READY TO POUNCE Surviving negative feedback can feel like a game of cat and mouse.
AFTER dabbling on and off ever since I could articulate words, in mid-2009 I started writing full time and haven’t stopped.
Working through plenty of strong emotions (and day jobs), I blasted through my blocks to self-expression and found my voice in fiction, plays, journalism and memoir – genres I had tried but given up hope on long ago.
Along the way I’ve collected a little wisdom about how the world reacts to what writers write.
It’s not always pretty – there are plenty of detractors out there waiting at their keyboards to knock writers into silence.
Writers are generally very observant beings – our art reveals an ability to dig deep inside and tell the stories we find. The easier we make it look, the more it drives people who have trouble expressing themselves into fits of jealousy.
So, ‘you’re wrong about that, you know’, is a very common response to the courage it takes to write.
You’ll get it at social gatherings, on the social media, and sometimes from friends.
But one person you’ll very, very rarely hear it from is another prolific writer. We know the hard slog that goes into the job.
Here are my tips to writing ‘wrong’ …
Use the criticism
After your first few ‘you’re wrong’ experiences, you may find yourself getting a bit upset at someone making a point of being negative. A good way to remedy the shock is to write about it. That’s exactly what I am doing right here, right now. Never go silent for fear of someone deciding you’re wrong. Just keep writing.
Check your sources
Then check them again. This is not just the job of the journalist. Often, an accusation of ‘wrong’ comes from a readers’ need to highlight an inaccuracy, sometimes very publicly. But you’ll be surprised how often you go back to your research material only to find you were more correct than you originally realised. ‘Wrong’ is an easy accusation to make, but it’s harder to wear with confidence in mixed company unless you’ve gone over your sources properly.
Self correct
Online publishing allows instantaneous correction of just about anything. If you’ve made an error, from a typo to a mistaken claim, correct it! Across the heavily political history of publishing, this ability is an incredible luxury that a writer could argue people lost their lives for. Use it.
Subject ‘experts’
Many have invested time and money into becoming experts in certain fields, and they sometimes feel they have cornered the subject against every other writer. Expect little support from such people – they’ll get upset and angry if you write on ‘their’ subject, or close-up altogether. Explain your use of their source material, sure, but never be afraid to add to the story without their approval or permission. They’ll tell you you’re ‘wrong’, of course, but you’re getting used to that now, right?
IT’S EASY to knock others from behind your keyboard.
Old fashioned knockers
There are few things more hurtful for writers who use the social media than the throwaway dismissal or casual drubbing from one of our ‘peeps’. Facebook has become a tender trap for their ‘friendly’ fire. Knockers are the hardest critics to recognise, because their message can be slow to dawn on us if delivered in a sustained manner over a long period of time. Deleting a few of their condescending, corrective comments is usually all it takes to deliver firm return fire about their lack of form.
The right of reply
Pieces I’ve written have attracted polar feedback. The same works have been called ‘uplifting’ and ‘undisciplined’; ‘powerful’ and ‘hurtful’; ‘insightful’ and ‘misguided’. I try not to soak up either praise or criticism, which is easy to say and hard to put into action. In the fine balance between listening to a reader’s feelings and honouring my own, I tend to listen to myself, because to assimilate the opposites in my readership might end in this writer silencing himself, and I stayed silent for long enough.
What I am still learning is how to adopt that iron-clad ego it takes to put my work into the public domain, and leave it there despite the wall of wrong. But I am developing a suspicion that all a good writer needs is the brio of a damned good judge. Objection? Overruled!
THE first time I tried to see The Imitation Game with my husband, the session was solidly booked out.
On the surface I was annoyed, but deep down I was incredibly pleased, knowing that a full house of holidaying Australians was being exposed to the story of Alan Turing, code-breaker, computer innovator and gay man now transfigured by time into an unassailable hero.
At our second attempt, we booked but ended up in seats down the front. Craning my neck up at the enormous screen, I realised something in me still could not quite come to terms with how this film’s gay protagonist garners such excellent box office.
I’ve known Turing’s story for many years – I feel his tragedy keenly as one of the first generation that missed out on electro aversion therapy and chemical castration by a fraction of time.
