Back after a Blog Break

Apologies for the long gap between blog posts of late. And for also deleting a previous post – something I’ve not done previously, as far as I remember. An explanation for both is needed!

First, about the break. I’ve started to get a couple of my comment pieces published online. This is fantastic – however, a few caveats. I’m not getting any editing work, and the number of hours that go into an article isn’t commensurate with the pay (who’d have thought?).

I’ve had three articles published in online newspapers/journals, and two of these were on paying sites (well that’s what they’ve promised). Of course two paid gigs do not a writing career make!

If the editing work starts back up (and it’s usual for me to have gaps, especially at the beginning of the financial year) then it would be a nice little combination – the writing satisfying the creative genie, the editing work channelling the left-brain-dominated control freak (and paying much better per hour).

But it is great for my confidence. Truth is it couldn’t have happened earlier.  I just wasn’t ready. I can’t help wanting to use the word ‘maturity’ at this point, which is a bit sad considering that I’m 51 years old.

Blogging alone has helped develop my writing – just doing it – but the willingness to bend my own concerns to the needs of the journals just wasn’t there earlier. Getting my point across in 800 words or less? Where did these people get off? Any subject I was interested in required at least 2500 words.

Now I am slowly developing the art – not unlike haiku, or any kind of poetry – of making my points succinctly. After a while you realise that it actually takes less time to write a short article than a long one, so it’s an advantage.

But it’s bloody exhausting in a way that blogging is not.

Now about the little um blog entry deletion. Self-censorship? Perhaps.

The entry was about the revolution underway in the mental illness treatment community. These changes are both exciting and controversial. (As an aside, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus in the psychiatric community at the moment about what causes mental illness, and this in itself is all at once interesting, promising and disturbing.)

I originally started the article before moving house in May, and then other concerns intervened. When I went back to it a few months later I didn’t really think the issues through before completing and publishing it. Much of the impetus had come from reading the book Anatomy of an Epidemic and the blog Mad in America.

But the issues that these changes bring up are challenging and potentially life changing for many people. As someone with OCD, who is always concerned about the effects her writing may have on others, I’m more aware now of the caution that it is preferable to exercise when covering this area.

I’m probably overly cautious, but that’s my hang up – the internet is scary in its ability to disseminate information, and change the way people behave, very quickly. When it comes to mental health, that makes writing about it a big responsibility.

The other thing that made me pause for thought was that the health system in Australia is so different from the American one. The Australian system is a chaotic hotchpotch of public and private services, and everything in between, while the US system is, in my understanding, almost completely controlled by health insurance companies.  It’s quite possible that there is more mismanagement and a greater reliance on drugs in the US, and therefore much more angst among consumers. In fact in Australia some of the new approaches, such as peer support, are being adopted by mainstream services, which is very exciting.

This doesn’t change the fact that the public system in Australia is desperately under resourced. My impression from the limited reading I’ve done is that psyche hospitals, which should be soothing, welcoming havens for recovery, are for the acutely sick only, and that after being stabilised on drugs you get kicked out quickly, leading to a revolving door syndrome for those without adequate community support (there are good community services available in some areas, but I’m not sure how comprehensive these are, and they are in flux right now).

The other problem is that I don’t find myself in either of the major narratives – the biological idea of illness and the anti-psychiatry push. Not that the anti-psychiatry movement denies the existence of acute mental suffering at all. It's just that for me, labels themselves aren't the problem - it's the kinds of treatments that they too often give rise to which need monitoring and review.

Anyway I am not going to weigh into any debates for the minute. I am very interested in writing about  new treatments, but my OCD is a factor that I need to take into account. Still, it is an exciting time that may well lead to a synthesis of the best of old and new treatments.

And whether my other writing leads to a new 'career' is something that only the future can reveal!

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The Return of the Muse: How Poetry Came Back to Me after Fifteen Years

Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry by Charles Meynier

I've been putting off writing my next blog entry – it was going to be about dancing in the lounge, a habit I've taken up this year, and I was reluctant to conjure images of myself cavorting around the room behind the closed venetians, arms flailing about, to the sound of 'Papa don't preach'. Now, thank the gods, I have something else to write about so you don't have to imagine that – instead you can picture me in a room full of drunkards, wannabes and has-beens, reading out my latest poetic gems on a bad microphone, legs shaking, head full of narcissistic enthusiasm.

After fifteen years lurking in the most obscure recesses of my unconscious, my muse has returned to the fold. And boy is she making up for lost time.

I wrote poetry in the 1990s, and even got a few of them published, but I never cracked the big journals. I was shadowed by the fact that a friend of mine was one of Australia's most significant poets. I followed her style religiously, as well as that of the poet I was writing my Masters thesis on, Frank O'Hara.

Then a few things happened. I met the love of my life, and spurned him. I studied editing and became a freelance editor. My brain became increasingly attuned to the nuances of prose, and I learned how to cut language short, to discipline and control long and waffly sentences. Somewhere along the way the tap of my poetry simply turned off. It was more or less gone. When I tried to write 'poetically' it came out as the most horribly strangled prose.

