Self-sufficing solitude

‘And I was taught to feel—perhaps too much—the self-sufficing power of solitude,’ wrote William Wordsworth. Photo: ©Matthew Smeal

The small beach is new to me, but I will be back. I have anchored here once before but it was summer then and crowded; today, on an overcast late autumnal day, I am alone, save for a small fishing boat some distance off. My own boat drifts languidly in the shallow water, its anchor buried in the sand part way up the narrow beach. I had first dragged my boat onto the sand, but I changed my mind with the falling tide, happy to ease it out rather than risk it being so high and dry that it will be quite an effort to get it back in the water later.

The westerly wind is blowing quite strong, but my little sanctuary faces southeast and is therefore protected. It is quiet here.

My first coffee is poured and waiting; brewed from the freshwater stream cascading over the rocks from above and collecting into a small pool in the sand, before running out in tiny rivulets to the estuary. We miss so much in our usual treated water from our taps. The sweetness and purity from what flows to me can be tasted in the coffee I now sip and in the eager handfuls I cupped to my mouth when filling my coffee pot.

The only sounds are those of water: the splash of water from the cascading spring and the lap of water in the falling tide. An occasional passing boat or plane overhead remind me that humanity is nearby, but the lengthy times in between are mine – mine to dream.

I lie as I am in the light, content in my surroundings. Oh, to be in nature again! To feel the air and coolness on my skin, to hear the sounds of water and to breathe the oxygen-rich air! This is freedom: a beach and alone. ‘And I was taught to feel—perhaps too much—the self-sufficing power of solitude,’* wrote William Wordsworth. It is intoxicating.

I saw a sea eagle on my way out. It was so near the start of my trip that I chose not to stop. I usually see sea eagles so to stop and watch so soon seemed frivolous. I saw it instead as a good omen for the end and the beach I am at tells me I was right – but my binoculars lay beside me at the ready.

The westerly wind has dropped off; but a growing rustle in the surrounding trees tells me it is swinging around to the south. The tide is dead low now and my boat still drifts easily in the shallows. I will have no trouble when I leave – but I don’t want to, I want to stay.

I am brewing another coffee now, more to feel the warmth from my Trangia hiking stove than from necessity, but perhaps too for an excuse to taste coffee made from the sweet stream water again. I have a few water bottles with me; I will fill one with this water and take it home.

A sea eagle flew by, as I knew one would. Perhaps drawn by the smell of coffee and the hint of warmth in the air. I was too slow with my binoculars but there was no real need: it was close. The eagle banked low and eased behind the small point. It was soon out of sight but returned moments later, a second one with it. Like me, the birds seem content. Their day is simple: to live and love, and to hunt when necessary. They just flew over again. I hope to see them once more before I go.

The fresh water intrigues me. I have filled a bottle and placed it in my tinnie. It makes me think of the joy and relief that sailors must have felt when coming ashore on a new land and finding a freshwater spring or stream to fill their empty or stale water casks. Graffiti on the small waterfall’s rockface reminds me of that time. It is not the paint of today, but the names of people and vessels carved carefully into the sandstone. The names are hard to read now, worn away from decades of running water, and any corresponding year is long gone. I know the area was a stopping point for whalers and merchantmen in the 1800s. It is romantic to think that I stand where they once did, thankful for the gift of clean water.

The wind is freshening again, and cold. The grey skies have remained that way and despite my pleasant surrounds, I know it will soon be time to leave. I may try for some fish—to replace what will be my dinner tonight, caught on a previous venture a few bays from here—but I will likely just go. I do hate to leave but I will be bashing into the wind and chop on the way home as it is. The sanctuary of this little cove sustains me, and my memories of today will take me through to next time.

* William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude, second part, lines 76–77. Excerpt taken from The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, Penguin Books (2001), p281

The Writing Process

Above: Laptops by other names: my Olivetti Lettera 32 and an ever-present Moleskine notebook. Simple writing tools that foster ‘concentration, without interruptions’.

Every writer has their own writing process. These days, it would be assumed you would sit down at a laptop or desktop, open up Word, and let the magic happen. But of course, there are as many processes as there are writers: pen and paper, notepad, laptop, typewriter, voice recorder are some ways of getting words down; and place plays its part: car, beach, forest, café, bedroom, study, park…the list is endless.

Over a fairly short period of time, I found my writing process: a small notebook and longhand. But that came from something else. Back in the mid-naughties, I found myself writing a lot on a typewriter. It was a fairly retro move, but I wanted to experience what other writers and journalists had experienced. I wanted to write ‘deliberately’ perhaps. And I fell in love with it.