“When you have to wait more than 20 years between screen heroes, you realise how straight audiences take theirs for granted.”
Seeing the way he trounced the entrenched straight male fraternity at Bletchley Park, as his keen mind turned the tide of a terrible war, all the while knowing how betrayed he would be by those he saved… well, it was heartbreaking.
His legacy was all the fuel I would have ever needed to overcome fear and just be myself as a teenager, standing on Turing’s shoulders.
Yet the very nature of his achievement – hidden and classified – took him from my generation until it was too late. So many of us slipped easily and quietly into our own closets and codes, fashioned in the shadows of sodomy laws and HIV/AIDS.
We silently air-punched for our beloved Alan Turing from our ridiculous seats. We lionised him, raised him up without hesitation, even though we knew we weren’t seeing the whole truth in Graham Moore’s excellent debut screenplay.
Plenty has already been written about the inaccuracies of The Imitation Game – you’ve got the usual casting concerns, like Keira Knightley not being a plain enough Joan Clarke; the wrong name for Turing’s Enigma-breaking machine; spurious spies and an exaggerated antagonist in Commander Alastair Denniston.
But to focus on all that is just so much dissembling avoidance.
Not since Tom Hanks’ performance in Philadelphia (1993) have screen audiences been exposed to a three-dimensional gay protagonist in a mainstream drama. I don’t count Brokeback Mountain – those cowboys were not even out to themselves.
Why is this so important? Well, because when you have to wait more than 20 years between screen heroes, you realise how straight audiences take theirs for granted.
It wouldn’t matter how much they altered the margins of Alan Turing’s life story, or shuffled facts to make a workable three-act plot structure, the fundamentals are not up for debate and need little embellishment. The Imitation Game is true to the man’s core experience. His tale follows the very equation of heroism.
Yet the film has its detractors. Films with gay heroes will inspire unsettled, contrary resentment until all the fairytales behind the great archetypal stories and their happy ever afters get rewritten and rediscovered, until they allow for all human experiences.
BROTHERLY LOVE Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
Also preying on peoples’ enjoyment levels is the fact that The Imitation Game is a tragedy. Like Philadelphia, there is no other possible outcome for the protagonist than one in which Turing is worse off than where his story started.
But this is not Hollywood killing off the queer to make a point: it’s the truth. The untimely death of anyone, even gay geniuses and HIV/AIDS sufferers, hurts like hell, and most of us are only just letting such feelings in.
To fully understand it, this film is best compared with Fred Schepisi’s A Cry in the Dark – the story of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, accused of killing their baby daughter Azaria at Uluru in 1980. Another relentless real life miscarriage of justice that made audiences finally look at the awful truth via nothing more complex than a recreation of the salient facts.
These stories cannot be assimilated in a two-hour cinema experience. They are in our minds before we buy our tickets and they linger long after our popcorn is finished. They are bigger than whether we like the movie or not.
The cause for hope is that the Chamberlain’s complete exoneration was due, in part, to writers and artists adapting their story and exploring it in multiple forms, just as Alan Turing’s WWII service was rediscovered by writers and artists long before the British establishment posthumously overturned his gross indecency conviction.
A Writer interviews George Georgiadis, refugee advocate.
THE Australian twittersphere freaked out when refugee advocate @VanessaPowell25 was threatened with legal action by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) in April, 2014.
Unless she removed a post on her Facebook, which documented one moment at a protest outside the Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, the DIBP would “consider our options further”.
“What else are detention centres, if not concentration camps?”
Public servants tweeted about looming changes in policy on the use of social media for political critique, and warned the Abbott government’s $4.3 million in contracts for research companies to trawl the social media, ostensibly to seek “perceptions”, was actually the force behind ‘dob in a mate’.
Talk of tweet deleting did the rounds. Powell removed the post, and her Twitter following tripled to over 800 across the weekend.
Like a few other journalists, I picked over the traces to find the facts, because a comment on Powell’s post by another refugee advocate, George Georgiadis, was the underlying focus of the DIBP.
So I took a gamble and friended him on Facebook. A few weeks later, George replied.
Turns out the man who posted the “offensive” comment was continuing to do what he has done for the past five years, visiting detainees at Villawood twice every week in between his shifts as a mental health nurse.
