Approaching Critical Mass in Writing Fiction

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For the first time in many years I have the fortune to dedicate as much time to my own fiction writing as I have to others’ over the years, and I’m finally at a point where I really feel as though I’ve got an interesting story to tell, and a halfway decent style.

(Perhaps that sentence wasn’t a good example of that style.)

I’ve been hacking at it slowly for nearly six months, and thanks to Asialink I’ll spend the next three months dedicating at least half of my full-time working week to developing a novel manuscript. A novel novel, actually, but that’s a topic I don’t know how to write about yet.

I know it’s going to take all that time and probably more to reach the point I’ve started thinking of as the critical mass of writing fiction – ‘critical mass’ being the point at which I’ve built up enough understanding of what I’m actually writing to be able to churn out prose that might actually be the mustard of maybe the first draft of the completed manuscript.1

I do sometimes feel like I’m approaching critical mass: I get carried away drafting a scene and before I know it I’ve spewed 2000 words; but then I have to stop and think about how to progress, and I feel less than certain that what I’ve written will make it to the keyboard 2, let alone the completed first draft.

This fluency problem is because I’m writing something that is heavily imagined: the characters live underground in empty mines, augmenting their reality with drugs and video games in an undetermined future. Of course it has dystopian and utopian themes, so I have to imagine the extension of current issues into the future.

And I’m trying to write characters who are not entirely based on myself. In all my other fiction, the characters lived in sharehouses, augmenting their reality with drugs and pubs around the turn of this century.

So I don’t quite know, yet, how my characters will behave, or what their environment will be like. I know the environment will be messed by the collision of Eastern slowness with Western progress, and the young characters will feel disempowered. That is about all I can easily explain right now.

The various intricacies are still swirling around between my head and the various notebooks I have underway, building up to critical mass.

  1. I’m bringing back ‘the mustard’ for describing things that cut the mustard. ↩
  2. I draft longhand, most of the time. ↩

TEDx Phnom Penh Social Media Workshop

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There was a TEDx Phnom Penh Social Media Workshop on today at Pannasastra University, and I went along with TweetDeck locked and loaded, ready to do some live-tweeting.

Check out the hashtag feed if you couldn’t make it. It looks like the feed is all me, but if you scroll down you’ll see that others were tweeting as well.

Apparently Facebook is big here, but Twitter is not, so it was really cool to see Justin Heifetz, one of the speakers, run through the process of setting up an account. I wonder how many new Cambodian accounts were registered today, and whether they will remain active.

The speakers were Kounila Keo (on blogging in Southeast Asia), Un Yarat (on building your Facebook audience), Justin Heifetz (on Twitter) and Joshua Wilwohl (on reporting with new media).

I got there half an hour early, which turned out to be half an hour late, and snuck into the air-conditioned room to hear Kounila Keo speaking, and something she said that I really treasured was “Blogging is your passport to the virtual world”, which reminds me of the saying about reading: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”

Kounila also mentioned what she described as “the gender gap perception” as a challenge to Cambodian bloggers, which I’d like to know more about. The note I made was “Parents think girls …”, but Kounila trailed off and I didn’t catch what perception of girls in Cambodia makes it difficult for them to blog.

Around about the time we all discovered the university had blocked Facebook, Un Yarat stepped up to speak about her work on the US Embassy Facebook page. The two ideas I took away were: “Build your audience by interacting with your online fans: answer their questions, ask them questions” and that “The US Embassy is reaching out to young people for their ideas and values”. It always tickles my soul to hear about getting young people involved in public debate, and anyone who knows me at all knows I love a good question.

The I got confused between Justin Heifetz and Joshua Wilwohl. Joshua Wilwohl explained how social media was influencing traditional media, and said, ”Social media is a disruption we need to be ahead of. Too many journos say we need to wait to see how this plays out.” Whoever heard of a self-respecting journalist waiting to see how it plays out?

I’ve heard similar sentiments among older members of the publishing industry, and it almost always gives me hives. Social media is here to stay, and anyone who ignores that will be left behind. Simple.

