Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

This simply-told story recounts one day for a 40 something Russian man, Shukhov (Ivan Denisovich), in one of Stalin's labour camps, somewhere in northern Kazakhstan. A place described as:

“Strange! Yes, a strange sight indeed: the naked steppe, the empty
building-site, the snow gleaming in the moonlight.”

But this isn’t a story built on languid descriptions of landscape. Shukhov and his 104th team are the focus: how they fight the extreme cold, how they work together, how the guards rule every movement, and how individuals fight for every precious personal moment. These moments are sacred to Shukhov. No longer a member of the 104th, but an individual suddenly, with the rare ability to focus inwards, concentrating thoughts on something other than inspections, marching in rank, and hard labour. Shukhov finds these moments in eating. He spends his entire day negotiating, bartering, and seeking opportunities to carry out favours, all in return for extra portions of thin porridge or “skilly”.

As the skilly “went down, filling his entire body with warmth” then

“Shukhov complained about nothing: neither about the length of his stretch, nor about the length of the day … This was all he thought about now: we’ll survive. We’ll stick it out, God grant, till it’s over”.

For Shukhov there is nothing to think about outside of the immediate need to keep warm, healthy and alive. As a middle-class Western man bombarded with all the distractions and information that the 21st century can throw, cast off into a distance-less and timeless void where anything can be got and anywhere reached at speed, it is a state of mind I am in curious awe of. Oh, if one could be satisfied with the basic necessities for survival taken care of each day, instead of this perpetual longing for some thing or some place else. (I did say middle-class!)

“’Why d’you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.’ … Shukhov gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn’t know either whether he wanted freedom or not.”

Does someone really need an experience like Shukhov’s to be able to appreciate home, family and security? Of the camp Shukhov says: “That’s what everyone used to say: ‘Going home.’ We never had time to think of any other home.”

Solzhenitsyn himself spent 8 years in various camps, charged with making derogatory comments about Stalin. When he was released in 1953 he spent another 3 years in exile, eventually returning to Russia to teach, this novel appearing in the early 60s thanks in large part to Alexander Tvardovsky.

As a writer I wrestle daily with what shall I write about? Time seems to stand still and shrink all at once. Constantly I feel like I am wasting time. Personal experience seems pithy and weak. The future weighs heavy, like a distant dark cloud looming on the horizon.

“Wonder of wonders! How time flew when you were working! That was something he’d often noticed. The days rolled by in the camp – they were over before you could say ‘knife’. But the years, they never rolled by: they never moved by a second.”

Solzhenitsyn’s writing was the first to expose much of the hard facts around Stalin’s labour camps, and, to me, raises many questions about how one lives one’s life today – both internally, and in action. This novel is as vital now as it ever was.

“You can push a man this way, and you can push a man that way.”

Acacia

It was with a feeling of excitement that I got stuck into David’s latest book – Acacia: Book One – The War With The Mein. First in a trilogy it charts the downfall of the mighty Acacian empire through the assassination of its king. Before he dies he sends his four children to the four corners of the known world where they are to mature and return one day to reclaim the throne.

Part of this enthusiasm, I must admit, was a selfish awareness that David had (loosely) based the main characters on my own family. King Leodan was modeled somewhat on my father, Laughton, and the four children on myself and my three siblings. Quite how far this inspiration stretched I’m not sure. Not too far I hope, as my sister, especially, comes out of it all rather dark and twisted.

David said Ursula Le Guin was an inspiration, as were Tolkien – no clearer than in the character of Rialus Neptos, his Wormtongue to the king – and other fantasy writers. He borrowed from myths around our world to create his own. And it’s a unique and very believable world. The first quarter of the book is fairly heavy going as the wheels are set in motion and the reader introduced to many characters, plots and cultures. But perseverance is rewarded with a rich tapestry of drama, intrigue and epic battles.

David obviously picked up the knowledge in pulling together massively disparate strands of narrative across such a vast landscape with Pride of Carthage. Perhaps the greatest skill he learned from that experience – and has honed here – was presenting battles in unique and arresting ways. There is film talk, and if that should ever come to fruition it will be interesting to see if they include the scene where an army (both male and female) of thousands strip all their clothes off to combat a beast attracted to bright colour!

