The Secret Life of Writers

The Secret Life of Writers or
What Writers don't tell their Families.

I have six children in their teens and early twenties who are all still living at home, (one has their partner living with us), so ours is a very busy house. From the moment I get up in the morning and take child number 6 to the train station at 6.30 am, until the last one gets in from UNI or work at around 9pm, I don't stop.

But while I'm doing the shopping, driving kids places and cooking, I'm writing.

So here is an insight into ... the Secret Life of Writers.

1. Everything is grist for the mill.

No matter how awful or wonderful the moment is, a writer will map it in their mind, so they can find it again and re-experience it to write about it.

2. Those long comfortable shared silences, aren't really silent.

While you're sitting there after dinner, sipping a wine or watching a sunset, your writing partner is really miles away, inside their latest book, wrestling with plot intricacies.

3. A writer is never bored (see 2.).

4. When your partner says they love you, they mean it. But ...

They wish everyone would leave them alone sometimes, completely alone, because time alone in their heads is a luxury. And they need it to feed the creative crucible.


As a writer I often feel like I'm living on two planes, one is the every day and the other is as vast as my imagination. As a creative person, a writer, artist or musician what goes on in your mental world that you don't share with your family?

Feeding the Creative Crucible

Creativity and writers ... People used to ask Harlan Ellison where he got his ideas from. He'd say from a little post office in Poughkeepsie (I'm paraphrasing because I read the quote 25 years ago and I have no idea how to spell the place).

But seriously, where do writers get their ideas from? The short answer is everywhere. Ideas aren't the problem. It's finding time to write. And it is finding time to let the ideas percolate in that creative crucible.

I googled creativity and found lots of sites to help generate creativity in the workplace, which is a little different from what we writers do. Here's a site with a post by Jeffrey Baumgartner on 10 steps to boost creativity. I liked numbers 9 & 10.

Stimulate your mind by reading as many books as possible. I'm sure every writer would agree with that one. And exercise your brain. One of his tips on how to exercise your brain was to argue with people. I'm sure he meant debate. I find if I don't get enough brain exercise I start getting edgy and go out looking for mental stimulation.

As a parent of six children, who are all teenagers and early twenty-somethings and who all live at home, I've spent the last 25 years on the run from one thing to another hosing down bush fires.

A lot of people talk about what music they like to listen to while writing. For me the greatest luxury is quiet 'alone' time. That's why I chose the image above. It doesn't have to be a beautiful place, although that helps. It doesn't have to be a seat on the beach, or even a walk along the beach. It just has to be time I spend alone in my head without constant interruptions. Mowing the yard is good. While the mower is going, it's too noisy for my kids to talk to me. And the repetition of walking up and down lets my mind slide away into the realms of free association, which is where I think writers find their creativity.

Where and how do you tap into your creativity?

ROR 2009

Photos taken on my phone, so they are a little grainy.

All we've done is rave about the food at ROR. So here is proof that people do some work. Here is Tansy writing book 2 of Creature Court.

More naked youths falling from the sky, I say!








And here we are preparing food while Dirk tells us what to do.

I'm 40 pages into a rewrite of the beginning of my book, thanks to the power of critiquing. Maxine did an 'invented noun' word search of the first 10 pages of everyone's manuscript and discovered I was the worst offender for overloading the reader with invented words. Sigh. I am trying to redress this.

It is good to be back home, mind you, the food was better at ROR!

The Joy of Writing

Days like yesterday, are days that remind me why I'm a writer. I'm polishing the draft of book two of King Rolen's Kin for Solaris at the moment, and there was a bridging scene I needed to write to make sense of the last quater of the book. When I came to this point originally, it just wasn't working and nothing I did made it fall into place. Pushing through, wasn't an option.

This time I came to the problem scene and kept right on writing. All the niggly little plot threads fell into place, in a brand new scene, which was better than my old planned scene. All day, as I hung out washing, drove kids around and did shopping etc the scene was bubbling away in the back of my mind. I couldn't wait to get back to the computer. There was this wonderful sense of excitment and achievement.

Nothing can take that away. Whether you are writing a book that has already been accepted or writing on spec, the private joy of creating is just between you and the keyboard.

Back to work!


Cheers, R.

Changing mental tracks

I've handed in my ROR book and am going through withdrawal. It's set in a tropical paradise with a dangerous underbelly. My mind is full of ideas to make the world richer/scarier, crank the tension higher and push the characters further for the next book.

But my next project is writing book two of King Rolen's Kin. This opens in midwinter. Meanwhile outside it is 30 plus degrees and the southern states are experiencing a record breaking heatwave. I'm experiencing a weird sort of dissonance.

No more grumbling. Back to work!

Cheers, R.

Clarion South 2009

The other exciting thing that's happening up here in sunny Brisbane is Clarion South!

This is a biannual event which ROR's very own, Margo Lanagan, has tutored on several occasions. When I first met Margo back in 1999, she had just heard that she'd been accepted to Clarion in the US. I was so excited for her, I hugged her. And she confessed that hardly anyone she'd told had known what Clarion was.

Clarion South is based on the US Clarions. Basically, the workshops are a 6 week boot-camp for writers of speculative short fiction. The attendees are selected on merit and live-in. Each week a different published author/editor tutors. This year the international tutors are Kelly Link and Gavin J Grant.