I found that what originated on a typewriter, required minimal editing later. Sentences, paragraphs, overall structure, flow, were all thought out in advance. Striking a key meant commitment, ink was going on a page, so more thought went into what was going where and when. The writing felt slower to begin with, but the gains came during the shorter editing process; and then my writing developed and became quicker too – there was no writing anything knowing I could fix it later, but – verb choice particularly – happened then and there; and rhetorical devices—those lovely flourishes that bring writing to life—found their way into my writing as I wrote it. I became a better writer.

But, for someone who spends a lot of time writing on a beach, and writing while away on motorcycle trips, typewriters are impractical. They also bring a large dose of self-consciousness because they are unusual in today’s digital world. They draw attention and are noisy. I remember one evening, writing on the balcony of a holiday apartment in Byron Bay when a young couple walked past on the street below and stood laughing and bewildered because they could hear somebody typing on a typewriter. I froze, and then retreated indoors to less solitude but a less judgemental environment too.

What worked for me was a small Moleskine ‘Cahier’ notebook and a gel pen. I have long been a fan of Moleskine notebooks and the Cahier series are classic work-a-day notebooks. The small size fits comfortably in the front pocket of my motorbike jacket, or in the back pocket of my jeans, and in the calico bag which takes up no space in my motorbike luggage and which I use to carry useful things down to the beach when I’m away. While a fountain pen remains my pen of choice, a Uni-Ball gel pen—first bought by necessity from a newsagent in Forster when I had oddly forgotten to bring a pen on a writing trip—proved itself so admirably on that one particular venture that it has become my go-to pen when I am on the road.

Like a typewriter, writing in longhand forced me to think about my sentences, paragraphs, structure, and style. I have a strange ego associated with editing: if I need to edit excessively, to rewrite extensively—and yes, editing does improve our writing—but if it goes beyond what is reasonable in my mind, it soon transforms into frustration which leads to a questioning of my abilities and of what I was trying to write in the first place.

And, like a typewriter, writing in longhand brought minimal editing. When I compare what I have written in my notebooks to what makes it to publishing, I have determined that I am about 90 per cent there in my notebook. When I write directly to my laptop, it never ends; I write and edit as I go, I shift paragraphs around, delete, change fonts and line spacings, and become distracted by checking emails and social media, searching the internet, and generally wasting time. When I write in longhand—or on a typewriter—I just write.

The process

So, what is my writing process? Time and place are important. Setting aside time is best but I often find it coming on first: an idea will appear, sentences will form in my head, a structure will blossom, and I reach for my pen and notebook – I carry one with me everywhere (again why small notebooks are excellent). A good example is from last week: I could feel an idea coming quickly, I had a 10-minute tea break due at the shop I occasionally work in; I took my break and soon had two pages of a story that will likely make this writing blog.

That’s an example of spontaneity, but my technical process is:

• I find and dedicate time to write

• I write out the story in longhand into a small notebook

• At some stage later, I will type the story into a Word document—making some slight and obvious edits as I go. If this follows a time away, it can require finding significant time itself

• I then let it sit for a day or two. It’s always good to leave it and come back with fresh eyes

• Those fresh eyes reveal surprisingly obvious edits that need to be made and omissions that need to be added. I do those

• I then upload it to my blog or paste it into a larger project.

Writing trips

Something I have come to value are writing trips. I alluded to this earlier, and for me, they usually involve several days away on my motorbike either camping or staying in a small cabin. They are times of solitude, fuelled by long days on empty beaches and broken only by trips to the shops or a retreat from the sun.

Above: The freedom and timelessness of being in nature, of having ‘the whole sky to fly in’. On a lonely beach, coffee brewing, sun rising, and ready to write.

They are times of uninterrupted thinking, where the overarching purpose is to write; the secondary purpose—which is so intrinsically linked to the first that it is difficult to separate—is being in nature. There is a freedom to being in nature, a timelessness I don’t feel anywhere else. There is a restriction when writing elsewhere—even at home—a sense of an impending interruption, a need to be somewhere else, other work that needs doing – yes, these are all the selfish qualities of a writer, but they represent the pressures that writers and artists don’t always respond well to. But having those open-ended days in nature are just magnificent! Days that can be devoted to your craft.

Mary Oliver said, ‘Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching…’* Never do those words make more sense to me than when I am alone on a beach, pen and notebook in hand, coffee brewing on my small metho hiking stove, and the day awakening before me, a day when I have nothing to do but smile – and write.

