I was trying to remember how many book awards ceremonies I’ve been to since I began working in publishing and bookselling. The closest I could get, without spending far too long on research, was between twenty-five and thirty – roughly one for every year I’ve been in the business (for a brief period there were two national awards, so it may well be more). But whether they are called the Ockhams, or the Montanas, or the NZ Post Book Awards or something else, the question keeps coming up – are they good?

There are problems with all book awards, all awards in fact. A short list of grievance might go something like this. They are too elitist, they are judged inconsistently, they lack diversity, they ignore various genres, they ignore minorities, they pay too much attention to certain genres, they lump together different genres, the ceremony is too long, the ceremony is too short (there should be a dinner), they are too complex, they aren’t wide enough in scope, they don’t sell books, they sell only certain types of books, they are expensive to attend. I’m sure I’ve missed out many.

Over the years almost all of these problems, you can call them challenges if you like, have been addressed by different formats and different systems. There was a time when there were numerous nonfiction categories (too hard to stock and promote, said some booksellers), there was a time when the national Best Pie competition received acres more media coverage than the book awards (well, who doesn’t like pie). There are endless occasions when the book of the year hasn’t been judged book of the year, in the eyes of many at least. There were two occasions when I remember the judging so offended some attendees, it ended in (brief and clumsy) fisticuffs. Is there any system that could address all of these challenges?

To diverge for a moment, at the recent Auckland Writer’s Festival (huge, well attended and buzzy) one of the eternal quandaries of such things raised its ugly head again – what to do about audience question time? Almost all sessions left time for questions from the audience at the end. Some sessions were so lively question time was cut short. But some chairs I think diplomatically reduced question time for fear of…well for fear of that nightmare scenario – the ‘this is more of a statement than a question’ type question. You know the one, minutes long, and not a question mark in sight. Sometimes this is just the audience member trying to formulate their thoughts (talking on your feet is not so easy). Sometimes they are more interested in demonstrating their own wisdom rather than listening to the writer’s. Occasionally they have a genuine beef, and occasionally too, they just want to bathe in the reflected glory of the writer, even if just for a moment. But if question time goes badly, it can kill a session deader than desiccated summer roadkill.

But it can also go very right. At Bernadine Evaristo’s session, brilliantly chaired by Paula Morris, there was time for a few questions at the end. During their session Morris had asked Evaristo about the recent Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, Granta’s once a decade list of who they judge to be the most important young novelists of the nation. Evaristo was happy there were so many women on the list (fifteen out of twenty), but unhappy that the number of writers of colour had dropped to only two. And so to question time, where an audience member wanted to ask whether the selection process for the Granta list shouldn’t ultimately be based on quality, rather than on any attention to the race or gender of the writer. The energy in the room, lively after an enthralling session, seemed to cool. This old chestnut of an argument has been raised so many times it has become shorthand for more racist rhetoric, and I did wonder if the audience member was asking it quite deliberately, to play the devil’s advocate. Anyway, for a second I think we all had this idea that it might cut question time quite short. Would Evaristo dismiss it? Be offended by it? Close it, and question time, down right there? Not a bit of it. As the question went on, she leant forward, a grin on her face, and began rubbing her hands together in a sort of anticipatory glee. You could tell, instantly, that she had heard this before, and she was so ready for it. Her answer was forceful, passionate and convincing and I can only weakly paraphrase it here (I wished I’d taken notes). Of course quality mattered, of course good writing should be recognised. But to judge, as the Granta judges had, that that quality wasn’t there in writers of colour spoke to them being out of touch with British literature in 2023. Do better, was what I heard, and I hope the judges were listening.

And maybe that’s the answer with book awards too. Book Awards are definitely a net good, especially our most recent iteration of them which have been so successfully and carefully managed. They have reinvigorated the media’s (and the public’s) attention for our literature. They have boosted sales for publishers (not always, but very often). They give a writer’s career and their confidence a huge boost, and that needs to be valued when it’s so hard to make a career as a writer here. They remind us that arts and culture are important to everyone, even in business, Ockham Residential’s Mark Todd being a great exemplar of this. In an industry where we don’t often get a chance to celebrate with each other, with our writers, but with our editors and publicists and all our people, the book awards feel like an essential outpouring of confirmation of what we do and why we do it.

But I think awards should also, always, be looking at ways to do better. It’s good for people to question the judging. It’s good for people to suggest changes be made to the categories. It’s even good for there to be controversy, from time to time, about who wins what award. All of this means, by and large, that people care about the awards and are passionate about our literature. In the end, it’s good for there to be, always and for ever, time for questions.

