Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

anne lamott

I stuck to my resolutions – that’s a first

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My photo — Corfu 2016

Here’s a brief report for January:
17600 words of the novel written (at a minimum of 500 words every day)
30 days of yoga
30 days of posts to this site
Books finished (from the list of 10):
• The Case for a Job Guarantee — Tcherneva
• Knife of Dreams — Jordan

That’s an unusually fallow month of reading for me but, because it’s a result of more writing and setting time aside for yoga, I’m prepared to accept it. It’s not the only reading I have been doing but it feels slightly disappointing nevertheless.

And here’s the plan for February:
Inspired by Anne Lamott’s story about the writing of her second novel (Rosie) which she retells in Bird by Bird, I’m using the next month to write a full treatment of the book I’m working on. Part of the problem is that I have been working on it a long time and I have taken breaks and attacked it at different places at different times. It is a bit of a mess and is getting harder and harder to hold complete in my head. Time, therefore, to get the story down and the way the characters change, who they are, why they act like they do, and what happens to them. More or less. I’m aiming for a full forty or fifty pages of treatment in the next 28 days.

I’ve joined the Seth Godin Akimbo Podcast Workshop, which starts tomorrow. I’m looking forward to learning some useful stuff from people also keen to ship a podcast. I joined the workshop rather than some normal hands-off course because a hands-off course would be my first choice. The Akimbo workshop stresses the necessity of joining in, of sharing knowledge, of engaging. I’m not someone who naturally plays well with others. So already I have the chance to learn something over and above whatever technical details I may glean about podcasting.

I want to complete more books from the list of ten. (I had thought I was going to add Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune as a replacement for the Tcherneva but my wife has convinced me to start Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and, after 90 pages, I’m hooked. Sorry, Olivia.)

I’m going to continue with yoga. This month, though, I’m going to watch and follow a session for complete beginners every day until the moves and poses and flows become second nature — and I can feel myself improving. Still with Adriene, though. Given that the month of ‘lessons’ I just did with her is free, I thought it was only fair to download her FWFG app and subscribe to her channel. It still comes in at a ridiculously reasonable price — far cheaper than a class a week at a local yoga studio, were such things still open.

I’m also going to add some weight training this month. The combination of yoga and refraining from sugar in all the most obvious forms has had some impact on my weight and my BMI but I want to add a bit of additional strength and tone where yoga may take a bit of time getting there.

So, that’s the month ahead. I’m looking forward to it.

Stop hiding behind mannered writing

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Come out from behind your disguise

“Still learning”: Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

The more I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing, the stronger it resonates. I am even reading the book front to back. Richard Ford, in a review of the book, wrote “You don’t even need to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway).” I took that as a challenge, obviously, because I’m an overgrown teenager when it comes to that sort of thing. (Then again, I tend to read books front to back.) And from what I’ve read of the Klinkenborg, I think it’s meant to be read from the start, following the sentences like a carefully crafted argument. The sentences build one upon the other. One after the other. Dipping into the book at random would offer meagre rewards unless the book had been previously digested whole.

Klinkenborg has at last made clear to me why I love reading Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg on writing. It’s not just the subject matter. What Klinkenborg has explained in his wonderful little manual on sentences is how sentences can express sincerity and honesty. How they are used to build trust. And with Goldberg and Lamott trust is what I feel when reading them. I trust them because I believe them. I believe the sentences they build. I recognise in their sentences and the vocabulary and structure within those sentences that they are sincere.

I can look to apply this to my own writing. The most frequent criticism I had about my writing when I was younger — much younger — was that it was mannered. Mannered writing is a sure sign that the writer is trying to both hide emotion and to make extra claims for his writing at the same time. The sentences read as if they were written to sound like writing rather than to express thought honestly and openly. Mannered writing, in short, fails to convey sincerity.

This was true, of course. I was writing in a style that I thought made me look clever. Made me look and sound like a writer. It was more important to look flash than to say what I meant in a form that allowed people to discover what I meant. Writing, in other words, as a form of disguise.

And the bad habit of mannered writing is a hard habit to kick.

There is a certain irony in this. One of the freelance writing jobs I’ve done from time to time in the past twenty years or so is as a consultant helping business executives break away from ‘corporate speak’ in emails and websites and press releases. Coaching them to find their voices. To try to be both genuine and human enough to connect with their readers, whether inside or outside the company. Anyone who has ever read ‘official’ company emails or scrolled through yet another corporate website full of ‘services’ and ‘offerings’ without ever quite discovering what the company does will understand the problem.

But, as with many things, it appears it is easier to teach than to learn.

It is both heartening and distressing to realise that at my age I am still learning things. Heartening because learning gives you new life; distressing because some of the things I learn I feel I should have learned a long time ago. Many of these things make me sit back, sigh, and say to myself “how come you didn’t know this?” The only way to move forward from that is to shrug.

Is it a good sign that I’m doing a lot of shrugging these days?

Sisyphus with cash-flow problems

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When the writing life is like eternally rolling a boulder up a hill

By Franz Stuck Public Domain

I wish I’d thought of the phrase in my headline. It’s Anne Lamott’s description of many a writer’s life. The phrase comes to towards the end of her introduction to Bird by Bird, where she talks about having no regrets for choosing the career she followed.

“I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.” page xxvi

I picked up my copy of Bird by Bird in 1995 in the Kinokuniya bookshop on Orchard Road in Singapore. It was the first book on writing I think I had ever read. I had always been of the “you can’t teach creative writing” school. What I probably meant was I was too pig-headed and arrogant to believe anyone could teach me anything. Understandably, I had written very little by 1995.

Lamott’s voice was warm and encouraging and compassionate. And funny. I’m not sure what the book taught me about the technicalities of writing but it certainly made me feel that doubts and fears and all the things that kept me from the page were perfectly normal.

I’ve had the book on my shelf since then. But it was only as I reached the suggestions for further reading at the end of Vivian Gornick’s book on memoir and essays (The Situation and the Story) that I was inspired to pick it up to read again. Gornick only lists seven books and Bird by Bird is one of them. I had forgotten the long introduction is really a memoir. It tells the story of how her father influenced her, her struggles at school, and then the practicalities of turning up day after day to face the blank page. Hence the Sisyphus reference.

Sisyphus refers to a character from a Greek myth who is damned by Zeus to eternally roll a large boulder up a steep slope — in Hades, of course — and never quite reach the top. The boulder always rolls back to the bottom and Sisyphus has to start again. He was probably on minimum wage, too, but that’s not made clear in the original stories.

Sisyphus never makes it to the top. But writes sometimes finish something — get the boulder over the crest of the hill and watch it hurtle down the slope on the other side. But then what? Back to the bottom of the original slope to look for a new boulder. Writers tend to condemn themselves to the eternal punishment. There’s no blaming Zeus for that.