Do you have any writing rituals?
Oh… get up? I write in the morning mostly, and I usually do my new writing in the morning and I look at it again in the afternoon and edit. But I don’t have any little quirky things where I have to have any special clothes or cups or socks or anything like that. I’m just very disciplined. Get up and turn up. It’s a bit different at the moment because it’s different sort of stuff I’m doing at the moment for promotion – bit different from writing.
What element of your writing brings out the grammar police in your editor?
I guess for me it’s probably my sentence structure that I really look at – they can be too long. One thing I’ve learnt with each progressive book is I actually like to read short punchy sentences so I try and write those more myself. So that’s probably one of the big things I look at to try and pull in is long sentences that probably have a bunch of extraneous words that don’t need to be there.
How do you feel about the book now it’s out of your hands?
It’s a fairly personal story this one, so it’ll be interesting to see how other people perceive it when they’re taking a little bit of your heart with it when they read it. So far the feedback’s been fantastic, that it resonates with people on so many different levels. So I feel good about it, actually! Hearing different people’s interpretations of things has been really lovely.
If Bone Memories was made into a movie who do you see playing the main characters?
Geography of Friendship is going to be made into a series and people ask me this – I’m a reader? I don’t watch television or film much! To be honest when people ask me about Geography and who I’d like cast in that I actually want to give new people a go? That’s what I want them to do. I want them to go to NIDA and say “here’s some really upcoming rising talent”. And I’d love them to use that. I would probably say the same for this one.
When you read, do you see it playing out in your mind or do you just see the words?
I’m a visual writer, so I’m a visual reader. I teach landscape writing, and it’s called ‘witnessing landscape’ because that’s what I do when I’m in nature, and so for me I don’t want to just be told what a place looks like, I need to have that as a felt experience so anyone who does good place writing has immediately got me. And it’s the same with characterisation - I need to see a three dimensional character.
What are you working on next?
I’m not working on anything at the moment but there is an idea percolating and it’s still this elusive little chimeric thing that I really can’t get my head around at the moment. It’ something about women who are in service to other women. I’m a bit intrigued by that. Just that alone makes me think it’s going to be a novel about class. That’s about all I’ve got at the moment.
The stepping off point for it was a poem I read by Robin Morgan, an American Poet, and it was from Dark Matter, I think the collection was called. And it was about a young girl they found in the tomb of a Moche woman from the 4th century and surprisingly this Moche Empress was a great warrior because she was buried with shields and swords and had many scars from battle, but sort of tossed alongside her was this fifteen year old girl who was obviously a servant, and Robin Morgan has done a beautiful re-imagining of that girl’s experience and I would love to somehow weave the contemporary with that sort of experience. And that’s all I’ve got!