sarah eve kelly

I did a stupid thing last night, filed firmly under It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time.

Wait: back up. I’ve gotten into my story, as PG Wodehouse would say, like a scalded cat. Some context:

I am on submission. This means that I have written a novel and found a literary agent for it, and now that agent is trying to find me an editor - in other words, trying to sell my book. I will not lie and say that this is fun. In a way it’s more heart-wrenching even than querying, because rejections don’t mean that I can disappear back into anonymity and make my pitch or my manuscript better: all I can do is sit on my hands and wait. I will say that I think it’s Good For Me in the same way that querying was - it’s teaching me the business; it’s informing the artistic choices I’m making for my second novel; it’s making my skin thicker. It’s another induction.

My part in this phase of the process is small. I read editor comments, as forwarded by my agent, and I wear my t-shirt that says BRING IT ON day after day. I wait. I try to make myself as attractive as possible.

Enter last night.

Last night my husband and I went to a shabbos potluck, a modest dinner with some other graduate students, at which we ate spinach salad, quiche, and tiramisu and talked about the future, the universe, and traffic laws. It was a good night.

When I got home, I posted this to Twitter: I WALKED HOME WITH NO PANTS ON. NO PANTS AT ALL.

I woke up this morning to a flurry of replies: ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh God, Sarah, what have you done now?’ ‘Are we talking North American pants or British pants?’

I was mortified, and I deleted the tweet. Here is the story: I wore my favourite pair of jeans to this dinner. I’ve had them for years, and have been refusing for months to acknowledge their deterioration. At the dinner, I went outside to take a phone call, sat on a ledge, and heard a loud rip. I jumped up, realised what the sound was, and sat down again. Another rip.

The jeans were falling right off of me, half an hour’s walk from home. Worse yet, when I tried to walk, the rip dug into the back of one of my legs and scraped against it, causing indescribable pain. These jeans weren’t going without a fight.

I stayed as immobile as possible for the remainder of the night, leaning up against walls, taking tiny steps when I had to, and acting like nothing was wrong. When we had finished washing the dishes, Mike and I said our goodbyes and starting trooping off home with four other students. I made the best small talk I could, and walked as fast as I could in these jeans that were no longer remotely shaped to house my legs. Finally, enough forks in the road came that Mike and I were on our own. I braved about half a block - seriously, I don’t know what it was, but this tear felt like a dagger in the back of my leg - and then gave up and ran into a phone booth.

Reader, I took my jeans off. In a phone booth.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. I was wearing a black mackintosh that reached just below my knees. As far as the world knew, I was wearing a mac with a skirt and heels. It was a warm night. Mike looked slightly askance, and I told him that he was welcome to walk twenty feet in front of me if he wanted to. But no: I looked perfectly civilised. The only thing that might have given me away was the folded - inasmuch as a shapeless shift of denim can be folded - pair of jeans in the crook of my elbow.

I came down with a fit of the giggles anyway, and when we got home, I tweeted that I had walked home with no pants on, which was perfectly true. But looking at the tweet in the unforgiving light of morning, I realised how it might look, and that I had to take better care of how I came across in public.

Back to being on submission. I have written the best novel I know how to write and I have gotten a supremely good agent for it. Now I’m waiting on a verdict. I have never once in this process gotten a rejection and thought that person rejected me because that person had no vision or didn’t care about art. I may have railed at the ceiling a little bit, of course, but in the end I still put my faith in the industry and do my best to acknowledge how little I know. Marketing, distribution, indigestion - I have come to the point in the merry-go-round at which my control over what happens next is severely limited.

It reminds me of a story my dad used to tell me when I worried about being popular. Don Juan and his friend, my dad told me, were going for a walk, when Don Juan stopped to tie his shoes. At that moment, an enormous boulder careened across the path about six feet in front of them.

The friend said, ‘Thank God you stopped to tie your shoes! Otherwise we would have been flattened by that boulder!’

Don Juan replied, ‘On another day, I might have stopped to tie my shoes right where the boulder landed, and we would have been flattened anyway.’

The friend said, ‘If that’s true, what control do we have over our destiny?’

Don Juan replied, ‘We can only do the best possible job of tying our shoes.’

And that’s all I can do: if I want to be a writer, my first duty is to write as well as I can as often as I can. If I want to be published, I can refrain from tweeting what might be interpreted as a confession of public nudity. That tweet reminded me of how much is, in fact, in my own hands. So from now on, I will have at my art with a will, and tweet with care.

Till next time, &c &c

This is a relic from the novel I had to abandon in favour of the current work-in-progress. I hope to return to it one day if I have a publisher who can indulge me (or if I don’t); for the moment, it’s relegated to my free time. I’ll return to my Elizabethan adventure next week.

The novel is called A Castle in Putney, set in the present day, and follows the adventures of Clara Stafford and her unlikely family in and around her eponymous home. In this scene, her brother and sister - four and eight - have just come in from an afternoon playing in the mud, and Clara is reluctantly conscripted into giving them a bath.

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1996

“Should I put them in the washer?” the now-nude Henry asks, holding up his clothes.

“Yes, into the washer,” Suzanne says, “and into the bath with you.” She goes into the kitchen and calls for Clara.

But Clara has gone into her bedroom and closed the door: she is fifteen and wants to be alone. She’s done her bit, played with the children. Now she pulls out The Liar and immerses herself in the life of public schoolboys.

Eleanor and Henry were born after Suzanne finished her doctoral dissertation, which is why they are called Eleanor and Henry, after the twelfth-century king and queen of infamous memory. Clara is just Clara, and she feels cheated. She’s never asked after the origins of her own name, but she knows enough about her parents to know that she couldn’t have been named after Clara in The Nutcracker. Like wine, opera, and cooking, Clara’s parents tried ballet and found that they couldn’t appreciate it enough. Books, newspapers, Suzanne’s covert cigarettes, and the mounds: that is where all the clues are.

