My SF Influences and Hopes: Part Two

Hi Everyone

Given that the Speculate Festival is on this Saturday (28 April 2018), here is the next instalment of the current series of blog posts on my interview questions. This post explains the background to the questions, while my previous post explores the first question asked during my interview:

What science fiction/fantasy first made an impression on you?

Below is the second question I was asked:

Why do you continue to write science fiction/fantasy?

An interesting question with a complicated answer that starts with a little personal history.

Image from here

As is evident from my previous post, I was an avid reader from an early age. Adventure and War stories. Science Fiction. Fantasy. Some Historical Fiction. Etc. I didn’t read much poetry, though I do remember memorising Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ for a school assignment. I didn’t, however, hanker to be a writer when I was young, unlike many of my later heroes such as W B Yeats, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, J R R Tolkien, Alan Garner, Roger Zelazny, amongst many others. I suppose I didn’t even realise such an occupation existed. Somehow I thought writers were magical beings ‘out there’ somewhere and books appeared from nowhere.

Image from a Melbourne TV Guide

Still, in my early teens, I started to write an SF spy story about aliens under Ayers Rock. The hero was prompted by a local TV show (Hunter). He rode a motorcycle called Black Bess (inspired by the Disney show The Legend of Young Dick Turpin and my father’s riding when a youth) and lived on a sailing boat (as did a favourite aunt and uncle). After four action-packed pages, during which the boat was blown up and the hero swam to shore to jump on his motorbike and chase the villain, I stopped. Not sure why, though I think it had to do with a sense of shame in doing something that would be seen as self-indulgent.

Image from here

Over the next few years, I developed an interest in music, taught myself the guitar, and tried writing song lyrics. I also started writing love poems to girlfriends, bad ones (in retrospect) based on half-remembered structures learned at school.

Image from here

After finishing a science degree, I found myself working in the research department of Telecom Australia. One day, surrounded by banks of magnetic tapes and electronic gear, I began writing, on a teleprinter, a report on some computer networking research I had completed. I suddenly had the eyes-wide, nostrils-flaring, bolt-upright epiphany that I could communicate what was inside my head to other people. That I could be a writer. Soon after, I started to write short stories, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and I have been writing in those genres, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since. Yet, this is when things became complicated.

Several years after that moment at Telecom, I went to a workshop on putting fantasy in your writing and discovered it was being run by one of Australia’s top poets and wasn’t about fantasy writing at all. I ended up attempting to write poetry, though all I could come up with was a chant to Lovecraft’s Old Ones and something else that I don’t remember. Yet, because of that workshop, I was invited, along with other attendees, to form a critique group at the Council of Adult Education (CAE). And here I met a real-life poet and suddenly I began to develop an interest in writing poetry.

Over the next decade or so, I moved into the poetry world more and more. I wrote poetry. Studied it at university. Edited it. Published it. Read at poetry readings. Developed a profile as a poet. Yet, the narrative urge wouldn’t leave me. I wrote literary fiction along with the odd speculative story. Eventually, I did a PhD in Creative Writing, the creative component being a fantasy verse novel called The Silence Inside the World, which featured the main character from one of those early fantasy novel drafts. Full circle.

Image from here

All of the above is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t only write science fiction and fantasy, but also speculative poetry, literary fiction, and literary/mainstream poetry. And I continue to write in these areas because they enable me to cover different aspects of my life experience, especially personal relationships, science, nature, myths and the sacred, using the best option available to me. As Ted Hughes once remarked after he was made Poet Laureate and a reporter asked him what he would write during his tenure, ‘I write what the muse tells me to write’.

Image from here

So, to finally answer the second interview question, I still write science fiction and fantasy because, unlike the literary mode, I am able to explore deep imagination and different worlds from our own, and also evoke the wonder that lies within and beneath life. And because of these concerns, more and more I am looking to mythopoeic literature as the home for my own work.

If you are interested in attending Speculate, which is being held at the Gasworks Arts Park, 21 Graham St, Albert Park, Victoria, this Saturday, there are still tickets available. For further information, visit the website (www.SpecFic.com.au).

I hope you enjoyed this post. As always, I welcome your comments. 

Best Wishes

Earl

Secondary Composition

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I am on a ‘writing sabbatical’. One of the projects I’m working on is the verse novel I wrote as the creative portion of my PhD in Creative Writing. Though the novel was good enough for the examiners, some of their comments, as well as those of friends who had read it afterwards, led me to believe I should tweak it before submitting it to publishers. I put the manuscript away for several years, while I worked on other projects and on making a living, but at the start of this year I decided I needed to finish what I had started. I needed another round of Secondary Composition.

Secondary Composition is my name for the third stage of the Writing Cycle. I have taken this phrase from Robert Graves, who in an early essay talked about ‘the secondary phrase of composition’. In another essay, he quoted Dr W H R Rivers from his book Instinct and the Unconscious:

In this comparison of the poem with a dream, one fact must be emphasised. The poem as we read it is very rarely the immediate product of the poetic activity, but has been the subject of a lengthy process of a critical kind, comparable with that which Freud has called the secondary elaboration of the dream...[my emphasis]

Conflate these two phrases and we get Secondary Composition. I find this term extremely useful for describing the critical and creative processes that occur after the initial white-heat first draft. I had been looking for such an all embracing term, because I found in my teaching that most students were using such terms as Redrafting, Rewriting, Revision, Editing in the belief that they refer to the same thing, when in fact they don’t. This confusion is something I plan to expand on in a future entry.

So, for the past two months I have been engaged in Secondary Composition work on my verse novel, which is titled The Silence Inside the World. Over the New Year period I had the opportunity for a writer’s retreat, which involved looking after the country property of some friends. The peace and solitude was what I required, and I spent the two weeks reading through the manuscript, making notes on it and using a piece of software called Snowflake Pro to help me clarify character motivations and plot points. The software is available from www.advancedfictionwriting.com, and can be used for the planning of a novel or, as in my case, as a diagnostic tool for an existing draft. Essentially, for those two weeks I was engaged in structural editing. I saw holes in motivation, plot and structure that needed addressing and gained more insight into the story I was trying to tell.

When I came home I was caught up in admin and teaching commitments right up to the moment of my long service leave kicking in. Since then, I have been a full-time writer and will be for almost another four months. For the past four weeks I have taken what I discovered on my writer’s retreat and been applying it to a line edit of the verse novel. This sort of editing is trickier than for a normal novel, as it involves more than the usual rearranging, condensing, deleting or adding of words and sentences that prose writing involves. I not only have to check syllable counts and rhythms for each line, but also have to make sure I keep scenes and actions in the three line stanzas I have been using. If I get rid of a line, I have to juggle the lines around them to retain the stanza form. Such story and editing demands are enough to drive a person to his or her favourite ‘comfort’ substance, demands I’m sure T S Eliot had in mind when he wrote the following lines in his Four Quartets (actual format unsupported by Blogger):

Words strain
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
'Burnt Norton, V'

Yet it is our job as writers, during our raids ‘on the inarticulate’, to keep trying ‘to learn to use words’.

What I can report is that, as of yesterday, I have virtually finished this round of Secondary Composition. The Silence Inside the World is now a verse novel of 8,589 lines, 64,141 words. I say ‘virtually’ because I will put the manuscript aside for several weeks, so that when I read it through again I will bring fresh eyes to the changes I made, some of them major. Only then will I be confident the manuscript is the best I can make it and is ready for the next stage of the cycle: Publication.

That’s a story for another entry.

Keep learning and keep writing.

Cheers
Earl