Writing anything we want

So last week I did a lovely event about women in theatre at the Southwark Playhouse. It was organised by The W Project, set up by Teo Connor and Loren Platt to celebrate and empower women in the creative industries—their wonderful blog is full of inspirational women. It was a post show event for Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play The Hairy Ape, and director Kate Budgen, filmmaker Elisha Smith-Leverock (who made the play’s excellent trailer) and I began by telling our stories of becoming and being women artists.

A couple of themes kept recurring. One was confidence, and whether women might be held back because (generalising wildly here) men tend to be more confident. I definitely have to steel myself to speak in workshops or rehearsals, to ask for what I want, to think of myself unapologetically as an artist, and (worst of all) to pitch. That’s one of the reasons I love being a founder member of Agent 160, where one of our core aims is to be mutually supportive, and where I feel part of a creative community.

We also talked about what women make art about—whether we are encouraged to make work from our own experience while men can write from outside theirs, whether our work is seen as marginal and subjective while men’s is universal and objective. The very first play I (co-)wrote, in a freshers’ festival at university, came about because two men said they needed a woman to “write the girls”. I owe them a massive debt for introducing me to theatre (if they hadn’t, I’d still be trying and failing to be Sylvia Plath) but I also wish I’d said “yes, but let’s just all write all the characters”.

Since then, my characters have included: a tree-sitter, thenovelist Joseph Roth, a fashion photographer puppet, an East Anglian wolf biologist, Gertrude Bell, a Plaistow boxer, a doubting rabbi, a Moldovan belly dancer, a grasping brothel madam, aninsomniac Shah.... I could go on. I have written about Iraqis, and Jews, and people with seizures, and women, and people who live in north London, and people who fancy the wrong kind of men, yes, so I have drawn on my own experience, but I poured just as much of myself into writing the insomniac Shah because that’s what writing is: an act of creative empathy.

When I told people I was doing an event on women and theatre after The Hairy Ape, they all asked why. The testosterone-fuelled play, with a mainly-male cast, and a key scene where they sweat it out in the hellish stokehole of a transatlantic liner, seemed an odd counterpart to an event about women. But as we sat on the stage and talked, it started to seem a really radical choice. If women can direct plays like this (and with the guts and energy Kate Budgen gave it) we must be getting somewhere.


Cross-posted from the Agent 160 blog which has lots more about women in theatre.

Chaos and coherence—how Homeland's given me a whole new way of thinking about writing

Am I the only writer who saw this scene in last week's Homeland and wished Mandy Patinkin would come over, look at the tumbled chaos of my work and make sense of it all, while I had a good night's sleep? This is the after-shot—Patinkin's character Saul has arrived to find that Claire Danes's Carrie has had a bunch of ideas that are scattergun but not random. He works out a structure for them.

It got me thinking about how chaos is as crucial to writing as coherence. And then I read this brilliant interview with Philip Ridley who says writing a play is

"like an explosion in reverse, you know when you see an explosion in reverse it begins with all this crap and rubbish all over the place, and then you play the film back and all these bits of detritus come together and they form a house, boom: 'oh, it was a house.' Whhhhhomph: “oh it was a chimney”. And that’s what creating something is like, it feels like it’s all out there and all you’re doing is kind of collecting it and gradually putting it together."

I think this is how I start writing—like Carrie frantically scrawling and underlining and scattering pages, I let rip and dream, dig, play, explore, follow my instincts, follow wrong turnings, get lost... It's anarchic and exhilarating. It can also feel a bit crazed and hectic.

Sadly I never wake up to find Saul has found a structure for my rumpled ideas; I have to do that myself. And that's the second part of the process, where the colder, more analytic work comes in. This is the bit with index cards and coloured pens and lots (but not too much) coffee. This work can be fun too—Stephen Jeffreys taught me that—but it's very different from the other kind of writing.

In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande says the writer has to have a "dual personality". So one half has:

"the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the 'innocence of eye'..., the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were newminted...instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see 'the correspondences between things' of which Aristotle spoke... 

But there is another element to his character...It is adult, discriminating, temperate, and just. It is the side of the artisan, the workman and the critic rather than the artist. It must work continually with and through the emotional and childlike side, or we have no work of art."

From now on, I'm calling these two kinds of writing Carrie and Saul.

