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February 25, 2006
And More Besides; Length and the Way of the List
The excercise using 10 lots of alternatives in a list gives me a longish micro and when I've been doing a few of these, I start seeing a theme emerge.
Midway through the previous week, I decided to do 30 lots. This was a stretch, but I noticed myself relax halfway through and start enjoying myself. I kept a book handy for those moments when my butt wanted to unstick from the chair. This time I had the Sleepers Almanac handy and I'd start to read a story and become alive inside someone else's fiction and suddenly I was ready to get back to my own. It's a version of doodling. The other thing you could do is have a shower--that's always good for lists except that the paper would get wet.
One of the things I've noticed of myself as a writer is the way I am getting so judgemental while I'm reading. So I'm stopping it. It does get in the way of having a good time with a book.
Early next week, I've got my list of 30 that I'm shaping for a story. I might add 2 of the short fictions that I already have, to see if I come up with a longer and even more complex story -- I have a nice letter come in the mail this week asking for a story so either I'll have to get one that's already in the bag or... But I'm always hanging out to create something new!
And tommorrow, I'm going to look at that cooking gadget again, the one that I mentioned before in another post. Tommorrow, I'm dragging my sceptical husband off to see what a miracle it is. I'm for anything that will save time so I can write more!
Posted by girija tropp at 11:34 PM | Permalink
February 24, 2006
The writing excercise, expanded and added onto etcetera
I have written about this before. Also, I have to acknowledge 3 AM Epiphany as the place where I started with the idea which grew and grew. I'll start off with the simple version:
Write twenty sentences, alternating as you go an idea/event/description/episode/oddball thought/desire from the past followed by the present. You could also try dream/present or something taken from old/new story. Once you are finished use the material to compose your story.
For myself, I am finding that I come up with rich textured narrative. Others in an online office with other writers at Zoetrope All-Story are finding that they are coming up with material that they don't know they can send out (too intimate) and others are hooked! Yay for being hooked!
So here's my theory: I think the left brain needs to be occupied while the right one is busy being creative ie, one is busy making lists and numbering while the other one is out to play, looking out the window and dreaming.
The beauty for me of this way of writing is that I can fit it into my life when I can't schedule a whole day to write. I can put down into my list as I go. Then I go back to find the pattern, the theme, and then the story!
More later....
Posted by girija tropp at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
A real writer knows how to get on top of the desk
Sometimes it happens. The desk looks like a storage facility. I've been planning to start work on my next opus in March. On my mental planning worksheet, I'd intended to get a few things done and under the carpet by now, like the GST (quaterly tax on pencil on paper and nibs and so on), stock-up on household goods so that no one would ask me to go down to the supermarket to get toothpaste when I was in the middle of serving a character their just desserts, be nice to everyone so that they can forgive me later--by making them 3-course meals right now, eat icecream, write lots of microfiction because my short-shorts will have to take second place soon, plus of course, clear that desk.
First, I have to clear around the desk, and that is when I notice how my bookshelves are filled with the books I was going to read two years ago. This is the reason all the books I intend to read now are still on the table--there is also the stash that I was going to read yesterday over there in the corner next to the coffee table that I bought from Nipoon. It's one of those art pieces that I could afford only because I knew Nipoon and his wife Namonita. (I tried to put these two names in a story and it didn't work out).
So I decide that the books on my shelves should go in the corner and those in the corner should go on my shelves and some could go on the 'donate' pile. While I am doing this I open my drawer--and find, ohoh, all the notes and stuff that I used when I was stuck on my last oeuvre. I read them through and most of is like reading about someone going off to the crusades.
While I am doing this I have a call from one of the Vegie Curry Man stalls saying that I need to bring up the sign they've left behind; pronto! Luckily, after some deliberation, it is sorted--Shani from the Chai Tent can divert here and pick it up. Meanwhile the 16-yr-old son of this writer is lying in bed groaning about his headache--why doesn't he learn about keeping tidy hours and eating properly? It seems to me at this point that I should clean out the whole house, or at least start on it, because who knows when I'll be able to be a downtrodden mat again!
I manage to empty out my bottom drawer and throw out a few story iterations (what's my secondary storage hard drive for anyway, but to store more effectively in triplicate, so I never have to look at old versions... and rest in the comfort of knowing that they are there, mouldering quietly in space).
My favorite non-writing magazine, Wired, goes at the bottom of a pile beside me. I add--Bomb, a few issues of the New Yorker and Harpers (issues with favorite writers). It's hard to move books into the corner pile because I am tempted to read as I go. I rescue a Granta (Truth & Lies). A few other Granta books try to come for the ride. And here is a Richard Brautigan, Watermelon Sugar that I scored from Amazon about 14 yrs ago because a critiquing partner said my prose was somewhat similar (at that time).
