On writing

The main counter-manoeuvre is to become the new weather god; to establish a climate in which characters who have not mattered, matter, and are safe, even if they don’t know it…

I take it as self-evident that meta-memoir must be avoided at almost all costs – and, correlatively, that my pass here is the word ‘almost’.

In permitting the reader ample space for introspection, Kofman’s narrator is as good a listener as she is a writer. And like any good listener, her role is not to leap to the rescue with answers or advice.

Tolstoy Together isn’t meant to be a standalone book but a companion to War and Peace, a prolonged conference of avid reading minds, a guidebook not for pre-reading but for reinforcement of the distributed memories shared among the travellers after each day’s exploration.

Inspired by the award-winning short film, How to Make Saltfish (2021), by Paul Bell and Stephen Pigram, the Posthumanities research group at Flinders University in Adelaide got to work writing this essay, collectively, more-than-humanly.

I wanted to talk to you about writing and publishing because when you write, you must write a lot, but that does not mean you will publish a lot, which means that when you are writing, or when you have finished writing, it might be that no one knows that you are, or have been, writing. It might be that no one particularly cares that you are, or have been, writing. Or not.

‘What is most important to me is to write a strong text. My intentions are aesthetic, not therapeutic. The work of research, composition, revision, structuring, is what absorbs me utterly and what brings me repeatedly to the page.’

Drama is about writing other people’s points of view of the world … Through craft you can hopefully speak to other people, and the more you do, the more you learn about what works, what doesn’t, how to connect to an audience, the ways you can structure a story to have a particular kind of impact.

When the regulars spoke of it, they agreed that Three Ropes was like a set. A character struts in, speaks a few lines over coffee and then leaves at their appointed time, as summed up by Macbeth.

If the narrating consciousness of my non-fiction is a ‘what’ not a ‘who’ then I am not worried about the voice sounding clever nor the ‘narrator’ being ‘interesting’ and worthy of ‘story / opinion’.