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I added a new gadget to my toolbox of writing equipment a couple of months ago and it’s transformed the portability of my writing life.
I bought a handbag-sized laptop. Yes, I know the average-sized laptop is portable – but come on! They’re not designed for people with only average upper-body strength who also have to carry a handbag and/or luggage. The new teeny-tiny one, with its proper keyboard and not a no-room-for-error touch-screen, lets me carry my work around without risk on an injury.
My requirements for writing are minimal – word processing and internet access. Beyond Fear was written in a corner of our family room at a desk big enough for my larger laptop, a few notes and a cup of coffee. The new laptop can shrink my workspace to the size of a toy. I can pick it up in one hand, carry it around like a book. It’s easier to handle than my giant thesaurus.
My son calls me an electronic anomaly. I attract unexplainable, unfathomable anomalies. Files go missing, apps won’t load, functions don’t work. It makes me nervous about updating. He rolled his eyes when I showed him the new laptop, told me I’d have to wait until he had some free time before he could sort it out – because, obviously, there would be an anomaly. But it surprised both of us when (gasp) it just worked!
It even coped with our old diesel generator when I took it on holiday in January and I was able to spend a week writing in the inspirational quiet of isolated bushland.
I don’t use it all the time, it’s just too small for that, but now I can take my home office to our local café when my daughter has a shift, order a coffee, catch up with her latest and conjure J K Rowling without the shoulder pain.
A yoga class isn’t the obvious place to find inspiration for a thriller but that’s often where it happens for me.
Writing is hard on the body. Not like digging a ditch is but sitting still for hours with your hands primed over a keyboard day after day does nasty things to muscles. To make it worse, I’ve had a bad back for years – the result of an injury and bad genes – and long periods at a keyboard were painful.
I didn’t start yoga to help with either of these problems. About five years ago, a friend asked me along. I met a nice bunch of people and, to be honest, in the first year I sometimes only went for the coffee afterwards. Then I started to notice the effect it was having on my writing.
After twelve months of twice-a-week classes, not only could I tie myself in a knot, I could also sit for longer without pain. And I realised the muscles I held rigid in typing got a great stretch and the ones that were lazy from inactivity were worked.
It wasn’t just physical. The creative process isn’t something I can switch on and off easily. Scenes, characters and dialogue tend to go round and round on an endless, involuntary loop in my head. Yoga short circuits that. It takes focus to stand on one leg or to fold in half and to breath in and out at the right times. The voices in my head have to shut up so I don’t fall on my face. So while my body gets a workout, my mind gets a rest.
So where does the inspiration come in? Well, that’s at the end. We finish with a relaxation session, stretched out on the floor, mind empty. That’s the theory, anyway. My imagination tends to leap back to life in those moments. Characters come alive, scene dilemmas are resolved and tired dialogue is revamped.
In yoga, strong poses are followed by counter poses, designed to release the muscles that have been worked hard. For me, my yoga practice has become the counter posture to my writing.
The best thing I ever did for my writing was to join a critique group. I live in a regional area with not many opportunities for writing companionship. Almost every writing course I’ve signed up for has been cancelled due to lack of interest.
About four years ago, I met historical author Isolde Martyn at a conference. A spot had opened up in her group and she invited me to join, if I was happy to drive to a hundred-and-fifty kilometres to Sydney once a month. So I started a monthly ritual that I credit for having a major hand in achieving my dream to be published.
We’re an eclectic group of ten with a variety of backgrounds and writing a range of genres from political intrigue to erotica. The aim is for honest, practical feedback – not a pat on the back. Believe me, it’s not easy putting your blood, sweat and tears up for critical analysis, and sometimes the response isn’t what I want to hear but it’s taught me to be objective about my work.
We meet on a mid-week evening. After my first session, followed by a long drive that got me home in the early hours of the morning, Isolde and women’s fiction author Christine Stinson offered to take turns providing a bed for me one night a month. They told me if I was determined enough to come so far to work on my writing, they were determined to make it easier.
I’m lucky – not all crit groups are equal. I’ve heard some shockers about jump-The-Gap type feedback and writers who can’t bear to hear their stuff isn’t best seller material. But I’ve found a shared passion for writing and an implied charter to keep each other going back to the keyboard.
I’ve wanted to write a book since I was at school but didn’t get serious about realising the dream until ten years ago. From talking to other beginner writers, I see that I started with a couple of advantages.
I was a journalist for twelve years and spent another six years running a public relations business from home. If you’re thinking that gave me a leg-up into publishing, you’re wrong. What I had was no fear of a blank screen and plenty of experience working around the distractions of domestic life.
The blank screen for a writer is like a sculptor taking the first hack into a lump of marble. Where do you start? How will I mould it? What if I take off the bit where the big toe should go?
As a journalist, you’re confronted with blank screens on a daily basis. In radio, it’s hourly. There isn’t the luxury to procrastinate. I try to work the same way now. Get stuck in, get words on the page and then the screen is no longer blank. And if I discover the big toe fell off, I can write it in later.
Writing around home life is hard, especially if you’ve got children and a husband with a time-consuming career. You learn to hold onto a thought while you drive kids around, check homework, answer questions, cook and shop.
It took me four years to write my first manuscript because I let it flounder at the bottom of my priority list. By the time I started Beyond Fear, I’d turned hard core writer/parent. Anything I could do when the kids were at home, I left until then. I bought a slow-cooker and had dinner on most days before nine a-m. I wrote from a desk in the corner of our family room and whenever I had the room to myself, I was working.
Since signing with Random House, I’ve knocked out a wall under our house and made an office for myself. The kids are now at uni, in and out of the house at all hours and when they drop by for a ‘hello’, it’s a happy distraction instead of another thought cut short.
A woman told me at a signing recently that someone she knew had been to the house in Dungog where ‘that’ had happened. The ‘that’ she was referring to was the terrorising of four women at an isolated B&B near Dungog in the NSW Hunter Valley, which is the story that unfolds in my thriller Beyond Fear.
My first thought was that I sincerely hope it didn’t happen to anyone in Dungog – or anywhere else, for that matter. My second was to put her straight – the story and the isolated hill it’s set on are entirely fictional. The third thought was a tick of personal satisfaction that my invented B&B was painted well enough for someone to claim familiarity with the Old Barn on the Hill.
I first visited Dungog about twelve years ago when I went to the annual rodeo. I recall watching it with a gasp wedged in my throat (those riders weren’t faking the falls!) and a nerve-jangling sense that I’d found a great setting for a story.
Dungog is similar to many of the villages dotted around the Hunter Valley. For a city-dweller like me, it captured that romantic sense of the regional Australian town. Lovely timber cottages on massive blocks of land that hint at nearby farm animals. A main street lined with heritage buildings, huge pubs and a stock and feed store next to the supermarket. And it’s all surrounded by lush, rolling hills that conjure up images of an idyllic farming life.
It seemed the most unlikely place for something really awful to happen, which of course made it perfect.
Bald Hill, the town in Beyond Fear, isn’t intended to be Dungog but is inspired by my memory of that first brief visit. I’ve been there a number of times now, still love it, had great coffee there and even a girls’ weekend in some mud-brick cabins (fortunately, no bad guys). While the Old Barn and it’s hill are fictional, the countryside that surrounds it isn’t – and yes, the mobile phone reception is both appalling and inexplicable.
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