Pick me! Pick me!

Christine Priestly on writing the writerly CV

My professional CV has been in circulation in one iteration or another for well over a decade: a catalogue of passionless buzzwords. But when it comes to trying to break into the literary world, that lack of passion slaps me in the face.

I have spent years trying to sell my studies and writerly pursuits as relevant in the professional non-writing world. Now I need to do the exact opposite.

All that business-speak, reams of flow-charts and mission statements, all that jargon-riddled documentation, needs to somehow morph and be moulded into experience that is pertinent and relevant to the literary world.

I need to show why I should be picked above all the other budding 'industriests', that I am dedicated, conscientious, able to work to deadlines, enthusiastic, and that this enthusiasm will translate into producing f-off awesome work.

It’s harder than I thought.

I read over my newfangled CV. Everything turned topsy-turvy, Magic Faraway Tree-style. What will they make of my extra-curricular activities, the stuff that usually sits in the ‘yes, I do have a life outside of work’ category, suddenly thrust into the centrepiece? How can I make the transition from ‘hobby’ (read: die-hard passion) into ‘career’?

And then there are those ten prominent years of analysis and techie-speak, climbing the corporate ladder, which somehow seem like a waste of time, irrelevant, barely transferable. How can I make them fade into the background?

But I know they can't be faded, nor should they be. Those years haven't been wasted and those skills are transferable. If I've learned nothing else, I know I can pick up the ball and run with it when I need to.

So pick me, I say, let me learn and work from the bottom up, because everyone has to start somewhere.

-CP

The outsider

Christine Priestly shares her share of another's creativity

Recently I met a fellow writer and was privileged enough to workshop one of her pieces. It was a personal letter about the decay of a creative partnership which was also a relationship. The downfall of one became an emblem for the other. A beautifully melancholy tale, it described her experience sitting outside the creative process of another – a lover, a partner, watching his creation extend and morph beyond them.

What touched me most was her depiction of what it was like to experience the work of a lover and wonder where it came from. Music, art, writing, all comes from a place inside you that no one else can ever know. It is deep and it is raw.

It’s not something I had ever experienced from the other side. I didn’t know the ache of wanting to be inside that part, knowing you never will. Of wondering what your lover felt as they described one character’s love for another, one character’s hate for another. Wondering if they will ever feel a fraction of that for you.

Now I know.

It aches in the worst possible way. As though someone was there, in that part of them, long before you and forever after, someone who stole it for any other.

I’m not jealous like this when I pick a book up off the shelf. Who is that author to me? And with any non-writer, non-artist, I might assume that part simply isn’t there.

But this is different.

Because I know what it’s like to write those words, to create them. I know it’s not creation at all.

And yet because I’m a writer, I know that each piece, each character, is not its own entity, but a part of you. A part that exists both internally and externally. When I write, I write to discover; in a sense I am not a writer, I am a reader. I experience the suspense, the joy, the pain, the emotions, as they fill the page. If someone asks me where a story came from I can’t tell them. Perhaps I write to uncover it myself, as I dig and I dig.

Then I wonder, is it like that for him? Are his words real, or imagined? Perhaps they are cruel manipulation, suckering the reader, with no genuine emotion at all.

And then I realise where the pain comes from. From knowing I will never truly know.

-CP

When like meets like

Christine Priestly shares why you should never date a writer...

Over the years I have watched lovers watch me 'in progress' during one writing fit or another. Working to deadline, real or imagined, letting my body moulder. During these fits, food becomes sustenance, sex a kind of manic release, and excercise something you do when your retinas begin to burn. You shower and dress only when you are forced to leave the house, and any outside contact seems alien and slightly awkward. You also, oddly enough, lose your ability to speak. Your verbal vocabulary vanishes into incoherence, and you struggle to maintain the most basic conversation.

These are things I have known about myself for years, but struggled to make known to and understood by my friends, family, and partners. All they see is an anti-social, ill-tempered, crazed bitch who lives on stale crackers and refuses to get out of her manky pyjamas for stretches at a time. How often have I caught myself saying, 'I'll be human again soon, I promise.'

More recently I have had the opportunity to witness this from the other side.

My lover - a fellow writer - has attracted the interest of a publisher, so for the past month my phone calls have become rude interruptions, Saturday nights have been spent in the throes of lap-top passion, and I have been haunted by a vague scent-impression of male deodorant and the image of my lover wearing something other than cruddy track-pants.

I’d love to say that tumultuous madness is part of our charm.

'You're lucky I didn't tell you to fuck off for an entire two weeks,' he told me.

He's right; in his shoes I might have done the same.

I find this curiously alluring. We develop our own habits, our own process, but the one thing we share is obsession. In the lunatic hours of the morning we call it a hobby, a craft, a desire, but the reality is it's so much more.

...And I thought our self-absorbed delicate egos were the things to watch.

-CP