Tools of the trade

In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer's point of view.

by Prof. Yasmine GOONERATNE

It is my firm belief that no one can be a writer who is not also a passionate reader. You can tell, as soon as you walk into a stranger's house, whether the people who live there are readers or not, by the presence or absence of book-cases and well-used books. Not magazines. Books.

Item 1: Books are the first items on a creative writer's list of essential tools. What are the others?

Item 2: A large cardboard box. A writer once told me that she never reads anything written by her fellow-authors, because she doesn't want her own writing to be 'influenced' by such reading. This, if I may say so, is nonsense. No writer can read too much, and the more she reads books of real literary worth, the better for her and for her present and future writing. If the books that come under your eye seem pretentious or silly, discard them. That's why you need Item 2 on this list. Put discarded books into the box, and send them away for recycling.

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

Item 3: A room of your own, into which you can put Items One and Two. The English author Virginia Woolf considered that "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". In my opinion, that is true for men, too. Few writers that I know enjoy privacy, or can claim a regular daily time-slot when they can read or write in the peace and quiet which I, for one, need in order to conceive ideas and follow them through. A few years ago, I undertook to write a survey of English writing by Sri Lankan women during the years between Independence in 1948 and the present day. In the process I learned a lot about the conditions under which most people - not women only, but men too - write creatively in our country.

My discoveries left me wondering, not only at the high quality of good Sri Lankan writing, but at the fact that Sri Lankans write at all. It is sad but true that our culture, despite all the claims that are made for it (by politicians and others), undervalues creative work, and conditions us to undervalue it ourselves, Most successful authors I know are either single or widowed. Those who are neither - like myself - have the dedicated support of their spouse and their family. Without that, we could not survive as writers.

Let us suppose, however, that the miracle has occurred. You have managed to get yourself privacy, in the form of a quiet place (a room of your own, however small, with a door you can shut, if you want to), and you have carved yourself some time (even if it's just a few hours a day, or late at night), in which you can write without being disturbed. What do you put into the room? Let's begin with what you don't put into it: the telephone, your cell-phone, the radio, and the TV. Let other members of the family have the pleasure of answering, listening to, and watching them. In your room, you need to have a writing desk, one with drawers for paper, pencils, pens, envelopes, record cards, erasers, correcting ink, paper clips, staplers, and all the other tools of your trade. A chair for that writing desk, of the right height for you, with a comfortable back-rest. A good light for the desk. Your typewriter (or computer and printer), all in working order. A paper-weight or two. An Appointments diary. This being Sri Lanka, an electric fan. A book-case, which offers, within easy reach of your desk, a Dictionary and a Thesaurus. Included among the books on your shelves, a few good poetry anthologies that you can dip into in the intervals of doing your own writing.(More on this subject later.) A clock. A large waste-paper basket. An inspiring picture or two.

On the subject of pictures: If you are putting photographs into your room, make sure they are photographs of people or places that make you happy when your eye falls on them. Avoid any that cause you to remember sad or unhappy incidents, and any that awake feelings of anger or resentment. This is your room, and there is no one you need to please with your choice but yourself.

We all have working habits that are personal to us. If you do your best thinking in a horizontal position, and there's room to fit a sofa or a day-bed into your room, by all means do so. There are some writers who like to work to music, and find Beethoven or Bach especially inspiring. (I like Verdi). Others enjoy the music of flutes, or drums, or Spanish guitars. If you are one of these, position your music source at a little distance from your desk, so that the music is inspiring, and not distracting.

The rest is up to you. The main thing is to avoid clutter, and objects that either distract the eye or require constant dusting.

Now that you have a room of your own, how do you proceed to use it?

Would you like to know how P. G. Wodehouse created his famous characters Bertie Wooster and Jeeves? When he was writing a book, Wodehouse would pin the pages up in undulating waves on the walls of his work-room. Pages that he felt were working well were pinned up high, those that he felt needed more work were pinned lower down. His aim was to get all the pages up to the picture rail before he handed them in to his publisher. A first draft worked out the plot. In the second stage, relentless revising, polishing and refining turned the novels into literary miracles.

