The importance of the right word

The importance of the right word -- poets know about this more than anybody. Le mot juste as the French would say. Not just the right word but the perfect word. We scrabble around for it. Cross out "cross out" and replace it with "strike through". Hmm, not quite. Perhaps "erase"? "Delete"? We think about the word's denotation and then what other words or ideas it connotes. Then there's the rhythm of the word, the sound of it, how it feels in our mouth. Words give our writing flavour and texture. The combination of words gives a writer style.

But what about when words go wrong? When they go wrong at the most basic level there can be a comedic effect. Take, for instance, my son. Yesterday, we were driving him off to an exam, and he was talking about the history assignment he had just submitted, which was to make his own newspaper (or at least the front page). Anyway, he was telling us he called it The daily brothel, and then finished with: "What exactly is a brothel anyway?"

Hmm. Too funny. His face, when we told him, was a study in mixed emotions: amazement, embarrassment (okay, more mortification than embarrassment), disbelief -- various other things, no doubt.

I like his newspaper title. I imagine a gossipy mag, with a mishmash of articles all mixed in together (obviously drawing on the messy house as a brothel simile/metaphor). But of course this is not how he sees it. And the lesson here is that we should all check meanings first. "Body" and "cadaver" are not interchangeable. A cadaver is a body, but a body is only ever a cadaver under certain circumstances. Not sure which -- then don't use it without checking the dictionary. The same with "horse" and "pony". All ponies are horses but not all horses are ponies. (And then there's the "galloway" in between...)

I love my dictionary. I live in it when I'm editing. Less so when I'm writing. But if I am writing and my brain supplies that word that I'm not a hundred per cent sure of, then I'll hit the dictionary. Doesn't mean I won't ever get it wrong -- there may, of course, be that word I am one hundred per cent sure of that doesn't mean exactly what I think it means. There are no guarantees against that. And of course meanings shift. I'm a great believer in preserving the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested", but it doesn't mean the dictionary supports my view. I sometimes think that dictionaries are too permissive in what they allow, but they do aim to reflect current usage, so perhaps I just need to get over it. In the meantime though, I'll be running my finger down the columns, looking for that word, and only ever using my thesaurus with a dictionary alongside it!

New movies

Well, the marking isn't quite finished, but last weekend I took some much needed R&R time and went off to see a few movies.

The first was Sex and the city. I was a fan of the television series, though it wasn't must-see television for me. Translation: I really enjoyed it and would watch it whenever I was home, but didn't tape it if I were going to be out. I'm not into fashion, but I loved that Carrie was a writer, and I loved that the show was bigger than life in the same way that "Desperate Housewives" is bigger than life. And that I kind of related to these girls. In "DH" I see myself as halfway between Susan the ditzy but loveable nutcase (not that I'm implying I'm loveable!) and Lynette, the harassed housewife, struggling to balance motherhood and career.

In Sex and the city I suppose I'm a blend of Carrie (but really only from the writing viewpoint), Charlotte (whom I feel I'm most like in a lot of ways -- except when she runs and when she's so anal. No scratch that. Anal editor person speaking here!) and Miranda. I'm least of all like Samantha. Not at all like Samantha. Are we even from the same planet?

So I enjoyed watching their characters interact, the ripostes from one to another. Such clever dialogue. (Though, going back to the TV series: why Carrie threw over Aidan for Big was always beyond me!)

I enjoyed the movie very much. And the surprise for me was Charlotte. I thought she had a couple of huge moments with Big -- considering one of the reviews I'd read said she (Kristin Davis) didn't really have to do any acting! I thought she was brilliant! Fans of the TV show will love the movie, because it's stayed true to the show. I've seen other TV shows made into movies and wondered how the writers could get it so wrong. (The first Star Trek movie was an example of this -- not a bad movie in its own right, but not true to the feel of the TV show for me. It was only the later ones that captured this.)

The beauty of Sex was that I went along with my mum and two of her friends, and of the three only one had ever watched the TV show, yet they all enjoyed the movie. That, IMHO, is great writing! It's like a poem where everyone can get something on an initial reading, but that some readers will draw further and deeper meanings from. (And it's why I never minded when actors from one show appeared in another playing their characters from the first -- as long as they "worked" in their own right.)