Processes are personal but common among them all is time. Find time, make time, carve out time; create a writing place and spend time in it. That time and that place are what you will associate with writing, and great things will come from being there.

A final note on familiarity

I have referred to such things as typewriters, pens, notebooks, and places, and even broader concepts like writing trips—which include said notebooks and pens—because association born from familiarity is important to the craft of writing. When I go away on my motorbike, I go away to write. A motorbike laden with panniers, my swag, and some camping gear means I am going away to write. Sometimes I am tempted to drive so I can take my surfboards and a guitar, but I know that my time will then be divided between surfing (usually best first thing in the morning, which is also my preferred writing time) and writing songs. Writing will become another player in a crowded competition where the prize is time. So when I go away to write, I go away to write – without interruptions.

I have written before of my reading place; it is where I like to read – and write. I have a study too, and that is where the final work is done. All are important stages of my writing process. The familiarity of our tools, the where and the when, are all part of that process, and all are conducive to good writing.

So, what is your writing process?

Appendix

What I use: an Olivetti Lettera 32

Above: Ready to write

I first heard of the Olivetti Lettera 32 when reading River of Time, Jon Swain’s excellent memoir of his time as a journalist in Vietnam and Cambodia in the early 1970s. ‘I brought to Phnom Penh next to no clothes but a few books and the usual immutable paraphernalia of the journalist in those days – an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter and a camera,’ he wrote*.

As a budding photojournalist making his own forays into Southeast Asia—and Africa—and enamoured by the rich archive of material created by Swain and his contemporaries as they reported on the conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, I was intrigued.

Before long, I had my own Lettera 32, bought from an older couple whose typewriter repair business was fast becoming obsolete and would soon follow them into retirement. I immediately fell for the sea foam green colour, and the contrasting red tab key which sometimes gets mistakenly struck as my muscle memory sends my fingers for the ‘return’ key or apostrophe. My Lettera 32 was made in Olivetti’s Barcelona plant; a serial number search puts its year of manufacture at 1970 – it’s the same age as me and I find something special in that.

Other research revealed how correct Swain was: the Lettera 32 being a favourite portable typewriter of its time, adored by journalists and students alike, and also by writers including Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road) who allegedly wrote all of his work on the same machine he’d bought in the mid-60s.

Above: Simple and uncluttered. You can write, or you can write.

Continuing research since has shown that many serious writers prefer typewriters to computers—for the reasons outlined in the article above—and that many younger writers are finding something special in the clack and clatter of the keys, and the more direct and immediate connection to their writing.

As a photographer who doggedly resisted moving to digital, and who stubbornly stood at countless airport x-ray machines while security staff sifted through every roll of Ilford HP5 and Fuji Press 400 I could carry, an Olivetti Lettera 32 suited me and my Luddite ways down to the ground.

I have always resisted change-for-change’s sake and the misguided belief that newer must be better. Newer usually means more convenience—at least until you need to upgrade within months of purchase—not higher quality. The things we pay for now are not things designed to last, that stand the test of time, but rather mediocre things created and sold and superseded at an absurd rate.

I have upgraded my computer several times since I bought my Olivetti. Failing batteries and unsupported outdated software render the older machines obsolete. Hard drives litter my desk drawers and a nagging sense that I have lost much material litters my conscience. That I can sit down at a machine as old as I am and write story after story, article after article, or book after book if I wanted to, is testament to both quality (in design and build) and simplicity. And I have an immediate hard copy that can be filed away next my notebooks.

It takes time to learn how to write well, and that time shouldn’t be hindered by never-ending upgrades and endless adjustments and distractions. Sometimes, slipping a piece of paper into a typewriter, or reaching for a pen and notebook is all you need to fly in the whole sky.

This article was written on an Olivetti Lettera 32. It remains largely unchanged from the original draft.

* Upstream, Oliver, M. (2016) Penguin Books p.23
*River of Time, Swain, J. (1995) Berkley Books p.14

What’s in a name?

Above: The Adirondack Guide by Winslow Homer.

I often wonder when I first stumbled across the word sojourner. It somehow got into my consciousness more than 20 years ago and has since become the name of my film company, the title of a song I once wrote, the title of a book I have written; it is the title of this creative writing blog, and if I ever own a small sailboat big enough to warrant a name, then I suspect I too will name it Sojourner. The word has a deep meaning for me, but why?

