Book an escape

Whilst traveling I wanted the crib notes about each country. Not just to ascertain key landmarks (a quick search on wikitravel can do that) I wanted to sit in the shoes of someone - be fictional or nonfictional - and experience the country through before landing it’s doorstep.

In fact nearly everyone on the truck felt the same. Most of these books went on high rotation, passed along to whoever had dibbed it next.

Britain - Notes from a small island

India - The White Tiger, Shantaram, Life of Pi and A Fine Balance

Nepal - The Climb and Into Thin Air

Tibet - Seven Years in Tibet

China - Wild Swans

Cambodia- First They Killed my Father

Thailand - The Beach

Australia - Down Under

After travelling through India I read 'A Fine Balance'. Even though I was in subzero temperatures in China, each time I flicked open the book I was transported me back to the bustling streets of Delhi. I could feel the hot slap of humidity on my skin and hear the story unfold to a sensory symphony of sights, smells and sounds.

It was a wonderful reading experience! Though I literally had to take breaks from the novel, as at times it became a sensory overland. From the jarring symphony of high-pitched car horns to the soft drag of handmade dry grass brooms on pavements. The angry spit of hot oil from street stalls frying Samoa to the heady perfume of cooked mustard seeds. The sickly sweet chai to the retched stench of faeces from open sewers. The kaleidoscope of colourful saris from roadsides to harvesting in fields. The crush of thousands of people passing under the stern gaze of policemen barricaded by sandbag walls at train stations.

I became conscious of recording the true essence of each country I visited. As I want each country in my novel to be a thumping beast of a character. To leap off the page, to curse, groan, moan or laugh, leap and pulsate with energy. Each country, city and region had its one vibe, it's own personality. Bucharest was crumbling, Delhi bureaucratic, Singapore a slick shoppers paradise, Berlin a bohemian playground and Jakarta a series of sweeping, traffic laden boulevards.

I don't want my novel to be all about me - that would the dullest book written. I didn't travel just to think about myself. I set on the road to see, feel and grasp the globe. I want to ensure I capture the character of each place. I want the reader to feel like they were on the road with me. 

Reader's Bill of Rights

Bookshop in Bucharest, Romania 

Reader's Bill of Rights - Daniel Pennac

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes

The hot heart and cold eye

The other day I mentioned I was on the hunt for a book. It still remains a sight unseen. Though in my half-hearted attempted to find it, I happily rediscovered another book. I abandoned the search and whittled away the afternoon re-reading ‘Naked, Drunk and Writing’ by Adair Lara.

I bought the book last year because of the title* and it’s promise to help the reader ‘craft a compelling memoir or personal essay.’ At this point I was half contemplating writing a travelogue about my impeding journey from London to Sydney. I was also starting to get steady requests to pen opinion columns in SpitPress.

On the first read I gobbled the book up. The pages are dog-eared and annotated with flashes of green highlighter and scribbles in the margins.  Adair Lara’s guide is personable and informative.  Lara addresses structure, subject matter, tone, narration, scene with a firm hand and wry wit.  Even Lara, a writing teacher, admits, “structure is not sexy”, yet I would consider her own book as delightfully playful. She blends anecdotes of working as a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle and teacher, throughout the book. Thereby giving each lesson or writing task depth and relevance.

Lara also liberally quotes other writers including Chekhov - “Tear your story in half and start in the middle” or Marilynn Robinson’s description of writers starting out “At first less in love with structure or pattern and more in love with words in a foolish but sweet way.”

Lara herself is also full of quotable titbits (hence the heavy-handed green highlighting) “Apply part A (Butt) to part B (chair)….Don’t vow to write. Vow to show up at the desk.” Or “You must work. You start with your hot heart, spilling truth any old way onto the page. And then you bring in your cold eye.”

There is a plethora of writing exercises in the book. In all honesty I have completed few. I read the book quickly and with immense joy. Then I packed it in a box with 18kilos worth of other goods and shipped it from London to Sydney.  

Some of the writing advice stuck like glue throughout the rest of my trip and inferred astounding impacts on my journal writing. Lara recommends that you collect sensory rich images as well “those cranky, eccentric details that could come only from a frontier where no one else has been: your life…the most neurotics details resonate like a tuning fork”. So I wrote my journal with a hot heart. Now I just need a cold eye.

* The title itself is a cute story in itself “somebody at a party once remarked to me over sushi that books with ‘naked’ in the title always sell”. 

Photo inspiration. Prague.

This is what I came up with for writing exercise number 2:

If Europe were a beehive come June 1^st, rain or shine, it gets mercifully hacked open. Everyone is on holidays and keen to get out and about.

