Learning to write

In a blog about writing and being a writer, it’s well past the time for saying something about READING and being a reader. It must be thirty years since I first heard the phrase ‘the reader within the writer’ and I used it often as a teacher of writing but it began to feel like such a simple, obvious concept that it eventually dropped off my radar, replaced by other, newer ideas.

In the last year, as I struggled with writing in an unfamiliar genre, managing the voice of an 18th century male protagonist, I found myself to be the learner once again. I examined every paragraph, every line, every word and tried to work out what works and what doesn’t. What’s good and needs to stay just as it is? What’s okay but needs different words or a different sentence shape? What’s awful, too repetitive, too weighty, too light, too obscure, too detailed?  There are writerly decisions to be made with every tap of the finger on keyboard. Deciding what to say next and how, which words to use and how to shape them into chunks of meaning, all that affects not just the content of my plot but also the style of the whole manuscript, the pace of it, the mood and colour of it, the things that are left with a reader long after they’ve finished reading.

So, I’ve been learning again in a big way, learning more about writing and trying to understand what makes really good writing so good.  What I’ve found – and I know it’s just a personal thing, this – is that if I can’t work out, at least in a simple way, why something I’ve read is really good, I don’t stand a chance of writing something that good myself. I don’t believe that the best writing happens by accident. At least, not the kind of books I enjoy as a reader. When the words demand to be re-read and read aloud, when I want to lay down in the words and breathe them in, I usually have the feeling I’m enjoying the results of an author’s hard work, their time and effort and skill and not just the quick’n’easy out-churning of their talent.

I realise now, more than ever, that it’s the reader in me who sits and tap-tap-taps every day at my desk. I admit now that I try to write what I’d like to read. Over and over again, I read what I’ve just written out loud to ‘hear how it reads’ and I find it’s the best way to spot the stumbles and repetitions and weak bits. With every word, I have to satisfy me, the reader.

When I feel really stuck, I sit down and read for a few minutes. I pick up a book that I love as a reader and remind myself what good writing looks and feels and sounds like. Last year, my go-to Good Book was Lucy Treloar’s wonderful ‘Salt Creek’, a place where I soaked up the very best of dialogue, description and action. Sometimes it was a reminder about the effect on me – as a reader – of the juxtaposition of long and short sentences, the way Lucy created a reading rhythm.  Sometimes it was a lesson in how to develop character, lightly and unobtrusively by weaving thoughts, memories and feelings into narration. And more…

There have been many other great books for me since I’ve been working on my own manuscripts and I discover new things about writing from all of them. There will always be something to learn. In the last few months, I’ve been excited by authors who do different, surprising things with historical stories. Books I’ve read lately, like Sara Schmidt’s ‘See What I Have Done’, make me want to shove myself out of the comfort zone and write in braver ways.  I’m just finishing the research for something new, something that I guess will take me to the end of 2017 at least, and I’m planning to try something that, for me, will feel really different. I know it won’t be easy and I’ll need to choose a couple of good books to sit on my desk, sustenance for the many moments of frustration and despair. One thing’s for sure, the more I read, the better I’ll write.

 

Perth Writers Festival 2017

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I look forward to three days of immersion into the world of books every year at the Perth Writers Festival, held at the UWA campus. It’s always exciting but this year I experienced a different kind of anticipation. I was there as invited author with two panel sessions to take part in and a 3-hour writing workshop to run for twenty-five people. Packing for what was clearly going to be one of the hottest weekends of the year, I wondered how I’d manage to look cool and calm while my nerves were speeding along in overdrive. How would I know what to do, where to go, how to get there and when?

I needn’t have worried. From the moment I arrived at the hotel, the PWF team had everything under control and the organisation behind the scenes worked like a very well-oiled machine. I was helped and looked-after in every way, including ensuring there was vego food available and literally guiding me from one place to another between sessions.  Even so, it was hard not to feel the world around me was surreal, especially when I first saw my own book on the shelves in the Green Room alongside publications by all the other authors at the festival, including some of my favourite writers like Patrick Holland, Jessie Burton and Hannah Kent.

The first panel session took place in the Tropical Grove amid the sound of parrots and the fringed shadows of palms, a perfect outdoor setting for a discussion about a botanical collector and an artist who painted birds. Convenor Barbara Horgan expertly guided Melissa Ashley and me through a lively discussion about the iconic women who are the subjects of our books. We did have one short interruption, when two members of the audience passed out from the heat!  If you haven’t already read Melissa’s beautiful book, ‘The Birdman’s Wife’ I highly recommend it. You’ll find that Elizabeth Gould and Georgiana Molloy had much in common.

