Tag: Profound

Sacrificing the ego

PeterLeave a comment

It’s my experience of life that ego is the enemy of much that otherwise might be good, but rarely does knowing it make a difference.

It’s one of the things I write about, though surreptitiously, as are all the things I write about. (To digress for a moment, I don’t set out to write moral fables or with such a clearly defined themes. I write stories that are true in themselves and which – as it happens in life – touch upon these elements and illuminate them).

Ego can also lead you astray in your writing, though I’ll speak only for myself.

I’m thinking about it now as I’m writing this, asking myself, what is good writing? There are probably many different answers to that, but at this moment, I think it’s connecting honestly with a deeper truth and putting it on the page without shame.

To become a writer of this ilk in the first place suggests sensitivity and quite possibly some introversion. Certainly, it suggests curiosity and thoughtfulness, and perhaps even some humility. And, to be good, honesty as well.

Writing is a solitary, anti-social business, and together with that set of attributes, there’s nothing to suggest the writer has any greater ego than most, and very likely less – and in my reading, it seems that there are many who have so subverted themselves in service of their work that ego doesn’t exist.

But, of course, writers are people too. They – we? – come in all types, all shapes, all politics, all beliefs and attitudes, all personalities. Sometimes, we’ll see that in the writing; sometimes, we laud the writer for their unique vision and individuality. This is what we’ve come to see.

Ego in writing is a balancing act. If it’s ego that leads the writer to boldly walk the plank where no one else dares go, then let’s go there. But equally, the writer who removes the ego from their work creates something that draws us in because it’s on a scale we can identify with – and so becomes our story as well as theirs.

In my case, I don’t have much choice in the matter. I have an abundant ego and a healthy dose of narcissism as well. The combination has favoured me often, made me bold when I needed to be and strong when I had to hold the line. It’s also made me stupid sometimes and led me to crash and burn more than I can say – but at least it has provided excellent fuel for the creative fire.

The voice you hear now is the voice of the ego. It’s the projection of me in my writer’s get-up. I won’t tell you any more than I want you to know and in a voice calculated to charm and intrigue. It’s not false or insincere; it comes unadulterated from my mind (you get the first draft), but the tone is curated to create an image of me as an individual. Never mind the other shit I keep secret from you.

But later, when I sit down to do my actual writing, I’ll look to set that ego aside. That’s a work in progress, but then I’m doing this for a reason. Fiction writing isn’t a vanity project. I set out writing all those years ago for a range of reasons. Ego was one of them – I wanted to leave a record, a mark, of my existence. But what drove it forward was curiosity, wonder, and a search for a kind of truth that made sense to me, and ego had no part in that – just the opposite.

This is not to say that ego is absent from my fiction writing. It informs how the stories come together, and it’s there in a voice I want to be heard. I’m not so humble that I want to take myself out of the story altogether, but the trick is to manage it, which means being ruthless sometimes, like Faulkner said, killing your darlings when they need to be killed.

In this way, at least, I am without ego – as I’m not in life, I seek to prostrate myself on the page. There’s a kind of glory in such humility, even if at one remove. Everything is subject to the raw truth. I’m searching for it for myself, and you readers get the chance to come along for the journey.

Be yourself

PeterLeave a comment


I was doing some housework the other day while listening to a Spotify playlist, which is pretty well the only way I can do household chores. I’m in a numb groove, the music plays and I sing along when it takes me, skipping songs every now or then, or pumping up the volume for the good ones, while like an automaton I clean and polish.

An Audioslave song comes on. It’s the late and great Chris Cornell with his smoky, resonant voice urging us to Be Yourself and I pause for a moment to increase the volume. Then back to work, I am, moving to the music, belting it out as I’m wiping down the kitchen bench, and it triggers something me, bang, like that.

