my reasoning

Today is the first of November, and November is nanowrimo month. I often begin to write for nanowrimo, and then stop. I'm no good at narrative. (Me being no good at narrative may be to do with me being somewhat less than goal driven. Elizabeth Farrelly in an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald was talking about desire driving everything, the theory of the quest driving all narrative fiction, all life. I don't have that. I think Edwin was right when he called me a peasant, in the nicest possible way, I have the drive to live from day to day, I like short term definable tasks, I don't mind repetitive work, I like to get a job done, I love watching plants grow. cf Billy Bragg "I know people whose idea of fun is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun") As I say, I'm no good at narrative. But I am good at observation and at remembering.

Ashley was talking the other day about a novel he was reading which was set in the town where he grew up. He said reading it was amazing. I said no one will ever write a novel about Caringbah.

A couple of days later, on the radio, I heard a Scottish writer talking about his novel and where he'd come from, that there just weren't novels about where he'd grown up - his theory being that until recently survival was all you could do, then, lately people had got through school and got to university, and only now were there people with the, I'll say, leisure, to write a book. And I thought, okay, yes, maybe this is me.

Maybe there is enough that I remember about Caringbah to make a whole lot of words. To make a thing, here on the web, that will describe to some degree what it was like to be there then.