Under the Mountain.

The year was 1979. I was nine years old. My father gave my brother and me a book. It was called Under the Mountain, and it was set in the city we lived in. We both read it - devoured it more like - and were transported to the mysterious and dangerous world beneath our own. It's the story of twins Rachel and Theo, and the enigmatic Mr Jones, who fight the slimy, creepy Wilberforces who sleep beneath Auckland's volcanoes and plan to take over the world. They must harness the power of their twin-ness to triumph.

I loved it. I yearned for an adventure to happen to me.


Then, shortly after, I was given the opportunity to audition for the part of Rachel in the TV series. My dream come true! Drama was my strong suit at school, and I longed to be on TV, convinced that child actors in NZ were terrible and I was just the girl to make it all better. I was sure to get the part, after all, I had the right name and everything! Alas, it was not to be. My brother Jonathan, three years older, also auditioned, and along with our friend Sarah, we had to come up with a mimed scenario to show off our acting talents. I had some vague idea about a kid being bullied on the way to school, but it was vetoed in favour of a gunfight. None of us got the parts, but Sarah later went on to star in another New Zealand children's TV classic, Children of the Dog Star. My brother went on to play Theo in the Radio New Zealand version. I went on to... write books instead.

Under the Mountain, the TV series, spooked a generation of NZ kids.

But that's not all my brother went on to do. He has now directed the feature film of Under the Mountain, which premieres this Saturday night in Auckland and which opens nationwide on Thursday the 10th. Go and see it in the opening weekend if you can, to ensure it gets a long screen-life. Go and see it if you have read the book, or seen the TV series, or go and see it just because you can. See volcanoes erupt! See slimy creatures and a creepy old house on Lake Pupuke! See a great homegrown supernatural adventure.

Spare a thought for a nine-year old girl whose dream didn't quite come true but who is very glad that her brother's did.

Relief. Proofs.

I have read some really excellent New Zealand fiction this year, including work by Mary McCallum, Sarah Laing and Emily Perkins, and I have just added to the list with Anna Taylor's short story collection Relief. At her best, Taylor's writing throws up the atmosphere of Kirsty Gunn's stories and the inventiveness with language of Anne Enright's. An example: "... he looks tired, his head small and pale like a peeled egg." That image stayed with me a long time after I'd finished the story.

I read the book from start to finish, and while some of the stories didn't work quite as well for me (mostly due to a slight heavy-handedness in aforementioned atmosphere and inventiveness) on the whole, I thought it was a remarkable achievement. The stories remind me of the kind of stories I used to try (and fail) to write before giving up and concentrating on novels; in other words, I wish I had written them.

In other news, the proofs for Magpie Hall have arrived. You often hear writers talking about how exciting getting the proofs is, because that is when your new baby is all laid out like a real book. I am making way through them slowly (too slowly probably) and so far haven't come across any howling mistakes.

I have a real, human, new baby to look after, and having something like this to look over is really nice; it keeps me from falling head-first into total domesticity.

Lucky me.

It was my birthday the other day and I was given two books I have had my eye on: Relief by Anna Taylor and As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong. The next book on my pile is The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, so a varied and sumptuous feast of debut New Zealand fiction awaits! (Just a quick aside: I just love the covers of Wong's and Catton's books: both designed by the very talented Keely O'Shannessy.)

As Bookman Beattie pointed out a while ago, there are a lot of new books being published in NZ this year, all of which seem to be by women (and I know for a fact there are a few more to come before the year is up). It seems the NZ lit scene is alive and well and is turning out new faces all the time.

But where are all the blokes? 

Bootcamp. Wuthering Heights.

That's where my novel is (at bootcamp that is, not taking a holiday on the Yorkshire moors). It's all looking very clear, everything's fallen into place etc etc. Now I just need to put the hours in and it will all be done. Feeling very good about it. Not much time for blogging.