There is a supreme sensuousness to David’s writing that comes in all forms.

It can be about physical characteristics: P.52 – “Her mother had given her the shape of her face, the character of her lips, the pattern of lines across her forehead. They had the same hands: the same rate of taper and length, the same character to the knuckles, the same thin fingernails, the same off-kilter slant to the small finger.” This passage resulting in a sublime refrain: “The girl of ten held between her palms an aged, decaying, fading grip on herself, like some strange conflation of the past with the present or the present with the future.”

It can be about sexual tension: P.418 – “She wore only a diaphanous shift, so short it was really just a shirt. Walking toward him, feeling his eyes on her, knowing the candlelight would highlight the contours of her hips and abdomen and breasts, she hummed with nervous excitement. It was the strangest of feelings. She felt tawdry and jaded, her lips moistened with oil, eyes shadowed like a courtesan’s. But she also tingled with innocence, as if she were a child again, girlish, walking in the glow of an appraising eye that seemed somehow fatherly. Very strange, she thought, but also decidedly to her liking.”

It can be about violence: P.441 – “Her sword bit into his wrist at an angle. The honed blade sliced up along the bones and cut free a sizable amount of flesh and muscle like it was soft cheese. His sword hand died, dropping the weapon.

“Despite the shock and pain of the cut, Larken was quick enough to extend his hand for the hilt. He would have caught hold of it, too, except that Mena circled her sword back and sliced the grasping hand. His four fingers twirled into the air, each of them dragging thin loops of blood with them. Mena would never forget the look on his face just then, nor in the following moment, when she carved a smile into his abdomen.”

David, unlike the work of Tolkien or C.S.Lewis, wanted a multi-ethnic world. And it is that. He takes great joy in uncovering wildly different histories, stories and myth. Borrowing from Nordic tales, New Zealand Maori myth, and an assortment of religions and animistic beliefs, his world is rich. Where he will take the next two books is anyone’s guess. He’s given himself plenty to work with.

Many people are likening his work to king of the genre, George R.R. Martin, but I haven't read any of his books so can offer no comment on that.

Like Carthage, this is a bloody, realistic portrayal of violence and power. There is a fair amount of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to some of the duels, but the battles are largely brutal and blunt. P.59 – “There was simply nothing to it other than the enemy pouncing on them and his soldiers dying, blood spray all around, limbs kicked across the sodden snow, bodies like cloth dolls strewn about in broken-backed postures impossible for the living.”

Unlike so much fantasy writing, there is no clear black and white regarding good and evil. Characters are painted in all colours, and we learn of their motivations and their place in a wider corrupt world. No one character is undeniably good or dastardly evil. There is much political and philosophical pondering bubbling under the surface narrative. It can be read in depth, or enjoyed superficially. Either way, he should reach a wide audience, and one that has been whipped into a fantasy frenzy by the recent Lord of the Rings resurrection, the end of Harry Potter and the imminent release of the His Dark Materials films by New Line.

Rejection-Rejection-Rejection-Rej...Oh

So I was all ready to write a bitter account of a writer's daily battle with far-away faceless editors who control you like some sick puppet master.

I had written an article, researched it, edited it, proofed it and had someone else check it out - Helen Harper - then came the part of sending it out.

I drew up a list of editors and publications and went about punting it via email. Oh the horror when I realised I'd sent it to various sections of the Guardian without attaching the article! Schoolboy error. Basic stuff. Really, really embarrassing.

How many of those editors immediately deleted any correspondence from me after that?

Then the waiting.

And waiting.

Then the first reply.

Rejection.

The process of watching your inbox reminds me of Luc Besson's The 5th Element when Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is told by the floating Chinese take-away host that he has mail. Korben wearily says he's not interested. The Chinese man very brightly says he should read it. Korben tells him to read it. The Chinese man opens it and exclaims: You're fired!