And that’s it, my two weeks is up, and tomorrow morning early I fly back to Wellington.

So here’s a quick final post about residencies, they seriously rock. Some sort of alchemy happens, a combination of the time you get (yep the money helps too), the space you get away from your usual world and the legitimacy you feel getting the residency in the first place. Together these things (if you’re lucky, and I have been) combine to make a creative, productive, rejuvenating place where you can live your days solely as someone who makes stories, or art, or whatever you choose.

So my plea would be, can we have more of them? And also, can we have residencies for parents with children, for people with disabilities, for people who need a carer on hand. Can we have residences in your own city and residencies on remote islands. Can we have residencies that last a day, that are one day on and one day off, when and where you can manage it. Residencies that last a week or a month or a year or three years. Residencies that come with a group, residencies where you are completely alone. Just, all the residencies you can imagine, all the time. Please and thank you.

Thank you to the Michael King Writer’s Centre for making this happen, and especially, thank you to Jan and Tania who made it so welcoming and comfortable and well, so completely awesome.

I really hope one day I get to come here again. But also, now I know what they are, I’ll be looking around for others. Everyone should. Good luck!

So what have we learned today?

Well I’ve learned, and this is something that has emerged out of entire two weeks here, that the writing doesn’t always go smoothly. Of course I knew this already, but the patterns emerged much more clearly when is writing is the only thing you do all day, every day.

The other day I wrote about one of the stories getting to a point where it seemed to kick off p[properly, which was a relief and a rush. Today was the other sort of writing day, when it’s a struggle to get sentences down on the page, and your inner critic is in overdrive, questioning all the decisions you make and laughing behind its hand at all the shoddy bit.

But this is all OK. It’s great when the story flows, but it’s also good when it doesn’t and you sit at your desk, wondering how long it is before you can have your next coffee break. Even today when the words all seemed awkward and ugly (mostly) there were still some ideas that made it through the mush. And yesterday there was one extremely weird one that made the whole day worthwhile, if I can make sense of it.

I don’t know if you’re a fan of movies about writers. Generally I’m not, because they always seem to either get it (and publishing) completely wrong, or they gloss over the bit which is the actual writing. Not that I blame them, no-one would watch two hours of someone sitting at the desk and typing, or not typing, as the case may be. Which is probably why we get those awful montage scenes sometimes. You know, the writer sitting at their laptop (or still sometimes, a typewriter), and a shot of a piece of paper which – in time lapse – grows into a larger and larger pile of paper until the author sits back into the chair with a large sigh. But I guess my point is that when you are writing something, a movie of that could easily show you walking on the beach, or making coffee, or siting in the sun looking at the sea. Because chances are the writer is still working on the story somewhere in the back of their head.

And this is what’s it’s been like having two weeks to do nothing but write, where I’ve been given explicit permission by the world to write. I’ve been at my desk every day, but the writing hasn’t always piled up in a satisfying time-lapse way. There have been lots of good days too, lots of energising days, when it has gone well. And from them I’ve learnt to be much more patient with the writing. To sometimes just be quiet and see what comes into my head, rather than forcing out a word count. I know it’s a luxury to be able to do this, and I’m grateful for it.

Also, that really weird idea just won’t go away, which I suppose, has to be a good thing.

I told myself I wouldn’t combine blogs from different days. But I guess I make the rules, so…

This entire blog began with an idea from John Banville, somewhat rejecting the idea that characters in books ‘come alive’ at some point in their creation. Banville’s point is more sophisticated than that, but I won’t repeat it again here (the first ever blog here post explains it pretty well if you’re interested). I think he’s right, but I also think there is often a moment when you’re writing something when the story does seem to begin to create its own energy. It becomes self-sustaining to a certain extent, able to generate more ideas, more scenes – more story – from what has already been written. Sometimes it can be when you reach a milestone in the word count (as I mentioned in the previous blog), but sometimes it can just be one sentence or one idea that gives you that animating jolt. Aha! you think, so that’s what this story is about. It’s a rush, and one of the best things about writing I know.

