Kiss goodbye to your darlings

Posted on June 14, 2016 by OMV

A famous quote from William Faulkner is “in writing, you must kill all your darlings”, which I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Part of the reason is that I’m neck-deep in rewrite territory of my screenplay and I’ve cut out more than I’ve put back in, including a couple of scenes which (naturally) I thought were bloody brilliant and broke my heart to kiss goodbye too.

But as Faulkner continues to teach us, if a scene, a character or a “darling” doesn’t progress or add to the fictional story, then it or he or she must be “killed” in a literature, not a literal, sense.

Editing out the crap or superfluous pieces of a story, of course, makes it more seamless, coherent and exciting, which is why it’s called a story. It’s not real nor is it true. At best, stories that are based “on real events” can only ever be thus, because more exciting bits and pieces are usually added to pep up the story-line in places or to make the characters more interesting or “alive” – but perhaps not entirely real-life.

I’ve come to realise that some people practice this creative art-form in everyday life, too, but I’ve decided I have no desire to do so, even if it could helpfully vanquish some memories and experiences from my brain forever.

One of the many modern quandaries I struggle with daily, including using my television and my mobile phone, is how one should deal with Facebook after a breakup. I’ve had my personal profile for more than eight years now – which also means it has been around to witness two relationship ups and downs.

In the beginning I was probably guilty of over-sharing on it – although in the very early days not many of my friends were on Facebook as well so it was like I was transmitting my cougar joy and smugness to a relatively empty void.

After the relationship ended on mutually respectful terms, both of us left any shared posts or photos on our respective pages because it was our history. Many years on, we’re no longer friends on Facebook. I can’t remember why, but it was most probably me who unfriended him in a fit of temporary passive-aggressive ridiculousness when I no doubt struggled to see him moving on with his life with a new, much-younger-than-me love.

But I never deleted anything of our time together online and nor do I believe did he. I never kissed goodbye to my virtual ex-darling just because it might make my past seem more linear or neat.

The ragged course of my other relationship also still remains in my online and real-life history, even though I often wish I could white-wash a lot of it away to save myself the anguish.

But, again, while I might practice the art of story-telling for a living, it’s not in my psyche to try to misrepresent my past as more pleasant than it actually was or, in fact, pretend a relationship or a person didn’t exist in my days gone by.

But I know that not everyone thinks this way and some hit the delete button on every shared online memory that ever there was. Perhaps it’s their way of wiping the slate clean to start again but personally I think it’s borders on the creation of a fairy-tale – just like the stories we read in a fiction book or the movies we watch on a cinema screen.

But real life rarely has such Hollywood happy endings or smooth trajectories.

You see, a few days ago, I crossed paths with one of these two lovers but I don’t think he saw me. It had been five years since I’d seen his face and after so long rumbling around the same city without ever bumping into each other, seeing him so unexpectedly did temporarily knock me off my sanity axis.

He was with workmates, while I was meeting a couple of friends. As soon as I saw him, I rushed to the other side of the bar with my head spinning but stupidly ended up sitting right outside the men’s toilet. Good plan.

Over the course of the next hour or so, I tried to decide whether to say hello, while simultaneously quizzing my mates on whether they thought he’d seen me. In the end, however, I never did do anything about the two of us being at the same place at the very same time.

Since then, I’ve pondered why I acted that way. It’s not because I wasn’t happy to see him or that I’d deleted him from my memory (online or otherwise). Far from it. Perhaps it was because he still looked very good to me (which is not a bad thing I guess) but ultimately I hope it’s because he’s moved on with his life and so have I.

It is still strange to me, though, that you can spend a proportion of your life with someone and love them with everything you had, but still not feel comfortable saying hello when you bump into them down the pub. If there is a next time I hope that I’ll be more brave.

So, instead, I stared at his broad, powerful and loyal back – which six years ago he’d turned away from me at the same time as I’d turned away from him – and later that night I smiled at the memory of us, of what we gave each other, and of the many reminders of our history together that I can revisit and learn from whenever I want too.

