Anne Enright's account in yesterday's Guardian of falling apart at at UEA was a fascinating read. Like many others, I can't afford a full-time writing course, so I was heartened by:

'writing is learned from the inside, and there's no one who can do it for you, much as they might want to help'

I couldn't quite understand what she meant by:


'I learned all the hard things at UEA - difficulty, incapacity, failure, humility, and the importance of working more on the page than in your head.'(my italics)

Any ideas?

Sheila

Here's the full article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/22/anne-enright-writing-author

Yes, I really liked that piece.

I do think one of the chief functions of a writing course like a masters is that it supplies the space for whatever will happen to happen. Which is why I think that if you are going to do a course, you'll get much more out of if you put it off till you've done huge amounts of writing on your own. Nothing on a good course is taught, and everyone will learn something different...

Emma

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" and the importance of working more on the page than in your head.'(my italics)"

Is she talking about the idea that you can't make a piece better till you've got it down on the page? And/or that it's no good leaving it in your head, however perfect it is there, becaue any story/novel/poem is only as good as how it's communicated, however imperfectly?

My first thought was she means write it, don't just think about it. It seems so trite, though, that I wondered.

Sheila

and the importance of working more on the page than in your head.

Louise Doughty, who attended UAE at the same time as Anne Enright, advises something similar - to paraphrase: write it down, because then, however bad it is, at least you have something you can edit. You can't edit a blank page.

Similarly, going by Anne's quote, you can't edit it if it's still stuck in your head.


- NaomiM

Hmm. I suppose I assumed writers would write things down without being told to - especially on an MA course.

I wondered if it had any connection with the kind of writing where people try not to think too much while they are writng - I think some people describe it in terms of not letting the right (or left) brain interfere with a more or less unconscious process.

Sheila

If you mean the Nano experience of just getting it down on the page and not stopping to correct it, I don't think she means that, Sheila.

Possibly she means not allowing the fear of failure to stop you from writing. Maybe she is talking of something similar to Portobelloprincess's thread; about stopping when the novel starts to get difficult....


- NaomiM


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Having read the article i think she means the fear of failure. The fact that while it remains in one's head the novel is perfect, but once one tries to get it down on the page it can never match the version in one's head. But one has to stick at it, however long it takes, and just do it.

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...and one learns from doing it.

One can procrastinate as long as one likes by going on courses, writing how to books, but we only learn by actually pulling a finger out and doing it.

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oops, I mean '...reading how-to books...'

The thing about Nano is that it gains momentum - the story takes off and takes you places you can't imagine and you end up almost living it and it makes you fight through the rough patches because it doesn't matter - you have to get the words down.

It also - as one of the pep talks highlighted - forces you to stop agonsing and make those pesky decisons - go down one track rather than hesitating at the crossroads and going nowhere.

I think many of us doing it this year would agree that the pep talks alone have been brilliant - having Philip Pullman and Meg Cabot send you encouraging emails has to help?

(ok you and xxxx others but hey - its my inbox

I started nano almost in despair - I was bogged down with the technical difficulties of my rewrite - I was miserable that a relative had started an MA that I wanted to be on and couldn't afford - the local writing group I'd started had failed ingloriously to fly - and it has been wonderful - a real morale boost and just the joy of getting the story - any story down on paper and having a licence to surprise myself and create 70 pages so far that didn't exist 23 days ago...

And it is a little like taking the top off a bottle of fizz - it splurges everywhere but hey - there are sparkles in some of those bubbles even if some of them do go flat

Yours on a nano high

Sarah

Thanks for posting that article.

I took her to means something similar to Naomi's interpretation. There is a dreamstate of words in the head - they perfectly convey what you want to say - the voice is pure and energised. Only when they get translated to the page do the gaping ellipses appear or the syntactical contradictions become evident. My brain conveniently forgets those. Like the apocryphal brilliant, subtle idea at 3am which in the morning reads as: there's lemon in his SOCK!!!