Then, after explaining that many Cambodians are not already on Twitter, Justin Heifetz ran through the process of setting up an account and explained a few things about how to use it. It was fun to be among it while this was happening, and it seemed to coincide with a slew of retweets, new followers, @replies and questions, like right then and there a whole crew of people were expanding the conversation.

(Something I really love about live-tweeting events like this is the way it, yeah, expands the conversation and the audience: it takes the ideas into a virtual space that exists outside the room, with absent but interested followers chiming in as they read the feed from home.

And live-tweeting facilitates a way for attendees to keep in touch after the event, if they’re not comfortable with networking IRL: you get new followers by @replying and retweeting their tweets, and then you can go away to interact online until the inevitable tweetup, when each of you are free and comfortable to meet.)

At the end of the session some of the participants did some live-blogging around the TED theme of “ideas worth spreading”, and the winning entry grabbed a free TEDx t-shirt. Here’s the idea I like to spread.

The full TEDx Phnom Penh event is scheduled for Saturday 9 June, is US$10 for foreigners and $5 for Khmers, and has a packed list of speakers. The theme is “aspirations, inspirations, generations”. I bought two tickets and two shirts, because I’m greedy like that.

And Then There Was Suffering: How God fucked with language

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I wrote about literacy in Southeast Asia the other day, but it was just a snippet of some broader thoughts I have about global literacy and how it influences well-being.

Basically, I wonder if we could alleviate suffering by developing a shared language – something like Esperanto. Actually I don’t quite believe in the idea of creating a shared language, because of the problems of self-interest inherent in whoever was charged with such a responsibility. All I can really say is I’m sure misunderstanding arising from language barriers is a root cause of the world’s major suffering.

After that post I was flicking through dictionary.com’s Word of the Day selection and came across an entry about our mate God: “Have you heard the story of the Tower of Babel?” it started. I had, sort of.

According to the Bible, all humanity lived together in harmony, until God decided to confuse the languages and spread the people across the Earth.

I don’t believe in the sort of god who could wave a finger and make this happen, but I dig the idea that for thousands of years an idea like this has persisted among perhaps the most well-read novel in history.

I like the idea that while we shared a common language there was harmony in the world.

Because, whether “God” caused the language problem early or geography separated us and kept us from developing a shared language, it is clear that language barriers between nations and their cultures are a significant cause of disharmony in the world.

So, apart from creating a whole language, what are some ways we could bridge the language gap? Interpretive dance? Puppetry?

The Stella Prize v. The Miles Franklin Award

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The Miles Franklin shortlist was announced yesterday, and there was no applause to the judges for including three women on the list. No proclamations about the award’s shift toward gender equality – or gender neutrality, for that matter, which seems to be a different thing, and a little too … well, neutral.

The Sydney Morning Herald published a media release about the longlist, which they titled ‘Women finally dominate Miles Franklin’. But that’s about it, unless I just haven’t found it yet.

There was an outcry, last year I think, because ‘no women have appeared on the shortlist in two of the past three years’, and the Stella Prize was established to ‘combat the systemic exclusion of women writers over several decades’.

But I’m yet to read about the cause of this systemic exclusion. I mean, obviously it’s caused by the patriarchy. But how?

We have to think about the actual cause of this exclusion, because it’s silly to just fight the patriarchy with such ideas as anyone ‘dominating’ a literary prize or combating the ‘systemic exclusion’ of women writers by establishing a women-only prize.

I can talk about the systemic exclusion of young writers from the literary and media landscape of Australia until the calves come home, because I have actually witnessed and experienced how this happens, but describing a literary environment characterised by the consistently male-dominated Miles Franklin shortlist as systemic exclusion of women’s writing is nothing but doublespeak.

And setting up a women-only prize is like going back into colonial history and fighting racism by setting up an Aborigines-only water fountain or pub. All it does is ghettoise the awards industry.

Imagine what would happen if a men-only prize was set up: a shitstorm, to put it mildly.

But can I criticise a women-only prize in public without getting my balls torn off and hung from a bra hanger? Probably not. At least, not in a patriarchy. Maybe I could if we lived in a matriarchy, but if we lived in a matriarchy we would probably all be a lot happier, and therefore less wont to complain.

If anyone reads this post and cares to comment, we’ll see.

But really, is it fair to establish a women-only prize?

