How to succeed at writing!

I’ve been doing a bit of mentoring and editing of late. The following was advice I gave someone who then asked if she could recirculate it. I said, ‘Yes’. And then I thought, ‘If she’s passing it on, maybe I should, too?’ This is hard-won advice from 50 years in the trade.

I do think – or rather, I do KNOW – that the first step in being creative is actually to do something! So many people come to me ‘wanting to write a book’ and then list all the reasons why they “can’t” start.

I tell them to sit down and get whatever writing tools they’re used to using – whether pen and paper or keyboard or vocal recorder – and start with the phrase, “I don’t know what to write…”, or, “Why am I sitting here?” or “I can’t bring myself to hurt so-and-so….: Something like that.

Then just keep writing any old nonsense, whatever pops up in mind. The important thing is to establish the flow, to let the words stream out. Do not censor them. Do not stop to check spelling, punctuation, grammar. Keep writing!

Write until exhausted then stop and do not re-read it. Put it away and go off and do whatever you normally do during the day.

Next day, read what you wrote and note anything that leaps out at you as having some power, some meaning, some emotional resonance.

Take that phrase and use that to precipitate the next piece of writing flow.

Another blockage buster I use is to say to them, “What is it you are most ashamed of and have vowed never to write about? Don’t tell me! Picture it in your mind. Hold it there…”

“OK. That’s your subject. Write it.”

That tends to sort the tyre-kickers out from the buyers!

I’m reminded always of the beautiful opening lines of Maxine Hong Kingston’s great memoir, “Warrior Woman”.

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said to me, “What I am about to tell you….”

It was a story of deep family shame that was always kept hidden. It’s the story Maxine writes out in full in the first chapter of the book.

Similarly with the great poet, Allen Ginsburg. When he was setting about to become a writer and poet his father wrote him a letter in which he said, “You must never write about your mother’s madness or your homosexuality.”

So they became the subject of Allen’s breakthrough poem, “Kaddish”.

In both cases both writers also locate their work within their own ‘outsider’ culture as members of, respectively, ‘Chinese American’ and ‘Jewish American’.

Facing the darkness and describing it is a really powerful place to start. Don’t worry about the Dialogue and the mystical side of it. ‘Just do it!’ is the essential commandment. 🙂

The key to successful, published writing lies in the rewriting. The almost endless task of editing. But that’s further down the line. That’s where the ruthless discipline lies.

HOW UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES CAN REMAKE OUR LIVES

Posted in 1 with tags gospel of St Thomas, hew wood draw water, Joy, WB Yeats, Zen Koans on July 24, 2012 by josieemery

Some years ago I wrote the following as I contemplated the changes wrought in my life by ‘unfortunate circumstances’. It seems to me now that ‘unfortunate circumstances’ are the making of our lives.

Here is that original post and at its foot I will add the change it has wrought. The change, you may note, is above all in the way I say what I have to say. It is now not just words, but words in flight: words in song.

“Now therefore you are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being slaves, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God…”

King James Bible, Joshua, Ch 9 verse 21.

“Before enlightenment: hew wood, draw water.
After enlightenment: hew wood, draw water.”

Zen Koan

Isn’t that interesting? One culture sees the hewing of wood and the drawing of water as a punishment. Another sees it as a path to liberation.

On the Internet there are very few hewers of wood and drawers of water. Most are drawers of electricity from the grid. It’s been my privilege the last year to move back towards that more primal state. A privilege evoked by my loss of status, income and privilege.

To save myself I had fled to a tiny hamlet in the bush. I arrived in mid-winter. I and the wood fire became a symbiotic couple: we needed each other to stay alive. I did not need to draw water from the well, but I did need to hew wood to heat it. And to cook and keep myself warm.

I was on call 24/7 to answer the fire’s needs. As needy as an infant it was. And as hungry.

As I tended it so my stress and anxiety, my guilt and shame, fell away. My mind was cleansed, and my soul too. I reflected upon many things and let myself explore strange waters.

One such backwater was the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas,

Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

He could have added, “Draw a bucket of water and I am there.”

I split many a piece of wood and slowly I began to understand those words. I learnt them too as I dug the garden and prepared the soil for spring. I began to see the Holy in the simplest actions. I saw God in the split wood and the turned soil.

I thought of something that Thomas had recorded, which I had earlier discovered: at first to my cost and later towards my liberation.

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.”