I realize that I have only got 3/4 way through a BASS 2005. Got stuck on the Stuart Dybek story 'Breasts' My husband loved it but I waded... So I put the '05 and '06 versions together with the O Henry Prize Awards 06 that I got only recently. I throw out my old journals, the workbooks, the visual diaries, my final year project in multimedia design.
I lie on the floor and consider what-next. Already 5 pm and no writing has been done--this hasn't happened in yonks and I feel as if I've got out of bed on the wrong side. Since I rolled off the mattress at an ungodly hour--my husband woke to do the St Andrews market gig at 4.30 am and my eighteen-yr-old eldest son got up at 6am to do the Sustainable Living Festival at Federation Square--I heard him sprinting from the gas tanks to the refridgerated van to the commercial kitchen; in and around the garden to the storage rooms and back into the house, door slamming slamming slamming, I haven't stopped a moment, inbetween doing my writing and fixing up stuff for the business during my 'breaks', yet I feel I'm not enough--otherwise why would I feel let down by my efforts?
The next day, I say this to the person who comes to do cleaning in the Vegie Curry Man kitchen, who shall remain nameless--because he is an important poet in the community and his peers would give him a hard time if they knew what he did for a second job. Anyway, this person is also a very wise person and we have great philosophical discussions because he is also a Sufi Master.
I tell him that I feel dissatisfied by everything, my writing included. He says this is good and compares it to the process of giving birth. A child that is just born, he says, does not look so good; one must fix him up, wipe the blood off the body and wrap the body in nice perfumed blankets before an introduction to visitors. This is not quite what I experienced at birth (he excused himself for being male and not an expert on birthing) but I get the metaphor. So long as the dissatisfaction is not for material things, he says, it is good. Something to reflect on: how to get on top of the desk and be happy!
Next: Extensions to my writing excercise:-- Longa Stronga Donga (an advertisement that can be seen while travelling the Hume Highway--for sexual apparatus)
Posted by girija tropp at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 13, 2006
What more could you ask for?
My partner woke up at 5 am to go and get supplies (organic fruit and vegetables) for the commercial kitchen and I began to surface out of dreamland. I'd like to get out of bed, I thought to myself. But I couldn't quite get the dream, and as I've been in love with my own excercise, I tried to mimic dream state.
The way into this state is to use what I understand from Eckhardt Tolle's book Being in the Now. I try and 'die' to myself, purposefully forgetting that I have a history, letting go of all the meaningful facts that compose who I am. My brain goes into a kind of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and my mind gives off a death rattle; I get a feeling that might translate into I'm bored Get me outta here I want to wake up properly This is all bullshit. If I succeed in handling the brain static, I fall back into the dream.
This time, I fell back into sleep! And had a whole other series of vivid dreams which will inform my next writing spree (if I can get all my work done today with some hours leftover). My writing mates on Zoe are having a ball with the excercise and I love what they are producing. Am I biased?
Also, I'm happy today. I have discovered the Track Changes and Comments function in MS Word. So my swapping of my novel pages with a friend is reaching new levels. I've used it years ago when Jodi Daynard at the Boston Review was editing my story prior to publication, but I was a 'passive' user.
Not only have I found life after Word, but there is a tray of organic peaches on my kitchen table. This is the season (mark my diary) when stone fruit are at their best. And tonight, I'm going to a demo of a new-fangled cooking gadget where you chop, blend, cook etc all in the one machine. I can already see myself -- writing on the banks of a river with the sun on my face and my trusty gadget in attendance.
Okay, back to work.
Posted by girija tropp at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 11, 2006
Dream writing
For some reason, I'm so tired today. Too long in front of the computer, I think. I generated a writing exercise based on dreams. Then Kim and Kathy and Jeff joined in and the flurry of activity was exciting and tiring as well, in a happy way. Plus it's been a busy week. Sleepers Launch night on Thursday. Fetching and carrying for my Year 12 son. Promising all sorts of things to various people, including a brochure design for my sister.
I've been reading this great book called 'Writing the Natural Way' by Gabrielle Ricco. A lot of it is what I use already and most of it I know. But I didn't know that I knew because I'd acquired my working habits in bits and pieces and not always from writing books; from design magazines, from observation Einstein-style. In the book, Ricco talks a lot about the Design mind and the Sign mind, like right brain and left brain, about clustering, and open loops.
