Interview with Daisuke Takahashi November 13, 2009

Daisuke Takahashi explains how a childhood book inspired a life of adventure.

We all know that childhood reading is important, that it feeds the imagination. No one knows this better than Daisuke Takahashi, whose love of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe inspired him to travel the world as an adult. In his twenties, Daisuke backpacked throughout the world, drawn to the wilderness of Himalayas, the Antarctica, the Amazon and the Sahara. His fascination with the Earth’s most remote regions stemmed from his love of Defoe’s classic novel. “For me Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was a kind of bible. It tells how one can manage to survive in a remote part of the world.”

He had always regarded Robinson Crusoe “as a fiction of the 18th century, just the imagination of author.” When he learned that the novel is thought to be based on the experience of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), Daisuke determined to find out everything he could about Selkirk’s story and how it related to Robinson Crusoe’s. “What was the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Everything started from this question and provided me with my inspiration.” Daisuke documents his pursuit of the answer in his book, In Search of Robinson Crusoe.

A large part of the book is concerned with Daisuke’s stay on Robinson Crusoe Island (formerly Más a Tierra), off the coast of Chile, where Selkirk was marooned for four years and four months. Daisuke, a seasoned traveller and explorer, used his survival skills to live off the island’s resources as Selkirk had done almost 300 years previously, with no modern tools or equipment. Daisuke believes that this experience was crucial to enable him to understand how Selkirk must have felt during the years he spent alone on the island. “I spoke to the island’s rocks and trees to relieve loneliness. Without this experience, I could not write about [Selkirk’s] castaway life.” Daisuke hoped that by living like Selkirk for a short time on the island, he would uncover evidence of the castaway’s existence. “Trying to find water and edible fruit or catching fish on the island like Robinson Crusoe was not for fun but to find Selkirk’s campsite.”

Daisuke draws on historical documents in In Search of Robinson Crusoe to give an account of Selkirk’s life. “We know about his castaway life from A Cruising Voyage Round the World by Captain Woodes Rogers. Rogers was a buccaneer and rescued Selkirk from [the island]”. In the small town of Lower Largo in Scotland, where Selkirk was raised, Daisuke gained access to documents from the local church which shed light on Selkirk’s personality. The church’s records of disciplinary action taken against Selkirk led Daisuke to draw the conclusion in his book that Selkirk was “hot-headed” and “prone to think with his fists.” This perhaps explains why, after one too many quarrels with the captain of the Cinque Ports galley, Selkirk was set ashore on a deserted island. To understand Selkirk’s role as sailing master on board pirating ships, Daisuke researched navigational history and explains that this information on the lives of pirates in the 18^th century lends authenticity to his writing. “Many parts of my book rely on this indirect but historical background, however, I write the whole story as my personal journey and experience.”

Daisuke’s advice for aspiring travel writers is to gather as much information as possible on location. “Notes and photographs are essential; hand drawn rough maps and sketches too.” To recreate a landscape for a reader, Daisuke says that it is important to pay attention to all your senses. “How does the air smell? Is it dry or humid, hot or chilly?” Sometimes he takes sound recordings while he is travelling and tries to get a feel for the local language. “I write my emotional feeling too. I want to tell the readers how I feel about it, so the reader may feel what it is like to be there.”

For his next adventure, Daisuke hopes to delve into the background of another work of fiction and travel to the Guiana Highlands of South America. “They say that it is a prototype of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. How did Conan Doyle write the novel?” Daisuke aims to find out.

In Search of Robinson Crusoe is available to buy on Amazon.

Blogoversary October 31, 2009

I was sure “blogoversary” was a real word but I’ve just checked on dictionary.com and it’s not listed there, although “blogosphere” is. Anyway, today is My Writing Life’s blogoversary and once again I am preparing to take part in NaNoWriMo, which kicks off tomorrow. In marked contrast to 31st October 2008, however, my cupboard is bare and I’m freezing sitting at my desk. I’ve been too lazy to go food shoping and I’m trying not to run up a huge gas bill so I haven’t turned the heating on. Other differences between then and now: I haven’t planned my novel at all, although there are three scenes in my head that I will write tomorrow, hopefully hitting the required 1 667 words; I am working full time now so I really will have to squeeze the writing into an evening slot; I’m in Scotland this year (I was in Spain last year) so I won’t be able to sit on a balcony enjoying the sun while dreaming up adventures for my characters.

