ONE of my least cherished memories is the first exam I took as a flute player. There I stood, my fingers trembling, facing a woman in a bobble-fringed poncho calmly scribbling comments as I piped way through bits of Handel and Elgar. It was an awful experience and I was so relieved to have reasonably well that I almost went back and thanked the examiner. I didn’t, partly because I was older than she was.
When you take up something new as an adult, especially if it involves a test of some kind, you’re being told how brave you are. It’s like being Poland. But I doubt that any adult who takes up a serious interest wants to win points for courage. More often it’s to satisfy a childhood ambition, to show that, despite your misspent adult life, you can do what you’ve always wanted to: play the cello, the the piano, become a dramatic soprano, tango dancer or whatever.
But you have to face something pretty disconcerting: at first you’re likely to be really, really bad at isn’t easy to accept, especially if you’ve been reasonably successful in other areas of life. Your ego insisting that you should be better.
In the case of a musical instrument, you know what good playing sounds like: call it the tyranny Sure, you’re making progress and working more intelligently than you would have done as a child, sometimes this isn’t enough. You know that, in the words of that smug Greek philosopher, there road to learning, the process is the important thing, the journey and not the arrival matters. But what ought to think or feel is irrelevant. Some of this came back in a dismal rush when, having spent a fair chunk of my professional life editor, I went over to the dark side and started to be a writer.
I know this probably doesn’t sound like much of a switch. Writing involves editing, or should: you need to take another look at something once you’ve drafted it. But there are pitfalls in the changeover, they’re every bit as frustrating as trying to get a good legato sound on a flute.
The problem is that editors are supposed to know about writing. That’s their job. As an editor, you’re supposed to be able to pick up a writer’s rhythm, to make suggestions that will improve the finished product on its own terms, not yours. You’re a kind of literary ventriloquist. You know about tone and how to analyse all that. But when you try to write, you find there is all the difference in the world between helping someone do it and doing it yourself. Just as hearing the CD of the Poulenc sonata several times doesn’t help you one bit when you pick up your flute and try to play it, being a reader critic of other people’s work does not make you a better writer, or even a good one.
So you have to forget what you have learned about helping other people free up their natural writing and struggle — like everybody else — to find your own. And all the time on your shoulder, like a gargoyle a Dore engraving, crouches you-as-editor, a small black imp that whispers into your ear: “This could better, no don’t write that, it’s bad, this is wrong.” This creature is, of course, the sort of editor you have never been and would never think of being, you know how demoralising are words such as these. You wouldn’t in a million years say things any of your authors. Only to yourself.
This is the sort of stuff you don’t hear much about at writers festivals. People sometimes go on about hell of writing, the horror of confronting the blank screen or sheet of paper first thing in the morning.
Somebody even said that writing is easy: you just stare at the paper until beads of blood form on forehead. Anything to convince audiences that you don’t just sit down at the computer, flexing your suggestively, and after a few weeks or months have a finished novel shoot out of your head. But still a kind of mystique about the process. Writers don’t often admit that before anything good can a lot of time has to be spent in being bad. Time in fiddling, writing utter drivel, the sort of stuff you’d anything to stop anyone getting hold of. They may pay lip service to biographers’ and librarians’ these mucking-around, early thoughts usually don’t make it through to posterity. They have to be but they’re nobody’s business but yours.
The good news is that you do get more involved in the process. But you have to learn to play. It fun, even. Just as you’ll never get that semiquaver passage exactly right by playing it 150 times stressing out each time, the thing is, as with words, to play around with it, try other stuff, be silly, back to it.
I have found that the more writing I do, the smaller and fainter that gargoyle becomes. (Not always, mostly.) Eventually on good days it becomes possible to imagine picking up that little black incubus, dropping it into a jar, sealing it and watching the creature pressing against the glass, glaring at you, mouthing its malignant words. You can’t hear a word it’s saying and you just watch it, satisfied for before going back to work.
Weekend Australian, August 2007