But since I’ve been here those moments haven’t come along that often. Probably because one of the books I’m working on has had most of its ‘aha’ moments and I’m revising and expanding an almost complete draft. And the other book is too new, still in the stage where I’m exploring ideas and scenes and characters, not really sure what the story is or how it works. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday the new book finally came into focus, and it did it with one sentence at the end of a chapter. Except that’s not really true, is it? The final sentence seemed to somehow distil everything about the chapter into one simple idea, and it felt like a revelation. But actually, all the work that had already gone into that chapter was what gave the final sentence its significance. Taken by itself it’s not particularly good or memorable, which is why I’m not going to repeat it here (sorry). But as I wrote the chapter I was asking myself, what is this scene for, how does it advance the story, what happens next? And that last sentence answered all of those question, and I got the jolt. Or maybe I gave the jolt to the story, I’m not really sure how it works.

So I still agree with Banville, the writer makes the story and not the other way around. And I still disagree too, or at least, I know that sometimes something else goes on. I remember seeing the late, great, Nigel Cox at a literary festival once many years ago talking about the ‘buzz’ that came off the writing when it was going well. And I remember another author at the same festival dismissing the idea of ‘buzz’ as something that never actually happens. But I’m with Nigel, and whether the buzz comes from the story or is given to it and reverberates back to the writer, I don’t think it really matters. I’m just glad when it happens.

A shorter post today because it’s been a long day at the desk, so this is a small thought from a small, tired brain.

I read an article today (in the online Guardian) about a new previously unseen collection of Charles Dickens’ letters that were about to go on display for the first time. There wasn’t a lot of detail about what was in them, except for one, which concerned his complaint about the removal of the Sunday postal service from his Kent village. “There are many people in this village of Higham, probably, who do not receive and dispatch in a year, as many letters as I usually receive and dispatch in a day…” he wrote. A prolific letter writer and reader then, which begs the question, where did he find the time? I mean, there were more than a dozen big novels, numerous short stories, plays and non-fiction books. He was the archetypal ‘man of letters’ and hugely prolific, but even so.

The article made me want to re-read Dickens, but also, made me realise that I haven’t been doing a lot reading while I’m here. This seems to be a pattern for me. If I’m deeply involved in writing something, then the capacity for my brain to absorb other stories contracts. There’s no question in my head that if you want to write you need to read. The other article I read today was about a recent debut author who admitted they had no real idea what they were doing, and relied on their agent to send them literary tropes to build their books around. Surely, it’s a lot easier to read some books? But yes, when I’m writing a lot, that narrative usurps all others in my head. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, it’s just the way it is. I imagine Dickens had no such problem.

But the other small thought I had (OK, there were two) was I wondered if Dickens had a mechanism by which he could see how many words were accumulating as he wrote them. Famously, many of his most well-known novels were first published as serials, which makes me think he probably had a very good idea about how many words he could fit in each episode, how many the printers could fit on every page (I need to find out if this was the case). You can see where I’m going with this, yep, the dreaded word count. I know, or part of me knows, that ultimately it’s not important how many words you write in a day. But I can’t deny the satisfaction I get when I hit a certain milestone. 10,000 words feels like a good start, 20,000 like the story might have legs, 60,000 and it feels like you might have a book. This is especially true on days like today when I kept hitting and then missing a number because I as re-drafting. Deleting and re-writing, expanding and contracting, so that the milestone wasn’t actually hit until the day was almost over. I can’t help but feel that Dickens got something of the same satisfaction too each time he sent off an episode to the publishers. Mind you, he probably had to pick up his pen again immediately, and start answering all those letters

Since I’ve been here I’ve been having vivid, wake from with a start, dreams. Not nightmares in the classical sense, but dreams of anxiety and panic. The ones where events seem to go chaotically, disastrously wrong. And although you know all along what you need to do to make things right, something always prevents you from doing it.

When I wake up from one of those dreams – it’s  usually very early in the morning, too early to get up – there’s a few minutes of panic as I come back to myself and realise where I am. Also that, no, Ted Lasso isn’t going to throw me out of the football team because I’ve forgotten my kit, again. There’s a great scene in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, where Will has a waking nightmare on Christmas Eve. It leaps on him as soon as he turns the light off, and the way he tries to overcome his fear is to turn the light back on and run through a little inventory of all the normal, familiar things in his room (it doesn’t work so well, but there are more forces at play than his subconscious). I think this is probably a common way of dealing with a bad dream. Looking around, making yourself note the familiar and ordinary, but also perhaps thinking of other good things that might have happened or might be happening soon. But it’s more than just an inventory, because each of the objects or events has a tale attached to it, some story about why it has meaning. This is what Will tells himself to feel better, the reassuring history of the objects in his room (Cooper is fantastic and writing about a lot of ordinary domestic things, as well as her skill at fantasy).

