Goal setting and the rhetorical problem

Orford’s goal-setting process has three tiers similar to those described in Chapter Two: first, the content goals that provide the sense of purpose that drives her writing fiction and define her driving rhetorical problems, specifically those revolving around crime fiction. Her choices for main characters and settings also come under this heading. Next she has writing process goals, where she has a methodical approach that helps contain her writing within the boundaries of time and circumstance, and lastly she has her style goals, which influence everything from sentence structure to word choice, the use of imagery and the painstaking revision process that pares her writing down to the cleanly structured prose she finally presents to the world. In this way the goal setting process drives all the other processes

A separation of these goals is a mental construct for speaking about them in a way that might facilitate a clearer understanding of the process. It helps to recall that one of the tenets of Flower and Hayes’ cognitive process theory of writing is that any one of the thinking processes orchestrated during composing can be embedded within any other in a hierarchical organisation (1981: 366). An illustration could be that setting style goals is a thinking process embedded within the higher order process of setting goals for her writing overall, which could be described as expressing an emotional truth about violent crime against women and children in Southern Africa. She describes how she came to write crime fiction from her background as an

investigative journalist: ‘as a journalist you can only list the facts – information and statistics – you never get to that emotional truth – to show the intimate space between two people where one has power and one does not’ (Orford, 2009d). Fiction, and the novel in particular, is Orford’s choice of medium partly because it is able to fulfill this goal of telling an ‘emotional truth’, often through characters’ perspectives, words and actions as discussed further under generation of ideas.

This is reinforced by a description of the heroine, Clare Hart, by her lover in Orford’s second novel, Blood rose (2007: 12):

Putting the world to rights, that’s what her investigative work was about, her beliefs giving her the courage to go where there were no nets to catch her if she fell. It fitted with her profiling work, her conviction that she could find the source of evil and eliminate it.

There is a sense in her books that she is trying to get to an understanding of evil in society, without an idea that it can be easily eliminated, but perhaps with an encouragement to women and young people in particular to empower and protect themselves from it. In Like clockwork, the reader is presented with a racy thriller on the surface, but there is a lesson to be learnt from the frustration of police at the late reporting of missing children by their parents. While it never comes across as a moral tale, the girl who survives does so mainly because she is physically and

psychologically robust and her parents call the police immediately they suspect she is missing.

In Blood rose, Orford tackles the problem that it is hard for many people to make themselves care about missing teenage boys who live on the streets, admitting that she finds it hard to care for them herself. However, caring about the fate of the murdered youths in the Namibian town of Walvis Bay leads to the uncovering of a sinister plot linked to Apartheid times and we are reminded of both common humanity and the fact that crime, especially violent crime, in any society affects everyone. One cannot turn a blind eye because the victim is not someone one can easily relate to. Orford’s heroine helps to link the boys’ deaths to the dark past of officially sanctioned violence under Apartheid as well as in modern ‘corrupt, brutal states’ (Orford, 2008b).

Principally, her content goals are driven by a desire to comprehend ‘What drives people to torture, to kill? [She wants to] understand it, not just worry in the middle of the night’ (Orford in Pike, 2008). At the Words on Water festival (September 2009), she described her writing as her way of facing the tokoloshe under the bed, recounting how she came back to live in South Africa after a long time abroad and was terrified by the extent of the violent crime in the country, which she took personally.

Moving from content to writing process goals, Orford says she deliberately keeps the free writing process separate from the reviewing and editing process (1). This is because free writing is used for the critical creative process of generating ideas and needs to come from a different state of mind than reviewing and editing, which are more cerebral and require a critical eye for detail. This is supported by

Csikszentmihalyi’s research, where the creative process was shown to require creative generation and critical reviewing in different states of mind. These two aspects of her writing process are further discussed under the processes of ‘generating ideas’ which follows this section, and ‘evaluating and revising’ which appears further on in the chapter.

Harder to quantify are the innumerable goals implied by every aspect of the writing process she describes, especially as the three types of goals are so closely overlapping in practice. Orford maintains that when setting out on any writing task, it is essential to ‘formulate a question that will sustain your interest…and then to be able to formulate in your mind precisely and clearly how you’re going to tackle that’ (3), indicating both a writing process goal and a problem setting process that drive content goal setting. Furthermore, you need to ‘comprehend [what] you’re reading [and] make it your own…by absorbing it and thinking it through and then writing precisely and clearly’ (3), highlighting once again a writing process goal, followed this time by a style goal.

This setting of style goals in particular is evident later on when she says that a particular aim with fiction writing is ‘a precision of emotion. So you don’t want someone to be kind of annoyed or slightly pissed…. You want to know: are they irritated or are they in a murderous rage? … the more experience you get… the more you calibrate the emotion that you are describing’ (3).