Clara was born before the dissertation had even begun.

She can hear Henry fiddling with the faucets in the bathroom down the hall and knows that disaster will strike soon. She listens for sound on the stairs, footfalls in the vast corridor, but hears nothing. No, not nothing: Henry has got the water started, and Clara hears a visceral blast that ricochets off the sides of the tub; she hears Henry’s scream of pleasure. Hissing a sigh through her teeth, she throws down her book and crashes out of her bedroom.

“Henry!” she shouts over the din of the water as she walks down the corridor. “Henry!” The corridor is a long one, and the water that courses through the Byzantine pipes when a toilet is flushed or a tap is turned on can be heard everywhere. It’s a castle, after all. A real castle, with turrets and all. Clara wanted a turret for her own, but her parents were worried. When you’re older, they kept saying, until Clara gave up. “You idiot,” she mutters, about Henry, as she opens the bathroom door.

“I did it I did it!” Henry crows over the water.

“You sure did,” Clara says, leaning over him to turn the water off. “Feel clean yet?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” says Henry, earnestly, looking down at himself.

Clara inspects him. He is, really, only dirty where his clothes didn’t cover him sufficiently: around his ankles; his hands (and, by extension, the taps, Clara observes); his face; his forearms. Clara swishes her hand around in the water, which hasn’t had the chance to heat up. “Are you cold, Henry?”

“No,” says Henry.

She turns the hot tap on anyway. “Shall we clean you off with the poof?” By poof Clara means her bath lily, which she uses for Henry’s baths because she likes him, and because she’s long forgotten how to use ordinary washcloths. He screams with glee, and she takes it down, using (again) her own body wash, which smells of nutmeg, to get the mud off her small brother. She will scrub his back and his arms and his feet and his armpits, but she hands the poof to him for his chest and his private parts. “Do your bits,” she says, and he does.

Eleanor bangs the door open. Clara sees that she, too, has no clothes on. “I have to pee,” she says, and makes for the toilet.

“We have a lot of bathrooms,” Clara mutters, watching Henry again.

“I should have a bath too,” Eleanor announces from the toilet, her legs swishing back and forth.

“You’re not dirty, Eleanor,” Clara says.

Eleanor hops off the toilet, flushes it, and makes her way to the enormous free-standing tub. Watching Clara narrowly, she climbs in.

“Mom!” Clara hollers. Henry has no problem with the intrusion of his sister into his ablutions: he scoots forward and Eleanor sits behind him. A great splash hits Clara in the face. “Mom!” she bellows again.

“I need to wash,” Eleanor says, and Henry, obligingly, hands her the bath lily.

“No!” Clara says, before she can stop herself, but Eleanor has already found the body wash. She dollops some generously onto the poof and begins primly rubbing herself. Henry, finished, has begun splashing, for something to do. Clara looks mournfully at the almost-empty bottle. She snatches it away and puts it up into the caddy by the shower, where Eleanor can’t reach it. Nutmeg fumes fill the bathroom and Clara thinks, for a moment, that she’s going to be sick.

It’s Arthur who shows up to rescue Clara. Clara can’t help herself: “Where’s Mom?” she asks.

“Downstairs,” Arthur says. “Now, what have we got here?”

He’s lucky he can’t smell. The nutmeg and steam fill the air until Clara, dripping, stands up to leave. Arthur is already on his knees by the tub. “Rinse, rinse, rinse,” he says, pouring water over Eleanor, who squeals. “Done rinsing?”

They both nod, and Arthur scoops them out of the tub, one on each side of him. “Grab the towels, Clara,” he says, and she does, throwing them over her two siblings like blankets over camels as they scream and kick with laughter in their father’s arms. Arthur carries them gamely through the bathroom door and down the hall. Clara looks around the bathroom, which is now quite as wet as the mounds and the grass and the footpaths outside. The tub is still full of grey water: her father never quite gets it right. Her mother will be horrified when she sees it. Clara tries, very hard, to turn on her heel and go back to her bedroom, back to her book, but finds that she can’t. She pulls the plug, which slurps and gurgles, and then grabs a towel and begins mopping the floor.

Suzanne, she knows, will still be angry that Clara used one of the good towels for a chore like this. That Clara doesn’t care about.

The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist’s object was to clear the head; it was Garp’s opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess - to make the messy things work for you.

That passage is from my favourite chapter of my favourite book: Chapter Nine, ‘The Eternal Husband’, of The World According to Garp by John Irving. It is a book about a writer. Most books about writers don’t work; this one does. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do.

So many of my revelations come when I’m desperate for new TV. I avoided watching Grey’s Anatomy for, what is it now, almost five years. It sounded like Ally McBeal with doctors, and I was never interested. I have now watched two episodes and haven’t been dissuaded of my original assumption, but I’ll keep watching because it’s summer and there’s fuckall else on. I’m an optimist.

I watched the second episode on my Sunday break between school and writing - I needed something to help me switch gears in my head. It made me think about story. When you’re sitting on your hands wondering if your novel will ever sell - or after the general quality of your present and future works - a lot of things inspire you to think about story in a melancholy way. This second episode of Grey’s made me think of Garp, and what he might think of the ‘mess’ of the story arc and how it was ‘cleaned up’.

The premise of Grey’s Anatomy is a bunch of rather gorgeous young doctors working in a hospital whose only complications are allegorical. This episode I watched today begins with the main character, Meredith Grey, talking about the importance of boundaries - personal, professional, and social. It ends with her saying that boundaries ‘don’t keep other people out; they just fence you in’, after which observation she takes her turtlenecked, leather-handbagged gorgeous self off to the parking lot to hang with her other doctor friends.

