August 16th, 2010
Over the last few days I attended a writer’s conference interstate. The taxi driver who drove me to the airport yesterday afternoon asked me what I’d been up to. I told him and he shyly confessed to me that he was writing a book. He was tertiary educated, presented as very intelligent, outlined the story he was writing but revealed that he could not overcome his own fears regarding his ability as a writer and was stuck gathering research material for the book rather than writing, editing and submitting. I’d hazard a guess and say that his manuscript probably had much to recommend it. The story certainly appealed to me – a family saga starting in Poland and moving to Australia. But he couldn’t get over his fears and thus was unable to complete the book and move on to the submission stage.
I understood immediately what he was feeling. I know several sensitive and wildly talented writers and artists who do not have the inner resources (or external support) to overcome these crippling anxieties. Their work remains undone or obscured by those who can cope with the emotional demands of creative work. A great pity.
I understood what he was telling me because I’ve felt those fears as well. I’m toughening up every day, but when you are starting out as a writer the self censoring, the constant self doubt and worry that you are just wasting your time and will be humiliated if you show someone your work can be crippling. But you cannot move forward unless you let go of the fear. You cannot develop unless you open yourself up for constructive criticism, as my friend Pete Morin says in his blog. You cannot drag the same manuscript around for ten years, tinkering here and there but refusing to submit. Burn it or shred it or dig a hole in the garden and leave it there wrapped in plastic for a few years, but let it go and write something else.
Or stop writing and do other things. Draw a line under that part of your life and move on, because hanging around when the magic has gone is a living death.
The decision to move onto something else is not an easy one, but nor does it signify failure. You have to ask yourself do I want to do this – with all the attendant agony, or do I not. Because if you do, you must find ways of dealing with the angst so it doesn’t hold you back. If you don’t want or need that pain in your life, let it go. Walk away and find a more soothing and rewarding occupation.
I walked away from the stress of the art world – and if you fear public humiliation and exposure as a talentless wannabee do not venture into that world - into a private world of growing vegetables and cooking. I got very good at the cooking; I made all sorts of Italian preserves, pasta, gelato, and foods from all around the Mediterranean – French, Lebanese, Spanish. I read their cultural histories and the history of food and ingredients, I grew heritage seedlings, scoured seed catalogues, haunted growers markets and French cheese shops, and it was a very soothing and creative period in my life. Constantly praised for my cooking skills, no one ever said ‘re do that bit’ or ‘cut that chapter’ or rejected what I offered. When I felt it wasn’t enough anymore, I decided to try writing. Now I just throw meals together because I’m consumed with what I do now. It’s probably the antitheses of the speedy modern life but that fallow period of almost ten years was vital to my journey back to public creative work.
I need the intensity and challenge of a creative mountain to climb. If I don’t have it I build that mountain in my head, and as anybody knows, it’s painful having a mountain inside a human skull. If I could walk away from it all and be happy I would, but I know it’s not possible for me. It is for some others and sometimes walking away is the healthiest thing to do.
So my taxi driving friend, what do you think?
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: creativity, Food, madness, writing | 8 Comments
August 3rd, 2010
I’m a stony eyed killer.
I’m your go-to gal when you want to kill off your darlings. I kill my own without any feeling of remorse. I highlight them, they startle in the sudden shock of light, knowing what’s coming is no pleasant cut and paste to a new context. I press delete. I feel nothing except a frisson of satisfaction in the job. I take a swig of coffee and keep moving.
I wasn’t always like this. My darlings were precious and I indulged them whenever I could, but it proved to be an unhealthy attachment, a toxic dependency that could only bring me down.
I had thirty thousand of them, the start of the sequel to The Book of Love, which I wrote in 2008 as I was still under the spell of my characters and could not let them go. I had to be with them, so I started a sequel, little knowing that one day a big publishing house would say, ‘do you have a sequel?’ Of course, I chirruped, not realising the full and fatal implication of that simple affirmative.
