Room with a view

I recently read The Unquiet Mind of Hilary Mantel, an article about two-time Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel. When she writes, she looks out on a view of the sea, where, as the interviewer says, "there is no sign of human life; nothing except waves and clouds." I think that must be the perfect view for a writer.  A view like this is not blank; sea and sky constantly change. This summer, I spent some time on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Islands I watched being hammered by waves disappeared in fog on the following two days. Ships passed. Whales sent up spouts of spray as they swam by. Storms rolled in. But the expanse of it, the way it literally opens perspective, has to be good for writing.

.

In the interview, Mantel says, "...of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there...." The interviewer, Sophie Elmhirst, follows this remark with the comment that Mantel "can sound arrogant." To me, though, this is just a writer talking about how much fun she's having. 

I've felt that little hit of pleasure -- especially while revising, when I have a better handle on what I'm working with -- when I know that some small thing has a resonance that maybe no one else will even notice. But I know.  

Mantel also says that "...to be a novelist is to relish uncertainty, to be shot with doubt." I think that explains why so many writers are almost superstitious about discussing something they're writing before it's done. You don't know exactly what's going on or why and you don't want to know. Part of the fun of writing is discovering what you're doing through the writing.

A crush on Uncle Leslie

Margaret Laurence looking untouchable.

I got a nice email this morning from a woman who read Shelter and said she'd developed a crush on Uncle Leslie. I felt the same way about him when I was writing the novel. Uncle Leslie has integrity. There's a moment in the novel when Maggie turns to him for fatherly affection and he has to overcome his uneasiness about the appropriateness of the situation. He knows it would be suspect to an outsider. But he also knows she needs him. I didn't really write any of that, but I was thinking it, and admiring him.

I fell in love with all of my characters at different points when I was writing. I was thinking about that this morning and wondering whether that needs to happen when writing a novel. I was really pleased when an editor told me she thought Emil was "hot." I thought so, too. Same thing with Vern. And I loved Rita when she first appears. To me, she's so capable and competent and untouchable, in a fierce, independent way. I heard Eden Robinson say once that her characters sometimes go off and do their own thing. Rita was like that. I had ideas for her and her role in Maggie and Jenny's lives. But at some point I realized that she had ideas of her own. Then, as the people you love best do sometimes, she began to frustrate the hell out of me. She becomes emotionally self-destructive, and stubborn to boot. Her untouchability becomes a liability and she won't listen to reason (from me or anyone else). Still, I love her. But I hate her a bit, too.

Research

Flora's Fountain bookstalls. Photo by Damitar Mazanov.

I got these three old guidebooks through Abebooks. I like to imagine they came from one of the bookstalls near Flora's Fountain in Bombay. The One and Unique Pocket Guide to Bombay was published in 1966, but has 1967 stamped over that date, so I guess we're to assume it was updated, by the stamp if nothing else. It's organized by itineraries. The first says: "So you are in Bombay. Let us go exploring this City. May be, you are a stranger to the city; may be you have friends or relatives to take you round. Be warned, these well-meaning folks may be of no help to you to know about the places and things in their historical context." But I'm in good hands, redolent of old basement and damp cardboard or maybe monsoon mildew. We begin at Churchgate Railway Station.

The Fodor's Guide to India has underlinings in red ink and smells just like the Bombay guide. Through the underlinings, I'm following the curiosity of some other traveller, back in 1969, when Ravi Shankar and the Beatles helped make India the place to visit. This one has maps. I love the blue of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. The guide calls Bombay, a "city that belongs to itself."

I'm glad that some people can't bear to throw away a book.

Annie Dillard's website

Annie's Dillard's Summer 1936

I remember reading Annie Dillard's The Writing Life a long time ago. "The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend." She's a master craftsperson. Each sentence is a perfect object. Not surprising that she is also a painter. I remember being impatient with the book. I wanted practical advice. It felt overwrought to me. It felt like it broke its own "rules." But I go back to it now and admire each of her carefully wrought sentences. It rings true.

She writes about the disappointment inherent in writing. She quotes Thoreau: "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them." And Henry James: "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to keep?"

Searching the web for something the other day, I came upon her strangely refreshing website. Crotchety, private, and scolding, about The Writing Life she says, "The Writing Life" (1989) is an embarrassing nonfiction narrative fixed somewhat and republished by Harper Perennial 1998

The self-critic

A manuscript page from James Joyce's Ulysses.

I once talked to a writer who told me that she read her novel over from the start on each day before she began writing again. If I did this, I would never write another word. When I think of my approach to writing, the word "headlong" comes to mind. I pitch forward, trying not to look back until I come to what I think is the end. Then I begin re-writing. I have an obsession with completing things. The doubt that would overtake me if I had to re-read my early drafts would be paralyzing. Here's a good article from The Guardian about the self-critic.

Daphne du Maurier

From Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: "The moss smelt rich and deep, and the bluebells were earthy, bitter. I lay down in the long grass beside the bluebells with my hands behind my head....I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say, 'By the way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She's married, with two children.' And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim."

I just finished reading The Scapegoat by du Maurier, too. The plot seemed implausible (two identical-looking men switch lives) and at first I didn't think I was going to like it. But her details are so rich and the characters so convincing that I was borne along and ended up loving it, and believing it. I didn't realize that she also wrote the short story, The Birds, that was made into the Hitchcock film. To me, she has the introspection of someone like Virginia Woolf, but she also has this compelling sense of suspense that sweeps me through her books and makes me want to to re-read them, more slowly.

Singing at the top of her lungs

Everything we learn about good writing says not to use cliches. I agree with that for the most part, although sometimes a writer goes to such lengths to avoid cliche that the writing calls too much attention to itself. Here are a couple of examples from Shantaram, a novel I've been trying to read:

Prabaker took the money and slipped it into his pocket with a movement as swift and fluid as the tentacle-grab of a squid.

Maybe if I was more familiar with the tentacles of squid, I'd get that.

I tried once more to find the words for the foliant blaze of her green eyes. I thought of leaves and opals and the warm shallows of islands seas.

From this, I get green. More importantly, I get a 936 page novel that's trying my patience as a reader. But certainly I've committed my own share of simile sins and metaphor mishaps.

My point is that once in a while, a cliche fits. Especially for a first person narrator, who sometimes thinks in cliche, like we all do. A cliche is also shorthand. It can stand for something. Or it can be so hackneyed that it's meaningless. This one, "singing at the top of her lungs," still works for me. To me, it evokes a fierceness, a bit of recklessness maybe. I associate it with singing in the car, letting loose. That's what my character does anyway, flying along the road, gravel scattering. Her singing, though, speaks for itself in the scene, I hope. I don't have to say she's trying not to let the bastards get her down, or that she's trying to keep her head above water.