I have no objection to this, but it strikes me that it is writing, and not psychiatry, that attempts to ‘clean up’. Psychiatry seems at least to recognize that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. In writing, there is simply no room for broken eggs.

This episode had one object in mind: show interns learning the ropes and growing up and getting to know each other. How distracting would it be if one of them were ugly, right, or overweight, because then you’d wonder how an ugly person came to be a doctor, and that would have to be a part of the story. Fat people can be secondary characters, not principals. This is of course true of most television, most film; and the best that novelists can do with such a thorny issue is avoid physical description of their characters at all.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could have an ugly main character without making an issue of it? I know I’m not the first person to say that. (’It’s like,’ Liz Lemon says, ‘those Dove commercials never even happened.’)

When I first queried The Fidelity Trial, I did it with the mess left in. I was lucky enough to find an agent who was willing to work with me to make my story a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted ugliness, illiteracy, and people peeing their pants. (How likely is it, really, that you could keep vigil in a closet for a night without having to go to the bathroom? Come on.) But that didn’t make a story. If the lady pees her pants (or whichever garment you prefer) during her all-night vigil, you forget what the vigil’s about.

People say that the best art reflects life; I don’t know if that’s true. I think we’ve enough life around us to reflect life, and that art should do something else, or at least come at it from a different angle - even holding up a mirror to something makes it look different, makes its nose more crooked or straight.

When asked about his portrayal of Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers says, ‘The reality is that viewers don’t want to see an obese, red-haired guy on a TV series.’ He makes it seem as though he’s made a discomfiting artistic decision, there, and defends it by going on to say that ‘nobody can tell me that how I played Henry isn’t right.’ So here we have Henry at a different angle - and who’s to say it’s the wrong one? I’m a Tudor historian, and I can’t say that. We all know that he was well on his way to fattitude by 1537, but his being fat, in a way, is like my maid of honour peeing herself - it’s become a distraction, and an excuse not to look at what else he was.

It’s another way of rearranging the mess, right: not using it, as per Garp’s instructions, but clearing a space on the floor so that you can move and look around. The Tudors eliminates Fat Henry from the mix, and that’s problematic, because with it they also eliminate Henry’s own character arc: you can’t show someone hardening, which is what Henry did, if he just goes from gorgeous bastard move to gorgeous bastard move. But it’s also interesting and clever: it makes you more willing to look at him, to understand him as a human being, to trust him again and again, because you want to trust Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, no matter how many asshole stunts he pulls.

But The Tudors is airbrushed fare: you’re not meant to see anything unpleasant beyond throats being slit, so it’s dangerous to read too much into it. The show was never meant to be about reality, which makes its occasional genuine insights all the more alarming.

I think what bugs me about Grey’s is that it has no such cartoonish claim: it wants to be gritty, to be real, to be frightening and cute and funny and poignant - in short, to run the gamut. And yes, it might be distracting if Ellen Pompeo had a huge boil on her nose or one tit bigger than the other. But what I do find distracting is the idea that, after a shift of however many dozens of hours, she doesn’t look dirty; her face is free of mascara flakes (not possible); her pants don’t have that accordion of wrinkles from sitting down that all pants have except when they’re fresh out of the wash.

So too with shows like 30 Rock, for all that I love my 30 Rock. Liz Lemon is meant to be a rough caricature of Tina Fey 15 years ago, the old Tina Fey who was a full 35 pounds heavier than she is now. So the show leaves the food in, and leaves us watching in torment while new skinny Tina Fey eats her way through another week in the life and never so much as feels bloated. There are a lot of explanations for this, and I’ve made them all - a bag of cheezies a day isn’t going to make you fat if that’s all you eat, for example. (This is not a diet. This is not a lesson.) But still, it stops you, every now and again - you love it at first, because she likes just what you like! And then a few episodes in, you look at her, and you look at you, and you think that Liz Lemon must have some secret she’s keeping from you. And maybe she does! Maybe season four will be all about Liz Lemon’s Tapeworm. Who knows.

I think my point is that the viewing and reading public can probably be trusted with seeing a bit more of the mess without becoming distracted. The problem with The Fidelity Trial, in its incarnation circa 2008, was that the story wasn’t complete - not that there were too many elements, but that there were vital elements missing. When you know what your story is - when you have your beginning, middle, and end - then you can start pouring on the mascara-flake detail that gives it dimension and makes it real.

And if you fail to do that, well, you’ll have a monstrously successful primetime television show that some unwashed bint in Cambridge will waste an hour complaining about.

(I can’t believe I wanted to post about the art of the mess and ended up with such a telling microcosm of the Achilles heel of all of my first drafts. Try clearing room on your virtual floor to sort this shit out.)

Till next time, &c &c.

This morning, in aid of putting off the monumental number of things I must accomplish today, I was reading my old LiveJournal posts. It may be a surprise to some of you that I have a LiveJournal account, and rightly so: I’ve been a very silent member since about 2003. I only signed up to read other people’s entries, and never got into the habit of posting myself, except when what I had to say wasn’t interesting or confident enough for my website.

I had a comparatively lucky querying experience. I started in June 2008 with a very mediocre draft of my novel, and signed with my agent in early October. Still: the summer of 2008 was the longest summer of my life. Also it rained a lot. But on 16 June - almost a year ago, now - I did a brave thing: a sort of querying version of counting my blessings. For all you out there at some point in the process, it might be an interesting read, so I’m posting it here.

I find it especially poignant because my agent is currently submitting my manuscript to editors (Dear Editors: I’m Really Nice), so I’m waiting in another way now. So, herewith: the state of Sarah’s mind on 16 June 2008, about a fortnight into the querying process.