I had started a sequel so finishing it should be easy. What foolishness, what utter inexperienced naivety, what lazy self deception. I struggled to shoehorn those thirty thousand beautiful words into a sequel. I … had … to … use … them …*panting noises*
I learned, through flagellating myself with these words day in and day out that it had been a bad creative decision. Two years before I had been in a different place as a writer and words written then, no matter how beautiful or funny, simply were not working. As I and my manuscript slowly steamed toward the iceberg, my publisher had the presence of mind to alert me. A pit was dug, the words assembled, the delete button was pressed. After that moment, killing a paragraph here a sentence there arouses nothing in me other than pride that I can be so ruthless.
As the editing of the sequel comes to a close and the sun sets on the smoking delete button, I look around for my next project and dig up a manuscript written in 2006. I start work, I get frustrated, I can’t get it to work, my mojo has not awakened, what is going on?
Done it again, haven’t you? How much pain do I have to go through before I learn to let go?
So I extracted the characters and will build them a new world. And I killed the rest.
I killed them and it was good.
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: imagination, madness, writing | 6 Comments
July 23rd, 2010
I am learning to type and click with my left hand as my right arm - despite the numerous potions and unguents massaged into this feeble overused limb - still hurts. But it’s the time of year, in the great circle of publishing, when manuscripts are returned to the humble scribbler for structural re-fits and while I can rise to this task, I can’t blog. I have posted a selection of reviews of The Book of Love, (on the Books and Reviews page) and a couple of interviews, (on the All About Me page) and will return to blogging when my arm recovers.
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: writing | No Comments
July 2nd, 2010
Dan Holloway is a contemporary writer who I truly admire. I read and re-read his work and I’m always left hungry for more. He possesses a phenomenal energy, intelligence and generosity of spirit and his commitment to independent publishing is matched by his actions in starting the Year Zero Collective and in publishing his own works through various independent publishing outlets.
We ‘met’ in the over heated world of writers online and are both members of the ethereal Grey Havens, a small, online, raggedy crew of writers with other lives in law, PR, journalism, child rearing, academia, writing and teaching.
Dan has recently released (life:) razorblades included and kindly agreed to talk about the work on my blog.
“My writing has been called bleak, dark, and bereft of joy and hope. The first two of these I will readily concede. The latter two, never. In a world where the default setting is vanilla, acceptance, expectation, normal; in a world where the tragic few who wrestle with life full-on and fail are condemned when it is not they who are too sick for the world, but the world too sick for them; in a world where the grey, suited swamp of the billion walking dead is revered; in this world, anyone or anything that celebrates the full, damaged, despairing, fucked-up and spectacular reality of life is a shriek, a shout, a holler of joy to pierce the eardrum of death.”
From the introduction to (life:) razorblades included.
Dan, you say your work has been called dark and bereft of joy and much of the work here is what you call ‘confessional art’, that is art where the author wears their heart on their sleeve, takes us into the darkest corners of their lives, writes the painful and the personal, and lays it bare and in our faces.’
How is Skin Book ‘confessional art’ if you are writing from a fictional character’s point of view? If it is fiction, then how do you see it as confessional?
For me confessional art is simply taking what is in your head and externalising it in the way that makes the very best sense. I don’t think questions of autobiography or “veracity” need come into it at all (although of course much confessional art IS autobiographical, like Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Every Slept With 1963-1995). As writers we happily accept that the “truest” way to convey something may be a metaphor, or a myth, and that’s how I see confessional art - it’s simply choosing the vehicle that is the very most appropriate one for whatever you are trying to scrape out of your head and onto the page. What’s particularly important for me is that an author never loses fidelity to the absolute relativism of truth (paradox intended). The moment we try to convey to a reader something that is true to them we are lost in the world of the impossible, in generalisation, in things beyond our reach. It’s only the absolute specificity of what’s inside us that we can hope (possibly without real expectation of success) to convey. And, ironically, it’s in that specificity that our only real chance of reaching out to other individuals lies.
To come back to the fictional character’s point of view - I think we need to separate out point of view from circumstance. I’m not a 17 year-old lesbian growing up in Hungary, never have been, and possibly never will be. Nor am I a 30-something woman who killed her abusive twin and flayed him to make a journal from his skin. The details of their lives are not the details of mine. But their point of view is mine. As a writer it’s my job to create the details that can best house and display that point of view, that best give it the grist to play out the questions that form the incessant noise in my head. The fiction is in the detail. The truth is in how characters deal with those details. I think art probably has to have both. Art fails when the truth is in the detail and the fiction is in the point of view (which is why autobiography is no more confessional than a novel); or when there is fiction in both - not because I don’t like escapism - I do - but because there is, I think, something inherently dishonest in pretending that we can create a point of view outside of our own.