Last night I watched the first half hour of the new Wuthering Heights mini-series. I reckon finally (finally!) someone has got it right. Heathcliff was menacing and scary and didn't look as though he was wearing a wig and a spray on tan a la Ralph Fiennes. Perhaps for once it will be true to the book ie all the characters will be loathsome. I have recorded the rest to watch as a treat for doing my work.

Wuthering Heights has been a very important work for me lately as you may have read on this blog. Last year I attended a series of lectures at Canterbury and even wrote an essay on it in an attempt to get into the head of the main character in Magpie Hall. The book itself plays an important role in my new novel - you'll just have to wait and see how.

Done!

A full draft, anyway. I've had a marathon 8 days in which I wrote more than 10,000 words. Please refer to my picometer, to the right. 100% done. Now the real work begins, whipping my novel into the best shape it can be. Sending it to bootcamp, perhaps. I think I might take the weekend off. Here's my reward:

Montanas and a title at last.

Congratulations to all the finalists in the Montana NZ Book Awards. I was really pleased to see Eleanor Catton on the short list for the fiction prize. I confess I haven't read The Rehearsal yet, but I always think it's a wonderful achievement for a first novel to get onto the shortlist for the big one. The book is on my TBR pile, honest. The only one I have read is Emily Perkins' Novel About My Wife, which I loved. I was sorry that Paula Morris's excellent collection of short stories didn't make it - surely she is long overdue to have her work recognised. But while last year was the year for short fiction (Alice Tawhai and Charlotte Grimshaw both on the shortlist of four; Grimshaw taking out the prize), it seems this year is the year for Young Adult fiction, with the inclusion of Bernard Beckett and Kate De Goldi, and the teenaged protagonists of Catton's novel. I have no complaints - I understand awards for what they are: the subjective opinion of well-qualified people who will no doubt choose different winners from the next set of well-qualified people.

On another note I have had a burst of productivity on my novel, and my deadline is looking easily achievable if I can keep it up. I also have a final title, all other options being rejected for one reason or another. The title is:

(dun dun dun DUUUUNNN)

Magpie Hall. 

Not writing.

It hasn't been the best week or so for writing. Son was sick at the beginning of last week, which meant we had to put off our planned trip to Dunedin until he was better. Which luckily didn't take too long - we drove down on Wednesday and back on Friday night. I had a dance workshop on Saturday which might have been where I picked up the illness that struck me down on Sunday night and has only started to come right this morning after lots of sleeping and generally lying around feeling sorry for myself.

So not much writing, but I plan to make amends in spectacular fashion this afternoon. Had a great time in Dunedin. I hadn't been there for nine years and as soon as I drove into town I remembered how much I love it. Something about the Gothic quality of light and the buildings and the way its history has been preserved in the inner city. I spent a lot of time in Dunedin in my youth, when I played in bands, regularly touring there and even living there for a short time when I played in the 3Ds. Then, I thought it was a magical place, full of ancient wisdom, and certainly there was something there that produced all that great music.

I even liked visiting in the middle of winter, staying with people who usually had nothing more than a two-bar heater to huddle around for warmth. We had many a party with blankets over our knees and we wore all our clothes to bed. It was just what we did. I think people must be softer these days with their fancy heating and wanting to walk around their houses without their coats and hats on.

The first time I drove out to the Otago Peninsula I loved looking at all the drystone walls - they seemed a direct connection to the Scotland the Dunedin settlers had left behind. But this time I didn't see any - perhaps they have finally fallen down and been replaced by wire fences; or perhaps we didn't explore enough.

We were very kindly accommodated by fellow author and blogger Vanda Symon. She and her family made us feel wonderfully welcome and relaxed, and, as she mentions on Overkill, we even had a bloggy lunch, with Tania Roxborough and Paradoxical Cat. So, while I wasn't writing, at least my brain was being stimulated. I am slightly in awe (and a little suspicious - kidding Tania!) of Tania, who wrote her latest novel, which is 120,000 words long, in approximately two months.