I might have to kiss goodbye to my darlings on the pages that I create as a writer, but I’ll never do it in real life. I’ll take the light and shade of life experience any day – no matter how much it might sometimes confuse me.

The streets of New York and me

Posted on May 31, 2016 by OMV

I’d been awake for 24 hours when I got my first taste of the Big Apple.

I was in one of those other-worldly states that only people who fly long-haul – almost literally from one side of the globe to the other – can truly understand.

Your exhaustion is mixed with a jaded, surreal sense of excitement, not unlike waking up after a very big night, still a little pissed and wondering where the fuck you are and possibly who is lying next to you.

I checked into my hotel, which I was soon to learn (later that night at 2am precisely) would be the recipient of road-works outside its front door that involved an actual steamroller and a quasi-psychotic, sleep-deprived Kiwi/Aussie who’d been “upgraded” to a room on the second floor and who slept her first-ever night in New York with five pillows on her head.

That first night, with only a few hours to kill before my fateful night of unrest, I took the short stroll to Times Square and like so many before marvelled at the light so bright it seemed like it was 9am and not 9pm as well as all the people – who were bloody everywhere.

Only a few days before I’d written a blog about the loneliness of being a self-employed writer and so I was perhaps a little unprepared for being thrust into an environment that screams at every single one of your senses at maximum volume, every single moment of every single day. It really is the city that never sleeps and the one that never, ever shuts up.

In those eight days I walked 85 kilometres or 53 miles around the streets of New York City. In hindsight, this may have been a tad excessive but my feet seemed possessed – but I did come home a kilo lighter than when I’d left and I’d eaten every bad food choice imaginable (how good are chilli dogs?)

But, if I’m honest, one of the reasons why I walked and walked – from 10th to 89th Street and everywhere in-between – was partly because the subway scared me shitless. And it wasn’t because I’d heard particularly bad stories about it because I did live in London for a number of years and rode the Tube (usually drunk) with no qualms whatsoever. The only reason I can think of was that I’d morphed into a scared old 40-something lady and hadn’t actually noticed. I mean, what other explanation could there be for walking those rock-hard streets so much I was exhausted almost every night?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my two solitary nights out in New York (which strangely were a Tuesday and a Thursday) were at the very beginning of my trip. My one and only weekend there involved more killer kilometres of solitary sauntering as well as people watching and side-stepping, and which culminated in me curled up at my hotel with two slices of bona fide New York pizza watching a movie on a Saturday night. Party Fucken Central.

That’s not to say I was completely nana-like during my sojourn. My two nights on the town were punctuated by a revolving door of curious Americans who couldn’t believe that I was a) a woman travelling by myself, b) not married, even though (in the quote of the trip) I was “pretty enough to be married”, c) could drink them under the table, of which they offered to pay for time and time again, which was rather charitable if you think about it. They sure were a friendly, generous bunch.

I’m not going to list the notable sights that I saw as I walked those streets, because that’s just boring. But ask me what’s on the corner of 34th and ninth or 48th and Broadway and I can quite possibly tell you.

I paced and prowled around that crazy “I think I love and hate you” city for hour after hour. And it’s only now that I understand that I was looking for my mojo, because I know I’d lost it somewhere along the way these past few weeks, months or years. But with each kilometre, as my calves ached and my hips creaked with age, weariness and hope, I knew I was getting closer to finding it. And so I kept on walking. Mile after Manhattan mile.

I strutted to Central Park, then traipsed through it and around it often. I meandered down Fifth Ave more than once and hung out in Hell’s Kitchen most of all. And each night as I lay listening to the non-stop noise and humanity happening right outside my hotel window, I tried to sleep while simultaneously fighting the urge to leave the safety of my room so I could walk some more.