Now I look back at my earlier poetic 'career' and realise something very important. The immaturity that was a feature of my earlier life, and that I still battle, stymied my writing in ways I was completely unaware of. Already I am becoming a better poet than I was then, because I'm practising every single day and my mind is much more open to a wide range of influences.

Back then, the only poems that I ever finished were the ones that had tumbled out more or less whole, with only the need to edit – I did attend writing workshops and got great feedback from my poet friend, but I'm talking about fiddling around with something already more or less complete. There are many worthwhile ideas that come out as small fragments, or even different entities that you can combine. You have to morph these bits and pieces into poems by worrying at them, revisiting them like an anxious nurse, turning them over in your brain and letting your unconscious fill in the blanks. This is the kind of work I only did occasionally fifteen years ago. Who knows how many good ideas I threw away because they required digging, when all I knew how to do was pan for gold.

The other thing I didn't do then is read as obsessively and singlemindedly as I do now. Naturally when I was writing my thesis I read the higgledy-piggledy band of poets that influenced Frank O'Hara and that was certainly wide. And I was already familiar with the confessional poets – Plath and Lowell from school (who could forget Plath's 'Daddy' or lines of Lowell's like 'My mind's not right' ('Skunk hour') and 'Crows maunder on the petrified fairway' ('Waking in the blue')) and later Sexton. Yet I was a bit snobby and with some exceptions, poetry that wasn't surreal or postmodern enough didn't really interest me. Now I'm a happy mongrel and will read anything I think is any good.

I'm no poetic genius. That sounds if there was a possibility I could be but what I mean is I'm okay with that now. I'm okay with being one of the masses who has to slog away at something to get good at it, or just better. Perhaps that was another reason why my poetry stalled before stopping altogether – I didn't really understand how to apply myself, even though I read poetry a lot. I didn't know how to follow a thread of experience, or to trust my own perceptions. My poetry was shallow and playful because I couldn't express my own life, I couldn't be a witness to it.

And I'm already harvesting the fruits of slog. I can see a noticeable improvement in quality, sometimes from one poem to the next. I can read poems I was writing weeks ago, days ago, and see clearly that they just don't come up to scratch. But it's also clear that it was necessary to write them to reach the current stage. Even more strange, some of my recent, relatively strong poems bear cadences from weaker poems from fifteen years ago. Experiments are never wasted, because their lessons are unconsciously applied to later work. What alchemy! What magic!

The trick now is to keep that inner life alive while also ensuring the outer life is whole. Keep up exercise. Keep going to Grow. Keep trying to get more work. I have to stay in the world.

My major challenge: time. No longer can I waste it, yet poetry needs time for the brain to simply waft with no object or aim.

As I read the work of poets that I didn't have the patience or attention span to stay with a few years ago, the importance of reading beyond poetry becomes evident. Poets devour history, biography, the classics; they refer constantly to myth.

Yet this doesn't mean intellectual snobbery. Quite the opposite. Every perception has the potential to contribute to a poem. Nothing is wasted, therefore the attention must be on everything. Poets are not vague, romantic idiots. They observe the world keenly, sharply, with an eye for the finest of details. They are, of all things, journalists! Just much more careful journos than those you will find on the pages of broadsheets like The Guardian, because they identify and note what too often remains invisible and unexpressed.

Which reminds me – that newspaper, whose online version fell last year on the parched Australian media landscape like a cooling shower, recently published a very nasty little article pooh-poohing a poem by the much-maligned young Twilight star Kristen Stewart.

Okay, so the title is terrible and the first paragraph not much chop but there are some great lines in the rest of it. Damn the Guardian for being so snobbish and a tad misogynistic into the bargain (how dare a vacuous female Hollywood star believe she could write something decent!). But us poets had the last laugh – the poem got a much fairer assessment from Professor Brian Kim Stefans of UCLA, and being compared to Bernadette Mayer and Antonin Artaud is no mean feat. I'll concur with the professor's encouraging line 'I say go for it Ms. Stewart'. 

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Memoir Writing: How to Find Your Voice as a Writer

Writing a memoir sets you on an inner voyage of discovery. At the end of it you’re almost bound to know yourself much better than you do at the start.

A vital key to writing a successful memoir is finding your voice as a writer. The irony is that you may have to listen to many other voices before your own comes through.

Your authorial voice is an organic thing that makes your writing unique. But how to unearth it successfully differs from person to person.

Some lucky people simply start to write, and the voice of their earlier self suddenly bubbles up and they simply channel it. For others it’s not so easy. When you start to write, there are likely to be psychological restrictions you’re unaware of: parental dictums to be polite; fear of hurting or embarrassing family members; the restrictions imposed by well-meaning teachers; even the sense of what is syntactically correct can all interfere with voice.