The highlight of the trip for me was the Otago Museum. We only visited two exhibits - the butterfly house (which I wish had been there when I was researching The Sound of Butterflies) and the Animal Attic. The latter is a replica of the original museum with its wondrous collection of 19th century taxidermy and natural curiosities, which was wonderful for research for my current novel.

 

We decided to take the scenic route back to Christchurch and got lost not once but twice, and since it was 5pm when we left, we were driving around the hills when it was dark, so we didn't even have the benefit of any scene from our scenic detour in the end.

The upside of being sick was that I caught up on some long overdue reading and in three days read Mary McCallum's The Blue and Sarah Laing's Dead People's Music, both of which I highly recommend. No time now to go into great detail - a hungry novel awaits.

Sunday Salon: Everyone else is doing it.

I didn't read as many books as I would have liked in this year, and I have a pile of gems sitting on my bedside table that I know I will love (or at least like a lot), but here are the best of the ones I did read in 2008.

Bits & pieces.

I am back from a great few days in Melbourne. I love that city so much. I would actually consider moving there. After all, I can work anywhere, usually. It would just be the logistics of moving the family there and finding the right things for everyone to do. I often think about the life that might have been. It's not that I wish I'd lived a different life - far from it - I just wish there was a way to live parallel lives. In one of those lives I would have moved to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language and made an effort to stay there and learn. I know I can still do those things, but it doesn't seem as easy to move around. Of course, I am forgetting I had my own shackles in my 20s too, usually lack of money or useful work experience that would make it possible to uproot for foreign shores.

I worked in London a couple of times - once for a year, then again for six months - but it's not the same as the challenge of going so far outside your comfort zone you don't even know what the local words for 'comfort zone' are. I'm sure the reality wouldn't be as glamorous as I am imagining.

Anyway, back to Melbourne: I shopped, I drank, I ate, I danced, and best of all I caught up with very missed friends. You see, with friends like those I feel as though moving to another country with a small child might just be tolerable - there would be willing babysitters and lots of fun things to do with friends that don't involve finding a babysitter in the first place.

I had no literary activity whatsoever, except I did read some of the stories, as promised, in Paula Morris's Forbidden Cities. It was the perfect book to take with me (this from someone who regularly confesses to preferring novels over stories any day). I urge anyone to check out this book - there really is something for all moods, especially when travelling. My favourite stories so far are the ones with a satirical touch - I guess they are more like the Paula I know in person. But the one I loved best will come as no surprise to anyone who knows my own short stories: it was called Bright and it was quite short and finished from a dog's point of view. I like a good dose of whimsy and melancholy in my stories, and this one has just the right amount of both. I've still got a few stories to go and they are now my perfect travelling companion on short journeys too - the bus to work.

I have decided not to write about seeing Goran Bregovic in concert. Let's just say it was love. I am far too daunted at the thought of putting the powerful feelings the show generated into words. I'm sure you can imagine the awe of seeing "a 15-piece all-male choir; a 12-piece string orchestra, a six-piece brass 'Wedding and Funeral' band; two female singers from Bulgaria; a guest vocalist Alen Ademovic and, of course, Goran Bregovic!" I will leave you with this image though: I wondered as I looked at everyone sitting so politely in the four-tiered-seating State Theatre when we arrived just how we could experience the promised overwhelming urge to dance. I wondered if an arts festival crowd is the ideal crowd and a theatre the appropriate venue. I needed have worried. By the end they were dancing in the aisles, clapping and singing. Two middle-aged women at the very front finally got up the courage to dance at the very end and were so pleased with themselves they high-fived.

Maybe I will write about it another day.  

Forbidden Cities.

I was going to call this post 'Foreign Cities' and say how appropriate it was that when I go to Melbourne this week my book of choice is called Foreign Cities. But it's not; it's Forbidden Cities by Paula Morris (see Bookman Beattie's recent interview with Paula here). I was getting it mixed up (again - sorry Paula!) with Charlotte Grimshaw's novel Foreign City.

