Christmas and The Magic Doorway

Christmas in Australia doesn’t look much like a Nat King Cole song. Sandcastles rather than snowmen, surfing instead of sleigh-rides, and a lot of overdressed Santas handing melted chocolates out to kids. There are mangoes involved, lots of them, and a box of cherries that I have to hide or else I’ll eat myself ill.

It’s hot outside, the sort of hot that comes laden with moisture, searing heat by day and cracking thunderstorms on dusk; the sort of hot that makes you want to sit very, very still beneath the ceiling fan and maybe even doze. The birds are up by five each day, and you can’t walk the streets at night without passing through pockets of air swollen with the scent of sun-warmed gardenias.

For Christmas lunch we’ll eat turkey and baked ham, but we’ll eat them outside at a long table beneath the jacaranda tree. There’ll be citronella burning to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when we’re finished the kids will demolish a watermelon and run back and forth beneath the sprinkler until they’re soaking wet. The crickets will start to chirrup in the underbrush as evening comes, and we’ll listen to Christmas songs about snow and sleds and little robin red breasts, as the pair of kookaburras who’ve laid claim to our backyard eye hidden snakes from the bough of the silvery gum.

The heat can be oppressive here; it can seem inescapable; but I don’t mind. Inside my house there’s a doorway to another world. Not at the back of the wardrobe (I know because I’ve checked). My doorway sits atop my desk and the ritual to pass through it goes like this: I close the office door behind me—carefully, quietly, so that nobody knows I’ve gone and asks me to play Pacman again (not that I don’t love playing Pacman, only I’m the reigning champion and I don’t play soft and it isn’t kind to beat one’s children every time); I draw the curtains on my view of hot tin roofs and backyard swimming pools; I fire up my computer and I begin to read.

The doorway opens quickly. You’ll understand, I think, when I say the black and white print dissolves like magic and there’s colour and movement and noise, a whole other world, behind it.

This year my doorway takes me to London in 1940. It’s cooler there, and dangerous. The bombs have begun to fall and no one knows yet the fierce battle that lies ahead. In the small room of a boarding house in Notting Hill, a girl called Dolly is about to cross paths with a pair of strangers who will change her life. A terrible thing is going to happen and a shocking secret will be kept for decades.

Listen. The air raid siren has just sounded; the landlady is drumming on her saucepan, ordering everyone to the shelter; the drone of bombers comes closer and Dolly runs towards her fate . . .  

You can go there, too, next year, but in the meantime I hope your own magic doorway takes you somewhere wonderful this Christmas.

A Christmas Fairytale

I wrote this a little while back (a little while? That bump in my belly is about to turn four) for the Australian Women's Weekly, but I thought I'd share it here in celebration of Christmas being just around the corner. 

Flying a kite inside the maze

I'm pretty sure this could be Eliza's gate at Blackhurst. I'm in the middle of writing my new book and I love it. There's no feeling quite like that of being lost inside its world. It's the desperate, delicious, absorbing pleasure of reading--characters and setting and plot that come to life inside your mind so that you need to turn Just. One. More. Page.--but a thousand times better. (It can also, occasionally, be a barren desert of a place, but that's a discussion for another time.)

All writers write differently, and I was asked recently whether my own process mirrors that of either of my two writer sisters in The Distant Hours.

(A quick refresher, Saffy and Juniper are two of the three Sisters Blythe. They both write, but where Saffy is methodical, reading, writing, drafting and re-drafting, collecting all her edits in pretty paper-covered boxes, Juniper is the archetypal artist, leaving scattered pieces of scrap paper in her wake as she seizes upon one idea after another, 'writing herself free of entanglement'.)

Illustration by Miss DoodleMy own experience sits somewhere between the approaches of my characters. I love to plot and plan in the beginning, and the process gives me enormous pleasure. But once the story is underway, even though I continue to fill my notebook with ideas and scene breakdowns, there’s a momentum that arrives. I liken it sometimes to flying a kite: at first it’s hard work, and you have to put in a lot of effort, dragging the thing along the ground behind you; but then, at some magical, wonderful point, enough wind and speed has amassed beneath it, and up it goes, flying by itself.

When the kite is up and I’m ‘inside’ a book, I relate completely to the idea of having to write myself free of entanglement. It’s like being stuck within a maze, which makes it sound trapping, which it isn’t, rather it’s all-encompassing. I become stuck within the maze of the story and for as long as it takes me to reach the exit, no matter what else is happening in my Real Life, the characters, their plot, their settings, are in my mind. It can be frazzling at times, but I can’t imagine not having them there. In fact, when I’m not working on a book I feel restless and, ahem, I’ve been told I become rather tetchy.