"Trust yourself"

I'm really proud to be part of this film about Robert Holman, a writer I hugely admire, who's also been very supportive of my work. His advice to "trust yourself" is good for everyone, I think, not just writers. But particularly for writers. If you can get a ticket to the Donmar's Making Noise Quietly, do! I can't wait to see it myself.

Have a green year!

Having been to two seders this Pesach, one Iraqi-Sephardi and one Ashkenazi, I noticed a few telling differences—aside from kitniyot. First, we eat a roasted egg at the start, to sustain us through the prayers (God forbid we should sit at a table for half an hour and not eat!). And, second, we do a lot more venting about the Egyptians—possibly because it's really a coded way of expressing anger and bitterness at the Babylonians who, when the haggadah, was first being put together, had just forced the Jews to dredge canals between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Another difference is that Iraqis celebrate the end of Pesach by going to the river, hitting each other with green branches and wishing each other a green year. I was in Camden last night, putting index cards on a pinboard to work out a story structure with a writer friend, so no running water or green branches, but we did order a pizza and wish each other a green year. Green meaning lucky, healthy, fertile and all good things. So, here's wishing all of you a green year.

You can take the girl out of Baghdad...

I was really glad to be asked to write a piece for Night and Day, a magazine from Chatto & Windus, first published in 1937 and recently revived as an online magazine—the original was edited by Graham Greene, and the revival is edited by Parisa Ebrahami and Tom Avery. Their fourth issue is themed around the Middle East, and my piece is about growing up Iraqi Jewish. The magazine is here and full of great stuff; I particularly love the poem by Edward Mackay. I'm really excited to be writing a book for Chatto about re-encountering my literary heroines, with the working title's What Would Lizzy Bennet Do? and there's also a bit in the piece about the children's play I'm writing for the Unicorn Theatre and the Birmingham Rep, tentatively called Operation Magic Carpet.

Things I've been doing when I should have been writing (and some writing)

I often feel like all I do is stare at a blank screen and walk around trying to have ideas. And this month I've been struggling with rewrites, and going through that phase where there's no room for anything else. But also I've been:

Listening to my friend Ben Musgrave's radio debut The British Club (still on the Iplayer), a wonderful detective thriller about snobbery and corruption and post-colonial malaise in Bangladesh (where he grew up), with Sanjeev Bhaskar playing the soulful hero Inspector Mondol.

Going to Rome! Where I ate deep fried artichokes in the old Jewish ghetto; they were immense. 

I also went to the house where Keats died. Poor, poor Keats. As he suffered through his last days, knowing he was going to die (he was a doctor after all), and that he could never be with his love, Fanny Brawne, again, he asked every morning "How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?"

Also in Rome, at the Villa Borghese, I saw this amazing Bernini sculpture of Daphne, pursued by Apollo, turning into a laurel tree. It's terrifying. At first the branches and leaves coming out of her fingers seem beautiful, but then you realise what is happening; she will never be a woman again. According to Ovid, as Apollo reached for her, bark covered most of her body, but he could still feel her heart beating inside.

Writing at the London Library, which I love, with its mix of tweedy academics, Mayfair swells and sharp screenwriters, its leather armchairs, quirky catalogue system, and miles and miles of books.

Writing at Ted Hughes's childhood home in Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire. It's been restored by the Elmet Trust and anyone can rent it. I always write like the wind when I'm there, so now I've become superstitious about it as a fix for writers' block. Behind the house you can just see the outline of Scout Rock, a looming, brooding steep cliff that Hughes called "the curtain and the backdrop to existence."

While I was there I went to Heptonstall to visit Sylvia Plath's grave. 

The flowers I can understand but why has someone stuck a plastic mermaid on it? And why all the pens? (And why such crappy pens?) The thing that looks like a cigar is actually lipstick. 

Watching Homeland—clever, uneasy drama, full of paradoxes and questions. Brilliant.

Dressing up as a masked assassin for a fancy dress party. I wore a flapperish dress, pearls, opera gloves, cigarette holder and a feathered mask. Thankfully no pictures survive.

