Think Small.

I can’t really even begin to explain how much I am loving Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”. I know I’m “late to the boat” with this one (think 165 years late) but previously I’d read Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and didn’t overly take to it. Too emo, and gothic for me.

But Charlotte has a little more humour, sentimentality, optimism and joie de voire than her sister - without losing the trademark Bronte bookishness and tendency to overanalyse. You know, they like to mull over things with dark clouds hanging over their heads. Just my kind of gals! In short, I am totes girl-crushing on Charlotte and wish she were around today so we could be BFFs.

There are moments in the book where I pull myself away from it, fighting the magnetic force the pages seem to draw, because it all becomes too much. I so strongly identify with the thoughts and feelings of Jane that it’s like I’m in her body, wriggling her fingers and toes, and everything that’s happening with Mr Rochester is just so breathessly wonderful and painful that I can hardly bare it.

Now THAT is one helluva writer.

I know back in that day women’s worlds were just so much smaller (especially women without means) - their breadth of experience and exposure to world affairs and places and people so limited. And this would inform why Bronte writes with such acute detail about this little cast of characters and their feelings and thoughts. I, on the other hand, - hurrah to feminism! - was blessed with the ability and opportunity to experience and know of much more.

And yet, lately I am enraptured by The Small, and so disheartened by The Big. I think if you look at the work of David Sedaris, and This American Life, and Jane Eyre (three things I have lately been reading) you’ll see there is so much power, depth and beauty to be had by the small and the personal. And perhaps there is more truth to be had than the churn of the 24 hour news cycle (be it television, web or what have you) - which is so filled with vitriolic debate, fake stories, hysterical editorials, rumours, mirror reflections and general rancidness.

When big ideas come before big money

Emily and I have been talking about where we can take Lane Change. We started Lane Change to kick off our “Winter B-icicle Challenge” but were careful to chose a name that was only vaguely linked to bicycles, thereby giving us the capacity to expand. After all, the two of us are not bike nerds. We’re environmentalists. We’re activists. We believe in change, in a better world. And the bike thing is just one battle in a bigger war to “win hearts and minds.”

Now we’d love to make a living out of Lane Change so we can dedicate more than just a few hours a week on it. But when we got talking suddenly the “how to make money” question began to dominate the brainstorm.

At some point I stopped and said, “Emily, if money was no option, what would you like to do?”

It’s kind of the same with this writing group I belong to, in which every week someone from the group submits a short story for the rest to critique. And the thing I’ve learned recently is that it’s important to first ask yourself, before you’ve written a single word, what is this story really about? What is the big picture theme? Because if you want to really create something meaningful, something great, there needs to be BIG IDEA behind it. Otherwise it’s just shadows and glitter.

In the bio-pic about gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, it’s clear that for Harvey he was not driven by a thirst for power or the prestige of a political career. “Politics is theater,” he says, and he used it only to further a greater cause: the acceptance of gay people in a then incredibly hostile environment. For Harvey it was the gay movement first, and politics second. And without the former, the latter had no meaning.

And that’s how Emily and I need to think. We need to ask ourselves, what do we want to achieve, how do we want to change the world? And then work out how to fund it.

Which is the opposite to how a businessman might think. They search for business opportunities. They first think, what can make me money? And the impact that it has on the environment and society is a secondary issue, or in some cases, not an issue at all.

"There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s—eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative. Today, the world has become a book—more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage. And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic narrative that used to belong to the novel. The crowds in Mao II, except for the mass wedding, are TV crowds, masses of people we see in news coverage of terrible events. The news has been full of crowds, and the TV audience represents another kind of crowd. The crowd broken down into millions of small rooms."

Don DeLillo in interview from a Fall 1993 edition of the Paris Review. DeLillo was responding to a question about a sentence from his novel Mao II, “The future belongs to crowds.”

"We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music."

Long and fascinating interview with Don DeLillo from a Fall 1993 edition of Paris Review.

Coming out of the ‘artist closet’

Last night we saw Amy Tan speak at the Bookworm. She’s a Chinese-American author most famous for ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and somewhat of an ABC idol. My friend said she was going to ask Amy to sign her tits. I said that I’d try to ‘fist bump’ her and that during the talk we’d all cry about our abusive tiger mothers and all the related piano-practicing trauma.

Well none of that stuff actually happened, but it was a great talk and we did get some books signed and a photo. I identified with her less as a Chinese-American and more as an ‘identity politics’ writer. She talked about her process, and doing immersive research for her latest novel (such as spending three weeks in an impoverished region of Guizhou), which excited me. It occurred to me, as it has more frequently of late, that this is what I really want to do. Be a writer.

