Writing week 04

Unnecessary updates.

Monday

Morning pages, followed by some typing then some deleting, then some moving things around, then a bit more typing.

The word ‘typing’ is to me the most hilariously damning verb you could ever use for a sort of lifeless but competent writing. Another editor once remarked about some book or other: ‘It isn’t really writing – it’s typing.’ Typing! They were exactly right – you could feel the dutiful pressing of the keys. But sometimes I think we must type and type and type until suddenly (maybe) we’re writing. Once, I interviewed the great children’s author Jack Lasenby, and he said that when writing his first novel, The Lake, there was a moment where he got stuck, so he started typing the whole thing out from the beginning again, working from a print-out. When he got to the thorny bit he sailed right on through, suddenly writing, carried by the momentum of all that typing.

I started typing when I was five or six, writing stories on the hulking computer in ‘the computer room’, which was a tiny room filled with ancient radio equipment belonging to my dad. The programme we used for writing was called PFS, which had a black screen and a blinking cursor. PFS stood for Personal Filing System.

At one point I developed an auditory disorder where the sound of typing frightened me. It took on a kind of three-dimensional quality and felt like something – a person, or people – rushing towards me. If I was in another room and I heard typing, I would scream and pull a blanket over my head. Other sounds brought on this panic too – light switches clicking, and sometimes voices, and fabrics swishing – but mostly it was typing, with its sound of rushing forwards, and its alien plasticky squareness. It took a long time to grow out of this, and thank god I have, otherwise I’d be in the wrong line of work.

Tuesday

Today I interviewed Alan, a bus driver, long-distance motorcyclist and painter. This was a delight and it drew me back to my main project with a new energy – not without fear, exactly, but with a sense of new substance and other ways of seeing. I find I’m swinging between two feelings about this project: excitement and then deflation. The excitement is: I feel that yes, there’s something there. The deflation is: No, there isn’t; there is less than nothing there. But when I talk to someone, the feeling that there IS something there finds more purchase.

Also today I finished Colm Tóibín’s new stories. At the moment – maybe partly as a reaction to world news – I am really enjoying writing in which very little happens, or in which something is about to happen but suddenly does not happen, or in which something did happen, but it was decades ago, and now the person is wandering around in their life, still somehow dazed by that happening.

Due to the Granta short story scandal, I’ve been thinking too about ‘bad writing’, and how something has shifted in how I might define or recognise it. I think I am more forgiving now of writing that doesn’t ‘work’ but that is, nevertheless, written by a person. This is because LLM writing has redefined badness; this new badness has a gaseous quality, a subtle but growing stench like there’s a gas leak in the house, and the sentences themselves seem to bulge and warp as they try to get into the correct shapes for making a noise. The noise the sentences want to make is the noise of insight and profundity, but instead they make a slow curdling hiss. When I come across LLM writing – on mailing lists, Substack, billboards, social media – it feels like the very writing is warning me not to go near it, the way some frogs have bright splotches to tell birds not to eat them.

Wednesday

Today was an incredible day. There were two things.

For the whole time I have had my driver’s licence, which is just over a year now, I have been afraid to fill up the car with petrol on my own. Now – please. I know, I know.

You do not need to tell me how much of a loser I am, for I have done it already and I will do it forever. My fear was this: I would do it wrong and somehow end up covered in petrol and lit on fire. The fire service would arrive and douse me with hoses and a scene would be caused. Underlying this fear was the ordinary fear that I would look like someone who was having their first day on earth.

In the morning, I was struggling with one paragraph in particular, and then a madness possessed me and I got in the car and drove to a petrol station and I filled up the tank for the first time. There was only a minor struggle to get the nozzle in, and only minor clowning as I paid the attendant. Then I got back in the car and drove off down the road. Are you listening to me? These are sentences I never expected to write in my lifetime. I am embarrassed to have written them, and especially embarrassed because I have written them in the midst of a fuel crisis, but now they’re written.

But this is the second thing. When I got home from filling up the car with petrol, I checked my email and found some incredible news sitting in there, which is that I have been offered a Creative New Zealand grant to work on the main project I am working on. It is $25,000 over the next six months. I went around yelling in happiness for a while. I still cannot believe it, and could not be happier or more grateful. I remembered sweating over the application in Auckland Airport on the way back from a work conference, wondering if I should just not apply; it was too hard and I felt that my proposal was, at its heart, silly and I was wrong to apply. But I also could not help hoping.

This means it will be much easier to get by and I can pay rent and bills and go on trips to speak to people for this project, without pressure to pick up other work. Best of all it just means I can work away on my thing without quite as much guilt or worry as I have been employing so far.

Thursday

Today I drove to Palmerston North and interviewed a pilot out in his hangar near Massey’s aviation school. Part of my project is about small aircraft flying, especially for older pilots, and I thought this pilot in particular would be good to speak to. (My partner Matt sat in the passenger seat for the drive to Palmerston North because I hadn’t done a longer drive before and was – you’ll be surprised by this – afraid of the motorway. Having now done the drive and been borne down upon by massive swaying trucks, I see this was a rational fear.)

Because of the driving and the interviewing, I did no writing today. But on the drive home, I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how to write about the very strange conversation I had had with this pilot in Palmerston North. Could I write about it? I knew that the interview had been funny, very funny, but it had also been kind of mad and terribly bleak in places. Also, at one point, my interviewee had body-slammed me. In a friendly manner – but still, what does one do with this material? I’d come away reeling and with no answers. The whole thing gave me an appreciation for people who are very good at interviewing – who can corral a conversation back towards sense, who can face the fire hose of talk head-on and, with sheer conversational muscle, extract the useful information. It goes without saying: I am weak interviewer. Written down, my questions seem very good to me, but in the moment of asking, every one of them disintegrates and blows away.

Home in Wellington, I realised I had accidentally left my Kindle Scribe in Palmerston North. (I must’ve put it down when I realised that the questions I’d written would be of no help to me.) So there followed a frantic organising of an overnight courier. Aside from this computer, my Kindle Scribe is my most precious and useful writing tool.

Friday

I need to say something: Pack and Send Palmerston North are the greatest people on earth. After speaking with them I quickly got a notice to confirm that my Kindle had been picked up, packed, and was roaring back down the motorway towards me.

Today I tidied up transcripts and tried to absorb and write notes on the week’s interviews. This was challenging, and I reckon it will take some time.

Then I turned to my secondary project and drafted a new thing. This always feels like sneaking out to the back of a shed and smoking. My primary project feels vast, overwhelming, and the secondary project feels unnecessary – and that very unnecessariness makes it more appealing in the moment. I need to get myself to believe that the primary project is even MORE unnecessary, that the world needs it even LESS – and then I will want to turn towards it.

Next week I will be travelling overseas. This is a trip I’ve been planning for a long time and about which I am very excited (and is also why I was so anxious to get my Kindle back). Though there will most likely not be a writing week, nor the one after, I’ll be writing whenever I have the chance and the brain, and seeking out libraries and quiet places. I often hope to write when in transit – at airports, on planes and trains – but what usually happens is that I don’t, because reading and listening to music become more important as the brain begins its slide into jetlagged oblivion. So, see you on the other side, and thank you for reading this far.