One way to get the flow going is to read lots of different memoirs. I’ve read hundreds of memoirs by now and they’ve all helped to put me in writing mode.

Reading other memoirs can provide permission. ‘She dared say that!’ you think, and a hidden part of you that has been crouching in the attic of your psyche for years, ignored or reviled, starts to stretch and parade herself. And there are things she’s desperate to tell you.

Like how you really felt when you moved house at the age of nine. And why you stopped dancing classes at the age of twelve. And who you really had a crush on, even though they weren’t at all cool. This disowned self is far more interesting and subversive than you realise and if you let her speak she may give your writing a force and immediacy that might otherwise be lacking.

When I first started writing it became apparent after a while that I was repressing the most interesting and subversive parts of the narrative. I would describe the event and then find myself mentally rehearsing something I hadn’t thought interesting enough to include. Hmmm. Over a period of time it became clear that the most interesting things were the things that I didn’t want to look at.

Good writing is about bravery. It’s about daring to look. Experiencing the feelings again is likely to be painful. But the pain won’t last. The record will.

When I consider voice, I find myself also looking at style, tone and language. Perhaps voice is the combination of these, powered by the essence of the narrative self who is the subject of the memoir.

When you read other memoirs, take note of the tone, as that is a key aspect of voice. Tone can range widely from highly emotional to melodramatic, from blackly humorous to cheerful or self-contained (and can also be a combination of any of these).

Also important is language, which also varies depending on the aims of the writer. For example, you can use language to bring the reader closer to the emotion or distance them from it. Language combines with tone to tell the reader who the narrator is, what life stage they’re at, and how much distance they have from the subject matter.

Two stand-out memoirists

Out of all the many possible examples of memoirists I want to choose two that illuminate voice. Both are excellent writers yet their styles are in  sharp contrast, at either end of two extremes.

In Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox (above) writes about a horrific childhood in small, jewel-like vignettes that have a haiku quality about them. They are highly visual recollections that together make up what one admiring reviewer called  ‘a montage of scenes and epiphanies’.

Fox was abandoned by her feckless parents at birth, and passed around from person to person, sometimes finding temporary sanctuaries, often not. In writing her memoir she seems to have stuck to the rule: ‘thou shalt not wallow’. There is little sentiment here and no self-pity. There is a sense of someone surviving sufficiently to retain the observer self, who notices the unique detail and stores it for later. 

Whether a restrained style is right for you will depend on your strengths as a writer and your subject matter. If you want to write with drama and urgency, you’ve got to read Marya Horbacher (pictured at top). She’s written two outstanding memoirs, Wasted: A Memoir of Bulimia and Anorexia and Madness: A Bipolar Life. The first details a near-fatal eating disorder that Hornbacher developed at the age of nine; the second her experience of, and coming to terms with, a severe form of bipolar disorder. Hornbacher’s work is fast-paced, highly dramatic and a miracle of immediacy. She is a lyrical writer from whom the words seem to pour. 

Hornbacher’s work is also noteworthy because, especially in Wasted, she combines an intellectual and at times scholarly approach with a highly vernacular, heightened and poetic style. A chaotic, free-for-all quality accompanies the powerful imagery and strong narrative drive.

There are occasional drawbacks to both styles. Fox has deliberately stripped emotion from her writing; Borrowed Finery  is almost an essay protesting the misery memoir genre. At the same time it occasionally becomes a little frustrating to read because you don’t get much of a back story (or a sense of Fox’s adult life – perhaps a sequel is required).

And while Hornbacher is brilliant, quixotic, un-put-downable, at times the reader feels trapped in the narrator’s hellish world and, especially in the earlier work, her self-destructive tendencies (of course, involuntarily identifying with the writer’s experience is a sign of good writing and probably what Hornbacher intended).

Neither of these memoirists is ‘wrong’. Far from it. Both have sought and found the voice that’s right for them.

Are you struggling to find your memoir voice? Which writers have helped you?

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The Tyranny of the List: How to Break Free of Your ‘To Do’ List

Lists are great things. They help give us focus and remind us of things we need to do. They’re essential in most work situations. They’re useful for remembering to buy a present or ring someone, keeping appointments, getting what you need at the supermarket, and completing an urgent admin task to avoid getting fined or penalised. And they’re absolutely indispensible in goal setting. They can also be important for people suffering depression or struggling to fill unstructured time.

But.

Every now and then they need to be ditched. I’ve discovered that letting myself off the ‘list-leash’ on a regular basis can be a good thing, even if it’s just temporary. If you’re fond of lists, or you want to become more spontaneous, it could be a worthwhile exercise to have a list ‘holiday’, no matter how short. (If you’re a bit chaotic and just starting to use lists to get more focused, it’s probably not a good idea – yet.)

