I’ve not been writing much this week, mainly because my house has been in disarray due to the clearing out of rooms and the laying of carpet. But in between shifting heavy boxes and bagging up books I’ve been reading. Reading is of course a great escape from the world around us but for me as a writer, reading often proves my greatest inspiration. I guess I’m always looking for the writer who makes me think, I wish I’d written that; who makes me wonder, how did she do that? Why is he so good? And when I discover someone I haven’t read before who makes me ask these questions it’s always a source of inspiration.
This week it’s the Australian writer Tim Winton – yes I knew of him but I’d not read him – in particular his novels Dirt Music and Cloud Street.
Cloud Street opens: ‘Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living.’ A bravura opening if ever I read one. I love what Winton does with language, mixing it up, sometimes inventing words, making it fresh. His prose is muscular- great verbs, but its lyrical too. He’s not afraid of omitting punctuation and letting the sense of the words just roll on. He doesn’t shy away from the romance of a place or of the people in it or of describing them to us. His evocation of place and person is masterful. He writes in Technicolor with a booming sound track.
So how did this inspire me? How should the best writers, the writers we admire inspire us?
For one thing Winton clearly writes about the places and people he grew up with and reading him made me think of returning to those places myself. It also made me want to experiment with language, to try to get that freshness into my own writing, make up some words along the way – not copy but imitate his style and in some way learn how he does it. Over the last two years I’ve done a lot of paring down in my writing, working for clarity and simplicity and on the whole I think that’s been a good thing. But I can’t deny Tim Winton has just given me permissions to shake it up a bit. He has tempted me to the sensual, to the extravagant, to the dizzying, musical richness that can be prose. Here’s my beginning – first draft of course
And here she was, Enid. Look at her now full skirted, wide belt, in that summer dress she’d made herself, all cotton flower and lollipop swirl walking across the flutter shadowed, sun spangled grass to the stream, dangling a bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle of lemonade in the other.
To my way of thinking reading the best and letting them inspire our work (a notion I return to time and time again) is a way to look at what we do afresh, it helps us take stock of our writing. It’s also playful and writing should always retain its element of play.
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
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