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I feel the need to say this while I’m still in the tall grass, viz agentless: I think the process of finding representation is a good one. From everything I’ve read, and everything I’m going through, I can’t imagine a more symbiotic way of acclimatising the virgin author to the publishing world.

Not sarcasm. I really mean it.

Here’s what you do: you finish your book (this is very important), you edit your book (also important), and when it’s the best you think you can make it (which is different from it being the best it can be), you spend approximately two months (in my case) putting together a query letter and synopsis (this is dreadful). After this, you trawl online for hours and hours building up a shortlist of agents you’d like to query (in my case, all across the ocean, because there isn’t a single British citizen who isn’t sick to the tits of Anne Boleyn, it seems). Adhering to guidelines and personalising each letter, off they go, your first ten queries, into the world.

And then you wait.

Boom: rejection #1. Boom: rejection #2. Myself, I created several folders in my Gmail: “Queries”, “Submissions Awaiting Response”, “Failed Attempts” (this is where I put my rejections instead of throwing them away), and glee of glees, “Partial/Full Requested”. They are cross-referenced. This, and smoking: the only fully organized parts of my life.

I’m still waiting. The waiting is horrible. Horrible. I can’t stress it enough with the horrible. But I get this slightly nauseating feeling that it’s good for me. Because it seems that publishing itself is a waiting game: one needs to be accustomed to waiting. It still means that one lives on New York time and one refreshes one’s email until the page crashes. I’ll have to be a bit more grown-up than I am now before that stops happening.

But here’s the other thing that’s good: once you’ve got an agent, you’ve got an agent. In the Panglossian case (”our noses were made to carry spectacles, and behold! So they do”), it seems the author and the agent come together in the best of all possible worlds, to each do what each does best. In the author’s case, to write, to learn, to follow instructions; in the agent’s, to sell, to mentor, to set up High-Powered Meetings with Important People. And each side is equally motivated, for whichever reasons. As I read it earlier this morning: your agent has no reason to sit on her hands. She’s just as invested in selling your book as you are.

I thought once I sent my manuscript out to Important People I would go mad finding errors in the text or worse yet, thinking it was worthless - curiously, this hasn’t happened. I’m starting to genuinely see the merit and the novelty in the story. I wonder if maybe I’ve been on drugs for the past month.

I know this probably sounds hopelessly naive. But when I’m feeling good about this process, I need to record it. For posterity like. So there it is. On this Monday, with the smell of sweet fig and cinnamon toast in the air, at 9:58 am in London and (sigh) 4:58 eh em in New York, I feel good. We’ll see how long it lasts.

If I had lived my life pro forma, I would be twenty-six years old right now. (Four years for a BA, two for an MA, three for a PhD.) That’s four years of my adult life unaccounted for.

Some people get it right out the gate. They know what they want at the age of seventeen and pursue it. I’ve known only one thing for as long as I’ve been sentient: that I want to write stories. I didn’t care how; I didn’t learn how until fairly recently. That was what I wanted, and I believed that university was immaterial to it. I went to university because that’s what people did; it was what my family expected, and I didn’t have any other plans. Looking back on my seventeen-year-old self, I’m gobsmacked that I got the application in, to the one university I solicited, on time and intact.

My undergrad was not a pristine thing. I didn’t care about school for the first two years, and when I started to care, I had a lot of ground to make up. Those first years still sit like ugly toads on my transcript: they’re there forever.

I don’t mind. In fact, I’m glad.

(My parents might continue to feel differently.)

In my twelve-odd years of adulthood, if not maturity, I have learned this: failure is incredibly important. It might be, in fact, the most important rite there is: real, high-stakes failure. Setting a goal and failing to meet it. It makes self-scrutiny possible, honest critical reflection that has nothing to do with Death and running your fingers through your hair. It brings you closer to understanding yourself, and is the only thing that makes it possible for you to understand others.

In these early stages of the professional writing life, I’ve learned something else that I wasn’t able to properly imbibe when it happened in junior high school: rejection is also important, developing the ability to believe in yourself when others don’t.

Brief History of Me: I grew up in the ‘gifted’ category; I was sent into special programs; I read and wrote early (though walked and talked late); I was sent into kindergarten a year early, just a bit younger than all the others, and my mother believes I’ve been trying to reclaim that year ever since. As I grew older, something started to happen to my ‘gift’ - I distracted more easily, I cared less. I got out of high school with an 87% GPA because I was ‘graded on potential’, a fact that did me no favours in university.

I was six years finishing my BA; it convinced me that School Is Not For Me. Mike and I spent ten months in Europe and I had a plan: we would return to Canada, I would take an admin job, and I would write at night. I loved writing because I wasn’t really doing it; I hadn’t settled into a routine yet. I thought the Muse would be at my shoulder if I only had the time. I spent a year trying this out.

What’s the lamest reason you can think of to enter an MA program? How about ‘My boyfriend’s doing it?’ Well, that’s why I did it. The novel was nowhere, my job was OK but I couldn’t see myself growing old in it; I felt like the teenaged Stephen Fry: My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. I was twenty-five. Mike wanted an MA, so I got one too.

That degree changed the entire course of my life. I went into it a mouse and came out of it a lion. There was my thesis, bound in red leatherette. I could do anything.

I got a degree; I got married; I left Canada. I finished my novel, got it represented, and came here, to Cambridge. I was twenty-nine when I arrived and I’m thirty now.

I met a woman during my first week here who was just starting the last year of her PhD. I asked her what she planned to do afterwards, and she said she didn’t know - she would only be twenty-six, and didn’t want to commit herself to a lifetime in one job. When I finish my PhD (sacrificial slippers forthcoming to ensure this happens), I will be thirty-two. And here’s what’s not in the offing: children. Home ownership. Lawnmowers.

