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Watch Me Write
Tomorrow I’m writing a short story in public. If you’re in Melbourne, you can stop by
and watch me do it. This is the plan: I turn up at
Federation
Square Atrium
11am Saturday with a laptop and no ideas. I plug the laptop into a projector,
to broadcast on the big screen hanging above my head. Then I spend the
next three hours drinking coffee, staring into space, and attempting to
write something.
I’ve wanted to do this for ages; in fact, in my first ever bookstore event (Union Square Barnes & Noble, NYC, 1999) I talked about how there should be bookstore writings, not readings. Because while I’m interested in what my favorite authors have to say, I’m really interested in how they work. I would love to see how they put a story together.
So this year I suggested it to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and they liked the idea enough to turn it into a 7-day spectacular: one writer embarrassing herself in public between 11am and 2pm per day. Saturday 22nd is my day, but you can also catch Eric Dando (today), Cyril Wong (Sunday 23rd), Reif Larsen (Thursday 27th), Evie Wyld (Friday 28th), Shaun Tan (Saturday 29th), and Jessa Crispin (Sunday 30th).
Clearly, this has the kind of potential for catastrophic public breakdown that I crave, so it should go well.
P.S. If you want to drop by at 11am and suggest some story ideas, that would be really handy.
21 commentsMachinations
I have a problem. Lately I’ve been happy with my writing; I don’t want
to make a whole big thing out of it, but the words have
been good words. I like them. They make me happy. One day, not too
long from now, I hope other people will see them, and be happy, too.
I haven’t mentioned this recently—by “recently,” I mean, “for the last 18 months”—because I got myself into the slightly embarrassing situation of publicly declaring my excitement for a book that, in retrospect, didn’t quite deserve it. I don’t think I had gone through the essential “falling out of love” stage, which must occur so that an author can stop making goo-goo eyes at her new baby and start dismembering it, to build a new body around the interesting parts.
Also, I figured it’s frustrating to hear an author talking about how great his writing is going when he’s not putting out any frickin’ books.
But clearly this has backfired—or at least run its course. I first got an inkling when a friend sent me a podcast on “Writers and Procrastination.” Then there were the growing number of emails and comments, like this one from Ian:
What do you do all day? I read Twilight for frack sake. I’m so bored. And you….watch movies and grow facial hair? Books! WRITE BOOKS! Short stories…..anything
People think I’m not doing anything. It’s a little strange, because if I’m on book tour for some paperback edition, people seem to figure I’m at least keeping busy. But if I bunker down and write, they assume I’m sipping daiquiris in the Bahamas.
I decided to tally up the number of words of fiction I’ve ever written. It’s 1.5 million. My finished novels tend to wind up around 80,000 words, so that’s about 19 books. Since Company, I’ve written about half a million words, the equivalent of seven novels.
But not seven good novels. I’m a pathological rewriter: I believe that if a book hasn’t had more words cut from it than it is long, it needs more work. Right now, I have quite a lot of fiction that is promising. Some of it is almost there. But not quite. And I do not want to give you a bad novel. I never want to do that.
So here is my problem. Even if I escorted a manuscript to my publisher tomorrow, it would be a year, minimum, before that thing reaches your hands. It would make you happy, I think. But it’s a long time to wait. It’s too long.
So I am going to do something. I know what the something is. It will be good. And it will be in March.
Thought for the Day
If an infinite number of monkeys working on an infinite number of
typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare,
a sufficiently powerful computer could auto-generate random combinations
of letters, numbers, punctuation, sounds, and pixel maps,
until it owns the copyright on every work of art that could ever be created.
One application of this machine would be to generate income by suing popular artists. Another would be to render all future art illegal.
Since going about your everyday life would inadvertently create an unauthorized performance of a copyrighted work, it would be illegal to do anything, at least for 120 years, except act out old books and films that had already entered the public domain.
Happy New Year!
I Should Buy Some Cement
I
should buy some cement, in case I need to hide a body.
I don’t plan on hiding a body. I have no particular body in mind.
But that’s the thing: if you wait until you’re there
with a bloodied lamp in one hand and a cooling body in the other, it’s
too late. You can’t jump in the car and head down to the
hardware store for cement at that point. You’d need to change your clothes,
stash the body somewhere it won’t arouse suspicion,
and this is assuming you can even get to an open hardware store.
It might be two in the morning. You might not have a car—or
you might, but with a fender caved in around a head-sized
crater, this being the reason why you need cement in the first place.
And think about how bad it would look. You have to assume the police will investigate. At best, there’s a missing person, at worst, they already suspect homicide. “Where were you on the night of the 24th?” they’ll ask. If your answer is, “Buying cement,” you have a problem. Sure, you can lie. Say you were tucked up in bed. But that’s another thing to go wrong. Did you use your credit card to buy the cement? Did you visit an ATM for cash? They’ll find out. They’ll track down the clerk who served you. And that clerk will say, Yes, I do remember a sweaty, frightened-looking customer in urgent need of cement. I remember very well.
