From Kate De Goldi

Dear Northland students...sorry about the delay in reporting to you after the magnificent trip with the Book Council...I had an excellent time with every single group I spoke to or worked with...the week is a glorious swill of incidents, faces, names, landforms...and feijoas, which I am now officially obsessed with (the ones in the supermarket down here in Wgtn are very insipid compared to those straight from the trees in Northland...

To business: my earnest hope is that you're all writing - but even more importantly - READING...if I was to efficiently distil all that I said to creative writing classes it would boil down to this:

1.First you must be a passionate, attentive and wide-ranging reader. A writer learns his or her craft firstly from watching the masters...as student after student said in class in answer to the question, What do you learn from reading?: you learn how to make sentences, how to create character, how to shape story; you learn vocabulary; you learn about difference; you see your own life reflected; you learn that you are not alone in the universe; you learn what it is to be human.

It's the same with writing: that is why we write - to learn about ourselves and to discover what we don't know...

2. A good writer is second of all A Noticing Person: a good writer is alert in the world, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling...a good writer (as Margaret Mahy has said) must go out and 'wrench story from the world' - you have to look for it, and the way to look for it is by observing the world around you - being attendent on what people say, how they say it, what they look like, the way they do things; by noticing trees, the sky, buildings, aromas, the words that are written everywhere - on signs, on vehicles, etc; by noticing the quality of light in a room, the sound of silence, the shape of something in your hand; by looking down and up and around...a good writer is a pilot fish, nosing through the water, sucking up experience...and then:

3. A good writer Records: you must note down everything you observe...keep a notebook...keep several. Write it all down (don't worry about style, simply record)...the reason you do this is that otherwise you'll forget! Record and then re-read: you'll be amazed at how much you don't remember noticing...and, curiously, the more you record, the better you get at noticing...it's an extremely fruitful process....and then something else happens:

4. A good writer Connects: once you get into the habit of noticing and recording, inevitably you start making connections between things...a good writer becomes habituated to seeing story in unlikely connections between observations. To take an example of my own that I related in a few classrooms:a) an anxious 11 year old boy comes constantly into his mother's bedroom late at night to ask questions (do you think this spot is cancer? what if an earthquake happens? How likely is it that bird flu will come? What if the smoke alarm batteries are flat? etc; b) I notice trucks around town saying 'Document Destruction; c) A friend of mine has always called his (real) father Uncle George; d) I think Gordana is an unusual and intriguing name for a girl; e) what if your mother named all her children after the cities they were born in?; f) a friend fiddles with the mechanism on a music box so that the tune is played backwards....and on and on...all these were things I wrote down in my notebook: they began to connect in mysterious ways and suggest a story...that story is now The 10pm Question, a novel I've just finished.
But that novel took four years...a good writer needs stamina and committment - and has to be prepared to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite...A question hangs over all this: why should anyone be interested in reading what you write? Why indeed? The answer, I believe, is that a good writer persuades the reader they want to read because a good writer REPRESENTS the world in fresh and interesting ways...


5. A good writer takes what they have observed, recorded and connected up and gives it back in surprising ways...we all see the world differently - the trick is to capture the reader by presenting our take on the world in startlng or unexpected ways...two of the best tools a writer has in this regard are simile and metaphor...

Here's a lovely quote about metaphor, from the American writer Jane Yolen: 'What is a meta-phor? The answer is: mis-direction. We say one thing, something important, in terms of something else...
...We live our lives through metaphor... John Ciardi has so wisely called metaphor ‘an exactly felt error’... and the idea that metaphor is important to human thinking is not new. It was old when Aristotle said ‘to make metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.’ And, I suppose, one might add it implies an eye for differences as well...
A number of the exercises I did in creative writing classes were around metaphor - seeing something in terms of something else...A pineapple, to take Wallace Stevens fine example, is also, a hut standing alone beneath some palms, and some green genii coming out of a bottle...many of you performed metaphoric miracles with a pair of scissors...

So, my questions for you:

What have you READ this week?

What have you NOTICED?

What have you WRITTEN DOWN in your notebook - what kind of a notebook do you have?

Have any connections started up in your head?

How are you getting on seeing things in terms of something else - MISDIRECTING? What else is a vacuum cleaner besides being a vacuum cleaner? What is the sound of your teachers voice really? When your parents look at you in that particular way what animal do they suddenly become?

More later...Kate