Becoming A Fiction Writer
One girl, one dream … and a whole lot of procrastination
January 8, 2011 by amanda

2010 retrospective on Becoming A Fiction Writer

Although I’ve well and truly got 2011 away with a great plan of attack and some poetry, I have just found time to take a proper look back on what I achieved (and didn’t achieve) during 2010. I’m not going to make excuses for not spending as much time on fiction writing as I usually would – it’s not every year you have a baby, and no matter how much I want to be a published novelist, being a mother is – at least at this stage of his little life – a whole lot more important. Although I’m planning on combining the two a lot more effectively in 2011.

Just the same, I didn’t do all to badly on my 2010 goals, mainly because I was smart enough to realise it was never going to be the year of huge amounts of writing. I had four goals, the first of which I completely achieved (submitting my Bratislava novel to a contest); the second and third (submitting Kanako’s Foreigner to agents and increasing this blog’s readership) got a little attention though not much progress; the fourth, to plot and complete my third novel didn’t really do so well, but at least I have a solid idea and a reasonable plot outline.

Looking back on reading – all important for a fiction writer! … first of all, there’s my 2010 reading list. Basically, I read a huge number of books pre-baby, and nearly none after, but this averaged out to “not too bad” in the book-reading department. Take a look at the list if you like and see if we’ve shared any reads this past year.

And now to my “Book of the Year” for 2010 – Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I cannot tell you how many reasons there are to love this book. A bonus is that it’s even by an Australian – you know how I can’t go past Aussie literature! I had planned to make more effort to read outside my preferred modern literary fiction genre during 2010 and I did “okay” – there is some crime/spy stuff on the list, a couple of classics and even a romance and a chick-lit – but I’m still hoping to read a little more widely in the future (I’ve got a gory thriller on the go at the moment so you can see I’m starting 2011 pretty well!).

All in all, 2010 was certainly the year of a new baby and not much of a fiction writing year, but at least I didn’t completely drop the bundle (or the baby!). And I’m on track to get a lot more writing done in 2011. Go me!

PS: Speaking of 2010 reads, I’d love to hear your favourite reads of last year – let me know in the comments.

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May 8, 2010 by amanda

April book of the month is an easy pick

If you happen to have been following my 2010 reading list, you’ll have found it a bit boring recently. After ploughing through a book at least every two days during most of the year, in April my reading came to a bit of a standstill. Which is hardly surprising considering what happened on 2 April. But anyway: my April reading totalled this -

However, I’m still going to announce The World Beneath as my book of the month, because it really was excellent. If it hadn’t been, I would never have found the time to read it this month! I’ve seen Cate Kennedy speak at writers’ festivals and she impresses me so much because she’s absolutely down-to-earth, and makes me feel like I, too, could actually publish a novel too – though probably not as good as hers.

While I’m at it, since April is over (oops – by more than a week!), let me give you an update on my writing for the month. You might be able to guess it was a bit of a slow month. However, one big improvement is that post-pregnancy, my poor carpal tunnel-affected wrists and fingers have improved considerably and I can stay back at the keyboard a lot longer. I did manage a significant piece of writing during April, but it was just for me – a summary, I guess, of the whole process of conceiving and giving birth my son, so that I don’t forget details of the experience. It was really refreshing firstly, to be able to sit at the keyboard and type for that long (interrupted by a crying baby rather than by pain), and it’s also been a long time since I wrote something “beautiful” that was for my eyes only – and it was a lot of fun.

Noticing that we are well into May is a bit scary, though – the Allen & Unwin/Australian/Vogel award closes on 31 May, and this year is the last year I’ll be eligible to submit a novel for the prize. After that I’ll (eek) be too old! This means that I really need to find some time to finalise the edits I want to make to my Bratislava novel. Soon. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do it, but they say the first six weeks with a newborn are the craziest and they’re nearly over, so I’m hoping I’ll find a few spare hours somewhere, somehow. And I’m also hoping that come the end of May, I’ll be able to report back with a bit more reading and writing progress than I had in April.

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January 29, 2010 by amanda

Writing Antarctic literature – Now that’s got to come from experience

You know I love travelling, but one continent I suspect I may never get to is Antarctica. It fascinates me, of course, but those cold temperatures are not as high on my list as many other places, and since I just finished a great novel set in Antarctica, I am doing a fairly good job of imagining it for myself anyway. That’s thanks to Robyn Mundy who wrote The Nature of Ice, and reminded me of another great novel about a modern Antarctic experience from one of all-time favourite writers, Nikki Gemmell, who wrote Shiver.

