This week Writing Our Way Home is pleased to be able to publish an interview with Caroline Brazier. Caroline is a teacher to, and friend of, Kaspa and Fiona. She is the author of six books on Buddhism and psychotherapy. Her latest book, launched in May, is Acorns Among the Grass: Adventures in Ecotherapy. Caroline is leader of the Amida Training Programme in Buddhist psychology and psychotherapy and spends much of her time at the Amida centre in France. She travels extensively and gives workshops and training."One day I'll write a novel. My book 'Guilt' is almost a novel and it's my favourite book, even if it's not as well known as some of my others."
Hi Caroline, thanks for taking the time to do this. On to the questions...
What drives your creative work?
That's a hard one to answer. Often there is a seed of inspiration, an experience, a memory, an idea. Once started though the whole process seems to drive itself. It gains momentum like a trolly rolling down a hill 'till it takes me over completely and I just have to surrender to its force. I'm not sure I know how to not be creative. I just am. It is a matter of opening the sluices and letting the images flow.
People have always described me as a creative person, but creativity comes out in many different ways. Sometimes my creativity goes into writing but at other times it goes into course design or working on the houses or land or into human relations. Sometimes writing is a choice. Sometimes it takes discipline to start. Sometimes one can deliberately set out to write. But in the end one needs to find the spark and to open one's heart and soul to it. The muse does the rest.
Writing is about inhabiting other worlds. To write well you have to live and breathe the world you are describing. It is a kind of entrancement. The writer is the shaman, travelling into the realms of the unseen and opening the eyes to new experience. It is an immersion. Once in the other space one feels ones way deep into the experience, searching for the right words and phrases, measuring them against the felt sense. One paints pictures with multi-layered images, richly daubed along the thread of the storyline.
What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
Where did it begin? I was writing poetry and stories from childhood - I think the first poem which I still have was written at the age of three or four.
I did go through a fallow period after I left school. I think I did too much comparing myself (negatively) with others and I was daunted by the idea of getting published - I thought that other people wrote books. Looking back I'd now say 'have confidence'. It would be nice to tell 16 year old Caroline that in the future she would get published. Maybe she would have taken writing more seriously then.
Of course there are practical tips I could give the young Caroline. I used to be far too flambouyant in my style - a wild romantic. Ive learned to tame it and be simpler and more concrete. But I think the freedom of writing baroque teenage novels and melodramatic poetry gave me a scope and sense of grandure I still draw on. It was a stage I am glad I did not miss out. In some ways though I think it is good to start writing professionally when one is a bit older. I don't regret the years of just writing for the hell of it.
Prose needs pacing, like poetry. It has light and dark, short and long sentences, different word tones. It is a middle ground between the innovative and the cliche, it involves allusion to the familiar with a peppering of surprising imagery. I think that a lot of my writing style comes form having heard a lot of good prose read out. My mother used to read me stories and poetry as a child so I think the sense of metre and sound is hard wired in me. I always listened to a lot of Radio 4 too. I really appreciate good broadcasting.
How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
3,000 words a day. Any words. Just do it.
How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?
I write in short intense bursts. A book takes typically two or three bursts of dawn to dusk writing in which everything else stops for a week or two. Then I don't write much for months. Writing is an obesession, or perhaps I should say a posession.
What is it like to send your work out into the world?
Exciting. Daunting. Sometimes mundane. I have learned that my feelings go through predictable phases as the book moves from my computer to publication.
Whilst I am actually writing it, it's an uphill grind until I have crossed the rubicon of 30,000 words. From that point on I feel a confidence that this book will live. It becomes a downhill slope to the finish, often with increasingly obesessive bouts of writing as I surrender to the process. Refining the manuscript then involves several trawls through the whole text, combing out knots of turgid prose which waffle pompously or simply break up into incomprehensible jargon. The combing feels endless. Some pieces flow pleasantly but some are impossibly tangled. I spend quite a lot of energy fine tuning prose as I go. Because I am a bit dyslexic I tend to read it aloud in my head - I love the sounds of words. Then suddenly it all runs free like an unblocked drain suddenly releasing a head of trapped water; it reads like it is meant to be. When it's finished it no longer feels like my work. I have been the servant of the process not its author. It surprises me.
I send off the manuscript with trepidation, never confident it will be accepted. It is a relief when the publisher gets back to me with the contract. I always try to submit the manuscript before getting the contract - I hate writing to order.
Then the editing process starts. Eventually the manuscript comes back from the copy editor. Another trawl. It is strange seeing what another person chooses to correct. Sometimes it feels really helpful, but other times it can feel intrusive, even a violation. My own feelings about the manuscript change over time, however. The process is not all rational. I have learnt that at some point during the editing I invariably l read the manuscript and go into a complete panic as I think 'this is a complete load of rubbish, have they really agreed to publish it?' This point ususally comes when its far too late to make any serious changes. All I can see is how clumsy and pointless and tortuous the book is, and how it exhibits every writing fault you can name. Several times in the early days I seriously wondered if I should contact the publisher and tell him it is all a terrible mistake. Now, though, I know this is just another state of delusion clicking in. I ignore the impulse, and somehow, miraculously, when the book actually comes out it seems to have become quite readable again.
And then it is out. I have gradually got more used to seeing my books on the shelves in book shops (sometimes) or people's houses.
I think for me some books are about completion and handing over knowledge to others. It feels good to have put the material in them out into the world and in a strange way I feel less responsible for holding it once it is published. Because many of my books contain ideas which I also teach I feel that once a book is written I have done my duty, recorded the knowledge and passed it on. They free me to teach more spontaneously. Other books, though, are more creative, and with these there is pure pleasure in sharing the things which bring me most alive.
What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
Get the manuscript well copy-edited by someone you dont know. (I'd add though that not all copy editors know what they are doing so always re-check their corrections! I will never forget how good my first copy editor was. I wish others were as thorough and willing to negotiate and dialogue over details)
What helps you to pay attention to the world?
The world. Being in it, one is constantly surprised by the unexpected and the mundane.
Writing helps too. I find again and again if I write about a place and then go back to it, I discover on my return that there are all sorts of things which I completely missed out of my initial description. If you want to improve your observation, look, write and then look again! I have written about this in my recent book:
Thank you Caroline,If we sit among the bamboo stems and close our eyes we probably simply think ‘I am sitting among the bamboo’. We probably have a vague impression of stems, partly derived from what we have just seen and partly from our concept of ‘bamboo canes’.
Then the intention to write about the experience forces us to look more accurately. What do bamboo canes actually look like? What colours are they? How do the leaves look against the sky? How are they spaced? The prospect of writing itself conditions a fuller examination of the bamboo as we rehearse the piece we must later put into words. We are pushed to look again.
Kaspa & Fiona
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