I know, I know, men’s writing already receives enough recognition and representation. But that’s not the point. When I think about it logically, outside of my sincere sympathies for anyone who is excluded: isn’t it kind of sexist to establish a women’s only prize, unless you can point to evidence of this so-called systemic exclusion of women’s writing from other, gender-neutral, prizes?

Isn’t it kind of actually sexist?

But establishing women-only clubs in a patriarchy is not sexism, it is equality activism, egalitarianism, however you want to dress it. Setting up men-only clubs in a matriarchy would not be sexist, because in a matriarchy the men would be the downtrodden, deserving of the right to ghettoise and foment against the matriarchy.

Do you see what I’m getting at? It sounds very anti-feminist, but all I’m saying is that this debate (and attendant activism) about the systemic exclusion of women’s writing is encased in a culture that obscures the root logic which dictates that prejudice is uncool in all its guises.

Sugar-coating it as equality activism or egalitarianism does not make it cool, just because we currently live in a society that is geared to serve the interests of one or the other gender.

If there is, in fact, systemic exclusion of women’s writing underway, we need to figure out a way of addressing it without establishing yet another award. Literature awards establish a false economy of ideas that I have banged on about enough in other posts, so I won’t go into it here, beyond, dare I say it: kill the awards and let the market sort it out.

I don’t really believe that, but certainly awards are not the answer.

To get to the heart of the answer we need to get to the cause of these claims of ‘systemic exclusion’. Then we can continue working toward a democratic market of ideas.

So, what even is ‘systemic exclusion’? It’s one of those phrases that are now used in ways that have more to do with an author’s (or a group of authors’) intentions than its actually meaning. Usually it’s a spooty way of saying ‘oppressed’.

‘Systemic’ is an adjective meaning ‘of a system’, and I would like this cleared up: what system is being referred to when critics employ the phrase ‘systemic exclusion’ in this case? Is it the adjudication system, the market system, the publishing system, the government system, the system of readers? Shit, the banking system? That system fucks up a lot of other stuff, so maybe that’s it.

Actually, the system of readers is the same as the market system, sort of.

Turns out ‘system’ is one of those words (like ‘spaghetti’ and ‘bowl’, and the phrase ‘systemic exclusion’) that make less and less sense the more you write or say them: they fall into the trap of ambiguity, along with ‘irony’, ‘paradox’ and ‘dodecahedron’, words that no one really understands anymore.

Once we know what system we’re referring to we can begin to address the problems in that system that might be causing exclusion of women’s writing. So if you’re reading this and have an idea what ‘systemic exclusion’ actually means, please fill me in.

Because until then I cannot accept the implication that somewhere, somehow, there is a bunch of mean-spirited, egotistical old men sitting on a panel somewhere, saying, ‘Ew, no, we cannot award a prize to this novel: it has girl germs.’

Linkage #03: Cory Doctorow, Kangaroos, Geometry of Sound and Porn

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1. Advice to writers from Cory Doctorow. But he says:

Especially don’t get in the habit of writing while smoking or boozing. Don’t hook the thing that makes you sane and whole to something that’s killing you.

Smoking and boozing is exactly what keeps me sane. He does say this, though:

Write even when you feel like it’s shit. You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it.

A necessary skill.

2. My housemate kind-of-jokingly said she wants to import a live kangaroo, so I looked up some info. This DFAT page says:

The live export of kangaroos is prohibited under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. There are a few exceptions where the purpose is noncommercial, such as inter-zoo exchanges.

And this page lists the native Australian pets that can be exported from Australia. Kangaroos are not on the list. It’s kind of sad that we still have to regulate such absurd behaviour as exporting kangaroos out of their natural habitat. Can you spell ‘cane toad disco’?

Cane toads dancing!

3. Boing Boing‘s post about Leo Geo and His Miraculous Journey Through the Center of the Earth, a ‘a lengthwise comic’.

4. The geometry of sound, visualised:

5. This comment on an awful post about one douche’s attempt to justify his obsession with porn.

I’ve used porn as much as the next young man, and sometimes it worries me: how it affects my relationships with women; whether it’s ethical to consume porn; and, lately, whether it goes against the fourth Buddhist precept of not engaging in sexual misconduct.