For me it’s all an example of how much story-telling is deeply part of all our minds. The story of things is there when we’re awake or asleep. It’s there in the homes we make and all the objects we place in them and the millions of small transactions and accommodations we have with each other every day. Those little stories are all around us all the time, and we depend on them to navigate our way through our days, and to hopefully make ourselves feel better when we’re anxious or upset.

I think my dreams are probably the result of spending so much time inside my own head over the last 10 days. My imagination has gone into overdrive with the constant exercise it’s getting, so at night time it just keeps going. Or perhaps, it’s just downloading a lot of unused story ideas, playing them out in my dreams to make space for more ideas the next day. I just hope next time I can remember my kit.

Google Street View. For a while there, back when Google were still frantically photographing what felt like every square inch of the planet, there were people who spent their time spotting the google street view cars as they tootled by, and staging impromptu dioramas. There were also a few other oddities that sort of horrified and delighted me at the same time. For a long period, the google view of a street in Wellington had a clear picture of my two friends walking their two dogs. And if you searched for my own house, you could see a slightly blurred view of my partner walking up the driveway (I think she might have been carrying the glass recycling crate). It was all new and odd and slightly intrusive.

I’ve been using street view a fair bit the last two days because part of the book is set in Rome, and I wanted to remember where things were and how they looked, if my character was to take a certain route from Trastevere across the river to the Basilica of San Clemente. I could remember parts of it from when we all still did overseas travel, but I wanted to get everything in the right place. It’s amusing and sometimes infuriating to me when you watch a movie or TV show set in New Zealand, and one moment the people are in Auckland and the next somehow somewhere else, without leaving the scene. I didn’t want to make that mistake, but also, knowing how the route would look was all part of building the place where the story happens.

It’s still odd though. I don’t know when the last time was you picked up the yellow man in the bottom right hand corner (the way he dangles from one hand is always a little creepy) but I did that a lot today. Dropping him on a glowing blue line again and again. Rotating him around to get the right angle, the right building, the moment when the passing bus wasn’t in the way. The little yellow dude really got a workout. But I wondered at a certain point whether it might be better to forgo the technology that let me do this, and just base my characters route on what I could remember. Was that somehow more authentic? Was it better to have just my own, probably inaccurate, memories of the place because they are more completely, somehow, mine?

I don’t think so. The way I assemble a scene in my head is to build up a sense of where they are, what they might see and smell and hear. I won’t use all of it, but usually I have most of it in my head when I write. And it isn’t me that I’m putting there of course, it’s the character that I’m manipulating, moving them this way and that. Making them react to what’s around them and feeling and thinking what I make them think and feel. In an odd way, part of writing a novel is making your whole head into a giant street view in which you place your little yellow characters. Except there might be a whole cast of them, rotating slowly around, following the bright blue lines you’ve mapped out for them.

Writing is like google street view. Yep, that’s where I got to today. Happily, I still have many days left.

I hadn’t quite realised before I came here how much time I would be spending by myself. I mean, that’s the point of the residency, two weeks to just write. But suddenly I’m deciding what to do only to please myself. What hours I keep, what I eat, where I go for a walk at lunchtime. I’ve been diligent about the writing hours because I want to make the most of the time, but that still leaves dozens of decisions to make just for myself. It’s weird.

I think that’s part of why I started narrating everything I do in my head early on, because I was trying to make sense of it, and trying to reassure myself that the decisions I made were valid ones. I mean, how could I tell when there’s no-one here to check in with? You can see a bit of imposter syndrome is still hanging about.

The parallels with writing a book are pretty obvious. You make millions of decisions when you’re writing a novel, whether you’re conscious of them or not. Why that character said or did what they did. Why the story set in Auckland suddenly veered to one set in Rome. I’ve talked about this before, but as you write your brain does a huge amount of unconscious work, especially when it’s going well. And when you go back and start revising, you become aware of all those decisions in a much more conscious way.

Of course you can find, as I did today, that you’ve made a mistake. The continuity doesn’t make any sense, for example. Or the motivation of a character which had seemed so plausible before no longer rings true. But just as often you find a connection that you weren’t even aware of, different chapters that play off each other, tricks of speech that make a character more alive. And also, this is something that I sometimes have to consciously remind yourself, you can change your mind. I remember a writing class when we were critiquing someone’s work and the idea of stakes came up. What were the stakes for the characters, what were they risking, what did they hope to gain? The author was a bit flummoxed by this, they hadn’t consciously thought about it before, and they weren’t sure there were any stakes in their story (though they wanted there to be). Our convener said, well, if you want stakes, just put them in, even if they weren’t there to begin with. You can change your mind. You can pull it all apart and put it back together a different way. You can do whatever you want. That’s one of the great things about writing stories.

