It could be worse

Nobody ever said that writing novels was easy. It takes too long, for a start, and it's bad for your health. It's lonely, and badly paid, and while a slight kink in the psyche is probably what made you a writer in the first place, you also have to be slightly nuts to persevere to the point where you can earn your living by writing-related work. But having spent the beginning of the week in the company of professional landscape photographers, courtesy of the Peak District Photography Centre, I'm beginning to think I'll have to stop moaning.

It's all in a dawn's work for Karen, Fran, Mike or Alex to get up at four, climb a fell in the dark (did you remember your head-torch, as well as making the right decision about which bits of kit were worth lugging up several hundred feet with you?) and sit there for an hour to catch sunrise on a distant peak. The forecast was good, but though forecasters can tell you that clear weather's coming, they can't always tell you just when. Not to within an hour either way of sunrise, anyway. Still, on the way down you see, in the flat, grey, damp light that's trickling through the clouds, how the celandines are glowing in a way that the sun would dim. An hour ago you were shivering on a wind-torn ridge; now you're lying flat on your front in the mud. They're like gold among the crumpled brown of last year's leaves. Only later do you start to think which magazine, if any, might buy the shot. If they do, perhaps you can buy a camp stove for the van. That would make sitting out a rainstorm in a car park, waiting for that elusive shaft of sunlight, rather more comfortable. Dawn's not the only light that picks out forms and colours, so once the hard, overhead light of the middle of the day has passed, you start all over again, and only get home after dark.

A landscape photographer might return over and over again for weeks to a set of rocks or a mountain stream, hoping for the right light on it to coincide with the right light on the distant valley, and then the season changes, the leaves come out, or fall, and the chance has gone till next year. A sudden frost will fringe winter trees with diamonds and you have drop everything to get there; a sudden flood of rain when you're on your way to the supermarket might flood the muddy ruts of an industrial site, so they reflect brick chimneys and abandoned towers as shimmering ghosts of their old strength. Use your craft to get it right in the camera - light, colour, structure, composition, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, white balance, ISO, exposure compensation and sharpness (those winds...) - and you won't have to spend too much time indoors at the computer tomorrow. Because you wouldn't do it if you didn't want to live outside: usually too cold or too hot or rain-soaked or sun-burnt, while every day  - every year - is chancy, contingent, unstable. You're always planning for a goal, but must always be willing to change your plans, or abandon them altogether, when something you see sends that little electric charge across your skin. It's that prickling skin that tells you that here, suddenly, your craft can make art.

So I'm going to stop complaining. But I'm also going to recognise that, apart from the sun-burn, the contingency is something I do know from writing. It might seem that, unlike photography, writing novels could be planned down to the last inch. We don't depend on the state of the sun or our batteries: we don't even have people peering over our shoulders and asking what we're doing. But actually, even at our desks, we don't know where we're going either: we plan the next turn, but we don't know what's beyond it. When we get there, it might be quite different, and need quite different writing. Here's our craft as writers: that we plan for what we hope we can do, but when everything changes it's our craft that can make the unexpected into art.

Comments

[ireneintheworld]

fantastic post emma; you got to the heart of photography there and all the reasons why i am a writer and not a photographer. x

[Janet]

Just read this after watching - from the comfort of a sofa - the 2002 TV version of Shackleton's 1914-1916 Antarctic expedition to the South Pole. At one point Shackleton wanted to abandon *all* non-essentials but his photographer, Frank Hurley Hurley persuaded him that a photographic record was essential - "otherwise we'll have nothing but our words". It seems the ship was rightly named 'Endurance' - what they suffered is almost unimaginable.

[David I]

No kidding, it could be worse. We could be actors.

On the other hand, as Edward Dahlberg pointed out, artists can at least hang their work, while all writers can hang is themselves.

[Emma Darwin]

Irene, I seriously considered becoming a photographer about ten years ago - nearly did a degree - but realised that I didn't in the end have the drive. I knew I'd been right when I started writing seriously, because with writing, I do have that drive: everything else in life just goes down under it like a steamroller.

Janet, it's true, and speaking as someone who writes historical fiction, I think it's one of the things that really is different about 'now' from 'then'. (Lots of things we think are different, to my mind, aren't). We do have this feeling that if it hasn't been photographed, it doesn't exist. There's a fairly recent account I read by landscape photographer working in some pristine wilderness of the Arctic. 'Wow!' he said to his Inuit guide, 'No one's ever seen this before!' 'No,' said the guide. 'What you mean is, no white man with a camera has ever seen it before.'

David, don't! ;-) My son wants to be an actor. At least with that, if no one wants to pay you for your work you can collect some friends and borrow a church hall for the show, or bribe your local bar to let you hang your photographs. We novelists have to persuade a corporate entity that they'll make a commercial profit from our work...