On wanting to be a woman

The other day, at the end of the leadership development programme I had been running, I took a taxi ride to Godalming station. As we passed under the oak leaves along the Surrey roads, the driver reached for his clipboard and brushed his hand against my thigh.

‘It’s okay, I’m not on the other side,’ he apologised.

It reminded me, with a jolt, that there are still people out there who find being gay unacceptable.

He drove on and I dreamed on, and, in a somewhat loosely linked way, his remark started me thinking about writing on the other side: in other words, from a different sexual perspective. I’ve always been a little wary of books where the author takes the point of view or the voice of someone of the other sex, even more wary when they try to be a dog or somesuch. My rather narrow-minded stance has been that if I want to read about what it’s like to be a woman, I would do better to read something by a woman. Of course, this reasoning breaks down in the case of the dog. I take a similar attitude to historical fiction: why read period pieces when I could be reading Jane Austen? Please forgive me, you hist fickers.

But everybody’s doing it. Writers seem to be magnetised by the idea of cross-writing. Nick Hornby did it in How to be Good, and according to The Guardian, who know about these things, “the shift in gender opens new possibilities for him: of more sustained psychological insight, and a bolder narrative rhythm.” Well, that’s got to be worth a try. And it’s been going on for a very long time: Henry James tried to know What Maisie Knew, and that’s often quoted as a classic of viewpoint, not just female but child too. I enjoyed What Maisie Knew, although I struggled with the long, complex, interwoven sentences. Many of the nuances were lost on me. Hornby is a slightly easier read.

When it comes to the female to male gender jump, the most recent example I’ve read is Rose Tremain’s The Road Home. It's an engrossing read but I didn't find the protagonist entirely convincing as a male. So, everyone’s done it, and everyone’s doing it, but I still wasn’t convinced.

Then I read a couple of Colm Toibin’s. In both The Blackwater Lightship and Brooklyn, his most recent offering, the main characters are women. In Toibin’s case, he pulls this off to perfection, (in the opinion of this male). Certainly my experience of his characters tallies with my experience of other women. Many of the scenes in Brooklyn, such as the sexual tension of two women whilst trying on swimsuits in a closed department store, are daring examples of cross-writing. I kept reminding myself that it was written by a man.

It’s irresistible. I’ve got to have a go for my next attempt at a novel. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time (plotter not panter) and the prospect does come with some trepidation. Perhaps it’s a bad idea, but I think I can pull it off. My credentials are that most of the people I relate to easily are women - I'm more at home with them than in the company of men. I started a business on my own and ended up working with fourteen women – it’s surprising no blokes ever took me to a tribunal.

At times I’ve felt like a gay man trapped in a heterosexual’s body. My girlfriend constantly ribs me about being gay. Now, before you all jump on me, I’m not saying that gay = female. I do understand that. The fact is, I’m not gay, not even a little bit, but I do believe I’m more in touch with my feminine side than many men. So it’s high time for a sex change. I’ve tried it in short stories and now for a novel. For ages I’ve been collecting examples of what it's like to be a woman – there's fun research to be had asking about this.

So, do you write on the other side? A million examples spring to mind. Anne Brooke springs to mind. What are the pitfalls I should avoid? Am I gay?

The Pram in the Head

There’s a pram in my head and it must come out.

 

When my twins were born, I had no time or energy to write. But the day they started school I sprinted home to my desk and haven’t stopped writing since. That was two years ago. All I have to show is a couple of published stories and a dreadful draft of a novel. What happened?

 

I’d heard Cyril Connolly’s warning: ‘There is no more sombre enemy to good art than the pram in the hall,’ but I mistrusted a decree from someone I doubt changed a nappy in his life. Anyway, he’d missed the point. Motherhood brought a creative license to make mud slides into rivers, dig clay from ponds for finger pots, build skyward ski jumps and all pile onto the sledge to test them, keep snails as pets, make vinegar and bicarb volcanoes– the list is endless and beguiling. Admittedly play doesn’t transform anyone into a good author, but it does demand sensory experimentation and tireless curiosity. Good traits for a writer. And though play makes irresistible calls on one’s time, it’s time that would be spent with children anyway. Then there’s the freshness children bring to language: ‘We run through muddy darks!’ my toddler announced when plunged from the brightness of a meadow to the sudden shadow of the woods. How could such a fertile time have diminished not strengthened my writing?