Movies can be great food for the writer's soul, and the second movie (all right, all right, I admit, I saw it twice in two days!) was one such movie for me. Prince Caspian, which I enjoyed so much more than The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Perhaps it helps having a character who reminds me physically of the main character of my novel. Yes, I'm always looking for him, even though I've settled on Tom Ward as the most likely candidate. But perhaps it's the grittier battles. I do love a gritty battle. The heavy thwacks of swords on metal. The grimness of stone walls. Ruins. Some beautiful coastal scenery. Horses. (Of course, horses. I'm far less fussed about lions who come along and save the day.) Men in armour.

Interesting to note how much cross-pollination was going on between Tolkien and Lewis, and one of those vagaries of being in a writing group together. I've never read the Narnia books. Probably a bit inexcusable for a fantasy writer, but then I came at Tolkien late (in my mid-twenties, and wondered about how I'd missed such a masterpiece!). The lion, the witch and the wardrobe didn't inspire me to read the book, but this one has. Though I'll probably only read that one unless I love it. If I love it I'll go back and start at the beginning and hope it's as good. That's not always the case.

I've got a book called The last legends of Earth by AA Attanasio, and it was one of the most amazing books I've ever read. If you like SF, and time travel, and disasters, and apocalyptic visions, go out and read it. Trouble was it was fifth in a series of linked books. I wouldn't usually start at number five but someone gave it to me, so then I had to go back and get number one and start from there. I hated number one. It was boring and didn't draw me in. I persisted, and it just never got better for me, and I didn't get that at all. How could that happen? So, yes, assuming all books in a series will be as good as each other can be quite fallacious. But I'm digressing. The blogosphere seems always to encourage me to do that. Friends write coherent posts, and mine ramble. But then I see this as a very different kind of writing (for me) than if I were writing, say, an article or a movie review. I'm perfectly happy to let it ramble!

But back to Prince Caspian... Highly recommended if you like battle scenes. Some violence but nothing to make you too squeamish. Others I'm looking forward to: Indiana Jones. And perhaps one or two of the new horror offerings. And Mongol, I think it's called! Seems like a few good movies coming up!

Into the end of semester

I'm likely not to be posting much over the next few weeks as I move into full-on marking mode. Today, I've been collecting up major assignments, and will get more tomorrow and more next week. As well, I'm currently reading a friend's novel, plus reading an anthology (and proofing) for another friend, and reading short story competition entries. But where does that leave my own work? On hiatus unfortunately. The only writing I'll be doing this week will be an editing test. Not exactly the stuff that feeds the soul. On the other hand, the course I've been writing is almost finished. Soon, I'll be at the end of semester break, and then it will be full-on novel. I'm hoping to get my draft finished in the first week and get it out to a couple of readers. How exciting is that? This is the worst time not to be writing -- so close to the end. So close I can smell it, and there's no better incentive.

What I have been happy with is that I've started implementing some of the changes (ie transferring them from paper onto the computer). I was hoping to cut 15,000 words in the editing pass, but every time I looked at how many words I was adding, I was worried -- really worried -- that I was going to add 15,000 words. Happily, I am actually cutting. Not as many as I'd hoped, but definitely cutting. Oh, let me at it: I long to be finished!

Writing the novel

I had a discussion with a student last week about how many projects a novelist can work on, because our students who are taking multiple classes that involve novel writing are expected to work on different projects. Of course, there's no correct answer to this question, and I've always said that you've got to find what works for you. Only this last year I've found that that's not necessarily the case.

Up until recently, I've always thought I was a one-project-at-a-time person. Even when it comes to short stories.

I get an idea and think about it, and that's where my focus is. It's one of the reasons I don't write many short stories -- because mostly I'm focused on my novel. It's a lovely, indulgent, obsessive thing, writing a novel. I don't get that same pleasure out of short stories or poetry -- but they do offer their own pleasures and satisfactions, especially the satisfaction of finishing something!

Some people have bags of projects on the go -- they swap and change depending on their mood or deadline, even working on several in the same day. My friend, Sherryl, is like this, and it's always made me shake my head in wonder. But writing our group novel this year has taught me that I can work on more than one project at a time, and the longer I've been doing both the easier it's becoming.