What process does your writing undergo from first impulse through to the beautiful crafting?.
It really varies a huge amount from piece to piece. My stories always start with a picture of a character. I tend to follow them around, and watch what happens, and then the story comes out pretty much fully-formed. At that stage I’ll edit and edit to cut it down.
Most of the time I edit for sound if that makes sense - as a reader I sound out what I’m reading in my head (that sounds really daft, but I used to do competitive speed reading, and apparently, we sub vocalise at up to 1500 words a minute, which is about 4 times as fast as the usual reading speed, so it really is something for writers to think about), so as a writer what really bothers me is how the sentences sound. I want the cadence to be exactly right, and the rhythms to work – even if sometimes that means my punctuation’s wonky, or I say “s/he said” too much.
For poetry, it tends to be the other way round. I start with a skeleton and work up, building sentences in. I have a very bad habit of writing lines that are hard to resolve (going back to the sound thing – it’s really old fashioned, I know, but I like my sentences to “resolve” the way a musical phrase will resolve), so I often run on and on and that needs to be edited really toughly otherwise it’s impossible to perform the poems. I do a lot of live readings, and whilst my breathing technique is OK, I don’t want to set myself an impossible task!
Simon Beckett said artist’s need to find ‘a form that accommodates the mess.’ I read on your blog that Skin Book was meant to be a Flash Novel not a poem. You were emphatic that it was not a poem and yet it reads as a verse narrative. Why was the form so important?
I was a teenager in the 80s and a student in the 90s so I grew up with Young British Art and the whole text thing, which has left a lasting mark on me in terms of how I present things
I’ve read a lot of collections of work recently for review purposes, and by and largely I’ve been hugely disappointed in them because they’ve been just that – collections. For me a collection should give you something more than you’d get by reading the pieces separately. The way they’re placed should lead you through, should make you see things in each piece you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. In the case of razorblades, I want to take people on a long dark night of the soul and out the other end.
I was emphatic it wasn’t a poem because I still somehow feel I don’t “get” poetry, and I don’t think of myself as a poet. It’s like cooking – I love cooking anything savoury, especially coming up with sauces and reductions that take weeks because there are so many layers to them. But it’s all by feel. And I get really nervous around puddings, because there’s this aura around them that they’re exact, there are rules. I feel a bit the same with poetry. Poets do all these weird things with indented lines and placing stuff on the page and I feel like I don’t understand it, so I can’t really be a poet. And SKIN BOOK has the full structure of a novel – I’ve spent years railing against classical ideas of structure (I hate rules – like I say I always feel like I don’t “get” them) in novels, and I wanted to show I could actually write one if I tried – albeit one that’s only two and a half thousand words.
I find puddings intimidating as well. I’ve had to stare down quite a few.
Life can be a living hell for some people and I firmly believe there are worse fates than death. It takes an incredible act of will to embrace the life you speak of in the introduction. an you talk about the introduction and its importance in locating the following works?.
In terms of the actual content, I think there’s a lot of glibness about life. Choose life is a phrase that’s wheeled out again and again (especially that awful ending to Trainspotting), and that’s just such a cop out. What do people mean choose life? By and large when someone tells someone to “choose life” they see them walk out the door and give a big sigh of relief that the person’s off their conscience, and that really sucks as an attitude. Life is HARD.