This goal to be emotionally precise clearly links to her desire to tell ‘an emotional truth’ as discussed above. She describes how she aims for her style ‘to be as spare and precise as possible’ (12). This appears to be based on her admiration for other writers with this style, such as her early mentor, J.M. Coetzee, and her experience of teaching at the University of Namibia, which she describes as leading to an epiphany that ‘You can present complex ideas to intelligent people and they won’t be uncomfortable’ and the realization that ‘writing “popular fiction” deflates that whole ivory tower thing where language hides what I’m really thinking’ (Orford in Dennill, 2008).

When asked about the importance of a love of language to writing, she says she loves ‘concrete language where you make the experience of …the senses visible in words’ (23) but while she loves imagery she does not like ‘flowery language’ (23). For this reason, she tries to write so that she can get to a single detail that would make a reader picture the whole thing it represents and discussed the example of the image she was exploring in her poem about Daddy’s girl:

the invisible sound of black hair tumbling

over a child’s plump cheek.

For her this image ‘is something that would move a parent so much. It’s just the little detail of her’ (23). She engages here in a search for ‘imagery that will distil that essence of what makes you respond to a child’ (23). It is this element that ‘[makes] literature come alive’ (24).

She uses the alchemic word ‘distil’ many times in her descriptions of her writing process, so this forms a secondary metaphor after the principle metaphor of

navigation and exploration. One describes her mapping out of character and plot, the other her transformation of this material in her choice of words and sentence

construction, as if she has a macro and a micro process going on, sometimes simultaneously, on different levels of detail and concentration.

Another goal in this distillation process is ‘learning to understand people and learning to merge what people say and my knowledge of context together so you don’t hear me showing off what I’d found out about gangs or whatever: a person would emerge who you could relate to’ (3). The authenticity of characters is very important to her. She elaborates on this while explaining her choice not to make her heroine, Clare Hart, a ‘kickboxing’ ‘superhero’ but rather someone with a more realistic range of

capabilities in keeping with her research on ‘what really goes on’ (11).

For her the most difficult thing to achieve ‘is to make the environment in which your characters move seem to have complete dissimilitude - they are just in [this

environment] and it must seem natural’ (14). This led, in part, to the generation of her particular characters in order to deal with the topics she set out to explore: ‘the only

people that did go anywhere were cops and journalists. …in the middle of Khayelitsha in a shebeen, if you say, ‘I’m a journalist doing a story,’ everyone will …accept that you’re there’ (14).

She appears to need a level of believability in order to allow the reader to enter into her story world, so this goal is linked to an anticipation of what a reader might need from a character. She makes this link to the reader when she says she tries to ‘write in that space where people, ordinary people who would just [do the same thing]…’ (21). Consequently, her goal is to help the reader identify with the characters and their choices and mistakes as ordinary human beings, rather than to create larger-than-life characters who are exciting to read about but difficult to relate to.

Places as well as people need to have life breathed into them if they are to draw the reader in, and Orford maintains that the audience she takes into consideration the most is her South African audience, despite her popularity overseas, because her work is to try ‘to find ways of reflecting South Africa’ (14). Thus both her goals for

characterisation and setting circle around a consideration of the needs of her perceived readers.

She sets style goals for her plot structure as well, centring on pace. For her most recent book, Daddy’s girl, she specifically wanted to create a three day plot which gives ‘the reader a feeling of unbearable “not being able to breathe”. Because this child is gone. … so I give the reader that feeling of a galloping train right from the start….there’s this controlled panic. And you try and function in that situation of panic’ (19).

Her writing process incorporates techniques to develop plot structure which are discussed in greater detail under the section on organizing.

A final goal that was singled out is to cover up autobiographical material so that the book does not show off her personal experiences. She states this as an oath as much as merely a goal: ‘I used to write a lot as a teenager and I swore that I wouldn’t write fiction until I didn’t need to write about myself’ (10). Naturally, however, much of her material is drawn from her life experiences, fierce beliefs and world view, and this leads into another aspect of Orford’s writing process, namely the generation of ideas.

3.2.2.2 Generating

Her initial idea for each new book centers on ‘an emotional interaction between two people’ ‘or ‘an ethical problem or interaction’ (1) that somehow lodges in her mind (1). New ideas are then generated, circling out from this kernel of an idea, through free-writing longhand in her notebooks. She keeps these notebooks with her all the time in case an unexpected idea emerges.

Her writing day follows a regular routine, getting her family out of the house in the morning, then going up to her writing desk in her studio to work from about eight a.m. till around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. She uses free writing (writing by hand everything that comes to mind regardless of what it is18) and says she

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This method is recommended by many creative writing manuals, so much so that it has become a truism that this is what one ought to do first (Cf. Cameron 1993 & 1996, Keats 1999, Haarhoff, 1998).

sometimes writes ‘I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do’ which helps her to ‘metamorphose into that parallel space of writing’ (6). She will ask questions of herself, in writing until ‘an answer comes and… it’s very, very, very exhausting sometimes when you’re in that creative phase. Often your best writing comes when you feel the worst’ (6).

