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I bought a new notebook today. It’s small and red with a butterfly on the front. I don’t need it. I already have dozens of half-scribbled-in notebooks scattered around the house. They’re tucked into my handbags, buried in my bedside drawer, stacked on my desk, squeezed between the books in the shelves and flung under my bed.
My name is Michelle Hamer and I have notebook issues. But I can stop any time I want…I think.
It’s just that there’s nothing quite like having just the right notebook when there’s occasionally time to write for me – not for the latest novel, article, editor or blog.
I can’t imagine a life without writing. I’m blessed to be able to write full-time as a journalist and author, but even if I had a different job I would probably still write every day. My fingers get twitchy if I don’t write for a while; they’re accustomed to the task of delivering the noise from my head onto a page or screen.
Personal writing has no deadline (oh joy!); doesn’t need to be finished, it doesn’t even have to make sense. It’s just random jottings, snatches of moments or emotions caught in words. Sometimes I write to process my thoughts and make sense of my life. Other times I jot down snippets of ideas or sentences that float into my brain, or turn people watching into a creative exercise.
Despite my extensive collection of notebooks I don’t always have one at hand, so I also have lots of jotted notes on the backs of envelopes, Medicare receipts, on crumpled brown paper bags that held my lunch and scrawled on the backs of bills that I really should have paid. I like how these scribbled thoughts are like fragments of history, caught on the ephemera of life. I keep them all, along with the diaries I have written since I was about ten-years-old. As the diary handwriting transforms from scruffy primary-school cursive to angry teenage scrawl and finally the harried scribble of a busy mum, I can track the landscape of my life.
One day I’ll gather all my notebooks, diaries and scraps of paper and collect them all in a box to pass on to my kids – who will probably take one look, shrug and put them out in the recycling.
I’m on deadline – again. As always. And it’s just as well really. If it weren’t for the deadlines bearing down on me I’d probably never get a project finished.
Right now I’m on deadline to finish this blog, and I’m trying; I really am, it’s just that all the kids have bowled in from school, full of chatter and squashed uneaten lunches, notes that need signing right now, and requests for food (I look pointedly at the mashed lunches but no one gets the hint) and then Ruby says she needs to be taken to dancing lessons, and Darcy wants to know if we can go to his mate’s house to pick up the skateboard he left there on the weekend, and suddenly I remember that there is only a tub of yoghurt and some parmesan cheese in the fridge because the kids have been at their dad’s for the past week, and while I’m pondering whether a yoghurt and cheese pasta will work the phone rings and someone in Dubai wants to know if I’m happy with my current mobile plan, and then the cat slips quietly in the front door and I happen to look over just as she drops a disemboweled rat under the couch and then Ruby (a committed vegetarian at 16) notices too, and all hell really breaks loose.
So it’s now it’s two hours later, and a whole lot closer to deadline. The rat has been summarily buried, the cat is banished to the backyard, supplies have been bought at the supermarket and vegie soup is bubbling away happily on the stove. We’ve been in the car for an hour-and-a-half delivering, dropping off and picking up. Now there’s a quiet half hour before dinner to really get stuck into this blog.
I just need to think of something to write.
The boys are watching The Simpsons and I stare at the screen for a minute or so, mesmerised by the color and movement until the ad break snaps me back to the task at hand.
“What are you writing mum,” Darcy asks.
“A blog for Random House, but I’m not sure what to write,” I tell him.
“Just tell them you think your 13-year-old son Darcy is awesome,” my son suggests with a cheeky grin.
“Tell them meat is murder,” Ruby shouts from the kitchen, the rat incident still raw in her mind.
“Why don’t you let me write it for you mum,” 11-year-old Ollie suggests, “I could put in some murders and bad guys and stuff.”
I drum my fingers on the edge of the laptop and smile at their efforts to help.
“Is dinner nearly ready mum?” Darcy asks, turning back to the television.
“When can I have the laptop for my homework,” Ollie chimes in.
There are noisy footsteps on the stairs and 19-year-old Harley bounds into the room.
“Hey all. Mum, Katie and me will be here for tea, ok? And I need to borrow the car tonight is that cool? Is there petrol in it? Oh, and can you lend me $20 bucks? Love ya.” And he’s gone again, running back down to his room downstairs.
I shake my head. It’s hopeless, I’ll never meet this deadline. I’m sure Random will understand.
I close the lid and pass the laptop to my son in resignation.
The pile beside my bed is growing taller every week. There’s another on the table in the hall, another towering stack in the family room, and of course there’s the overcrowded bookshelves where the unread tomes clamour for attention among those already read and loved.
So many books, so little time. Sometimes to get a sense that I am working my way through the pile more efficiently I dip in and out of several books at once, enjoying a narrative here; a theoretical discussion there. But for me the best way to read a book is in one sitting, in several hours of being lost to the story, the characters and the mood of a book. When it’s finished there is always that slight sense of loss and sadness, but the delicious satisfaction of having stolen away from this life and its concerns to another place and time.
Recently I read Catcher in the Rye this way. I’d read it years ago and wondered what all the fuss was about. This time I read it with my breath caught in my throat and emotion rising in my chest. J D Salinger’s writing captures the despair, shock, guilt and confusion of his protagonist Holden Caulfield so beautifully and so cleverly. As I read I am by turns caught by his words, and then next by the story.
There are so many incredible stories, so many amazing writers and powerful, important, compelling or delightfully entertaining books.