All in all I feel like I have taken a rather reckless approach to NaNoWriMo 2009. It might just work for me though; we’ll see if I have a novel out of it in a month’s time.

Rodge Glass – Edinburgh Writers’ Club 2009 October 30, 2009

Rodge Glass is the author of two novels and a biography, Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, for which he received a 2009 Somerset Maugham Award. He recently visited the Edinburgh Writers’ Club to talk about researching and writing about the life of his mentor.

Glass was tutored by Gray while doing his MA in Creative Writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities and subsequently spent three years working as Gray’s personal assistant. Glass felt compelled to write the biography so that other people would know what it was like to spend time in Gray’s company. “He was a complete nutcase, worth writing about.”

Although Glass had been in close contact with Gray for several years before beginning work on the biography, he says, “At no point did I feel like I knew Alasdair better than anyone else. I felt I could contribute something in a way that someone with a pile of books and good reviewing skills couldn’t do.”

Gray supported Glass with the project, providing him with contact details of friends and acquaintances he could talk to and allowing him to read his unpublished writing. “If my book’s worth anything it’s because I had access to all the things I wanted to.” Gray’s personal poems were particularly revealing, giving Glass an insight into his subject’s mind. “For a biographer it’s gold; all the masks disappear. The narrator is the poet.”

One challenge that Glass faced with writing the biography was to communicate the facts while making the book an entertaining read. He was conscious that he should try “not to make Alasdair into a cartoon  - not to make fun of him – and also not to make the book dry.” Glass’s solution was to include anecdotes and diary entries from the time he spent working for Gray to give an impression of the subject as a person. He describes the resulting book as “a portrait of the artist as an old man.”

Glass points out that writing a biography of a living person has its drawbacks and advantages. “It’s incredibly inconvenient to write about someone you can bump into in Iceland because they can complain about [the book] but it makes it easier to make it vibrant.”

When asked if he will add chapters to future editions of the biography to cover later years of Gray’s life, Glass responds that he has no plans to do so. “[The book] was never supposed to be an absolute truth. It’s an intense emotional engagement over a particular period of time. There’s an honesty to that that I’m proud of.”

For anyone interested in writing a biography, Glass has this to say: “Immersing yourself in someone else’s life comes highly recommended by me but don’t immerse yourself to the extent that you neglect everything else. It’s a quick way to the insane asylum.”

Overheard October 24, 2009

I began my course in shorthand a few weeks ago and today I started a new job so I’m finding that I have less and less time to work through the items on my to-write list.  That’s why I thought I would cheat a little today and give you some quotes from talks and author events that I’ve been to recently that didn’t make it into other blog posts. Just for a bit of light relief, you understand!

“Dickens couldn’t write about sex for toffee.” – Joanna Trollope

“You have separate eggs to make the omelette but once it’s made you can’t treat it as separate eggs.” – Jenny Joseph (on combining meaning and form in poetry)

“I am not a fan of Sayers. I find her writing overblown and I find Lord Peter Wimsey insufferable. He’s a man whose face you’d never grow tired of slapping.” – Val McDermid

“From the Chalet School books I learned that there were three institutions of higher learning: The Sorbonne, Oxford, and the Kensington School of Needlework.” – Val McDermid

“I didn’t want to write ever again. I wrote too much too quickly after Behind the Scenes – that’s why I wrote the short stories. I felt it was very important to write short stories to train myself not to finish everything.” – Kate Atkinson

“If you’re an author of a series of novels and you tell your editor you’ve come up with a radical new idea, their sphincter tends to tighten a bit.” – Ian Rankin, turning to stare intently at the sign language signer.

“Georgian houses are very rational, very square. They’re big and they’ve got lots of light – and I like red brick.” – Sarah Waters on why she chose to model Hundreds Hall on Georgian mansions.