Sojourner means ‘a person who resides temporarily in a place’. It’s a romantic and carefree notion to be sure: wandering from town to town, staying a while, and moving on. The Western genre is full of sojourners: cowboys riding into town, saving the day, and riding off into the sunset. And of course cruising sailors are the epitome of sojourners, gliding from island to island or from sea to sea seeking new ports and new experiences.

The word also conjures thoughts of pilgrimage and solitude, of deep thought and reflection. They are thoughts of living outside the box and seeing what lies around the next corner, and then the next, of uncommon experiences and a life full of stories.

But we are all sojourners aren’t we? We are only on this planet for a short time, we will reside temporarily in this place and then move on. Others have been before, and others will come after, so what we do during our time here—how we spend it and how we leave the planet for those to come after—matters. Along with being sojourners, we are also stewards.

That freedom to move is what appeals to me: of not being tied down but of being in control of your own decisions – of having agency. Some may consider that selfish, but freedom, true freedom, is vital to our wellbeing yet lost to our modern lives.

Whenever I have had the freedom to accept full time work, I have been both excited for the opportunity, yet terrified by the conditions. Yes, I will earn money. Yes, I will have financial security for a time. Yes, I will have prestige. And yes, it will come at an unbearable cost. My days will not be my own. My hours will be dictated to me. My life will be governed: what I do, when I arrive, when I eat, and when I leave. And, I will need to ask permission for time away. My life will be determined by the whims, competencies, and calendars of others. My days will be filled with minutiae: the unimportant will become the important. Great stress will be placed on fleeting subjectivity; fine details of inconsequential projects bearing negligible outcomes that will be forgotten soon after launch day.

Some feel great relief at the security such busywork brings. Others like me bristle at the intensity placed on its mediocrity. But while sustainable employment is a good and necessary endeavour in any society, it is how we define employment and what societal expectations we place around it that I find interesting. In many cases modern employment exists merely to perpetuate our foundational belief in consumerism and materialism. Instead of working for necessity, we work to feed an insatiable appetite for more. Like Huxley’s soma, our consumerism exists only to placate our quiet desperation, while the principles underpinning that employment lie at odds with a deeper connection to the natural world around us and the spiritual world above and within us. As Thoreau said, ‘We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.’ Our freedom and agency are expressed through a desire for more things, not more life.

Above: Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph) of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce.

Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, the Nez Perce chief more widely known as Chief Joseph, was quoted as saying, ‘You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.’ Joseph’s land had been taken, his people killed, and his culture and way of life were disintegrating before his eyes. As one of the last Native Americans to have experienced the true freedom of a primitive life prior to the white man, his was a harrowing situation. But that cultural disintegration happened to make way for our modern Western society, for a new way of life that focussed on prosperity through enterprise and the acquisition of wealth, and not on necessity and a relationship to spiritual and emotional wellbeing. The connection to land, to people, and to place were deeply rooted in the Nez Perce culture, even Joseph’s name—Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt—means ‘thunder rolling from the mountains’, the poetic imagery and connection evident; but in this burgeoning new society, the land was merely a commodity, something to be exploited, to be torn up, sold, built upon, mined; the rivers too were dammed and diverted; the oceans emptied of life, and the air polluted – all in the name of progress and Manifest Destiny.

Above: A replica of Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond.

As someone who craves connection and simplicity, and who bristles at hollow enterprise, it is little wonder that the word sojourner holds such meaning. But when did the word pop into my thought space? Many years ago I read Walden, the quintessential work by Henry David Thoreau about his living alone in a cabin for two years in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts. My cheap Oxford University Press, World Classics edition of Walden is worn and dog-eared, sentences are underlined, and numerous Post-it notes have been torn into smaller strips and stuck to the many pages to mark something profound. The cover is adorned by The Adirondack Guide – a peaceful Winslow Homer watercolour of an old, bearded man glancing over his shoulder as he rows his skiff across a pond in a thick Appalachian wood – itself a study on solitude and simplicity that gives the reader a hint to the enchantment that lies within. I read Walden several times in my younger years, but it has been many years since I last entered the woods surrounding Walden Pond with Thoreau. Having just read another of Thoreau’s works—the essay Walking—I decided it was time to re-read Walden and seek solace in those regenerative woods once more.

In the very first paragraph I read, ‘At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again’.

I should have known.

Above: Anchored in a quiet bay, trying out my new fishing rod, and with my trusty copy of Walden to hand, I noticed a surreal coincidence between the book’s cover and my surrounds.