Great swarms of people swoop onto anything that has been vaguely labeled as a tourist landmark. The calamity of foreign languages creates a heady hum in cobblestone streets across the continent.

Even if you’ve run marathons, walking five hundred meters saps your stamina. There’s the constant threat of getting sideswiped by a stroller, struck by a wayward elbow or suffocated by a swarm of tourists unexpectedly rounding a bend. The constant stop-start flow of foot traffic burns the calves,buckles the knees and causes cheeks to flush.

Crafty footwork

Big-ticket cities are like this all year round. Even in snowstorms Piccadilly Circus is literally a circus, Paris is packed and Rome is overrun. But there seems to be a round robin of popular alternatives.

Prague

Through the magic of cheap airline tickets, reams of overt and covert advertising, these alternatives sink into the collective conscious as 'The' destination to visit that summer.

This summer it was Prague and we were in the heaving heart of it.

Like any run of the mill travellers, we were keen to capture it all on camera. Though even Olympic level gymnasts would have struggled to contort themselves to obscure strangers from the photo frames. Yet we all valiantly gave it a shot. Ducking, weaving, kneeling, lying down on cobblestones or straddling lampposts, wildly angling the camera lenses.

Random on the Right. Aidan and I posing fountain side.

We gave up. Huffing and puffing we would mutter the now commonly thrown catchphrase 'photoshop. You can definitely erase them all.'

Sounded like a great plan.Yet even if you actually blissfully swipe strangers away with the click of the mouse, you wouldn't to be able to erase the haggard drag of your shoulders and sheen of sweat across your brow. You can’t help but look absolutely spent.

Though you'll get a hundred odd people in your photos, it's worth snapping away, Prague is truly picturesque. Simply stunning. Yet, it's not the Prague I imagined at all. For lack of a better description it was all a bit too...clean.

Through a strict plan of restoration and gentrification that facades are freshly painted and flawless. The cobblestone streets smooth. Even statues appear almost ageless.

Sculpture in Prague

I expected a bohemian ragtag attitude or a poetically caviler indifference. Perhaps an accordion player sitting on a street corner. Soft cap dragged rakishly low. Gypsy music slyly slinking out of bellows. Yet it was all too shiny. Too new looking. And absolutely exhausting.

Composting

Since reading about Patti Miller's term 'composting' - I’ve been more consciously shifting and ruminating over certain aspects of my trip.

Mud bath, Glastonbury 2011

Though I haven't really mentioned much about my trip at all! Basically I left Australia at the end of May 2011 for a European summer. I chose my destinations based on if I could nab free accommodation, but more importantly fitting in as many music festivals and gigs as possible - including Glastonbury (UK), Benicassim (Spain), Sziget (Hungry) and a host of gigs in and around London.

In August I boarded a bright orange truck and travelled with a group of strangers from London to Sydney. We drove through Europe camping along the way. We mainly pitched our tents in the back paddock of farms out of the prying eyes of the farmer – though an 8x8 orange semi-trailer is somewhat hard to unnoticed!By the end of the six months we had camped on an abandoned airstrip, in old quarries, mountainsides, farm yards, freshly ploughed fields, swamps, car parks, an old train station, on beaches or even just pitched on the shoulder of roads.

All the passengers on board became firm friends by the time we drove across Turkey into Iran, In fact I now count the majority as family.

Masuleh, Iran

The truck continued through Pakistan and I flew onto India, where I later met up with truck after a share of strange and wonderful experiences in South India – including getting scouted for a Bollywood film. From there we drove into Nepal, crossing the Himalayans in Tibet, then down the Yunnan province in China into Laos. Leaving the truck behind we crammed onto public transport, with chicken coops balanced on our laps and boxes beneath our feet, as we travelled through Vietnam. Before island hopping thru Thailand, getting stuck in monsoonal Malaysia, celebrating Chinese New Year in Singapore and then sailing to Indonesia. We drove through the centre of Australia before arriving in Sydney travel worn and possibly distastefully unkempt.

Some things have bubbled to the surface of my compost heap, including:

- Nightclubbing in thermals in Lhasa, as military police played poker and sung karaoke in the next room. I should add that by this stage we had been wearing these thermals day and night for ten days straight!

