Archive | June 2021

Writing from the Inside Out

Jun26

Book number two from the writing course reading list is Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo. A good quarter of the books on the reading list are books on writing technique and other ‘how to write a novel’ type books.

Dennis Palumbo is a scriptwriter turned psychologist whose practice centres around working with writers and other creatives. He spends his days listening to writers who aren’t writing. Well, that seemed relevant.

In a series of small chapters talking about the various things that get in the way of writing, like isolation, waiting for inspiration, rejection, feeling blocked, fear and doubt, Palumbo draws on his writing experience and his therapeutic practice.

The central theme is that all the feelings writers have, rather than getting in the way of writing, are actually the fuel that we should be putting into our work.

The Doll Funeral

Jun22

I’m doing a writing course for the next nine months and the reading list is quite intimidating. There are nearly 100 books on it. It’s been less than two weeks and I’ve bought ten of them already. Obviously, I’ll buy more than I read and many will sit on the bookcase unread for years. But some will get read, and thus reviewed. Or what passes for a review on this blog.

The first of those is The Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer. I read a three-page extract as part of my homework this week. It was well-written with a rich, evocative style and a real sense of menace in those few pages. Enough to make me want to find out what was going on.

It was not the story I thought it was going to be. From the extract I expected that sense of menace throughout and for the story to be how the protagonist, Ruby, escapes her predicament. It’s not quite that. Ruby learns on her thirteenth birthday that her parents are not her birth parents. For Ruby, this is good news. Her father is violent and hateful towards her and her mother weak and ineffectual. The terror of this situation is effectively conveyed in the first third of the book.

Then the tone shifts. Ruby stands up to her father and, thinking she’s done something irreversible, flees into the forest. After a few days she returns to find that her adoptive parents have decided to ship her off to an aunt. Ruby runs again. This time she finds other lost children and attempts to survive a winter with them. Interleaved with Ruby’s story is her real mother’s tale. Then there’s the thread where Ruby sees the spirits of the dead. In the end Ruby finds out about her real parents and they’re not much better than her adoptive ones. It’s kind of a happy ending, but one that feels out of kilter with the menace of the beginning.

Overall, I didn’t enjoy this much. I liked the first third. The writing is evocative and creates a claustrophobic and frightening opening, but it made promises the rest of the book didn’t keep. In the rest of the book I was more interested in the mother’s story. I liked the way there was always the suggestion that Ruby seeing spirits might have been caused by getting hit on the head so many times, whilst still conveying how utterly real it is to Ruby. I quite like books that resist classification. Despite all that, I found the ending unsatisfying and was disappointed not to read the story I thought I was going to read.

On a daily reading habit

Jun12

In January 2021 I gave myself a challenge to read for thirty minutes a day, every day for a month.

Prior to lockdown in March last year I read on weekdays on my commute. I had two and half hours a day on trains and tubes and at least some of that time was for reading. Then we shifted to working from home. So many upsides to that; and one significant downside. I stopped reading.

It has always felt self-indulgent to read at home. I guess it feels self-indulgent to read at all, but when I’m on train there’s not much else I can do so the two things have become closely connected in my mind. As I wasn’t on a train on an almost daily basis, I wasn’t reading.

Naturally, that didn’t mean I stopped buying books. I just stopped reading them. Or, slowed is more accurate. It’s not like I didn’t read anything between March 2020 and January 2021, I just didn’t do it very often.

Some things I know. Watching TV too much isn’t great for my mental health. My mood slips gradually the more TV I watch and sometimes it takes a while to catch it. At the end of the working day I am tired and it seems like watching TV is a low energy activity and picking up a book will be too much effort for my eyes and brain. I love reading and making time for it makes me feel better, yet somehow it’s hard to do when I’m not on a train.

With the change of routine and the uncertainty of 2020, unusually I felt the need for new year’s resolutions. I needed some small goals and structures for my non-working life, so I decided to give myself twelve monthly challenges, starting in January with reading for thirty minutes a day, every day.

In January, I cracked through about twelve books, plus finished off a few I’d started reading but not quite completed. There was one I started but didn’t like, so discarded it. I’ve grown out of reading books I’m not enjoying for the sake of completeness. I found that if I started the day with thirty minutes reading, I’d often spend another few hours in the afternoons and evenings reading too. I’m not going to tell you that reading consistently made me a better person in some way, because that’s not what it’s about. I can’t say I was more productive or more creative or more informed. It just made me happier.

The twelve monthly challenges thing lasted until March. Then I lost interest. The daily reading habit has stuck. It’s nice to wake up in the morning knowing the first thing I’m going to do is read my book for half an hour. My days are better because of it.