So. I am going to Melbourne this week to visit friends and have a small holiday, and I shall be taking Paula's new book of short stories, which I'm very much looking forward to reading. Even though I'll be in a foreign city with much to do, I will also be in a nice quiet hotel with all the time in the world, and if there's one thing that I don't get much of these days, it's lolling around reading.

I love Melbourne. I've only been once before but if I was going to move to Australia I wouldn't have much trouble settling there I think. It certainly isn't what I would class as a forbidden city; at least, nobody has forbidden me to go there. It might be forbidden in as much as I'm a bit worried about shopping temptations and perhaps drinking too much with my lovely friends. Ah, the decadence!

The Melbourne Arts festival is on and I'm going to see Goran Bregovic's Tales and Songs for Weddings and Funerals on Saturday night. Bregovic made the music for Emir Kusterica's films Time of the Gypsies and Underground, both films I loved, with the music contributing significantly to that love. Here's the blurb:

"The maestro of this timeless new sound, Goran Bregovic, melds a 37-piece ensemble from the best of the Balkans: a 15-piece all-male choir; a 12-piece string orchestra, a six-piece brass 'Wedding and Funeral' band; two female singers from Bulgaria; a guest vocalist Alen Ademovic and, of course, Goran Bregovic! The result is a recipe for riotous fun, passionate performance and exhilarating energy – featuring Bregovic’s much-loved film scores, hot-wired revivals of traditional tunes and new fusions of flavours from Gypsy to rock."

I can't wait. Perhaps afterwards I'll try and give another stumbling music review, where I try and put into words things that I only feel with my gut.

I'm also going to see if I can't get a bit of dancing in, since Melbourne supposedly has one of the most vibrant swing dancing scenes in the world. And speaking of early-20th-century-dance-styles, Melbourne is also home to one of my literary guilty pleasures: Phryne Fisher, the can-do 1920s flapper detective gal, the creation of Kerry Greenwood. If you want maximum escapism with fabulous frocks and mint juleps, you need look no further than Phryne.

Writing and babies.

Many of us have done it and failed. Some have succeeded. Some of us are thinking about doing it. I recommend Making Babies by Anne Enright for those who have done it and those who are thinking of doing it, and also the latest post by Lauren Groff. I just read it, smiled, and thought, ah, yes. You can't ever help seeing the humour in such endeavours, and this is what keeps you sane. I can't believe I went through it all and out the other side. And could quite possibly think about doing it all again.

Donna and me.

I can see now why some writers take ten years to write their second books. I’m thinking of people like Donna Tartt and Junot Diaz. Second books are hard. Well, technically speaking it’s not my second book I’m working on; it's my third, although as a follow up to my first published novel, I will call it my second.

It’s not that I’m paralysed by anxiety. If I go looking for the anxiety, I can find it easily enough, and find plenty of things to feed it – will this one be better than the last? Will my publishers like it or reject it? Will I be able to finish it before my residency (and salary) runs out? – but I’m not feeling that anxious, honestly. I’m just looking from the outside in for a moment, cool and detached, at the process I am going through with this one, and it has made me think of Donna Tartt writing The Little Friend. Of course she had extra pressure – how to follow up a mega-hit – that thankfully I’m not burdened with. I’m just really interested in the way this novel keeps slipping out my grasp, like soap in the shower. Just when I think I’ve got it, it twists away again. One moment I think I know exactly what it is, and the next it morphs and changes and I realise that what I have written so far is no more than a bit of dabbling to get me ready for writing the novel properly.

