Sally Hollis-McLeod
Culture
How to write
by Philip Matthews
Can creativity be taught? Two new writers reveal their methods.
Persistence is everything. Paul Shannon estimates that he has some 80 rejection letters at home, from publications politely refusing to run short stories he submitted. They stretch from the early 1990s into this decade. Impersonal form letter followed impersonal form letter. “It’s bewildering after a while,” he says. “It’s like they’re not even reading them.”
In 2001, he made a pact with himself: he would quit writing if nothing was accepted by the end of that year. He sent a story to Metro, one he began in 1998. It was titled “Curing the Ham”. Unbelievably, they said yes. “I was floored.” He sent another to this magazine. He got another yes. Suddenly things were happening. Then what do you do? He thought he might need an agent. He read about Craig Marriner’s Stonedogs winning best novel at the Montana Book Awards. There was a guy called Michael Gifkins named as the author’s agent. “I thought Stonedogs was pretty out there. Perhaps I should contact this guy and see what he thinks.” Gifkins, arguably New Zealand’s leading literary agent, suggested that Shannon develop “Curing the Ham” – “build a community” around it, Gifkins said. Huh? Shannon figured out what he meant and wrote a novel. He started this “coming of age” novel, ultimately titled Davey Darling, a month before his 40th birthday, a month before his first son was born.
The novel went from Gifkins to a range of publishers and Penguin seized on it. “I was absolutely floored,” Shannon says. “I was totally speechless. I had a message on my phone at work from Geoff Walker [Penguin publishing director]. My head was spinning.” The book is published this week. Vigorous and robust, tragic and gothic, it details South Island working- class life in the 70s from the point of view of a boy no older than Shannon would have been then. Antecedents might be Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s The Scarecrow, Ian Cross’s The God Boy and Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. At the time of writing, Shannon only knew about the first of these. At his initial meeting with his new discovery, Walker was amazed to learn that Shannon had never read The God Boy. He promptly fetched him a copy.
“Most New Zealand writers also get the literary magazines and read the novels as they appear,” Walker says. “But Paul hasn’t done that, he’s just emerged perfectly formed, as you might say.” In other words, he never attended any creative writing course. “Maybe if he’d been to a creative writing course he would have had some of the corners knocked off him and it would be a smoother book. But he’s got some lovely touches which are basic to his talent and haven’t been learnt anywhere.”
“I often thought I should do the Bill Manhire course [at Victoria University],” Shannon says. “But the problem was always money. How could I afford it? And by the time I moved to Auckland from Wellington in 1993, it was beyond me, really.” That said, Shannon has internalised Manhire’s two key pieces of advice. The first opens Manhire’s introduction to an anthology of work by Victoria students, Mutes & Earthquakes: write what you know and write what you don’t know. “I think that’s really good advice,” Shannon says. “The what you don’t know stuff is what gives it magic, what keeps it going.”
The second piece of advice is the bad news: writing really is work. Manhire has little patience with romantic ideas about inspiration striking like lightning, as though writers are a species with more sensitive antennae (“The hopeful writer who waits for inspiration may end up waiting forever”). Sarah Quigley stresses this, too, in her recent creative writing guide Write, which mixes brain-loosening randomness exercises (write about eating oysters, write about spying on someone) with observations on the true nature of the business (“Even when your writing is going reasonably smoothly, it’s rarely what you’d call ‘fun’. Kazuo Ishi-guro once said that, while he often feels satisfied at the end of a working day, he can’t ever really say he enjoyed it.”) Between Write and Mutes & Earthquakes, you could give yourself a thorough, and sometimes thoroughly disheartening, creative writing course.
Shannon agrees that you must put in the hours, no matter how uninspired you might feel. “Things happen when you’re at the keyboard. They don’t happen anywhere else. Manhire’s totally right. You have to do it all the time. I try to do it every night.” He has a day job as a website manager and has two small kids, but he finds some time in the evening. Right now, he’s into the second novel, with a target of 400 words a night. “It’s like you’re inching it forward all the time.”
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