 

I thought at first it was rustiness, that practise would free it. It didn’t. I needed feedback then. Joining critical forums just proved the work was mundane but not how to fix it. Then one day a spritely woman from church approached me for the title of an anthology I had work in. She wanted to recommend it to her book group. I couldn’t believe how loudly, ‘Nooooooooooooo’ rang inside my head as I feigned an emergency and scarpered. The idea of anyone in the village reading what I used to write had me up all night. What would they say about that prisoner losing control of his bowels? Or those sexual fantasies of an underage teenage girl? They must never read that work. It was uncensored. The problem had come to light.

 

I’d  spent five years programming myself away from the writer’s instinctive role of impartial social observer to that of Pillar of Suburban Morality. Joyce Grenfell had nothing on me. Five years of, ‘Don’t slurp your milk! Don’t prod the cat! Pull your pants up! You know we never say that!’ had quite simply whipped my voice into submission. I now type with a straighter spine (sit up at table!) and there’s no longer rolling tobacco between the keys (a good thing, alas) but the words are as sterile as a bottle teat. My writing wasn’t particularly salacious or explicit, but it was direct, and now it’s sanitized. Or was, until recently. For me, the antidote was to return to basics. I picked up my dog-eared Natalie Goldberg, whose Zen-babbling enthusiasm I’d long scorned in favour of more stringent tutors. I read her in the bath and in bed and at dawn. I applied her rules (don’t think, don’t stop.) The pram is freewheeling downhill.

Guest post by Deborah Dooley at Retreats For You

Deborah Dooley has been a freelance journalist for over 25 years, covering a huge variety of subjects from health issues to celebrity interviews. In 2008 she started Retreats for You, welcoming writers to her idyllic home in Sheepwash, North Devon.

Deborah blogs at http://retreatsforyou.blogspot.com/

We’ve all heard inspiring stories about women writers who regularly rise at 5am to write for 2 hours before waking their four children, getting them dressed, breakfasted and off to school, and then going off to work, (wearing a neat suit, high heels and full makeup), having first bestowed on their partner a kiss full of sexual promise. They’re marvellous. I’m not. And I suspect that had I not been fortunate enough for the last 25 years or so, to write for a living, I would rarely have found the time or indeed the energy to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

And so I sympathise entirely and profoundly with people whose jobs, children, partners, cats – whatever - sabotage their literary endeavours. And when the last of my three children flew the nest, a suggestion for filling the resulting space wrenched me from my brief and slightly self indulgent period of empty nesting with all the force of a Chambers Thesaurus hurled through the air by a frustrated journalist with writer’s block and a tight deadline. The idea was so obvious, and so right.

A writers retreat. A place for people to write, with no distractions, and discussion and feedback on their writing if needed, in a supportive environment, nurtured by plenty of home cooked food and enough good wine to fuel the muse.

Researching the idea, which was thought up by a dear friend, was simple. I asked every writer I knew, and a great many I didn’t, what they thought. Reactions ranged from ‘it sounds like heaven’ to ‘how soon can I book in?’ The plan was an unqualified success, even before we’d opened. And since Sheepwash, our village, is somewhat off the beaten track, my husband, an affable type, volunteered to run a taxi service for guests, to and from the nearest mainline station in Exeter.

In March last year, following the application of a lot of white paint, and the purchase of some crisp white cotton bedding and several angle poise lamps, we welcomed our first guests to ‘Retreats for you’.

To a lot of people the idea of opening your home to strangers might seem a daunting one. But the simple fact that this is a home and not a hotel, plus the immediate common ground we all share, means that we get to know our guests with astonishing speed. Within hours they are helping themselves to tea in the kitchen of our rambling house, and wandering comfortably in and out of the unlocked front door, to visit the village shop or pub, or wander around the beautiful Devon countryside.

We all eat together around our big wooden table, like a large literary family, (although if someone wants to carry on working, they can take a tray up to their rooms). And in the evenings we sit around the fire in the living room, discussing and sometimes reading work, and sharing ideas and creativity. Our guests have included fiction writers (including one Mills and Boon author), poets, people writing autobiographies, screen and playwrights, and children’s writers. All have been charming in so many different ways, and in almost every case, they achieve much more than they set out to during their time here. For me, witnessing their level of achievement is a pure delight. A bit like giving birth - but much less painful. Retreats For You is now a year old, and I am immensely proud of our many positive testimonials, especially as the recipe for success is so simple.

Take one writer, and add a cosy but xen like room with a desk and kettle. Remove the pressures and chores of everyday life, combine with feedback if needed, and fold in plenty of good homecooked food and a dash of wine. The result? Several thousand good quality words.



www.deborahdooleyjournalist.co.uk/retreats.html

Head Count

At a recent book reading and signing I was asked an interesting question.

Frankly, any question is welcome over the sea of bemused faces that usually follow my reading an extract from my latest novel, which makes no sense out of context and has been expunged of all swearing, violence and spoilers. At that point someone asking the way to the loo is a godsend.
But I digress.

