What advice do you have for young writers?

Thomas Mann hit the nail on the head when he said:

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Amen to that!

Every writer stumbles and hits roadblocks. What can help pick yourself up and trudge on is advice from authors who have been there, and overcome the very same roadblocks. 

Below are a few writers I have interviewed over the years, and their answer to my question: "What advice do you have for budding young writers?". Some are wacky, others are practical. All are worth thinking about.

 If you have a good piece of advice, then please share it in a comment. Every little bit helps, after all :)

 

Alison Stewart 

Don’t be afraid to write and keep writing, but also don’t be afraid to edit. Don’t be put off by rejection – easier said than done! It goes without saying that you should read widely and when you come across something you love, take note of how the author has achieved this. And as I said earlier, enter your writing in competitions. You never know your luck!

Kelly Gardiner 

Read. Write. Read. Write. And again. That’s all. Just keep being as good as you can be. On a more practical level, read passages out loud so you can hear if they ring true – and if something makes you hesitate or wonder, then it needs more thought. I learned that the hard way.

I’m currently writing in 25 minute bursts with a five minute break in between, just about chained to the desk so I can’t get distracted. It really works, especially for rough drafting. If I can’t think of the right word or I don’t know some historical fact, I just write “something” and go back to it later. Otherwise I can spend twenty minutes looking up the etymology of one word or the price of boat hire on the Thames in 1640 and not write any more for hours.

 

Margo Lanagan 

Read as much and as widely as you can - not just in the areas where you're already a fan but in new genres.

Don't just focus on "being a writer" and living in your own imagination - have another life, another career, that feeds into your writing by connecting you to the real world.

Write a lot, and again, write widely. Try lots of different ways to tell the stories, or communicate the impressions, that you carry around inside you. That way you'll find the forms that suit you.

Doug McLeod

Get a really terrible job first. I worked on a building site for a short time and it was horrible. When I find it hard to write or just don't feel like it, I remember how it felt holding those bricks around. If you really want to be a serious writer, don’t get married or have kids.

 Laura Buzo

Get a wife.

And also, don’t try to do it all on a laptop. Even is all you have is a laptop, buy a separate keyboard that you can set up to reach ergonomically. Seriously. Look after those tendons. You only have one set.

Kelley Armstrong

Keep writing. It’s boring advice, but it really is the most important thing, I think. You need to love writing and keep at it, always practicing and writing new things, even if you don’t get published quickly (most authors don’t)

Interview with Margo Lanagan, author of 'Sea Hearts'

I was lucky enough to receive an early copy of Margo Lanagan's new novel, 'Sea Hearts'. I devoured the book in one day, but was still thinking about the story days after reading the last line... I'm very happy (though not at all surprised) to start reading reviews full of praise for Lanagan's Gothic fairytale.

So of course I couldn't pass up the opportunity to interview the author herself. Asking her about Selkies, 'Singing My Sister Down' and "Snipers picking off clowns".

Many thanks to Allen & Unwin, and Margo Lanagan for taking the time to answer my questions!

All images used are from weheartit.com

♥

Q: How were you first published, agent or slush pile?

Neither. I was working as a freelance book editor when I wrote my "apprenticeship" teenage romances at the suggestion of one of the publishers I worked for. When I had written my first novel, a junior fantasy title, I submitted it directly to an editor I already knew from my editorial work. I had edged my way into the publishing world by other means before it hit me that I could actually be a writer myself.

Q: Are you a plotter or a ‘pantser’? – That is, do you meticulously plot your stories before writing, or do you ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ and let the story evolve naturally?

With novels, at first, I head off in a rush, very pantserishly, and just play for a while with what feel like the most fun beginning scenes. Once I've elaborated on them for a while, I reach a point where I really need to sit down and put the accumulated scene-bits into some sort of order so that they progress in a sensible way towards a climax (sometimes I have to do this with longer short stories, too). But I'll try to keep it fairly rough and flexible; too much planning and the writing itself becomes boring.

