At the moment, I am reading all about Shakespeare - thanks to the very good book The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl - which made me interested in Shakespeare's life so then I bought 1599: A Year In The Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, which I am reading now, and then I realised I knew pitifully little about Elizabethan history so I ordered some books from Amazon marketplace (aka My Financial Downfall) about life in Elizabethan London and also got some Shakespeare sonnets from the library and off we go! I'm not ploughing through War and Peace or Bleak House, as I intended, but who am I to spoil the fun of random literary exploration? I'll get to Dostoyevsky next month. Maybe.
Talking of libraries, my local library has the ability to make me quite mental with irritation. I was in there the other day hoping to dutifully stock up on 'classics I haven't read' and thought, "Oooh Yeats - I've never read him' - so I headed over to the small and pointlessly named Literature section, where they put books they don't quite know what to do with - poetry, drama, critical studies - bizarre, archaic curios! And there was no Yeats (none!) and no Ted Hughes (my other project this month). But there was one copy of Ten Fantasies by Abi Titmuss. Literature, Dorset Library Services? Abi Titmuss? Ghost-written celeb soft porn? I'm guessing she ended up there as they don't have anything as racy as an erotica section, but even still. I moved her into the Large Print section where hopefully she will find a more suitable audience. The biography section is rubbish too - plenty of Geri Halliwell, not much of anything dealing with anyone over the age of 35.
That said, I went on a special outing to Bournemouth Library recently and that was much better - though, scouring the notice board for Others Of My Kind, I did notice there's not much in the way of reading/writing groups in this neck of the woods. It's something this part of the world is lacking - no big literary festival, not many readings, not much of anything really. You'd have to go on the iron horse to Bath or Bristol - or even all the way to London (mercy!) - to get your bookish fix.
However, I am in discussions with an email friend about maybe working together as email buddies on a novel together - not a joint novel - we'd do one each but swap sections and be generally supportive, which would be great. Obviously I need to get a good gang of short stories done first for the Mphil - but it's something to consider for the future. Having someone on the Outside Looking In is invaluable, I have discovered. Having someone pick up on mistakes or praise you or ask questions just helps you bumble on.
As for those short stories, I am struggling at the moment with a classic case of Too Many Ideas Not Enough Time and I need to stop panicking about this, and just concentrate on the week by week, day by day side of things, rather than going BUT I WANT TO DO SO MUCH and actually doing nothing. A thousand words a day rather than empty creative flailing: that's another resolution. I shall write that in my new Mslexia Diary. How very smug I am.
One more thing: opinion seem to be divided on the 'kill your babies' school of creative thought (ie. find the bit you like the most in what you have just written and CROSS IT OUT YOU TERRIBLE SELF-REGARDING PEACOCK - I've mentioned this in a previous post) - some people seem to think it's a terrible idea. I am not sure. I can see the logic in it, but.. sometimes... y'know - you like what you've written, don't you? What can you do?
I think most 'rules' about writing should be taken with a pinch of salt as, generally, it's not something you can legislate. I did enjoy Scarlett Thomas in the latest Mslexia cheerfully advising budding authors to forget all about such woolly things as 'morning pages' and workshops (it should tell you something that the second Google result for 'morning pages' takes you to a site for 'Highly Sensitive Souls') - particularly as Mslexia recommend morning pages in their diary! Maybe I am too cynical, but I do tend to think that many of these suggested rituals and rules slightly cloud the issue - which is, if you want to write something, just sit down and write it. It's that simple. What's the worst that could happen? It might be rubbish. It probably will be. But at least it's there - and that's something, eh? That's something you can go on with.
And while some writing exercises are useful and productive and creative, I think some of them foster the sense that writing is just a side-step away from the kind of life coaching exercises you do to Build Your Self Esteem and Greet Your Inner Child. This is in no way a dig at life coaching - which is a marvellous thing, I've been to a life coach myself, yes, I have - but sometimes I think the boundaries are blurred between writing to improve your self and writing to improve your writing, and I am not sure that is entirely helpful.
It's a tangled web, obviously, as our selves are intrinsically tied up with our writing -but the journalist in me tends to see writing more as a job of work - and is suspicious of anything that delves too far into the exploration of your sub-conscious and inner workings as a way of 'bringing out the writer in you'. There isn't a writer in me, as far as I can work out. I just am one, when I write.
I'm also suspicious of anything that asks me to take my sub-conscious seriously. I could write down my dreams - sometimes I do - but they're so utterly bonkers, it's like I have a perverted, surrealist clown that inhabits my head at night. I don't want to work with that guy. He's mad. Last week, I dreamt that I looked after tigers in a zoo and before I released them into the wild, I had sex with them. Is that in any way helpful to my creativity? The week before, I dreamt about Brandon Flowers, lead singer for The Killers. He was doing an impersonation of Marilyn Monroe while wearing a white body stocking with a pubic wig stuck on the outside. Do you think I should use this in my work? I don't doubt that dreams and the like can be inspirational (look out for my next work: Loving The Animal Within: How One Woman Came To Tame A Tiger !), I just don't think they should be prioritised over the much more humdrum and dull Sitting Down And Actually Getting On With It.
Anyway! Something else I am doing this year: reading poetry. Which I am enjoying. Talking of poetry, doesn't Sean O'Brien look scared in this picture?
Oh and talking of Ted Hughes - which I was, very briefly, further up - when I was an English student at uni, my flatmate and I went through a stage of leaving notes for each other (the usual 'I am going to the pub - see you later' sort of notes) written in the style of Ted Hughes during his 'Crow' years. That was funny for a while. I also have a very vague recollection of a class discussion about one of his Crow poems - a poem that featured things falling out of and/or being sucked into a massive vagina (Google is slightly blindsided by my "Ted Hughes Crow vagina" searches and I can't find the poem in question yet) and me saying to my friend Tony, in an extremely facetious way, "Oooh, I think Ted's got some issues!" and us getting stupidly giggly. Fun with poetry! We were probably hungover, to be fair. Ah, academia.
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