On this occasion there was not only a question but a thoughtful one: as a child had I had imaginary friends?
I conceded that indeed I had, being an only child, had many.
The rather fearsome, elderly lady asking – for these are generally the ones with the cojones to pipe up at such gatherings. And bedraggled CW teachers. But they often just want to moan about the state of the publishing industry, how it no longer nurtures true artistic talent.
But back to my lady. It was her theory that all writers had imaginary friends as children. That most lived in entirely imaginary worlds.

As adults, she advanced, we continue until we eventually feel compelled to write it all down.
Now I can’t speak for others, but this struck a chord with me.

As a kid I had armies of exciting playmates freewheeling in my head.
Together we would form pop groups, perform complicated dance routines and travel to far flung lands. Frequently Hawaii.

From time to time, we would quarrel and I’d be forced to cull. Fortunately, there were infinite new friends waiting to be born, all more engaging than their fallen comrades.
By puberty, when many put away childish things, I simply swapped my pigtailed pals for handsome teenaged boys. Naturally, all were desperate to kiss me.
By adulthood, I knew that my little dream world wasn’t entirely normal, that I should engage more fully with ‘real life’, make actual human friends.

I vowed to spend more time with flesh and blood friends. The trouble is of course, those friends are rarely vampires, or the President of the United States. They don’t suggest trips to the Amazon or invent ways to travel through time.
A few years ago, well into my thirties, a new ‘friend’ appeared. She was energetic, outspoken and funny. Great company. She lived in a world where terrible things happened to innocent people and her knack was to set everything right.
One night, I can’t say why, I wrote her down on a piece of A4. The rest is history.
Three books later, Lilly and I are still enjoying our time together. She gets stronger and deeper, more herself with every day. Sometimes we argue, sometimes I’m sick of her. But mostly we have fun.
Of course she’d better not get too cocky or I might throw her under a train.

Guest Blog by Anna Reynolds on running the WriteWords writing site.

Hi, my name's Anna Reynolds and I'm one-third of the team behind WriteWords, one of the UK's most successful and popular writing sites. We set out to create a real community for all writers, from beginners to experienced, across all genres and media, and we're excited by how diverse and lively the site has become.

My WriteWords colleagues are David Bruce, the Webmaster, and Richard Brown, a non-fiction writer, who is our Directory Editor. One day back in 2003, the three of us sat down in a pub- as you do- and decided we wanted to create the kind of site we'd like to be part of ourselves, something very friendly and accessible, but also with great info, jobs for writers, interviews with The Great and the Good, and lots, lots more.

It's exciting to follow what goes on within the WriteWords community - some members have started out with us at a very early stage in their career, and gone on to get major publishing deals; other times there are really interesting debates and discussions on the site - which, unlike a lot of sites rarely end up in pointless bickering and in-fighting. I also love it when writers help each other- my experience as a stage writer is that we're an isolated bunch, working in our own spaces, not really sharing what we do and often feeling intensive rivalry- but I think WW writers are incredibly supportive and helpful toward each other, and great at sharing and swapping advice, opinions and info.

We're constantly looking at how we can maximise links with publishers, agencies, magazines, theatre companies and others- sometimes that happens organically, for example we recently ran an interview with a new travel publisher, city-lit, who have already begun working with several WriteWords members as a result. Sometimes it works like that- we see an opportunity and seize it, sometimes it comes through an existing WW member who wants to draw their own publisher or agent or editor into the WW mix. Because the web is such a fluid animal, constantly reinventing itself, the possibilities are endless. But the core of WriteWords is, I think, the community- the groups and the forum and the archive, that’s the biggest and most fantastic place for networking, both casually and more formally.

When I'm not running WriteWords, I'm a theatre writer with over 20 plays produced across the UK and internationally, and I've also written for magazines, newspapers and short story anthologies. These days I tend to focus on collaborative theatre, writing with and for actors, designers, directors, circus performers, singers, composers, dancers, you name it. Sometimes this works and is extremely exciting, other times it drives me to the point of madness. I've got three fairly big plays to write which open in June, July and August respectively, so that'll be fun. In fact, I’d better get back to writing them right now…

What flies onto your screen?

Based on the true events of 21/06/09…

I’d been so looking forward to today. My husband deserved those tickets to Rick Wakeman at Hampton Court, despite his protestations that we couldn’t afford them. He’d been a lifelong fan and it was a special concert of music the star hadn’t played before. So, despite the price of £120, I bought them secretly in January of this year – as a combined Father’s Day, anniversary and birthday present. The concert was in May 2010.