“The Little Stranger is my first novel that doesn’t have a gay element. I was apologising to lesbian audiences months in advance of publication.” – Sarah Waters

“I’ve just never done an event in Cambridge because I’m so worried people will come out and say, ‘why did you write that about my town?’” – Kate Atkinson, on Case Histories.

BBC Writersroom Roadshow – Dundee 2009 October 15, 2009

Can you get a hernia from coughing too much? I have come down with a stinking cold and my cough mixture is only offering temporary relief. It tastes foul, too. I wish I were a kid again and medicine tasted like banana milkshake or strawberry Ribena. I am constantly too hot or too cold and my veering body temperature seems to be completely independent of whether or not the central heating is on. As I walked shivering through the streets of Dundee yesterday to go to the BBC Writersroom Roadshow, I had no idea if the abundance of people in t-shirts was due to uncharacteristically warm weather or to the hardy nature of Dundonians.

The roadshow kicked off with George Aza-Selinger telling us a little bit about the Scotland Writes competition. After that, Paul Ashton ran through some advice on what the BBC Writersroom is looking for in the first ten pages of a script.

I’ve already blogged about the Scotland Writes launch event and the Edinburgh Screenwriters meeting where we heard more about the competition so there’s not a lot of new information to add to that. Regarding the synopsis, they are looking for “a two page summary, just to give you that chance to add in information at this stage that we don’t know yet from reading the first ten pages.” You don’t need an episode or character breakdown in your synopsis – “If you need to describe the characters outside the script then the script isn’t really working”. You do need to say what the story is about and why you are telling it - “People need to know the whole feel of the story rather than the details.” About the impending postal strikes: “We will blog about it on our website and let you know. You can always send us an e-mail if you want to know your script has arrived.”

Now for the BBC Writersroom Guide to the First Ten Pages:

• Start the story on page one, grab the reader’s attention straight away. Don’t preface, set-up or introduce story or characters.
• Format is incredibly important. Master the format and make it your own. Watch drama, see how the stories are structured. “Too many people try to subvert the format before they’ve mastered it.”
• Direct the action and the story. Write what an actor can show. Don’t direct the camera.
• Know your world and story, genre and tone. There should be a focused way in to your story, “don’t try to set up too many storylines at the beginning.”
• “Character is the most important thing.” Characters have to be compelling on an emotional level. Avoid cliche, subvert stereotypes. “Come up with people you want to spend time with. You don’t have to like or admire them, you just have to want to see what they are going to do next.” Your characters have to make the reader sweat, cry, laugh and cringe. “We spend a lot of time reading scripts that are really well crafted, well turned, but it doesn’t make you feel anything.”
• There are only a finite number of stories so you need to have a fresh, unique perspective.
• “Good dialogue expresses character.” Don’t write on the nose, use subtext.
• “You need that desire to tell a story – that’s got to be there or you can’t do great writing.”
• “We need a sense, when we get to the end of a script, that the ending is inevitable but not predictable.”
• Be yourself. “We’re looking for writers; we’re looking for people.”

Further advice on creating your best possible first ten pages can be found on the BBC Writersroom Website.

Sam Kelly and David Bishop Q&A October 12, 2009

You may remember that over the summer I went to a couple of writing workshops, one on Experimentalism for Beginners and the other on Writing for Graphic Novels. The workshop leaders, Sam Kelly and David Bishop, have recently taken part in a question and answer session with the Scottish Book Trust, which you can read here. Their advice on what gets them excited about writing and what puts them off is particularly useful.  Just for the record, my favourite word is “curl”.

A Disappointing Day for Contemporary Poets October 8, 2009

I was going to begin this post by wishing you all a happy National Poetry Day, I was even thinking of throwing in a jaunty little haiku, but I’ve just visited the BBC’s poetry season website (I blogged about it a while back) and read the results of the Nation’s Favourite Poet vote and now I don’t feel all that happy or jaunty at all (luckily for you; you’ve been spared my terrible haiku.)

Do you know, only four of the top ten poets were born in the 20th century? I was going to work out the average year of birth but I realised that John Donne in second place, born in 1572, would skew the results somewhat. Thank goodness for third favourite Benjamin Zephaniah, born in 1958, the only one of the nation’s top ten poets who is happily Not Dead Yet.