Telling a suicidal person to choose life has consequences, and if you’re not prepared to see them through the consequences, and explain that choosing life is more difficult and more painful than choosing the opposite you should butt the hell out. I think there’s such a simplistic attitude to suicide and death, and life, and I wanted to challenge that. I wanted people to realise what they’re doing when they talk about choosing life. I find the idea that deciding to live means you’ll be happy ever after really offensive. “To live” means a lot of things. It’s fine to tell someone “to live” but that has consequences. Consequences that in some cases may be immoral and utterly unacceptable to the majority. But if you’re not prepared for that you should shut up. That’s why I ended with SKIN BOOK. It’s about two characters who are beyond acceptability. One character is a sex criminal, and the other killed and skinned her brother as a child. Together they’re happy. There’s no comeuppance or karma. They chose to live.
reading (poem)
cinched in the waist of a wholesome window
five streets from soho
ohso proper doorways
and strangers in sunhats with san miguels
and they’ve all got drinks and kisses
and they’ve all got slickety laughs
and they’ve all got smiles and cigarillos
and just enough friends
and just enough coke
and just the right words
and just the right names
and in streamers we tattoo the streetlamp black
and in velvet our tongues streak the glass
and we’re all strung out for the smell of piss
and all the beers are someone else’s
Dan Holloway
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: creativity, Dan Holloway, imagination, madness, writing | 9 Comments
May 30th, 2010
bring on the adverbs
I am painstakingly working my way through 90,000 words examining their arrangement on the page to see if I can achieve greater fluency, clearer descriptions, less cluttered dialogue and an elegant solution to every tiny problem I encounter.
That is my goal. I won’t achieve it. There’ll be clangers and clumsiness, excess and irrelevance and even a fair old swag of self-indulgence. But I’m slaughtering my darlings as cold bloodedly as I can. Having rewritten most of the book I’ve waded through a veritable Thermopylae of blood, and I’ll keep up the slaughter as long as I have to.
The perfect text will always hover out of my reach, but at least I’m trying.
I’m always astonished at how some writers don’t do this. I’m thinking of a piece I read recently, posted in the public domain, by an unpublished writer as an example of his writing skills – not an informal communication, or even a blog post. Numerous spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes and clumsy expression pointed to little time spent polishing, cutting, polishing and cutting again and again.
The competition for readers is intense; the competition for publishers is three times as intense. I know typos slip through, apostrophes can be wild and faithless creatures and trained proof readers can miss errors. But if every line is plagued with such mistakes it signifies either a sloppy, unprofessional approach or an eagerness to get the piece out before it’s ready. Either way, it’s not good.
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: editing, reading, writing | 3 Comments
May 12th, 2010
A few years ago, when I decide to write, I read an article on obstacles in romantic fiction. The author of the article stated that the writer must find an obstacle that will keep the lovers apart and fuel their desire. This obstacle could not be anything that could be cleared up by a good talk between the couple.
I remember thinking that most of the time obstacles in romantic relationships usually stem from not talking to one another. Lovers can avoid talking for many reasons – the assumption that the desired one should be a mind reader, or will judge the other harshly or probe for weaknesses. Or perhaps the lover doesn’t have the language to describe their feelings or would rather escape into a bottle or work or television instead of talking it out.
I‘ve been giving some thought to my male protagonist, trying to work out why he’s taking the stance that he is – which is basically not talking and subsequently letting his perceptions of his love relationship become wildly distorted. I look back over his life, (I know this guy pretty well by now), and see control has been a big issue for him and that he’s a linear problem solver who likes to act. When faced with a crisis he cannot solve, both in his work and relationship, what does he do?
He has a few drinks – that’s a given. He tells his closest male friend nearly everything, keeping the relationship stuff mostly to himself. He’s not going to go to see his girl and say ‘we need to talk’ because what if he did that, told her he’d never stopped loving her, but finds out that she has stopped loving him? Too painful, too humiliating, not doing it. Instead he’s going to do a Clint Eastwood and ride off into the sunset because his own heart scares him more than all the guns and outlaws out in that there wilderness.
What does she do? Tells her closest friend, has a cry, eats chocolate and examines his every word from the last six months for any hidden meaning she may have missed. Does she go and see him and say ‘we need to talk?’ No she does not. Because she’s angry and he’s a selfish pig and can come to her for a change.
A good talk might have saved all the agony, but nobody is willing to put his or her cards down first. Not talking, for a host of reasons, is the classic obstacle for couples. Particularly now when divorce, religion, and social pressures don’t provide the external obstacles they once did.
