Soul-baring

First published in Column 8 on the 9^th March, 1994

This must be the week for columnists to bare their souls – not excessively – in public.

First up was Alan Duff, using his column to tell us of the novelist’s trials, and how he’s had to hive off to the woods for solitude in order to face the awfulness of his 500 blank pages.

I’m glad to see that in his solitude he’s rediscovered the ‘economic value’ of poetry: in his case poetry is helping him to earn money by writing a novel. Probably more useful than using it to cure depression – although the depression that arises in front of 500 blank pages is considerable.

Good on yer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, for helping Duff’s creative juice to flow.

I’m also glad to see that Mr Duff has realised there’s more to write about in the world than the vexed question of whether the Maori need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It was becoming dull as the only subject of his column.

Another soul-baring writer, Sandra Coney, also has a tendency to play a harp with one note.

In the now defunct Sunday Times, she this week gave us a rather peculiar valedictory, as though at the time of writing her column she wasn’t entirely sure whether she was still employed or not.

She, too, spoke of the blankness that can hit a writer: ‘times – terrifying times – when I have faced my computer screen with not a thought in my head and a deadline looming. On other occasions my mind’s a-buzz like a nest full of wasps.’ (I find comparing ideas with wasps as appropriate as comparing sentences with stinging nettles.)

Ms Coney also mentioned the way in which public feedback often comes only when you say something people don’t want to hear. (Bouquets are garnered in private.)

This fact was confirmed on the opposite page by Piers McLaren of Rotorua, writing in the Letters department. Sandra Coney’s articles ‘contain little of substance.’ She ‘hates men.’ She should write ‘one – just one – article in which she praises the good qualities she has experienced in males.’

I tend to agree with Mr McLaren in regard to Ms Coney’s anti-male theme: truth can, after all, be spoken without constant sniping. Balancing on the other foot, however, I concur with her remarks about facing a computer screen with not a thought in my head. I’ve had that experience more than once myself. (Readers might think it was more often still.)

We columnists have further problems. Some great idea swoops in like an eagle and we find it is too big to handle in the space available. You have to abandon the attempt to fit all you want to say into 600 words.

On other occasions so many possibilities contend for your attention you can’t make up your mind which to tackle. But there’s one worse problem.

I read once that male writers were supposed to be better off than women writers, because men had ‘more time.’ As a male part-time writer I am puzzled by this. Any writing I do has to be fitted in between my full-time job, my family commitments (nowadays mostly consisting of ferrying one or other of my numerous offspring hither and yon at all hours of the day and night), and other duties of the average parent’s life.

On top of that, I’m no longer able to have my writing machine tucked away in private. It now resides in one of the living areas. Meal cooking and eating rage around it while radios blare; teenagers discuss current fads on everlasting phone calls, or cavort or highjink or argue or throw each other on the floor. Interruptions turn all you thoughts into split infinity.

After all this moaning, perhaps we columnists need to stop boring you with the difficulties of writing – but don’t hold your breath.

Sandra Coney -
photo by Mike Sykes

Sandra Coney went on to write her column for the Sunday Star Times, which seamlessly replaced the Dominion Sunday Times (the full name of the paper mentioned above). She gave us another six years of her thoughts.