And so it was on my final day in New York that I walked down the dark steps on 42nd and, with much anxiousness, took the subway downtown. I looked around at the heaving hordes doing the same and wondered if they could tell I was a subway virgin. If they did, they sure didn’t show it and I sure wasn’t going to give the game away, so I just clutched onto my ticket tighter and pretended I knew where I was going and what I was doing with my life.

A few hours later, I bravely took the journey back again and something in me notably shifted. All of the “life shit” of recent years let go of me and I knew there was nothing to fear. No more than walking the streets of New York alone, but far from lonely, because you’re amidst the masses who can make you feel very small but also sometimes very big. No wonder people come to this place to follow their dreams, I thought. It made me feel like anything was possible – even if in the end, it was a visual and aural overload that I partly wanted to run away from.

But a few days later, while horrendously sick in DC (that’s a blog for another time), I found myself searching online for where I’d stay on my next visit to the Big Apple. I think that city creeps up on you like that. Too much all at once but once you’re gone, you want to go back and do it all over again. A bit like good drugs or a mind-blowing one-night-only lover, now I come to think of it.

And so it was that part of that research was how close my future NYC hotel was to the subway, because maybe my aimless days of wandering might be done for a little while. I think I strode those streets of New York and perhaps somewhere around 47th I found myself.

This solitary life

Link

It was at the moment when I caught myself eagerly engaging in an overly long convo with a checkout operator that I knew something in my life had to change.

Before I begin, I must confess that deciding to leave the security blanket of being an employee to work as a self-employed, full-time writer is one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made (although, my life hasn’t been littered with too many smart decisions, let’s be honest).

Every morning now, after a quick breakfast and daily dose of news, I head into my writing room to start the day dressed in my new “work uniform” of shorts, t-shirts and bed socks. I can’t remember the last time I brushed my hair. Today I have an open door policy that no one walks through.

A life lived outside of usual nine-to-five constraints, plus being single and a writer, means it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a Tuesday or a Sunday. I mostly work whenever I feel like it as long as I meet my deadlines. Ah what “freedom”!

Lately I’ve noticed I’ve been breaking up my days by taking leisurely strolls for lunch or coffee or (so I thought) for no reason at all. Alas, the aforementioned, supermarket situ made me realise my motivations were far from unconscious.

You see, I’m a writer who likes other people’s company as much as I like my own. But the craft requires solitude of such magnitude that it’s a fine line between inspirational and suicidal thinking.

In my past life as a journo in newsrooms, I got to fulfil both parts of my personality with the opportunity to write as well as to be involved in some of the most vulgar conversations imaginable – those were the days.

Today, I work on my own, every single day. Sure, I have a few phone calls and interviews most days but nothing beats being with other human beings in the flesh. One of my contacts and friends offered to meet me yesterday in real life, instead of just doing an interview by phone, and he will never know (until he reads this blog) what a highlight of my week that was. I may have dragged the get-together on too long in hindsight but I did introduce him to Colombian cheese bread to make up for it.

I’ve also been trying to increase my human contact (it sounds like I’m in a prison of my own design) by looking after my godson more, which I joke “gives my life purpose”. I even earnestly look forward to visiting mum, which is natural and right of course, but I usually forget that these days I have to attend a dementia ward to do so, which if truth sadly be told, is a bit of a buzz kill.

These past three months of solitude, however, have been beneficial because my screenplay finally became much more tangible than just a conversational fire-starter used when one was trying to impress people and/or trying to get in to their pants.

But I now know that something has to change. I’m not made of the right ilk to spend hour upon hour “cooped up” in my writing room, no matter how ridiculously wonderful and inspiring its view.

To write about life and about people, and to be the best version of me, I need more human connection but I’m not advocating going back to work “for the man”. Hell no. That’s because it seems I’m not the only lonely, self-employed, house-bound soul out there and hot desking is these days a “thing” that’s totally on my radar, at least for a couple of days a week.

I can only hope that the “hot” part refers to the quality of the people inside these mythical modern places, because my stories would become so much more interesting almost overnight, don’t you think?