Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing

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The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.” While experiencing the culture, ask questions, go to places off the beaten path, and, most importantly, be respectful. Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure- and unhappy too- but never as miserable as the twenty-first- century Neopatriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled. We were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong. A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, to publish alongside her new work of nonfiction, The Cost of Living.

Try, if possible, to finish in the concrete, with an action, a movement, to carry the reader forward. Never forget that a story begins long before you start it and ends long after you end it. Allow your reader to walk out from your last line and into her own imagination. Find some last-line grace. This is the true gift of writing. It is not yours any more. It belongs in the elsewhere. It is the place you have created. Your last line is the first line for everybody else. You’ll have to do significant research to write about other cultures, but it’s definitely worth it. Learning about other cultures can be enriching and helps both you and your reader see the world in a new way. Try to research before traveling to learn about acceptable communication and avoid doing things that could be seen as offensive. To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.” Think about your family history within the context of time and place. Did you grow up with Florida sunsets, church barbeques, Bugs Bunny, and listening to 90s grunge? Or were you raised with miners’ strikes, Margaret Thatcher, and Jacob’s Trio biscuits? Your life may seem boring at best, but your experiences can provide delightful vignettes or source material for a novel. When writing about interests and hobbies, start with why you love this thing. The rest will follow.Sometimes we take a character from our own immediate lives and we build a new person upon that scarecrow. Or sometimes we take well-known characters in history and shape them in new ways. Either way we have a responsibility to write them into life. Set goals. Accomplishing even small goals like a weekly word count or writing time can give you a dopamine rush and motivate you to keep writing. There were many times while reading that I leaned in eagerly, feeling that Deborah Levy could eloquently express things that had been a real struggle for me also. Her essays enthralled me and I intend to read more of her work. These ideas are organized by theme and topic for easy reference whenever you’re unsure what to write. Don’t forget to print or bookmark this article so you can refer to it when needed. Personal Experiences And Anecdotes Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

While travel and adventure can appear glamorous, countless stresses and challenges are involved. That’s the type of content that is interesting, so don’t feel like you need to censor or sanitize your travel experiences. Obviously, you need to think about your audience and what publication you’re writing for, but sharing challenges can make your experiences more relatable. Even if you don’t think your life is interesting, it’s still a treasure trove of source material and inspiration! Start with your earliest memory or something that seems mundane but holds a special place in your heart. Get as detailed as possible. Natural born writers are at once inside and irrevocably outside of life. That is their genius. They are able to describe their lives from dual points of view: one of immediacy, perceptiveness and details and one of separateness, distance and alienation. Karl Ove Knausgaard comes to mind. Deborah Levy plays and dances in the same league.In "Why I Write", Orwell entertainingly declared: "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." He divided reasons for soldiering on into "sheer egoism", "aesthetic enthusiasm", "historical impulse" and "political purpose". Like Orwell, Levy is entertaining and makes his categories her chapter headings. But, unlike Orwell, she is not steadily organised. She is a maker not a clearer up of mysteries. And she is fugitive. It is this that gives the book its subtle, unpredictable, surprising atmosphere. Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) is the first of Levy's "Living Autobiography,” which now has three short volumes, and maybe more will come. I’ve had a good year reading Annie Ernuaux, and most recently two volumes of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, all of which I enjoyed and learned from.

Your personal experiences give you a unique view of the subject. Instead of trying to write as an expert (unless you are!), write from your unique angle. What was the political climate when you were in grade school? Do you remember being aware of any of it? If not, research a political event when you were 11, and write a scene where it impacts you without knowing it. How do we approach the things we know that break our hearts? What do we do with that unwanted knowledge and that broken heart that keeps pounding inside us, hurting and surviving?This is the first volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series of memoirs (later followed by “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real Estate”) this was published in 2013, two years after her Booker shortlisting for “Swimming Home” To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed. Her massive ego helped her crush delusions about feminists under each of her shoes- which were smaller than her spectacles. When she wasn't too drunk, she found the intellectual energy to move on and crush another one. Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December."

Trapped by hormones. Trapped by children and familial affections. Trapped by pervasive patriarchy. Trapped by social expectations and professional barriers. Trapped by the vagaries of the time, place and circumstances of birth. Trapped by legal injustice. Trapped by misogyny. Trapped (sometimes) by being Jewish. And trapped (if you’re English) by Brillo pads and West Finchley. It’s a jungle out there for every woman. The second section while perhaps simpler in a literary sense (and less reminiscent of her powerful fictional writing) is also the most powerful – an account of her time in South Africa as a young girl after her anti-Apartheid father was arrested and held in prison for four years, something which lead to the author developing a habit of speaking very quietly and then reverting to silence. As Levy said in a recent Guardian interview “It was really about being totally overwhelmed by everything, not believing that my thoughts were in any way valuable to anyone, probably very frightened thoughts, and so I just stopped speaking.”. This section explores how Levy eventually started to rediscover her voice through writing. One of the strengths for me of this section is how Levy as an adult conveys and explores her feelings as a child – in a way which to me seemed both true to the remarkable lived experience of a child but with the literary filter of an adult. In Anne Lammott’s classic book on writing, Bird by Bird, she encourages writers to start by writing their personal experiences. She lights little fires for us along her path. We follow the flames like moths in her wake. She shows us how a creative life emerges from the roughness of the terrain. Magazines and online publications are always looking for travel and adventure stories, so if you like to travel, you should be writing about it! There are several approaches you can take when writing about travel, so use these ideas if you’re overwhelmed by the thought of writing about your last adventure.

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An esteemed writer finds herself unable to ride escalators without being moved to tears by the overwhelming sensation of being carried forwards whilst remaining still. One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Pro Tip: Ask questions! We often think we know everything about our family, but there are probably experiences and events you’ve never heard about. Current Events And News Stories