Not that it’s easy. Truth to tell I’m addicted to lists, especially the daily ‘to do’ list. Writing the list and then ticking the items off once I’ve completed them gives me a sense of comfort, security and achievement. Perhaps you’re the same. Sometimes not doing something that we strongly believe we need to do right away, even if intuition is telling us to leave it for now, can be excruciating.

And that’s part of the problem.

Over the last two decades or so I’ve worked very hard to develop and trust my intuition. One of the reasons for this is my tendency to behave in quite compulsive, driven ways. Many of my actions over the years resulted in putting much energy into particular aims, goals or activities that weren’t right for me.  All too often the form – getting something done and ticking it off – was more important than the worth (and sometimes timing) of the behaviour. I would complete a task or work towards a goal in a bloody-minded way, while completely failing to listen to the faint intimations within that were gently telling me what I really needed to be doing at that particular time.

I’m now much more intuitive, but this ability has been hard won (wish I’d learned it when I was a young ’un!).

In the past six months or so I’ve noticed that, especially where the weekend is concerned, I  write my ‘to do’ list and then often partially, and sometimes completely, ignore it. That’s because my intuition is telling me to do something completely different. I might end up sprawled on the carpet watching DVDs on a Saturday afternoon instead of mopping the floor, or staying home and writing instead of meeting up with a friend (or the opposite).

The results have been fascinating. When I ignore the list, I follow my energy, and yet things still get done, although not always in the timeframe I’d envisaged. When the right time to mop the floor comes, the energy is magically there to do it. Or suddenly I might get the urge to do some yoga in the lounge room instead of having to force myself. And after my slothful afternoon watching DVDs, hey presto! I’m recharged and ready to face the world again.

 What if you procrastinate?

There’s  a really important caveat here. Following your energy isn’t the same as procrastinating. I may still not want to mop the floor (in fact I never do; it’s the domestic task I hate the most, with cleaning the bath coming a close second). But the energy is there once I start, and the task is done in an optimum way.  If you’re trying to overcome procrastination it may be a challenge to ditch a  ‘to do’ list, but it could still be a worthwhile experiment.

On the other hand, list-ditching can sometimes help with procrastination. Imagine you’ve been planning to get a Twitter account. You’ve been putting it off because you assume it’s going to be difficult and complicated, and the more you think about it the more trouble it seems. Then one day when you’re being spontaneous your energy leads you to Twitter and before you know it, you’ve signed up. Spontaneity can help ditch the overthinking that can lead us to put things off.

None of us has unlimited energy or time. We’re all trying to juggle various roles, interests and activities. When I trust my energy and  throw the list away, even for a short while, I find I get a surprising amount done with less effort.

I don’t want to make out that I’m some sort of spontaneity saint. Quite the opposite. In fact at the moment I’m itching to update my long-range goal list; I’ve let this go for a while and I’m really feeling the need to have that structure again.

But even when I give myself the safety and structure of a list, whether it’s a daily or long-range one  – and as I’ve said, I need daily lists during the week – there’s flexibility in it. If something doesn’t feel right to do at a particular time, I won’t do it. Sometimes it may feel right to do at a later time, and sometimes not at all. I still keep my A4-sized  diary open on my desk, reminding me of any appointments or particularly urgent tasks.

Ditching the list can be especially valuable for creativity. We all know that the muse doesn’t turn up at scheduled times (although self-discipline encourages it to do so – that’s a separate topic). Being willing to drop everything and write a book chapter, complete a sketch or strum the guitar for half an hour means you make the most of your creative energy.

An exercise for the list-addicted

If you’d like to be more spontaneous, you could experiment with ditching your ‘to do’ list, but you don’t have to go all the way.

One option is to write your daily list and then simply give yourself permission to ignore it if necessary. Try doing one or two things on the list, and see how that feels. (Better still, write your list slowly and intuitively - you may be surprised at some of the items you end up with!)

Another option is to give up the list for, say, a few hours. Write it, but give yourself a few hours off, or don’t write it at all until halfway through the day.

The more daring option is to have an entire list-free day – scary but fun! Enjoy the ride!

I’d love to hear about where you are with  ‘to do’ lists – whether you’d like to become more disciplined with using them, or are trying to be a bit more spontaneous.

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Time and time again

Human beings are hardwired to regret. One of the most pernicious regrets is that of lost time.

Do the following statements sound familiar? We learn from our mistakes. Even suffering brings growth. If we take a wrong direction it provides valuable feedback that can enable us to make a better decision the next time. Similarly, if we are too frightened to act in case we make a mistake, then that defeats one of the main purposes of life, which is to learn.

All of these things are true. However, it’s also true that some mistakes come at a great cost, and that some decisions have serious adverse consequences. We don’t always get a second chance. These are hard truths that I believe some new age spiritualities do not take account of.

One of my earliest heroes was the melancholy Leo Sayer, surely the forerunner of today’s emo. ‘I’ve wasted, wasted, so much time / walking on the wire’, he wailed on one of his early and greatest hit songs, ‘The show must go on’.