Short stories usually don't require much planning. I'll have the idea, and some vague notion of a climactic scene towards which the story's heading, and I can hold all that in my head and charge ahead without notes.

Q: Where do story ideas generally start for you? Do you first think of the character, theme, ending? Or is it just a free-fall?

They start with the germ of an idea that I've noted down, e.g. "Snipers picking off clowns" or "People buying silence in a can, jar, pill, or just downloading some". I'll cook this idea for a while (a day or two, or half an hour if I'm on a serious deadline!) until I've got a character with some kind of distinctive voice (or whose actions and thoughts I can relate in a distinctive voice) to pin the idea on, and a situation in which the idea makes sense (story-sense, I'm talking about, not real-world sense). I'll have something of an ending, but theme pretty much never comes into it. Theme grows all by itself, like a kind of mould or stain through the story, in the process of writing it.

Q: How do you tell the difference between which idea will be a short story, and which will evolve into a novel?

By the number of nodes it has, i.e. points where, when I poke it, story ideas fall out. A short story idea will generally consist of two half-ideas that come together to form a single node; a novel idea might be, for example, an existing traditional story (like the selkie stories for Sea Hearts, or like "Snow White and Rose Red" for Tender Morsels) that has many more nodes than can be utilised in a short story.

Q: How long did it take you to write ‘Sea Hearts’, from first idea to final manuscript?

I wrote it as a novella first, in about 8 weeks, in 2008. It took between 18 months and 2 years, on and off, to develop it to final-draft novel.

Q: I loved ‘Sea Hearts’ – and something I especially enjoyed was the fact that it’s a Fairytale/Fable from all sides. So we get the story from Rollrock’s ‘ witch’ Misskaella, as well as the bewitched men and even Selkie children. Did you always know that ‘Sea Hearts’ would be an all-encompassing narrative?

Yes, it pretty much had to have several narrators, because the Rollrock islanders, they're not very communicative people, and the matter of the selkies was shrouded in secrecy and shame. So if a character knew part of the story, he or she tended to keep it under his or her hat, and the only way to show it was to enter mind after mind and show its particular secret.

Q: Misskaella has become a new favourite character for me. She was wonderful and full of grey areas – the Rollrock ‘witch’, with her own reasons and tragedies for what she did to her island home. What was the hardest part about writing Misskaella’s story?

Deciding how much magic she could have probably presented the most difficulty. At first I made her a very powerful witch, with weather-changing and healing powers and attractive to all wild things. But her magic didn't work properly as a system until I decided that she would only have powers in relation to seals and selkies. I had to limit her to make her story—indeed, the whole story—manageable and coherent. (PS: I'm very fond of her too, the cranky, filthy old thing.)

Q: When did you first hear the tale of the Selkie legend? What is the appeal of this Scottish folklore for you?

I wouldn't be able to say when I first heard a selkie tale, but it would be in quite early childhood; when I did my small amount of research, all the different versions of the stories sounded familiar to me in a general way. I think the appeal of selkie stories lies in their romantic landscape of coasts and stormy seas; in their beauty (both the physical beauty of the seal-people and the attraction of the perfect love that selkie-people and their human partners enjoy); and in the insoluble problem at their centre, that selkies and humans cannot live comfortably together.

I think this central problem clearly refers to the difficulties humans and other humans have when they cohabit. Each person, the selkie tales' sub-text says, is a different species from from each other person; we can never quite come perfectly, permanently together. There will always be misunderstandings and missed connections, losses and pains.

Q: If you could put on the coat of any animal in the world, which animal would you choose to morph into?

Seals do look like fun, I have to admit, both for the swimming and for the sunbathing. I'd make sure I was a female seal, though; I'm not very interested in all that bellowing and bleeding that the seal-blokes do.

If I can tear my mind away from seals for a minute, though, I'm thinking I wouldn't mind being either some terrifically agile mammal (some kind of very swingy monkey), or a top-of-the-foodchain bird, like a sea-eagle.

Q: What was your geographical inspiration for the fictional Rollrock Island?

