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Blogging a novel, and the 14 years in between
Photo credit: HarshLight Fourteen years is more than enough time to turn procrastination into a profession. And from the outside maybe that’s what it looks like I’ve been doing, at least when it comes...
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Literary fashions: on writing historical fiction
Image credit: Jo Naylor In her excellent collection of essays, On Histories And Stories, AS Byatt quotes an interview with various British novelists about why they were writing historical novels....
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On reading
Image credit: Dhalmel Ever since I learned how, I have read quite a lot. The childhood habit of reading for half an hour before sleep waned a little in my early twenties (when neither reading nor...
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How my call centre job helped me get published
Image credit: The Poss I had my first novel accepted by Sleepers Publishing about three months ago, just after my twenty-seventh birthday. The age I do things doesn’t really matter to me that much, but...
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A messy kind of sense: Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts
Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts has been trailing me. It’s marked-up, Post-it noted, and dog-eared. I’ve scribbled notes about it. I’ve made a diagram. And still, there’s something gorgeously unresolved...
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On winning literary prizes
Image credit: Fumihiro Toda One of the defining characteristics of life, whether it is the life of a crocus or the life of a capitalist, is competition. The flower that blooms is the winner in a series...
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A writing guide for the time poor
Image credit: Martin Cathrae One of the questions I’m most frequently asked when people find out I am a writer is ‘how do you find the time to write?’ It’s a reasonable question. I have a demanding...
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Just a number: The literary world’s obsession with age
I used to be obsessed about what age I would be when I had my first novel published. I’d go on the Wikipedia pages of every famous writer I could think of to check how old they were when their first...
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On horses, Gillian Mears and Australian fiction
Speaking at the 2011 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Gillian Mears spoke of the yearning she felt to once more be astride a horse. Mears, who is no longer able to horse ride due to advanced multiple...
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In defence of creative writing courses
The first time I walked into a creative writing class at the University of Melbourne, I was fifteen years old. As part of the Work Experience program at my high school, Year Ten students were required...
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Kindness and Failure: The journey of writing Heat and Light
The landscape of Heat and Light. Beaudesert, Queensland. Image courtesy of the author. The first of Heat and Light I wrote was the short story ‘S&J’ in December 2011. The story didn’t come from...
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A Murky Business: On being a writer
At what point does writing become a job? At what point do we shift from being a person who writes as a hobby, to one who writes as a professional? Is it when writing takes up a certain amount of our...
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The Art of Influence: On writing The Flywheel
My book for young adults, The Flywheel, was published last month. It is the first book I’ve published, and it took me a fair amount of time spent alone in a quiet room to write. Now that it’s out in...
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Spark, flow, sigh: The erotics of body and mind
Photo: Eugène Durieu Recently, as we sat around having a few drinks after a book launch, the poet Jennifer Compton asked the question, ‘Do you find writing to be an erotic act?’. My instinctive answer...
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Cate Kennedy on motherhood and creativity
Rachel Power interviews Cate Kennedy about her love for writing and her daughter, in this extract from her new book, Motherhood & Creativity. As someone who writes such piercing and sensitive...
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What Australian Literary Conversation?
Literary Australia can hold a sustained public conversation about as well as a Salvation Army band can play Wagner. I’m not referring to conversations held privately between peers, across coffee...
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‘You’re the least important person in the room’: Memoir and Bad Behaviour
I studied creative writing at university. I loved almost everything about the course: the teachers were inspiring, the readings insightful and provocative, and the workshops were a safe and temperate...
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A Bride Stripped Bare: A writer gets naked on the path from novel to memoir
Call me Eve. Of course it’s not my real name … But it’s the name I call myself when I think back to that time when I was a young wife – so very young, so very hungry – and I picked the fruit and ate...
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On Journals: Private writing in the age of the overshare
Image by Barry Silver I often have an anxious feeling when I reread the very vain and pretentious passages of my adolescent notebooks. I wonder why I scrutinised my male high school crushes with...
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Cold Feet and Hot Little Hands: Abigail Ulman on writing – and not writing –...
When my short story collection, Hot Little Hands, was half-written, I was fortunate enough to get a book deal for the finished product. At the time, I had six stories, and I only needed to write three...
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