Herbert DaviesI had an incredibly wise and generous drama teacher when I was growing up. His name was Herbert Davies and Edie’s Herbert in The Distant Hours is based on him (in spirit. There are a number of differences in their biographies). He was seventy when I met him and over the next couple of decades he became a great friend and mentor to me. He’d been the Head of Drama for the Welsh BBC, he’d served in Burma in the second world war, and he’d been part of that set of Welsh poets and actors including Dylan Thomas, Rachel Roberts, and Richard Burton. Herbert used to tell me there were two ways to approach acting, with intellect or with instinct, and that the very best actors, were those who were able to combine both. Writing, it’s always seemed to me, is very much the same.

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You can read more of my thoughts on writing in this month's Historical Novels Review.

Picture credits: Now that I've worked out how to do it, I've attached links to each image leading back to the place from which they came. 

How do I love thee, notebook?

A while back I did an interview with Historical Novels Review. The journalist and I live in different cities so the interview was conducted via email. This happens sometimes--it's actually my preferred mode of Q&A, not because I'm anti-social (well, maybe just a little bit) but because I always feel more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I do out loud. Funny that.

The list of questions when they arrived excited me. This isn't always the case with Q&As, and the reasons were twofold: first, they were things I hadn't been asked before (always a good start); and second, they were about the actual process of writing, which is far more interesting to talk about than, you know, one's self. In particular, they were about how much--or little--my own experience of writing compares to that of my characters in The Distant Hours.

With the kind permission of the interviewer, Elizabeth Jane, I'm going to publish some of the Q&A transcript here for those of you interested in writing. The interview itself is out in this month's Historical Novels Review.

The first question is about notebooks. A subject dear to my heart . . . 

Q: Whether in a muniment room with dead man’s notebooks; taking a sneaky read of a sister’s journal; finding the courage to write on the crisp new pages of a new journal; or while sitting in a quiet place with writing materials and a strong cup of tea, the notebook is a strong feature of all your writer’s lives. Can you tell me now this works for you? Are you a notebook person? If yes, what do you write in your notebook? Information? ‘Everything you see and think and feel?’ Or do you carefully craft scenes, ‘reading aloud and relishing the pleasure of bringing your heroine’s world to life?’  

KM: I am absolutely a notebook person. To imagine being without one fills me with dread. (I only keep notebooks for story-writing though, and I’ve never been able to stick to keeping a diary.) By the time I finish writing a novel, I’ve usually gathered around ten notebooks of story ideas, random images, plot schematics, scene details, graphs, snatches of overheard conversation. . . you name it, it’s in there. Scribbled, crossed-out, connected with arrows, stapled in on top of other bits and pieces. Quite a mess, but a somehow lovely one. I’m a visual person and to see them sketched out in my notebook helps me to clarify my thoughts and pin down my ideas. Also, the pen in hand forces me to focus.

A page from my current notebook. NB Neatness is not an option

I have a great fondness for stationery in general and I take enormous pleasure in selecting a new notebook at the beginning of each project. The feel of the paper, the thickness of the cover, the colour and spacing of the lines inside. . . sigh. Still, I’ll work with whatever I’ve got when the ideas start coming, the backs of old envelopes included.
 
When I was about a quarter of the way into The Shifting Fog (House at Riverton) I lost a notebook. I’d left it on the roof of my car when I strapped in my small person, and then forgotten to collect it and driven away. As soon as I got to my destination and couldn’t find it I knew what must have happened. I drove back along the same route, heart in my mouth, but there was no sign. I letter-box dropped, door-knocked, walked the streets, offered a reward: all to no avail. I wonder sometimes, how different (or not) the story might have been had I found the old notebook with its chapters plotted out.
 
It was an awful experience, but it taught me that no matter how essential the notebook seems at the time, no matter how tightly I cling to it when I’m dreaming up a story, a novel is a living, breathing organism and will continue to grow—perhaps in even more propitious ways than those sketched out—without it. There are always more ideas and new ways of tying them together, and the unconscious mind is a powerful thing—it doesn’t need a notebook to keep hold of the really important ideas.

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I'll publish more from the interview over the coming weeks, so stay tuned. The image of the Moleskine at the top came from here; but, for the record, I don't have a preferred brand of notebook. My current love is a Clairefontaine with a cherry red cover. 

On life and creativity

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Extract from the Stanford University Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

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You can read the whole text here.

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And if you admire creativity, vision, and people who refuse to let go of their childlike joy and wonder, I think you might enjoy The Pixar Story. 

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