I had brought forth that which was within me – which I had denied for far too long. I brought it forth and it liberated me.

Liberated me to where I could at last be one with hewing wood, drawing water, watching clouds and walking on the mountain.

And now, some 6 years later.  THE COTTAGE SONG

 

 

 

Murderin’ Women No More

This is from an email exchange with a research scholar friend.

She said,

 In your email you talked of men’s violence and its association with war; maybe it is the outcome of war.  I question this because of the prevalence of violence inflicted by men and boys who have not been to war, are generations away from anyone who has been to war.  This has me wonder if war is indeed the outcome of the association of men and violence, and not the other way around.  

I tried to reply but I found it too confusing. At the same time I was recording a song I’d written nearly 2 years earlier. Although I’d performed it a few times I’d hesitated to record it. How could I, a transgender woman, buy into this great and important debate? I felt that I’d been part of the problem. I’d not been violent but I’d certainly been sexist. And until I stepped across the gender line I had no idea how endemic male violence towards women was. How it was not just considered ‘normal’ but somehow a male ‘right’.

Now, as a woman, I was seeing it all anew and aghast.

As a musician and increasingly a songwriter I am always listening. But now old favourites were becoming harder to digest. People like Muddy Waters. People like Johnny Winter. It was Mr Winter who brought me undone. A video interview with him as an old man playing a favourite song of his. You’ll have to wait til 4 minutes in to hear the song.

I had blithely assumed that with age came awareness. I’d assumed also that newer generations of men were listening to what women were saying, were reading the statistics, the news reports, having discussions with their partners. Were standing up and singing, ‘No More Violence To Women.”

So I went to hear a local virtuoso. A brilliant guitarist. Far better than I’ll ever be. His song was titled, “If I Killed You I’d Be Out In Ten”! He said it was a favourite of his son’s.

So my song came into being. In the time between writing it and recording it I’d gone through another transition. I was no longer hiding my male past. Now I was thinking that there were things I could share, things that might help other people. In the recording I decided not to shy away from the depth of my ‘old’ male voice. I would use everything I had in this song.

It’s a blues, it’s a country song, and it’s a 60s protest song. My role models were people like Pop Staples and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Here it is. ‘Murderin’ Women No More’. My tiny drop in the great groundswell that has begun.

I’m not advocating censorship. I’m just asking, guys, that you be conscious of what it is that you’re singing. Look on it as an ‘answer song’, a fine tradition going back at least to Kitty Wells in the 1950s. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” 

 

Wind In The Dunes

 

Sometimes it takes a long, long time to get an idea, a story, to work. To distill it out of the ether.

When I was 10 years old, my brother and I found a skull in the sand-dunes near our family farm.

It was wild, wild country back them. Coastal swamps, scrub, dunes, and a long, long lonely beach. A few isolated settler farms.

That place, the Coorong, was a land with a dark history.

As I grew older and became aware of that history I tried to capture it in a novel, which failed. In a screenplay, which failed. But the story, the images, would not go away.

Then I took up song-writing and, suddenly, it all came together.

I wrote the essence of the song in an afternoon…plus 40 years of failing to write it in other forms.

I then spent a few more months polishing it, arranging it, getting my voice to the point where it could deliver the song, working out the accompaniment. Finding how to play it on my old guitar. Then finding a producer to work with who could capture the sound. We got the sound down before Xmas, 2017.

Then I went on a road trip of some 1,000 Km to return to the place where it all happened to capture some video imagery. Pretty rough imagery as I only had my Zoom recorder. But I had the feeling, and I do think that is what counts in the end.

Here it is. Wind In The Dunes.

Flowers and Doorways

Suicide. How do we deal with it?

I’m terrified of death. I don’t want it to come, even though I know it will come. And the older I get the closer it comes. I cling to life almost desperately. So, when someone else makes the choice to kill themselves…?

I’ve been close to a few suicides. A good friend, a neighbour, a stranger whose life briefly touched mine…and I was the last person they spoke with. That was all in the cities. I came to a small country town, fleeing the dark trauma of the cities. In a country town everyone is a neighbour. We are all family.

And there’s the rub. We’re all connected. So when one of us un-connects like that, we all feel it. You feel it in the street. In the air. In the hills that suddenly seem to crowd closer and more forbodingly around your tiny little settlement.