The last two are kind of the same thing.

The most affecting part of the comment, for me, was this:

also believe that the industry is already taking advantage of people’s sexual desire, turning them into consumers in order to access their own sexuality.

The idea of selling my sexuality to a porn company is just something I hadn’t considered I was doing, and selling my anything to anyone just isn’t right.

6. This awesome clip of Goyte’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’, covered by Walk Off The Earth:

 

 

Literacy and the Labours of Living

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Yesterday morning I had my first breakfast down the road from the homestay I’ve moved into in Phnom Penh, and the common experience of blank incomprehension, when I said hello to the waitress, has made me reconsider a few things: my broader ideas about how facilitating understanding through communication and literature could be achieved; and my personal involvement in this, beyond working as a spooty middle-class editor in Australia.

From the limited perspective of my experience in Australian English-language publishing, I thought we could improve the world by bringing literature out of the economic margins and into our government’s understanding of it as a social good.

I whole-heartedly believe that if we just talked more, we’d all be better off.

But after living in Southeast Asia for six months I’m realising it’s not as simple as this: der, it’s not just a matter of campaigning for pro-arts policy in the Western world, when elsewhere there are millions in the world from countries where such literacy is simply not valued (yet), where basic existence is most people’s first priority.

'Riel', the Cambodian currency, in Khmer

But before now I simply hadn’t experienced the world-stopping incomprehension of two people trying to communicate without a single element of language in common. In developing countries like Cambodia, the basic standard of living must be improved before people have the luxury literary leisure pursuits, away from the labours of living.

Outside the 3000+ NGOs here, how can we start achieving this?

On a personal note, I’m seeing that my idea of going back to uni and studying philosophy and economics so I can do policy work in Australia is shifting: maybe instead I’ll do something like international development, and see if I can influence global policy toward more mutual exchange of bi-lingual literature.

Hey, maybe even basic English teaching would be better than working as a spooty middle-class academic.

The Problem of Not Feeling Discombobulated

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For months now I’ve been almost entirely absent from the internet, following a pattern I didn’t know existed until I realised I was in the middle of another dormant phase.

These usually follow either intense periods of online antagonism (when the dormant phase is short), or intense chapters in my career (when the phase is longer).

Like the time I spent months antagonising American conservatives and nearly died from their blatant intellectual xenophobia. Or the time I drove up the east coast of Australia looking for my Weber, after my tenure at Voiceworks. Pretty much all I wrote that year were these posts for Nomadology, and an essay for the EWF Reader, which I’ll try to publish here soon.

I read a lot of books and travelled a lot of kilometres, which was not unlike this period of dormancy. Then I was reading books like Norman Mailer’s An American Dream and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, this time I was reading a lot of Thai literature, about which I have a column coming out soon.

But mostly I couldn’t bare to get online and engage in any real way.

In fits and starts, the internet appalls and exhausts me, inspires and antagonises me. Sometimes I cannot do without it, other times I cannot stand it. Communicating online has been an outlet for my rage and frustration at humanity’s lumbering progress1, and for my hopes and my dreams of at least one fresh idea about new ways to live.

It has also been a weeping wound, a valve left open between my soul and the soulless internet.

Not a symbiotic relationship at all.

I would come to feel thin – not in a light way, but in a porous way, to lift an idea from my friend Karen.

I have been feeling porous lately: things flow through me and leave me unperturbed. Feeling unperturbed is unnatural in the world we inhabit today, to the extent ‘combobulated’ is not a word, but ‘discombobulated’ is, and ‘philogyny’ is not in the average person’s active vocabulary, but ‘misogynist’ is a household name.

If we are not perturbed by today’s world, we are either doing it wrong or doing it right, but unless we have reached Nirvana I’d say we are doing it wrong.

So I’m going to kick this blog out of dormancy and begin chasing the curious and perturbing again, because I’m not miserable enough a lot of the time, and because I promised Felice I wouldn’t stop asking questions.

My friend sent me this, which is a good start: Suicide Note, where Mitchell Heisman presents an idea about why to die, and asks why life is so sacrosanct.

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.

