Beginning

This last week I read The Scar, by China Mieville. It was an enjoyable book in most ways - the imagination that went into its creation was expansive (and clearly more profound than what eventually made it into the book, restricted as it was by its finite number of pages), the plot was engaging, and the resolution was satisfying. However, what really hooked me in was the prose itself. Reading Mieville felt like physically taking words from the page, and enjoying the way they were hooked in together, almost seamlessly from start to finish; it was like running my hand over a piece of finely crafted furniture, and being aware of how beautiful the finish was, how well concealed all the joins. It was like expensive scotch. It was a truly enjoyable experience.

In 2004, I graduated from my first degree, a Bachelor of Creative Arts: Creative Writing, from Flinders University. Most people would doubtless say that a creative writing degree is a hobby degree. These days I would tend to agree. When I applied for the brand new degree though (application by portfolio; no TER required) my mind was full of possibilities. When I was accepted at the beginning of 2002, an eager (and arrogant) 18-year-old, part of the inaugural class, all those possibilities seemed to be confirmed by promises, delivered at congratulatory information sessions.

'This course,' they told us, 'has an extremely limited intake, because there are very few jobs in Adelaide for people who want to write. It will be intensive, and you will meet people in the industry. You will attend events, and at the same time as you develop as a writer, you will develop as a user of the writers' market place.' In the event, none of these things occurred.

Well, that is not true. I learnt a great deal about writing, mostly from one or two really brilliant tutors who were prepared to bear with the class and its pretentions (creative writing students are painful people), but the promised 'contacts' proved untrue, either forgotten or ignored by university staff. The only event was compulsory attendance at Writers' Week in 2004. (That was an event I could happily have missed, as it seemed to be in no small part populated by people who wanted to seem intelligent and sophisticated by virtue of attending Writers' Week. Mid-way through the week I started collecting quotations from random strangers I overheard, astonished as I was by the academic pretentions on display. Sadly I don't know where those ended up, but I think I remember one woman in a wide-brimmed, red hat saying something along the lines of 'Of course, when I heard him speak in Rome, he said...') There were rumours in the class that the reason we were not given the opportunities promised was because the course-coordinator had decided she did not like us, and that our writing lacked substance because we lacked life-experience - it was an incautious tutor who dropped that hint. (I don't know if that was true or not: it seems an uncharitable attitude which it would be uncharitable to believe in. The following year however, the bachelor was filled with Mature Age students, rather than the crop of school leavers in that first run through.) Whatever the reasons, the degree left me qualified for nothing, and I spent 2005 unemployed. It was the most miserable year I can remember from my priveleged little life.

Those I went through university with are all employed in totally different fields now. Some went back to study (myself included, in 2006) some found work where they could. The closest to publication that I am aware of any of us getting was when one of the girls got a job cataloging books in a distribution business. Most of us, to my knowledge, didn't put pen to paper in any meaningful sense again. For me that degree is now a ten-thousand dollar albatross that I am gradually paying off through a job I got from my next, more useful course of study.

This is, of course, a self-pitying story of being given a good thing and complaining, naively, because it did not lead to another good thing. But there is a point to it. Like my classmates, I haven't really written anything since graduation. I had a brief dalliance with poetry while I was studying Social Work (probably a result of gaining some real life-experience) and have occasionally made half-hearted attempts at putting together a story or two, but in the main, these have been poor, cliched creatures, like fan-fiction found languishing in some dingy corner of the internet, but without even the entertainment value of ridiculous (by dint of being anatomically impossible) sex. Lacking the genius for instant success or the motivation to persist, and made bitter by what I felt had been promised, and not delivered, I set down my pen.

Reading Mieville's work this week sparked something in my brain that has been dormant for a long time. Feeling his writing in my mind made me suddenly realise, 'I want to write.' But.

I still lack motivation, and certainly I still lack genius. I have other priorities now, artistic passions not made sterile in the autoclave of formal education. I have a little girl, a beautiful thing who nevertheless cries when I am sat for too long at the keyboard. I don't, then, want a project; I don't want the depression of feverishly pumping out five-, ten-, even twenty-thousand words, only for inspiration to run dry and leave me with another half-formed embryo of an idea. There are already too many still-borns in my imagination. What I need is something small, something piecemeal, that I can take and leave as I want and need, and not feel guilt about my lack of drive and commitment.

The internet is a wonderful place at times. There is so much that is fascinating, useful and beautiful hanging in the long corridors that stretch across the continents, stored on massive computers I-don't-know-where, and indexed by Google, the new Librarian, for our pleasure and use. At the same time, there is much that the internet has made worse: internet forums are filled with the shrieks of racists, extremists and fools; the crazies of the world no longer need to drag a chair, step-ladder or milk crate to the side of the road to harangue passers-by, because everyone has a voice. And the internet, in a quirk of technology, has allowed the astonishingly imaginative and beautiful work of China Mieville, to inspire another god-damned blog!