Suddenly, all meaning and purpose is held up to harsh questioning. And those of us left behind feel a tide of guilt, of shame, of pain and rage. We remember the last thing that person said to us, or didn’t say. A look that – in retrospect – was full of meaning but at the time was just an odd look. A meeting of eyes where the other’s were clouded and ours full of un-comprehension.

We walk out to the town’s edges and there is that dark night; the blackness which you never find in cities. A darkness which makes human-kind not just insignificant but unimportant. So we turn back and all we can find to do is place some flowers in that doorway.

I confront my terror by placing words and sounds into ordered arrangements. The writing of a story and a song becomes my escape from the pain of living on the edge of death.

Flowers In Your Doorway. A song about suicide.

DANCIN’ ON THE GENDER DIVIDE

So there I was, cruising down the freeway and, for once in my life, in the passenger seat. I had time to ponder and reflect – mostly about my life and its challenges. The confrontations over gender and its so-called ‘dysphoria’. The idea that male and female were eternally opposed. All the arguments I’d read through the decades. And now here I was, cruisin’ with my man. Society had now defined me as ‘woman’. I was happy.

I saw the sign before it saw me. It read, GREAT DIVIDING RANGE. We were driving through forest and hills. The Great Divide! And suddenly something in my mind opened and words poured through from some other realm.

I’d been a writer all my life, but had retreated into silence in the mountains. I thought I would write no more. Now IT was writing me. I grabbed a pad and transcribed the words from above. Then I realised they were not stories, not poetry: they were song lyrics. I wrote all weekend. By Sunday night I had six sets of lyrics.

Over the next two years I had to learn to sing them. I had to upgrade my guitar skills. I had to rediscover my childhood keyboard lessons and start transcribing the melodies. All the time acting under a compulsion far greater than myself. A challenge had been issued. I didn’t think I was up to it. Like the prophets of old I’d been commanded and commandeered. But IT would not let me rest.

So, here’s the first song that came to me.

Songman From the Plains

For me Glen Campbell was the ‘voice’ of Jimmy Webb. Webb’s soaring melodies and Campbell’s sweeping voice. So to think of Glen now in death is also to think of Webb’s words. I responded to the wide-open plains feel of both. The one song above all was ‘Wichita Linesman’. As a child on the farm I lay awake listening to the sweeping melody of the phone lines that the linesmen had brought to our farmhouse there on the Southern Ocean coast. Beneath that melody was the steady beat of the 32 volt diesel generator that gave us our warm yellow light. ‘Wichita Linesman’ had both that aching and arcing voice and then the dead-string sound of a baritone guitar that was like the generator’s pulse.

As a writer what caught my ear in the song was how it evoked a character and a life. How it got beyond being a pop love song to being a biography. It was an adult song for an adult audience. People who worked hard jobs conscientiously. Who went out into the weather to honour their pact with society. In this case to keep the power lines running. It caught the inner life of this conscientious man. His love, his need. Things I’d striven for in short stories. Decades later I would strive to catch such ideas in my own songs. Ideas as hard to catch as the sound of the wind in the wires in the dark and lonely night on the plains. Farewell Glen Campbell. Songman From the Plains.

 

The Return of Zarathustra

After four years of silence on the mountain – listening to the wind and what the eagle says – I return to the marketplace, like Zarathustra before me, bringing my songs, speaking in a new voice filled with old wisdom. Wisdom learnt the hard way.

“I’ve been through the fiery furnace/ I came out the other side.

I watched people burning/ I saw how they died.  

Only one thing I know/ One thing I can do.

Keep myself honest/ Keep myself true.”   (from, ‘Born in Armour’, J. Emery, 2017)

My first venture into the marketplace is at

WHOLE LOTTA LOVE BAR

452 Lygon Street, East Brunswick, Melbourne

Sunday, July 30, 3-4pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I Were a Carpenter

It’s interesting that when I started this blog I subtitled it ‘A writer’s life, work and ever-evolving identity.’ Interesting because I no longer see my identity through the lens of ‘writer’. Interesting because even though I was prepared to shift my identity from ‘male’ to ‘female’ I needed to hang on to something of my past as an anchor. Sure, I never abandoned my football team despite changing cities. I needed that identity as ‘A Crows Fan’ more than I needed the identity of ‘male’. Even though I have no desire to visit the city where my football team resides.

But ‘writer’, that was different. Somehow whatever I went through, whatever I shed or adopted or grew into or was challenged by could be dealt with by understanding that, as a ‘writer’, I was an observer with a mission: to experience, observe and report upon my condition.

