achievements for the month: posting off 1350 pages of printing to various vaguely-interested publishers, awards, competitions and grant bodies. the main achievement there being to muster the enthusiasm to believe it will all come to something or other.
getting a final draft of my uni story together.
discovering that I can go ahead and do the BlueBug zine all by myself as, after putting up notices all over Melbourne Uni's English and Creative Writing departments, ThirtyPeople has still only had exactly one, fairly average, submission.
deciding that the novel which is the subject of abovementioned grant application is worth writing. which is scary, as I now know that even a poorly researched and badly planned novel is a pit of tar which sucks you in and swamps all other activity.
would you give me $10,000 to do this? If you're an Australian taxpayer, you might be about to...
Idea: to write a novel of 75,000-100,000 words.
There’s a plot outline below, but until it’s written, of course, that is entirely contingent on how the work unfolds.
The themes I want to work with are around identity, the importance or otherwise of knowing where one came from, the corrupting power of extreme grief as manifest in infertility, but most of all, the process of producing art from words.
I understand there’s a huge gap between imagining and achieving, but this is what I want to produce: a book that combines suspense with a journey through the heart of narrative; an exposition of what it is to write that addresses the question of authorial ownership, while showing how a person’s identity is both anchored in and independent of parentage and upbringing.
These two issues would be combined in the protaganist’s discovery, reading and rewriting of notebooks kept by his biological mother. Both his adoptive and biological mothers would, in the novel, speak only through memories and the notebooks. He would gradually discover that while his biological father was the man who brought him up, his putative parents were infertile together; that he was actually the product of an affair, and that his adopted mother basically took him from his biological mother.
I’d like the book to be a way of thinking about cause and effect; how some abused children grow up to be saints and others demons; how it may or may not matter if you later find out that not was all as it was presented to you; how you can come to forgive someone you’ve never met (his birthmother), and someone you can no longer reach (his adoptive mother).
By using the notebooks, I’d like to get inside the mind of the biological mother, who was unable through circumstances to actually “write”, ie be recognised or published, and to examine the way a writer (James, the son) makes a novel out of scraps of information, random phrases and ideas, and how the application of a filtering theme (in his case, the question of beginnings) to such scraps can help them cohere as a whole. James’s finished “novel” would be a resolution of his relationship with his mothers.
The adoptive mother’s story would examine how the desire and social pressure for a child can corrupt a person – while her story would be set in pre-assisted reproductive technology times, the basic question of what you’d do to have a child is the same.
While I recognise that this plot has potential parallels with the “stolen generation”, I don’t intend at this point to address those questions specifically, and I don’t intend the characters to be indigenous.
In effect, there would be three stories in this book:
1) the story of James’s tangled parentage,
2) the story of his reconstruction of that parentage and rewriting of his birthmother’s notebooks into a piece of art.
3) the actual story that is written from the notebooks.
Execution:
My sources will include: published and unpublished writers’ notebooks such as those of Murray Bail; published letters by writers including Patrick White, Vladimir Nabokov and JRR Tolkien; books and weblogs on adoption and infertility; my own notebooks kept over a 20-year period; my own experiences of IVF, infertility and motherhood; my unpublished stories around the theme of identity.
I plan to spend at least ten per cent of the grant on professional editing advice from acknowledged editors, research materials and expenses. The rest will probably go on childcare to give me time to write, and general living expenses.
getting a final draft of my uni story together.
discovering that I can go ahead and do the BlueBug zine all by myself as, after putting up notices all over Melbourne Uni's English and Creative Writing departments, ThirtyPeople has still only had exactly one, fairly average, submission.
deciding that the novel which is the subject of abovementioned grant application is worth writing. which is scary, as I now know that even a poorly researched and badly planned novel is a pit of tar which sucks you in and swamps all other activity.
would you give me $10,000 to do this? If you're an Australian taxpayer, you might be about to...
Idea: to write a novel of 75,000-100,000 words.
There’s a plot outline below, but until it’s written, of course, that is entirely contingent on how the work unfolds.
The themes I want to work with are around identity, the importance or otherwise of knowing where one came from, the corrupting power of extreme grief as manifest in infertility, but most of all, the process of producing art from words.
I understand there’s a huge gap between imagining and achieving, but this is what I want to produce: a book that combines suspense with a journey through the heart of narrative; an exposition of what it is to write that addresses the question of authorial ownership, while showing how a person’s identity is both anchored in and independent of parentage and upbringing.
These two issues would be combined in the protaganist’s discovery, reading and rewriting of notebooks kept by his biological mother. Both his adoptive and biological mothers would, in the novel, speak only through memories and the notebooks. He would gradually discover that while his biological father was the man who brought him up, his putative parents were infertile together; that he was actually the product of an affair, and that his adopted mother basically took him from his biological mother.
I’d like the book to be a way of thinking about cause and effect; how some abused children grow up to be saints and others demons; how it may or may not matter if you later find out that not was all as it was presented to you; how you can come to forgive someone you’ve never met (his birthmother), and someone you can no longer reach (his adoptive mother).
By using the notebooks, I’d like to get inside the mind of the biological mother, who was unable through circumstances to actually “write”, ie be recognised or published, and to examine the way a writer (James, the son) makes a novel out of scraps of information, random phrases and ideas, and how the application of a filtering theme (in his case, the question of beginnings) to such scraps can help them cohere as a whole. James’s finished “novel” would be a resolution of his relationship with his mothers.
The adoptive mother’s story would examine how the desire and social pressure for a child can corrupt a person – while her story would be set in pre-assisted reproductive technology times, the basic question of what you’d do to have a child is the same.
While I recognise that this plot has potential parallels with the “stolen generation”, I don’t intend at this point to address those questions specifically, and I don’t intend the characters to be indigenous.
In effect, there would be three stories in this book:
1) the story of James’s tangled parentage,
2) the story of his reconstruction of that parentage and rewriting of his birthmother’s notebooks into a piece of art.
3) the actual story that is written from the notebooks.
Execution:
My sources will include: published and unpublished writers’ notebooks such as those of Murray Bail; published letters by writers including Patrick White, Vladimir Nabokov and JRR Tolkien; books and weblogs on adoption and infertility; my own notebooks kept over a 20-year period; my own experiences of IVF, infertility and motherhood; my unpublished stories around the theme of identity.
I plan to spend at least ten per cent of the grant on professional editing advice from acknowledged editors, research materials and expenses. The rest will probably go on childcare to give me time to write, and general living expenses.
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