The second panel, convened by Vivienne Glance (who so skilfully drew out the less obvious connections between my book and that of Amy Stewart) was just as lively and even standing room at the back of the lecture theatre was full. Feeling a bit more relaxed after two days of nervousness, I found myself laughing as loudly as everyone else at Amy’s hilarious descriptions of the personal research she and her husband ‘had to do’ on the alcoholic beverages that are the subject of her book, The Drunken Botanist. If you fancy creating your next tipple entirely from plants, you’ll need to try her recipes!

The writing workshop on Saturday morning was a great pleasure for me, working with twenty-five writers at just about every different stage you could imagine. There were writers of fiction and non-fiction, writers who had already completed a first draft of their manuscript and others who were still making early notes, experienced writers and even writers who didn’t yet think they WERE writers. Working with others opens the mind, especially if they bring fresh new views about how and why we write. I always learn as much as I pass on and this time, I’m sure, I’ll be seeing a few names I recognise on publishers’ lists of new releases before too long. Good luck, everyone!

I must admit to you that meeting some of my favourite authors, having dinner with them and having photographs taken with them while we sat in the book-signing area was a huge thrill. How could it not be? I’m a reader! But there were other wonderful things to remember. My publisher, Picador, is based in Sydney but the team were in Perth for the festival so it was very special to have time for long discussions. Phone calls do their job but nothing can replace talking face to face. But the best thing of all was the same thing that always means most to me and often makes my eyes fill up with emotions I can’t really describe. My biggest thank-you goes to all the readers who came to my sessions, asked questions, bought the book, talked to me and told me snippets of their own stories, so many people I’ve never met before. Somehow, the book I wrote, the book you read, has forged a link between us in the magical way that happens when readers and writers connect. In the end, you’re the only reason I believe it’s all true and I really am a writer.

 

One of my fan-girl moments. My book on sale next to the latest by Sebastian Barry, one of my favourite books of 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

A little empathy

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With writing on hold now for a few weeks and time for other things, I’ve been thinking even more than usual about the way each moment leaves us poised forever between our past and our future. I suppose that fascination with time is one of the reasons I love history. I’ve spent the last year writing a new manuscript, finding my way through two centuries while trying to think not just as the writer but also as the main characters and as a reader. I’ve learned lots of new things along the way, including how much there is still to learn about good writing, but I know for sure that being able to empathise with others is a critical ingredient in the recipe.

To describe what someone feels, to explain how they see what’s around them, to reveal their motivation for words or actions, all that means leaving yourself behind, being able to get right inside them and look outward. Empathy lies at the heart of creating authentic voice and viewpoint for a character. It’s critical, too, in predicting how a reader might react to the authorial decisions you make, the words you put on the page. Readers and writers have to work together, even though they never usually meet. It’s also a very human thing to do, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, even if their life is distant from your own in time and circumstances. That’s true if you’re a writer and it’s also true if you’re not. Empathy and love and basic human kindness aren’t such distant cousins. That’s been on my mind lately as I look at Christmas images everywhere.

Yesterday I was given a very special gift by a close friend, a Nautilus shell she had mounted in a setting of real beach sand and framed to hang above my writing desk. It makes real an image described in my manuscript, a Nautilus seen laying on the white sandy floor of the ocean in clear, shallow water. The shell became an iconic image for the book’s protagonist and for me during my year of writing. For both of us, it’s a symbol of the connected nature of living things, a reminder that we’re all in this together on this little planet. A bit of real empathy goes a long way, and not just at Christmas. Thank you, Patricia.

E conchis omnia

Lizard on a log?

Well, that hasn’t been me over the last two months since my last blog! I haven’t been slacking but the current projects have been moving forward in fits and starts in a busy diary of events including a few overnight trips to Perth. Last week was the final booking until November so I’m back to editing my new manuscript and working on some transcriptions that have been patiently waiting, so I’m hoping to tick a few longstanding things off the list very soon. A week of illness was frustrating – sneezing and coughing but no writing – though there was a bright side: all that thinking time and now I have a brand new file on my computer: the title of the next manuscript. It even contains some character and plot notes. If I ever get to the writing (2017?) it will be a prequel and that feels like an interesting challenge.

img_6563 St Bartholomew’s, East Perth

Last weekend was the wonderful, annual Perth Heritage festival and I was lucky enough to speak in two very special venues, each so different. Perth Town Hall was grand and impressive, the most elegant stage I’ve ever been on to talk about Georgiana Molloy.  St Bartholomew’s in East Perth was small and intimate, a beautiful little building and a very moving setting because two of Georgiana’s daughters were buried there.  A big thank you to Heritage Perth and to the National Trust for inviting me. The sore throat and disappearing voice arrived just hours after I finished the second talk so it was lucky timing!

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Never say ‘Never!’

Earlier this year I was at the Margaret River Library, talking about the latest research I’ve been doing since publication of my book about Georgiana Molloy. I closed the presentation by making the point that some things simply have to remain a mystery forever.

I showed the audience a photograph taken at the JS Battye Library a few weeks earlier, an image of a document found among the papers of John Molloy, Georgiana’s husband.