Yes, George Georgiadis is a public servant, and in the midst of the social media storm, he dobbed himself in on Facebook. This week, I became his 18th Twitter follower.
He didn’t want to talk about ‘that comment’ because, George said, it’s “bleeding obvious” he’s under surveillance, and this issue is not about him, it’s about the men, women and children incarcerated in Australia’s detention centres.
Listen-up slacktivists, we have a lot to learn.
POLITICAL PRISONER A child behind Australian wire (Photo: Asylum Seeker Resource Centre)
I started by asking George if five years of visits to Villawood had allowed him to witness any change in governmental approaches to mandatory detention.
“What do you mean by ‘a different government’?” George asked. “Both major parties are now almost indistinguishable, we simply have different politicians doing the same thing the previous politicians did”.
“Nor can it be claimed that one party is worse than the other in their cruelty toward asylum seekers. It was the Labor Party’s then Minister for Immigration, Gerry Hand, who introduced mandatory detention in 1992.
“It was the Labor government which reopened the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres. It was the Howard government which worsened conditions for people in detention, however, they also removed children from detention, but it was the subsequent Labor government under Julia Gillard which placed children back into detention,” he said.
“Things have been getting worse, but it’s not because one party’s policies are worse than the other, but rather because we as a nation have become worse.”
In 2011, George Georgiadis appeared in Detention Centre, an SBS interactive documentary in which his barely concealed emotion for asylum seekers’ plight illustrates the passion behind his words.
“I stated that we as a nation had lost our compassion. Now it’s worse, we have lost our empathy by dehumanising asylum seekers in the media, breaking their spirits, returning them to where they have fled from,” George said this week.
“I mean, for God’s sake, we are now trying to send Syrians back to the horrors of Syria! Children born in detention are being kept in detention! People Australia recognises as refugees have been held in detention for five years and will continue to be held indefinitely.
“There are over a thousand children being held in detention centres, pregnant women and newborns are being sent to detention on remote islands lacking facilities. How is any of this acceptable to people who supposedly pride themselves on living in the land of ‘a fair go’?
“You can’t just continually blame the government in a democracy. The Australian peoples’ hands are not clean in this either,” he said.
Touché.
“A concentration camp is ‘a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents’, etcetera,” George said. “That is precisely what detention centres are”.
“They are not ‘processing centres’, because there are asylum seekers being held in indefinite detention because they are ‘Stateless Persons’. What ‘process’ can they go through other than being granted a nationality?
“They are not ‘processing centres’ because there is no ‘process’,” he said. “Since Manus Island was re-opened, not one asylum claim has been processed, not one”.
“This is not ‘administrative’ detention as is claimed in order to justify its indefinite nature, it is quite obviously punitive detention, and worse, it is the punishment of innocent people seeking refuge in Australia with the aim of deterring other innocent people from seeking refuge here,” George said.
“They are being punished for not only their own innocence, but the innocence of others.
“This nation has gone mad, and is completely insightless about its madness. People who have broken no law are indefinitely locked up in detention, they are dehumanised, cut off from society, denied freedom, denied access to legal assistance or trial, they are killing themselves, cutting themselves, hanging themselves and now they are being murdered.
“What else are detention centres, if not concentration camps?”
Why does George believe successive Liberal and Labor governments have sanctioned this treatment of people?
“It’s simple,” he said. “It’s scapegoating. There is a brilliant story by Ursula K. Le Guin entitled The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas which describes a ‘utopia’, a city in which everything is idyllic and whose inhabitants are intelligent and cultured. But the happiness of Omelas depends on one thing: a single, unfortunate child must be kept imprisoned in filth and darkness and must not be shown any kindness”.
“If any kindness were to be shown to the child, the peace and prosperity and happiness of Omelas would end. Each citizen of Omelas learns of the existence of this child at their coming of age. Most are shocked and horrified at first, but soon learn to accept the child’s fate.
“A few, however, choose not to accept, and they walk away from the ‘bliss’ of Omelas which they realise is, in reality, a dystopia because of the abused child.
“This is much like what is happening now in Australia,” George said.
“If you want people to vote you into power, the easiest way is to create an imaginary enemy for people to fear and then promise to protect them from the bogey man.
