Lee Murray has won the Sir Julius Vogel Award four times - against me one of those times (I think that makes you my nemesis now, Lee, btw). She is an excellent writer and has been instrumental in projects that help support and grow the NZ writing community, such as the "Baby Teeth" horror anthology. As a Valenines Day special feature, Lee talks about combating loneliness as a writer.
Writing is a lonely business. Everyone says so.
And it’s true that it does involve a certain amount of sitting down by yourself
in front of your computer, or with your notebook in hand, and churning out
words. Getting the word-count down. Or up, as the case may be. But writing, even
get-it-on-the-paper writing, doesn’t have to be solitary; there are lots of
ways to make it a team activity, even when you’re the only author whose name will
make it onto the final document. I’m involved in such several ‘writer teams’
all of which help me to either create, develop or polish my writing in some
way.
There’s my beach team, for example, four sci-fi
fantasy writers with a memoir gal thrown in. This group meets for internet-free
weekend retreats four or five times a year at an isolated beach location—I
could tell you where, but the isolation is the special bit—and over baked
potatoes, chocolate and coffee, we write. Alone, but together. Every half hour,
someone will stop their writing and say ‘Hey…’ and ask question about story crafting
or world-building and we’ll push back our chairs and burst into conversation
about where that storyline might go, or what that world might look like. Even
our memoir gal will pull out her earbuds and join in the debate, although,
admittedly, for tangents regarding gravity, portals and Mer physiology, she
tends to roll her eyes at us and carry on tapping. Sometimes though, those
conversations carry over to lunch at the picnic table, or on long walks down
the beach and back again, or late into the night in front of the fire. I can
guess what you’re thinking: that with all that gassing there’s no way we can
get any writing done during those retreat weekends. In fact, Conclave, our collection of four science
fiction and fantasy novellas, is the outcome of just two of those weekend
retreats, and the discussions that went on there. (Yes, our memoir gal managed
to get her manuscript completed, too.)
Another of my writing teams is Clarke’s, a
group also focused on science fiction and fantasy, but named after our coffee
shop meeting venue (with no reference whatsoever to Arthur C. Clarke). Armed
with pots of tea, pages of scripts and red pens, this group of four (three plus
me) convenes one morning every two weeks during school time to critique an
excerpt of each other’s writing. That’s three hours to get through around 16000
words. It begins somewhat like that first witches scene in Macbeth as we stir
the cauldron and rub our hands together, working up to pick at the minutiae of
someone else’s writing. Grammar, spelling, inconsistency, filtering, repetition,
plot holes: if there is something wrong with my manuscript, this group will
hunt it down and kill it. Striking down adverbs and cutting out clichés, they
look at every word, every auxiliary verb, any dissonant syntax. The Clarke’s
team are brutally honest, with emphasis on the brutal, and yet there’s no need
to pull on protective body armour because this lot offer their suggestions in the
nicest possible way. Oh yes, the rules
require that no one interrupts while the critique is being delivered. I’m not
sure who made that rule up. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded in keeping it yet either.
Or the one about not laughing.
And finally, there’s my first-draft writing
sprint team. This small cheer team of two meets at random when it works for
both of us. On those days, we make ourselves coffee in our respective kitchens,
and meet online via Facebook messaging to thrash out some words. We set a hopeful
word count, and a deadline an hour or two in the future, and off we go, me here
at my desk in the capital and my colleague on her laptop somewhere at the back
of beyond. About 45 minutes in, I’ll ping her to say I have written 500 words
and she’ll ping me back telling me how awesome I am. I am nowhere near awesome.
We both know I am excruciatingly slow as she will have already tapped out a
breath-taking 1200 words, or thereabouts. My colleague will downplay this
number, assuring me that first draft words are all crap anyway and half of hers
will have to be deleted, but I can do the math and I know that even deleting
half those words still leaves her out ahead. Sometimes though, one of her kids will
accidentally drop a bag of flour on the floor, or she’ll have a super gluey art
project needing her supervision going on beside her at the kitchen table, and
I’ll be able to sneak ahead. ‘Awesome stuff,’ I’ll say, all smug, when she
catches up. ‘You go, girl.’ There is some obligatory back slapping and mutual
admiration involved, because this teeny team is all about not feeling lonely
and left out when there is some lonely get-it-on-the-paper writing to be done.
Obviously, there are all sorts of other ways to
combat writer loneliness: writing clubs, online groups, buddy systems, and collaborative
writing are just a few. So with Valentine’s Day upon us, I guess the message
I’d like to tie to a balloon and send out into the world is that we don’t have
to be lonely hearts: writing needn’t be lonely at all, not if you find the
right colleagues to keep you company.*
*Tip: when seeking to combat writer loneliness,
it is helpful to know that most writers can be motivated by a small offering of
coffee and chocolate biscuits.
Lee Murray is a
four-time winner of the Sir Julius Vogel Award and holds an Australian Shadows
Award (with Dan Rabarts) for Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror (Paper Road Press). She tends to forget
she has this website http://www.leemurray.info/ and
is more likely to be found wasting time on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leemurrayauthor?ref=hl
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