Writing resilience

Alumni Guest Contributor Deborah Rice

Writing: what better life could there be – so long as you manage to make a living from it?

I’m lucky that as a journalist I do just that, even though paid work has to take priority over spending time on my creative endeavours. It’s a career that allows me to ask important people significant questions about big issues – and expect them to be answered. It also allows me to explore a fascination with language. But the craft is focused on communicating succinctly and, even after almost thirty years in the game, it’s a constant struggle to write a news story which is both concise enough to get a run in a radio, television or online bulletin and comprehensive enough to provide context and balance. Tight, multiple deadlines make that even more challenging. As many others have noted before me, the more time you have to write a story, the easier it is to pare it back to its essence and find the words that best express each idea in the least amount of time or space.

Writing for recreation comes as a relief. I can tease out an idea, decorate it, drift with it. I can make things up. It gives me a wonderful sense of freedom and release. Sometimes it’s almost spiritual, when the elements of a sentence or a story click together with that inexplicable magic which makes me look at the page or screen with a sense of the words having been channelled by a more creative soul.

Yet some days, even that writing is a chore.

It was great feeling inspired again recently, when I interviewed Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith for ABC News. She’d just won the inaugural Mona Brand Award for Women Stage and Screen Writers, presented by the State Library of New South Wales.

The only award of its kind in Australia, it was made possible through a bequest to the State Library of NSW Foundation by the late Mona Brand, who also wrote under the name Alexis Fox. She was a trailblazing Australian poet, author and a prolific playwright in the 1940s and 50s, with more than thirty plays to her name. Her work often addressed controversial social issues. It was performed on stage, radio and television in Australia, England, Eastern Europe and India, but not many people have heard of her here.

Curator Anni Turnbull with Mona Brand collection Photo Vanessa Bond State Library of NSW

There’s an obvious comparison to be made with Joanna Murray-Smith, who has a huge body of work, including almost two dozen plays that have been performed in more than 30 countries. In addition, she’s a screenwriter and a librettist and has three novels to her name. Yet you could be forgiven for never having heard of her.

“It’s quite a body of work now, I’m surprised myself,” she told me as we prepared for the interview.

The 54-year-old burst onto the international scene in 1995 with the gender politics play Honour, created while she was studying in the writing program at Columbia University in New York. Meryl Streep delivered the first reading – imagine being able to say that!

“It was an amazing experience, particularly for a young writer, to be watching your words coming out of that extraordinary mouth and with that extraordinary intelligence behind it and making them work in fact,” Murray-Smith said.

Honour hit Broadway with Laura Linney and went on to several sell-out London seasons, with luminaries including Diana Rigg.

It was the first of many of Murray-Smith’s plays to be staged overseas, including The Female of the Species, based on the hostage-taking of Germaine Greer. Most recently the playwright has been attracting sell-out audiences with Switzerland, a darkly witty two-handed thriller which reimagines the last days of the reclusive Patricia Highsmith, the best-selling author of The Talented Mr Ripley.

When you consider the Australian has penned many plays that attract huge audiences for weeks at a time across different countries, that’s a lot of bums on seats. Murray-Smith is clearly one of the nation's big cultural exporters. But her success has not made her wealthy and, like Mona Brand, she seems to be better celebrated abroad than at home. So she accepted the $30,000 prize with deep gratitude – not just because it will help feed her children, but also because it validates her talent.

“It’s an incredibly precarious life emotionally, financially, intellectually. There’s no sure thing about a writing life, or about an artist’s life. You always feel as if the last thing you wrote that was successful is the last success you’ll ever have, you never trust your own ability to surpass what you’ve done before or to get it right or get it better,” she told me.

“So the money is like a little buffer, I guess, to allow you to explore and experiment and write the next thing. But it’s also, more importantly, a psychological boost.”

I was surprised that Murray-Smith admitted to self-doubt, given her international success. Until then, I had thought of her as the very embodiment of confidence. Intrigued, I asked her more about that vulnerability, even though I knew her answers would never make it into a short news story. The aspiring novelist in me couldn’t hold back.

Murray-Smith emphasised that she knew she was living a life of great privilege.

“There’s not a day I don’t wake up and think how lucky I am to make my life from my imagination.”

Then she laughed.

“But on the other hand, as we all know, artists live in a perpetual state of injustice or despondency or feeling that they’re not well enough loved by enough people.

“Any affirmation will automatically translate to fuel a kind of creative adrenalin which is vital to the ongoing writing life.”

Of course, being able to see the reaction of an audience to what you’ve written can be transformative.

“It’s always thrilling in particular watching audiences watch your work. If they seem to be engaged with it there is no better feeling,” Murray-Smith said.

“You walk into that room and you survey those five hundred people who are all looking to stage, looking and engaged by an inventive story that just began as a tiny little sliver of an idea inside your head. You think, how can it be that that one small idea which has been extrapolated through my imagination, but not through real life, should have ended up here being watched by all these real people who paid real money to see it, being performed by actors who are at the height of their ability on a stage designed by designers who are at the height of their ability - somehow this whole collaboration has come about between the creative people and the audience - it’s all come about through one tiny idea that I had in a single moment.”