But my attempts to use those observations as the basis for ‘writing’ met with resounding disinterest. And a writer is surely someone who writes to an audience – not to the void. In despair at the disinterest I gave up writing. Alone on a mountain I was forced to face myself without a defining lens.

All through my changing life there was something else I’d never let go. Something physical: my father’s, grandfather’s and my own woodworking tools. I’d carried them from Adelaide to Sydney to Maldon. And the skill, ability and knowledge to work with them and transform timber into furniture.

As the ‘writer’ identity crumbled like Ozymandias’s statue I found myself in need of furniture. I had no money. But I could scrounge old timber and I had the tools – which had been in storage for a year and not used the previous 3 years. Which had come from Sydney to Maldon in a van with my books and clothes.

I started up my grindstone and cut new edges on the blades.

I made a table. I made a bench. I made a cabinet.

And a new ‘identity’ rushed up through my working hands as I slid my grandfather’s Jack plane over the old wood, or my dad’s No 6 jointing plane, or used my own biscuit jointer. I felt a surge of reconnecting with the neglected masculine line of my life. I was a Jointer, a Carpenter, a Cabinet Maker. I was a Maker of things. Someone who brought new identity to pieces of old and abandoned timber.

Somewhere in the Tao Te Ching it says that the carpenter who understands the Way works all day and his tools never grow blunt. The wood is one with him – just as the Gnostic Gospel of St Thomas recalls Jesus saying that he is as much in the wood as in the hands that work the wood.

So it is with me.

The Olympics? Just another reality TV show.

 

The television version of the Olympiads is no longer the broadcast of a sporting festival but a form of reality television. Once this is grasped then the behaviour of media and audiences is explicable. The tears, the dummy-spits, the outbursts, petulance, rage. These are the fodder of reality television. And, of course, the indignant responses of infuriated audiences is simply part of the loop.

For the Games to work as reality television requires cameras to have immediate access to private moments of the athletes (and sometimes their parents in the stands). At the moment when an athlete is at their most exhausted and vulnerable, that’s where the real ‘gold’ is found.

My first intimation of the way sporting television was moving was in 1985 when I covered the inaugural Adelaide F1 Grand Prix. Drivers were raced from the seats of their cars into the media tent to be debriefed the moment they’d completed their circuit. I watched Aynton Senna stumble into the glare of the camera lights immediately after having set the fastest lap. Wherever his eyes were, it was not in that room.

”What were you thinking on that blistering lap?” someone asked.

Those distance-focused eyes roamed the room and then he said, “By the time I see something, it is behind me. I don’t have time to think.”

“What did you do on that lap that made it different to previous laps?”

“I drove balls out,” he said.

That’s when the cameras grab the athletes. Before they can think and while the testosterone and the adrenaline are still in the red zone.

Twenty years later I had my own chance of being reality television fodder. A very persuasive documentary producer had talked me into letting him document my gender transition. At first I was eager to co-operate. But then I began to see the damage the process was doing to the delicate balance of emotions and needs within myself and my immediate family.

“That documentary tail is wagging your dog,” a wise friend advised me.

The crunch came when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our relationship had become very fraught before that news. To the producer it was the golden moment. “If we can get a camera into the hospice with you and your mother as she is dying, we’ll have a network sale!” he enthusiastically advised me.

I refused. He pressured me…strongly. This would clinch the deal. Maybe I could take a mini-camera in with me? Or just grab some stills of her dying face? I refused. The deal fell over. Eventually I summoned up the courage to confront him and advise I was no longer part of his project. He threatened legal action.

He was, by his lights, right. The documentary would have sold. He was now out of pocket.

The effect of documentary film-makers on their subjects (or of any intruder into a human process – say, an anthropologist living with a tribe) is itself well-documented. But now the reality cameras are affecting the performance of athletes at many sporting events.

When the ref. blows her whistle, when the umpire raises his finger, the challenged sports-person looks immediately to the big screen over the grandstand to watch the replay of their actions. Media-management is now an essential part of elite sports training. But time and again the rush of blood, the “brain explosion” short-circuits that learned behaviour and then the cameras swoop like the vultures they are.

And we, the audience, respond – whether with glee or outrage being irrelevant. We respond. That is all that is required of us.

For the logical extension of this mind-set, a viewing of Dee McLachlan’s new movie, 10terrorists, is mandatory. (A movie in which I do have a financial interest.)