So lat night I had an hour or two to myself after the gym and I began work on my masterpiece: The Definitive Australian Gay Classic.
This hasn't been done before, to my knowledge.
It fits somewhere into the same genre of those old Crawford productions like All The Rivers Run. A bit like A Town Like Alice (the second half). A feast of the Baz Luhrmann variety. With a bit of Brokeback Mountain thrown in.
Priscilla Queen of the Nineteenth Century.
In novel form.
Not a movie. Which the above would infer.
I plan to be the Colleen McCollough of homos.
I post this here in the hope it will encourage my fellow literary-types to also write. The Lending Library could expand its borders a little.
A safe place for bookworms, nerds, wordies, grammar-Nazis and would-be members of the Literarty.
What is this?
The CNG Lending Library doesn't actually exist - not in the physical sense. It is more a concept. A fellowship.
It is about sharing works of literature. It is about combining the libraries of four journalists who between us, figured we probably had enough titles to keep each other amused without a visit to A&R/Dymocks/Borders.
It is about afternoons wrapped-up on the couch under a doona with Dickens. It is about evenings cocooned in bed with Atwood or Picoult or Kerouac.
The rules are simple:
1. Loan and lend in good faith.
2. Respect the volume, the owner and the author.
3. Never take a book into the loo.
4. Always return promptly.
New parties are welcome to join by application: cnglendinglibrary@gmail.com
What's on the bedside table?
- Rachel: The Post Birthday World
- Lindsay: Howard's End
- Kate: Dorothy Sayers short stories. She's mistress of the genre.
- Dan: Catch 22, Joseph Heller
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7 comments:
I write all the time. Not as much as I used to I suppose. My ambitions aren't quite as lofty though. I just do it for something to do.
I set myself a goal about two years ago that I would actually finish a novel and I finally did it about a year ago. Unfortunately it is pretty shit - I really had to push myself not togive up with a side effect is that much of it just isn't paticularly good. It doesn't have lofty ambitions - it was intended as the kind of book I would read on holiday - but I'm not sure it even reached its goal of being entertaining.
Anyway, for the past three months or so I have been trying my hand at something quite different and have just hit the 35 page mark (yup not much but exciting to me).
I'm expecting the reach the place where I get bored with the whole thing pretty soon now so I'm wondering how you guys deal with it when you just lose interest and whether you think it's worth pushing yourself on...
I have trouble with plots. I think it's because i've been a journalist for so long I can't think that far ahead anymore. I've always written totally awesome descriptive passages and then thought, right, what should the characters do now? So consequently 35 pages is a bit beyond me. I love short stories.
For my big novel that gets me the recognition I deserve I know I should just write about what I know. But I'm worried about straying into thinly disguised semi-autobiographical territory which is generally arrogant, pretentious wank-ville. Unless you're augusten burroughs. or Jack Kerouac. Although I think both of them are arrogant and pretentious but at least only for 400 or so pages at a time.
Write what you know is such a common refrain. I have a real issue with the thing I'm writing at the moment because I feel like I have turned my back on that advice.
The story started off focusing on a girl who was basically a fictional me, but as I wrote I became more interested in the character of her ex-boyfriend to the point where he has taken over the entire story.
What do you think about girls writing about guys and guys writing about girls? I feel like a bit of a fraud, particularly as I often get irritated by female characters written by men.
My fraud is even worse than you'd think because (sorry Dan) one of my characters is gay too. Oh fuck maybe two of them are, I haven't really figured it out yet. What the fuck does a straight girl know about a gay guy? Not much, not much at all.
I think about that a lot, sometimes I have to google a male author because I feel like he's too good at describing a female mind and start to think maybe Steve is a female name wherever he's from.
I think being an author means putting yourself in other people's shoes, even fictional people, so I suppose a good author should have no problems doing it.
Oh and I should add that since you're creating the characters you're the expert on them. So if someone says "gay men don't think like that" you can always resort to the "well, this one does" response. But of course if they're thinking that in the first place they've lost their suspension of disbelief anyway and you've probably lost them.
Having said all of that mostly all of my characters are female, so what do I know.
Maybe I'll have to adopt some kind of pen name. Sebastian Melmot has a nice ring to it...
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