I’d been struggling with my writing. I felt uninspired and everything I wrote seemed dull and lifeless. Words on a page. There are musical equivalents to that, but this song wasn’t one of them. It’s vibrant and Cornell’s voice gives it a sinuous grace, even as the bassline drives it along. It’s not the greatest song ever, but it’s vibrant and real – and that’s what you want in your writing, something vibrant and real. And I’m feeling it when the sentiment hits me: be yourself.

God knows that’s something I’ve tried to live by in my life and mostly succeeded, though not always to best effect. In theory, it’s what you want in your writing too – it’s your unique voice and perspective that’s going to sell it. But then writing is a more conscious business. To be yourself truly when you write is to go out on a limb, fearful that it may snap behind you. It’s much safer, much easier, to retreat into writerly habits.

On your bookshelves are your idols, great writers with a diverse range of voices and perspectives, every one of them different, but when pressed you go back to them. How would so-and-so write this, or what’s his name? It becomes an exercise in consciously grinding the prose out, bereft of inspiration. You write how you think you should write, rather write how it feels natural.

And that’s what I realised suddenly as I was wiping down the kitchen bench. I had become a technician churning out words that almost by definition must be dull and lifeless. I may as well have been writing a textbook. I wasn’t writing from what I felt. I was sitting there disengaged from the urge that had led me to write in the first place. The creativity that animated me had been submerged by a conscious mind too busy thinking. My instinct, my voice, had deserted me.

I went back to my work and just about dumped the last weeks’ worth of writing. I returned to the well, letting myself feel the story again and not simply think it. Why was this story important? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Where was I in it? I let it return to me slowly, let it fill me again until I knew it again like fate yet to be written.

There’s a spirit of irreverence in this. This is your story, why concern yourself with the rules imposed by others? Let it go. Let it be. Let it flow through you, let the words come, fresh and with a zip. Tidy it later if you need to (and you certainly will), but give it life by letting it go.

So, I got back inside of the story and let it drive me forward and all I did was use the words given me.

I think it’s very easy to lose your way when writing, particularly when something comes of it. I think that’s one reason some authors struggle so badly writing their second novel. They have become self-conscious with what they have achieved. They try to emulate it. They force it. With a bit of success, they feel as if they have now to measure up to a higher standard, but it was the standard they achieved without a conscious thought that matters.

Everyone has a different opinion and there’s probably no right way or wrong way, except what is right or wrong for you. My two cents worth is that stories come from inside, and it’s from inside you must write. You can’t search for stories outside you and hope for them to be real. You have to own them, have to live them in a way – as real as your own life – just in a different dimension.

I’ll have to remind myself of this, again and again, I’m sure: be yourself. That’s the good stuff.

Why this story?

PeterLeave a comment

Why do you write what you write? I often wonder that. It’s not so much where the stories come from, more: why these stories? Why do I write stories of this kind and someone else something completely different?

It can only be how you’re made, how you think and see, how you interact with the world about you. Whatever you write today was likely born many years ago and shaped by experience in the time since. What you write is a product of who you are, and the person you are has been a long time in the making.

We share that in common all of us, whether we write or not. We’re subject to the forces of nature and random chance. Domestic imperatives dictate many of our choices, and capricious personality much of the rest. It’s different for everyone, but everyone has a perspective that evolves with time and experience, whether conscious or not. We take on a bias. We learn, or perhaps we don’t. We see through a subjective lens, and from that, we form attitude – and maybe even philosophy. We each become our own distinct character.

Not all of us write about it, though. It occurs to only very few. I can only speak for myself, but curiosity motivates me to write. I want to explore character. I want to travel back from effect to see the cause, complex and shrouded in mystery it so often is. I don’t pretend to understand, but the act of writing – for me – is a means towards understanding. I write, and often afterwards, I’m surprised at what I’ve written. I’ve written things with more insight than I was aware of as if the act of writing dragged it up from some hidden place in me.

But why the things I write? The answer to that is always personal, which the writing seeks to expose. Once more, there’s a distance between what I know and who my true self is. What I write comes from that true self, up from the depths, uninterpreted. The person who writes of it is like an observer trying to make sense of it. I’m like a witness looking in through a window, trying to untangle what my eyes can see.

