flow*. The audience were mostly young hippies of the time, interested in altered states of consciousness and such. But there was also an elderly woman who kept being insightful. When Ram Dass asked how she'd gained so much wisdom, she told him, "I knit."

Discomfort:

But if all we did was flow, I guess we'd never struggle; and the struggling can bring us the best of our work. When running uphill, we have to push, and we're fitter for it, which can make us better runners.

Of course, it isn't just exercise that teaches us this: many of us work emotionally in just the same way. I've been writing a story for quite a while, which reminds me of my past. The more I work on it, the more the memories come, and they're things I've been trying to forget. But I know this story is meant to happen, and I know it'll come in the end. And once it's there and I can look it in the eye, I'll be stronger for it.

Escape:

If I'm in a bad mood, there's nothing better than writing a story to snap me out. The same goes for reading: give me a book and once I'm immersed this life won't seem so shabby. And yes, when I'm running, I escape any gloom; but it's more than that. Running, like writing, works to remind me that sometimes we aren't as stuck as we believe. Often, an image flashes through my mind when I'm running in the sun: every time I raise my sole, a flame erupts from the earth. It's the same with words, right? They can help us with a lot, be it coping, relenting, or remembering our fire.

*Sadly, I'm having problems finding out where I read about this. Maybe in an article I've since lost. You can buy Ram Dass's 60's bestseller, "Be Here Now", here (and now, if you like).