I’m a guest blogger this week on what sarah reads, discussing The Writing Process …. about desk chaos, lack of process, and the horror of letting go of your novel for the first time.
Apr 262012
One of the characters in my next novel is an eagle who escapes London Zoo to roam the city, causing havoc. Creating her has revived my childhood interest in anything avian, from poetry and biology to watching, unreasonably fascinated, while pigeons poke around in dustbins outside my office window.
As a kid my dad took me bird watching on the Essex marshes and we spent hours crouched in a salt-beaten wooden hut looking out on the mud flats, listening to screaming gulls and watching flashes of movement: buzzards above the marsh, tiny wading creatures lifting knobbly legs out of the reeds.
Now I’m a more urban bird-enthusiast: scraggly sparrow bodies in neighbours’ gardens, crows lingering on park benches, the chirping of birds merging with London traffic in the morning. I’ve spent some time in London Zoo, as well, peering at what could be illustrations in a book of nonsense poetry: Eastern white pelicans, bright-feathered Hyacinth macaws, hunched Griffon vultures, Harrier hawks, and crazy-haired Rockhopper penguins.
But however much I watch, it’s difficult to grasp what it feels like to be a bird. They are such very odd creatures. I want to know whether healthy pigeons mock lame pigeons, if crows are irritated by raindrops, if magpies make friends. And then I saw Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird on a bookshop table.
“What does it feel like copulating for a mere tenth of a second, but over one hundred times a day?” Birkhead inquires on one page. “What is it like to be a male re-capped manakin in a Central American rainforest, displaying like a demented clockwork toy in front of an apparently uninterested female?” And perhaps best of all: “What is it like to be a flamingo sensing invisible rain?”
These are undoubtedly some of the best questions ever asked in the history of questions, and the answers don’t disappoint, either. It’s a compellingly written investigation into how birds feel, exactly what I wanted to read before putting the finishing touches to my fictional eagle.
To make it a truly great book, though, Bird Sense ought to have come with a poetry section, including Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and Gerald Manley Hopkins The Windhover. It should have several pages devoted to Ted Hughes and his miraculous knack of clambering into bird-consciousness. If my fictional eagle could even hint at the majesty of Hughes’s hawk in Hawk Roosting, I’d be ecstatic. “It took the whole of Creation/To produce my foot, my each feather:” Hughes writes, and the words make me oddly tearful each time I hear them. “Now I hold Creation in my foot/ Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -/ I kill where I please because it is all mine./ There is no sophistry in my body:/ My manners are tearing off heads”.
On Friday I stood on a stepladder and signed my name on the walls of Diogenes Vertag in Zurich: deep in their gluey, papery smelling archive rooms. I was in Zurich to present the german language version of The Pink Hotel at the annual Diogenes sales conference. With the signatures of titans like Paulo Coelho and Ian McEwan terrifyingly nearby, I took a deep breath and hoped not to misspell my name. (It’s happened a stupid number of times before – an extra “n” while autographing a book, a missed “t” on a birthday card – like I’m not in charge). But this time I nailed it: Anna Stothard, March 2012.
Joyce and Kati, the editor of The Pink Hotel
Names worry me. Personal, but shared. Ours, but we don’t choose them. Meeting strangers I repeat names in my head like a mantra until the syllables – Kati, Ruth, Vinny, Catherine, Philipp – sound like a nonsense poem, but hopefully a poem I remember. I live in fear of forgetting names. “What’s in a name?” asks James Joyce in Ulysses (I visited his grave last week, in a cemetery so close to Zurich zoo that you can hear lions roar if you come to the grave at feeding time). “That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours,” he answers.
Shakespeare’s Juliet answered the same question: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Of course the sound of “anna” didn’t develop from the smell and sight of Anna, while the word “rose” was presumably inspired from a sense of the flower. The word “rose” was given to roses when they already existed while I grew into the word Anna over time, scrawling then name I was told is mine over and over through my life until I (just about) owned it.
The protagonist of The Pink Hotel doesn’t own her name. Her future self, the book’s narrator, doesn’t mention one. The best character names summarize and hint: Pip, Tintin, Havisham, Gandalf, Philip Marlowe, those wide voluptuous vowels of Madame Bovary, the meandering creepy “humm” of Humbert Humbert, the ethereal noise that “Lyra” makes in your mouth, and the spit of the words Fagin or Becky Sharp. With The Pink Hotel, I knew my character wasn’t going to own herself enough to deserve a name, she’s too ghostly and uneasy to own much of anything as she starts her journey.
Whenever I stand up and read from The Pink Hotel, as I did at the Diogenes conference in Zurich last week, I feel briefly as spectral and willful and brazen and nameless as my character, who only begins to piece together shards of an identity – a taste here and a wish there – during a blisteringly hot summer in Los Angeles as she trawls through remnants of her mother’s disastrous life. It’s a peculiar, and not entirely pleasant feeling, turning momentarily into a character who does not embody herself enough to deserve a name.