At the beginning, it would take me a few weeks to reacclimatise -- I'd have to sink back into the depths of whichever project I was working on. Being in the writing group and doing the plotting or reading out what we'd just written and discussing it made it easier to get back into this. But there was the unfamiliarity of what others had written -- I say unfamiliarity because clearly I had heard their portions and discussed them, but they weren't integrally part of me the way the parts I'd written were. I know the details of my character's background, for example, in far more details than I know of their characters'.

The challenge with my own novel has been different. I've been working on this book a long time, so I'm very well acquainted with it. But it's a complex story with multiple viewpoint characters, and worse than that, multiple drafts. I say worse because the problem is that when I've been out of it awhile I forget which things belong in which draft. I might remember that A does this, but it might be something that I've taken out of the current draft for whatever reason.

Paradoxically, I've found that the thing I thought I needed (time to reimmerse) has been the thing working against me. It's actually easier to work on multiple projects if they're all on the boil at once, if I'm working on both in the same week, rather than having that gap between them. This works really well in that I can do whatever the mood takes me. If I'm in a writing mood, I'll head off to the group novel. If I'm in an editing mood, I'll work on my own -- which also requires some slabs of writing as I make changes that I've decided on. This week's change, for example, is in a background scene that my main character remembers. When he was a small child, he found his sister hanged, and that change has been to make him find her a few minutes earlier, when she was dying and imploring him to help her when things went wrong (knot on the wrong side of her neck so that she was strangled slowly). This secret he has kept. Everyone else thinks he found her dead. It's all about making the worst thing possible happen to your characters. This doesn't have a great effect on the story as a whole, but does strengthen his motivation for doing the things he has to do, and is perhaps something I'm thinking more about because I'm busy writing the other novel, putting my character there through the wringer. Honestly, you have to love writing!

Reading your writing

Today in class, I did something I do most years in my Novel 2 class: I started reading James N Frey's "Seven deadly mistakes" that a writer can make (from his book How to write damn good fiction). The first mistake is timidity, and he talks about the different types of timidity a writer can experience or exhibit. One of the things that often comes up in such sessions is the fear of public speaking -- I mean, writers in their garrets and all of that, right?

Yeah. We wish. (Or I do, at least.)

Like it or not, these days writers are expected to promote their books -- book tours, interviews, readings, writers' festivals, conventions etc. I used to suffer terribly from a fear of public speaking -- so much so that in my first six weeks of teaching, I didn't sleep for three days before each class. By the time I got in there I was so exhausted I needed the adrenalin-kick of the fear to keep me upright! These days I've learnt some modicum of control over it, and enjoy walking into my classes. I don't know that I'll ever be entirely comfortable in front of strangers, but it's not the incapacitating experience it once was. I have teaching to thank for that.

However, I'm always aware of reading aloud and how nerves affect readers. On my twenty-first birthday, I had to give a speech at school on the affects of lead on haem synthesis. I was worked up over it (vomiting beforehand and all), and annoyed that I had to do it on the day of my twenty-first birthday. Afterwards, I sat down and leaned across and said to my best friend, "How did I go?", and she told me that it was probably okay but that I'd spoken so quickly she didn't understand one word. Not one!

So, that's always my first piece of advice to anyone who wants to read their work: read slowly. No matter how slowly you think you're reading, you can probably read it even more effectively by slowing it down more.

My second piece of advice is about diction -- about pronouncing your letters clearly, really biting out the consonants. My daughter sings -- she has a great voice and range, but she sometimes slurs her letters. I see it with some of my poetry students. It's something you have to be constantly thinking about. Pronounce each letter. Practise. Read your story or poem out loud and anticipate any problem words. Write them on the page phonetically. (Don't forget to use double spacing for prose!) Record yourself reading your story and then listen back to it. Was it clear? Did you stumble over any words? Can you replace them with something easier?

Thirdly, run your finger or thumb down the page as you're reading. This helps you keep your place if you look up at your audience -- and you should look up at your audience. The more people you can make eye contact with, the more you'll have in your bag.

Fourthly, warm up beforehand. Some poets like to do vocal exercises first -- just like singers warming up with scales.

Fifthly, time your talk -- especially if you are time-limited. Nothing worse than a five minute talk that runs for fifty. Yes, I've been to some! Have your introductory patter prepared and written out, and include this in your dry runs.

Sixthly, don't just practise alone. If you can, get some friends to listen in. You may feel self-conscious, but it will be worth it for the insights they can give. Listen to any advice they give!