Roughly, the Outer Hebrides. But only very roughly, as I've never been there, and I didn't research them closely. There's definitely more Lanagan-land than real Hebrides in Rollrock.

Q: You gained real international acclaim for your short story ‘Singing My Sister Down’ (Black Juice, 2004). At the time, did you have any idea that that short story would be such a tour-de-force? And have you ever been tempted to expand on the story and turn it into a novel?

No, if I'd known how "Singing My Sister Down" would be received, I think I would have been totally paralysed by self-consciousness. But I wrote it in a notebook on the train on the way to work, over a couple of commutes; and it was one of those stories that just fell out all of a piece, and required almost no revision (you can see some of the changes from first draft to last over here).

I did start a novel that at the beginning was in the same world as "Singing", but it wandered off and never quite became anything. Well, never say never, eh? But I'd call it a "paused draft", and have no intention of going back to it any time soon.

Q: Your novels are released internationally to much critical acclaim. But what is ‘lost in translation’ between US and UK editions? And have you ever put your foot down to keep a particularly unique Australian reference?

I wouldn't say this is a problem with my two novels, as they're both based in European myth shared by a large enough proportion of the US and UK readership; they simply don't contain any direct references to Australia. With the short stories, I've sometimes had to clarify a turn of phrase or change things like "He's not as dim as he sims" to "He's not as dim as he sums" so as not to mystify US readers unacquainted with the dim sim. But no serious translation issues have arisen.

Q: You have written so many short stories – do you ever worry that the well will run dry on ideas? Do you have any tips or tricks for combating writers block, or getting a story started?

No, once you've got into the habit of collecting ideas, you quickly collect enough to last you several lifetimes - and then you collect more, because making an idea-note for an as-yet-untackled story is always more attractive than knuckling down to the third revision of the story you're supposed to be working on.

Writer's block and story-starting difficulties are different forms of anxiety. Breathe deeply, look the anxiety straight in the eye and tell it, "Yes, I see you, but I'm going to do this anyway." Then banish it from your mind and forge on until you relax and pick up the flow of the story you're working on.

Q: Some favourite author(s)?

Anne Tyler

George Saunders

Anne Enright

William Mayne

Kelly Link

Alan Garner

Jennifer Stevenson

W. G. Sebald

Gail Godwin

Ursula Dubosarsky

Q: Can you tell us what you’re working on next (and when we can expect it in our hot little hands?)

Another fantasy novel, set in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland and colonial New South Wales. It won't be out before next year, I'm thinking. Also, the Blue short story collection, which will be reprints, some of them re-worked, of my nastier stories published in anthologies. This collection will be clearly marked "Not Suitable For Children or Younger Young Adults".

Q: What advice do you have for budding young writers?

Read as much and as widely as you can - not just in the areas where you're already a fan but in new genres.

Don't just focus on "being a writer" and living in your own imagination - have another life, another career, that feeds into your writing by connecting you to the real world.

Write a lot, and again, write widely. Try lots of different ways to tell the stories, or communicate the impressions, that you carry around inside you. That way you'll find the forms that suit you.

'Sea Hearts' US cover

'Sea Hearts' by Margo Lanagan

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

'Why would I? People are uneasy enough with me - if I start bringing up sea-wives, they'll take against me good and proper.'
'It could be secret.'
'Could it?'

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock - the men, the women, the children - once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?

Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire and revenge, of loyalty, heartache and human weakness, and of the unforeseen consequences of all-consuming love.

There are rumours about Rollrock Island. Mainlanders claim that the small, remote island is populated with impossibly beautiful women … mams and wives with silken hair and long limbs, lips you could lose yourself in and fathomless eyes. They say these women came from the sea – conjured by a witch for the Rollrock men to bed and wed. Rumour has it that these sea-maidens wash ashore and bewitch men, stealing husbands and suitors alike.

But the Rollrock women are curious creatures. Born of the sea, they came conjured from the skins of seals. Their coats were taken by men to keep them ashore, to keep them from returning to their watery freedom.

