First words

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I’m trying to remember the day I sat down and began writing my first novel. You’d think it would be something you’d remember, like your first kiss or your first day in a real job. But then maybe it’s me. I can’t remember the first time I had sex, let alone my first kiss – as for work, well, that’s a mystery. Likewise, the day I sat before the screen and wrote the first words – I got zilch.

What I can remember is about twenty years ago when the idea for the storyline first popped into my head. I wasn’t looking for an idea, but there it was, and I knew it was good right from the start. There were times in the years after I made juvenile attempts to write the book, all for naught. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready until a day somewhere around four years ago when I decided to get serious and write it. And I did.

It took a long time to write that first book. I had an imagination, and I was okay with words, but putting them together as a novel was a different challenge altogether. Basically, I learned on the job, but I kept going. After I finished the third draft, I figured I had to let go of it and let people read it. Anyone who’s ever written seriously knows how spooky that is.

The good news was that it was well received. I got told I was a great writer, told that it was a fascinating story, told I should go out and get it published, I’d make a mint! Whoa, guys, I said modestly, secretly delighted. Just knowing it wasn’t a total disaster was reason for relief, but I wasn’t buying the superlatives. I knew it was good enough, and I knew it wasn’t great. The response gratified me, but I knew there was a lot of work still to be done. Maybe I was on the right path.

What was more surprising was that many of my readers associated the story with my recent experiences. I’d endured challenging times, and they thought they could read it in my words. Except – as I explained to them – I thought this up years ago, way before any idea that I would suffer such angst. On the surface, it seemed a strange coincidence.

It’s not as simple as that, though. I don’t remember how I thought up the plot in the first place, but figure it was informed by my experience of film noir. I love those old movies. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been more attracted to the flawed anti-hero than the pristine hero, who is generally dull.

I like the darkness of these tales. There’s a complexity to the protagonists. They’re not perfect, but they’re real. Often, they’re stubborn, unwilling to accept what’s been dished up to them, and more aware than everyone else. There’s definitely an existential appeal to these characters, which isn’t for everyone but very definitely was for me.

Oftentimes, these characters are doomed, and the story about their struggle to defy that fate. In a way, that was my story – about a man who sets out on a path not knowing where it would lead him but finding an unexpected opportunity for redemption along the way. And that was the story I thought up then.

When I finally wrote it, it was from today’s perspective, not twenty years ago. In the years between experience had shifted my perspective in general, but recent experience had directly informed the character development and the writing. The book I came to write was different from the book I would have written then, and though I couldn’t see it, there was truth in my friends’ belief that it was my story.

All that was about two years ago: I wrote another draft after their response (I’ve become much more efficient since), and it sits in the bottom drawer of my desk (actually my hard drive), waiting for its final revision. There, it’ll stay until I’m ready to go back to it. I think it’s pretty good, but it can be better. I can’t make it better until I get some distance from it. When you’re writing, you live the story. I imagine it’s a bit like method acting. You’re in the characters and the story and lose all ability to see from the outside.

That’s why I’ve put it aside. I wanted it to settle in me. I hoped I might even forget it a little. At the end of that time, I want to come at it and read it objectively. It’s been sitting in my bottom drawer for the last year and a bit, and I reckon there’s been enough distance for me to come at it clearly. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, but I haven’t forced anything. I’ve let the thoughts come to me. Right now, that means when I sit down to write the final version, it will be pretty different from what’s there now. It will be more intimate and compact. I’ll simplify it. It will more closely align with the classic film noirs, a personal journey the protagonist must endure and ultimately surmount. That’s the idea.

What’s it about? People ask me, and generally, I tell them it’s a bit of a combo between True Detective and Heart of Darkness. But I can see a bit of Out of the Past in it, too.

I won’t get to it until I finish the book I’m writing now (more on this next post), maybe 2-3 months from now. I’ll be ready, though and looking forward to it.

How I came to write a novel

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I started out writing stories. Later, I wrote a few travel pieces and some essays. I dabbled in some poetry, too, just for the hell of it, but I’m no poet. If it counts for anything, I also wrote a bunch of white papers when I became corporate, and for years, I’ve had a side hustle as a freelance copywriter. And I’ve written plenty of content for the web.

I never took any of it too seriously. I was constantly urged to write more often. People told me I was good at it. Sometimes, I thought I was good at it too. It was easy to do, but it was abstracted in me. Sure, I wrote, I enjoyed it, hell, it was something I needed to do, and I might one day commit to it properly – but I had other things to do as well.

Like so often, it took an unexpected life event to change that. I received a shock to the system, and afterwards, I knew – as I never had before – that existence is precarious and opportunities are finite. I realised that there is an end date to everything and that no matter how gifted you are it matters not one whit if you don’t use what you have. I could let it slide by – that would be easy, after all. Or I could choose to make a stand and do something.