I read an article recently in which the author bemoaned how few books he could hope to get through in his remaining lifetime. He guessed that at one book a week, he could consume roughly 50 books a year – not much I think when I look at those teetering book sculptures beside my bed.
Maybe the advent of digital books will make reading something we can fit better into our busy lives? But somehow the reading is less rich for me when done on a small screen without the experience of holding a book, turning its pages and breathing in its papery scent. Maybe I’m old-fashioned?
Years ago when I worked as an editor at The Age newspaper in Melbourne I caught the train to and from the city each day, giving me a glorious hour each way to escape into a book. The downside was the weeping and laughing I did in public, but it was a golden time for filling my head with stories and ideas.
Reading another’s words creates a unique relationship between you and that author – no one else will read those words and create the images and associations that you do. Your relationship with any given book is unique.
At the Melbourne Writer’s Festival a few years ago a keen would-be author in the crowd asked a guest speaker why they should even bother chasing a literary career when surely all the stories had already been told, all the ideas exhausted?
“Yes,” the speaker replied, “millions of stories have already been told, but no one has yet heard yours.”
Clearly with all the books already waiting to be read, and new voices and stories emerging each day, we will all have to find new and creative ways to fit more words in to every day.
We’ve found potato people growing in the bottom of our cupboard. They’ve clearly been there for some time, growing stealthily and silently in the back corner of the pantry.
They’re like miniature trees, gnarled and twisted into impressive trunks and branches, from which sprout dozens of tiny potatoes.
One has his branches outstretched like a marauding tuber monster ready to attack, but maybe we misjudge him, and instead his body language is seeking embrace rather than menace.
I don’t want to throw them away, these impressive, self-contained lives that got on with the business of growth and regrowth without any other input.
The children are at their dad’s house today, so I put the potatoes on the shelf propped up against the spices to show them when they come home. Already they look like little characters to me and we name them the Tuber Brothers and wonder at their prolific miniature spud propagation.
Stories offer themselves up everywhere. From the bottom of the potato basket to the shapes of the clouds. Once on a long drive through rural Victoria I pointed out the grass-covered hills around us and explained to the kids that they were slumbering dragons, dormant during the day, but trawling the countryside for adventure after dark. The story grew and grew in the car that holiday until we had a cast of dragon characters and adventures worthy of any medieval creature.
At six the fairy at the bottom of my daughter’s wardrobe helped her to sleep and feel safe in the dark. Fairy Wendy was a part of the family for years and frequently held fairy balls under Ruby’s bed.
In a recent children’s writing class I spoke to the kids about the importance of imagination. Where was their imagination I asked? In their toes; in their veins, or maybe in their head? One seven-year-old boy described his imagination as a beautiful gliding swan that pecked him on the head when it wanted his attention. Another girl said her imagination ran like electricity through her body, and one little boy sagely remarked that the best thing about imagination was its portability. You can take it anywhere he said.
Imagination is a powerful tool for writers. It’s not just about dreaming up new lands and an array of bizarre characters, but the ability to wonder what could happen to a person and how they would react….if…
If their husband cheated on them
If their best friend died
If they placed material things above people…
From the simple act of wondering ‘what if’ comes creativity.
So when I look at these wondrous spiky creatures in my kitchen I don’t see overgrown spuds; I see a story possibility, the germ of an idea and I begin to wonder ‘what if?’.
I’ve moved my office this week. From the pokey back room with no view and mottled shag pile, I’ve relocated to our big timber kitchen table, which fills one end of the living room. From here I have large windows on three sides and a constant view of trees, garden and sky.
It’s Autumn and the tree outside the glass back door glows as though lit from within, its leaves infused with a rich mellow light, and red and amber stains throughout the foliage.
The chatter of birds rises and falls; the only other sound apart from my fingers on the keys. Two fat pigeons are bobbing and crooning at one another outside the window, content to soak up the last stretches of late afternoon sunshine.
Around me is the detritus of family life; toys and a guitar, string and sticky tape from a craft project, school notes, a pair of shorts Ollie decided not to wear yesterday and Darcy’s jumper flung hastily on the back of a chair.
On one of the crowded bookcases sits the forlorn figure of poor Snotty, the stuffed blue elephant who now requires delicate reconstructive surgery after falling fowl of Tommy the Jack Russell who loves a good chew.
It’s a silly place to sit really. When the children are home they watch television in this room, do their homework at the table and bring their books here to read. I have to clear all my papers, empty tea cups and scribbled notes off the table at dinner time so we can gather to eat. Yet I keep being drawn back to this spot instead of the office which seems too remote and separate from life to really be useful for writing.
Writing never happens in isolation. It never happens just when I’m at the computer. I write in my head while I’m choosing mandarins at the grocer, listening to my son tell me about his wicked sick flips at the skatepark, or stirring the gravy to make sure the lumps dissolve.
I’m writing when I’m driving the kids to school; their part-time jobs and after-school activities; when I’m peeling potatoes for dinner and wondering where the hell all the matching socks disappear to.
I’m writing when I see my toddler nephew’s fascination for life, when I hold one of my kids as they laugh or cry, when I look at the sun in the trees on a day like this, or when the man I love looks into my eyes.
For me writing is constant. It’s only the typing that happens intermittently. The committing to paper of ideas born sometimes from the mundane, sometimes from wonder and emotion. I do some of my best writing horizontal, eyes closed, on the bed. This reflection sets the tone and the mood for the words which will come later, often on a laptop at the kitchen table, amid the chaos and color and joy that is life.
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