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I have dawdled away the best years of my life in bookshops. As a boy there were pinball arcades and bowling alleys and milk bars; but always at some stage I would slip away from the gang and end up at the bookshop. The owner took pity on me let me malinger and browse. He had seen a few other bookworms similarly entranced by the endless worlds on his shelves.
A good bookshop is as large and holy as all the books ever written, to me. And owners of bookshops, though usually dishevelled and unkempt, are keepers of a faith. They are wise, slow and caring. They should be our parliament. Imagine Australia run by this congress of moth-eaten sages who have taken many odysseys and tilted at countless windmills, while seated drinking tea. Utopia.
I write all this because I’ve just been told my mother-in-law went to buy Pepsi Bears in Geelong and found all the bookshops closed down and had to travel as far as Queenscliff to get a copy. To quote James Fenimore Cooper: “My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.”
If the death of the bookshop is certain then, yes, my day has been too long.
While doing publicity for a book you will run down some surprising conversational cul-de-sacs. (Culs-de-sac?) Pepsi Bears is a collection of short stories that, seemingly, has an animal theme. Making me come off, as one reviewer said, as a modern-day Aesop.
Really, the animals in the book gathered by accident as much as design. But interviewers, who are flighty, suggestible beasts at the best of times, love a theme. And their questions tend to try and winkle out some higher meaning they know is held fast in the depths of that theme.
Here are some animal-themed questions I’ve been asked on radio in the last couple of weeks. I went into these interviews regarding myself a clever man and a cool cat. But was soon defeated, and the answers I gave were generally hesitant and bewildered and trailed off in ellipses…
“What do you think we’d look like if polar bears ran the world?” (I kid you not. Now imagine an audience of unknown thousands listening, the clock is ticking, you don’t want to be rude to the interviewer… answer that question.)
“Anson, are the animals in your stories stand-ins for people you have known?” I actually just said, “No,” to that one, resulting in much dead air.
“Douglas Adams said that mice were the real rulers of the Earth. What do you think about that? Will mice outlive us all, Anson?” I think I plumped for bacteria.
“Anson, can a lyrebird really be taught to sing pop tunes?” “I’m not sure,” I told that interviewer, “But a two-year-old human can be taught to fetch beer from a fridge. So, you know, the world is good even if poultry can’t reinterpret The Clash.”
I’ve never taken a writing course, so I don’t know if they work. I don’t know if writing can be taught. Maybe the many degrees and certificates on offer amount to an opportunist scam, like the stores selling picks and shovels to people on the way to the gold rush. Or maybe writing 101 is a legitimate industry that grew on the dream many people have to write.
Were the people who did a course and went on to write well going to be writers anyway? Was the course a shortcut. Maybe it fast-tracked them by a couple of years. But then, maybe it put them on tracks too closely parallel to the other writers it graduated.
I sort of hope writing can’t be learned in some tertiary institution, because if professors have the recipe it detracts from the magic, for me.
I heard a well known Australian writer, and writing teacher, quoted the other day on radio by a student who said, “Never start writing a story unless you believe only you, of all the people in the world, could write it.” I couldn’t believe that advice. For me that’s permission for anyone who ever had misgivings to surrender.
My advice on writing would be directly counter to that. Put on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, or Lou Reed Live, or Bach or Dave Brubeck or The Dirty Three. Something with a lot of notes and not much voice. Sit down and begin to write. Write a sentence and then another and let the sentences be tools for unearthing thoughts and write them down. Just write. The act of writing produces more writing. It builds a volition of thought and words that are the tracks of some story or other. Who knows if you’re the only one who could tell it? You don’t know the story until you write it.
Writing fiction allows you a certain grace that writing opinion doesn’t. Since Pepsi Bears was published this month I’ve been compared to Jonathan Swift, Roald Dahl and Peter Carey. Critics and bloggers have said a great many nice things.
But I also write opinion pieces and articles for newspapers and websites. In the comment trails the audience splits into warring factions and I am either lauded as a child of The Enlightenment or, just as frequently, cited as an ally of the devil, a dimwit of the first water, a smartarse desk-jockey, a pinko, commo mongrel and/or a right-wing Tory hack.
It was shocking for me to learn that a goodly percentage of the readers of major broadsheets cannot read satire at all. They don’t have the critical facility, or the sense of humour or, perhaps, they don’t even recognise what it is. Or maybe they just like being angry. And it is, of course, easy to be strident, brave, and furiously righteous while sitting anonymously in your bedroom. I suspect many haunt the comment trails because they aren’t the type of people who could voice an opinion in public. Which shows these online Speakers Corners do have some value.
But, anyway, let me tell you the readers of fiction are, by and large, better readers than the readers of newspapers or their online equivalents. Jorge Luis Borges once said, “A good reader is a rarer and blacker swan than a good writer.” Presumably the swans in Argentina, as in fairytales, are white. But the man has a valid point. Not everyone reads with the same degree of acuity, clarity or precision. Not everyone brings a powerful and informed imagination to bear. This, presumably, explains the popularity of Dan Brown and his brethren.
Stats I’m inventing as I go suggest the reasons not to write outweigh the reasons to write by a factor of twenty-five to one. Firstly, there is a Norfolk Terrier staring at me, unblinking, venting whimpers that suggest scented journeys along the bluestone alleys of Port. Should I walk the little bastard? How can I write knowing his mind is trained on me?
Outside, the council has a brace of dullards in flouro-vests jack-hammering at Mother Earth, their jowls and buttocks wobbling like a sumo on a rough road. The whole house is shaking.
“Writing – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the arse. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.” That’s a quote from Steve Hely, who wrote a damn good novel recently. It’s a joke, of course, but I can see a powerful truth behind it. God, I could push a button right now and go from writing to looking at Halle Barry naked. Dickens didn’t have that temptation.
And there are a million distractions if you want to acknowledge them and let them become distractions. But there is only ever one real reason not to write. And that is because you may not be any good at it. You might sit down to appease your long-held urge to write, to bring your world into full technicoloured life, and find that there’s nothing there. That brilliant voice in your head leaks onto the page slowly in an insular idiom akin to the mutterings of a bag-lady or a veranda prophet. By trying to write you might find out you can’t write. And there dies another dream.
And no matter how much success you’ve had; no matter how many good days at the desk and lit prizes and spangling reviews, a writer always sits down to the desk with that fear. Maybe I’m no good. Maybe I’m no good any more. Maybe my stuff is used up.
It’s only after writing for an hour or so and the thoughts are piling up behind your fingers and you’ve already reached a few moments and made yourself laugh and made your eyes moisten that you know that fear was bullshit. An excuse for cowards.
But it will be back again in the morning. Isn’t everyone scared of writing?
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