I am building this theory about why fad-ing (the creation of a short microfiction, daily) works. She says, in the book, that clustering is a key to the design mind... and I think I do this automatically with the fad words and then use the Sign mind for logical structuring... I don't usually separate the process but I'm trying it out (adapting them t my purpose) as I read through this book.
My own Creative Experiment goes like this:
Write 10 sentences about something that happened in a dream and 10 set within events in the last week, alternating as you write. Use a list of 5 words at the top of the page and incorporate them at will. Once you've finished, look for patterns in what you've written and recreate the story.
I usually hit several walls: one at about the 6th item. Another when I'm finished because everything seems bitsy. But I loved the end result which I sent to the Butterflies of Vertigo anthology. Plus I loved reading everyone else's new work using this excercise.
Posted by girija tropp at 11:46 PM | Permalink
February 04, 2006
Sundays and Cybele, my friend Peter Bryne, an invitation
Over the last few weeks, I've mentioned my stories up at Mad Hatters Review and told you about the reading that Peter Bryne did for me. Meeting Peter came out of the story being accepted at Mad Hatters because they have the audio component and my partner Hal said: I know this wonderful man who comes to St Andrews market and loves our food. He's in radio and has a great voice. And this is how my friendship started with Peter. Anyway, the other day, he sent me the following email with an invitation. It contains the most divine tale. Read on:
Girija and Hal..... lemme, as they say, tell you a little story.
Back in the 1960's, as a callow teenage student, I went along to what was then Melbourne's only arthouse movie theatre (decades before the term 'arthouse' was coined, that's how long ago it was), the Australia Twin on Collins Street. There I chanced to see a little black and white French film called "Sundays and Cybele", which starred Hardy Kruger and some other people I didn't know. Turned out it was the most exquisite, beautiful, glorious, shattering, sublime, heartbreaking, ennobling, fabulous, delightful, uplifting movie ever made!!!! My opinion had been justified about 12 months before, actually, when the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In the course of the month it screened, I saw it many times. The usherettes (yes, that's how long ago it was) actually got to know me. So obsessed did I become over this wonderful film, I actually stole the colour poster from the display case outside the theatre on its final screening. And, apart from my memories, for many years that was all I had to remind me of "Sundays and Cybele". It popped up on late night TV a couple of times, but I was usually too distressed to watch it, trivialised as it was by being shrunk down to the size of a TV screen and being punctuated by ads.
In the 1970s, however, I discovered a Melbourne company called Nostalgia Films, whose brief was to send away overseas and obtain prints of films, if you were crazy enough to spend the money. I was. So I became the proud owner of a 16mm Cinemascope print of the most resplendent and divine film ever made. Every so often, I would borrow a friend's 16mm projector, scrounge an anamorphic lens from somewhere or other, and show the film, usually on my living room wall. Not the ideal way to see it (noisy with the projector right behind you and you had to get up every 30-40 minutes to change the reel), but quite a memorable occasion on those times when it all came together for myself and a handful of guests.
Before I leave the 1970s (and there is a purpose in my telling you all this), just one more anecdote from the decade. In 1978, the star of "Sundays and Cybele", Hardy Kruger himself, came to Australia to make another film, and appeared as a guest on the Don Lane Show on Channel 9 to promote it. Don and I worked together on radio at that time, and my future wife Rhonda worked for him at the television station, so was able to wangle an entree to the Green Room beforehand, where I cornered the aforementioned Mr. Kruger, produced the poster and asked him if he would sign it. The conversation went - Kruger: "Ah, my favourite film!" Byrne: "Mine too!!". Anyway, I now have, as one of my most precious souvenirs, a framed, autographed poster of "Sundays and Cybele". It is hanging right behind me now, as a matter of fact.
Cut to the 1980s. Second daughter about to be born. Rhonda and I torn between 2 names for her and thought we'd wait til she was born before naming her either Skye Cybele or Cybele Skye (Rhonda loved the film too).
Cut to a couple of years ago. I interviewed a gentleman named Ross Campbell on my radio program about a little cinema in Fitzroy, the Erwin Rado Cinema, where, from time to time, people hire out the theatre for film screenings. The theatre is used mainly by the Melbourne International Film Festival as a kind of screening/preview facility, but little film societies occasionally hire it out to run, for example, old silent film classics, or maybe a Garbo festival, or maybe a festival of Italian films. Turns out this theatre has, apart from the delightful and charming Ross Campbell running it, a 16mm cinemascope projector!!! Bingo!!!!!!! Imagine my delight. Ross has joined the 3 reels together for me and now runs the film for me from time to time in the Erwin Rado Cinema, in perfect conditions. It's a delightful little theatre, with the most marvellous atmosphere, and seats about 30-40 in absolute comfort and privacy. Seeing "Sundays and Cybele" there is an awesome experience (if you can stand me sobbing all the way through it). In fact, Skye Cybele Byrne saw the film for the first time there with just me, just the 2 of us. Wow!!!!!