- Been shown the secret trails of bird nest poachers on the small islands off Thailand

Sailing in Thailand

- Discovering a choking fear of claustrophobia in the dark depths of the underground city in Turkey

- Almost tripping over the edge of a volcanic crater in Indonesia – all because I was trying to get ‘the perfect shot’

Before climbing the crater of Mt Bromo

- Getting locked below deck on a 36hr ferry journey though Indonesia. This was slightly disturbing, but the situation became unnerving after remembering that they evacuated 1^st and 2^nd classes first on the sinking Titanic. The situation became even more nerve wrecking when we realised that the life jacket boxes were empty

Clutching onto a buoy for dear life once we were allowed above deck

- Somehow managing not to contract a full body fungal infection after a visit to a grimy Turkish spa bath. Lesson learnt - saving five lira is not worth the experience of getting boisterously pummeled with a rag by a very naked, middle aged Turkish woman

Istanbul in bloom

The rot sets in

Community garden, Highgate Hill, London

Lately I’ve been thinking about bodies. And compost. But mainly bodies.

I haven’t been thinking about body deposable techniques. Rather I’ve been dredging my brain for everything I learnt in uni about anatomy and musculoskeletal conditions*. My neurones are synapsing over time. I’m left dull witted and entirely at risk of falling asleep on the train after work. Once home I’m house hunting, training for a half marathon**, reacquainting myself with friends and family (so they don’t wonder who the strange redhead is sleeping in their daughter’s bed) and starting two separate yearlong diplomas.

After a nine months of having little worries and no responsibilities other then occasionally wearing clean clothes and eating vegetables - I’ve somehow piled a whole lot of responsibilities onto my plate so that I can’t even see the plate anymore.

Needless to say I haven’t been writing much, other a couple of letters and what you see on this blog. Whilst I’m happy with the blog, it’s been sliding into mainly book reviews. I’ve only vaguely mentioned writing my travelogue but not to any real extent. I love doing book reviews, but the original intent of the blog was to focus on developing my writing and have a manuscript written, edited and good to go by the year’s end.

So this last month I’ve been ‘composting’. According to Patti Miller author of ‘The Memoir Book’ -

“often, experience feels monolithic and can take time to break down into usable elements…tackle events which are too recent, and not only are they (writing students) overwhelmed by the events emotionally, they also find their writing ‘lumpy’ and raw, much like the original materials of a compost heap.”

Because I like plans and lists, I’m taking on Miller’s advice to do some ‘pre-writing’, which is not posing with your pen poised as if you are just about to write something. Rather

“You are not writing the memoir, you are writing about it. This pre-writing is a ramble, a kind of scaffolding, from which you explore the general territory.”

This week I’m going to figure out my approach to my travelogue – I’m half thinking of creating a chapter/personal essay for each country I travelled to***. But I want to figure out themes, intent, tone and style. Hopefully I develop a strong base so my compost heap sprouts a small seedling which grows into a heaving tree

'Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven', Secret Garden, Islington, London

I realise I’ve taken Miller’s metaphor and completely changed it’s meaning, but I think the idea of trees more appealing then rotting banana skins..

* I’m a physiotherapist

**I once read a study that if you visual yourself exercising this has a positive physiological affect on your cardiovascular health, minor at best, but at the minute I’m risking crow’s feet as I concentrate super hard on imagining myself running. I’ll hopefully squeeze in a spot of actual running this week .

*** England, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Belgium + Hungry + Bulgaria + Romania + Prague + Austria (in one essay as I spent I fleeting time in each), Turkey, Iran, India, Tibet + China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia

How do you do?

I've tentatively dipped my toe into the world of writing with some success, however I want to submerge myself.

Ballpoint Arcade is my office. My desk space. This is a place where I will sharpen my pencils, rifle through my tatty, torn notebooks, surreptitiously sniff crisp new paper before rigorously wrestle with words. It currently looks shiny and somewhat sparse. But fear not, there will be reams sheets of scribbles, piles of dog-eared books, rainbows of post-its, stacks of yellowing newspapers and inky ballpoint pens rattling about. But unlike my real world desk you needn't worry about the sweet smell of decay from the occasionally forgotten banana skin, wedged beneath a raft of papers.

The intention of the blog is to pull up my socks and step up my game. Move past half finished stories and create a new system of filing ideas that doesn't involve napkins or cereal boxes, so budding ideas may bloom. I'm getting professional. Not just aiming to get published but also to hone my writing and editing skills.

I have drawn up a calendar of writing competitions to act as deadlines. They include a range of genres from fiction, essay, creative nonfiction, poetry - as I want to push myself. I'll be taking direction from those who know best - writers. By reading and reviewing books of all sorts from writing how-to guides, cozy murder mysteries, sic-fi, chick lit, classics, nonfiction, fantasy to speculative fiction.

Whilst I plan to write daily, I'll only be posting here three times a week. I'm currently balancing a couple of other writing projects including a travelogue about my recent 9month overland journey from London to Sydney.

Please stop by, nibble on an iced vovo, sip on a cuppa and stay for a chat. Book recommendations are warmly welcomed as well as opinions on the weather and writing.