Now, if only I could make up my mind about what I want for dinner.

The Michael King Centre is in Devonport (Auckland’s North Shore for those who don’t know the city). I used to come here a lot when I was a kid to hang out on the beach with my friends. In those days the ferries you caught from the city were large, ponderous, wooden vessels that seemed to take ages to cross the harbour, but that was part of the adventure I think.

Maungauika, what we called North Head when we were younger, is an old military base on a volcanic mound that overlooks the sea. They built observation posts and gun emplacements against a possible invasion, and connected them with a network of tunnels burrowing through the volcanic rock. It was the tunnels we were always most keen to see. A lot more of them used to be open than are now, I guess they’ve crumbled and become unsafe.

Today when I walked around the place – looking for all the old tunnels and caves that I remembered, finding some and finding others boarded up – I had a rush of some of the old feeling I used to get when I was there. One of the tunnels, the one near the disappearing gun, is still as I remembered it. There’s a section of tunnel with no lights at all, so if you want to you can walk forward in complete darkness. Trusting your memory of the route and the slope of the concrete under your feet (yeah I have a torch on my phone, but this was not the time). But next to the main tunnel, if you look for it, is a really narrow tunnel, not much wider than your shoulders. If you follow that, it will lead you around and through some other rooms, cramped and dark, and it was there the feeling came back to me strongest.

 It’s a combination I think of knowing there’s a huge weight or rock above your head, pressing down, and an awareness of being somewhere that was once full of people and purpose and is now abandoned, and a sense – sometimes quite strong – that you are being watched.

I don’t know who or what is doing the watching. Maybe it’s someone from my childhood drifting around those tunnels. Maybe it’s just the sound and smell of the sea that permeates them. Or maybe – warning, big metaphorical stuff incoming – it’s the presence of my memory itself. It felt today that the tunnels I found and the tunnels I tried to find were like memories. Sometimes you can get so close to them that you can see and hear and almost taste them again. At other times, only little pieces of them are accessible, and they’ve been changed by what has come later. The incidental shame and regret and nostalgia you get when looking back has blocked them off. See, I warned you about the metaphor stuff.

But if it is memory that is watching you in those dark tunnels, then I’m OK with that. Not everything that lurks in such places needs to be feared. Sometimes it’s benign, and sometimes it’s just old you, wanting to remind you who you used to be.

When I’m beginning something new it almost always starts with an image. Not an idea or a character or a story I want to tell, but an image of something. A teenager walking along a dirt road to a high bluff and vanishing. A boy lost on an endless tidal flat, the water silvering the sand and reflecting the sky. A girl walking along a city street through the circle of light made by a streetlight and into shadows again, like she is leaving a stage. When I begin, I try and put that image down in words. But just as often I’m trying to tease out what the feeling is the image provokes. Sometimes that feeling is too elusive to pin down, but other times it’s very concrete – an emotion like fear or loneliness, a sensation like cold. It’s only after I’ve teased out the image that I can begin to see what the wider story happening around it might be. What led to that point? What happens next?

This new thing I’m writing began like that, but then went in a different direction. The image was a group of friends – high – in large, low car. The sort of thing your granddad might have owned, the type of car taxi drivers all used to drive before they went electric. A Holden Kingswood perhaps, or better, a Toyota Crown. There’s a low sun turning golden, and the light filtering through the windows of the car is picking out the friends one by one as it navigates a hilly road, showing all their secrets.

I thought after I’d written this image down, which became a scene, that he bigger story was about the group of friends and their various intertwining’s. I worked up an outline for it, notes for lots of events and relationships in the friend’s lives. Lots of drugs and sex. And then I layered over it another story. One of the friends looking back on that idyllic time and lamenting what his current life had become. And honestly? It was boring. At least it bored me, and that’s never good. The scene in the car felt alive, but I couldn’t conjure any others that had the same vibrancy, and the realist sections about the older friend were just too mundane. Writing a character who is disengaged with the world is just not very…engaging. Perhaps sometimes even if the image is as strong and deep as the car scene, that’s all it is. A moment, a glimpse, and nothing else.

Anyway, now the older friend has an encounter with an ancient and possibly evil deity and things get much more interesting after that.