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walking and falling

jennifer mills

Magnificent Seven

Thursday, May 30, 2013

This is a talk I gave at the Emerging Writers Festival on the weekend, an event in which myself and the other Ambassadors were asked to give seven pieces of advice we wished we’d had when we were embryonic writerlings. A few people asked, so I’m sharing it here in full. Thanks EWF for inviting me back as an Ambassador!

I’m not going to give you any advice about how to write. To be honest I still have no idea what I’m doing. So this is more of a public service announcement (with guitar):

1. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

The world is full of people who will ask to use your work for free. Some of them will be non-profits, some billion-dollar media corporations. Some will be friends or shoestring creative startups. Most of them will tell you it’s good exposure. We all work for free some of the time, and sharing is awesome, but we also have to fight against the erosion of the value of creative work. That’s why I started @paythewriters. Learn early that your work has value, and it’s your right to ask to be paid. People will respect you for it in the long run.

This means you need to have a sense of your own self-worth, too. The only way you will learn the value of your work is by doing your best work. Focus on making something good and true and beautiful and the rest will fall into place.

2. PACE YOURSELF

One of the first things my publisher told me was persistence is more important than talent. It took me years to realise that persistence also means stamina.

It’s important to take a long view. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint; it will push you to the limits of your emotional endurance. I know I sound like an extreme sports nerd. But seriously, learn to pace yourself. When you are young it’s easy to be swept away by the urgency of your work. I lost sleep writing between night shifts; I became a full time writer by moving into my car.

By all means, go for it. But if you want to be around to keep doing this in ten, twenty, fifty years, you have to learn to find a healthy pace. Some people might be able to write a book a year, and others might write one a decade. There’s no right way to work – find your own way to work sustainably.

3. LOOK AFTER YOUR HEALTH – MENTAL AND PHYSICAL

The end of a novel is always accompanied by some kind of ailment – right now it’s nascent RSI. Watch out for workplace risks like carpal tunnel syndrome and the various mental/emotional disorders that afflict our trade. Be good to your body and your mind and treat your partners, friends, and family with kindness.

Being a writer does not give you permission to be an arsehole. Topping yourself is neither romantic nor interesting.

You are going to need to dig into some dark places to do your true work. It’s your responsibility to do it safely and without hurting people. This might mean exercising and eating well, getting away on your own for a while, or just making time to not be obsessed with your projects. Your novels aren’t going to hold you at three am or take you to the pub when you’ve had a shitty day at work. Look for the networks that support you, the people who make you feel good about what you’re capable of, the people who make you feel capable of more, and hang on to them.

On a similar note, look for the stuff that makes you feel like shit, and get the hell away from it.

4. RUN YOUR OWN RACE

This one’s hard, but find a way to measure your success that is not about any external rewards. So what if writer X tweeted their epic word count, or writer Y won a prize, or writer Z has published three bestsellers by the age of twenty-five? Envy is nothing but poison. Let yourself feel it for five minutes and then let it go. Don’t compare yourself to other people; measure your work against its own challenges. Writing is not a competition. In the end it’s not about you at all, it’s about the story. Ego bullshit is a distraction worse than any youtube panda channel. Watch the pandas if it helps.

5. EMBRACE FAILURE

Everything I’ve written has failed to achieve whatever it was I set out wanting to achieve. It’s always a failure, and the best you can hope for is an interesting failure. This is the nature of the work, it’s the nature of language, and it’s why I keep going back to my desk every morning. Honing your craft means not being defeated by the gap between what you can do and what you know you are capable of. Remember Samuel Beckett’s words, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ There’s no learning without failure. Embrace it for what it teaches you; you’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.

6. FUCK BRANDING

Writing is not a competition, and you’re not a brand. There is a lot of pressure on writers to repeat ourselves or define ourselves according to the strictures of marketing. Find a better way to understand your work and a better way to derive meaning from it. Challenge yourself creatively and technically. Go after the interesting problems, not the rewards. It’s much better to lose sleep over a difficult issue with your novel than to lose it over feeling like a hack.

It takes strength but it’s possible to resist your work being entirely subsumed into the capitalist mindset. We all know reading is more than just consuming, so let your work be worth something more than the cover price. Telling stories is a big responsibility and it’s not to be taken lightly. Do something good with it. Make something that matters.

7. ASK FOR HELP

For the third time, writing is not a competition. Talent will get you some of the way. The rest of it is hard work and relationships and luck. If you need help, ask for it. Some of the most generous people I have met have been writers who will genuinely go to the ends of the earth to support other writers, to help people hone their craft, find an audience, learn the arcane laws and rituals of publishing. If the work is good, people will support it. You don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. It’s okay to ask for help.

Learn to trust your own judgement, too. Have the courage to ignore their advice, and all of mine, if you think it stinks.

When you do become successful, remember how important other people’s help was to you, and pay it forward. Share skills where you can; answer questions; offer a hand up to others if you like their work. Literature subsists on a culture of generosity and mutual aid, and it’s up to us to sustain that culture.

Filed in awards, emerging, EWF, perfectionism, work-life balance, writing | | Comments (6)

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From the eye of the storm to the heart of the emerging writer (via Brooklyn)

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

I am back home from Eye of the Storm in Alice Springs, and feeling recharged from a spell in the desert full of engaging conversations, joyful reunions, fascinating panels, and a little bit of resting beside Ellery Creek. I was honoured to be a guest in my old stomping ground and I want to thank the NT Writers Centre and Kelly-lee Hickey for inviting me along. Here’s a round-up of the festival on ABC local and there are some photos from the event at ABC Open Central Australia’s flickr (Thanks Dave Nixon!).