Beware Rollrock Island, they say. You must wear a cross on your back to avoid sea-maiden temptation. And don’t send your beloved betrothed to the island for anything – for he won’t come back the same and smitten with you.

‘Sea Hearts’ ('The Brides of Rollrock Island' in the US) is the new novel from Australian author, Margo Lanagan.

This novel is absolutely divine. In ‘Sea Hearts’ Lanagan is writing a new Fairytale addition to the old Selkie legend. Scottish in origin, and supposedly beginning on the Orkney and Shetland Islands, the Selkie story concerns women who masquerade as seals (and vice versa). They are inhumanly beautiful and mystifying – in some legends they shed their seal coats and tempt men to their beds, only to vanish by daylight. In others, the mysterious women live amongst us, perfectly normal until the day that the sea’s pull is too much and they leave all behind (even children and husbands). In ‘Sea Hearts’, Lanagan weaves a far more delicious and dastardly tale about these Selkie sea-maidens …

Set on the fictional island of Rollrock, the book follows a cast of islanders as they encounter the Selkie legend of their home. Daniel Mallett is a happy young boy who collects sea-hearts for his mam to cook up. He and his other friends (all boys) play on the rocks of the island’s namesake and do their best to avoid the local witch, Misskaella. But Daniel and his friends feel a secret closing in on them … to do with the lack of girl children, and the odd barking language their mams converse in when they’re ritually bathing by the rocks.

After Daniel, the book’s narrative recedes, ebbs and flows; like the tide coming in. Lanagan takes us back to the beginnings of the Rollrock mystery, where we meet Bet Winch, a young girl whose older brother has gone missing. His new wife comes calling, looking for her Nase, needing help with the two babies they have at home. But Bet and her mother discover the young man in an abandoned cottage, holed up with an incomparably beautiful woman who smells like the enticing ocean.

Dominic Mallett was bundled off his native Rollrock Island after his da’s death. For years he lived on the mainland, and is even betrothed to a mainland girl. But he has to return to Rollrock for sentimental souvenirs, and though his fiancée is reluctant to see him venture back to the island of his childhood, he promises he will return in time for their wedding. Nothing shall keep him from her.

And then there’s Misskaella Prout – she is the book’s hinge, the beginning of the Rollrock legend and resident island witch. We meet Misskaella as a young, fat girl – living with a loveless ma and siblings as mean as snakes. The family don’t think much of Misskaella, and the villagers even less. But there is something special about this young girl … she brings the seals from the rocks. One day these great, lumbering beasts crawl to town. Their heads swivel when she passes, and they congregate around her family’s house. Misskaella is told to wear a bandaged cross on her back, to ward off the seals. Because Misskaella has a gift, and if she’s not careful, terrible things will come of her power to call.

Growing into a bitter and shrewd woman, Misskaella puts her ‘gift’ to good use, and starts calling Selkie sea-maidens from their coats, to be married to Rollrock men – for a price.

Any man seeing this maiden's lips would want to lay kisses on them; he would want to roll in the cushions of those lips, swim the depths of those eyes, run his hands down the long foreign lengths of this girl. Oh, I thought, women of Rollrock, you are nothing now.

Margo Lanagan’s novel is divine. She has written a fairytale from all sides – the witch who birthed the legend, the men spelled, stranded sea-maidens, right down to the children born of the mythological creatures. These multiple perspectives make for a delicious and fanciful tale, but my favourite was Misskaella’s. Without her point of view we may have been made to think she was simply an evil ‘witch’, just as the residents of Rollrock do. But Lanagan allows us a glimpse into Miss’s sad childhood, her weird and wonderful connection with seal magic, even exploring her own doomed fate with the Selkie magic. Misskaella is a wonderfully tangled character; almost Shakespearean for the way her own magic turns in on itself.

‘Sea Hearts’ is a divinely lyrical retelling of an old myth. A Selkie fairytale narrated by all the players – from the witch to the cursed men, the stolen sea-maidens and the cubs they birthed. Lanagan’s tale is fanciful and Gothic, hauntingly complex and utterly beautiful.

5/5