cafe

There were beautiful women at the other tables. That was the thing with this cafe. People made an effort. They dressed for breakfast in fashions that were expensively casual. There was makeup, subtle, or playful, blue eyeshadow and little swirls of pink on cheeks that complimented a spray of pink or orange hair dye. People glanced at each other, coveting. They glanced at her table but they looked away again. He noticed this. He made his face seem cheerful, his default setting. She looked up from her book and closed it without marking her place or memorising the page number. He watched her clumsily push her seat back from the table, spilling a little of her coffee. She thrust her hand out to him and when he took it he noticed with relief that it was warm and dry. She had a firm enthusiastic handshake.

He smiled warmly. He felt exhausted suddenly, a tiredness that crept up on him and lingered.

"Hello." He made his voice sound bright, interested. She stared at him too firmly. He noticed that she barely blinked. The beautiful people at the other tables laughed and toyed with their fromage fresh with wild berries. He shrugged into the chair. She was reading Proust, Way by Swann, but he noticed she had turned the book face down as if she were embarassed by this. He only knew what it was by the little picuture of Proust on the spine. He knew it was the new translation and he wanted to ask her how it compared to the one he had read but she curle her fingers over the book self-consciously and slipped it into her handbag.

reading

I have been getting up at 5am to write. I stare at the screen and feel tired and wonder where it is going and why I am doing this instead of staying tucked up in bed where it will be warm and there might be an easing of the nightmares that still rattle around inside me.

So instead of writing I begin to read. Reading is a part of writing. If I read something inspiring it will make me think about the way it was constructed. I will be encouraged by something beautiful that has been printed and bound into a relatively attractive package. I will want to compete with my own work. This is the plan anyway.

I have been sliding into depression again and even the idea of writing exhausts me. Instead I will read and I will repond to what I am reading here and in my work. After all it is all a part of the process of writing.

I am a slow reader. I read each sentence carefully. Where my fellow workmates tear through books I turn their pages ponderously. I stop and think and move on. I read like I swim, slowly and consistanty. I need glasses and I squint at the page because I never wear them. The words blur and shift and are difficult to pin down. Often I get a headache for my efforts.

I am reading "The Two Kinds of Decay" by Sarah Manguso. It is a memoir about a girl who gets a blood disease. It sounds like a misery memoir but it isn't. It is sparse and clean and more life philosophy really. The medical things make the reader squirm and there are a lot of medical things. I like her lack of sentimentality. Her writing reminds me of the writing of a friend of mine, very mannered and restrained, just the back of a whale protuding from the water, the rest is hidden and lumbering and huge. The rest is left for the reader to discover in herself.

I think about my friend Mark as I read this book. Yes I knew it would come around to talking about my friend Mark. Mark had a stroke almost two years ago. His recovery has inspired me to think about the brain in this way. He is the same man, only changed because of the damage inside his head. I think about the time I was visiting him in hospital. I think about the hope and the possibility for recovery and the feeling like something is happening that might make things better. I think about the after-time, the slow moments when it seems like nothing is happening. The time it takes for him to adjust to the world, the un-learning. He has spent the past six months learning about the things that he can no longer do. He is learning, but this process is removing things from him one at a time. He is settling into loss.

I remember when I was filming him, hoping to make a documentary about his recovery. A friend of mine turned the camera on me and started to ask me how it was to be supporting Mark through this. I started to cry. I didn't feel sad, but it is there on film, me bursting into tears and weeping. 'I can't communicate', I told her and the camera. 'I can't communicate'.

I sit each morning at 5 am and I look at my computer screen and all the hope that I have gathered around me though the night dissipates. When I was a child I had a recurring image of me with my lips sewn together. I look at my computer screen and the image comes back to me without any trouble at all.

Sad

I am sad because of the writing. Everything can be tracked back to the writing. If the writing is good then I am momentarily happy but then the real world intrudes and a heavy melancholy sets in and lingers.

Sometimes I wonder if I have to get into this kind of heightened state of sadness to be able to write well. Some of my best work has happened when I am sad.

This kind of depression is not new to me. I have been experiencing it since I turned 15. Too much and I can not sit on the desk at all. A small dose of it and I cannot communicate with others which is the perfect kind of solitary confinement to begin writing. It is also too easy to accept the world as it seems when you are happy and confident. You are not pushing against the world. You are not encountering its hard edges.

I am being cruel to one of my characters in this new book. The one who looks a bit like me. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. I walk out into the world and I have lost my edges. I have been getting up early, 5.15 and writing and I am tired all the time. I am finding novels tiring, except the Faulkner, but I shouldn't be reading the Faulkner because I am a bookseller and I have to read new release fiction for Christmas. I am finding that I am becoming angry about novels, about their failings. Then I am feeling like my own work is destined to be fatally floored like the novels that I am reading at the moment.

My character will hurt the girl who looks like me. He will hurt her because she is too eager and unattractive. He will hurt her because she is me and I have something against myself at the moment. I feel sorry for her but I do not feel sorry for myself. I feel angry at myself for being a lazy writer. For plodding along, one paragraph a day, for wasting opportunities that I might have taken. I see other, younger writers who are running into their fine careers and they deserve it but I am saddened by it.

I renew my commitment to hard work but I am exhausted already by the thought of it. I start a memoir which is clean and interesting and unsentimental and I think that my own memoir, which is being read as we speak will not be clean and unsentimental. I think that I might be boring. I feel judged before I have even begun. I can see the floors in my new novel before they are written.

