A Writer's Life

I just attended the Yarns in Barns festival in Masterton, and though I didn't see any barns, I did hear a few yarns. Very entertaining they were, too. Unfortunately I only have the notes to my own bit of what turned out to be a hilarious debate on the Friday night (in the post below) so you can't get the full flavour of just how much fun it was, but I had a ball. Met some wonderful people, exchanged some authorly bon mots, talked a lot of rubbish. It was marvellous.

As I soldiered home yesterday with a hangover, I was newly aware of how being a writer can mean a life of wild contrasts - on the one hand, the writing, and on the other, the promotional stuff.

It's lonely, writing. There's no other description for it. You spend hours, days, eons all alone, with only the clanking spaces of the inside of your own head for company. If you're very lucky, you might find your brain populated by a chatty character, and that can sometimes break up the silence a little, though there's always that worrying little accompanying undercurrent (I'm hearing voices. No, it's just a character. But will it ever shut up? I'm hearing voices).

Then you grow to crave the silence. Your hearing becomes hyper-sensitised: you can hear a baby cry two streets away; what you think is full-scale renovations next door is simply someone at the other end of the street wheeling out the dustbin; lawnmowers sound as though they're shaving the hair off your head. 'How am I supposed to work like this?' you wail. To nobody. Or, occasionally, to the chatty character in your head who, let's be honest, doesn't really like to be interrupted and can make you pay for it in many, many ways.

At times like these, I find there's nothing else for it than to head for where there's some life. An hour or two working in a cafe restores the balance in your ears, and reminds you that there are real people having real conversations, while drinking great coffee and eating actual food instead of re-toasted old toast and scapings from the bottom of the oven.

And then you have the complete opposite end of the scale, like the Yarns in Barns Festival - shoved out into the limelight, expected to be outspoken and witty and engaging with strangers, when you might not have used your voice for forty two hours straight and aren't completely positive you've even got one any more (other than the narrative variety).

For some writers it's completely anathema, like dragging a kiwi out of its darkened case and demanding that it tapdance in a spotlight. The two natures do not, cannot go together. For my own part, though, it's something I really enjoy. I love performing, and even do it voluntarily in acting classes and the like. And I love training, so it's no hardship to be suddenly on my feet in front of 20 people (or 220 people as it was on Friday night), generally being a bit gobby.

It's so different to my usual life, however, that I can go a little mad in the headiness of it all, like a kid on a sugar-high. More used to not going out at all, I try to have all my nights out in one evening, having as many high-speed conversations as possible, making all the new friends I can, drinking (apparently) my entire quota of wine for the last month or so, or whenever it was I last went out.

Well, all I can say is, it was worth it. The high-speed conversations were ennervating as well as entertaining, and the new friends will turn out to be just that, I hope. Maybe even some new clients, as well, who often turn out to be friends in time. As for the wine, I can just regret poisoning my liver with it but not a second of the bonhomie in which it was imbibed, and try to do better next time.

Because there will be a next time, of course, someday. After I've spent a few days or weeks or eons placating those little characters in my head. Shush now. I'm home again. Shush. Shshshshshsh. Don't make me come up there ...

The Yarns in Barns Debate Moot - that comedy is just a funny way of being serious

I have to admit that I needed some advice on how to address this weighty issue most effectively – that the best way to get across a serious message is with a light touch; a humourous touch.

Unlike my esteemed team-mate, I am not a comedian. I’m a writer. And I’m a serious writer, but not in the most common interpretation of the word. I’m not literary, grave or overly earnest in my writing – I write about girl spies, flaky women, and boys who turns into dogs – but I do take my writing very seriously. It’s my job, my chosen career, and I deal with serious issues: the breakdown of families and marriages, the loss of hope, of love, even of children. Yet I still believe that the most important part of my job is to entertain, and it is by entertaining, with laughter and humorous characters, that I manage, I hope, to discuss these other issues which form the heart of each story.

So to take a sombre and literary route to this discussion, I decided to look up the dictionary definitions of the words “serious” and “comedy”. I turned first to the Cambridge Dictionary, and looked up “serious.” The first definition given there was ... bad. The second definition of “serious” was ... not joking. While I was pondering the rather impoverished vocabulary used in a dictionary from what is arguably – well, not arguably, it just IS – the finest university in the world, my eye was drawn instead to the little advert that appeared twice around the definition, top and bottom.