I imagine Donna Tartt starting The Little Friend with an idea: little girl’s brother gets murdered; little girl is kind of quirky, with a quirky Southern family; quirky little girl sets out to find her brother’s killer. I bet she doesn’t even know until she gets to the end that Harriet isn’t going to find the killer. Tartt probably thinks the whole time she is writing, ‘Well I don’t know who did it, but I’m sure if I keep writing it will all become clear.’ Except it doesn’t. So she keeps writing. And as she writes, the book changes – she needs to introduce a strange misfit family into it as suspects and she becomes enamoured of them and wants to give them a point of view. She starts to love writing their dialect. For a while, she follows them to see where they will take her.

She finishes a draft and goes back and changes lots of things. She rewrites passages so they sing, so she can really feel under the skin of the character, view everything through their eyes and write the world accordingly.

In the meantime, some years have gone by. She still doesn’t know who the killer is. She changes some more things, rewrites some more. Another few years goes by. And so on. She knows this whole time that it has to be better than it is, that if she just keeps working away at it, it will get better and better until it is finally worthy of releasing into the world.*

I understand now. I just hope and pray that I can condense that process into a much shorter time.




*Warning: may not actually be how Donna Tartt wrote The Little Friend. In other words, don’t quote me.

A blog I like.

I don't know why I didn't add this one to my blogroll - just forgot I suppose. But Lauren Groff's blog on her website is completely delightful. The author of The Monsters of Templeton - which I bought after reading its lovingly crafted opening chapter in the shop, and which was short-listed for the Orange Prize for New Writing - is in the late stages of pregnancy, so her blog is about books, writing and doing up her nursery or looking longingly at people drinking champagne at awards ceremonies. She really is a smart cookie and makes some interesting observations about books she's writing, reading and that are being talked about, as well as issues such as literacy and freedom of expression. She has also posted some quite refreshingly honest responses to some of the reviews her book has had (some of us try to pretend we don't read ours).

She doesn't have a 'comments' section, otherwise I would tell her I like her blog and how much I relate to so many of her posts.

Because I didn't have her on my blogroll, I only remember to look every few weeks, so there are always a few new posts to entertain me. Now I'm adding it to my blogroll. You can find links on her site to some of her elegant short stories, too, soon to be published in book form (love the cover Lauren!).

Sunday Salon

I am greedy. I acquire books at a faster rate than I can read them. This has never been a problem for me, as they have always been absorbed by the thousands of books I have on my shelves at home and therefore all evidence of my extravagance disappears. It is quite alarming then, when you move to a temporary home and only bring fifteen or so books with you, when your book collection suddenly doubles and is well on the way to tripling. So I have tried to hold back a bit, only getting books out of the library or not at all, and it has been torture, but my bank balance is no doubt thanking me. I have been walking around bookshops longingly fondling the books I would like to take home with me and love. 

So I was delighted when, after doing a reading at the local UBS bookshop for Poetry Day on Friday, I was given a very generous and welcome koha - a book voucher. With my voucher I bought two books: Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier, which I had checked out of the univeristy library but which had been recalled before I had made much headway into it. Since it is a source of inspiration for my new novel, I thought this is one book I should own rather than borrow. The other book I bought was Emily Perkins' Novel About My Wife. I have wanted to read it ever since it came out, but had been holding out on the actual buying of it until I knew I had the time to sit down and read it. And still it called to me...

The voucher was unexpected, so it was a huge relief to be able to purchase these two books that have been cooing my name for so long.

My greed continues. Not only did I get myself these two books, but as it was my birthday this week, I also got given two new books, both, coincidentally, by Anne Enright: Making Babies, her memoir about pregnancy and motherhood and Taking Pictures, a collection of short stories. I finally finished The Gathering and while I felt a little unsatisfied at the end, I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, and it made me want to read more of her work. Having heard her speak, too, I knew that she would be the perfect person to write an antidote to the What to Expect When You're Expecting/the First Year type baby books. I will definitely be reporting back on that one.

So I have all these new books beckoning to me, but first I have to read Petropolis by Anya Ulinich as I think I can reveal that she is one of the authors on the session I will be chairing at the Christchurch Writers Festival in September. The programme is being launched on Tuesday, so I'll reveal the others anon.