Seventhly, if you're doing an interview, you can ask for a list of questions or, if your interviewer isn't prepared to give you one, at least the likely topics so you can have something prepared. Having said that, bear in mind that some level of spontaneity enlivens a talk. Go ask Jack Dann how to give a great talk, and he'll tell you he just goes out there and gives schtick! It's great if you can do it, but I, personally, like to be prepared! If you can't be, though, just chill out and take the time you need to answer questions. I know plenty of writers who will answer questions with a stock sentence like "That's a really good question" just to give them a bit more time to think.

Having just attended the Beyond Cuisine dinner, with actors reading works of fiction -- see Ellen's blog for a report -- I took great notice of how the actors read. There were a few notable points: the main difference was how much they varied the pace -- mostly reading slowly, even more slowly than I ever have, but with occasional bursts of speed, especially in the dialogue or in direct thoughts. These bits were much faster than I would have ever dared. Of course they all had superb pronunciation, so that the words were clear, and their great clarity meant that the sped-up reading was still easy to understand.

They also were more animated, which of course I'd expected, but the other thing they did was use pauses to a much greater degree, and for a much greater length of time than I ever have. And it worked. It was as if they were reading a story to kids they wanted to engage, but they exaggerated things even more. Well worth going to see some actors do it, just to get a feel for how better to perform your own work. Oh, I'd love to do some acting classes to develop this even more!

Busy week

This week is a full on social week, and all to do with writing:

(i) Wednesday morning: launch of the Ada Cambridge exhibition at the VU library on the St Albans campus
(ii) Thursday night: dinner out with my Clarion South buddies -- or family as we are now -- where we will reminisce about that crazy six weeks where the temperature varied between 31 and 33 degrees every day and we had no air-con in our dorms, and we workshopped over half a million words, and most of us churned out a story a week and a collaborative story. I know I did. And kept a journal (50,000 words worth)
(iii) Friday: lunch out with Effy whom I taught Text and Culture, part of the Diploma of Liberal Arts, with. (All right, this is a teaching one more than a writing one.) Effy drove the subject, luckily, and I scrambled to keep ahead of the class, because I did not have a background in Arts. When they start teaching Haematology for Writers, I'll be right there!
(iv) Friday night: dinner out at a special performance as part of the Williamstown Lit Festival with Western Women Writers, Ellen from SuperNOVA, and Susanna from work.
(v) Saturday morning: attending the first session of the CBCA conference to see Shaun Tan's speech, and then to see Sherryl's new book Tracey Binns is trouble launched. With a character name like that, how could that not be close to my own heart.
(vi) Saturday: go to the Williamstown Literary Festival sessions and attend the prize-giving ceremony of the Ada Cambridge competition. Can't wait to see who wins! I've just found out that at least two of our students have been shortlisted, which is rather nice. Of course, when you're doing the shortlisting, you're looking at blind entries and have no idea who has entered, so it's always interesting later on to find out who the winners are, and whether any of them are even names that you've heard before.

And around all this I've been getting Poetrix ready to go to print, which means finishing typesetting and cobbling together bios (and then paring them back because they were too long), writing an editorial, having it ready for proofing by (last) Wednesday, proofing in writing group, now making the final corrections and then doing one more proofing pass. Should all be ready by tomorrow! Then I better get into my assignments.

Sweet vengeance

I've had a few visits from friends of late who are in various stages of the publication process. One is a friend and past student whose first book (a memoir) is due out in a few months. His has been a long road, which began in TAFE and continued through academia. We started off as students together, became friends, and then I became his editor and I suppose in a way one of his mentors.

His has been an interesting path and one that should inspire any writer who is struggling, because he has had a lot of knockers along the way -- a lot of people who have told him he's not good enough, he's never going to make it, he should discontinue his studies because he wasn't a good enough writer. Lots of things along these lines. Each year, he seemed to take on another, another who said: drop out now. Fortunately, there have also been a few who have believed. Fortunately, because no matter how strong your fortitude, no matter how determined you are, it can be hard to go on in the face of such relentless criticism.

He's not one to fall easily though. He has spirit and guts, and when he gets knocked down, he gets up with an I'll-show-them attitude. And he has shown them. As I've said, his first book's coming out soon -- much sooner than the would-be manuscripts of some of his knockers. Sometimes vengeance is sweet.