For me, the hardest thing to put up with in my present life is that, from my own reckoning, I ‘waste’ huge swathes of time, especially compared with my idealised image of what someone with my degree of intelligence ‘should’ be doing. Inevitably I link this wasted time with the present structure of my life, which is the result of mistakes made years ago, when I was literally a different person from the one I am now.

I’ve long forgiven the wasted time of my late teens and twenties, when I didn’t know any better. But in my early and mid-thirties, when I’d started to recover from an eating disorder and gain some sense of engagement with reality, I continued to make some decisions that I knew at the time were unnecessarily timorous. The mistakes I made then led to wasted time that to some extent continues into the present.

This doesn’t mean that I never have valuable experiences. It does mean, however, that I miss out on many important aspects of life and I don’t work nearly as much as I’d like to.

Most of the time I can live with regret about the past – it’s gone, and I know I can’t change it. It’s the continued wasting of the present, the seeming unavoidability of that waste, that’s difficult. And this also relates to the realities of ageing and living alone. I can learn from my mistakes, but the fact is – to be perfectly blunt – at 47, it feels as if I’m literally running out of time.

There are three fronts on which the time appears to be washed under the bridge by forces I can’t control: not working enough because of fear of others, and therefore not being able to shovel money away for a more secure and fun lifestyle (own house, holidays, old age, more music, theatre, expensive clothes, money for good causes); through depression and anxiety not ‘improving’ myself enough ‘culturally’, with appropriately highbrow music, film, and literature; and through having my literary creativity curtailed by the ‘failure’ to achieve an emotionally and socially fulfilled life (the blog has helped a bit with the creativity).

I envy people who write successful books out of the horrors of mental and physical illness or addiction because it seems to me that they have somehow recuperated the ‘lost’ time, made meaning of it and created something new from it. Not only do they help themselves by writing their story down and shaping it into narrative, but they help many others by sharing their story and offering hope. They may also gain financially from sharing their suffering in a way that chimes with others.

I fully understand that I am clinging onto an idealised version of myself. If I had a family I would probably be overly busy, but much of that busyness would involve mundane tasks. I’ve always had a morbid fear of being a female parent, and being given the role of self-sacrificing ‘mother’ instead of equal partner in the parenting enterprise – I look at my sisters, all of them mothers, and simply don’t know if I am better or worse off than they. But fathers also get lost in the mundane – I think of the hours my brother-in-law spends ferrying his kids to footy and basketball.

Yet even amidst the ennui and chronic exhaustion, as a parent I would be able to tell myself that I was achieving a valuable long-term goal – the continuation of the species and the nurturing of tomorrow’s taxpayers and, hopefully, stewards of planet Earth. And my brother-in-law probably uses at least some of that driving (and game watching) time to bond with his children.

As well, the wound of loneliness sometimes requires the antidote of bad television rather than the intellectually stimulating read that some busy parents, including mothers, might crave. At times, such parents might envy the likes of me, free of the never-ending drudgery and pleas for attention. But they might find me curled up in a ball bewailing my fate as I watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares rather than poring over the Collected Works of Charles Dickens as Beethoven’s Ninth thunders in the background.

Obsessed with time management

My fear of wasting time also relates to the mistaken belief that not doing something productive is somehow sinful. I certainly didn’t pick that up from my Catholic upbringing. Instead, this fear stems from the time when I was completing my Masters thesis in the late 1990s. I was on a scholarship, studying full time, and surrounded by successful people who gave papers at conferences, tutored, learned French to improve their understanding of theory, and attended reading groups.

At the time, to my way of thinking the pursuit of knowledge easily trumped consumerism, materialism and any sort of interest in popular culture, and from my lofty, poverty-stricken heights I looked down scornfully on anyone who did not value intellectual endeavour, seeing them as sadly deluded. I spent hours in the library brushing up on theory, much of which has now long since vanished from my mind.

But the sense of directedness I saw in the high achievers was pervasive. I remember one day glancing behind me at the library queue and noticing my supervisor further behind me in the line, waiting to have a book checked out. She poked her head around to scan the queue and, with a quick jerk of her body, abruptly left. I still remember what that momentary action indicated to me: the instantaneous weighing up of the time she would lose in the queue compared with the convenience of having access to the book. This suggested someone whose life had no spare seconds, who was so full of purpose and responsibilities that time management meant the difference between ongoing achievement and mere striving.

So in the couple of years following my Masters I would use every minute of spare time ‘productively’, by, say, reading small cards on which I’d drawn kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) while waiting forlornly at a city bus stop on a biting cold winter’s afternoon.

And before I started editing, and during the times when the work dried up and I was coaxing survey responses from reluctant telephone interviewees, I’d surreptitiously go over Japanese sentences while waiting for respondents to pick up the phone. Eventually the supervisors noticed and, despite my high success rate in obtaining telephone interviews, ordered me to stop. This caused me unseen angst; I couldn’t just relax and let the time be spent simply making enough money to live on. I was obsessed with ‘improving each shining hour’.

