Writing about Writing
VICTORIA KINGHAM
The Palace Workspace is a well-considered refurbishment of an ex-department store in Robertson Street. It’s five floors of glorious open space, warm, redecorated and lined with nicely-selected paintings by local artists, vintage posters, maps and photographs. A terrific central resource for all kinds of conferences and classes: I hope it will be well used.
If you know me as a writer at all, it will be for reviews, short pieces, interviews. I’ve produced a great number for this paper (and others) which makes me very happy. I am hoping that the power of a group, however, will enable me to produce fiction, rather than opinion or everyday facts, so I have signed up for James Young’s creative writers’ workshop on the top floor of the Workspace. He himself is an engaging man from Northern Ireland, with something positive to say to everyone and an encouraging manner.
This was an elegantly diverse group of eight people: ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-seventies, with contrasting, fascinating life positions. The customary introductory exercise (pair off and each one of you introduce the other) revealed a very constructive variety of writing experience and milieux. After that came a short exercise – listening to background sounds for three minutes and writing about the interlude for four. But where other people seemed immediately able to diversify into coherent memories, imaginative flights of fancy, short fictional paragraphs and poetic descriptions, my own effort, while moderately well-written, remained obstinately grounded in the realm of the factual. So I am waiting (hoping?) to have my own powers of imagination unleashed, removed from the merely immediate experience.
LIFE, STORY, LIFE STORY
Alternatively, if I do end up writing non-fiction, I could aim to free myself from the conventionally-structured academic style so painstakingly worked over a number of years. It earned me qualifications, and indeed, with only slight modification, enables me to write this. There are, and have been, of course, many great authors whose actual life experience corresponds approximately to their fictional representations of themselves, whose writing style corresponds to their lifestyle. If I were Jack Kerouac for example, I could write an endless, wild journey on yards and yards of uncut paper with dubious paragraph breaks. If I were David Foster Wallace, I’d write huge chunks of almost undifferentiated text-and-dialogue, some seriously drug-fuelled, some corresponding to the form of a tennis match. If I were Jonathan Safran Cohen, I’d start from the middle and work backwards and then forwards, and my dog would tell jokes. If I were Wordsworth, I would pace up and down my sister’s cottage making sure that the rhythm of my life-poem flowed correctly, incomparably. If I were Caitlin Moran, I’d produce lewd, short, humorous descriptions of what appears a chaotic, but enviable, childhood. There are, after all, infinite ways of representing pieces of one’s life.
This workshop was an excellent start to what I am sure will be a valuable experience. Like David Copperfield, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Watch this space.
Hastings Writers’ Workshop, The Palace Workspace, 1-3 Robertson Street. Details at hastingswritersworkshop.com
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