Sebastian Faulks says in the introduction to his short biographical book, The Fatal Englishman, that when writing about real people he resisted the urge ‘towards unity that finds it’s best expression in fiction, when the events can be shaped and patterned to echo the themes, while characters can be made, within the limits of their realistic capacities, to behave in a way that adds further harmony.’ He continues by saying ‘The lives of real people, unlike those of fictional characters, seem to exert a small but constant outward force away from order.’
In real life then, my two characters, both too stubborn or fearful to sort it out probably move onto the next partner and do it all again, until there is no happy ending, just regrets, and eventually compromise and maybe a hint of wistfulness.
But, lucky for them, it’s not real and I’m looking for harmony and thematic unity. So my man stops on his way to the sunset and says to himself, ‘Hmm, I sure do miss her. Maybe she’s worth the risk. I’ll go back and see if we can talk it through.’ And my woman thinks, ‘I don’t mind doing all the emotional heavy lifting – as usual – I’ll go and find him and tell him how I feel so he’ll feel safe with me, and then we can talk.’
Most couples avoid having a ‘good talk’ until they are dragged in front of a counsellor or so much is at stake they can no longer avoid it. And I consider this to be an excellent obstacle. Not as exciting as the king forbidding such a union, or being separated by war and never losing hope, or even battling social prejudice to be together. Not talking is realistic, it comes from within the characters and therefore is within their capacity to deal with it, and thus allows for a vast landscape of psychosocial hills and gully’s for the novelist to explore.
Sebastian Faulks, The Fatal Englishman, Vintage, 1997
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: desire, love, reading, writing | No Comments
May 3rd, 2010
April was a hell of a month for me. Rewriting a manuscript while promoting another book has been draining. I’ve been scribbling in notebooks on planes, trains, hotel rooms, cafes, beds as well as experiencing reviews of the book for the first time, doing interviews, readings, a couple of launches and book signings, keeping the house going - sort of - and wrestling with this new world of the published author and all it’s internal and external crises.
I’ve enjoyed most of the publicity work, particularly the radio interviews and meeting booksellers at various bookshops. Aspiring writers could do no better than to go and have a chat with the managers of these bookshops to get a good feel for what people buy and why. I suspect booksellers are overlooked as a resource for unpublished writers because, apart from being busy, they don’t have a hotline to the givers of contracts. But I’ve learned so much from having a chat to both managers and staff and from looking at every detail of how books are presented to buyers in these shops.
You can look at the Nielsen Top Ten best sellers and think you’ve done your research on what readers are buying, but until you go to the coalface, you haven’t really. I’m looking forward to doing more and to having a few days break while the rewrites sit and ferment.
Related posts
Categories: on reading, on writing |
Tags: books, publicity, publishing, reading, writing | No Comments
April 15th, 2010
I haven’t posted for a while, not because nothing has happened, but because too much is happening and finding time to post has been difficult.
The Book of Love is in the shops, it’s been launched, reviewed; I’ve been interviewed and will be re launching in Brisbane at Avid Reader bookshop next Wednesday night.
It’s quite a feeling to see your own book in the shops. To have a copy of my book in my hand while in the cosy chaos of my study is one thing, but to see it on the shelves in a bookshop with thousands of other books all jostling for attention is a humbling moment. The competition for readers is ferocious and underlines, for me, just why getting a book published is so hard. Because it has to be better than good, it has to hold its own on those shelves. It is imperative to find out what is out there and where your book lies in relation to its competitors. This may sound very cold blooded and commercial to some writers, but book publishing is a commercial business.
As a consequence of being published, assumptions have been made, by some of those who are unpublished, that I know what I’m doing and have discovered a formula that just needs to reproduced to ensure the miraculous appearance of a contract.
Not so, my friends.
My path to publication is specific to me, others must find their own way. The Internet abounds with sites for writers, some with brilliant advice and others not so shiny. You have to sift through it, talk to other writers, get a feel for what people like to read – as opposed to what you like to write.
There is no easy way, no shortcuts and no magic formula. It’s bloody hard work, and you need a good dose of luck and a massive dose of stamina – both physical and mental to deal with not only the writing, but also the marketing and promotion and the other demands that unexpectedly appear.
I deal with it by burrowing back into my stories and leaving all the rest on the other side of my study door.