Mar 162012
“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” Mark Twain
On a bench at the top left corner of an island called Djurgarden in Stockholm earlier this week, I watched a child talking to herself with panic in her eyes: intent and discontent in her little bobble hat and matching mittens against the skyline of Stockholm. Perhaps she was lost, or mad, or both (too many Swedish thrillers in my head). Or a ghost. A sea monster?! Or, also quite conceivably: a school kid practicing a speech while her mother watched sullenly from a nearby bench.
They had probably been practicing for hours and imagined a change of scenery might help, but the kid was still no mini-Churchill, no aspiring Emmeline Pankhurst. She spoke too quickly, fidgeting from foot to foot, and looked occasionally at her mother with an expression of abject hope and horror.
Ice everywhere, visiting my brother in Stockholm
I’ve always thought it must be exhausting to be an extrovert: an inexplicable urge to attend parties on weeknights, go on holiday in eager groups and enjoy open plan offices. On the other hand, being an extrovert would help with the odd speech. I’m going to the Essex Books Festival and a Diogenes Sales conference at the end of this month. I enjoy talking about writing, but it’s a slightly masochistic pleasure. Not terror like the Swedish kid was feeling as she gripped index cards in her mittens, but not yet effortless either. I was fascinated by Susan Cain’s article on introversion and shyness in The Guardian this week. She defines introversion as “a preference for environments that are not over stimulating” while shyness is a more crippling, insidious thing, a “the fear of social disapproval or humiliation.”
I’d never given much thought to the difference, but it’s crucial. Shyness hurts. It makes you blush at inconvenient moments and panic while practicing speeches to your mother on darkening Swedish islands. Shyness is something that you can battle against over time, even if it takes hours and hours of practicing speeches as the sun goes down. (“Shyness can stop you/From doing all the things in life/You’d like to,” as The Smiths point out).
A preference for sitting on your own for long periods of time, though? That’s just good sense. It’s not something worth fighting. A card in a Stockholm bookshop made this point nicely: “No one is able to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind.” - Selma Lagerlof, Swedish children’s author and Nobel laureate.
“There’s a flower called ‘bird of paradise’ all over Los Angeles: it has orange leaves shaped like knives, although from a certain angle the flowers also look like gaggles of slim-necked tropical birds,” – The Pink Hotel
I’m thrilled to be on the longlist for The Orange Prize, announced this morning to mark the hundred and first International Women’s Day. I was planning on blogging about the strange science of the colour pink today for Women’s Day. I lay in bed last night planning sentences about light spectrums, rainbows, and the mysterious part of the colour wheel where ultraviolet and pink reside. I was going to write about too-glam children in sinister pastel lipstick, the crack of rock candy between your teeth, coral way down in the sea, and the exact shade of colour on the menacing beachfront hotel in Los Angeles that inspired The Pink Hotel.
But now I have a different colour on my mind, and am far too excited to contemplate the science of light receptors. “Orange is the happiest colour,” as Frank Sinatra once said. I’m proud to be a part of today’s celebration of women’s achievements, and to be connected to The Orange Prize along with such wonderful writers as Anne Enright, Ann Patchett and Al Kennedy. The only book I’ve read so far on the list is The Forgotten Waltz, which was entirely beguiling, but I’m looking forward to reading them all. It’s going to be a huge pleasure over the next few months. Keeping to my colourfully themed twenty four hours, I think I may start with A.L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book.
Mar 042012
I found this photograph last night, in an old notebook labelled “eavesdropping”.
Taken at the Hollywood and Western Metro Station in LA, it makes me think of Ernest Hemmingway’s Flash Fiction (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”).
Much to the consternation of nearly everyone I met during my two years living in Los Angeles, I never owned a car so went everywhere by public transport. What a drug den is to a junkie, LA public transport is to an eavesdropper. Perhaps to justify my lack of wheels, I used to busy myself writing down shards of overheard conversations (can’t do that in a car):
“I need new sneakers Ma, honest, the jury won’t like these yellow ones.”(Young teenager with his mother on the metro red line)
“You can’t leave psychic traces on IKEA furniture, that’s a fact.” (Armenian Woman talking to her friend – I stole this line and used it in The Pink Hotel)
“How many you feed her, man?” said a kid in a baseball cap on a bus stuck in Hollywood Boulevard traffic. “One a week,” says his chubby friend, clutching a box wrapped in a white plastic bag. “Where do you keep ‘em?” says the first kid. “Freezer,” says the kid with the box. “Your Mom don’t mind?” says the first kid. “She don’t know. I put the rats in an ice cream tub and my mom says she’d never get work if she ate ice cream.” There’s a pause, as both boys stare at the box full of what is presumably snake food.
