needle-felting is like creative writing

My sister is working on a needle-felted landscape based on a photo of a riverside path along the Yarra. Tree ferns line one side of the winding track.

She laid down fibres with her needle-felting machine but put it aside because she didn’t know what to do next. Then she decided on some hand-stitching and embroidery to give it more depth and make it look more like the concept she had in her mind when she began.



It’s been weeks now and the project sits on a bookshelf where she can look at it from across the room and assess how it resembles the original photo. She keeps adding layers. She sews over it and dulls it down. When a spot doesn’t look right she removes it by sewing over it again. She needs to highlight the brightness of the sun on the tree fern leaves. She needs to bring the sunny spots into sharper contrast to the shadows on the winding path.

It’s like writing.

I've been watching a series of videos of Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer-winning author, as he writes a short story in real-time. Thirty-four hours of watching his creative process. Seventeen two-hour sessions.

His method makes me think of my sister's needle-felted project, because he writes about three hundred words each night; and then reads them over next evening, and adds to them, and changes them, and re-arranges them, and perfects them, before moving on.

It's amazing and inspirational to watch.

talking to authors

This evening I went to Rendezvous, the Romance Bookshop, because a group of well-known writers were signing their books. They are in Australia for the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, which finished three days ago.

I felt hesitant to go, because I tend to freeze when I meet authors and usually produce a glacial silence, interspersed with bursts of gibberish as I try to squeeze out some intelligent talk. But my sister was the keen fan tonight, so I felt relatively relaxed; I was just moral support.

And then she wandered off.

There I was standing beside Jo Beverley. I've read many of her novels, but 'author phobia' set in and I couldn't remember any of them. I thought I'd better say something, so I asked, 'How much research do you need to do, considering you know your period so well?' It seemed a safe enough question, because I know her historical detail is always accurate.

And the conversation went from there. It was inspiring to a wannabe writer like myself.

Here's some of what I remember of the discussion.

• Her plot evolves as the events and characters lead her.
• If she didn't take pleasure in writing a book, it's likely her readers wouldn't enjoy it either.
• She usually works about four hours a day.
• Generally she will read back a couple of hundred words of what she wrote the previous day as she starts a new session.
• She doesn't let her 'internal critic' loose on the first draft and if she can't think of a particular word, she types in symbols as place-holders.

In describing her technique for building characters, Jo used the metaphor of a sculptor building a figure in clay. First she pulls together a rough shape and then adds layers of detail. Which gives me the chance I've been waiting for - to use my newest verbal acquisition. Her characters are made of clay but they don't have argillaceous feet.

And if you don't know what that second-last word means, you might like to subscribe to one of my favorite email services - A. Word. A. Day. If you do, you'll get one interesting or unusual word mailed to you each day.

Today's word was 'argillaceous'; meaning made of, resembling, or relating to clay: clayey.