If you’re even just the slightest bit curious about what a stint in Antarctica would be like, I’d highly recommend these two novels – one told from the point of view of a photographer, and the other from a journalist, so they’re not your typical science-based Antarctic non-fiction. In fact, both books are beautifully written, particularly from the point of view of explaining both the landscape and the reality of everyday life in a continent that most of us know little about.

“Writing what you know”, Antarctic style

No doubt you’ve heard that writing teacher’s adage, “write what you know”, and although I would edit that to be “write what you know, or can reasonably accurately find out about”, I do concede that I will not be writing any stories set in Antarctica in the near future. What I’m trying to say is that these Antarctic novels really brought home to me how effective it is to write about your own experiences – both Mundy and Gemmell have had their own experiences in the deep, deep south – and especially so when your experiences are somewhat unique.

I guess that’s where a lot of my ideas for novels come from, too. While I haven’t had the amazing chance to hang out in Antarctica, I have been able to live and work in countries as diverse as Japan, Slovakia and Germany (not to mention my homeland of Oz), meeting lots of different local people and learning heaps about the cultures. The reviews for the draft of my first novel, Kanako’s Foreigner, often mentioned an appreciation of the details of Japanese culture, so I guess I was doing something right.

Some of the ideas I have for future novels – I could give up the day job now and write full time for a hundred years just to get them all written – are starting to verge away from what I know towards the “what I could find out about”. It’ll be interesting for me in the future to figure out how much I can do that, and how well I can pull it off. I know it annoys me if I’m reading a novel and there’s an obvious error of fact, or at least it’s obvious to me because I have some special experience. Something to ponder.

Over to you: What’s your take on “write what you know”? What do writers do who don’t have such a breadth of experience to draw on? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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December 29, 2009 by amanda

Nam Le deserves $100,000 for his short stories

When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.

I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like to write more of them, because they’re obviously a smaller investment of time than a novel, and therefore valuable in the sense of getting practice at polishing my writing and getting some fiction published. But then I feel like a bit of a fraud, because what I really want to do is write novels, and short stories really are an entirely different genre, and it’s not fair to treat them as a “mini novel” just to get some practice. So I’d more or less abandoned reading them when Nam Le’s collection The Boat was announced to be the winner of the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Then I figured I had to read it.

Obviously, The Boat is an extremely well-written collection of stories. You can’t fault Nam Le’s writing. And if you look around the web at the various reviews, most people seem to think you can’t fault is diversity, either: the stories range from assassins in Colombia to Vietnamese women on boats to elderly men in America, so Nam Le is clearly able to write way beyond his personal experience.

But. I’m sorry to say there’s a “but”. I really want to adore this collection of stories. And I definitely think that Le deserves his $100,000, for he’s an extremely talented writer, and has got a lot of well-deserved praise. But, personally, I just felt like this collection is too diverse, too unconnected, and I know there’s no rule that says a collection of short stories should be connected but I just felt like they all belonged elsewhere. I mean, I guess if I read these stories elsewhere and independently, I would recognise Nam Le’s style and feel them to be a little connected, but as a book to hold in my hands and read, it just doesn’t do it for me. And my second (related) “but” is that knowing these stories all came from the same author disconcerted me a little; it’s hard to believe that one person could know so much about the life and culture in Iran, Colombia, Vietnam and Australia, all at once. Of course, in a way that’s the sign of a great fiction writer, but I just felt like I couldn’t quite trust him that it’s all how it really is. Okay, enough of my rambling, because obviously thousands of other people love this book, so I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves.

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December 21, 2009 by amanda

Western Australian writers: You should all read Craig Silvey’s novels

I’m a fairly patriotic reader, for two reasons – firstly, I really think there is such great literature coming out of Australia, and secondly, because Australian authors are the ones I’m most likely to be able to see in the flesh. Make that Western Australian and I’m even more patriotic, so this post is a little like one big advertisement for West Aussie writer Craig Silvey.

First off, I should tell you the thing that bugs me the most about Silvey. He’s younger than me (by six years). And he’s already had two novels published (and a children’s book, but let’s just stick to the novels for now). What’s more, they’re both great. I was overseas when his first, Rhubarb, was published, but I picked it up a couple of years later at a second-hand sale and recently devoured it. Set in Fremantle, my hometown’s port, and full of interesting characters, it’s a great read – but the next one’s better.

This year, Jasper Jones was published and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read a bunch of reviews suggesting this novel is like the Australian version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’d have to agree; it’s delightful and devourable, with a great narrator and characters which really inspire me to improve the characters in my own fiction. A coming-of-age story set in a small Australian country town during the time of the Vietnam war, Jasper Jones covers the events of one (pretty eventful) summer in a teenager’s life. It’s so good that I’m not going to say much more about it, because you should read it first; after you have, go and read what Silvey himself said about the writing of this novel. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to what he produces next.

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