I certainly don’t wish to undermine the brilliance of the poets who made it into the top ten, I merely wish to point out that National Poetry Day seems not to have reached its goal of ”bringing poetry to the public eye” if most of the poets on the shortlist were firmly in the public eye, or at least somewhere in the back of the public’s minds, already. Who has not come across the Nation’s Favourite Poet T.S. Eliot before?  Have we not all had William Blake, W.B. Yeats and John Keats forced down our throats at school? Where are all the contemporary poets?

Before voting took place, thirty poets were pre-selected by a panel of judges (including the Director of the Poetry Society and the Director of the Arts Council). Each of the thirty names on the list is accompanied by a head shot and if you scroll through all the photos, you will see that only seven of them are in colour. That’s right. Most of the pre-selected poets lived before colour photography either existed or became popular. Some of them, judging by the oil paintings and pencil sketches, were around before photography existed. What were you thinking, panel of judges? You have done a great disservice to contemporary poetry. Looking at this list of thirty poets, one might think that poetry was a dying art.

On the contrary, poetry is alive and well and evolving with the times: in the last decade or so with the advent of mobile phones we’ve seen poems written in text speak and condensed into 140 characters; there have been poetry slamming events popping up around the country and videos of poets performing their work are all over youtube. The list of stale poets in the top ten (with the exception of Benjamin Zephaniah) makes no reflection on the dynamic nature of poetry. There are poets writing now about current affairs, about troops in Afghanistan and knife crime in London, issues that people today feel strongly about and can identify with. I have never studied English literature and I don’t read poems critically, but for enjoyment. I don’t feel that I can engage with the writings of TS Eliot, no matter how popular his poems were at the time he was writing with them. I do feel something, a kind of pang of recognition, when I read the poems written by women in the New Writing section of Mslexia. (Another disappointing fact: not one woman features in the nation’s top ten).

After this rant you’re probably expecting me to recommend some contemporary poets. I’m not an expert at all but recently I’ve come across and liked poems by Mark Thomson, Liz Niven and Meirion Jordan.  Here are links to youtube videos of Mark Thomson and Meirion Jordan reading their own poetry. Enjoy!

New Beginnings October 3, 2009

This is the type of post that you tend to see in January – a kind of summing up of the last year and a bit of an outlook on the next one. I spent 20 of my 26 years in full time education so for me the new year has always started in autumn. September is a month for finishing things off and these last few weeks I’ve been living with my head in the past as I’ve remembered all the phases of my life that have come to an end. In September 2005 I graduated from university; in September 2008 I completed my PhD ; in the last few minutes of September 2009 I pressed print on the first draft of my first novel.

October is when new adventures begin. Four years ago today I moved to Switzerland. One year ago my writing life officially began when I went to Spain to enjoy a much needed time-out in a writers’ retreat. Now I’m thinking about what comes next. I’ve handed over the first draft of my novel to my sister so that she can give me some feedback on it. Over the coming year I plan to rewrite and redraft it. I’m going to perservere with scriptwriting and in the next twelve months I would like to complete one TV drama pilot episode and one radio drama script. I’ve been keeping this blog for almost a year now and I’ve really enjoyed writing articles and interviews for it so I’ve decided to try to pitch articles to magazines. Finally, NaNoWriMo 2009 is rapidly approaching and I am going to take the opportunity to write the first draft of my second novel. Participating in NaNoWriMo 2008 is one of the best things I have ever done and I can’t wait to take up the challenge again!

Contemporary Women Writers – Oxford Alumni Weekend 2009 October 2, 2009

In this, the third and final post to feature an event at the Oxford Alumni Weekend, I would like to share with you the notes I made at the Contemporary Women Writers session with Joanna Trollope, Francesca Kay and Clare Morgan.

Q: Do you show early drafts of your work to other people?

JT: I’m no good at sharing work in progress with anyone. My editor will see the 4^th or 5^th version. Usually my editor, sometimes one of my daughters, will see the novel first.

