Save the date! Help me celebrate the launch of my new book on Saturday 1 July. My second novel The Crystal Ballroom – stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene – will be launched by Stephen Matthews at Collected Works Bookshop, Level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne at an afternoon of book launches and readings to celebrate award-winning Ginninderra Press’s 21 years of independent publishing.
Hope to see you then 🙂
At a literary lunch recently I overheard someone say: ‘The thing to do is put the idea in your subconscious. Your brain will do the work.’
It takes time for our experience to make its way through our consciousness. For example, it is hard to write about a journey while you are still in the midst of the adventure. We have no distance from what is happening to us. The only things we seem to be able to say are ‘having a great time’, ‘the weather is good’, ‘wish you were here’. It is also hard to write about a place we just moved to, we haven’t absorbed it yet. We don’t really know where we are, even if we can walk to the train station without losing our way. We haven’t experienced three scorching summers in this country or seen the dolphins migrating south along the coast in the winter.
“Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964).
So we take in experience, but we need to let things make their way through our consciousness for a while and be absorbed by our whole selves. We are bower birds, collecting experience, and from the thrown away apple skins, outer lettuce layers, tea leaves, and chicken bones of our minds come our ideas for stories and poems and songs. But this does not come any time soon. It takes a very long time (three to ten years in the case of literary fiction). We need to keep picking through these scraps until some of the thoughts together form a pattern or can be organised around a central theme, something we can shape into a narrative. We mine our hidden thoughts for ideas. But the ideas need time to percolate: to slowly filter through.
Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, summed up what could be the creative process when he wrote ‘The Guest House’:
This being human is a guest house.
Each morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite
them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi, in The Essential Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks, 1999
Our work is to keep rummaging through the rubbish bins of our minds, exercising the writing muscle, in readiness to answer that knock at the door when it comes.
As the author Vivian Gornick said: ‘The writers life is the pits. You live alone and you work alone, every day I have to recreate myself.’ She paused and laughed. ‘But when the work is going well there is nothing that compares.’
What about you? Are you ready to answer the knock at the door? 🙂
Header image: Creative Commons
My second novel, The Crystal Ballroom is released today! If you’re in Australia you can order a copy from your favourite bricks and mortar bookseller or directly from Ginninderra Press. Print and ebook editions are also available from Amazon, Book Depository and other online booksellers.
‘Libby Sommer lays bare the foibles of human nature in her finely observed stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene. Brilliantly drawn with wit, compassion and poignancy, the characters you meet in The Crystal Ballroom are sure to remind you of someone—maybe even yourself.’ – Jan Cornall, Writer’s Journey.
‘Libby Sommer exposes the secret lives of the singles who dance at The Crystal Ballroom. Authentic and powerful, this unique book will be loved by the dancers and readers.’ Frida Kotlyar, ballroom, Latin and Argentine tango dancer.
‘Libby Sommer’s fiction has wit but is essentially serious with a subtle but strong underlying pathos, a wry humour and accomplished satirical tone.’ – Amanda Lohrey, Australian writer, and novelist. Patrick White Award winner.
‘Sommer’s existentialism is one of the best and most articulate voices of middle age angst ever.’ –Richard English, novelist and Visiting Lecturer, Brunel University London.
The book will be launched at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne on 1 July. Details to follow. If you’re free, come along.
I hope you enjoy reading The Crystal Ballroom: stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene. I’m very excited that My Year With Sammy and The Crystal Ballroom are out there in the public arena – thrilled that my work has finally made it out into the world after all these years.
Sometimes we sit at our desks to write and can’t think of anything to write about. We face the blank page. We sit there until blood pours from our foreheads, as one famous author was heard to say.
Making a list can be good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life in all its richness.
10 ideas for writing practice:
Be honest. Cut through the crap and get to the real heart of things.
Zen Buddhist, psychotherapist, writer and teacher, Gail Sher in her book One Continuous Mistake says the solution for her came via haiku (short unrhymed Japanese poems capturing the essence of a moment).
“For several years I wrote one haiku a day and then spent hours polishing those I had written on previous days. This tiny step proved increasingly satisfying,” Gail Sher.
She said it gradually dawned on her that it was not the haiku but the “one per day.” Without even knowing it, she had developed a “practice.” Every day, no matter what, she wrote one haiku. In her mind she became the person who writes “a haiku a day.” And that was the beginning of knowing who she was.
Gail Sher suggests writing on the same subject every day for two weeks.
“Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter places of subtler, more ‘fringe’ knowing,” Gail Sher.
She writes in One Continuous Mistake that the Four Noble Truths for writers are:
So start coming up with your own list of ideas for practice writing. Life happening around us is good grist-for-the-mill.
Header image: Creative Commons
Libby Sommer, Author 