“‘Border Protection’ sounds impressive until you realise we live in a nation which has no borders with any other country, yet now has a government department responsible for protecting those imaginary borders. It’s advertising hype to buy votes, nothing more.
Five years of visiting asylum seekers has given Georgiadis a deep awareness of detention experiences. How has this impacted on him?
“I was actually scared about what I was getting myself in to, and that fear, in some ways, has proved to be justified,” George said. “When I saw for myself what was happening to fellow human beings, I couldn’t go back to not seeing it. My life has changed dramatically as a result, and I’m glad it has”.
“The despair of the situation, the hopelessness, the apparent indifference of the majority of Australians to their plight, not knowing the reason why you are imprisoned and having no redress, the years of young lives wasted away, being separated from contact with family and friends,” he said of what he has seen as a visitor to Villawood.
“I have to be very careful here because there is a genuine fear that cases which are discussed in the media are unofficially punished with adverse assessments. This climate of fear has, in my opinion, been deliberately created to prevent cases coming to light which show the cruelty and inhumanity of the system.
“It is not safe to do so now, perhaps in years to come when the concentration camps are closed, individual cases will be able to be openly discussed.”
What can ‘average’ Australians do to help asylum seekers?
“They need to stop being average. Average people are the most destructive to the world in my experience,” George said. “The average Australian couldn’t care less about our inhuman treatment of asylum seekers”.
“If we think of it as a bell curve, about 20 per cent of the population care about what is happening and want the inhumanity to end. On the other end of the curve, another 20 per cent hide their racism and bigotry under the guise of ‘Border Protection’ and ‘saving lives at sea’.
“The middle 60 per cent – the ‘average Australians’ – try to reassure themselves that their silence on the issue is neither condoning nor condemning,” he said.
“Asylum seekers have become political footballs and have been demonised in this nation, and this dehumanisation has allowed us to lock them in prison indefinitely – even children and newborns – without charge or trial.
“To remain silent in the face of this is like remaining silent when you see a child being molested. There is now no ‘morally neutral ground’ on the issue of the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia,” George said.
“Ultimately, each person has to decide for themselves whether or not to ‘walk away from Omelas’, but I recommend making the decision that you will wish you had made when looking back on your life on your deathbed, and once you make that decision, act on it.”
For those who act, is there a way to gauge the impact of their actions?
“What makes a difference to the issue of our treatment of asylum seekers are the peaceful protests around Australia, the candlelight vigil for Reza Barati (the asylum seeker killed during a riot on Manus Island) which drew 15,000 and the Palm Sunday rallies around Australia which drew more thousands,” George said.
“Trying to stop the buses from taking handcuffed asylum seekers to remote detention centres is an act of love by a friend for a friend, but angry violent protests will never achieve anything in my opinion.”
It was George Georgiadis’ comment on Vanessa Powell’s public image of a bus intended for detainee transport from Villawood to Curtin, Western Australia, which drew the attention of the DIBP. I asked George if he recalled his comment before it was deleted.
“Actually, no, I can’t, but if you read the three DIBP’s tweets, they differentiate between the comment and the post, and insist that the whole post, not just the comment, be removed.
“The post was a photo of the back of a private coach being used to transport handcuffed detainees and the name of the bus company and their contact details were on the back.”
How did it feel to be singled out in this way?
“Laughable. If the aim was to have the post removed, why on earth would you make a public tweet about it to draw attention to it instead of sending a private message? If this is a result of the $4.3 million taxpayer dollars spent on social media research, I’d be asking for my money back,” he said.
“It’s ironic that for a department which insists on keeping the public in the dark about operational matters, it has managed to publicly disclose the names and identifying information about detainees in its care and also publicly draw attention to a post they supposedly wanted removed.”
George cites a Sydney Morning Heraldreport on the Abbott government’s contracts for social media analysis about border protection as the reason his comment came to the DIBP’s attention.
When asked about whether being a public servant should prevent him from commenting on government policy, George Georgiadis simply said:
“Yes I am a public servant. I was always under the impression that, in a democracy, a public servant serves the public and that the government is supposed to do the same.”
Michael Burge Media 