FK: The very first person that read my work was my daughter because she typed it for me. You’ve just got to grit your teeth and your nerve and get through the writing process by yourself. It’s not a community activity.

CM: Some people benefit hugely at certain stages of their writing career by sharing their work with other people. I tend to get it right to a certain extent before I want to show it to other people. I show it to someone close to me so that I don’t make a complete fool of myself.

Q: What is the role of an editor?

JT: The role of an editor is absolutely enormous. I learned a great deal from my first editor 35 years ago about presenting characters, varying tension and the presentation of dialogue. I don’t think there is a single writer on this earth whose work would not improve by editing.

FK: My agent put in commas and removed words and I knew he was right. This paring down by someone you trust is a creative process, not a destructive one.

CM: Acute editing is a) marvellous and a relatively rare skill; b) to be valued by any writer.

Q: What would you say to someone at the start of their writing career who wants to get published?

FK: It’s a gruelling process. One needs a huge amount of luck. Publishers can’t read everything or give everything the attention it deserves. My only advice would be keep trying if you’ve got the confidence to do it and you can bear to do it.

JT: When you want to be published very much, don’t despise any form of being published. Whether it’s a piece in a church newsletter or in a magazine, every bit of writing contributes to your accomplishment as an author. Never despise the details.

Q: Would you be happy if you were not published?

FK: Writing is an act of communication. It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to be published. It meant I was communicating what I wanted to say to somebody. Not being published would be like singing into an empty room: you’ve not got the purpose an audience would give you.

JT: If I knew I was writing into a void I’m not sure I could do it. I see the reader as an integral part of what I am writing. Without you, what is the point?

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

JT: Always have a notebook with you. Listen to people on buses and in the checkout queue. Fill that notebook with photos and lines of poetry. You are making a patchwork which is training that acute observation of human relationships.

FK: Practice and practice and practice. Writing is, after all, a craft. Even if that writing is the most perfectly crafted shopping list or e-mail, keep those writing tools sharp.

CM: You need the ability to listen to the voice in your head, the intonation and rhythm and pacing of that inner voice that speaks the words of what you are writing to you. Often the authentic voice can be quashed by notions of what’s fashionable or, worse, literary. Try and find that true voice.

Joanna Trollope is the author of fourteen contemporary novels and has also written several historical novels under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. Her most recent novel, Friday Nights, explores the nature of female friendships.

Francesca Kay’s debut novel, An Equal Stillness, is written in the style of a biography of a fictional artist, Jennet Mallow.

Clare Morgan is director of the Master of Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.

Three Oxford Poets – Oxford Alumni Weekend 2009 September 30, 2009

The second highlight of the Oxford Alumni Weekend was hearing three prominent poets read a selection of their work. After the readings, poets Bernard O’Donoghue, Jenny Joseph and John Fuller answered questions from the audience.

Q: Can you tell us something about the writing process?

JF: Sometimes a chance word in your notebook suddenly flowers and you’re off, and then there are those poems that you are bound to write. They’ve always got to be created from something somehow. You have to work on them and you can’t rely on flashes of inspiration.

JJ: I’m trying to avoid saying ‘bloody battle’! The Torrent took over two years to write. I had stacks and stacks of notes. At one point I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish it. You’ve got to sit with the bits you’ve got and go on with it. The battle shouldn’t show in the poem. If it does show then the poem isn’t finished yet.

B O’D: There are poems that write themselves quickly and ones you have to work on. The ones that write themselves quickly are often the most satisfying.

Q: Do poets have editors?

JF: I’ve published poems for 48 years and 95% of the time I’ve had no editorial feedback. I recently got a new editor who has made suggestions on the placement of poems in the book or told me that they don’t understand a poem.

JJ: A publisher will feel that a poem is made before it gets to them. If the poem is commissioned, they do feel like tailoring it more.

Q: What relevance do form and meaning have in your poetry?

JF: I’m fully concerned with form in every facet, but meaning has to be there, of course.

JJ: I can’t separate them at all. I can’t think of form as a piece of clothing that you can take on or off. Mostly it’s the form that comes first in that you hear the rhythm or the shape of the poem. The words are hovering and you’ve got to sort of dig them out.