At its height, this fear of wasting time would have extended to, say, the idea of socialising with people who I didn’t have much in common with (ie my relatives!). But one gift of my social phobia, and the exploration I’ve done in trying to understand it, is that I now see those everyday interactions as being vitally important.

There are two reasons for this: they're good for mental health generally, because as humans we need to interact with others and feel safer when we’re with others, and particularly our ‘pack’; and because they provide me with valuable exposure practice for my social phobia.

So to some extent regret about wasted time is something I live with. Slowly I’ve begun to realise that the moment, even in its occasional awfulness, even when not filled with mental exercise, has its own integrity.

I could learn kanji till I was blue in the face but it would be useless, a waste of time, unless I was attending a Japanese class or had a reason for learning it such as a planned visit to Japan. Neither of these situations applied, so the keeping up with my Japanese study became, in the end, a waste of time rather than a good use of it.

The concept of mindfulness helped me understand this. Mindfulness involves becoming an observer of the self – one’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings and current actions – in order to move into the present in a more profound way. When I divide my attention too much (writing my diary while watching tele, for instance) I’m subtly diminishing my experience of time, indeed of life. While trying to save time, I may actually be wasting it.

I love good thrillers and I need to spend some time vegging out on weekends. But I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to decent thrillers at my local video store. So last weekend I ended up on a Saturday afternoon watching one of the worst klunkers ever made, Cold Creek Manor with Denis Quaid and Sharon Stone.

There literally wasn’t a scary moment in it; it could have been parody if it hadn’t been so dull and lacking in humour. It made me wonder about the technical aspects of thrillers – why some work and some fail spectacularly. But perhaps the most important thing for me to do was to actually pay attention to the film, observe and follow the creaky plot, and try and work out why it failed, rather than just having it on as background to my random thoughts.

Another reason why unstructured time is vital is that it refreshes the mind and enables creativity. Late one afternoon I took my seven-year-old niece to the park, supervising as she mucked around on the play equipment. For quite a long time she half-lounged on a swing, moving slowly back and forth as she gazed into space. This natural ability to enjoy mental downtime is too often mistaken for laziness. But it's the space in which new ideas and creative breakthroughs hatch themselves.

A book on worry that I read recently goes further than advocating basic mindfulness. In The Worry Cure, Robert R Leahy provides useful advice for incessant worriers who are busy dreading what the future might bring. One of his suggestions is that once you’ve brought yourself back to the present moment using mindfulness, you can add value to the moment, make it count.

I love this idea because it extends the concept of mindfulness so effectively. You bring yourself into the present, become aware of your body, breathing and perceptions; then you do something to improve the present, even if it’s just subtly. This could be something insignificant, like savouring a cup of tea, putting some music on (Beethoven’s Ninth?) or taking the kids for an ice cream.

Using intuition is also important to me in combatting my fear of wasting time. In the past I was constantly using my will to forge ahead; now I use intuition to decide whether something’s worth spending energy on. Anything that feels right can't really be a waste of time.

Being busy for the sake of it can actually cause harm. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s political demise provides a cautionary tale. Rudd seems to have been unable to stop work, to delegate, and he also caused great harm to his staff because he unapologetically worked them to the bone, no doubt causing havoc with their family lives.

‘A staff working year is probably like a dog year, that is it's probably worth seven years in normal life’, he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph of 15 April 2010. That report also stated that he had lost 28 staff, presumably since coming to office in late 2007.

The coup that ousted Rudd in favour of Julia Gillard occurred for many and complex reasons, but the refusal to delegate seems to have been one of them. I sympathise with Rudd and wish fervently that the party had given him an ultimatum months ago rather than cruelly dealing the death blow – but I can’t help seeing in his fate a grim warning about the effects of overwork!

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There’s something about Cate

‘Our Cate’, as the Australian media love to call Cate Blanchett, has well and truly made it. She’s been in countless successful films, and is regularly on the red carpet at opening nights. But she’s one of the few stars who will always be first and foremost seen as a practitioner of the actor’s craft rather than an empty-headed celebrity. This blog entry is a little treatise of admiration for her – well, sort of – and a meditation on acting styles.

The other night I watched a great documentary on ABC 1, In the Company of Actors, that featured Blanchett. It’s a fly-on-the-wall study of the process of taking a successful Australian production – the Sydney Theatre Company’s Hedda Gabler – to New York.

The original season, directed by Robyn Nevin, was performed in 2004. It starred Cate Blanchett as Hedda, who agreed to the project because it was to be based on an adaptation of the original Ibsen play written by her husband, Andrew Upton. The cast would include actors of the calibre of Hugo Weaving, Aden Young and Justine Clarke.