I really liked Anne E.'s piece, but I thought it said a lot, very eloquently, about what the course was for her, and by implication what she'd been like as a writer before, but that's only one person's. But I know a lot of people who've done a Masters these days, and they've all had very different experiences, and would tell you very different things about what it's meant for them.

The free-writing that you're describing, Sheila, is one way of getting some words on a page, and I think it's right - NaNo and other such techniques are closely related to that, though not entirely, since you're trying to steer it a little, even if as Sarah/Optimist says, part of the value is that you don't try too much, and are relaxedly open to all the ways it could go.

And I agree that the story in your head can look so complete, so perfect, that writing it down can seem surplus to requirements. 'What? You mean I have to write it down? Why? It's all here!' Alternatively it can be impossibly daunting, because the written-down version can only be one version - one kind of condensing of the cloud of unknowing in your head, and impossibly inadequate. Which is why I was extending it to suggest that she's implying that the novel exists as much in the communicating: that the communicating is as large a part of it (larger?) than the imagining.

Sarah - how fantastic to hear that NaNo's being so brilliant!

Emma

"as much in the communicating" - exactly. And there's the rub.

The gap between the cloud- the multiple layers of nuance and meaning that exist in the version of the story in the head - and the first draft is intriguing. What happens? Is it that we think we have realised whole scenes in words in our head when actually they have been completed with images and emotions we experienced as we conjured them, so that the process of then finding the words to transpose the ideas is limiting?

It is a fascinating article - if she worked 4 pm to 4 am she must have worked incredibly hard?

I identified with the theme of no one being able to do it for you - I imagine - though I don't know - that the mere fact of being in that comapany - in an environment that is all about the writing perhaps has a delayed action effect? Maybe you don't write the magnum opus that year but you go away with more awareness - more knowledge you have absorbed?

The bit about needing longer than a year to get it wrong before you learn to get it right resonates though I imagine she is an intense perfectionist? And you have to know you are getting it wrong and have the tools to fix it?
Certainly thought provoking.

Yes nano is fab - today - could all go pear shaped tomorrow

It sounds as though NaNo is having the same effect as Anne Enright is saying about her course with 'more on the page than in your head'... The getting it onto the page is the crucial thing - the difference between thinking about being a writer and being one. There is a vast difference between having a brilliant novel in your head and putting one on the page! Pretty much everyone I know thinks they could write a novel - actually writing it is a giant leap! THE giant leap. Anything that makes you prioritise writing instead of always leaving it to being the last thing you get round to doing after everything else (even housework) seems to be a really useful thing.
Good luck to all those NaNoing!
Jxx

Her thoughts about failure echoed JK Rowling's motivational speech which also addressed failure and how one should not be afraid of it.


- NaomiM

I've known a couple of people doing a full-time MA who said they wished they could have done it part-time (sounds backwards, but it was to do with the living costs for two years being more than one). I'd always assumed that full-time total immersion would have been better if you could do it. But they felt that there almost wasn't enough time between classes and assignments to brood and write, before new stuff was piling in on top: that in some ways it would have been better for things to be able to grow more slowly before they had to be pinned down and got into workshoppable form.

But I think it's true that it's madness to expect you'll come off an MA with a finished novel, though you may. Much more likely that, like Sapph, I think, and others I know, what happens is you go away with all sorts of seeds in your head, and try-outs and half-finisheds in your bag, and a much sharper set of tools, and it's the next thing you write which really benefits.

(I finished TMOL in the first year of my MPhil, but then I'd got a lot of experience in writing novels already, and there were no other classes or modules or reading lists - there's no other course which is purely about you working on a single, whole creative piece)

Emma

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Just heard from another writer friend, a brilliant short story writer who's always got stuck in trying a novel, saying NaNo is fab and brill and she's 50,000 in! NaNo rocks!

Just wanted to add that I agree with Sarah that NaNo is great, and the motivational emails have been fantastically good this year.

I've just had a look online to see if they're available to non-participants, and it seems that they might be, because last year's are up. So this will be the link, for the future:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/peptalks2008

One or two of them are already available. I can see Philip Pullman's talk and Katherine Paterson's, for example.