On Father’s Day I hid them in a box of chocolates and told the children to pester him for one until he opened it up. Which they did. Okay, okay,’ he grinned, ‘let’s all have a Rocky Road with a cuppa.’

The kids and I sat on the sofa and looked at each other with excitement as he fished out the bag of goodies and then two “cards”. He turned them over, his eyes widened and then filled with tears - he couldn’t believe I’d bought them. With flushed faces, the kids hugged their knees and gazed from their mum to their dad. Oh god – I was going to cry. So I stood up to make that cuppa. As I got to the kitchen door I glanced back.

But now his brow was furrowed and he mumbled something about the date. ‘May 2010’ I grinned, thinking he was pulling some joke. He bit his lip and slowly shook his head. The kids’ smiles dropped. ‘May 2009’, he said.

I gasped and he nodded, his face full of concern. And like a child my face crumpled and my hands flew up to my eyes. I released a loud sob. His tears of joy morphed into my tears of distress. And then anger – ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ I asked the room, and buried my head into his chest. Don’t tell me it’s the thought that counts.

When finally I drew away, my youngest came up. He looked at me, a glint in his eye, and those tears of anger suddenly morphed into tears of mirth. How we all laughed and wiped our eyes. And then I sobbed again. And then I chuckled. In the space of ten minutes I’d experienced a whole gamut of emotions.

And the point of this post? Emotions are the hardest thing I find to write. If my husband had slapped me around the face or torn up the tickets, if the kids had shouted out how foolish I was, or jumped up and down with hysteria, this episode would have been easier to describe. I find that action scenes, or those full of drama or violence, fly onto the screen. But when it comes to emotions, I stumble and falter. I find myself recurrently using phrases like ‘he bit his lip’, ‘her chin trembled,’ ‘their faces flushed’ - it all seems so unoriginal and crass.

So what flies onto your screen? Emotion? Sex? Violence? I suppose the only remedy for difficult bits is practise and reading lots.

Sweating the small stuff

Perhaps that title should be: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Or it could be: Why sweat the small stuff? Or, Sweating – the small stuff. That one sounds quite funky. Or, perhaps it could be . . . and that’s my point.

How easy it is to agonise over the syntax or grammar of a sentence. I have to confess to a love of all that tinkering. Part of the beauty of the language is that we have a lavish assortment of ways to express the same thought. I enjoy taking the time to feed every single one of the eighty thousand words in my WIP through the mental thesaurus?

Writing a novel is all about making a series of decisions. Martin Amis made this point in a conference speech about one of Saul Bellow’s books. He includes it in Visiting Mrs Nabokov, but I can’t check exactly what he says as all my books are in boxes at the moment with builders crawling all over the house. As I remember, Amis describes the process a bit like a decision-tree with Bellow starting with big decisions and then working his way steadfastly down to ever smaller ones. The biggest decisions include the overall structure of the plot, who's the main character, the setting, etc. The small decisions include choices of words.

The question I want to ask here is whether it's tempting for those of us somewhere below Saul’s status to jump on the small stuff too early. Am I the only one who goes through manuscripts again and again, polishing and polishing, without having corrected the mega-problems? That way you end up with something akin to a highly polished dustbin lid.

The more you polish, the more you’ve invested of yourself in a piece of writing and, because it is well-written it can be harder to see the problems, and easier to let yourself off. The more you polish, the more difficult it is to make bold changes or even to junk pieces altogether if that is what is really needed.

Is it a form of laziness? In a way, yes; and in a way, no. It's shirking the disagreeable work, but those of us who do this also work long and hard on our prose, attending to each sentence with lapidary care. It's harsh to call us lazy. We're just doing the wrong work. Doing what we feel comfortable with, like the builder doing up a house (an easy image for me at the moment) who rapidly settles on painting the gloss on the dado rail in the dining room when the wall still needs to be moved because the kitchen’s too small.

The bigger questions are often structural, especially whether to remove chunks that don’t work. Does the plot work? Is there enough pace in the narrative? Is the main character interesting enough?

I recently read someone’s draft novel: over 107,000 words without a single typo. That's an amazing achievement for a writer working alone, with no proof-reading help. It was a highly polished piece of writing. What he had missed were the serious structural issues and that there was far too much interior monologue.

When we do this, I think we do it because we long to call the thing finished. We ache to put it in front of some sort of an audience. We've laboured over it for months or years. If it’s polished we can convince ourselves it’s ready to submit even when a little voice in our heart knows about the lurking problems. We know that, at least, it will look professional, from the micro-angle of the quality of prose. Nobody will be able to say it’s badly written, but will anyone want to read it?