Graeme Lay and his outpouring of “lingusitic lava that smothers everything”
Graeme Lay describes his writing day.
Impatient by nature, I write very quickly. Far too quickly. But I can’t help it. Once the urge is upon me, it wells up like lava, as unstoppable and just as messy. That’s why I envy those writers who say that they spend hours crafting one paragraph, or even one sentence, until it’s perfect. Frank Sargeson once told me that’s how he worked: slowly, painstakingly, incrementally.
Oscar Wilde, asked one evening why he was looking so weary, replied, “Oh, this morning I put a comma in, and this afternoon I took it out again.”
I’m just the opposite. With me, the words (and commas) pour from the keyboard and out onto the monitor, as inexorably as a volcano in spate.
But when the eruptive phase is spent – usually after two or three hours – and I print out and look over what I’ve written, I’m always appalled. Shocked at how bad it is. What seemed at the time to be just right is almost always so wrong. The writing is careless, ragged and repetitive. Adjectives and adverbs abound, infinitives are split, modifiers dangle, redundancies proliferate. The characters are overdrawn and speechifying, settings are described so adjectivally they could have been taken from tourist brochures. Prolixity is rampant; there are three times more words than necessary. The outpouring of linguistic lava has smothered everything in its path.
And then … and then … the real writing begins. I pick up a biro – always a black one – and set to work. Time to do the really hard stuff.
Iwork from a desk in a corner of the lounge in our villa in Devonport. Through the sash windows there’s a view of conical Mt Victoria, its slopes coated in beautiful Lincoln green. The view is uplifting, but it’s often also distracting. I’m easily, sometimes willingly, distracted. But I also remind myself that Mt Victoria, too, was created by an upwelling of lava, and that pile turned out all right in the end.
As I rewrite, I force myself to be ruthless. Darlings are murdered everywhere, their bleeding corpses strewn over a page that has become a battlefield. It’s death by black biro. Syntax is recast; word kites fly from the margins of the page like hovering vultures, waiting to feed.
I return to the keyboard and the monitor, bring up the original draft and insert the corrections I’ve made in longhand on the printed page. There are many, many corrections, and there’s far more cutting than pasting. I remind myself constantly that each draft should be leaner – and therefore stronger – than the last one.
Back to the keyboard for another draft, and another, until that first version is virtually unrecognisable. Delete, delete, delete, until the volcanic mountain of words becomes something resembling a symmetrical shape. Like Mt Victoria, viewed from my window.
If I’m lucky, the final result will be okay. But there’s no guarantee of that. There never is.
“What seemed at the time to be just right is almost always so wrong. The writing is careless, ragged and repetitive.”