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I said, “I’ve always believed that John Molloy drew this little sketch of Napoleon for his children, telling them about his adventures in the Napoleonic wars and perhaps even saying that he had caught a glimpse of the emperor himself during the Battle of Waterloo. But the provenance of this sketch this will probably be something I’ll never be able to find out.”

That same afternoon I sat down at the computer and decided to have one more go at discovering some pathways, clues that might just lead me to the truth. What came to the surface that day is a remarkable, twisting tale.

Ten years ago I said, “I’ll never find out how and when John and Georgiana first met. It was nearly 200 years ago and nothing’s recorded about that small event.” Then, in 2011, a list of old apple trees on my computer screen opened the door to discovering the wonderful story of their first meeting.

I’ve learned an important lesson: when it comes to research, never say ‘Never’.

To read the next instalment of this story, ‘John Molloy and the emperor’ look  here:

 

© Photograph by Mike Rumble

JS Battye Library WA (SLWA) ACC 4730A Pencil drawing presumed to be of Napoleon with tree and cottage to the right. Anon.

From fact to fiction

The last few weeks have been full of new experiences and much new learning. When things slow down a bit I’ll try to collect my thoughts about all of that, especially what I’ve learned about being interviewed and how to stay calm when you’re on the phone, live, to a lot of people listening in other states. I’m still a real beginner but the best things so far (for me, anyway) have been the encouragement and feedback. Readers tell me their thoughts about my book and their own reasons for a personal connection with the story. Messages from reviewers and writers have also meant a lot to me.

It’s also been a busy time of moving on with writing something new and that feels strange, with so much interest now in John and Georgiana Molloy, having so many conversations about them and answering questions about researching their lives, at the same time as I’m travelling  further into the new manuscript I’ve been working on for the last six months. It’s fiction so it’s another challenge but I deliberately set out to find out what would happen for me as a writer if I stepped way beyond my comfort zone.

The extended pathways of research over the last decade meant that I collected a huge amount of interesting material that ended up being filed away and was never used.  But there were a few things – tiny, colourful pieces from hidden lives – that lodged in my memory and kept burrowing away into my imagination. I couldn’t let them go and last year I decided to find a way of bringing those parts together and adding new elements to make a complete story. I thought fiction would be so easy in comparison with writing a historical biography… After all, you can just make it up! But it’s not easy. It’s difficult. Yet it’s difficult in the same delicious, mind-stretching way because it still involves choosing words and putting them next to one another in the very best way you can.

Family anecdotes and old, old documents like this one from Georgiana’s history started me off on an exploration of someone else’s world, one that I had to create rather than find. But it still feels like ‘finding’ and the people in this narrative have already become real to me in a way I’d never, ever anticipated. The strangest thing of all, so far, has been the way a new character appears in front of me in the scene I’m writing. The whole book is planned and researched and plotted and yet someone I wasn’t expecting suddenly walks onto the stage and I realise they were part of the story all along. I just hadn’t met them yet.

Publication Day!

Tomorrow, March 22, is the publication date for the new Picador edition of ‘Georgiana Molloy, the Mind That Shines’. We’ll be celebrating a happy ending to more than a decade of work and a year of self-publishing but with so much going on it feels like an exciting new beginning at the same time.

I’m so happy with the wonderful job that publisher Alex Craig and editor Jodi Devantier at Picador have done with the book, and the new interior design and subtly updated cover from Lauren Wilhelm.  There are two more sections of new colour images and I finally have the hand-drawn maps I’d hoped for in the first edition – which had to fall by the way in early 2015 when we reached our budget limit.

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The best thing of all at the moment is having the opportunity to talk to so many people about the book. I can’t say I look forward to the nerves involved in recording live radio interviews that will air in every state, but it feels fantastic knowing that the outcomes of my research into Georgiana’s life will be reaching so far in the next few weeks. My original objective was to make the story publicly available, even if that meant printing fifty copies at home and sending them to libraries or just publishing the book on a website.

In the new edition, a few extra lines appear in the list of thanks, including an acknowledgement of the hard work of the whole team at Picador; so many people contributed their skill to the final lovely package. There’s also an expression of gratitude to my agent, Martin Shaw of the Alex Adsett Literary Agency, who’s done so much to support and encourage from the very first tentative email I sent him on 21 July last year. He’s simply the best and I could not be luckier.

And there’s another important addition to that list: ‘Huge and heartfelt thanks go to the many bookshops and other retailers who supported the self-published book in 2015 and started it on its journey.’ Booksellers shared their enthusiasm with readers and did a great deal to keep sales flying high.

Finally, I’m so glad that the book being published tomorrow still has the same statement on its very first page – and nothing else – just the acknowledgement of country. It was a personal choice for me in March 2015 and Picador have retained it in this new edition.

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