So, there's a lesson in this for all of us. Many writers struggle with that self-confidence demon. A hard crit session can see egos pinned to the board like dead butterflies. But writers who will make it unpin themselves and rise again. They keep writing. Their confidence may swoop and dive, but this doesn't stop them. Writer's block may cripple them from time to time, but they get over it. They get over it because they're driven to write. That's what makes them writers.

What is story?

While I was at work, beavering away at writing materials for one of our online subjects a few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with another teacher about the difference between plot and story. Both are interesting words because everyone seems to define them differently. Plot can be seen merely the sequence of events in a story, and so can story. EM Forster is often quoted as having said (or at least written in his Aspects of the novel) that "The kind died and then the queen died" is a story, but "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. Plot, according to him, involves a causal sequence. Sometimes it is just defined as the storyline, or the order that events happen in the story (which can of course differ to the order in which they unfold!). Plot unfolds in sequential order (in causal order), but isn't always presented that way. It's all very interesting, and I could spend days (if I had them) researching the differences, but as a writer I feel that it's more important that I spend this time actually writing! It's so easy to get sidetracked into interesting, but essentially meaningless (in terms of how it will improve my novel) research!

So what is the point of this blog post then? Only that I had a minor epiphany last week about short stories. Not so much an epiphany because I had already gathered in the knowledge and consolidated it, but last week was the first time I related it back to something that happened to me in my early days of writing. So what is this piece of knowledge -- I'm sounding mysterious, I know, and I'm not consciously trying to do so.

In my early days of writing, we had a guest writer come into one of our writing groups and do a workshop with us. I submitted a story I had written that I really liked and thought worked well, and braced myself for the criticism I knew would follow. What I didn't expect was at the end of the criticism, the writer said something along the lines of: "This is a nice piece of writing, but of course it's not a short story."

What?

It had a beginning, middle and end. It had conflict and rising tension, a climax. And it was short. How could it not be a short story? The criticism itself was fairly positive and constructive, but that one little worm of a comment dug into my psyche. Unfortunately, I was too shy then to ask for clarification -- his throwaway words "of course" made me feel like I must be stupid if I didn't know that, and so I came away full of doubt. And for the next year, I wrestled with that doubt and didn't write a thing, because I had decided that I didn't know what a story was. Of course I always get over such hiatuses -- what writer doesn't? And in the time I had been reading, and writing drabbles and things -- just no "formal" short stories.

So, the other day I was workshopping something in our writing group and said that I really liked it (which I did), but it wasn't a short story. Hang on a minute. I'd come full circle. So what did I mean?

What I want out of a short story is to see the main character changed by the events of the story, i.e. they have to grow. If the character isn't changed, then at least I want to come away with some new perspective, some new insight into the way the world works. In this particular story, the character came away with new insight, but it wasn't a new insight to me (and I didn't feel it would be for many people) and so, although the story was vividly written and evocative, it failed to satisfy me as a reader -- failed to satisfy my needs of what a short story should do. The character had new insight but hadn't grown because of it. It's almost like truncating a hero myth story before the character returns to the real world, so that we can see their growth. (Maybe Jane Campion should take heart, considering all the flack she copped for The piano where that is exactly what she did do! She showed the return, and from the return, we see the character's growth, in action.)

I'm not sure I quite have all the arguments sorted in my head yet to give an effective enough treatise (to the author) about why her short story wasn't a short story to me, but it's almost there, and then I'll have to do just that, because such comments need to be qualified, justified, so the author has something to work with and to learn from -- rather than just go into a fugue from. Workshopping is never meant to be a tool to sharpen writer's block, but to pierce and deflate it!

Writers' group

Business as usual: talk, papers, cakes! (Which means publishing success.) No starving in our garrets here!


Well, I have been superbusy with work this week, one of the bane's of teaching a new subject (but also one of the joys!), and so I'm way behind on my blog again. And I have had so much to post about, but I wanted to do one about writing groups first. Honestly, writing groups can be the saver of sanity for many of us -- a chance to get together and talk books and writing (hmm, there's a blog title in that somewhere), and the whole publishing process with people who understand, truly understand, the passion, the drive. What better way to spend a few hours than talking writing! We will workshop, talk about articles (on writing) we've read and any new insights we've gleaned. Something I love about writing is that no matter how much you already know, there's always so much more to learn! I love it! The day I think I know everything (which I hope will never come -- on several levels, I hope this) is the day I give up writing!