We watch the cast rehearsing the play in Sydney, in a huge high-ceilinged studio, where they’re dressed casually and horseplay around in between finetuning scenes. Next thing they’re in New York, working out how to buy subway tickets, carrying out a technical rehearsal, experiencing their first taste of New York snow, and taking part in a Q and A with local high school students.

Despite the stellar cast, it’s Cate Blanchett who stands out in the doco, even in the rehearsal room. Cate can’t help but always be acting. In this doco, sometimes I swear she responds to the camera (despite herself, I reckon) and plays the part of an actress rehearsing a role. Not that she’s not actually rehearsing the role as well, of course.

Which leads me to the thesis of this blog entry. Forget the bad actors, I’m not talking about them, the ones who are stars first and actors second. (I’m also talking about film rather than the stage, as the latter necessarily involves exaggeration of movements, voice projection and so on.) When it comes to good film actors, I think there are two kinds – those who overtly dramatise the role, perhaps are in danger of overdramatising it, and those who disappear into it. Blanchett is definitely in the former category.

In the doco, the camera takes advantage of this quality in Blanchett. We see her dressed for her role as Hedda Gabler, hair up in a severe bun and wearing a very fitted Edwardian gown with a high collar, set to make her first entrance on the first night in New York. (We find out later that the audience has included luminaries such as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep.) In the moments before she goes on stage she stares nervously around, breathes, drinks some water, waits. The camera at this point shows a quick series of stills of her performing these actions, rather than obvious motion. Blanchett’s whole persona lends itself to this beautifully. Again, she’s unconsciously acting being an actress waiting to go on stage.

You can’t fake this kind of, well, fakery. It has to be there, in the litheness of your movements as well as your intelligence, and the way that the two work together. That’s why Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow will never be great actresses – they’re reasonably intelligent but they can’t communicate their characters through their bodies that effectively. When Kidman tries too hard to do this, she’s ludicrous. Blanchett's lanky body, in contrast, drips affect, no matter what she's doing.

This category of actors show off their craft – you know they’re acting, you can see it, but does that matter if the acting’s good? I don’t think it does, mostly, in the same way that you might be able to see the machinations of a favourite writer but still love their work.

The other classic example of this style is, of course, Meryl Streep. Think of the mannerisms she employed in Sophie’s Choice, or the exaggerated accent in Evil Angels. Streep is always on show, always being seen, yet she’s mesmerising. Recently I watched her being interviewed by British talk show host Jonathan Ross about her role in Mumma Mia. She draped herself on the couch and smiled just a little too magnanimously, and she was stately, dignified and actorly. But she was also funny, ironic, willing to laugh at herself.

Emma Thompson’s another obvious example of this category – her style was just perfect for a classic melodrama like The Remains of the Day.

The danger with this kind of actor is that if they are let loose they may ultimately overdramatise, so it’s very important that the director reins them in. One of the few of Blanchett’s performances I didn’t like was her role as Katie Hepburn in The Aviator. A drama queen playing a drama queen? It was way too much (and she was too old for the role, I thought).

I sympathise with this kind of acting because I think I can understand it. It’s fuelled by a particular kind of sensibility that always needs to add another layer to life, to either send it up, ramp up its emotional volume, or both. It’s born of a compulsive need to comment on things, to reflect the world back at itself, through the medium of the body. It runs in my family – my uncle was an amateur thespian and my sister’s a drama teacher, and as a frustrated non-actor I’m always wanting to mimic people and dramatise the stories I tell others. I don’t think it’s necessarily an exclusively feminine tendency, but I think women add to it a further layer of culturally installed self-consciousness that men don’t tend to have.

There is a very different kind of actor that, as I said, inhabits the character so entirely they disappear into it. It’s not a matter of underplaying the role, but of letting one’s ego disappear altogether. Samantha Morton stands out in this regard, for example in her role as Deborah Curtis in the film Control.

At her best Kate Winslet does this too and Aden Young is simply brilliant at it, as he demonstrated in the role of Nat in the recently released film Lucky Country. And let’s not overlook Anthony LaPaglia: it’s been said of him that you can see him thinking. Finally, there’s Russell Crowe, bless his cotton socks, who despite his huge ego and the dramatics he gets up to with telephones in real life, is never afraid to play men of every stripe and character, and to ‘become’ them.

Ultimately neither acting style is innately superior to the other. Both styles remind us that no matter how obscenely rich and ridiculously feted they are, and even how absurd their private lives may become, good actors are first and foremost artists.

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My life as a blogger

It’s about four months since I started blogging and though this is hardly a long time I have been thinking lately about the effect it has had on my life.

I’m hardly Robinson Crusoe in turning to blogging. An article about blogging in the Age newspaper, written two years ago but still worth reading, estimated that 1000 new blogs are created every day. More recently it’s been estimated that a new blog starts every second.

I remember reading more recently about a survey which found that blogging improves your mental health and reduces depression. That’s not why I started blogging. It was because I had something to say but had failed as a short story writer and as a freelance writer for local broadsheets. I wanted an audience. But I also just wanted to get my constant political gripes out of my system. Modern life makes me angry. I wanted a forum to express my anger, goddam it!

