One new years resolution I didn’t give up on. A book every fortnight for the year. A varied selection turning up some of the best reads of my life. Not an insurmountable challenge to read a book every two weeks, but alongside a heavy year of thesis writing, I thought it was a pretty good effort.
Will be continuing the trend next year.
Tonight we had our last writing meet up for the year. With one of our members away on holidays, it was left to me and Daniel to shoot the shit and generally avoid the prospect of writing by talking about it.
Amongst many topics (the state of Australian politics, China’s human rights record and the future of humanity in general) we talked about our respective failures of late to get below the surface of our writing. That we had lost the love of the sentence; that feeling you get when you nail the ‘sound’ of a sentence or passage of writing.
Part of it, I decided, was my inability to devote more than half an hour at a time to writing. Half an hour a night might be a good ongoing practice procedure, but it doesn’t give you any space to get comfortable with a sentence or paragraph. Just one good sentences can take me an hour to get right. My 30 minutes gets me to the surface, and by the time I pick it up again the next day, I have to jump start the whole creative process again.
The culprit: my desktop internet browser icon.
I earn a… Read more
A novel is a significant undertaking. Having forged a successful, albeit limited, writer’s portfolio of short stories and features in the past, the prospect of carrying an idea for more than 3000 words is intimidating for me.
And yet, presumably a novel is achievable at any skill level. I can write a language, so it stands to reason that physically there is nothing stopping me pumping out writing 60,000 words. The same simple premise underlies the yearly Novel in November challenge put out by NanoWrimo.
With physical constraints out of the picture, the challenge instead seems more about how to manage the process to achieve an acceptable outcome. After all, every engineer has a project manager, and writing a novel has long been compared to constructing a house or bridge. I can write 60000 words, but what approach and what skills are going to help ensure the 60,000 words don’t fall apart the minute I start probing it with questions of plot and character. For that matter, what approach is going to help me overcome the urge to give up, as the miserable foundations you lay rarely give any indication of the final product.
So to help see me through… Read more
In Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose suggests that all writer’s would do well to have a designated section of their bookshelf reserved for books “by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us.”
In the past few years I have started to collect such a shelf, and I thought I’d share some of the titles on it and explain how they got there.
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy. This one may seem like an obvious choice, considering I did my thesis on the post apocalyptic, but the reason it has stayed put is due to the power of McCarthy’s prose and the structure of the narrative. I can flip to any page and begin reading, even just a single paragraph, and it makes sense. It has taught me the importance of completing each scene emotionally before moving on.
- Falling Man, Don DeLillio. Someone once told me that when drafting a novel, DeLillo begins each new paragraph on a separate page. Falling Man taught me how to create an emotional narrative that sits outside chronological bounds. That whilst writing, the true significance of each scene can remain unclear until
First day of the Christmas holidays. Thought I would be really productive today and get some writing done early. Unfortunately, it’s not happening.
One of my creative writing tutor’s once told me that the way she wrote her book was to simply ‘turn up’ each day. My problem is that I turn up, then give up. Sometimes what I write seems so turgid that my fingers feel as heavy as lead. Like today. It feels pointless continuing. With every terrible sentence I feel like I’m committing some kind of literary sin by giving them space to exist.
Today is one of those days where I doubt I am a writer at all. Like somehow I’ve managed to fluke it thus far and now the truth is catching up. Why does my imagination taunt me with ideas, then abandon me once I hit the keyboard? Urrghhh.
I’m happy to announce that my new long story City of Birds has been published in the Spring 2009 edition of Sitelines.
City of Birds was the creative half of my recently completed Honours thesis on Naturalism and Trauma in Post-Apocalyptic texts. The story explores how naturalist narrative techniques can be used to represent trauma in the post apocalyptic genre, hopefully doing so without letting the ‘method’ get in the way of the story: a post apocalyptic romp through a not-too-far-in-the-future world debilitated by endless flood surges.
Set against a backdrop of submerged freeway systems and water logged cities, two stories intertwine: the dogged survival tale of three men and their airboat, and an equally bleak refugee experience of a father, brother and son escaping the inevitable next surge.
It’s unashamedly written as a homage to another author’s style (of whom I’ll let you figure out) hence I think it’s main weakness is the risk that some readers may find it derivative of what’s become a very popular genre over the last couple of years. That said, my creative writing teacher always told me that when you’re learning to write, imitation is often the best technique… Read more
When I was embarking on my thesis early last year, I discovered a distinct lack of online discussion of post apocalyptic theory. Sure I could find a fairly extensive wikipedia reading list of post apocalyptic fiction, but there just didn’t seem to be a good starting point for exploring post apocalyptic theory from a more academic perspective.
Hence, I thought I would kick things off by laying down the reading list I developed for the various post apocalyptic theories explored in my own thesis.
For ease of use, I have tried to group the readings into the various ‘theoretical disciplines’. Most of these texts can be accessed via regularly available journal databases or Google Scholar.
Let me know if it helps. If you want to add to this list, leave a comment at the bottom.
Trauma and the Post Apocalyptic
The following texts deal specifically with representations of trauma in fiction, and can be used to link post apocalyptic literature to trauma theory.
Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. This is probably the best and most comprehensive book written about post apocalyptic… Read more
Stumbled upon a fascinating new piece of research done by a fellow apocalypse fan Chandra Phelan. The research tracks apocalyptic endings over the last 200 years.
Phelan has come to some interesting conclusions; suggesting that in the last 20 years apocalyptic endings have become increasingly vague – pitching stories that begin well after an event has occured with little to no explanation as to what has bought about a post-apocalyptic state.
To go with her analysis, Phelan has produced a very snazzy chart mapping the ends of civilisation over some 423 books, poems and short stories, in an attempt to find a logical trend (see below).
Phelan states:
“The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.”
As the… Read more
I set myself a challenge to read 26 books in 2009, one every fortnight. This is the 22nd. Just four books to go with just under four weeks left in the year. Very doable.