I was inspired to root through that old “eavesdropping LA” notebook last night after watching the brilliant Tis’ Pity She’s a Whore at The Barbican, where private transgressions repeatedly occur under the claustrophobic glare of the whole cast on stage. If the crowd isn’t watching, then servants hover in the wings and scorned lovers crouch like wound springs, watchful, ready to pounce. Lydia Wilson is a breathtaking chameleon as Annabella, the punk child/woman who everyone circles in John Ford’s warped play about incest and hellfire. She is so delicate and strange amongst the production’s blood and raw-lust and disco music that at points it seems like the whole worrying melodrama might be shifting scenes in her imagination.
(I should say at this point that Lydia and I went to primary school together, so I may be biased – we used to play games in my garden that would have made John Ford blush – but I’m pretty sure she is objectively brilliant in this production.)
“I fear much more than I can speak: good father,/ The place is dangerous, and spies are busy,” says Annabella. I wonder if anyone has written a history or eavesdropping? Othello, Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, spy novels, the available texts would be nearly endless. Whether it’s listening for plot points outside bedroom doors, or the grain of a story presented in an abandoned buggy on the metro, or a half overheard argument (“I don’t know if I can stay if you keep learning the flute,” I overheard a man said into his mobile outside Selfridges a few days ago) I doubt there’s a writer in the world who isn’t an avid eavesdropper.
(Lydia with The Pink Hotel!)
Feb 242012
I’m not a natural list maker. My mind doesn’t enjoy the decisiveness of a good bullet point, or the clarity of an efficient summary. The German publishing house Diogenes recently bought rights to The Pink Hotel and asked me to perform the deceptively simple task of listing my “likes” and “dislikes” for a slot in their magazine. I like swimming pools and eavesdropping, I thought to myself as I walked home after meeting the director. I like horror movies, crows, the smell of sunscreen. Sharp pencils. Toy soldiers. I don’t like: Monopoly, the word nubile, pigeons, the smell of roses. A telephone book sized catalogue came into my head, but when I got to my desk it seemed almost unbearably intimate, somehow, to write it all down.
I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to write a list.
Months passed. I decided there was something clandestine about a list, something not-quite formed, almost humiliating, like the scribbled first draft of a poem, or notes for a letter that you meant to destroy but didn’t and then found months later and tore up quickly. Lists are reductive, but revealing. I don’t like sunburnt knees, or numbers, or tennis, but the idea of a definitive list of these things made me feel nauseous. A list feels like sketching yourself and not doing a good job. I didn’t want to write a list.
A school friend of mine once filled an entire notebook with a list of her “likes” and “dislikes”, presenting this summary to her boyfriend as a gift that was part love letter and part crib notes. He never had to wonder if his girlfriend liked vintage porn, or roller coasters, or Nabokov, or soy milk (she did); he never had to ponder growing a moustache (dislike) or buying her Chrysanthemums (never). It seemed a very glamorous idea at the time, but it’s the last thing I’d ever do. Surely half the fun is guessing?
There’s a American magazine called FOUND run by the amazing Davy Rothbart, who collects found love letters, photographs, letters, photographs, doodles, hate-mail, post it notes, anything. My favourite finds are the wayward array of lists that make their way into Davy’s hands. “Never Call Landon again,” one letter says. “Get hair done”, “whiten teeth”, “no blow”, “Drinking only 4x a week”, “sex w/Chris Only”. Or another: “email Corey”, “introduce him to lesbians”, “convince self that I’m not madly in love with him”. Each list, even the shopping lists, are like miniature character bios, concise autobiographies.
The best Pro/Con list of all time is Darwin’s on marriage. “Charms of music & female chit-chat,” Darwin lists on the plus side of marriage. “Loss of time”, “cannot read in the Evenings” and the possibility of “banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool,” he files on the side of avoidance.
Last weekend I came across the ultimate Likes/Dislikes list, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, in a friend’s mouldy garage. “Splendid things,” the Japanese court lady lists haughtily: “Chinese Brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist state”. Unlike telephone directories, top ten inventories on music websites, restaurant menus and dictionaries, Sei Shonagon writes lists that ought to be read out loud with an earnest yet flirtatious pout. “Words That Look Commonplace but That Become Impressive When Written in Chinese Characters,” she pouts: “Strawberries, A dew-plant, A prickly water-lily, A walnut, A Doctor of Literature, A Provisional Senior Steward in the Office of the Emperor’s Household, Red myrtle.”
I’m not sure what red myrtle is, but I know I like walnuts and strawberries and Chinese characters. Swords with decorated scabbards are quite cool too. I hate milky coffee and crowds, automated telephone purgatory, stilettos at one am, writing lists. I like Truman Capote and Roald Dahl, movie trailers, vodka. Easy. I’m getting the hang of this.
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