The Australian novelist Eleanor Dark, whose home in the Blue Mountains has now become a retreat for writers - "Varuna", where I had the privilege of completing my first novel - stored her novels-in-progress in labelled drawers, a chapter to each drawer. An Australian writer of my acquaintance pins around his study a series of photographs clipped from magazines, of people who seem to him the living images of the characters in the novel he is writing. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of many award-winning screen plays for Merchant Ivory Productions, wrote her Booker Prize-winning novel Heat and Dust as though it was a screen-play. She first wrote great slabs of material set in the 1920s, and then slabs of material set in the 1970s, fifty years later. Then she cut them up and spliced them, as though they had been celluloid. (She learned how to edit film from Satyajit Ray himself, when Merchant Ivory was filming her novel The Householder.)

Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past and Swann's Way, wrote in longhand, then in extensively revised, successive drafts. He would have the entire text typeset to form a first draft. Then he would make additions on scraps of paper, pasted on the borders of his typed first draft, sometimes pasting sheets of papers to the borders of pages to make room for the new material. Most of his writing was done in bed, at night, in a cork-lined room, surrounded by the apparatus of an invalid.

There is an English poem that expresses very well what I regard as the 'bliss' of writing in delicious solitude. It was written by an unknown scholar-poet of the 8th century, and this translation is by Robin Flower:

I and Pangur Ban my cat,

'Tis a like task we are at,

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men

'Tis to sit with book and pen;

Pangur bears me no ill-will,

He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see,

At our tasks how glad are we

When at home we sit and find,

Entertainment to our mind.

Often times a mouse will stray

In the hero Pangur's way;

Oftentimes my keen thought set

Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye,

Full and fierce and sharp and sly,

'Gainst the wall of knowledge I,

All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,

O how glad is Pangur then!

O what gladness do I prove

When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,

Pangur Ban my cat and I

In our arts we find our bliss,

I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made

Pangur perfect in his trade;

I get wisdom day and night

Turning darkness into light.

A word about poetry anthologies.

Of all the books we encounter in our journey through childhood, poetry anthologies are surely the most inspiring for the future writer. I first met English poetry in an anthology titled LAUREATA. I don't own a copy of it now, and I have forgotten the name of its editor, but I do recall that the first poem in that anthology was Scott's 'Young Lochinvar", the next was Alfred Noyes's 'The Highwayman', and I believe the next to that was Macaulay's 'How Horatius kept the Bridge'. I defy anyone whose first encounter with English poetry features those three poems, not to be enchanted - by the music of the words, by the exciting story that each poet relates, by the vivid pictures the words create in the mind.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding-

Riding-riding-

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

There was a teacher at my school, Mrs Doreen Keuneman, who was a true romantic at heart, and when she read poetry in class, she read it with passion. You could, if you closed your eyes, actually see that 'ribbon of moonlight', you could see the 'purple moor', you could see the glamorous outlaw who is the hero of the poem -

He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;

They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!

And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,

His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

and of course, the love-interest of the tale -

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,

And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;

He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there

But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord's daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

Poetry, in whatever form it comes to us, is meant to be read aloud. This applies across the board, from a 14-line sonnet to Shakespeare's King Lear, and whether the poet wants to tell you an exciting story (as in a ballad), pay compliments to a sweetheart (as in a sonnet by Campion), argue with his God (as in Donne's religious poems), or make you think about contemporary life (as in Pete Seeger's lyric, 'Little Boxes'), what you are hearing is an artistic approximation of the human voice. One of the wonderful things about having 'a room of one's own' is that you can read poetry aloud without disturbing anyone, or having them think you're crazy.

But though I loved reading and reciting poetry, I never thought I could write it. Of course, like many people who like reading poetry, I tried my hand at imitating my favourite poets. I suppose you do that, too. But writing poetry that is truly original and voices your own ideas and not someone else's, now that is an activity in which you are not merely listening, responding and imitating, but actually calling the shots yourself. You are telling the story, choosing the words, making the music. And that is the moment at which a childhood and adolescence spent reading and enjoying good poetry (preferably aloud) really pays off.

When the writing of original poetry entered my life, it did so, literally, out of the blue. Nothing prepares you for the life-changing experience of writing poetry. The first poem that I recognized as truly my own, owing nothing to any of the poets I admired, came into my head in the form of an image, three days after the death of my father. As I developed it, I knew instinctively that I was in the presence of true poetry, and that the voice that rose from the page was an original poetic voice. For all the poems I wrote subsequently, I found the tools lying close to my hand. They had been placed there by all my years of reading and teaching great poetry.