The advert was this: TRICK OF A TINY BELLY! Cut down a bit of your belly every day by using this 1 weird tip. Next to this was a diagram of a woman lying on her side on the floor, doing some peculiar side lift. When she was up on her elbow, she was plump, when she was flat on the floor she was thin. Amazing.

And from this I deduced three things:

1 – how easy it is to be distracted from a serious agenda by something lighter, like that woman up on her elbow.

2 – that the students of Cambridge University, of whom I was one many years ago, will in the future probably be very dim, but extremely toned ....

And 3 – that I really must lie on my side on the floor more often.

Anyway, I gave up on the Cambridge dictionary and turned to another, where “Serious” meant “requiring deep thought or application”. And I thought – yes, so for those not given to deep thought or application, which is, after all, most of us, then comedy is the perfect conduit for feeding us with serious information.

And what is comedy, according to the dictionary? It is: a piece of drama of light and humorous character in which the central motif is triumph over adversity. And what could be more serious than triumph over adversity? The origins of the word came about in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and lord knows they needed a bit of triumph over adversity then, what with Black Death and plagues, life expectancy of about 14 and a half, and a fashion statement being the wearing of a wimple.

Comedy came about, I’m sure, because of the need to make sense of, to deal with the weightiest and darkest of situations – sickness, loss, pestilence, death, war. And isn’t it true that comedians themselves often developed the art of being funny in order to survive the most serious of personal situations: bullying, being ostracised, even massive and manic depression. Some of the greatest comedians of all time, present company excepted, have used humour to exorcise the demons of their dark and serious minds – John Cleese, Tony Hancock, Robin Williams to name but a few.

They worked out that it’s much harder to be angry, to victimise someone, to beat them up, even to kill someone if they’re making you laugh. My teenage daughter worked this out for herself when she was still very small. Now she’s 13 she’s got a whole stand-up routine to divert me when the need arises, and I find it really hard to seriously consider murdering her ...

Building on that, I’d like to pick up on a suggestion made by comedian Sanjeev Baskhar in a recent episode of the Monty Python series. He pointed out how good comedy crosses age and religious and cultural barriers like nothing else on earth. His idea was this: to drop Mpegs of Monty Python’s fish dance scene into war zones, because it would be so much harder to want to kill someone when you’re watching a famous man in silly shorts being slapped with a snapper. Or the more likely image these days of a famous man in silly shorts being photographed with a celebrity wannabe stripper, which is not being slapped with a snapper, but being snapped with a slapper.

In fact, I like the idea so much that I’ve got an even bigger suggestion to make. Why stop at Mpegs and videos? Now that the Comedy Festival’s all over, we’ve got hoards of NZ comedians with nothing to do– why not drop them bodily into war zones to do a bit of a routine and take the attention away from people killing each other. Picture it, people - Dai Henwood in a little flak jacket; Jeremy Elwood in fatigues. They wouldn’t just record the news of the last Seven Days, they would BE the last seven days. And if we get a few of the manically depressed ones as well we’d be killing two birds with one stoned comedian ... the comedy antidote to Al Quaeda suicide bombers. We’ll call them ... the ComiKazes. And furthermore, by sending a dozen comedians into battle, we’ll be doubling the size of the New Zealand Armed Forces, so it’s an all-round winner. The triumph of humour over adversity.

I think it would work. Because there is no doubt in my serious writer’s mind that comedy is the best way to tackle the dark issues of the world. And if you take away only one thing, one useful tip, from this debate, then I hope it’s this:

If you lie on your side flat on the floor, you can trim your belly, because apparently the fat just drips right through the floorboards. You heard it here first. Thank you

Come along to this!

Too busy writing books to do blogs this week, but check out Yarns in Barns during the last weekend in May. Have been roped into doing a debate which terrifies me (but should be massive fun) and then a workshop on the Saturday which doesn't (and should also be fun). http://www.writegoodstuff.co.nz/yarns_in_barns_2010.pdf