The pencil versus the laptop computer, and single versus multiple viewpoints.

Call me old-fashioned, but I love writing with a 2B pencil on a pad of lined writing paper. You can do it anywhere. On the train, at a railway terminal, on the beach, on a bush walk, even lying on your back in bed. And the pencil is light. You can take it anywhere, together with a scrap of paper.

But the main advantage is that writing with a pencil seems more spontaneous. Perhaps that’s because of the slow speed of my typing, at around 35wpm. When I write, I scribble a scene out longhand fast with pencil and paper, then read it and edit it, then later dictate into Word, using a voice recognition package with the wonderful title ‘Dragon Speaking Naturally’. After this, I edit and edit and…edit again.

I began writing from different viewpoints more or less accidentally, when I wrote a short story ‘The Clouds’, published in New Writing in 2001. This was my first short story and I did it in the first person from three different viewpoints: a grandmother, a daughter and a granddaughter. I wanted to explore the different ways each viewed a death. That was because someone I loved very much had died, and this helped me make sense of it.  

Less personally, multiple viewpoints allow you to explore the innermost thoughts – what some term interior monologues - of different characters, and to learn about how they think and what they feel. The characters’ views of one another can also be enlightening. Why? Because if one character forms an opinion of a particular person and a second character forms a different opinion, you’ve learnt something about all of the parties involved. This is the fun of multiple viewpoints.

Editing the manuscript can be very enjoyable, but also endlessly frustrating. Editing Stillwater Creek felt like what I imagine working on a sculpture might be like. When rewriting it – and there were a lot of drafts – I would experiment with pulling out one scene to see if the entire edifice looked as if it might collapse. If it didn’t, then I’d learnt that this particular scene was superfluous!

Though writing is a lonely activity, I have to say that one of the nice aspects about editing and finishing Stillwater Creek has been how generous people in the publishing business have been with their constructive advice.