Related posts
Categories: on writing |
Tags: marketing, publicity, publishing, writing | 2 Comments
March 27th, 2010
I’m currently engaged in the rewriting of a manuscript. That sentence sits lightly on the screen, but it’s weighted with a load of emotional and intellectual boulders.
After the initial ‘oh dear’ moment when you’ve been given the feedback and you realise it’s all hopeless and you should never have tried writing and may as well give up now before you become a tragic figure of fun whose attempts at a career become a byword around the publishing houses for acute and pathetic failure – after that moment, is a glorious rebound. Yes! That’s why it wasn’t working! Where’s my manuscript, let me at it!
All sorts of possibilities suddenly become possible and you feel refreshed and can see the way forward. That’s if you can distance yourself from your work. Very important that you do this. You, the writer, are not your book or manuscript and you cannot take sincere, constructive criticism as a personal attack. You want the best for your book, you want it to stand on it’s own two legs and march into that publishers office and have them gasp with delight – and you won’t get that being precious.
In a previous incarnation I taught drawing and painting to first year art students. Invariably a student would get to a point in the painting where they would go no further, because up until then, they had never produced anything as good. My job was to gently encourage them to go further, to take a risk and see if it could get even better. Some students wouldn’t budge. I can understand their point of view, but I’d always come back with ‘You’ve done it once, you can do it again. You didn’t fluke it, you worked for it. You can maybe never reproduce that particular painting again but the ability to get to that standard is there.’
It wasn’t the finished product so much, but the ability to let go and be fearless - to be able to see where it wasn’t working, not collapse in a heap and catastrophise, but to re-think and re-work the weaker areas. It’s not an easy thing to do. Creative work isn’t easy, it’s bloody hard, and it might be easier to take up crochet or canoe building, but would the same challenges be there?
With writing, as with painting, if you trust the individual giving the feedback and you can trust your own ability and instincts then re-working becomes a lot easier. Learning to collaborate is a vital part of creative work, although I must stress pick your collaborators carefully. And few writers are published without being thoroughly edited – structurally as well as line edits, both by professionals and test readers alike. The core of the work is yours, it’s your voice, your skills, your discipline and craft, but the bottom line is a book that is as good as it can be.
I’ve been asked to read and give feedback on people’s writing many times – not that I’m an expert, but it just seems to happen, like if you are a doctor at a party and someone wants to show you the bleeding lesion on their buttock or some other malady - and I’m always cautious about what I say. If I sense the writer is open to feedback then you – as giver of feedback – can both have a very intense and rewarding experience working together to improve the manuscript, always bearing in mind, of course, that it is their book. But if I sense the writer doesn’t want to hear anything but praise, I let it go. There’s no growth in praise alone.
Related posts
Categories: general, on writing |
Tags: creativity, writing | 4 Comments
March 21st, 2010
Helene Young has been writing for eleven years and her first novel, the adventure/romance Border Watch, has been published this month by Hachette Australia. I’m lucky to have Helene as a guest on my blog this week where she talks about her book, her writing and her work as a commercial pilot in North Queensland, Australia.
Helene, you work as a Check and Training Captain with a regional Australian airline and have been flying for twenty years. I’m quite awed by this and I’m curious to know what led you commercial flying.
The idea of something so heavy getting airborn fascinates me, and that fascination started when I was young. My dad had a brochure from the late 1920s for a Flying Flea, an aircraft he’d dreamed of building. From time to time he’d pull the pictures of this boxy little craft out and I’d pour over it with him, wide-eyed and awestruck. (One of these aircraft still hangs in the Brisbane Museum.)
We also spent a lot of time at Currumbin Beach and our house was under the flight path for Coolangatta airport. You could just about count the rivets in the wings as the aircraft roared in to land. A nightmare for residents now, but from a child’s perspective it was magical! The desire to fly simmered away until I was twenty-four. I still can’t quite believe I’m paid to have fun every day.
How have you found working in a male dominated industry?
Like most industries that have been the traditional preserve of men, the last few years has seen a major influx of women. In our Queensland operation, 9% of the pilot group are women. The vast majority of Cabin Crew are women, so on a fun day, there are four feisty females running the show! (Love the look on a tough mine worker’s face when he realises his life is safely in the hands of a couple of chicks.)