We don’t even know where we want to be, let alone when, or how.

I wouldn’t cast the four years of my adult life during which I wasn’t in school as a monolith failure for the sake of an analogy; they weren’t. I was on the garden path, not the other one. I did fail, at most everything you can imagine. Whenever I did, it’s because I thought something would be easy, and it never is; the things you love are, by definition, difficult, challenging. When I was up for a challenge, I was ready to experience love properly, not just for people, but for vocation.

I write this now because I am being challenged by what I love (if ‘being kicked in the teeth’ is suitably a ‘challenge’). This is harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I know what failure is: not something you struggle against, but something you buckle beneath. As long as I’m still struggling, I haven’t failed. As someone had it, ‘It will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.’

I don’t regret not having lived a linear life. If I had, any strong breeze might have felled me. It pays to put a foot wrong every once in a while. (And, of course, that’s why I did it in the first place. All that drinking in undergrad was calculated to make me strong and bind me to glory.)

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Herewith: the promised post about knitting. It will knock your (knitted) socks off.

Those following at home will know that I’m Living the Dream. Those who know me better will know that writing and Cambridge have been in daydreams and sightlines since I was about seven years old. I have also documented with some assiduity my compulsion to react badly to good fortune; I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to figure out why. I know now, and the reason is too pathetic and selfish to impart even to such a self-indulgent medium as this.

The upsides of Living the Dream are too many to count. I’m so lucky that I occasionally nauseate myself. Not only did I get to Cambridge: my husband got here too. You can’t imagine the logistical sets-of-three-train-connections shit that would have resulted if he weren’t a student here. We’re here; we’re together; we’re off in the same direction.

I also get to make my own schedule - provided said schedule gets everything done. Everything that requires doing, of course, can be done from this chair. Yes, I’m behind. Yes, I’m lost. Yes, I’m terrified. But I’m a lucky girl.

Also: really good fudge just down the road.

I have professional backing for a novel that I thought I knew would never see the light of day. It may never, still, but it has a fighting chance now. I love the world my clumsy hands have brought to life. I love the shaft-of-light moments that startle me into making it better. This I can also accomplish from this lovely, squashy blue chair.

There are so many other things, but stop me: I’m losing my point and I’m about to make myself vomit a little.

The problem with Living the Dream is that you’re living it out loud; you’re living it on deadline. The things that I used to do on the sly - character sketches, reading Eric Ives, wondering wondering wondering after the awesome power of getting to where I wanted to be - are (apart from the wondering) now done in the open, with expectations from people outside my own brain. I’m part of a club, but it’s not without its dues.

So when I sit down in my lovely chair for eleven hours a day of what I’ve wanted to do all my life, I often flex my fingers with a bad grace and a high heart rate. This has to be good; this has to be original; this has to be scholarly; this has to be riveting. Sometimes - just sometimes - this makes it feel like work.

And so, last term, being Michaelmas Term, I had a Long Dark Teatime. I clutched my towel. I didn’t know what came next; I only knew that I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t all that good at admin work, either, but I was buffeted by a wonderful confidence that I didn’t have to be good at it: it wasn’t what I do. Well, this is what I do, and it’s being tested, now, day after day.

The upshot is that I’ve spent my entire life - from the age of six onwards - doing things on the sly. Deciding the main performance of the day just wouldn’t cut it. Now I’m here, doing this, and it’s not possible to make that excuse; and besides, if I were to do something on the sly, what would I do? All the fun stuff is already taken.

Enter knitting.

Two years ago, half a bot of sippy-cup gin into an evening, my dear friend Vanessa undertook to teach me to knit. Vanessa is an amazing, just-for-fun, on-demand, flashing-needles knitter. I swear to my heathen gods that half the reason I want children is because I want them to have a blanket by Vanessa. That night we drank and drank, and knitting took on a vitality, an importance: my stubby hands were making needles work.

Seriously: I suck at knitting. I really suck. It’s like chess: I sort of know the moves, but I get my ass kicked every single time. This is not Vanessa’s fault. I shall have to go back to Edmonton and get just as drunk to learn how to purl.

Still, I love it. Three weeks ago, Lent term threatened. Novel revisions are due; research writeups are due; so many things are due. So much fun. I’d have hidden under my bed if it weren’t one of these weird English beds that sorta goes all the way to the bottom. But instead of retreating to the corner I have specifically reserved for the fetal position, I dug through my closet and found two skeins of wool and a set of knitting needles.

To this point I have only ever managed lumpy trivets. But they are trivets!

In the fullness of time I want to be better at knitting - I’d like to make the hat, for example, that my agent asked for. But I don’t want to go overboard, and here’s why: there are two things that I’m good at. They are writing, research, and research writing. (No, that isn’t three. Shut up.) And I’m not nearly good enough at them to sit at the big kids’ table yet, but I’m getting there. Perseverance, discipline, love and love and love, a stiff drink. They all help. I’ll be what I want to be.

But knitting is the thing I’ve found to do on the sly. Nobody wants me knitting (trust me). But I take feverish joy in making lumpy scarves and squares and tearing them apart when they don’t work; I love to sit in front of some good television of an evening and plough away at these pieces of shit, knowing that they will never be evaluated. Knitting, if it has done anything, has made me love all the more what I now have to work really hard for. Before, it was OK to be a shitty writer; nobody ever saw. Now people see. But nobody - except Mike, whose love is, as yet, unconditional - has seen my knitting.

