Dear Readers,
I have some time to write on this sunny morning. The beach is red-flagged so NO SWIMMING today, and my dear Mama who is visiting is busy online, attending some clever and interesting course. I’ll meet her for lunch, and now I am here, in a café, writing to you.
I started writing these letters as a warm-up to working on the thing I’m writing (a long avant-garde-ish half-story about loss and love) and I like it. A bit of a brain-dump or a decompression or something – drawing thoughts together and making sentences out of them. Sometimes it’s funny and other times it’s sad and sometimes you write back and let me know what you think or how you feel and I like that very much.
Usually some little event occurs between letters that inspires what I write about, like The Lament of Lime Lady last week. I wonder how she’s doing. But some weeks in my small life nothing new happens. The tide rolls in and rolls out and the sun shines and the rain falls or doesn’t and whatever fiction I try to throw together to share with you finds no spark. Like today. Here I am, writing without knowing where this letter is going to go.
I feel like the inspiration for the Big Stuff of Books comes from somewhere in the deep time – urges to commit something to words to share that grow inside us over months and years. I was lucky enough to get to talk about books and writing as a guest on this very fine podcast earlier in the week. The two hosts were kind and gracious, and generous with their questions. We went back to our days of reading as children and let me tell you, gang. I rambled and enthused and extemporised and generally spieled at length. It was great. I talked so much and so quickly that I can’t remember most of what I said, and that for me is a Very Good Thing.
Of course not all story ideas rumble up from the depths of the subconscious soaked in heritable trauma and dripping with unresolved early-life anxiety before being disguised in metaphors involving bears or balloons or leavened with fart jokes. Kevin Barry speaks well about finding the source of fiction in the events of your life ten years ago, and poets and songwriters are built different, spurred into words by the motes in a sunbeam or the barest of glances from a lover.
And maybe there’s a balance (hello again) between writing with meaning and how we mean the words to be received? How much meaning does the fiction have to have for the writer? How much do my feelings about the words and characters impact the telling of the story? (A fair bit, I suspect.) And how much do we just want to make readers laugh and cry and Feel Things and and be entertained, and how much do we want to inspire them to ask their own questions? And how much do we consider the reader at all? Is that the line between ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’? Writing without consideration of your readers, or imagining a particular reader with your story in their hands?
So many questions, Paul. Where was I? Inspiration and necessity of it. I was on a rail replacement bus on Tuesday night with my wonderful sister and niece and some rowdy, vaping, swaggering teenagers. One of them, Barney, needed no inspiration – only an audience. He was loud, brave and silly, spitting out anecdotes with wit and some fierce energy – a compulsion to be telling stories. I mean, the stories were mostly about Barney and his peng hair and bare girls but here I am telling not even a story about nothing at all so who am I to critique his material?
Maybe I’ve learned something here. Inspiration is handy but is not exactly necessary if we have an audience or a reader or even only the desire to share our words. Thank you for listening.
Yours sincerely,
Paul