I am declaring my insecurities and this in itself makes me feel insecure. There are so many books out there and so many writers and life just goes on and on and on. Tomorrow, I will get out of bed at 5am. I will be focused and I will not pause tho whinge or feel sorry for myself. I will just write. This is my re-commitment.

before

She was already there. She was perched on her chair with her legs angled away as if at any time she might slip from the table and out onto the street. She seemed unsettled despite the novel pressed open on the table. the coffee half drunk. There was lipstick on her cup and her mouth was a red pout in a thick face. She was unlovely. It was unkind of Evan to think it, but this was the first thing he thought. She was the kind of girl who would blossom in internet chat rooms or on the phone. She was plump, but not in that cute fleshy way that some girls were plump. Her extra flesh seemed like a jumper in summer, too full and suffocating. Her face, which might have been pretty, was a thing hidden in a mess of chins and big hair. The lipstick saved her lips from dissapearing entirely amongst fat cheeks and a dimpled chin.

She knew it probably. Any girl who could sit at a cafe with such little conviction had a sense of herself and the judgements of those around her.

She was sharp and funny. He had to remind himself of this or he would have hovered in the doorway for a while before turning around and walking off into the city. She was clever and made him laugh and knew all his secrets. He took a breath and stepped into the caffe. He was flooded by the scent of burnt coffee, grease on a hotplate, someones too-strong perfume.

fragment

The weather map was on the television. He stared at it. There were numbers listed in neat rows and he knew what they meant. Brisbane. Max 30 degrees. Late afternoon storm. He knew what this would mean. It was information that had been communicated. A simple transaction. He closed his eyes, turned his head away from the screen. He struggled to remember what he had seen. Something on the television. Something about the weather, maybe. This was as far as he could take it. When he opened his eyes and looked back at the TV it was sport. He was almost certain it was not sport that he was struggling to remember. It was something weather related.

His brain was an open fist and any information seemed to trickle through his fingers. When a nurse came to take his bloodpressure he said "Hello, hello." and had to wonder if this was a repetition, if she had arived an hour ago and if he had already greeted her several times in the interim. He distrusted his own responses and his memories. Perhaps it would be safer to ignore her, nod without comment. He struggled to even say the word 'hello'.

Endings

I asked one of my favourite authors, Gerard Donovan about endings. I thought perhaps at this early stage it would help me to focus if I had some idea where this was going to end. It would help with the subtle metering out of things.

"I think an ending grows organically out of the story and should be a moment where the entire story sweeps in front of the reader's eyes again--not as a summary, but as a fresh review with the new impact that there is no more to come." This was a part of Mr Donovan's answer and it perfectly describes the ending of his novel Julius Winsome which ends so effortlessly that I had to back track and read the ending several times just to see how it worked.

The thing with an ending is that it often obliterates the rest of the novel. If for instance there was a slow patch earlier in the text, a perfect ending will make the reader forget about this. At the same time, a slow or dragging ending will ruin what may have been a wonderful piece of work. Take the ending of Ian McEwan's novella, On Chesil Beach with a last chapter that falls heavy and leaves you exhusted with it's dates and facts and clumsy tripping towards the finish line.

With my unpublished manuscript A Little Death (a thing that is still close to my heart after all these years), the ending came before the rest of it. I wrote the ending first and although it changed and shifted, I found that the core of it stayed intact. It made the writing easier. There was a place to aim for. With another manuscript "Paper Dolls, Holding Hands" I knew where it was going. I had the thing in my head. The ending turned out to be somewhere in the middle and perhaps this is why the book drifts off like a song that is faded out rather than coming to a complete stop. This works for the text in its own way but it is not ideal. With "His Father's Son" I didn't know the ending at all and I still think the ending of that manuscript is the wrong one. I want to go back to it and tear the second half off it and replace it with something more complete, but I still haven't found what this should be.

I just finished my memoir and when I came to a particular scene and wrote a particular line I knew that this was it. I had to stop there. I had to go back and work up to that scene because I had found my ending. It made emotional sense.

I have a sense of the ending for the Brain Book in me. I know how it will feel, happy and melancholy at the same time. A compromise that will be fine but not ecstatic. I know that he will not make a sudden and miraculous recovery like Jill Bolte Taylor who wrote "My Stroke of Insight." This ending is a slow acceptance. He has been pushing against something for a long time, holding on to his past before the stroke and the damage to his brain. At the end he simply has to stop pushing. Stop trying, and when he steps back there is a clear path and he realises that he can take it and that it won't be so bad.

This is not specific. I am not sure how this thing will play out, but I know the colour of the ending. I can see that picture by David Casper Friedrich with the man standing at the edge of a frozen lake looking into more ice, more sky and this is the way it ends. A stepping back and looking. The end of a struggle and the beginning of something new.

I am constantly sad. I know that this is because I have not developed traction. I feel sad and I feel lonely. I feel like I have let go of a friend. I have completed something which is like a separation. I am on the verge of tears most of the time. I am looking back towards the dark spaces that I have been struggling to avoid. I will have to fall before I can begin to climb again. I feel like I am shimmying across the cliff face, holding on by the tips of my fingers. I need to let go. I need to feel the pain of something over and the overwhelming exhaustion of looking up at something huge and unweildy that is about to begin.

unhappy endings

In life things don't end the way you want them to. Either they are too neat or they are disapointingly flat or the problem just drifts away and we forget our question. I am dissapointed by endings. Michael Ondaatje has dissapointed me occasionally with his endings. Tim Winton so often trails away. My friend has pencilled his own ending into his life and I am sad about it. I want my book to have an ending that will make the journey so much more worth while.

I am going to take my boy out and talk to him about this book. He is the structure head from heaven. I seem to be struggling to find my way. He is a useful tool in the creative process. I know that I need to find some sense of structure to make this work for me. I don't know where I am going. I am just drifting along writing the occasional scene but it is not gelling for me yet. I will write a structure map. I may even draw it up and hide it on the inside of the cupboard where it will not be intrusive in the house. I will write it on the blog.