I’ve been privileged to have some wonderful mentors who tucked me under their wings and shared their knowledge - Gordo and Tubby get special mentions. I’m now heavily involved in Checking and Training and, while it is rarer to see another female in that role, I get to work with a fantastic team of men.
Why did you start to write, and for how long have you been writing?
I started writing with intent when we moved to Cairns for my airline job. We didn’t know anyone and I had more spare time than I knew what to do with, so I started tapping away at the keyboard. ‘This’ll be easy and a bit of fun,’ I thought. ‘I’ve always loved reading.’ As it turns out it was fun, but 11 years later it’s not been easy!
Your book, Border Watch, released by Hachette Australia in March, focuses on the flight surveillance operations on the endless Australian coastline, and features a feisty heroine, terrorists and a scene of Circular Quay being blown up, (a scene I can’t wait to read). Tell me how the idea for Border Watch developed.
I only threaten to blow up Circular Quay, Phillipa, LOL! Though every time I go through the train station I look up and wonder…
Three key events came together to create Border Watch. In 2000 a boat full of asylum seekers made its way from Indonesia, around Cape York, inside the Great Barrier Reef, past Port Douglas, and came ashore at Holloways Beach, about 5 kms from Cairns CBD. They tried to phone a taxi, but the driver became suspicious and called the police. That’s when the authorities noticed the rusting red boat resting on the sand. The next event was finding a body washed up on my local beach. That tragedy took a while to distil into something I could write about. The final thing was an influx into the airline of pilots who had flown for Coast Watch, the real surveillance operation that protects our coastline. Their stories were fascinating. They’d witnessed all manner of border incursions during their time with the operation, from asylum seekers, to pirates and drug smugglers. All good fodder for an overactive imagination!
You live in Cairns near the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, a very beautiful part of the world. Is developing a sense of place an important part of your writing?
Place is so important to me. I hope I’ve made the Australian landscape another character in Border Watch. The moods, the colours, the drama, make for a wonderful vibrant canvas. Most people won’t have the opportunity to see northern Australia from my perspective. I hope I can transport them there without them having to leave the comfort of their hammock or fireside armchair.
How do you find writing and piloting aircraft fitting in together? Obviously you’re not preoccupied with character dialogue while you’re bringing a plane into land, but you must meet many people who spark your imagination.
I won’t admit to having internal dialogues coming into land, Phillipa –might be too disconcerting for the travelling public! A girlfriend insists it’s fortunate I’m a Gemini… split personalities come in handy… There are days when I wonder myself how it fits together. In aviation, I’m checklist driven, numbers focused, analytical left-brain oriented. When I write I’m anything but analytical! The two roles need to stay very separate and perhaps the act of putting on a uniform helps to keep that distance.
I meet people who inspire me in the strangest places. Just last night a group of us were having dinner at a Thai restaurant close to the Sydney hotel. One of the pilot’s mother and new partner joined us. The gentleman was a fireman – my next story involves fires, so it was serendipitous!
What book are you currently reading and where is your favoured reading spot?
If you ask me in a couple of weeks it will be ‘The Book of Love’!
Meanwhile, I’m reading Undercover by Damian Marrett. I read anywhere I can. For now the seat on a jet heading home (as a passenger) is the most likely place I have time to read. It’s so important to keep reading, but when time’s tight that’s one of the luxuries I lose…
Thanks for having me on your blog, Phillipa.
Thanks for being my guest, Helene. I loved Border Watch even though you didn’t blow up Circular Quay. Perhaps just a small explosion in the next one - confine it to Fort Denison? I look forward to Beyond Borders, published by Hachette Australia in 2011.
To celebrate the arrival of The Book of Love and Border Watch Helene and I are asking my blog readers to tell us where they like to curl up with a book. The most interesting will win a copy of The Book of Love and the runner up will receive a copy Border Watch
See links page for link to Helene’s website
Helene signing a copy of Border Watch
Related posts
Categories: on reading, on writing |
Tags: Australia, reading, writing | 20 Comments
The Black Demon on the Writer’s Shoulder - flick him off or not?
for a good feed ...