There’s an embarrassment in saying that, and I think it stems from the anti-intellectualism of cultures like the United States and Australia (particularly the latter). Our response to anyone who wants to dedicate themselves to their art: who do you think you are? You so arrogantly believe you’re talented? Want to avoid civil responsibilities and get a ‘real job’, as the rest of us have? Perhaps it’s also linked to our out-of-control celebrity culture. We think someone wants to be an artist, and we confuse them with wanting to be famous.

Earlier this month I was in Melbourne to see an actor friend of mine in the final year performance at the end of an exhausting but exhilarating three years at drama school. Before drama school she was, believe it or not, a medical student. And I had witnessed the incredible struggle she went through, all throughout her medical degree, torn between her desire for a ‘stable life’ and what she felt like was her ‘true self’ as an artist.

At the time, I don’t think I truly appreciated the courage it took for her to finally make the leap and quit her medical degree to become a full-time acting student (at, I should say, one of the top drama schools in the country). It’s only now, when I consider taking up the life of a writer: the unstructured lifestyle where one has more time than money, the insecurity, the unknowing of what the future holds, that my knees buckle and I return to the office and life as a hired blogging-gun. 

And for me the gap is not so large to leap. Writing is one of the core duties at my current position. But I want to do the kind of writing that requires me to pour in a lot of heart and sweat. The kind of writing in which I am developing my craft, pushing personal boundaries, exploring new lands and leaving on the page something more lasting and impressionable than a day’s internet reading. Writer as artist, rather than writer as hack journalist.

For my friend, however, the gap was a chasm and in that, she is a true inspiration to me. In leaving her medical degree she departed the world of annual salaries, health insurance, holiday pay and promotions. Not to mention the conservative prestige of being a doctor. And instead chosen a life with incredibly huge risks, all in the name of art. It was an act that was not selfish, but rather selfless. And she has no fallback plan or safety net. It is art, or nothing.

A girl in Sydney, a boy in Melbourne

A friend of mine - one of my best friends, in fact - recently asked me to do a reading at her wedding. She flattered me by saying how much she liked my writing so could I read something I’d written or write something for the ceremony? Of course I agreed, but did so without any awareness of how difficult I would find the task.

My previous pieces of writing more frequently featured titles like, “A manifesto for single people”, hardly appropriate at a wedding, so there was nothing for it but to write something from scratch. I wrote, butchered, trashed, re-wrote, in my head and on the paper, over and over again. There were two unique obstacles:

1. This wasn’t a speech, it was a reading, so I couldn’t joke my way through with a few funny and sentimental stories.

2. I’m a perpetual bachelorette of two (very much) divorced parents. What do I know about love and marriage, other than the kind that is either unrequited or utterly traumatizing?

Everything I had on paper looked desperately cynical, self-conscious, too earnest, too egotistical, too nervous. It was all so wrong.

In the end, it was a conversation I had with her, a mere half day before the actual ceremony, that inspired the bulk of my reading. Which just goes to show that one really must draw from life to write something authentic.

—

In Sydney, there is a girl. She is equal parts nerd, equal parts fabulous. The girl love words. She uses it to not only describe the world she lives in, but also all the aching, sweet and soaring feelings that come pouring out of her. She uses them to ascribe things meaning, and to give things a relationship to one another, in the hope that perhaps she can make sense of a world that is too often senseless.

In Melbourne, there is a boy. His mind is filled with big ideas, his heart full of feeling. Girl and boy, they are in love.

At first this love inspires the girl to do what she always has. She writes. Allow me to correct myself, she doesn’t write - she blogs. The perfect medium for the self-reflective type. She writes furiously and without abandon about her new love. The words are natural and free, tumbling and fumbling thoughts that veer wildly between ecstasy and angst.

Allow me to read you an excerpt. [Read a hilarious and sweet excerpt from her blog describing the first time she told her then-crush-now-husband she liked him.]

Alas, like any good love story, it was not all smooth sailing. But any time spent apart was to be but a pit stop, and in the second time around, something had changed. The girl no longer wrote cascading sentences of adoration for her love. And yet she still adored her love. Her blogs no longer danced between false bravado and nervous second-guessing. And yet she still had a piercing sense of analysis, still had moments of doubt. Her blog - though now excellent in a different way - was no longer her best friend to which she would confess all. Because this time, she had found that best friend. And his name is [my friend’s husband].

The girl loves words, but in love, words fail. They don’t deserve to capture love, because words are bodies, and love rises above the weakness of mere mortals. Love is an energy, a movement. Each of us can sense it when we’re standing in this room. When we’re with this boy and girl.