Knitting, and a couple of pub nights a week. That’s all I need to keep loving what I do. Both make me look forward to conquering a new day. Living the Dream is a burden of its own: you have to find ways to cope with it. It sounds ridiculous; it is ridiculous, but it’s true. There have to be failsafes, coping mechanisms to ensure that you continue loving what you’ve thoughtlessly loved your entire life. Knitting shows me that I’m horrid at something; it reminds me of what I’m good at, what I’m working towards.

Knitting is a life-affirmer. Ridiculous or not, it’s getting me through the Dream.

Maybe I’ll try basketball next.

A few notes: my next post will be on Living the Linear Life. My dear friend Amy Bai has begun ‘Confession Fridays’, and I’m thinking of doing something similar, just because she’s so faboo - any ideas for Theme Days on the blog? I’m eager for suggestions.

Till next time, &c &c.

Herewith: an orderly post about publishing, spewing forth from my lovely shiny new laptop which was gotten at a discount.

When I say ‘these days’, I’m not talking about publishing being in the sinkhole; I’m talking, rather, about our particular Gen X-Y group of writers, and what our legacy will be in fifty years’ time, and further on. (Yes, this does qualify as Muttering About Destiny, so feel free to smack me.)

I’m writing to you from Glen Cove, New York, as I’ve been reined in by the family to spend some quality time with the Best Brother Ever while my mother and stepfather are out of state. Hanging out at my mom’s house is, now I’m an adult, a constant exercise in comparing my household to hers (what a horridly anti-feminist sentiment, but we’re still there, girls, we really are), and, this time, comparing my book collection to hers. Looking over my shoulder, a cursory glance at her bookcases gives me Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Miriam Toews. Also a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I left the last time I was here.

As those of you who are regular readers - or have spoken with me for half an hour at a stretch - will know, I have a complex about Margaret Atwood. I have no idea what it’s about. It is, at least in part, about the number of interesting photos taken of her over the years: she’s got this small-titted writerliness about her, a crackling tininess that I find terrifying. There’s also the voice. People have made fun of her voice for its deadpan, monotone quality, but in that tone I hear confidence, an I-don’t-write-for-you-ness. I want that, and she seems to have had it from the beginning.

I have confessed here, after all, that I write to be read.

The problem I have with The Divine Ms A, though - the principal problem - is that I can’t get next to most of her novels. I was raised to believe that reading Margaret Atwood was not an option, but an imperative. I shall likely feed the same codswallop to my own children about John Irving, when the time comes. (My Atwood indoctrination began when I was about four.) I know, objectively, that the novels are very good, very worthy, but I can’t sink in to them. There: I said it (again).

Still, I can’t just dismiss her and move on.

Every night here in Glen Cove, I devote the fifteen minutes before attempting sleep to reading a few pages of a book called The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Rosemary Sullivan, a professor at the University of Toronto and a serial literary biographer. It is masochism; I am very good at this. From this book I learn what I already knew: that in the 1960s, Canadian publishing was a vast wilderness, occupied by about four white men. From this decade, this generation, rose Margaret Atwood and her various consoeurs, and by the end of the 1970s, Canadian publishing was a teeming, pulsating culture all its own. In other words, Margaret Atwood had a job to do. She had to change the landscape, and she did that.

Listen:

In my mind’s eye I see Margaret Atwood standing on a bridge: the woods are at her back, the city is before her, and she commands both worlds. There are bodies under the water, trolls under the bridge. This is, of course, an absurd image I have invented, but it conjures up a vision of a woman who, out of years of training and willed attention, has claimed deep mythological roots for her writing. She speaks with an incisiveness in which the pleasure of provocation is implicit. She takes herself very straightforwardly. She is a writer.

This from a book whose subject asserts that writing is a state of doing, not a state of being. From this one paragraph, I glean that in Canadiana, the women’s market has been cornered. Finished. Nothing left to see here. You see why I’m frightened.

As difficult as it is to get published today (when I imagine the 1960s in Canada I imagine poor-quality Xeroxes bound with paperclips - perhaps hemp twine - crisscrossing the country by rail), there are more books now than there ever have been. What it must take to get noticed in such a sea!

The challenge to be a voice that stands out is not only an artistic one - although that is the primary challenge, despite the whining of the many-headed. I might be the only person alive who feels sorry for JK Rowling, even for someone like Stephenie Meyer, because what could they write now that would be taken seriously, that would be bought and read for more than morbid, fingertip curiosity?

Even if you find your voice, even if it stands out, even if people love it, there are quagmires.

What haunts me about Margaret Atwood is that now that she’s been read, loved, respected these past forty years and more, it is all the more difficult to find a corner of writing that hasn’t yet been claimed. Another terrifying sentence from The Red Shoes:

… I am fascinated by the mystery of artistic confidence. Where does the strength come from to believe in yourself as a writer?

Wait, for the sake of fuck: you have to believe in yourself? You have to have ‘artistic confidence’? I’ve finished a novel: does that mean I believe in myself? Well, I suppose it does. I believe that my seven-year-old self wanted to write novels for grown-ups. In my early adulthood, I believed I held tremendous insight into the human condition. Now, I’ve written what I most feared in my Atwood-driven childhood: a plot-driven novel. No successful, slightly-too-thin, middle-aged women falling back on their beds in a blouse and garters to contemplate the ceiling, unhappy marriages, and The State of Things. My mantra used to be I’m not old enough, I don’t know enough, but I can’t hide behind that now.

The problem is that I haven’t created a mythology for myself yet. That’s next. Or another novel.

What does it take to be an individual in this flood? What does it take to be both worthy and noticed? I suppose I ought to concentrate on the worthy and leave the noticed for later. Still.

This dovetails nicely with my next post, which will be existential and will involve knitting. So much for orderly.

Till next time, &c &c.