It’s imagination that makes a story of that. Experience, that inner, actual being, presents a sense of something you seek to explore through the means of fiction. It’s understanding you seek, and you search for it in deconstructing it into the form of a story.

That’s the process, more or less, or at least the best I can figure it. Why these stories? I don’t know exactly, except that they come from inside me, and it’s my job as a writer to decode them.

To be clear, I do this for myself because I want to understand. It may be different for other writers, but for me, it’s personal. These are mysteries I want to engage in. I feel them in me every day, something rich and sometimes bewildering – but vibrant too, as if it has a pulse and is true. I’m grateful to be the man I am.

What’s the go?

PeterLeave a comment

The question is, why do I write? Where did that impulse arise? How? Why? I don’t think that’s something I can ever know for sure, and probably it’s not one thing that has led me down the path of writing, but rather a combination of things thrown into the pot together have made me the man I am – and the writer I’ve become.

One of my earliest memories is reading The Shaggy Dog Story. I was reputedly three going on four at the time, and that was the first book of thousands I’ve gone on to read. My mum encouraged me to read. She’d been a singer once and had a creative bent. I inherited her love for music and reading, which we would share in the years to come.

I had an Aunt who was likewise a great reader. I’d receive a parcel from her containing books every Christmas and birthday. I was a rugged, tree-climbing boy who played sport with my mates and rode my dragster around the neighbourhood, but none of that stopped me from becoming an avid reader. In these early days – between, say, six and nine – I read a lot of Enid Blyton, particularly the Famous Five series.

The other influence on my reading habits was my grandfather. He was a gentle, quiet man whose greatest pleasure was sitting down with a good book. As a boy, I can recall going to the MCG with him to watch a test match – and on many occasions, he would stop into a bookshop, from which he’d invariably leave with another couple of books to add to his collection.

He had bookshelves full of books on every topic ranging across genres: fiction, non-fiction, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on. As I got older, I would range across his shelves and pluck something out to read. Often, it would be an old paperback with yellowing, brittle pages that no one knew anything about.

You can say then that I was steeped in a culture of reading. I couldn’t imagine not reading, and pity those who never learnt the pleasure of it.

None of that makes me a writer, though it’s good preparation for it. When did I first set pen to paper? Why?

At school, occasionally, we would be given creative writing assignments. Perhaps because I had read so much, I found I had a vivid and original imagination. I found delight in coming up with these plots and in the reaction to them. Still, I had no thought then of ever making anything more of it.

That only came after I left school and then by accident. I’d travelled to Sydney from Melbourne and stayed with my aunt in a great apartment in Watsons Bay. The sun shone, the beach was nearby, there was an alluring woman I fell for, and life was laconic.

One day, I just started writing. I don’t know where the notion came from, but it was a story touching upon the second war – I’d been a military buff – and it had philosophical elements, probably quite pretentious. From there, I began to write erratically with months in between and one or two occasions, probably years. I did it, but I didn’t see it as a profession. In any case, I had found myself with a career wearing a white collar.

It’s different now. Probably for the last fifteen years, I’ve been convinced this is what I’m meant to do. That’s the thing: you can’t stop yourself from writing. The words pile up in you, demanding to be written. They gotta get out somehow. As I said in my opening post, there’s mystery and wonder in this because I can never really understand how it works that way or where the words come from. I’m grateful, though.

To answer the question I started with, you must be curious about everything to be a writer. You walk down the street, you get on the tram, you catch up with your friends – whatever it is – there’s a part of your mind always observing, always ticking over, always asking questions.

The answers to those questions aren’t always readily available, but that’s where imagination plays a part. Curiosity breeds imagination, I think, though it doesn’t always take. On top of that is life experience. Combined all – curiosity, imagination, experience – and you have the necessary elements for creativity, and you can begin weaving worlds in your mind.

That’s as good as I get to explaining this right now, but I’m happy to get your viewpoints on the subject.