Most of the rest of the editors hadn't even replied. So I awoke early this morning, sometime around 4am, and couldn't get back to sleep. I shuffled into my slippers and pulled on the dressing gown and fingerless gloves. I had to do something. I came to the computer ready to post about the depressing position of being a writer.

The mailbox said I had a message from the South China Morning Post.

Click.

YOU'RE FIRED!!!

Actually it said they would be running the piece this weekend.

Huzzah.

Onto the next thing, and the next series of rejections.

My conscious

My conscious is divided up thus: 50% of each day thinking about writing, 40% beating myself up for not writing, and perhaps 5% of it concentrated on actually writing. The other 5% involves food and the like. Okay, so those figures are embellished, it’s probably nowhere near that. But that’s how it feels.

After spending a couple of weeks almost full-time writing at home a whole lot suddenly happened to divert my attention. This always seems to happen.

I went for a writing/research job with a Wellington-based company, Story Inc, which looked really interesting. They put together exhibits, interactives, signage and the like for all sorts of things: Museums, nature reserves, industry headquarters.

It took two days to write my application, then four days of worry before I heard back. Then they asked for two samples of writing. One was to write 115 words about an endangered New Zealand bird, The Stitchbird or Hihi. The other was to design an interactive exhibit that explained the Buddhist notion of karma in one A4 page. Both were to be for an uninformed young audience. Have fun with it, they said. I did for the first 30mins. For the rest I sweated. That was another three days. Then another four days of waiting.

That week I wrote an article We All Live Downstream which I am currently trying to sell.

On top of that I took on part-time work at the Lighthouse Cinema nearby. It fulfills a boyhood dream of working as a projectionist. I’ve already managed to drop an entire film, Ocean’s 13, which took over 2 hours to put back together. It’s great threading the film up and then adjusting the frame, setting the lens, and fretting over whether you’ve done it right.

I got an interview for the job. So that was another day of preparing and another three days of waiting.

I didn’t get the job, but strangely they invited me in the next day.

I spent the next two weeks in their offices working freelance. I worked on a Maori Rock Art exhibit in Timaru, South Island, New Zealand, and an exhibit for a museum in Bangkok, Thailand about the earliest people in Southeast Asia who settled in a region called Suvarnambhumi.

So the fiction is, as usual, on hold – except for in my mind where it continues to fester.

I have plans to write some more articles before leaping back into the novel.

Until now

This blog has been somewhat random to date. Mainly compiling other people’s articles, blogs and websites of interest. And of course images found during my continuing search for the loneliest cabins. But there has been very little comment of my own. My aim is for that to change. What I intend to do is chart my progress as a writer. Part of my reluctance to engage myself in actually writing on the blog has come from a fear of putting too much into it and not enough into anything else. But I’ve come to realise that writing, in any form, will help overall.

In a southern American twang: “Well what we gat here? A ree-dah?” – Bill Hicks.

First then, the story till now. As a kid I read a lot. Unlike most kids I lived in some fairly remote places, including the Isle of Rum – population around 20. This definitely fuelled my interest (need) in books, music and computers. My father, Laughton, read many books to me (that I subsequently reread), and the ones that stick in the memory most are The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, a lot of Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin.

By the time I was seven I had written (and recorded on cassette) my first poems. One of them I remember a little of: “and the noise went beep beep beep all night long / Oh what a noise.” This was inspired by a stint in the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh.

The first time I remember turning my hand to fiction was soon after when I began a sequel to Lord of the Rings. The first scene involved the principal characters searching for Gimli’s axe in the rubble of Helm’s Deep. I bashed this out on one of the typewriters in the Nature Conservancy Council office on the island.

Over the years I kept a diary at various junctures, and wrote many letters to my siblings who all lived abroad at different points. The other memories I have of my writing came through school. At James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh I had a stereotypically larger than life English teacher, Mr Campbell, in the mould of Alasdair Gray. He sang at you in a theatrical voice and was prone to embellishment and great humour. He had the required physical characteristics: corduroy suits, a missing thumb, wiry grey hair that surrounded a bald dome like a bird’s nest, and a glass eye. On one of my old jotters my friend Gavin Sutherland and I had been writing the name of our band, Amorphous Head, in different styles. And below this Mr Campbell has written: So this is what goes on in the secret corner! He was inspiration in itself.