If I was still in the desert, I’d be going to the launch of Josh Santospirito’s excellent graphic adaptation of Craig San Roque’s essay, ‘The Long Weekend in Alice Springs’. Josh was my flatmate when I first moved to town and we were both shiftworkers – he in psychiatric nursing, me at the women’s refuge. Many is the early morning we would sit with a recovery beer trying to talk each other down from a troubled night shift. I’m proud to have endorsed his book! at last!

Next I’m gearing up for my panels at the Emerging Writers Festival, which takes place May 23-June 3. I’ll be Ambassador for Fiction, so you get to come up and ask me questions about the nation of Fiction and its customs (I’ll bring some visa applications). My panels include “Cutting it Short” on the resurgence of short fiction, and this one where despite my distrust of writing advice I will try and dispense some.

I’ve been involved in the EWF since they invited me in 2007, back before I’d published much of anything, and have fond memories (zipping Nathan Curnow into a rabbit suit in 2009; interviewing Paddy O’Reilly about her reading habits in 2010) – so it’s wonderful to be returning for the fourth time to celebrate this awesome festival’s tenth birthday. It’s a solid lineup, too. Book your tickets to the Conference here or buy a golden ticket and inflate yourself with inspiration like Violet Beauregarde!

If you can’t wait for a taste of my infinitely questionable wisdom, the excellent short story website The Short Form, which is based in Brooklyn NY and publishes interviews, advice and recommendations from short story writers, was kind enough to interview me this week. I was stoked to be able to recommend five Australian short story writers recently published in literary journals here and share some of the good work being published around the traps. I dispensed some questionable advice. I also got to be illustrated, which has improved my appearance no end. Now working on becoming more grayscale…

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Horseracing

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Although it’s seven weeks since I got out of sleep lab, I still feel like I’m just waking up. Partly it’s the mayhem known in Adelaide as Mad March. Forums, panels, workshops, concerts, and one or two late nights at the Barrio… I wasn’t even booked for much, but somehow ended up being caught in the frenzy. It’s easy to spend your entire year’s theatre and music budget in March, even when you don’t live in Adelaide. It did not help, except that it did, to fly to Victoria for Easter and see Bruce Springsteen play at Hanging Rock. The gig was spectacular, though the man’s back catalogue is such that a week later I’m still thinking of songs I wish he’d played, and he played 29 of them. He’s beyond prolific; it’s almost extravagant. That longevity is definitely something to aspire to. I got to see another of my heroes in March, the great Laurie Anderson (I named this blog after one of her pieces) who was just an incredible and spellbinding performer/storyteller/weirdo. I have been doing a lot of aspiring.

In the way of twitter jokes that turn into life plans, I’m racing a short story collection against the novel, in the hope that one or the other will be finished this year; the lead changes week to week depending on which one is giving me a bigger headache. Questions about how the writing is going tend to be answered evasively and I am occasionally overwhelmed by urges to leave the country and disappear, which usually means I’m getting somewhere, I think. It is amazing how much worse at this I seem to become with every book.

Plenty else to do, anyway. Here‘s a review I wrote for the new Sydney Review of Books on Kerry Greenwood’s true crime book Tamam Shud – the book’s about Somerton Man, a fascinating case, and the review’s about all sorts of things – class, dualism, fiction and non-fiction and narrative structure – but mostly it’s about Weird Adelaide. Which is, as they say, a Thing. It’s been fun to get my teeth into a longer form review, and I’m really happy that the SRB has come along in a difficult time for literature and criticism with space for good writing about writing – it’s well worth reading all of it.

At Ryan O’Neill’s blog at the Review of Australian Fiction I’ve written a bit about how the horse got its name – including a sneak peek at what my first drafts look like. There’s a whole series on titling collections which makes for good reading, especially the hilarious list of O’Neill’s discarded titles.

In other news, the horse has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor prize – it’s a long list of eligible books, but I’m chuffed to see my name on it (adult me is happy with the entire company, but thirteen-year-old me is particularly pleased to be there with Molly Ringwald).

Short stories today, by a nose.

Filed in awards, frank o'connor, short stories, The Rest is Weight, writing | | Comments (3)

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Sleep/talking

Monday, February 25, 2013

I’ve got a new post up over at The Subjects with some reflections on sleep, sanity, capitalism and productivity. The sleep lab was an amazing experience and I’m still digesting what I’ve learned, so will continue to post over there as long as I am able. In the meantime I am enjoying reading back over everyone else’s posts and comparing our states of mind in various states of decay.

All four of us along with the Appleton Institute’s Drew Dawson will be speaking on a panel at Adelaide Writer’s Week on the 6th March, so come along if you’re at the festival or follow the live tweets.


I’ll post all the drawings I made in the lab soon so you can see the progression.

I’m also appearing at a Writers’ Forum at the SA Writers Centre on Friday 1st March, which promises to be a fantastic opportunity for emerging writers by the look of the program.

For three consecutive Wednesdays starting on the 13th March I’ll be running short story workshops at the SAWC. I chose a series of three workshops because I’m excited about the possibilities of going deeper into the work with a small group of writers – I often find workshops only skim the surface of what’s possible. Places are limited so book early via the SAWC website. It will be a blast.

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