Monday 7 August 2017

A Memoir of Love and Literature

In the European tradition, Karina Szczurek celebrated her name day on Wednesday 2 August. It was a double celebration, in fact, as she had chosen the date to launch her memoir, The Fifth Mrs Brink, at the Book Lounge in Roeland Street, Cape Town. Published by Jonathan Ball, the book is an account of the year following the death of her husband, internationally acclaimed novelist André Brink, interwoven with Szczurek's life story and her relationship with Brink. This was a time of loss and mourning, catharsis and renewal: 'The only reason to write a memoir is to share something that might matter to other people,' she said. 'In order to reach out and connect, you have to make yourself almost unbearable vulnerable.'
Szczurek, whose family defected from Poland thirty years ago, led an itinerant life thereafter – the Italian refugee camp to which they were heading burnt down and they managed to cross the border into Austria. The family spent financially harsh years in the US, after which Szczurek studied in Austria and Wales.
They met in Vienna when Szczurek was a graduate student of South African literature. 'For me, meeting André was a homecoming on all levels,' she said.
After Brink's death in February 2015, the idea for a memoir simmered in her. But 'thinking about something doesn't mean doing it,' she said. Finally, sitting at a café, she ordered a drink and petitioned the universe. 'I thought, ”If I'm ever going to write this book, the first sentence needs to come to me now.'' And it came: “There is nothing like chocolate.” There can be no writing about André without mention of chocolate,' she said. The sentence was relocated during editing but served as her way in to the story.
In response to Book Lounge owner Mervyn Sloman's questions, Szczurek spoke of the personal meaning of writing. 'Those moments that are so ungraspable at a given time... When you try to grasp them and articulate them and communicate them to someone else, that's what writing is all about.' Memoir-writing also entails keeping some things to oneself: 'No-one is better at hiding among words than a writer,' she said.
No longer hearing Afrikaans spoken around her has been an unexpected loss. 'I missed it terribly. I still do.' These days she reads children's books in Afrikaans. 'It gives me pleasure to have Afrikaans around me. I speak it, but only to my cats.'
The Fifth Mrs Brink  is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek title, considering Brink once erroneously told an interviewer that Karina was his sixth wife (and Wikipedia indeed states he was married six times. The memoir is a tribute to a connection that lasted a decade in real life and endures in book form and in the heart of its author. Before leaving the stage, Szczurek held up a burgundy pen. 'Dark red was André's favourite colour. This was his favourite pen and I am using it to sign books tonight.'  

Thursday 18 May 2017

21 great quotes to get you fired up about your writing

Just been rejected by a publisher? Wondering how you're ever, ever going to get your manuscript finished? Considering giving up on being a writer? No, friend. Noooooo. You're just in a creative slump. As a writer, I know there are times when everything's flowing: ideas, time, money, words, praise. And there are times when Things Fall Apart (sorry) and you're tempted to give up. If that's you today, read this advice from those with experience in persistence, including me.

1. 'Learning to fail also includes learning to write like crap and not care. Push through. We all write like crap...The reader will never see it. You’ll revise it to perfection and delete the bad parts. The key is to have something down to work with. So learn to fail. Keep going.' - Hugh Howey, author of the Silo series

2. J.K. Rowling: Failure is so important. It doesn't get spoken about enough. We speak about success all the time. But it's the ability to use failure that often leads to the greatest achievement. I've often met people who are terrified, in a straitjacket of their own making, because they don't want to try for fear of failing. Rock bottom wasn't fun at all. But it was liberating.
Oprah: How so?
J.K. Rowling: What did I have to lose?
- The Oprah Winfrey Show

3. 'Go, go, go! Sorry to have to remind you, but one day you’ll be dead and you won’t be able to write.' - Catriona Ross, Story Star: How to write your first novel and use the uncanny power of fiction to turn your wishes into reality.

