( blogger doesn't seem to be allowing me to classify posts at the moment, but this one falls under the category of work towards the creative piece)

Have spent a lot of the last couple of weeks writing 2500 words on a trip to Queensland I did 20 years ago, and its aftermath, I thought seriously about using that as a basis for my main creative piece. But it's been submitted to the magazine I wrote it for and I don't feel as if it would help to rework it.

Still, the topic of the magazine - Hidden Queensland - and the nature of the piece, which explored the undercurrent of hippy/Queensland influences in my otherwise pretty middle-class Melbourne life - has made up my mind to work on the unremembered-past piece, out of the three I've been considering. It does risk being solipsistic but (in reference to the quality of the writing in the Garner book and in the Didion), I think as long as I keep trying to turn the individual events outwards to more general themes it might be OK.

Someone referred yesterday to the Age A2 piece on 20/4 about the Italian broadcaster who has written a biography despite having no interesting dark secrets - this is the question that arises if you don't have any unusual drama in your life - why write about it? To do so is basically saying that I am "clever" enough (in the Kate Holden sense?) to make what I'm writing worthwhile for itself.

The easier option would be to go for the dramatic moments - the car crash, cancer, moments of great danger - but the thing is that over the course of a life, pretty much everyone has those moments too. It's all about interpretation.

Next step: to dig up that box of letters and read for a bit.