Despite packed houses, some of Murray-Smith’s plays have had mixed reviews over the years, particularly from US critics.

“I deal very, very badly with criticism.”

Murray-Smith laughed again.

“I would like to say that having children changed all that because suddenly I was tapped into what was really important; they may have softened the blow a little, but criticism still wounds very, very deeply. For a while I felt that if I was a truly great writer, if I was a really wonderful writer and I worked incredibly hard and I was very perspicacious about my own inadequacies, that I would kind of outrun the critics - and of course you can never outrun the critics, you can’t please everyone all the time. There are critics who have hated me from the very beginning of my career and have never changed their minds and nothing I do will change their minds.”

So how can a writer manage to move forward, under those circumstances?

“What happens is you go to bed and you fall apart and you cry and you say I’ll never write another thing, I can’t stand this anymore, I’m going to work in a book shop... then two weeks later you find an idea has clung to life in your head and you can’t resist it.

“Before you know it, you’re sitting back in front of a laptop and you’re writing again and the pain that you’ve just been through, a bit like childbirth, fades from view as the excitement for the new idea takes over.

“I often say to writing students that really the whole trick of a successful writing life is that your ego just eclipses your vulnerability. Really the whole trick is keeping on, as an artist of any kind, I think.”

On stage to accept her award, Murray-Smith had more to say about that resilience.

“It has taken me a very long time to realise that the rocket fuel for a writing life is the ego, which is prepared to go back into the boxing ring over and over and over again, stumbling punch-drunk towards the next idea, the next play, the next figment. The bruises help you learn. The blows are difficult to endure. But in the end, it’s not a choice. You do it reflexively because you have to do it. Whether or not you do it well or badly, optimism will go into battle every time with your vulnerability. And at the very last moment, when you are determined to abandon the creative life, the faith will deliver a knock-out blow to the doubt. ‘God, this is the one! This is the one!” You find yourself back in front of the page… until next time.”

Did William Shakespeare (or his staff writers) experience the same highs and lows? Actually, I’m mystified by how much we still revere Shakespeare’s plays and expect Australian students to identify with their universal truths, despite their many anachronisms, yet tend to show disdain for our own modern playwrights.

“Stage is often really overlooked as a branch of our national literary culture,” Murray-Smith told me. “So I think the fact that there is a prize specifically about writing for performance is a really fantastic triumph for the incredibly multifarious writers that we have in Australia, who are tremendously good at what they do – writing for the Australian stage here and also writing for the international stage – who are almost never recognised as significant cultural commentators and social commentators about the life that we’re living in Australia today – unlike prose writers, for instance.”

It’s another theme that Murray-Smith expanded upon during her speech at the State Library of NSW.

“When our leaders, our politicians and our media look for opinion, or for flourishes of the imagination, or for creative reflections of time and place, they should be looking to the stage and the people who put populations of observations, ideas and human beings upon it. We are a pool of independent, untapped cultural and political minds whose imaginations can chart the past, reflect the present and lead us into the future: note us, listen to us, fund us, follow us, value us. The imagination is not an adjunct to life, it is at its heart. It’s not a sidebar to national identity, it is the soul of it.”

The truth of what Murray-Smith said was highlighted when I was listening to the BBC World Service on the way to work recently, at a ridiculously early pre-dawn hour. It was a discussion about Populism and the Anti-Establishment Revolt, broadcast from the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in the week leading up to the US Presidential election. The panel was made up of two former politicians, an academic and one of Britain’s most acclaimed political playwrights, James Graham. The host, Owen Bennett Jones, made no big deal of Graham’s inclusion, it was simply accepted that his insight and opinion were equally valid and valued as the other ‘authorities’ on the subject. In my experience, that’s not something that generally happens in Australia, even though playwrights make a career of studying human behaviour and reflecting social issues.

I made a note to myself, to suggest asking a playwright for an opinion next time my newsroom was in need of a social commentator – and a woman playwright at that.

“Of course everything that I write I’m doing backwards and in high heels, as the saying goes,” Murray-Smith said. “It’s always harder for women writers, it always has been harder for women writers – as we all know, women can’t be geniuses, so thank God there’s a prize!”

I could have come away from our conversation discouraged about writing, given the struggle that a seasoned professional like Murray-Smith still faces despite proving herself over and again. But her honesty and self-deprecation were blended with a contagious enthusiasm.

“When things are going your way as a writer, there is no better life. You wake up every morning and think, ‘I make my living from inventing stories,’ and what’s more fun than that?”

When I’m next feeling uninspired or even downright defeated by my own writing aspirations, I plan to remember Joanna Murray-Smith’s energy and passion and look at my world through her eyes.

“The other great thing about a writing life, which I think sometimes is the best antidote to that terrible emotional and financial fragility, is that everything you experience, everything you hear, every relationship you have, everything you notice, everything you overhear - all of it is grist to your mill,” she said.

“There’s something wonderful about knowing there is no aspect of your life that does not relate to this very profound engagement you have with your craft.”

[Editor's note: Joanna Murray-Smith's award was announced by Deborah Rice in early November on ABC TV News.]