At Breadalbane Academy in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, another elderly English teacher gave me full marks for a piece of creative writing. No one else had had such a privilege for a long time, he said. But what marked it out for me was the content of the piece. It was a gritty, no holds barred (well, I thought it was for a fourteen year old’s English submission at school) piece about young folks going off the rails at a house party. I may be embellishing the story now, but I remember my classmates were shocked that such content was not just accepted, but prized.

Had there been an undergraduate creative writing course available back then I’m sure I would have applied. For as long as I can remember I’ve always imagined writing for a living. As it was I ended up studying Film & TV and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. With the advent of email a lot of my writing became enmeshed with communication back to old friends in Edinburgh. Stories involving them as the principal characters and the like. I also got into journalism and became Sports Editor for the Glasgow University Guardian.

Studying Scottish Literature has had a profound effect on my writing. I learned what texts were important (from Barbour’s Bruce to Stevenson and Scott to House of the Green Shutters and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to MacDiarmid to Alexander Trocchi to Kelman and Gray to Spark and Lochhead to Banks to Welsh to Warner) and how they slotted into a Scottish psyche. All courtesy of an inspiring department led by the enigmatic Douglas Gifford.

With the emergence of the Creative Writing Masters at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities I decided to apply. There was something appealing in the fact applications were approved based on a folio of writing, rather than previous studies and qualifications. So for the first time in a while I sat down to produce a few thousand words of fiction.

Once accepted I spread out the studies as thinly as possible. It didn’t seem worthwhile to complete the course in one academic year, unless one had produced that barnstorming novel. Instead I did the course part-time which seemed to make my studies much the same as those students who were full-time. I had the same amount of access to the staff. Could be present at just as many lectures and workshops. But I knew I would have another year of the same.

The first year for me was run by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, two of the most famous Scottish writers, and I had studied them during my undergraduate years. I spent the majority of this year attempting to write a screenplay as my mind was fixed on being involved in film. I was also terribly caught up in the mechanics of producing two anthologies with funding from the course, and in coordinating and running a weekly reading night at the Scotia Bar. In hindsight I believe my priorities were all wrong, and I don’t think I took advantage of the staff and course nearly enough. Which is why I am glad I decided to take a year out (spreading the course out as much as possible).

When I returned the course was altogether different. Kelman and Gray had retired, and Willy Mayley had returned from a sabbatical. His positive energy altered the makeup of the department considerably. On a personal note, the time away had also fixed my mind on prioritising the writing over anything extracurricular. So it was that I devoted my time to writing for this academic year 2004-2005. I had a deadline of six months – between October and March – as I would be returning to California for a job. I finished my first novel, a landmark. Again though, with hindsight, I can now see that my need to complete the novel in that timeframe affected the quality of the prose I produced. There was little rewriting, redrafting or redressing. Instead I pushed on to finish the story. My study of Scottish Literature and time at Glasgow University (going on six years by this point) also affected my work and the appreciation of my peers’ work. I found the cosy scene claustrophobic and was turned off by writing that I found to be Scottish short-sighted navel-gazing. It was all too close to home

Ever since then I have been travelling and living abroad and waiting for life to get out the way so I can continue to write. Two years later I’m now realising life won’t do that for you. But I find it hard to slot in small stints of writing amongst other work pursuits. So far it has been all or nothing. I need a few months of dedicated time to write. In the past year I created that time to produce more prose in Thailand, and now in New Zealand I have the time to dedicate myself to it again. The outsider perspective of living abroad will, I hope, give me the necessary inspiration to dig a little deeper this time. There is no cosy scene to get lost in.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve come to appreciate that any form of writing is a good thing. So I supplement the frustrating production of fiction with blogs, travel writing and various non-fiction stories for websites, newspapers and magazines in the hope that I can earn enough to write for a living.