Progress Report 1

From now on, I’m going to try to separate out my musings on the technical progress (or otherwise) of the book from other entries. If you, dear reader, are only interested in the experiment, you only need to read the entries flagged as Progress Reports. If you are more interested in pictures of Gothenburg and little anecdotes about the city, go for the other bits. OK?

Gress
There was a moment this week – a grey morning around 5 a.m. – when I wondered whether I would be able to call this a progress report. Gress there had been, but whether pro- or retro- (or in- or e-) I didn’t know. Later the same day, though, I completed the first draft of my first section, and started to feel better.

On Monday 17th, after having managed to get Blogger.com to work for me (more or less) and posted my first two blogs, I set out for town. First stop was a stationer’s to buy a notebook and a pen. Chatwin supposedly used a French notebook called ‘moleskine’. This is now produced in Italy. (Go to http://www.modoemodo.com/ and click on ‘history’ and ‘stories’.) I did look at them, but I didn’t like the soft covers, and the only hardbacks on sale were reporters’ notebooks and too small. At getting on for 150 Skr for one book, I also thought they were ridiculously expensive. Instead, I bought a locally produced hardback notebook (lined paper) for 29 Skr. (Ten Swedish kronor is worth about 1 Euro, 75 British pence or 1.30 US dollars.)

I also wanted a retractable ballpoint pen – a Bic or something similar – which I thought ought to be easy to find. No, no. All pens must be ‘jell’ pens nowadays. Horrible stuff. Blots almost as much as a fountain pen. A pencil then? Swedes seem to use propelling pencils for preference, but I don’t like them. I don’t like pencils. It probably has to do with age and habit (and bad eyesight). In the end I was able to find a ballpoint I was satisfied with, though it cost me more than my notebook (32 Skr). Worked fine for two days and then started to blot … Sigh. I should have gone with the jell pen and not kicked up such a fuss. But you know us artists :-)

Then I sat in a café and numbered the first 30 pages in the notebook. This is also something Chatwin is supposed to have done, but it’s not an affectation. It helps if you’re writing a lot and jotting down ideas of all sorts as they come to you. With numbered pages, you can produce a running index or list of contents and find your ideas again when you need them. It’s also a good way to overcome the moment of totally blank panic that overcomes you (well, me anyway) when you actually sit down to write something. No matter how much I think I have to write, an empty sheet of paper which I’m supposed to be filling with “deathless prose” can chase everything else out of my head as soon I sit down to it. (That “deathless prose” is Lawrence Durrell reported by his younger brother Gerald, by the way.) Numbering a few pages is a way to distract your mind for a moment in order to let the words start to come. It also helps if you want to calculate numbers of words written, which for this project, I do.

Jonathan Raban
Just so you know I don’t have a monomania about Bruce Chatwin, another of my role models is Jonathan Raban, author of Coasting. This is a perfect little book which manages – seemingly without effort – to combine travel with history and biography, and literary criticism with navigation, at the same time as it presents a many-faceted picture of Britain at the end of the 20th century. Here’s a reading tip! Read Coasting immediately before or after reading Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea. They were both written at the same time, they’re both based on a journey around Britain – Theroux walked clockwise around the coast, Raban sailed anti-clockwise – and they both describe meeting one another (in Brighton, my home town). The Theroux book is well-written, interesting and a lot of fun, but Raban’s book has all that and a depth of thought, a perspective which puts a completely different spin on the things he reports. Let’s face it, I’d be hard pressed to write as well as Theroux, but (apart from Chatwin) it’s Raban I’d like to measure myself against.

In one chapter of Coasting, Raban plays the tourist in London. I have decided to do the same here in Gothenburg – at least for a time. (For more on Raban, there seems to be a new Internet site devoted to him at http://www.jonathanraban.com/ – go look.)

Touristing
So, most of this week has been devoted to touristing – not a hard job exactly, though in the hot weather we’ve been having, not as easy as it might have been. My days have looked more or less like this: Mornings I sit and write on my laptop, working on the first draft of the book or reading in my various sources. Afternoons, I go into town and walk around, stopping off in cafés, parks and museums as the occasion presents itself. I’ve been working my way through two books: One on the stories behind some of the street sculpture in Gothenburg (Statyer berätter by Bengt Öhnander). The other is a brief presentation of some of the city’s listed buildings (K- – for Kultur – marked) called 100 utmärkta hus i Göteborg. I bought these at the Tourist Information office on Monday. Sometimes there’s something new, more often (I’m pleased to be able to say) they remind me of something I have heard before.

What I’m collecting as I tourist are: a) much of the diary entries (bits of which may appear in this blog, though not under this heading); and b) most of the photos (some of which will show up here, others of which will be the basis for illustrations in the book). My reading however is mostly to remind myself of Gothenburg’s history and track down the details of some of the more interesting stories.

Words
Well, well. I started writing this early on Sunday morning, and now we’re into the small hours of Monday, so let me wrap things up with a quick word tally. In the 7 days between Sunday 16th and Saturday 22nd I have written, by my count:
4000 words approx in the diary
2790 words in the first draft of the first section – this includes some quotation
1275 words in the two blogs published Mon 17th
1100 words in various texts which may turn out to be part of other sections of the draft.
9165 words total for the week
= c.1300 words/day for 7 days.
My target was 2000 words/day, so I’m falling short, but it’s still quite respectable. We'll see how it goes next week.

Göta Älv from Masthugget, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.