Belinda Castles: In the quiet margins

Walk, swim, stretch, rest – find a little space in the schedule for generative lulling.

The first day began with a walk from my hotel in the rain and wind around the Sydney Opera House and among the figs and ponds of the Botanic Garden, ferries and bridge blurry, workers in high-vis and suits downing huge coffees and smoking. The plane flew west into the sun across strange land formations – vast dunes, gullies like knife slashes. I picked up my car in the industrial suburbs of Perth in the blazing afternoon and headed up the highway into the hills. Here was Katharine’s house: wide verandah, old trees. The writing cabins trailed in a row down the long bush garden. Through the wide window over the huge desk, the sun set for hours over the city.

The first days brought the familiar tussle. What am I doing? Who am I kidding? Everything I’ve written before comes down to luck… And then with walks on the red tracks, the oom-oom of bronzewings, trees going up and up, there came the moment where absorption took hold, and interest in the work overcame self-doubt.

In my diary is the pattern of the days and weeks, the project taking shape in my mind. Uncertain starts, questions, more and more research notes, passages that break off when I find the momentum to move to the laptop. Messy pages where some flash of connection on a walk or waking needs scrawling quickly.

What stays in my mind are the walking track and the suburban pool by the highway, the rumble of trucks as you come up for air. Imaginings seem to need stretches of idling to find a form – always more not-writing than writing going on. After hot summer days in the cabin, when the blessing of the cool dry wind came through, I was out the door, walking the track, sinking into the landscape of birds and grass trees and warm late light. When the heat lasted into the evening, I swam laps amid the kids and trees and black cockatoos.

The images come as you wake from a nap, or sit on the back step pondering the cactus tree. The idea arrives and you write it down, only to see you wrote down the same thing three pages ago. Something is trying to emerge. The job, in this life that requires attention to so, so many other things, is to seek and to find the time to let it come.

Top ten tips (otherwise known as reminders to self)

1. The first draft will not be pretty. It doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten how to write. Be brave, keep going. This is the discovery phase.

2. Energy and interest are your key resources. Find ways to nurture them. Be gentle with your body and brain.

3. Writing needs a quiet margin around the writing time. Walk, swim, stretch, rest – find a little space in the schedule for generative lulling.

4. Community is everything. Helping others to write helps you to write.

5. Read for music, timing and glimpses of the weird, and to remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.

6. If you’re feeling fidgety, put your phone in another room and set an alarm clock for 45 minutes. (Or ten minutes. Or an hour.) No need to stop when the alarm goes off if things are getting going.

7. If the screen is hostile, write some thoughts, memories, images, impressions in a notebook. Something will spark.

8. Writers have ambitions for their career but what happens to your work once you’ve finished it is out of your hands. The writing life is in the writing, and in the relation to the world that offers you.

9. Learn, keep learning, that feedback is a gift.

10. Remember that writing is fun.

Belinda Castles is an award-winning teacher of creative writing, with fifteen years of experience teaching at university and hosting workshops. She's also an award-winning novelist (Stella longlist, winner Asher and Australian-Vogel Literary Awards, Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist) and the editor of Reading like an Australian Writer. Her latest book is Walking Sydney: Fifteen walks with a city’s writers.