The cakes: celebration of Sherryl's CBC shortlisting (fingers crossed here!), and Margaret having poems accepted into two different magazines


We celebrate the triumphs, and commiserate over the failures. We toast the near-successes -- for example, when I was recently shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards. I didn't win, but just being shortlisted was a fantastic thing. And a success in itself. And (for any members of Western Women), yes, er, I do realise that I haven't brought a cake along for that yet! It's coming, I promise! We work on Poetrix, our poetry magazine -- and indeed did that last week and this week, where we finalised selections for the next issue. It's a rich and varied experience. In the old days, we used to do a writing exercise each week. Sometimes we still write, sometimes we plot out the group novel or read excerpts, sometimes we workshop, and sometimes we attend to our social calendars. In the next few weeks (including this week), our group has (or has had) a book launch, the launch of the Williamstown Literary Festival, lunch out, the launch of the Ada Cambridge exhibition, a literary dinner and performance, another book launch, the Williamstown Literary Festival. Lots of stuff happening. And it's great. Keeps us on our toes, and makes us feel part of a literary community.

The vagaries of publishing: a fantastic writer laments the size of her latest royalty statement

In the shadow of the moon

Tonight, I went to see In the shadow of the moon, the documentary about the moon landings. I am a child of the space-age (just), and I remember as a child, leaving school with my class to watch the moon landing. I remember not quite understanding what we were going to see or understanding why, but, once the broadcast started, being entranced. At one point all the kids went off into another room to eat their lunches, and I just wanted to stay by the television. It could be, of course, a glorified and romantacised notion now of what really happened, but that's how I remember it. It had a huge impact on me, and no doubt seeded the future spec fic writer in me.

One of the astronauts in the film (was it Michael Collins?) talked about afterwards, visiting other countries, and the people talking about how we had done this -- we, as in all of humanity, something he'd never really experienced before. I got that. I felt it too -- this immense pride that we had been able to pull back impossible boundaries and do this marvellous thing. If we could go to the moon, we could achieve anything. We could rise above all the ugly aspects of our nature, the selfishness and pettiness and greed, and achieve greatness. Human beings might actually be worth something!

There are those who have always disputed the money spent on the space program -- that it could've been used to address poverty or pollution or something else, but you might as well argue that humankind doesn't need art. The space program is a powerful symbol of the peaks we can aspire to, an embodiment of hope. Or, if you want to take the bleak view, something we'd better perfect for when we completely stuff things up here.

And for me there was a writerly parallel in this film. Something I always find amazing is the chasm between the published writer and the unpublished in terms of their "authenticity" (for want of a better term). If my book were accepted tomorrow, then overnight I would go from being a small player in the scene to being a major player whose opinion was sort after and trusted, and I might not have learnt a damned thing extra in the inbetween time. This film, and The right stuff both touched on this too -- in quite different ways -- how the astronauts were suddenly catapulted to the position of national heroes, but they hadn't actually done a thing. How interesting to hear them talk about it from their perspective.

Would I recommend the film? Absolutely. Those who don't go gooey at the sight of a Saturn V (are there really people out there who don't?), who don't want to go to space camp -- or even better: space itself! -- who don't know who the Mercury 7 were, or the first Russian and American into space may not be as het-up about the whole film, but should find enough of interest anyway. Makes me want to go out and watch The right stuff all over again. Already the soundtrack is playing in my head...

The other Boleyn girl (mild spoiler alert!)

The other day I went with a friend and my kids to see The other Boleyn girl. I always love a good period drama -- I'm a fantasy writer, after all, and a lot of times I feel fantasy is closer kin to historical fiction than it is to its bedfellow science fiction. And this film put me right there: forests, galloping horses, costumes, castles -- ah, fantasy writer's heaven. And the type of soundtrack I could write to. (But which my husband hates.)

Recently (as in some time in the last six months) the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ran a miniseries about the Boleyns and Henry XIII, and it was interesting to see how the miniseries differed from the film. One account was it made much more of Mary's happiness in her initial marriage and reluctance to go to the king. This was touched on in the film, quite clearly, but still wasn't as big a deal. OTOH, the movie had a two-hour running time to the TV show's three and a half (or thereabouts). I remember despising her husband for his weakness, feeling much more of her desperation. I suppose he was still portrayed as weak -- his only reaction to the news seemed to be eyes brimming with tears, but his part was over so quickly that I barely noticed.

