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Six questions for Kate Holden

JA December 08

Kate Holden is the author of the bestselling memoir, In My Skin and, more recently, The Romantic, both published by Text. She writes a fortnightly column in the Saturday Age, as well as reviews, stories and essays for a wide range of publications. Spike sat down with her over the digital divide to chat about Mogwai and mathrock, disgraceful meandering and how best to wield polysyllabic Latinate words.

What’s a typical day spent writing like for you? Can you describe your routine?

This question has proved really difficult to answer. I have to admit I am not a paragon of discipline. I do not have the radiant gleam of one who’s at the desk by eight every day or who rises, precisely six hours later, with 500 perfect words (a la Graham Greene) in a tidy pile of printed loveliness on the desk beside me. I also do not spend days lolling on couches or walking by the beach waiting for the muse to strike. I’m efficient enough, but although I have the mad privilege of being a full-time writer I hardly have what I can even call a typical, much less full-time, working day. Oh, to be able to answer this question in one superb paragraph!

An ideal working day would be: get up, to my gym class early, back home, at the desk by ten, an hour answering emails, an hour doing paperwork, perhaps a little ancient Greek or algebra to cleanse the palate; lunch and quiet reading for a couple of hours, and then an afternoon of lucid, focused writing before dinner, an hour’s revision and preparation before bed, a blissfully peaceful sleep after this insanely lovely and admirable and implausible day as a Real Writer.

But I seem to abide in the workaday, common, cluttered limbo of the freelancer. My work is made of four main parts: freelancing (reviews, essays, introductions, oh god all sorts); promotion, like writing answers to interviews, or doing interviews in person or by phone or on radio, and also public speaking which I do a fair amount of; book-writing, the ‘proper’ stuff; and administration. I also have to keep house, keep fit, keep social and all the rest, usually during the weekday and usually during work hours.

So a typical day sees me emailing, ignoring emails or flagging emails to answer later; a couple of hours of treading water by reading the news and rearranging my computer files to look more tidy; I go to the gym and eat lunch and then feel tired and then … time for a cup of tea … play with the cat … very important to water the plants … online Scrabble most urgent … look, it’s time for dinner!

Somehow despite this disgraceful meandering I always get everything done, including my fortnightly newspaper column; I’ve written four books in the past five years as well as dozens of other small pieces and an academic thesis, and I always file on time or ahead. When I look at what I get done I’m amazed, if not actually incredulous; if only I had a typical working day, what wonders might I achieve!

How do you get into the creative mindset? Heavy metal music, spoken word or herbal tea? A pile of books by the window?

The best stimulation I know for thinking and feeling hungry for work is reading other people’s stuff. Probably best to stay away from direct competition but reading history, arcana or any good non-fiction makes me want to synthesise and tangentialise, if that makes sense. While I’m consciously reading about London in the 17th century, my creative mind is thinking about bog bodies and gods with horse heads and Latin mottoes and conversations between characters in cafes. Also I’m so inspired by reading fierce lucid prose, it makes me want to make my own. The bright cathedrals of creative possibility all too often come out as shanty shacks, of course, but I love those moments, half-dreaming as I skim a page, impatient to get up and work but afraid to ruin the dream with the reality. Good conversation is of course a great rehearsal for writing (or running lines through my mind as I sit on a tram) but so rarely do I rush straight to my desk and get any of it down!

I usually write to music, preferably without words: a lot of baroque burbles on my stereo (its regular patterns, its rich loveliness, its heavenly reconciliations are so good for thinking to) or something mathrock like Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which hushes and rises and is full of power and momentum and has really long tracks and suggests something vast. Or soundtracks. I have become a soundtrack frump in my old age. I like to write to music that has an emotional journey, but one I can bend to my own purposes. I tend to have playlists for different books; chosen from music that takes me directly to where my protagonist is going.

If we made a surprise visit to your workspace, what would we see?