4. 'I play and I keep playing because I choose to play. Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.' - Andre Agassi, Open

5. 'Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be caused by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That's not a possibility. It's only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I'm the one who's hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don't have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I'm the one who can stop hurting me. It's within my power.' - Byron Katie, Loving What Is

6. 'Your fear is energy. Use it to your advantage and have it catapult your performance. If you try to suppress it, it will only come back at you with a vengeance. Instead, just sit with fear in your body; notice it without panicking about it being there.' Simon Ekin, author ofThe Art of Courage

7. 'I once read that the only constant that all humans have is a 24-hour day. If you take out eight hours of building a career, and eight hours of sleep, you have eight hours to do something that you really love. This eye-opening observation changed my mind forever. You can never find time to write; you can only create it. To fit writing into my schedule, I break down the work into easy, manageable pieces. My latest novel is about 60,000 words. Instead of trying to write everything at once, I chose to write 1,000 words per day. Within 90 days I had the novel ready, including revisions.' - Kinyanjui Kombani, a.k.a. The Banker Who Writes.

8. 'Writing is a blast, but it's also work. So forget about waiting for inspiration. Sit your butt in a chair every day and write a set amount of words. In a few months, you'll have a completed novel. Repeat many times. Eventually, you'll have a story that could pay the mortgage. If you do this long enough, you might be able to quit your day job.' - Vaughn Heppner, author of The Lost Starship

9. Interviewer: Do you have any advice for younger writers?
Jim Harrison: Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch.
- The Paris Review

10. 'It takes a long time to become an overnight success, so work harder than you ever thought possible. Then work some more. Don't give up. Don't complain. Just do it again. And then again. And if it's not working, my final piece of advice to you is probably the most surprising of all – quit. Don't stop writing entirely: Quit that particular sentence, paragraph or chapter. If it doesn't fit, cut it out, step over the blood, dry your tears and move on.' - Margie Orford, author of the Clare Hart series; O, The Oprah Magazine

11. 'You've got to plan; you've got to be meticulous, but there comes a time when you have to accept the consequences of what you're doing. You've got to dive in and go for it. If you dive in with thoughts of victory and defeat, if you're listening to both wolves, it ain't going to happen.' - Lewis Pugh, endurance swimmer

12. 'Each moment is a new beginning. The point of power is always in the present moment. You are never stuck.' - Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life

13. 'Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing. It is. If you can relax into time, not fight it, not fret at its passing, you will become better. You probably won’t be very good at the beginning, but you will become better, and eventually you may actually become good. But it doesn’t help to be afraid of time, or to measure yourself against prodigies like Conrad or Crane or Rimbaud. There’s always going to be somebody who did it better than you, faster than you, and you don’t want to make comparisons that will discourage you in your work. In fact, most fiction writers tend to graybeard their way into their best work.' - Tobias Wolff, The Paris Review

14. 'We all have talent but only those who see the value in their talent make it. ...get the necessary means to educate yourself about your passion and how to maximise your talents.' - Fashion designer Leah Misika

15. 'The best books come from deep within us. Consider your life experiences when you're seeking inspiration for characters and stories. I drew from losing a baby halfway through a pregnancy for one of my characters and from the loss of my dad for another. Readers can connect with characters who go through the same struggles they experience in their own lives. Tapping into how my own losses affected me allowed me to create more emotional, authentic stories. I treasure messages from readers who tell me they've gone through similar losses and that my books helped them find healing.' - Brenda Rothert, author of Bound

16. 'I'd define the essence of a writer in four words: imagination, passion, consistency, and quality. Keep your hopes above all else, no matter what. Never get discouraged, make the most of negative criticism, but don't get carried away with positive feedback either.' - Christophe Paul, author of The Penny Thief

17. 'Keep writing. Everyone reaches a point where they think they should throw the book away. I always think the difference between a published and unpublished writer is that the published one just kept writing.' - Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

18. 'Don't focus on the end goal. Focus on what's in front of you. Take it one stroke at a time.' - Chris Bertish, first solo trans-Atlantic stand-up paddleboarder

19. 'If you want to write a novel, ignore all advice. Just write the damn book, even if you're sure everyone else will hate it. If you like it, many others will.' - Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series

20. '”Sabrina, I want you to write me a novel.” Her commanding tone sends electricity down my arms. “Stop waiting for something or someone to inspire you,” she says. “Get inspired by your own life. Find a chaise; lie on it; be your own muse, for heaven’s sake. Can’t you see the best stories are already inside you, awaiting their release?”’ Catriona Ross,The Presence of
Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel

21. 'You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.' - Woodrow Wilson, (1856-1924), 28th U.S. president



Catriona Ross is the author of several books, including three guides for writers: Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know; Story Star: How to write your first novel and use the uncanny power of fiction to turn your wishes into reality, and the novel for aspirant novelists, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel.