The realisation was scary, but it was also stimulating and fascinating. There was no question what I would do. But even as my resolve stiffened, I found myself drawn into the human mystery of it. Having endured what I had, having journeyed from there to here, I found a great well of material to draw from. I had only to look inside myself to observe the intricacies of human nature, and looking outside, I found reflections of that. I’d always been a good observer, but now I had the insight misfortune rewards you with.

Getting serious about writing meant that I set myself on writing a novel. Till then, that was something I would get around to ‘one day’. In the time before, writing a novel was not something I could conceive of. Writing a story was hard enough. Stories were bloody hard, but at least they were short. I didn’t have the mental stamina to write something as sprawling as a novel – but that was before.

I read a lot of stories. In many ways, they’re harder to write than a novel because you have to be pure in the telling. It has to be a distillation of purpose, which becomes expansive in a novel. A story captures a moment in time, a snapshot of character. The long form of a novel allows for more diverse perspectives. It gives you space to develop both character and story. There’s an arc that encompasses both beginning and end and everything in between.

I was drawn to writing novels because I wanted a broader canvas. As I write this, I’ve finished one book and nearly a second. I can report that it’s not as complicated as I feared. Like most things, once you commit to it, it becomes easier – not easy, it’s still bloody hard – but not impossible, as I feared.

The advantage I have is that I’m disciplined. The ideas come easy. The words are more challenging but manageable. The right words – well, that’s another story. But then, if you sit yourself down and apply yourself day after day, you discover there’s always a way. That’s something else true of life in general.

It’s been nearly four years since I stared at the blank screen and began to type. I’ve learned a lot in that time, and still have much more I can learn, and hope to. It’s been imperfect, but it’s been satisfactory. I’d rather not say it, but it feels like something I was meant to do.

In my next post, I’ll try to explain what I’m writing.

Why this story?

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Why do you write what you write? I often wonder that. It’s not so much where the stories come from, more: why these stories? Why do I write stories of this kind and someone else something completely different?

It can only be how you’re made, how you think and see, how you interact with the world about you. Whatever you write today was likely born many years ago and shaped by experience in the time since. What you write is a product of who you are, and the person you are has been a long time in the making.

We share that in common all of us, whether we write or not. We’re subject to the forces of nature and random chance. Domestic imperatives dictate many of our choices, and capricious personality much of the rest. It’s different for everyone, but everyone has a perspective that evolves with time and experience, whether conscious or not. We take on a bias. We learn, or perhaps we don’t. We see through a subjective lens, and from that, we form attitude – and maybe even philosophy. We each become our own distinct character.

Not all of us write about it, though. It occurs to only very few. I can only speak for myself, but curiosity motivates me to write. I want to explore character. I want to travel back from effect to see the cause, complex and shrouded in mystery it so often is. I don’t pretend to understand, but the act of writing – for me – is a means towards understanding. I write, and often afterwards, I’m surprised at what I’ve written. I’ve written things with more insight than I was aware of as if the act of writing dragged it up from some hidden place in me.

But why the things I write? The answer to that is always personal, which the writing seeks to expose. Once more, there’s a distance between what I know and who my true self is. What I write comes from that true self, up from the depths, uninterpreted. The person who writes of it is like an observer trying to make sense of it. I’m like a witness looking in through a window, trying to untangle what my eyes can see.

It’s imagination that makes a story of that. Experience, that inner, actual being, presents a sense of something you seek to explore through the means of fiction. It’s understanding you seek, and you search for it in deconstructing it into the form of a story.

That’s the process, more or less, or at least the best I can figure it. Why these stories? I don’t know exactly, except that they come from inside me, and it’s my job as a writer to decode them.

To be clear, I do this for myself because I want to understand. It may be different for other writers, but for me, it’s personal. These are mysteries I want to engage in. I feel them in me every day, something rich and sometimes bewildering – but vibrant too, as if it has a pulse and is true. I’m grateful to be the man I am.

My kind of writing

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Go to the local library, and there’s a book on every subject. For every book, there’s an author. Scan across the bookshelves, and you’ll find thousands of books, each one different from the one before. Each book has a mind behind it, a history and perspective, passion and ambition. There’s a story behind each story.

Though I read books of every type, my writing is contained within a narrow band – fiction, literary. I read books that educate me, books that stir and excite, books that explain and elucidate, books that divert and entrance, every kind of book, but the only kind of book I want to write are those informed by the so-called human condition.

I think when you start out writing – as a young person anyway, as I was – it comes from a love of reading. Books are a great club, and you feel privileged to be a member. You read all the time, taken away to different times and places, with different voices whispering in your ear and different perspectives to share. You live it so richly that there comes a time when you think, I want to do that too.