 

  1. by ‘progress’ I mean ‘getting better at living on this rock’, not ‘increasing GDP’ ↩

One Less Arbitration Prize

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or, A Loss for Writers Means a Win for Readers

There is a lot of complaining on Facebook today about the new Queensland Premier canning the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, and it all sounds the same: shock and/or horror; damn politicians, they don’t value the arts; lots of ironic jokes about declining literarsey.

The stock-standard moaning about this dent in Australia’s literary welfare system bores me to tears and leads me to worry about whether anyone doling out these criticisms has actually thought about the effect these prizes have on Australian literary culture, because one less state-sponsored literature prize in Australia is not the worst thing that could happen for the literary arts.

In fact it could be a good thing if we direct our criticism of the Premier’s decision to a more positive place: funding ways to empower readers as arbiters of taste.

Because mostly these prizes promote sub-standard manuscripts as award-winning books, and maybe they’re good for one writer a year, but for readers these awards are exercises in unreliable arbitration of taste, from the top down. If you care about literary literacy you will be concerned about how this arbitration dilutes the quality of the literature market.

I’ve been on these panels, and I’ve seen books published because a prize has to be awarded, not because the book is worth publishing outside the context of the award.

If you’re going to complain, ask the Premier to channel the saved money into market research and audience development: ask him to empower readers as arbiters, because canning the award actually disempowers the elite gatekeepers on the judging panels, which is a good thing, right?

I thought you all hated the elite gatekeepers on the judging panels.

*ducks for cover*

Linkage #02: Dystopia Through Internet Freedom Via Hacktivism

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All of the following links have some bearing on the research I’m doing for Flux.

  • An article from the Guardian, by Margaret Atwood herself, about The Handmaid’s Tale, one of my favourite books of all time. I read this book many years ago, and had forgotten about ‘the forbidding of literacy’ and ‘the denial of property rights’, both of which are themes in Flux.
  • While I’m on the theme of dystopia: an epic article about Gmail privacy, the home page of EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation and the home page for Fastmail, the webmail provider I’m considering switching to in my ongoing attempt to escape Google as well as I can. (Fastmail is run out of Parkville, Victoria, Australia, where I lived once. And, um, I used ‘epic’ because the article is epic, then I realised the article is published by EPIC: Electronic Privacy Information Centre. Can you spell ‘tunnel vision’?)
  • Let’s run with this theme. See this picture, which I found on Facebook and then sourced from tomorrow started, a visual collective outlet of inspiration:

    This hardly needs a caption

  • A Wired article about We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, a documentary about Anonymous, a hacktivist group who relish in taking down websites of organisations they consider to be acting unjustly. Check out their Twitter feed for updates on their hacking activities.
  • The Wikipedia entry for ‘hacker ethics’.
  • The Concept page of OpenLeaks, the project a former spokesperson of WikiLeaks set up after he apparently got tired of Assange’s dictatorial ways and his determination to release information faster than the organisation (or the world, perhaps) could handle. The video linked to in the page explains it well:

Triage Live Art Collective

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My dear friend Hayley “Birchy Babe” Birch just pinged me a link to a project she was involved with, and which we yabbered about at length when we were hanging out in Pai.

Triage Live Art Collective, a group of people who

ask awkward questions and like to locate human warmth. our work tends to challenge and critique social niceties, is theatrical, allows strangers to meet and takes extensive liberties with time. we think of art as good medicine.

These ideas are so near and dear to my heart it’s not even funny. I’ve been asking awkward questions for as long as I can remember, to the extent my father coined a generic answer: ‘Pumpkin’, he would say, and then, ‘Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.’

I wrote about this once at the original SIB, in a post about literary prizes.

And the idea of art as medicine is just so self-evident to me these days it actually upsets me that many other people don’t get it, least of all our so-called progressive and representative governments.

Live art is the balls. Some of the most disconcerting experiences I’ve had in public were the result of live-art projects, like the storefront installation that was setup at TINA one year, where you could go into a ‘supermarket’ and buy all these generically rendered products and take them to the counter, where they would predict your future based on what you chose.

I remember there was a wall of fluffy pink hearts in bags, and in among them was a real heart. Does this ring a bell to anyone?

If you know of any cool live art going on around the world I’d love to hear about and give it a plug here at SIB II.