Carmel Bird was interviewed on the radio recently about her latest book, Writing the story of your life: the ultimate guide to writing memoir. She suggested listeners work ‘to the sound of ticking’, while doing one of the writing exercises she has devised for it.
Here is that writing exercise, as it appears on page 8, with a note she sent to accompany it.
Expanding the Facts by Writing Them Down Under Pressure
Think of a clock or a watch that had a special significance for your in childhood. Write a description of it. Then keep writing for twenty minutes. Observe and enjoy the way the facts blossom before your eyes like Chinese paper flowers. Setting yourself a strict time limit for a short piece of writing is very effective. You may be amazed at how much you can write in such a short time. It is only human to respond to the pressure of a time limit and to rise to the occasion. People in writing workshops are frequently quite shocked at how much they can write in even just five minutes, under pressure.
NOTE
People really need the context though, in order to take what I am saying seriously and to understand that every word of the exercise matters – eg – UNDER PRESSURE is highly significant – they can’t just meander along with it and pay half attention – real writing (as you know of course) is always like doing an exam – there is a time limit and there is the imperative to concentrate and do the best and to get it right. And then there is the word DESCRIPTION – which I have put in italics in the book – but they need to understand that they are working like a camera – that they are just DESCRIBING – they are not making up a narrative, telling a story, or commenting on emotions etc etc, that this is just the FIRST exercise in a set of 28.
Carmel Bird, 2007
Here is my response to Carmel’s 20 minute writing exercise. I’m writing about my mother’s dress dummy, to the sound of her sewing machine:
Pins stuck into its cotton skin, ragged and worn with use. The skin of my mother’s dress dummy was tired, like my mother was tired. Under the shower with her when I was 10, her belly full with my baby brother, we sang “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’. Laughing. Then we sang it again as we walked along Springvale Road towards Bellbird Corner. Sitting on her knee, or on her hip, I was small for my age, or have a memory from very young…I don’t know…I witnessed endless cups of tea drunk around her sewing machine, and the snip of her shears – the large black-handled scissors she used for tailoring. One day she made a tu-tu for a theatre company, out of stiff white gauze that stuck out in layers – layers of ever decreasing lengths as they neared the crotch. She said she used to work for J C Williamson’s before the war, making costumes. I badly wanted a tut-tu, one that stuck out like that. But she made me a floppy one with only one layer, and it was hard not to show my disappointment. My mother loved clothes, and dressed me well. She would look in shop windows for ideas, draw them on scraps of paper and then draft her own patterns on newspaper. Some of her methods were a little unconventional. One day she had me lying on the kitchen table to measure my leg length for a pair of trousers. Mum said her mother Phoebe used to cover her up, when she was young, with hats and gloves in the summer, so she wouldn’t go too brown. Phoebe was a small, smartly dressed woman with beautifully shaped stockinged legs, permed and blue rinsed hair. She was always telling me to cross my legs when I sat. Mum said she and Phoebe never really got along. The dress dummy mum used sat in a corner of her sewing room, and would come out into the living room where she set up her sewing machine. She worked quickly and decisively, with authority, pins between her lips as she adjusted fabric around the dummy’s hips and bust, neck and shoulders. There were no legs. Women in mum’s day didn’t wear trousers. She removed the pins from her mouth and we would drink tea and sing.