I think I remember that moment in my journey, though it’s so cliched I’m almost embarrassed to relate it – but here goes.

One day at my local library, among four or five books I’d borrow every few weeks was a copy of The Essential Hemingway. I was about fifteen. I’d heard of Hemingway, naturally, but something had put me off him till that point – the cliche, perhaps. I knew I’d have to read him someday, so I finally plucked him off the shelf.

You can guess what happened after that. Like thousands upon thousands of people – men mostly, and often teenagers like me – I found myself transfixed by the seemingly simple but affecting prose.

As an adolescent boy, this was a period when I was particularly vulnerable to the robust language and attitude of someone like Hemingway. I didn’t know anything yet. I didn’t know who I was. Hemingway gave no sense to that but a feeling that was purely visceral. I could feel it in my stomach. I wanted to be as clear and true as he expressed.

Unfortunately, like thousands upon thousands of people, primarily men, I spent a good few years trying to emulate Hemingway’s style until I figured there was only one Hemingway and besides, I had my own way of thinking and my own words.

There comes a time when writing for its own sake is insufficient. You get older, you live more, you travel, you fall in and out of love, you suffer and you glory, you battle and you strive, and so on, as we all have. And somewhere in that, you feel as if you have something you want to say. Life takes shape in you; there’s an attitude, even perhaps some ramshackle philosophy; in any case, you feel it burgeoning in you. You must get it out.

But what is it? That’s the question. Indeed, that’s the journey – for me, at least. What the fuck is it? Writing is an exploration of that, a hypothesis. You seek to transmute some vague sense into words in the shape of a story. It’s a tryout. Is this what I’m trying to say? Is this what I know? What is this thing? And you try and try again, knowing you’ll never get all the way there, but you learn plenty by trying.

I was re-reading some Thomas Mann recently. He’s an author very different from Hemingway. He’s an author of the mind. An author of great sensitivity and insight. He’s one of those writers who make you look up from the page to ponder something you’ve just read. There is a kind of wisdom in such writers and often a terrible poignancy.

That’s the writer I want to be, though perhaps I need to be that man first. As much as anything, I want to do this for myself – and really, I am my own audience. I write to understand. It’s probably therapeutic, but at least it gives me an insight into the workings of human psychology.

Life goes much deeper than the simple routines we adhere to without thought, and each person much more mysterious than they generally allow. That’s what I want to write about, but through the lens of my own experience. I want to feel and know it and not let it slip by me. I want to articulate and remember it. Writing – for me – is a form of conscious living.

I’ll write next about the two novels I’ve written or am writing to explain this better. Suffice to say that my experience has led me to the kind of writing I do, though that doesn’t explain it all.

So you call yourself a writer

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I once had a friend who called me a wordsmith. I was working in corporate at the time, had an official title, and besides, was used to being called all sorts of things – but never a wordsmith. Never mind what you’re doing here, he told me, that’s what you are really. I was more chuffed than I was willing to let on, and, as you can see, I’ve never forgotten.

Calling yourself a wordsmith is a bit of conceit until you’re in the biz properly. It’s a bit like watching from the stands and thinking, ‘If only’ this or that, I might have been one of those sporting stars, too. Or reckoning you might have been a great entrepreneur/politician/musician/whatever if only you’d had the chance. He called me a wordsmith on the strength of a few things of mine he’d come across and been impressed by, but while I had the craft, you’re not anything until you commit to it – and it took me many years to make that commitment.

Years after that episode, I’m no longer just a wordsmith; here I am, proclaiming myself as a writer. How do I justify that?

I can answer that in several different ways; take your pick. I write in just about every free moment I have, and when I’m not writing, I often think about it. That would probably come as a surprise to many people who know me because I don’t go around advertising the fact. That’s my secret life, though it’s not secret by design – it just doesn’t fit into the conversation these days. That’s one reason I’ve created this site as a forum for discussion.

I reckon I think as a writer does as well – creatively, without boundaries, constantly enquiring – which fits nicely in my day job as well. That’s my strength: to see connections and imagine possibilities, to see the bigger picture and bring creative solutions to it.

In the end, it all comes down to the work: you can’t be a writer without having written anything. Over the years, I’ve had a variety of pieces published and much more available in the public forum. I’ve written a novel, and I’m working on the second one now.

I was a wordsmith before when I dabbled in writing, as if it was no more than a cool hobby, Back then, I would write the odd story or essay just for fun. I call myself a writer now because I’ve moved onto the serious stuff and am writing with ambition. This is what it’s all about – and it’s what I’m about, too. And that’s why I’m seeking your support – to head full pelt down that path and find out where it leads.