The unedifying spectacle of me hunched in the shadiest and glummest room of the flat, bad posture, cold cup of coffee, frowning at my Scrabble game and looking appalled to be sprung. Hopefully the desk, a beautiful old wooden leather-padded relic inherited from the Museum of Victoria, not too cluttered. The cat keeping me company on the windowsill. Purcell playing on the stereo. A halo of virtuous intention around my head.

Do you keep a writer’s notebook (or equivalent)? If so, can we take a peek – what’s something you jotted down recently?’

I can’t imagine not keeping a notebook, I’ve been doing it for decades. Though tragically you never manage to capture all that passes. Mine is a cross between a commonplace book and a jotter: I love my notebooks better than any of my proper writing, for the treasures contained in them.

A page for example:

George III, on meeting Edward Gibbon: “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon?”

In 179?, when balloons were all the rage in England, people that summer saw them everywhere in the countryside, floating above the hedgerows and the meadows.

An MC introducing me at a talk: ‘and without further adieu…’

The possums spitting at each other at night outside my window sound exactly, exactly like the plumes of fire outside the Casino.

Do you write for yourself, or do you keep an audience in mind?

I’ve published two memoirs now and find that, at least with the first, it was a definite process of stepping through phases in this regard: at first it was all for me; then for my writing course class; then for a publisher/editor; then for the inconceivable public; then for the real public. Writing the second one, I fast-tracked these steps, but still, by the time ‘The Romantic’ was published, it was a piece of work which felt quite distant from me. This displacement is the only way to publish a memoir and not go insane.

As many people do, I write to dictation, the voice in my head. As a kid I wrote for myself, stories I couldn’t find anywhere else, so I made them and often kept them secret. As an anonymous writer in an online community a few years ago I joyfully did the same but in adult writing: for my own pleasure, which happened to coincide with the tastes of my friendslist. But as a professional writer I have to remember that I am not doing this for vanity, but to communicate, that it is outward-looking work. In a way this is a bit of a sorrow: rarely these days do I write something purely for the joy of it, for myself.

For a couple of years I have been working on a novel which was started purely because I wanted to write it and because I felt that expectations of me were high and I wanted to get away from them so I wrote something which probably only makes sense to me. In the face of faint, perplexed responses from friends and stern remedial lectures from my publisher, I am undaunted: it pleases me and the time to give up this satisfaction and turn to ruthlessly making it more publishable has not yet come. I want to love it myself before I put it at a distance. I’ve also discovered the benefit of waiting: letting a project just gently percolate through your consciousness and subliminal consciousness perhaps for years, gathering sense and elements, filtering out the dross; and the huge excitement of finally allowing yourself to pounce to the keyboard and start it!

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding that the pieces I write which I most caress and which most, I imagine, express my temperament are the ones greeted with a negligent sniff by readers, while the things I rush out feeling derelict of duty are the most popular. This phenomenon continues to bamboozle me, ruin my confidence in my own judgement and give me the shits. But there must a lesson in there: polysyllabic Latinate words do not a great work make, Kate, much as you might enjoy wielding them.

Finally, what’s the last book that you loved, and why?

I lay in bed the other day and read an entire book: ‘Saffron and Brimstone’, short stories by Elizabeth Hand. She’s an American writer I loved in my twenties but had forgotten: good ole Amazon brought her to mind somehow, and I ordered her latest works (hard to find in Australia). This selection of her short fiction blew me backwards: I lay there electrified, as if I’d trespassed across a forcefield into a realm of such concentrated, superb creativity, such elegant writing and such breadth of material that I could hardly move, only crackle. She writes what might be described as a branch of New Weird: strange, unsettling, deeply beautiful tales, often finely researched and forensically invested with realism even as she conjures fantastical tangents. Her work is not only clever and polished and interesting, it’s also moving. It made me absolutely, acutely want to rush to my desk and write something half as wonderful; naturally, I enjoyed this feeling so much that I did no such thing.

 

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