The incest issue was handled differently too. In one it happened; in the other it didn't. I won't say which is which for those who haven't seen the film. I did wonder though whether I really believed Natalie Portman the more beautiful of the two -- Scarlett Johansson has that exquisite almost ethereal beauty that I can imagine angels having. It's almost otherworldly. She was the girl with the pearl earring, after all! (I'm waiting for the film that pits Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley as sisters, as I think they look alike. And the one with David Tennant and Tom Ward as brothers!) And, of course, beauty *is* in the eye of the beholder, but even so... Anne did, however, have all the fire and temperament that Mary lacked, so that may have added to her attractiveness for some -- not that Mary was meant to be unattractive, but a point was made that Anne was the beautiful one.

My children came away wondering why Anne was, in their words, "such a bitch", so we had a good discussion about ambition and power, but this seemed almost mystifying to them. Ah, how jaded we become as adults.

Would I recommend this film? Yes, to anyone who loves a slower, beautifully shot film. For some it may be too slow, but I really enjoyed it. I just wish there were more films like it on these holidays... Just means I'll have to return to my books -- one that I'm reading is all about the kings and queens of Britain, and there are so many good stories between its covers. Plenty to inspire the fantasy writer within me!

Writers supporting each other

One of the things I love about writing groups is the support that we give each other. Sometimes this is via critiques and workshopping where we give each other feedback. This can, at times, be uncomfortable, but a good critique group is worth its weight in book contracts. Good critique groups help us to grow as writers, and let's face it: that's what most of us want to do.

Sometimes this support means going along to things together -- whether that's a night when one of the group is getting an award (such as the group from Sydney did for the FAW Awards, which I blogged about earlier) or just doing something together as a group as a bonding experience. Western Women Writers has had trips to art galleries to write poems, or to support a past-member who is an artist and had an exhibition. We've conducted launches of our magazine Poetrix, done readings together and attended residential weekends, hired people to run workshops for us, baked cakes to raise seeding money for the magazine -- all kinds of things.

Sometimes this support means picking someone up when they're down. Writing is a hard game. Few of us go through it without facing some kind of rejection. There are exceptions, of course (Isobelle Carmody comes to mind), but for most of us there are those depressing days when a manuscript comes back with a no-thanks (and if we're lucky a comment), or when we find out we weren't selected for a masterclass or workshop or whatever. One of my close friends is facing down this experience at the moment, having missed out on a place in a development program with a manuscript I thought was working really well. It is disappointing, but somehow being surrounded by fellow writers who understand, truly understand, what this kind of disappointment feels like makes it easier. Not pleasant, certainly, but easier.

We need to support each other through such times. Manuscripts get rejected for all kinds of reasons: not good enough, not right for the market, the slot that was going has just been taken, another similar story has just been signed, too long, too short, didn't like the main character... The list is endless. Our friends can remind us of the great things that our manuscripts have going for them. My friend's was full of terrific writing with great characterisation and setting.

The other thing about supporting each other is being able to rejoice in the success of others. My great friend, Sherryl, today was shortlisted for the Children's Book Council Awards, and I cannot tell you how happy I am for her. This is a well-deserved honour, and it's fantastic to see her up there with all the big names, because she sits rightly among them! So woo-bloody-hoo, Sherryl! Let me put my happiness out here in the public sphere.

Sometimes I hear of writers who aren't capable of offering this kind of support. They begrudge their friends their successes, seeing each as an opportunity they missed. That kind of competitiveness (the oh-you've-just-been-accepted-by-such-and-such-mag-so-I-must-submit-there-too) diminishes us all as people. This is not a competition; one person's fantastic success can open doors for all other writers, so we need to be happy about such things, not bemoan them. I really don't understand people who think otherwise, especially when they're your friends.

At Western Women, we have a tradition that anyone who has a success has to bring cake. It's not a recipe conducive to skinny writers, but perhaps it has fostered this atmosphere of goodwill that pervades the group. Personally, I don't know if this is the case or not, but I do know I enjoy working in such a supportive atmosphere.