As I progress, I’ll write a lot more about the novels in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, the first novel has been parked and stuck in the bottom drawer of my desk as I write the second. When I finish this draft of the second novel (I’m about 15,000 words off that), I’ll put that in the bottom drawer and pull out the novel to give it a final revision and polish – and then off the publisher, it goes. At this stage, I reckon that’ll be about November this year. Then, I’ll take out the second novel and do the same to that before starting on my third novel, which I’ve already mapped out in my mind.

Remind me to explain more about this process to you. And, as always, I welcome your questions.

What’s the go?

PeterLeave a comment

The question is, why do I write? Where did that impulse arise? How? Why? I don’t think that’s something I can ever know for sure, and probably it’s not one thing that has led me down the path of writing, but rather a combination of things thrown into the pot together have made me the man I am – and the writer I’ve become.

One of my earliest memories is reading The Shaggy Dog Story. I was reputedly three going on four at the time, and that was the first book of thousands I’ve gone on to read. My mum encouraged me to read. She’d been a singer once and had a creative bent. I inherited her love for music and reading, which we would share in the years to come.

I had an Aunt who was likewise a great reader. I’d receive a parcel from her containing books every Christmas and birthday. I was a rugged, tree-climbing boy who played sport with my mates and rode my dragster around the neighbourhood, but none of that stopped me from becoming an avid reader. In these early days – between, say, six and nine – I read a lot of Enid Blyton, particularly the Famous Five series.

The other influence on my reading habits was my grandfather. He was a gentle, quiet man whose greatest pleasure was sitting down with a good book. As a boy, I can recall going to the MCG with him to watch a test match – and on many occasions, he would stop into a bookshop, from which he’d invariably leave with another couple of books to add to his collection.

He had bookshelves full of books on every topic ranging across genres: fiction, non-fiction, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on. As I got older, I would range across his shelves and pluck something out to read. Often, it would be an old paperback with yellowing, brittle pages that no one knew anything about.

You can say then that I was steeped in a culture of reading. I couldn’t imagine not reading, and pity those who never learnt the pleasure of it.

None of that makes me a writer, though it’s good preparation for it. When did I first set pen to paper? Why?

At school, occasionally, we would be given creative writing assignments. Perhaps because I had read so much, I found I had a vivid and original imagination. I found delight in coming up with these plots and in the reaction to them. Still, I had no thought then of ever making anything more of it.

That only came after I left school and then by accident. I’d travelled to Sydney from Melbourne and stayed with my aunt in a great apartment in Watsons Bay. The sun shone, the beach was nearby, there was an alluring woman I fell for, and life was laconic.

One day, I just started writing. I don’t know where the notion came from, but it was a story touching upon the second war – I’d been a military buff – and it had philosophical elements, probably quite pretentious. From there, I began to write erratically with months in between and one or two occasions, probably years. I did it, but I didn’t see it as a profession. In any case, I had found myself with a career wearing a white collar.

It’s different now. Probably for the last fifteen years, I’ve been convinced this is what I’m meant to do. That’s the thing: you can’t stop yourself from writing. The words pile up in you, demanding to be written. They gotta get out somehow. As I said in my opening post, there’s mystery and wonder in this because I can never really understand how it works that way or where the words come from. I’m grateful, though.

To answer the question I started with, you must be curious about everything to be a writer. You walk down the street, you get on the tram, you catch up with your friends – whatever it is – there’s a part of your mind always observing, always ticking over, always asking questions.

The answers to those questions aren’t always readily available, but that’s where imagination plays a part. Curiosity breeds imagination, I think, though it doesn’t always take. On top of that is life experience. Combined all – curiosity, imagination, experience – and you have the necessary elements for creativity, and you can begin weaving worlds in your mind.

That’s as good as I get to explaining this right now, but I’m happy to get your viewpoints on the subject.

Why this site?

PeterLeave a comment

I’m a writer. Not full-time, and it’s not what it says on my passport – I have to make a living, after all – but in spirit and every spare moment, that’s what I am. You see, I always wanted to write and don’t think I could stop even if I wanted to.

The act of writing consumes me. Even when I’m not sitting there tapping away, it’s in my head, on the train to work, in bed with the light out, preparing dinner, and so on. And when I’m ‘writing’, I’ll often sit there with an intense look on my face, figuring something out or just pondering the work in general. Then I look up and hours have passed. Such is life.

This is why I’ve created this site. Writing is a solitary activity. It’s something I wish I could talk about more because – to me – it’s a fascinating process. There’s mystery and wonder and magic in it, as well as a lot of hard work and discipline. A lot of it I don’t understand myself. I’d love to share the experience of that with people who are interested in such things and plan to post updates to this site regularly. As part of that, I’m interested in what you think. I welcome your questions and divergent perspectives.

And – just quietly – if you’d like to support me in this lonely and puzzling quest, you’ll find a link to my Patreon account at the right of the page.

In the meantime, read, enjoy, and feel free to ask me your questions.