Personally, I can't think of anything better than spending 6 weeks, focused totally on writing. I know when I was tutoring at EnVision, which lasted one week and catered to book length authors, the writers came on leaps and bounds because of the intense atmosphere and one-on-one time with their tutors.

Wishing the 2009 Clarion South students and tutors all the best!

Cheers, Rowena.

the search for bigger pictures

So where do you get your ideas from? This is the question most guaranteed to set a dedicated author's eyes rolling. I mean, duh, creative people pluck them out of everywhere, don't you know: the aether, their hair, their arses, their dreams, the TV, the headlines, other people's work. Ideas are, after all, the easy part of fiction. It's how you parse and render them that makes a difference, yeah?

Actually, I'm starting to think it’s a very good question. If ideas are so plush and plentiful, how come there's so much tedious fiction out there? Why are slush piles choking with the same old, same old? It can't be because people can't write – everybody writes these days. Everybody blogs, word-processes, chats, emails, texts. Everybody has all the tools they need to be a writer and getting published is about as difficult as falling off a log so long as you're not too fussed about a publication's provenance, credentials and readership.

We've all heard that old adage 'write what you know'. Well, that's a damn fine idea if you happen to be an articulate astronaut, outback adventurer, brain surgeon, fashionista, rock star, molecular biologist or trapeze artist. But if, like me, you're just another white middle class wage slave, maybe you want to rethink that hoary old chestnut. Because maybe we just aren't that interesting and maybe what we know about is duller than a public service tea break. I have developed a better idea. Find something you don't know much about, learn it up and run with the baton from there.

Which is pretty much what the last three years have been all about for me. Not intentionally, mind you. There was never a cunning plan aimed at improving the quality of my prose. I didn't perceive great gaps in my imagination. I just knew what I knew, wrote what I wrote, dug what I dug, etc. Some of my output was deemed worthy of publication, but I wouldn't have said there was anything special about any of it.

And then I changed jobs. I found myself working for a small educational publisher, producing eighteen books a year on an assortment of health and social justice topics. Eighteen serves of research and production: lather, rinse, repeat. Going over and over the text in preparation for publication, the intel contained rattling around in the backroom of my psyche, groaning and churning away like a big old machine. Things I thought I knew, things I know I'd rather forget. Multiple versions of the same stories, source documents, white papers, green papers, opinions and statistics. Sites, both reputable and outré, trawled for content, the duds, mutants and miscreants briefly squeezed, then tossed back over the side. Ten years as a media monitor never educated me quite like this because electronic media morphs into one almighty jabbering voice. These books feature many and multiple mouthpieces. Headlines are advertisements. They're selling something, be it gossip, news or a state of mind. Behind the headline is where the trail often begins.

The internet is a vast and plentiful ocean resplendent with tall ships and betentacled horrors. Search terms fed through Google Advanced bring up many a seceded realm ruled by Pirate Kings and Voudoun priestesses; buried treasure nestled amongst Commonwealth fact-sheets and intergovernmental reports. There is no gatekeeper because there is no gate. Only peepholes, millions of them peering inwards at the boiling tide. Oh my god, it's full of stars is right, my friend. I challenge you not to find something worth writing about in there.

When I look at a timeline of my own published work, I see a distinct correlation between the point at which my stories took a turn for the interesting and the date I began my day job. It's a linear timeline, so perhaps it could be argued that my writing simply improved with practise. I, however, see more than coincidence. The press I work for publishes dark titles: Juvenile Crime, Indigenous Disadvantage, Child Poverty, Consumerism, Resilience and Coping Skills, Natural Disasters, Amphetamine Use, etc. We did a book on Happiness and Life Satisfaction once. Couldn't sell it. Nobody wants to know about the good stuff.

All this murk has been seeping into my head. The food I eat is farmed with suffering, my clothes manufactured in sweatshops, my chocolate harvested by child slaves; I wipe my arse on old growth forests; I eat the dead flesh of tortured and mistreated animals. My lifestyle is unsustainable, my carbon footprint the size of a Yeti's. Indigenous countrymen live in third world poverty; Indigenous women are 11 times more likely to be murdered than myself. Forty-five per cent of Australia's 100,000 homeless are children. Yeah yeah, you're thinking, I know about all of this. I read it in the paper and heard it on the news. But do you feel it? Does it change you? Does it all stay embedded in your head? Each time you learn one of these facts, do you attempt to adjust your life accordingly in a pathetic and pointless attempt to make it better? Do these issues coagulate and ferment? Does anything become of them, or do they pass undigested through your memory like intellectual psyllum husks? Do you now write dark fantasy and horror when once you wrote about… stuff? 'Cos I do.

Something to think about, maybe.

Welcome to Ripping Ozzie Reads

Great News.

My agent, John Jarrold, has sold a three book deal to SOLARIS, the genre imprint of Games Workshop's publishing division, BL Publishing.

The series is called King Rolen's Kin and book one, Byren's Bane (working title), will be released early 2010.

The books follow the lives of three of King Rolen’s heirs, when their kingdom, Rolencia, is invaded by their ancestral enemy, Merofynia. A sweeping fantasy adventure, the narrative explores the eternal questions of ambition, trust and betrayal.

Writing is a long process and days like this are rare. So I'm enjoying the moment!