Thursday 16 March 2017

Book Club for Two (or Even One)

Members of The No-Pressure Book Club are forgiven for not reading their books, or forgetting to bring a book to a meeting, or not attending for months on end (life, you know). This gives some meetings a refreshing intimacy.

I belong to a book club. Ours is not one of those portals to revelry, where women end up drinking and dancing on tables to Belinda Carlisle and forget to talk books. No. The No-Pressure Book Club really is about literature, despite the fact that membership can be thin on the ground at times.

We set the bar low, in a good way. Launched about a decade ago by a psychologist friend of mine (I guess the title gives that away), it's a fluid, friendly association consisting of a few invited members. We meet approximately once a month at a member's home, all contributing a snack so as not to burden anyone with hostessing anxiety. We each take one book we recommend or have heard is a worthwhile read (a second-hand book is perfectly acceptable) and tell the others about it. We like literary fiction and well-written, stimulating non-fiction, and you can throw your used magazines into the ring too, along with your pride, as there's usually a taker for those. We're renowned for only reading the literary best-sellers once all the hype has died down, usually two to three years after publication.

At the No-Pressure Book Club, nobody takes offence if members don't have time to read a book. For six months. Or forget to bring a book. Or forget to attend a meeting because they're engrossed in an erotic romance, and I don't mean a novel. There have also been long stretches where members too distracted by, say, new love or a white-knuckle life crisis, announce, 'No books for me; I'm just taking a magazine this month'. It's all okay.

Book clubs are a phenomenon here in South Africa as books are expensive; a club allows members to share the cost of books. Typically, our club consists of a small group of women, but we once had as a member an American guy who was working in Cape Town for an NGO. The fact that he looked like Barack Obama's hot younger brother and gave intellectually rigorous analyses of the works of weighty US authors kept attendance high. It was reminiscent of The Jane Austen Book Club, though our man left after a year to take up a place at an opera school in New York. He sang arias at his last book club meeting.

We have had marriages, pregnancies, births, divorces, mid-life crises, illnesses – the best of times, the worst of times. Occasionally there are only two of us at a meeting, my psychologist friend and me. The Core, as we refer to ourselves, catch up on our lives over snacks and tea. As my friend pondered at one of those intimate gatherings, 'I sometimes wonder if book club would continue if there was just one of us.'
'Yes, I think so,' I said. 'We're committed.'
'I could do it,' she mused. 'I could make snacks and tea, as usual, and hold book club for one. Write down which titles I'd taken out in the little black book. Select some new ones from the stock.'
In these times of Kindles and short attention spans, one must be flexible.

For me as a writer, it's also interesting to note how diversely people read books. There are those members who doggedly read a book to the end ('The author spent all that time writing it; they must have had something important to say,' one member explained. Personally, I have no qualms about abandoning a book if I run out of mood or feel the plot is sagging, or dropping it on the second page if I suspect I made a selection error). And there are those who glance at the last page to see the ending – jokes! Nobody in our book club would ever do that.

What binds the members is that we like to read books and then discuss them, turning a solitary activity into a shared experience. I remember a member hovering over me as I surveyed the table of books at a meeting, urging in a fervid whisper, 'Oh please, please read Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer. I need someone to talk to about it. It got quite weird at the end and I need to debrief.'

Which explains why many women and some men across the country meet monthly in this way: because humans love to sit down and be told a story by a master storyteller, and in world where books are relocating from paper to pixel, that's something that will never change.

Catriona Ross is the author of several books, including the just-published ebook, Story Star: How to write your first novel and use the uncanny power of fiction to turn your wishes into reality