Sunday Salon - and navel gazing.

I am still reading The Gathering. Things have been a bit slow on the reading front this week as I have had a sick child to deal with.

So the book I'm choosing to talk about this week is a new book, of which I have just heard news, by Chris Else, called Gith. Chris was my mentor, through the New Zealand Society of Authors (click on Programmes and Services to find out about the mentor scheme and other useful services), when I wrote The Sound of Butterflies, and gave me lots of very wise and useful writing advice. He also has a blog, which has absolutely no navel-gazing whatsoever. Well, maybe just a bit. Not that there's anything wrong with navel-gazing (Chris, you might want to tell Amanda to avert her eyes more often).

Anyway, keep an eye out for it, I certainly will. Chris says the blurb describes it as ‘An unorthodox love story and a page-turning who-dunnit, written with heart and intelligence’, and I think it's a gorgeous, eye-catching cover, too.

An example, as promised.

In my previous post, Four Little Lights in the Fog, I promised to return with an example from Stefan Merrill Block's book, The Story of Forgetting, of describing the 'coffin, not the grief'. So here it is. The teenaged narrator's mother, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, has disappeared from the family home one night, and her son goes looking for her.

"But my voice only echoed across the wide, blank pavement, with only the tungsten streetlamps bearing witness, hanging their heads, apathetically dim. I almost turned back to get my dad and the car, but for fear of losing even a second, I just kept running, beyond the staring, skeletal eye sockets of a thousand darkened windows, past the endlessly churning motorized waterfall at the entrance of our neighbourhood..."

I think we can gather from this that Seth is feeling pretty bleak. Taken out of context, it almost seems over-written, but in the novel it works perfectly. I hope this goes some way to illustrate what I was banging on about.

I highly recommend The Story of Forgetting by the way.

Sunday Salon - my first.

I have joined a blogging group called the Sunday Salon, where members write on Sundays about books they have been reading, enjoying (or not), and thinking about. So this is my first post.

At the moment I have quite a few books on the go, which is unusual for me. I generally read one thing at a time, usually fiction. But I am in the research stage for my novel, and that obviously involves a lot of reading, and of different kinds of books. Anyone who is wondering what my novel is about will no doubt pick up clues from my reading matter!

I'm dividing my reading into four categories at the moment. Research, inspiration, pleasure and work (although they often intersect). For research this week it's been The Collector by Michael King (oh how handy that he also happens to be my father) about the Austrian Andreas Reishek who came to New Zealand in the 19th century to work as a taxidermist at the Canterbury Museum and left with ill-gotten Maori artefacts. It's a terrific read, and as my father's literary executor, I would like to see this book back in print as I think it will appeal to fans of good narrative non-fiction with a historical science bent.

For inspiration, I just finished Henry James' Turn of the Screw. I was interested in the unreliable narrator, and all the Gothic elements of the story, but I have to say: people have made jokes about James' verbose style (even Edith Wharton, according to her biographer Hermione Lee) but I was unprepared for how much it killed the story for me. It's not just because it was of its time - I have read and loved many, many Victorian-era novels and been gripped by them. This one could have been so much more (athough I do acknowledge some of it is brilliant).

For pleasure I am reading Anne Enright's The Gathering. I was expecting this to be a huge, heavy (in more than one sense of the word) tome, but I picked it up in a bookshop and stayed reading and could not put it down. And it's quite short and written with a light touch. I am savouring it slowly (no choice with all the other reading).

For work, I am chairing a session at the Christchurch Writers' Festival this year, so have four books to squeeze in on top of my other reading. And these four particular authors haven't been announced yet, so I can't actually tell you what they are! But I will in time.

Outside of all of that, I have read this book approximately 35 times this week.

Three Novellas for a Novel.

