A Glorious Mess

Goodness, what a weekend! Here in Perth, the Western Australian Writers Festival kicked off with a weekend full of workshops, author readings, pop-up bookstores, information stalls and other events. I managed to get to precisely none of them.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, because everything on offer looked interesting and worthwhile. It also wasn’t because the weather was too hot as a wet cold front blew in and gave us all a delightful respite from the searing 40-plus days and stifling nights that we sandgropers have been enduring. No – I didn’t get to leave my local area to attend anything at all because I was parked on my bottom writing. Yep – that thing we aspiring writers have to do to get words onto the page.

I am fortunate to live only an 8-minute drive from the Peter Cowan Writers Centre (pictured) on the gorgeous grounds of ECU, Joondalup. Unless it’s a Saturday, and I forget not to take the shortcut that goes through a roundabout that feeds the car parks of Bunnings, the Good Guys and Spotlight. Then it’s a fifteen-minute drive.

This Saturday was the second workshop hosted by the Centre for Stories at the Peter Cowan Writers Centre to train storytellers for a Joondalup Festival event in March. In January, I submitted a story to earn a place. At the first workshop a week ago, I was instructed to pull that story apart and rewrite it to fit the requirements of the tutor – a lanky, energetic and engaging Englishman of Jamaican descent named Colin. I listened to all the tips I was given (focus on connection and address the stakes) and reshaped my work accordingly. During the week, I asked for listeners, presented my story verbally and took note of their feedback. I made sure I fell within the eight-minute time limit. By this Saturday, I was ready to present.

We were told every participant would talk, and then the group would decide which four stories needed to be heard the most. Those people would take their stories to the Joondalup Festival. I steeled myself for rejection, even though I knew it wasn’t that my story didn’t matter or wasn’t well written or even well presented. I have a speech and debating background and am quite comfortable talking to an audience. But I had also heard the stories of the other group members at the first workshop, and they were all incredible. Childhoods spent in refugee camps, families split apart and left homeless by war, emigration to unknown lands with unfamiliar languages, painful divorces, the healing power of nature, and navigating life with children whose path didn’t take the same direction as most. And then there was my story of living with a hole in my skull and desperately trying to find people and places that could help me not succumb to loneliness and despair from isolation.

Seated on hard wooden chairs around a large dark table, the diverse group listened to the reshaped stories. Then, we were informed that this beautiful gathering of life travellers would not be choosing the four storytellers after all. Instead, we would resubmit our stories, and someone who hasn’t met us will decide. Colin took notes on each presentation, but ultimately, it is the stories themselves that will win over the person who has the final say. We have a week to resubmit, so I will tweak a word or phrase here or there. But my story is what it is, and I have to accept that is enough.

I am relieved the group wasn’t asked to choose because how do you decide which story has more power or rips at your heart more or opens your eyes to others’ ways of life without the people whose stories weren’t quite ready or were similar to someone else’s feeling they didn’t measure up? Everyone’s story matters, so I’m glad we didn’t have to make that call. 

Sunday found me back on those hard wooden chairs that scrape loudly on the polished floorboards whenever I try to stand up discreetly. This time, the course was about the structure of story writing. Much as I love writing, I’ve never had to pay much attention to how it’s done. I just write what I want to say. My friends have always enjoyed my words, and until now, that has been enough. But, if I want people to be interested in publishing my work, I have to follow the guidelines they expect.

Trust me, having to follow the rules – or even learning that there ARE rules – grates strongly. I have a little issue with creativity being stifled by expectations and formulas. However, the words of a wise 18-year-old who only recently survived ATAR English have become my mantra: “Learn the rules well so you can break them”.

This Sunday afternoon course will take up nine months of my year. From 1 pm to 4:30 pm, with only a thirty-minute break at home for lunch after church, I will sit with eight others and learn jargon and structure and any other elements deemed necessary to be a good story writer. I will be forced to read books I’m not interested in (first example: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. I couldn’t get past the first three pages, so I read the study notes instead). I will have to discuss various books in depth, which will be challenging because I have never enjoyed book clubs. That admission might surprise some since I have work in books, but that disdain comes from two places – the first being that I don’t need a prop such as a club to initiate discussion, and the second that I want what I read to be what I wanted it to be, not what someone else says it should be. I prefer to enjoy things on my own terms.

We needed a story, or the idea of one, to bring to the group to work on. Mine is the genre of memoir, but I quickly discovered that the structure and process of story-writing doesn’t always match my chosen style. For example, you can’t “What if” a memory. Something either happened, or it didn’t. To still get the maximum benefit from the course, I decided I might as well start writing a fiction story. I played the “What if” game and came up with an idea that I thought was interesting enough to keep me going for nine months. It’s pretty superficial, and there’s no intent of publishing it, but it’s fun to imagine and create rather than always being bound by reality.

And there you have it. I wanted to be a writer, and writers write. I’m grateful I don’t go to work on Mondays because it’s my only time to recover from what is now a second job (that doesn’t pay anything!). I know my decision to fill my weekends and some of my evenings with writing courses and workshops, along with taking up any offers and opportunities, will limit me in other areas. But if I want to one day have my work on shelves in a bookstore, to tell my stories to a wider audience, I have to forge my way through the hard yakka first. And, who knows, maybe one year, I’ll be the person presenting something at the WA Writers Festival!