In Orford’s writing life, there is no room for waiting for inspiration to strike, and if it ideas do not generate spontaneously, she has ways of stimulating the generation process. While she has not actually read any of Julia Cameron’s famous books19 she has heard of the technique Cameron (1996: 13) maintains is compulsory for all artists (including writers), which is called ‘morning pages’. These are three pages of writing which must be done by hand every morning. Cameron claims you can see them as either ‘brain drain’ or meditation and they are to be written without censorship of any kind, about ‘whatever comes into your head’ (Cameron, 1996: 13). The purpose of doing the pages is ‘process, not product’ (Cameron, 1996: 14, author’s emphasis) and they are not meant to be analysed or turned into art (1996:17). Orford describes how she uses them:

I find I just get all the top fluff off my brain…. I switch off my phone so I don’t have any email connection… and then I just sit and I work. It’s being a builder. You arrive on site and there is like cement, a pile of bricks and there’s no wall (6).

This analogy of construction crops up in Imraan Coovadia’s interview a month later and then in Van de Ruit’s: prosaic and practical. And yet it is this hands-on work of the builders who toil daily at their craft that allows the architects’ graceful, sky- challenging designs to be realised. Treating her daily writing as a job she has to turn up for on time may not sound very creative but creativity without this discipline seems less likely to happen.

An important point to remember at this stage is that the initial idea for her first book was independent of outside pressure. However, once Like clockwork had been published, her agent sold the book along with a package of synopses for future books by Orford. This means that the premise and plot outline for Blood rose (2007) and

Daddy’s girl (2009) were decided on long before the books were written (4). This is how one book is being written while another one may already be quite far down its conceptual development (1) in her notebooks. Moreover, her books are linked to one another by plot lines and by their central characters, so generating ideas for one book impacts on the others in the series and it is probably not possible to entirely untangle and separate out the ideas generation process for each book in Orford’s case. For that matter, a lot of the material in her books seems to derive directly from some of her experiences in investigative journalism and documentary film making. However, even these sources of ideas can be traced to the author’s own core concerns as a woman, a mother, and a scholar as described under content goals above. This echoes Murray’s contention that his ideas for a piece of writing could probably be traced back to years of thought on a topic and Csikszentmihalyi’s assertion that ideas that emerge for a creative project tend to have been through a preparation phase in the mind first and this could involve what Flower and Hayes referred to as the long term memory.

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Character drives plot according to Orford and it is choice of character that permits her to write about particular issues in away that fulfils her goal of conveying an emotional truth in a way that that readers can relate to. Orford described the creation of the heroine of her series, Dr Clare Hart, as a spontaneous occurrence: ‘Clare was born like Athena, fully clad…a very painful birth, I can tell you that much! I thought, “Who is this woman who has just popped into my psyche – who is this very vulnerable human being with a damaged psyche and this hard shell?”’(Orford, 2009d).

It can be argued that this Aha! moment of a woman popping into her psyche ‘fully clad’ stems from Orford’s interest in female sexuality and violence against women, fueled by her work in investigative journalism. Moreover, she discusses novelist Milan Kundera’s inspirational use of sexuality and the ‘space of the erotic’ as a space that can be defended as a defiance against violence in a troubled society like the Czech Republic under Soviet rule (12). She draws on this when generating her own erotic scenes in which her heroine, forensic profiler Clare Hart, is able to move from horrific images of mutilated corpses and an abusive, exploitative sex industry to a healthy sex life of her own. She explains this as a goal she has, to help women in a particularly sexually violent society like South Africa reclaim personal power through reclaiming their sexuality:

I’m a patron of Rape Crisis and I was trying to …quantify what the loss of sexual desire and how many orgasms a woman will not have after sex… and all that delight that has no quantifiable monetary value…. If you can maintain that or get that back then you’ve pushed that thing to the edges , so it’s a way of saying that you will keep that little domain of pleasure and freedom for yourself (12).

She describes having aspired to achieve the same truth as Kundera in her own writing about ‘how people interact’ especially in sexual relationships. She ascribes his talent for erotic writing to ‘detachment’ and his ‘almost [forensic]’ style in showing the erotic as a compulsion or desire between two people rather than just in being naked. She also loved his writing as a reaction to the ‘flattening of power’ that happened under Soviet rule, where the erotic ‘was the last space of privacy…that couldn’t be controlled.’ Thus for Orford, writing about the erotic in a society like South Africa, with endemic violence against women, becomes a rebellious act like Kundera’s ‘[countering] the discipline of public violence’ (12).

Notwithstanding this common thread, each book’s inspiration and generation of ideas is in many ways a unique process. She had already written an investigative piece on the trafficking of women for the Cape Town sex industry for Marie Clare magazine before writing her first novel on this topic, Like clockwork. Her childhood was adventurous, as her family moved from place to place in Namibia, giving her an