Announcing the latest book by Carl Shuker, winner of the prestigious Prize in Modern Letters and friend of mine: Three Novellas for a Novel. Available only for a limited time, and only online. Carl has made the bold and very modern move a la Radiohead of making his book available for however much the reader wants to pay for it. It consists of, as the title suggests, three novellas, the first of which, The Depleted Forest, is available now.

Carl is a fearless writer. He writes some of the most incredible prose I have ever read, unlike anything I can think of. He got the recognition he deserved when he won the Prize in Modern Letters for The Method Actors, because his books are not easy reads; they are challenging in their style, their subject matter, and their structure, and for this he will probably never be considered mainstream. The great thing is that this does not sway him - he continues to write the books he wants to write and probably always will. I think he might be a genius.

Please go and check out his latest work at http://www.threenovellasforanovel.com/.

Overheard conversations and Mailer's unconscious.

I recently read an interview with a local writer whose debut novel has just been published. She talked about how she always carries a notebook around with her and writes down snippets of overheard conversation, how people will often find her in the bathroom at parties, madly scribbling.

I don't do that. It seems to not be a part of my nature. I used to think that made me a bad writer, that I wasn't always observing people acutely and using interesting conversations I'd heard and characters I'd met. Sure, I carry a notebook around with me, but that's usually to write down things my imagination dreams up before I forget them.

I think I did, once. I did it because I thought that was what I should do, and I certainly wrote descriptions of some interesting people I saw or met, but I don't think I have ever directly used them. I once saw a young girl standing at the counter of a cafe with her mother. From behind, she looked about ten and she wore a long pink cardigan, a pink floral skirt and frilly bobby socks. She also clutched in her hand a packet of Holiday Lights and a lighter. Then she turned around and I had a moment like Donald Sutherland must have had in the movie Don't Look Now, when the little girl in the red coat he has been following all over Venice, thinking it's the ghost of his daughter, turns out to be a wizened old crone. Who then stabs him.

I didn't get stabbed, but the little girl I had observed was actually about 35, still dressing like a child but smoking cigarettes.

Anyway, I dutifully wrote down a description of her in my notebook, but she never made it into any of my novels or short stories. Why would she?

Despite not jotting these things down anymore, I know that I do observe, in my way, and these observations get chucked on the pile with all the others in my unconscious mind, where they fester and ferment and come out, in whatever form, when they are ready.

I also hardly ever use my own direct experience in my fiction. I once quit my job and travelled around Europe for three months in preparation for getting serious about writing. Listen, I needed to. After four years at a job with no proper holiday my mind was gunked up and needed a bit of freeing. Upon my return, my aunt asked me what I had written while I was away, and what was I going to write based on my experiences, and I said "nothing". She couldn't understand and thought I had wasted my time somewhat. But I know that bits and pieces from that trip are still all buried in there, and they will, and probably have already, come out in some shape or other.

Imagine my delight when I found an essay by Norman Mailer in his book about writing, The Spooky Art, called 'The Unconscious'. Everything I have talked about above was not even something I had consciously thought about before, apart from having a vague sense of confusion at my inability to use real life conversations, characters and experiences. So it is fitting that an essay entitled 'The Unconscious' helped me to understand my own methods that I had buried deep inside me.

Here is what he says about creating convincing characters: "As we go through life, we do, after all, observe everyone, wittingly and unwittingly. Perhaps, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse someone in a restaurant who represents a particular inspiration or menace or possibility, potentially friend or foe -- and the unconscious goes to work on that. It needs very little evidence to put together a comprehensive portrait because, presumably, it has already done most of the labour. To use an unhappy analogy, it's as if the unconscious is a powerful computer that does not often need much in the way of new data to fashion a portrait, considering how much material it has stored away."

And about using your own experiences, citing 9/11 as an example: "If you never write about 9/11 but were in the vicinity that day, you could conceivably, in time to come, describe a battle in a medieval war and provide a real sense of such an event. You could do a horror tale or an account of a plague... All kinds of scenes and situations can derive ultimately from 9/11. What won't work is to go at it directly."

