Rules for writing

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction (the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop).
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Jonathan Franzens rules for aspirational writers, as told to the Guardian. You can find rules from other authors such as Margarets Atwood and Richard Ford here and here.

To write

Whenever I ‘decide’ I am going to write I always fail. I will clear my throat, push my chair forward and pick up the pen, staring at my paper. The first sentence always comes easily, it’s anything. A thought that pops into my head. A fluid line that someone once said to me. Where it comes from I am uncertain but there it sits, lonely on the page. Following the first sentence is the difficult part. And so, after half and hour I am left with a paragraph that looks foolish and I ridicule myself and screw up the paper.

Proper thoughts and ideas that turn eventually to writing form in my mind on the edges of sleep, while I am selecting a courgette at the supermarket or starting absently at a vase of flowers. It will suddenly come to fruition and I will be seized with an urge so great, so overwhelming that I find anything, a napkin, a receipt, a business card and furiously scribble, afraid that the idea will escape like cigarette smoke out the car window. I am happy for anything concrete that will capture a vague or foggy outline that has been brewing in my mind.

The idea must be followed up. A wisp on an idea scribbled on a torn napkin will lose meaning if it lefts for days, weeks or months. What was once an urgent idea quickly becomes a random formation of words and the idea is be lost forever, or until the next time I am staring absently at a courgette.

I know it is foolish when I ‘decide’ to write. Why force myself into a fruitless writing process that leads to frustration and tears? Why write inane and cumbersome words if all it leads to is bad writing? Because I couldn’t not. Because I feel like a lazy writer most of the time. Sometimes the ‘idea strike moment’ is a hazy memory of the past and desperate for anything I will fill line after line of my book with terrible writing.  Because even though the writing is sometimes terrible, it feels right.

Girls got talent

My super talented friend Courtney Sanders has set up always sometimes anytime, an amazing new website that I plan to add to my morning ritual of internet scanning + cuppa tea. Beautifully designed, culturally relevant and showcasing the work of some seriously talented people, I am very excited. Also, you can visit Courtney's personal blog here. She knows her stuff!

Super youth

I have started a column for super lovely lifestyle web magazine  Super Youth.  It has been set up by the ever wonderful Casual Poet Culture and the site is brimming with interesting and inspiration articles about various artists around Asia. Do check it out if you have a spare moment. Shameless self promotion I know! 

Forgotten habits

Lovely Natasha sent me the best package from Korea, filled with the best imaginable stationary. The joy of receiving it in the mail was overwhelming. And, it couldn't have come at a better time. I had been mulling for a few days about starting something I hadn't done for years.

A diary. Not a 'dear diary, today so blue' but more sporadic thoughts as they struck. It started shakily, I had almost forgotten what it was like, what I was supposed to write and how I ended things. I couldn't shake the feeling I was writing it like someone else was going to read it so it wasn't really truly for me. This feeling is slowly sliding away and I'm getting bolder with my words and thoughts. 

It strange the way you feel in a moment when you write something, that is your total truth for that moment. Then a week, month, or year later everything is different. It's great for learning but that's is also the danger in diaries.

Above, the cover, the first page which is self conscious as talking about Mum and Dad and my grandma, a grocery shopping list quickly jotted for tonight and my boyfriends little brother Adrian and I practising writing our names.

Us and them

The world is split into two different kinds of people. When I moved into my flat, we were having all our kitchen goods delivered. My then girlfriend got off the phone and said to me, “we need to stay in because the fridge men are coming.” The world is divided into those who hear that and think, “I need to be in because I’m having a kitchen delivery” and those who hear the word “fridge men” and immediately conceive of a kind of cyborg creature with a big open door in his chest and stopping arms and legs and kind of freezing demeanor—a fridge-man hybrid.

- China Mieville

Wordsmith

John Cage

Composer

Philosopher

Artist

Mushroom collector

Poet

Music theorist

Print maker

Mastermind

Postcards

Maps got me thinking about postcards.

My Moose and Poose have been sending me postcards from where ever the wind has taken them since I could successfully interpret my Moose's old school handwritten scrawl (which I love, handwriting; a lost art for another post).

Whether they've nipped down south or popped over the ditch, I can always expect and eagerly await a handwritten postcard from them. I've collected and kept all these postcards over the years and collectively they are a map of not only my Grandparents travels, but of their limitless love.

Why write?

“I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake in real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write to be happy.”


Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006 (excerpt from The Australian Financial Review Friday Dec 16 2006).