Do you have any writing rituals?
When I was writing The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, I would light a candle and some dried gum leaves in a bowl on my writing desk in Frenchie, my 1968 Olympic Riviera caravan that I bought in 2020 to use as an office. With the candle burning and the smoke rising, I would verbally pay respects to Yugambeh ancestors and descendants on whose land I was writing, and express my gratitude to be here. After that, I talked to the women of my line. I thought about what struggles they went through in order for me to have this life. I thanked them before I started writing. Doing so gave me a sense of mindfulness, settled the noise, but also allowed me perspective about how much bigger everything is than the fear of creating something new might have us believe.
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
I am honestly a combination: I’m all about plot points before I go to my desk, and then once I’m there and have started writing to follow those plot points, I’m a pantser with all the details.
Something I've learned about my writing process is that the physical act of typing on my keyboard is often my very last stage of a writing project.
While writing The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding I was reminded that so much of novel-writing, for me, is thinking and gathering scraps and fragments of story, then researching them and falling down all the rabbit holes that going through the research door opens.
At the very beginning, when ideas are starting to split open and shimmer, my typical writing day looks like me staring into space, and handwriting bits and pieces here and there. This is my connect-the-dot stage, when lots of ideas can sometimes come flooding into the room of my mind. I try to treat it a bit like being at a party of guests who don’t know each other. I mingle, find the ideas that seem interesting, get to know them a bit, then stand back and observe as the ideas bump into each other, seemingly not knowing each other, until, zing! Connection between ideas happens. This process involves constant self-discipline to stay the course and trust the process, so I don’t disregard any ideas out of self-doubt or fear.
Once I feel the shape of my piece of writing (an essay, a novel etc) is known to me, as much as it possibly can be, then I got to my desk and my writing day is like a typical work shift. This is when the marathon, the graft of plotting and pantsing, of day-in-and-day-out writing happens.
How do you feel about the book now it’s out of your hands?
The way I feel now that The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is out of my hands reminds me of how it’s felt through my life to stand at the Departure gates of the International Airport, still there, standing in the same spot, after you’ve just watched someone you deeply love disappear from view in the boarding bridge. It’s countless emotions all at once: bereft, heartsore, wary, uncertain, grateful, excited, and buoyed by an awareness of what a gift it is to know this feeling firsthand.
What is your number one rule for writing?
Write what you love, without shame. It’s as simple and as hard as that.
Before I’d finished my first novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, I was often confused, thinking that becoming a novelist meant I should be focused on the outer writing world as much as the interior – the world of agents, publishers, networking, social media, writing tips. Those elements very much have their place in an author’s life, but before I was an author, none of those things got my first novel written. The only thing that did was protecting the magic of my interior world, which we all have – our imaginations – and self-discipline. I realised I had to choose to use my will, over and again, to show up and to write every day, for however long I could. And writing was not always clacking away at my keyboard. It was staring at café walls and out of bus windows and into my garden and thinking about Alice Hart’s story. Thinking about moving it along. Every time I returned to my manuscript to write another line, I developed a habit of focusing on one question.
Do I love this story?
It felt to me that writing a novel alone, lonely, without any security or guarantee of being published was hard enough. So, while I was writing, whenever fear made me falter or stumble (which was every day) that question became my touchstone.
Do I love this story?
If my answer was ambivalent, I knew I needed more staring into space time to think, daydream, re-centre myself in the story until I felt reconnected. Until I felt that love firing in my belly again. I came back to this question again throughout the process of writing The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding and have continued to return to it through and after publication.
Do I love this story?
Are you reading anything at the moment?
I’m currently reading Homecoming, a painfully exquisite poetry collection by Elfie Shiosaki. I’m also very excited to get my hands on an advance reading copy of Meanjin, Brisbane author Claire Christian’s new novel, West Side Honey. It’s out in April 2023 and is about the ferocity of female friendships, taking up space, and all the delicious possibilities when we find the courage to dictate the terms of our own life and relationships.