Getting my tarot cards read. For the first time. It was eerie, inspiring—and fascinating. Especially when I got this card. The Chariot symbolises a union of opposites—the black and white horses pull in different directions but the charioteer has to get them both moving the same way, without being torn apart. It can be about interpretation, conflict resolution, translation...it's a very appropriate card for the daughter of refugees.

Arguing (amiably!) with my writers' group about form and content—can you be radical in both or just one? We couldn't decide.

Watching the RSC's Taming of the Shrew, which casts the play as a feminist rom com and pretty much gets away with it. My friend Maddy Costa's written brilliantly about it over on her blog.

Discovering a new park in north London! Gladstone Park in Dollis Hill is lovely. It has pleasuregrounds (I love the word pleasuregrounds), and German Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis's devastating memorial to prisoners of war and victims of concentration camps.

Roasting broccoli. With olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. Breadcrumbs for the last five minutes. Grated cheese on top. And lemon juice squirted over to finish. My new obsession.

Watching Edward Bond's Bingo at the Young Vic in an incredible production, with Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare. It's one of my favourite plays and I'd never seen it before. The scene where Shakespeare and Ben Jonson drink and spar is the best thing I've ever seen or read on writerly creativity and despair.

And it's back to my own writing...

Radical empathy

This is a guest post I wrote for Jewish Book Week's excellent blog, Bagels and Books. It's a review of an event they did launching Jonathan Safran Foer's new haggadah.

There was some confusion at the beginning of Retelling the Story. Maureen Kendler said a critic had called the new haggadah edited by Jonathan Safran Foer “a feelgood haggadah” but this turned out to be a joke made by Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the contributors. In fact, Safran Foer thought “feelbad” might be more appropriate—the haggadah challenges us to see ourselves as though we have personally left Egypt. Safran Foer began with the question “how can this book encourage that empathic leap?”

His haggadah is not a book of answers—he wanted “to provide a space, an opening, for people to put their own feelings.” So surrounding a translation by fellow fictioneer Nathan Englander are four commentaries: Goldberg focuses on the Jews as a nation, Nathaniel Deutsch takes a scholarly approach, Rebecca Goldstein does lit crit and Lemony Snicket’s strand is titled “Playground”. There’s also a timeline—Safran Foer calls it “the story of the story”—about the haggadah through the ages. Kendler quoted the Times earnestly explaining, in 1840, that Jews don’t drink blood at Pesach. And instead of pictures the book is designed—complete with inkblots and wine stains—by Oded Ezer.

It was fascinating to hear Safran Foer speak with rigour and passion about how he decided he wanted to make a haggadah that would be “unified and useful, not beautiful and interesting”, and had to exclude some of the original contributions. He sighed—and the audience sighed with him—when he revealed that a painting by RB Kitaj hadn’t made the cut.

And there were laughs of recognition when he described his father “a model of a militantly atheist seder leader” who organised his seders around dissent. As Goldberg sees it, “Judaism demands that you can’t be satisfied with the way things are. The haggadah is more than a story. It starts in slavery and ends in freedom. It is obviously a metaphor for the way things are supposed to be. You’re supposed to come out of the seder thinking: I’m going to do something.” He even feels that if you throw away your seder leftovers while people in the community are hungry, you have missed the point. Of course, no discussion of Pesach can ignore the food. Safran Foer, who is of course famous for writing fervently and scrupulously about his decision to give up meat in Eating Animals, feels that “the seder table is a very appropriate place to talk about where food comes from”. Goldberg was troubled by the “ornateness” of some seders while Safran Foer defended the groaning seder tables because “we are supposed to set the table as befits free people”. Yet another Pesach paradox.

There are already 4000 haggadot out there and when Kendler opened the discussion up to questions it seemed as if everyone in the packed hall could have written their own haggadah. For Goldberg this engagement with the text is what Pesach is all about; he described it as a festival that “demands that you write on to the haggadah your concerns”. My favourite answers came to the thorny question of whether one should avoid translating the haggadah’s appeal to God to “pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know You”. Goldberg, in line with the haggadah’s aim to inspire “a radical act of empathy” suggested that “wrath” might be interpreted as “constructive anger” that would provoke us to go out and change things. And Safran Foer, too, was typically unsqueamish. “I don’t think there’s anything that shouldn’t be addressed,” he said. “If there’s anything my shrink has taught me, it’s that addressing things brings you more happiness than not addressing them.”