A Way with Words
Dean Parker describes his writing day.
Ihave a tiny office space that I rent at the Auckland Trades Hall on Great North Rd and I leave home and walk there every day, like a normal person. The desk I have there I assembled from a Warehouse Stationery kitset.
To its left hangs a painted bamboo curtain, partly covering an open-plan entrance through which a nun used to appear.
To the right is a window that gazes at a blank five-storey wall rising up like an Imax screen.
The computer on my desk doesn’t have a modem, so I dwell in myself like a rook in an unroofed tower (to quote Seamus Heaney) and can’t be distracted from the writing task in hand.
That task recently has been to write a novel.
Normally I write play scripts, but every so often I weary of rattling my tin cup outside the silent stage door.
I’ve read Tom Stoppard saying, “To be a playwright is to have your heart broken every day.” Couldn’t happen here; in this country the first requirement of a playwright’s survival is a heart of stone.
Writing a novel means that between 9am and noon (gentleman’s hours) every day, I do a steady 500 words.
I was once asked by the owner of a cheap Chinese eatery I frequented what I did. I said I was a writer. He asked me how much I wrote each day. I gave the automatic reply, “Five hundred words.” He went away and must have picked up a magazine and counted out 500 words because the following day he came back up to me and said, “That’s a good job.”
But do 500 words a day and it mounts up, and when I’d turned out 40,000, half a book, I sent them off to my friend Roger Steele, a Wellington publisher.
He flew up and shouted me lunch in SPQR on Ponsonby Rd, a cafe I go to because Tom Scott takes me there and charms the waiters, who, in turn, associate me with him and are always pleasant to me.
Maybe they’re just pleasant to me because they all know they’ll get a positive response to their question, “Another glass, sir?”
I actually live in the neighbourhood of SPQR; 35 years ago, my companion, Isabel, and I bought the worst house in a semi-industrial street. It cost us $48,000 and we were fleeced.
Of course, the dilapidated dwelling is now Minutes Away From A Lifestyle – that is, it’s in the vicinity of SPQR – and worth $48 billion.
So when Roger offered me an advance on the novel to prevent my running off to Penguin, I simply wrote on and signed a napkin saying that the book was his and I didn’t want an advance; for what is a publisher’s paltry offering to the owner of a $48 billion Ponsonby property?
Roger’s book took me six months; pure pleasure before returning to the ritual of waiting outside the stage door with that uneasy feeling of imposing on busy people.
The waiters are pleasant to me, because they know they’ll get a positive response to their question, “Another glass, sir?”