And I wanted to stop pretending, as a writer, that I was completely sane. I’m not, but at the same time I’m not completely un-sane (I don’t like the word ‘insane’).

There are things I have discovered about blogging that I don’t like. It would be wrong to romanticise it. Despite the stories you hear about canny wunderkind who seek fame by crashing celebrity parties and then blogging about it (Julia Allison springs to mind) there are things I’m too scared to talk about.

This is due to low-level paranoia as much as anything else. For instance, I have written a couple of entries about my regular walks to the park with my sister’s dog Jordan. But I have had a couple of crushes at the park and I’m simply too paranoid to go into them.

But because my blog is anonymous there are things I can talk about – namely, my family. I can’t tell you how it has helped me to – well not just bitch about them, but try and put their peculiarities into words. I think in these instances the often silent blogosphere has acted like a wise therapist who simply nods sagely and looks understanding. My family are weird, no doubt about it. And getting that into the ether in black and white has been incredibly liberating.

What I love most about blogging is the looseness of the form. A blog entry can be a sentence, a poem, an essay, an article, a diary entry. And there is no compulsion (except in my case, self-induced) and no deadline. If I stop blogging tomorrow it won’t matter. No-one will stop paying me. No-one will email me and demand copy. This is a form that cuts a huge amount of slack. It’s perfect for someone like me who is blocked as a writer.

Although it wasn’t my primary aim I think blogging has helped my mental health. When I’m not working (which has been too much of the time this year) it gives me purpose. It keeps my brain going. It forces me to order my chaotic thoughts. It makes me aware of my shortcomings but somehow more tolerant of them. And it makes me feel heard, even if the most enthusiastic visitor to my blog is – yours truly (did I mention I was narcissistic?)

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Describing the mess

I heard Helen Garner on Radio National recently, speaking about writing her most recent novel The Spare Room. She described her difficulty in constructing the end of the novel, and referred to the 'small voice' within that told her that even though what she had written sounded good, it was utterly wrong.

Then she had a moment of revelation. She was washing or drying her hands after disconsolately going to the loo when it came to her that she could write the novel's ending as a flash forward. She began writing furiously and had nailed it in a couple of days, and then she lay on the floor and howled – she had been afraid to face up to describing the death that occurs at the end of the novel. Garner expressed wonder at the way in which some writers can keep ploughing on, ignoring the instinct that is telling them they're on the wrong track, until they end up throwing out '140 000 words'.

Hearing this was such affirmation to me of the pitfalls of creative writing. My creativity is like an elusive bird or butterfly that I can't catch. I start with a brilliant phrase or idea, begin writing and then it somehow disappears – as if a too-logical part of my brain has stepped in and blocked it or, more easily fixed, I've stopped following the idea and gone off on another tangent.

How easy it is to just keep writing at this point. And indeed, many guides to creativity advise just that. They talk about 'free writing' and insist that one should just keep going and not judge. But my creativity doesn't always flow in the right direction. I know when I've veered off, but I just don't know how to get back on track again.

Another thing Garner discussed was her habit of writing for an hour each day, practising getting down the tiny details of life, a skill that is a hallmark of her work. This is what I'm trying to do. But there's another difficulty here: how to stay true to one's own experience, and not adopt other voices and familiar tones, or echo popular discourses. It's so easy to avoid your own complicated, messy reality when it's not reflected in the culture. But the point is that no-one's is: not exactly, anyway. The rush to be like others can stop us examining the tiny revelations and puffball-like imaginings that make our brains and experiences unique.

This also holds for memoir. It's got nothing to do with writing talent and everything to do with sheer bravery, to dig down into the dirt and find the bulb of what was actually going on emotionally when recalling and describing any particular incident. What I've discovered is that the willingness to do this sometimes feels profoundly disobedient. In other words, parental injunctions about not feeling and thinking certain things have to be gently and persistently exposed and ignored. It's sometimes exhausting but the effect is exhilarating.

Compare these two pieces of writing about my discovery that I had inadvertently taken home a pencil after visiting my grandparents'. The first is an early version of the experience, which I wrote without thinking too much about the incident:

Sick with misery, I pondered my grandparents’ horror at the theft, their immediate loss of trust in me. I had disturbed the natural order of things and from now on they would regard me with disdain. I had no right to be in the car, no right to be going home to a normal dinner like a good child. My very future as a member of my family was suddenly doubtful.

I revised this text after letting myself relive the incident, and I think the result is stronger:

In that second of apprehension I fell through a kind of ontological trapdoor. God fled from the air: all the evil of the world came to rest in that truant pencil and my traitorous heart. For surely on some level I had meant to steal it? I had no right to be in the car, no right to be going home to a normal dinner like a good child. My very future as a member of my family, as a loved grandchild, was suddenly doubtful.

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