This has helped me to understand that the child-like woman and the three months around Europe (for example) have all become a part of the mish-mash that is my unconscious brain, the animal that I get to work so hard for me on a regular basis. I might not write about that woman, or those train journeys, but they contribute to the composites that end up in my work. The Sound of Butterflies is ultimately about a long-distance relationship, of which I have had plenty. And as, Mailer points out, I need to take care of that animal: "Sometimes, I think you have to groom the unconscious after you've used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who's a finer animal than you."

Romance and growing older.

This is another post about a film, this time the film of a book that I loved when I read it in my early 20s - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I came to Marquez through a stage 3 university paper, Post-colonial Lit at Auckland Univeristy in the early 90s. One Hundred Years of Solitude was taught by Sebastian Black, he of the tightly-buttoned paisley shirts and the bushy grey beard, which he often stroked as he pondered his own words. His enthusiasm for the work was infectious and I experienced the joy of loving a book because I not only read it but discussed the ideas it threw up. A boy I fancied sat in front of me and I gazed at the back of his head and nodded at his intelligent questions. Our lectures finished at 6pm, so as the days got shorter we would walk out together in the melancholy light and I would try and make him mine.

I read Love in the Time of Cholera after that, which was a much more straight-forward love story if I remember rightly. It appealed to my early 20s romanticism and idealism, when I was still falling in and out of love regularly and believed in all comsuming passion. On reflection, the boys that I fell in love with, especially those who spoke the language of love, were always the ones who ended up getting bored and moving on once the first spurt of romance (all midnight swims, drinking wine, sitting up all night talking) started to wane. They were in love with being in love (as I was, I guess). Still, exciting at the time and an essential part of growing up, but having now experienced more lasting love I can see that those affairs were nothing more than games really. Fun games, but games I'm happy to banish to my past.

So when I read Love in the Time of Cholera, with its great love that spans more than 50 years, I swooned over it in a way that I never would have over a Mills and Boon. After all, this wasn't just high romance, this was literature!

After seeing the film, I'm not quite so sure. I just wanted to give Florentino a slap, and Fermina for that matter, for falling in love before they've even spoken to each other, and believing they will die without each other. At least Fermina had the sense early on to see what it was: an illusion, with no grounding in real life. After Fermina rejects him, Florentino mends his broken heart by patiently waiting for Fermina's husband (a much more likeable character in the film) to die and by screwing more than 600 women. Oh the romance!

It's been so long since I read the book that I don't know whether the film was doing the book justice or whether it was just a bad film. I'd be interested to hear what others thought. The most interesting part for me was the relationship between Fermina and her doctor husband, but the film was marred by achingly bad make-up. The film-makers for some reason felt the need to give a young man a prosthetic face to make him look like a young Javier Bardem and it just looked awful. It was so distracting, as was the make-up of Giavanna Mezzogiorno as a young girl and as an old woman. It just looked like she had too much foundation on (one exception being her naked torso as a 70+ year old woman - now that looked realistic). For a review that sums up how I felt about the film, go here.

I'm going to have to read the book again to try and distinguish my feelings for it from the film, and to see if my jaded-but-content-in-love 37-year-old self still relates to it the way my wide-eyed 21-year-old self did. But I read Marquez's latest, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, about an old man in love with a young virgin, and to be honest, it left me cold and bit creeped out. I also think that the magical realism that I loved as a youngster (and tried to badly imitate in my own writing) is something that I've just grown out of.

My final thought on the book/film is that just like those young men that I had intense but short-lived affairs with in my youth (yes, including the boy from the lecture theatre), if Florentino had scored Fermina when they were young, he would have lost interest in her almost immediately and still ended up sleeping with 600 women. At least Fermina's husband gave up his mistress when she asked him to. I doubt Florentino would have done the same.