Call a Writer: Meg Mason on seeking peace and quiet

'Why are we even still having to convince ourselves that writing is a real job?'

Courtesy of Meg Mason

I have a delightful new interview with Meg Mason for you today, but first, a couple of bits of business.

This Sunday 2 October, 10am UK time: The In Writing Creative Hour is back. Join me and other friendly faces for a writing session together on Google Meet. Bring a project you’re working on (or a blank page) – we’ll have a chat and then spend the best part of an hour writing in companionable silence. It’s a great way to set up your Sunday and a lot of fun. Do make sure you’re a paying subscriber so that you receive the Google Meet link on Sunday morning.

Paying subscribers can also listen to a recording of today’s newsletter – including my phone call with Meg, which is about twice the length of the highlights you’ll read below.

(Note: please use the above button instead of the one that says LISTEN at the top of this newsletter. I have no control over that, it’s an automated reading provided by Substack, and it doesn’t include the phone call audio.)

If these extras sound fun to you, please do upgrade your subscription if you haven’t already – it’s a total bargain, and you can’t say that about many things at the moment. Without your support, I couldn’t do this work, so thank you.

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You may remember that back in May I announced that I was starting a new, occasional series: Call A Writer. Well, it turns out to be a very, very occasional series, because I’m only doing the second one now, four months later.

Meg Mason is the author of 2020’s brilliant Sorrow and Bliss, a bestseller which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She’s also written two other books: a memoir, Say It Again in a Nice Voice, and You Be Mother (which was her debut novel, published in Australia in 2017, and has recently come out in the UK too). She was on the In Writing podcast about a year ago.

Meg very kindly agreed to be the second writer I called for this series (she lives in Sydney so it was actually a Zoom). She’s currently writing a third novel. Below are some edited highlights from our conversation, touching on what it really means to focus; why writing can feel like a frivolous enterprise, and what she learnt from George Saunders about allowing herself to take it seriously.

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Hattie: When we were emailing, you mentioned that your biggest problem is finding a place to write – but I see that you’re in your little writing shed that you were in last time we spoke. So what’s going on?

Meg: Yes, because it’s evening. The shed still exists, but in daylight hours, for almost a year I’ve been absolutely plagued by neighbours’ renovations. I live in a super high-density part of Sydney, so you can touch our neighbours over the fence. And everybody’s renovating, so all day long it’s just intensive excavations and angle grinding and trucks and shouting, and it’s been genuinely so distressing that I’ve honestly thought, I think I have depression.

I have this intense frustration and panic that I want to write, and if I could write, I would be writing. And there are so many times in a project where you’re actually secretly hoping for something to derail you, because you don’t want to do it anyway – so you’re like, Oh I have to go to the doctor, OK I can’t write today. That’s very sad, do you know? But this is like, I’m desperately wanting to do it, and honestly every morning I’ll sit down and my hands will hover over the keyboard, and then someone will start slicing bricks in half.

There’s a lovely library in the city and there’s an art gallery that has a research room, and I’ve been going to places like that – but when you’re at a certain point in a project, it’s so hard to be here and there. Just the whole thing of, and then I had to put my laptop away because I had to put more money in the car meter or something – you know, it’s so hard to settle into the work and get to that really deep place that fiction requires you to get to, when there’s noise and someone wants to borrow your charger. You and I chatted about phones last time, and how I find them to be really destructive on that ability to get into deep thought. I think it’s the same thing: my brain is like, No, I’m not going to take you there if you’re not going to stay there. I’m not going through all of that effort, and the painful sitting and waiting at your desk to get into that state, if it’s going to be for ten minutes.

So because of that, I’m finding it harder and harder to get in every day. I haven’t quite solved it yet, but I’m at that point of: is it officially time to rent space? I’d heard Lucy Prebble talking about it on your podcast, saying that she could never justify it, and then she did it – rented space – and it was a way of honouring the work, and being like, no, this is a real job.

Why are we even still having to convince ourselves of that? And yet we do. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I feel like, Oh it should be free, I shouldn’t have any overheads. I don’t know why I feel so guilty about it but I do, so I go and look at these spaces, and then panic and don’t put applications in. But I think it might be time, Hattie. I think it might be time.

I think it’s time. If you were working at a magazine, which I know you have, they would provide an office, a desk, a good chair, a computer… There are expenses associated with writing, and this is your job and why shouldn’t you buy yourself the things you need in order to do your job? I totally think you should. And I think it’s almost a symbolic moment as well, and you might find that it takes you to a different place in terms of your writing.

I think so. There’s definitely a sense of shame about writing being what I do and what I want to do, which I struggle with all the time. It’s such a weird job, it’s not saving lives, it’s not important, no one needs you to do it, and there’s enough books already. It’s so embarrassing to then be like, And it’s so serious that I lease corporate space – I just can’t bring myself. It’s like admitting that I really want it, and I have to pretend that I don’t and I just dabble. Hours of psychoanalysis would be required to get to the bottom of it.

It is funny that we don’t feel that writing is a proper job. I feel so embarrassed sometimes when I’m having conversations with friends who are doctors or are working with homeless people, and I’m like, ‘Well, I had a really difficult day today because I couldn’t work out the argument in this article’ – you know, it’s so trivial. But the world needs things to read.

Yeah. And I had this amazing conversation with George Saunders. I asked him about how he felt about that – does he feel this slight shame in his career? And he’s like, ‘Absolutely. Should I be writing when the climate is changing? Probably not.’ But then he was saying that he’s met enough people out in the world who say that his work does mean something to them, that it’s almost like he has to give them the benefit of the doubt, do you know? He was saying that he feels that a writer’s job is maybe to have this opportunity to think deeply about the things that all humans want to think about, but people with real jobs don’t have time. So we have to think about it for you, and create some work that lets you access those feelings much more quickly – because you can’t just sit in a tiny shed listening to an angle grinder and thinking about the human condition, but I can. And I will do that for you!

So maybe I am providing a service, and therefore I should just be doing it in some sort of incredibly private co-working space – which is what someone needs to invent, a co-working space for introverts. 

Yeah, you don’t want to ‘co-work’.

I’ve visited so many, and they’re full of people who want to chat, Hattie. It’s vile.

Listen to the interview in full here or on your podcast app, by becoming a paid subscriber. Buy Sorrow and Bliss and You Be Mother now, and listen to Meg’s episode of the podcast here.

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One last thing – I’d like to know more about you, and I’ve created a new thread where we can do that. Please come and comment with a little about who and where you are, how you arrived here, what you’re writing or would like to write (or enjoy reading), and anything else you feel like sharing.

I hope to see lots of you on Sunday for Creative Club. Until then, good luck with your writing this week.