On a website (IMDB - the International Movie Data Base), where I was once trawling for snippets of information I might not have known about my all-time fave film, I once posted a review, along with an invitation to any reader anywhere on the planet who knew the film and who would like to see it again, to come to Melbourne and I would run it for them. One man from Williamstown responded, and I have actually screened it for him, along with a handful of other invited guests. It was a very special night - he hadn't seen the film for 40 years! I've also had emails from France, Belgium, South Africa and other places, all from people who love and remember the film, all wishing they could get out to Melbourne to see it, but unable to for one reason or another. Recently, however, I received an email from another Cybele! She has never seen the film after which she was named, and her mother, who named her for it, hasn't seen it since the early 1960s. Best part? They live in Sydney!!!
Best part for Hal and Girija? Cybele and her mother Elissa are coming down to Melbourne in early February to see the film together. Also present will be Skye Cybele and Nic, along with a handful of my other friends. I am hoping that you guys will be amongst the select little group on the evening of Sunday, February 5, from 6pm. The plan is to see the film and then adjourn to the greatest restaurant on the plant (apart from the Vegie Curry Man van at St. A's Market), the remarkable Wabi Sabi Salon in Smith Street, Collingwood, just around the corner from the cinema, where I have taken a block booking of the rear garden for dinner. Wabi Sabi is truly the most wonderful place...I eat there at least 3, sometimes 6 times a week. Sophia (Aussie girl) and her boyfriend Tomoya (young Japanese god) are just the greatest humanoids and have become good friends. The garden area out back, sublime in itself, seats only about 16, so numbers are limited, but that will just contribute to the specialness of the occasion.
Love,
Peter Byrne (and Skye Cybele, who, if she were here and not at Apollo Bay on holidays, would be in the next room screaming "Make them come, make them come". I can hear her now.)
-------------------------
All of this is history now. The invitation has been accepted and Sunday night we'll be having an experience to tell our children's children.
Posted by girija tropp at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 01, 2006
The Sleepers Launch next thursday, Sunday's Topic Alert, Bits and Pieces
Diary note for next Thursday Feb 9th for the Sleepers Launch. 6p.m. And all you OS writer friends of mine, email me to let me know if you want me to buy you a copy at the special price! Here's the blurb:
Put next Thursday in your diaries for the launch of Melbourne's very own Sleepers Almanac. It's our second one, and this time we're featuring the likes of Sean Condon, Paddy O'Reilly, Girija Tropp, Nina Cullen, Mihai Sora and Meg Mundell, as well as Frank Moorhouse, Kieran Carroll and Stephanie Alexander. And many more. There are 44 authors in all! It's bigger than the last one, and it contains a board game! So come for chocolates and a glass of champagne -- celebrate with us at: *** The Launch of the Sleepers Almanac 2006: The Nervous System *** Upstairs at Dantes, cnr Gertrude and Napier Streets, Fitzroy. Thursday the 9th of February 6pm Start Being launched by The Kitchen Sink, featuring members of the Drowsy Drivers (Keating! the Opera). There will also be performances by The Bedroom Philosopher, David Astle and Leanne Hall. And the Almanac will be at a special launch price. So make sure you blot out the evening for some literary shenanigans.
Also, keep an eye out for the story I'm going to post this Sunday. When Peter Byrne (listen to him reading my stories at the Mad Hatter's Review by clicking the audio link on the side of the picture) sent me an email inviting me to a special event, a screening of a French film he saw in the '60s, a black and white French film, Sundays and Cybele, he also told me a story which I will share with you. Look out for his amazing story and a delicious splash of local history.
And all you guys probably know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said he is finished writing. Right?
Plus, I'm still tired from watching the Spielberg movie Munich last night. I was so on guard about being sold on a point of view that I exhausted myself. Having said that, it was still pro-Jewish. Also, I dragged with me my husband who is Jewish and was concerned, with the election of Hammas, that these were volatile times for this film to air. I kept whispering 'Are you ok?' in his ear. But he was not moved by the movie and found it lacking in 'story'. I said that it seemed that the intention of the movie might not have been 'story' and we had a opinion exchange!
Posted by girija tropp at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)