Helen Garner - Skating With Detail

Last night / last week / two weeks ago (this blog post has been slow work in progress), I attended a lecture, part of a three day conference, NonfictioNow, held at Melbourne's RMIT University.  An event bringing together writers from around the world and across Australia, 'inviting them to lay down their pens, step away from their keyboards and swap notes on writing (and reading) non-fiction – right now.'

I had just finished a long day at work and as I found a seat in the elegant Storey Hall (deceptively better looking inside than from from the street) I weighed up whether to get out my iPad and take notes.  Tired and hoping to be entertained I thought better of it - I'd watch Helen Garner rather than allow my fingers to tap dance over the iPad.

We learn the divide between 'real life' and fiction young (and younger now) where any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  How many writers feel comfortable with that disclaimer?  My Dad often warned me that I wasn't living in the real world, and for large chunks of my adolescence and well into my twenty something-ness I wasn't:  I looked out of windows and longed to be somewhere else.  I didn't listen to music or read books, I lived inside them.  I knew my Dad's real world to be the stuff of fiction, and mine, the only reality, the only one that spoke any kind of truth.  There was a story in my looking out of windows, the longing to escape the tension and unhappiness I found inside a room, especially, inside the family house.

A great writer, of fiction and/or non fiction notices things, picks up, the detail.  There were two significant details in Helen's lecture which haunt me still and leave a trace, a piece of evidence which point to the ‘crime’ a good writer detects.  Their ability to notice, and follow with purpose and determination something very small, nearly hidden, and from there to unravel a story.  Helen described her attempt to become a good ice skater earlier in her life.  Her progress was slow and awkward until one day she noticed an ice skater who looked professionally accomplished.  She described how he looked the part, with his hands clasped behind his back and a zig zagging easy flow as he glided over the ice, body lilting, she imagined a scarf around his neck floating in his wake and followed behind him mimicking his movements, magically skating with ease.  Her description was poetic - mimic, and you will become.

The second detail was an interview Helen had conducted with an arts director years before.  She had asked her questions, written and shaped her article, and, reading back over it realised she had missed a very important admission, had let it slip, a comment about anger, something she hadn't followed up at the time with another question, perhaps opening up the interview in another, unexpected, certainly unplanned direction.  But the point is -  she realised her slip and it haunted her.

Writers remember, they capture, the details others skate over.

http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/a04507217d06/