AVERIL ROBERTSON

I have been working on a short story for a competition. The idea came from a hilarious conversation at the craft group I attend (cross-stitch and knitting for me, thanks for asking). I set up my competition folder in my Google Drive, created a new Google Doc, then started to type. I thought I was writing a comedy. A farce, poking fun at how modern technology has actually, in some ways, made our lives more difficult. 

The story had other ideas. It quickly turned on me, steering me repeatedly towards a far more serious story, with characters having a far more difficult time than I had intended for them to have. I politely asked it to return back to the plan; it refused. I tried starting again; the original nagged at me for attention. So in the end, I wrote the story that wanted to come out.

Why did this happen to my story? The premise started as a joke – a bunch of crafting (note: not crafty) women having a giggle – but that coincided with women’s safety suddenly becoming a media focus after too many horrible events for women at the hands of men. Clearly these things were churning somewhere in my subconscious, pushing me to write a different story than I intended. Is this a bad thing? Probably not. Art – writing in this case – is at its heart an expression of society. If we live in a society where men hurt (physically and emotionally) and kill women so often, then that must surely come out in our art, in whatever form.

Patricia Karvelas wrote a hard-hitting column on the ABC about how violence by men against women should be treated: as acts of terror. Author Megan Rogers (The Heart is a Star – a phenomenal book about love, grief and trauma) shared this incredible Instagram post about the language used when we talk about men hurting women, and how that language must change. A raw and poignant cartoon from Cathy Wilcox was published in The Age. A significant and practical plea from men’s misogynistic violence expert Jess Hill appeared on The Guardian. The so-absurd-but-real-it-makes-you-cry man or bear test bombarded the internet.

Sometimes, the job of an artist – any kind of artist – is to take in, internalise, then re-express what is happening around them. Instead of fighting it, forcing the art you thought you were going to create to appear, you just need to let it happen. Perhaps what I ended up writing was not amazing work – the judges of the writing competition will figure that out. But if nothing else, it was a creative opportunity to process the appalling behaviour of men (yes, yes, I know, not all men, but enough of them that we can just say men – see the Megan Rogers Instagram post for more on that) in the way I needed to at that point in time. At other points, maybe we need to simply sit and cry. That’s processing it, too. So if you read a story, see a post, hear of something that gets your attention, and it keeps coming back and tapping you on the shoulder, listen to it. Feel it. Write it. You might surprise yourself.