A few weeks ago I posted that I’m a cowardly reader; in fact, I’m my own worst enemy at the bookshop, unwilling to take a chance on much. It takes me ages of wandering up and down the fiction section, pulling things out, reading the jacket copy, reading a random page, to find something I’m willing to take home with me. When I love a book, I really love it, but books are like friends: it takes a lot for me to commit.

Now, another admission: I’m externally motivated.

I know, I know you’re supposed to write for the love of storytelling, for the love of pounding the keyboard, for the love of seeing your own ideas come to light. It’s partly that, sure. If it weren’t, I could seek gratification elsewhere. But what really gets me going is the idea of other people reading.

Actually, it’s usually just one or two people. This is a revolving-door system: I’ve always got somebody, or a couple of somebodies, in the back of my head when I’m writing. They’re always people I know, and I couldn’t begin to explain why, at that moment, I want to impress him or her in particular.

And my need for validation doesn’t stick at this one person: I want it from anyone who wants to give it. I write to be read, full stop. Naturally, validation can come in the form of criticism as well - I suppose it’s not validation so much as interest. Nothing I like better than a big fat fight over form and content. (I take criticism well, yes I do.)

Back in undergrad I was in this remarkable writing group; it started as an advanced non-fiction prose course of seven-odd people and Ted Bishop, still the greatest writing mentor I ever had. When the course ended, we decided to keep meeting, in pubs, to keep writing and passing our stuff round. We all wanted to write for a living; we were all a little full of ourselves, but good Jesus, we had a great time. One night, a night when I was scheduled for the chopping block, Ted bought the first round and asked everyone to dig out their copies of my piece, and after swallowing half his pint in one, he announced that Sarah Eve Kelly Has No Soul.

‘I couldn’t get past the second page,’ Ted said. ‘This was absolute, absolute swill. Just garbage.’

‘How can I make it better?’ I asked.

‘Take out the fucking garbage, why don’t you,’ he said, ‘and put something else in.’

By this point there was no solemnity left on his face, and he could barely make himself heard because we were all laughing so hard. It’s true, though: it was garbage. I went back to the piece the next day and took a hatchet to it, suffered for a week, wrote and rewrote, and sent the result to him.

I still have the email he sent back: ‘THERE, you see? I knew you could do it. Gorgeous.’

So, basically, I’m like the kid who kicks up in the middle of a restaurant. Any kind of attention will do.

Fast-forward to now: I knew I was going to struggle with novel revisions. I don’t look at a document and naturally see how it can be bettered; I lose the forest for the trees fairly quickly. I shall have to get over that. Right now, when a scene needs fixing, I’m far more inclined to just scrap it and rewrite it (although, of course, nothing is ever actually scrapped - I have a ‘cutting-room floor’ document that I fill with everything that’s deleted from the manuscript). Bad habit. So here I am, suffering, and instead of actually revising, I’m whining about revising to my (now online) writing group, moaning about how I wrote this novel in a vacuum, how nobody loves me - generally being the screaming kid at the restaurant.

Three people take pity on me and offer to read. They don’t even make it sound like pity. Being a brat obviously pays off: I’m dancing in my living room.

Suddenly I’m galvanized. Revisions need to happen, and fast. No more musing about the Muse - I make half a dozen practical quick-fixes and send the bugger off. And now I’m waiting.

That was the motivator; that got me out of my rut. The idea of people reading, like, right now. Not telling a beautiful story; not the subtle wonder of composition.

People reading: I love it. Even if I get a verdict of Swill.

This isn’t to be confused with glory, mind. Misanthropes don’t like presses of people. Just one person at a time. That’s the kind of career I hope to have. Unfortunately that’s not the kind of career that pays the rent, but it’s what I want.

There you have it: my ignoble Tuesday confession. What will it be next time, I wonder? My bath habit? That there are some published writers to whom I secretly think I’m superior? My hope that Stephen Fry will comment on one of my Twitter tweets? We’ll just have to see what next Tuesday brings.

Till next time, &c &c.

So I’ve been tagged by CarmaSez to articulate six things that make me happy. I had to think about this for a day before I could get to it, because I didn’t want ‘When Graboid works’ to be one of them. And for any of you who have braved my 100 Random Things About Me meme, you know that a list isn’t just a list with me. It has many semicolons and parentheses. So let’s see what I can come up with.

1. See, the problem is that most of my happinesses are in the past tense. I like having eaten well; I like having gone for a walk. I like having met my writing goals, my school goals. OK, maybe my happinesses are pluperfect. But I’m not really an ‘in the moment’ kind of girl, and I’m done punishing myself for that. But, hm, the first of six things is probably baths. The kind with oil and good smells that makes your skin red all over. The kind that makes you sweat. The kind with a book that’s so good that after you’ve gotten out and wrapped up in a huge bath sheet, you go to airdry on your bed and keep reading. Preferably falling asleep at some point.

2. Happiness the second (and no, these are not in any particular order) is kissing. Who cares who’s reading this: I like it. A lot. It’s one of those happinesses that can be present, past, and pluperfect.

3. Reading out loud. I’ve never read to anyone - or if I have, I can’t remember - but I love to read out loud. The first audiobook I ever listened to was A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and the man was a master reader. I’ve tried ever since to imitate him, probably failed parlously, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the only time I like the sound of my own voice. And the best place to read out loud? In the bath. The acoustics are great.

4. Cows. Cows make me very happy. Watching them, talking to them (I don’t often have the occasion, sadly), contemplating them. Cows are beautiful creatures, so slow and peaceful. We could all chew a page out of a cow’s book.

5. Pub nights. Not clubs, not bars. Pubs. Preferably a patio of a summer’s evening with a double for everyone (followed by another and another) and a big ashtray in the middle of the table. Quiet nights that aren’t quiet, when you’re not required to be clever but it’s fun if you are, when you’re allowed to shriek with laughter and fall on people’s shoulders and grasp their hands and give them kisses. Strange happiness for a misanthrope, but there you are.