Consider how much better if you can simply trot down to the basement, flick on the light, and haul out those 60-pound bags of cement you stashed there for precisely such a contingency. No need to leave the house: just get mixing. You’ll have to pull up some floorboards, of course, or find a nice, quiet spot in the garden, and do quite a lot of digging. There is hard labor involved. I’m not saying it’ll be a breeze, something you can knock over before catching the end of Letterman and retiring to bed with a book. My point is when the payoff is avoiding spending the rest of your life in prison, it’s worth putting in some effort.
Like I said, I don’t plan on killing anybody. I’m a reasonable person. But I can’t say there’s absolutely zero chance that one day I’ll find myself with a dead body that needs hiding. I bet everyone thinks that, until it happens to them. It’s like insurance: I don’t really think my house will be destroyed by an earthquake, but I’m covered, just in case. Those kinds of things, I don’t like leaving to chance. I’m not a gambler. A bag of fast-setting cement retails for six dollars. A team of lawyers after the fact will cost me hundreds of thousands—and probably do less to keep me out of prison than timely application of cement. I think the economics speak for themselves.
Then there’s the peace of mind. You can’t put a price tag on that. Right now, even though I’m just home by myself, I feel a vague sense of unease. I know that through a series of strokes of misfortune, I could find myself with a body and no way to hide it. Having bags of cement in the basement, even though I’ll probably never use them, means I can relax. It’ll give me a warm feeling, just knowing they’re down there. Ready for a rainy day. I’m going to get some now.
Orwell: Blogger
So are you following the
Orwell diary?
Me, I was in a state of near-sexual excitement
when I heard they were posting George Orwell’s 1938-1942 diaries online,
seventy years after he wrote them. But that’s a whole other story; back to
Orwell. Imagine! A peek at the intimate thoughts of one of the
20th Century’s literary giants: a man whose searing intelligence produced works of majestic
satire, whose vision seems to only grow more relevant.
What crackling intellectual thunderstorms, I wondered, raged inside this man’s head? In 1938, with a world war a mere twelve months away, what socio-political clouds did he see brewing? I signed up to the live feed right away. Orwell blogging: was there anything the man didn’t anticipate?
First entry, August 9: Orwell relates how he caught a snake. I wondered briefly whether this was a reference to the Munich Agreement—the snake could be Chamberlain or Hitler, maybe, even Daladier. But no. He was talking about an actual snake. Well, okay: I guess if I caught a snake, that would be exciting. I’m not sure I’d blog about it. But still. I could see, I suppose, that even one of the world’s great thinkers might, upon encountering a snake, temporarily cease pondering the human condition to remark, “Ooh, snake.”
Next entry, then:
August 10
Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.
That’s the whole thing. All right, so maybe my expectations were a little high. He wasn’t writing essays. He was writing for himself. And the important thing wasn’t the prose; it was the train of thought.
August 26
Hot. Dense ground-mist early this morning. Many blackberries now ripe, very large & fairly sweet. Also fair number of dew-berries. Walnuts now nearly full sized. Plenty of English apples in the shops.
Lots of apples, really? Well, that’s… good, I guess. You need apples. The more the better. Especially in shops.
August 28
Night before last an hour’s rain. Yesterday hot & overcast. Today ditto, with a few drops of rain in the afternoon. The hop-picking due to start in about a week.
Hops-picking. You can’t begin looking forward to that too soon. Got to love the delicious anticipation of looming hops-picking.
August 29
Overcast & chilly. Heavy rain last night. Dahlias now in full bloom.
This was when I decided to claw out my eyes to relieve the boredom. At least then something would be happening.
They say you should never meet your idols, because you’ll only be disappointed. Maybe you shouldn’t read their diaries, either.
(Or their web sites, ha ha, yes, very clever.)
New Fiction: How I Met My Daughter
I
wrote another short story! I know, it’s crazy. It’s like I’m just pumping
these things out. Anyway, it’s in stores now in Australia as part of
The Bulletin’s
Summer Reading Edition, in a super-cool layout complete
with creepy doll’s head pic. I tell you, there’s something about a
creepy doll’s head pic that just works with my
writing, you know? Maybe I can get them to print some in my
next novel.
If you’re not in Australia, this would be the time when you start to get annoyed. I mean, Australia was already pretty ace, but now it’s also got new Max Barry short stories with creepy doll’s head pics? That’s just too much. But I say would, because The Bulletin said I can post their spread here for your online enjoyment. Which is damn cool of them. So here it is:
This story is quite different to my usual groove, and I’m interested in what you think—whether you prefer this or Springtide, for example.