6. Finally: people asking me questions about English history. I really, really do like that. It gives me something more than pride. It’s permission to elaborate on something I love, when generally this is what makes me strange and shitty at conversation. Usually this takes the form of friends asking me to annotate epic dramas. I remember one day years ago when a friend called and asked, ‘Hey, do you still have that Anne of the Thousand Days rental?’ I told her I had, and get this: she asked if she could come over and watch it, ‘… and if I have any questions, can we pause it while you answer them?’ I fell in love that day.

That’s it: six things. I think I broke a sweat; I think it’s time for a bath. But first, I tag:

Gretchen McNeil
Marsha Moore
Colleen Lindsay
Liz Medwid
Amy Bai
Kim Bewick

The rules are as follows: link to the person who gave you the award; write down six things that make you happy; post the rules; tag six others and let them know you’ve done it; tell the person who tagged you when your entry is up.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c

I have a good turn of phrase. It’s gotten me out of tight spots since primary school. I’ve told so many lies, and all eloquently; I’m a lucky girl. But if I hear one more word about The Muse, or characters following writers around while they do their shopping, I’m going to end it all.

‘Sarah is very gifted but does not meet her potential.’ That was on all my report cards. I would like to invent an Official History for myself in which I was a misunderstood straight-A student, but I wasn’t. I’m getting a doctoral degree from the best History faculty in the world, and in grade school I wasn’t even that good at Social Studies. I never tried because no one made me try - I wasn’t a huge achiever, but things weren’t bad.

This was the era during which I believed there was a Muse, a misty anthropomorphized entity who genuinely sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, because that’s how it felt when I wrote. When I wrote letters asking for extensions, when I flew on the euphoric currents of all-nighters to get papers done. The half-dozen novels on my hard drive - all approximately a page and a half long - are the result of the Muse.

But the Muse is a tease. The Muse makes you pay, eventually.

I spent years wittering on this blog that I was almost finished The Fidelity Trial, that if I just had a little time, if inspiration struck just once more… well, in July 2007, free of all distraction, I took an inventory of said ‘almost-finished’ novel and after one horrific day, realized that I had exactly 76 usable pages out of the 300-odd stinking up the document. In the document in front of me now, those 76 pages, too, are nowhere to be found.

The first time I tried to write, tried to make a day of it, a routine, the first time I had a job to complete: that was when I realized that the Muse is a sham. Some days are better than others: you can put that up to the Muse if you want to, but really it’s just you having a good day. You can similarly blame the bad days on the Muse, but that’s just you having a bad day. What you bring to the table is what you bring to the table, full stop: the summer of 2007 is when I saw, for the first time, that writing is sweated labour.

I’m not saying the creativity isn’t important; a writer hasn’t got a prayer without it (neither do most people). But discipline is the thing. Writing is self-directed. Most everybody has a few well-wishers, but writing is a sideline until you make it something else. Nobody’s ever going to care as much as you do, and if you can only be bothered to write when the Muse strikes, well, lucky you if that happens every day.

It was Margaret Atwood who first annoyed me with this, although I imagine most if not all of her stories are apocryphal. She related that she was walking through a field one day when she was quite young, and that God’s thumb suddenly bore down on her forehead, and then she was a poet. Just like that. But the thing about Margaret Atwood is that she’s a prolific, prodigious writer who obviously works very hard. Books are like sausages: no one wants to know how they were really made, and so here comes Margaret Atwood, master storyteller, to tell you a charming story about how from God’s thumb to her Selectric came ‘Variation on the Word Sleep’ and Life Before Man.

My own Origin Story hasn’t yet been solicited. That’s all well and good: I’m nobody. If I’m ever asked, I doubt I’ll tell the truth. But there’s a freedom in being nobody: right now, I can say that yes, it’s tremendousy difficult even if you do have the occasional inspiration and a reliably good turn of phrase. It’s probably impossible if you don’t.

It could be that I’m just jealous of people who claim to - or really do - have constant ideas jockeying for position in their heads. I have some ideas. If I’ve an urge to commit them to virtual paper it’s because I want to look back and say, ‘That was clever.’ But it’s the sweated labour that allows me - occasionally - to look back and say, ‘That was moving - that was important.’

I’m heading into two straight weeks of revisions before a trip to New York mid-month. It’s wonderful but I’m also bloody fucking terrified. During the summer of 2007, when I had enough money not to think about it, when Mike was at work, and there was nothing but me and the story, I dreaded sitting down at the dining room table in the morning and examining what I’d done the day before, wondering where today’s 1,500 words were going to come from. I didn’t feel like an artist; I didn’t feel like a vessel. I felt like a machinist whose hands weren’t sufficiently calloused. But after five years of pissing and moaning and only writing when the Muse struck (Lesson #1: try to write your book from beginning to end - the Muse always struck at some arbitrary point in the story) and having 76 semi-usable pages to show for it, the novel was complete in six months because I decided it would be, not because the Muse helped me out, not because Anne Boleyn followed me to bed every night and said, ‘Psst, I should throw a hairbrush at my brother tomorrow.’

It’s a wonderful feeling, trusting yourself, working to completion. Getting professional feedback told me that my work isn’t done, but I trust myself to finish it. Who was it who talked about hitching the unconscious to the writing arm? This is what I’ve finally done. I have to finish my revisions in two weeks, and I’m going to. Nothing beats that.

Everyone’s process is different, but there is no writer you admire who did not have to work and sweat and suffer for the craft. It’s a question of loving it enough to suffer for it (or loving the idea of posterity, at least) - that’s an old chestnut that’s got some real truth to it.

Till next time, &c &c.