I'll Tell You Mine - Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

In a response to the debates about gender bias in writing which flared up in 2011 after yet another all male Miles Franklin shortlist, Elizabeth Lhuede set readers and authors a bit of a challenge. It was the Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge. Elizabeth asked for people to read and review fiction written by Australian women writers. At last count 354 had signed up for the challenge and 776 reviews have been linked. Elizabeth suggested that writers review books from a outside their own genre.

So, it's taken me sometime but it was worth the wait, because reading I'll Tell You Mine and writing a review for the Challenge has been a delight.

As book reviews go, this one is perhaps a little odd. It focuses (perhaps obsesses?) over some rather arcane writer geek-nerd-trainspottery stuff. But hey, I write, therefore I look at how other writers write, and at how they make things work. I'm especially interested when they make things work that I think are really very difficult.

So, let me set the scene.

I was a goodly way into I’ll Tell You Mine before I noticed something. It was something I’m often aware of straight up in a book, and generally I notice it because it irritates me.

The narrator of the tale, Kate, an angry 15 year old Goth, was telling me her story, in the first person and in the present tense. That’s quite a tricky combination to pull off. In fact it often doesn’t work, because as the novel unfolds and tries to sustain an “in-the-momentness” it can all end up being less than Buddhist and more than a little bit laboured. In I’ll Show You Mine, not only does Pip Harry use both voice and tense with total control, she uses them to pitch-perfect affect.

I first met Pip in a writing course at UTS, we reconnected again through our marvelous agent, Sophie Hamley. There's a lot of excitement in finally holding in your hands the book of someone who was sitting in the same night class at uni, workshopping our pieces and dreaming our dreams.  When that book is a rip-roaring read and a skillful piece of writing - it's even more exciting.

The first person point of view puts a lot of pressure on the writer to maintain our interest and engagement as we set up camp inside the brain of a fictional character. We are trapped there for the duration, so if this relationship doesn’t work out, if we are not interested, if our empathy is not engaged, then the reader will probably bail. This is not to say we have to love, or even like, the head we are in, but we better be interested enough to want to stay there.

Coupling that kind of an intense voice with a present tense telling, where everything is happening now, where there is no distance from the moment we are in, or the voice of the character who has put us in it – well, I’ve sometimes found that particular combination to be wearing. Eventually the writer gives in and resorts to lengthy recounts in the past tense to fill us in on all that has happened in a life up till now, and I’m often left wondering why a more conventional narrative choice of past tense storytelling wasn’t chosen from the outset. But for a story told by a teenager, where small moments are of monumental importance, where the world is seen in absolute single focused, zoom-to-close-up clarity – it’s a compelling storytelling technique.

In fact, I’d venture to say, what better way to tell the tale of a teenager than in the most immediate way. When you’re in your teens you honestly don’t have a huge life experience to look back on. It all lies ahead but more importantly it’s all happening NOW!

As I read, I’ll Tell You Mine, I was swept up by the story. This is not just a technically clever book. As angry Kate does her best to burn every bridge, break every rule and jeopardize every friendship, I was consumed, caught up in the world of the boarding house of a girl’s school, the like of which would have had Enid Blyton reaching for a stiff drink.

The book reminded me that I haven’t read a lot of Young Adult literature for a long time. I guess like a lot of "no longer young" readers I’ve tended to leave it all behind, thinking it had nothing to say to me. Reading I’ll Tell You Mine reminded me what a wealth of story and emotion lies within the tales that a talented author can tell young adults.

As Kate makes poor choices, subsumes into a sea of hurt, obsesses over the wrong boy, fights  the wrong battles for the right reasons, it all came flooding back. The memories. The way as a teenager you really did feel stripped of your skin, nerves exposed, each slight, each setback capable of detonating your world and sending you into an abyss of misery. I confess I was somewhat relieved that I didn't live in that world anymore, but I'll tell you mine, I had an absolute ball re-visiting it.

Congratulations, Pip on a fabulous debut novel. May it be the first of many.

Doin' Crime with the Sydney Writers' Festival

This Sunday I'm spending Mother's Day at the beautiful NSW State Library giving a workshop as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival. The workshop is entitled - Doin' Crime.

For many writers getting the crime right is an intimidating prospect. How much insider knowledge will you need to make it authentic?  Should you plot and plan, or make it up as you go along?

My approach is that crime works as both a framing device that can help to give you the spine of the plot but more importantly the crime is an opportunity to develop character and setting.

Although a crime might lend itself well to the plotting of a novel, it is not a substitute for story.

In my reading and writing of crime it has always been the why of the crime that  has been intrinsically more interesting and has offered more emotional depth than the who dunnit, or even the how dunnit.

So, in putting together this workshop I came up with some questions to work through which will allow us to look at using crime to give us plot and structure and more:

What is needed to solve this crime? 

This involves thinking about the elements or legal proofs of the crime, clues, evidence, witnesses, physical material, alibis, motives, means etc?

How will my characters solve this crime? 

This involves making decisions about who knows what, who did what, who will discover what, and how they will discover it? It involves considering what obstacles the characters will face in solving the crime and how to weave the crime into a story and a plot. 

Whilst those questions involve using the crime as a way to frame plot and structure, the last question is the one that will provide the layers and depth to the tale.

Why tell the story of this crime? 

What does the choice of crime tell you about the characters, about the setting of the story? This involves thinking about the crime as more than just a plot device that pushes your characters around a chessboard. The crime should arise out of the characters and the place and be intrinsic to them.

I've spent the last few days assembling some teaching aids - such as the opening sequence of The Wire:



I think there's a lot that crime writers can learn from The Wire - something I've blogged about previously here at The Concrete Midden.

Closer to home we'll be having a look at some of the best bits of Blue Murder for that authentically Australian feel:




And in order to show how things change on the writing, rewriting, drafting, redrafting of a book I've been looking back over the very early notes I made on the idea that became The Old School.

It was amazing to see how much changed along the way and how much stayed the same.

There were still a few tickets available at the time of writing, so if you fancy spending Sunday talking crime at the State Library then you can book through the Sydney Writers' Festival pages.

It's time to #PhrockUp for #Phryne

If you've been watching the wonderful Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on ABC on Friday nights then you'll know that the fabulous Phryne Fisher really knows how to frock up.

 See what I mean?

I'm absolutely delighted to be speaking with Miss Fisher's creator, Kerry Greenwood at the Sydney Writers' Festival on Sunday 20 May. I was a frustrated fan last year at the gathering of the clans, aka The She Kilda Sisters in Crime Festival, when my panels clashed with Kerry's talks about the upcoming TV series.

This year ABC are really giving Australian crime writing a red hot go - Miss Fisher is a rich, lush romp that remains true to the novels' subversive take on cosy crime. Later in the year we can look forward to Peter Temple's Jack Irish taking to the screen in the guise of the perfectly cast Guy Pearce. It's great to see the national broadcaster seeking out and investing in local stories and doing them with flair.

So if you're in Sydney in May I'd encourage you to find something fabulous in the wardrobe, fire up the Hispano-Suiza, and come along to the Sydney Writers' Festival and #Phrockup for #Phryne.

PS: If you're a writer with a crime inside then you might want to pop along to a workshop I'm running for the SWF - Doin' Crime on Sunday May 13. Many potential crime writers often see doing the crime as the most difficult part of the book. In the workshop we're going to look at how the crime element of your work can inform character and plot and place.

She Came, She Saw, SheKilda

Over the past weekend women crime writers from across Australia, and from Singapore (Shamini Flint), South Africa (Margie Orford) and New Zealand (Vanda Symon), gathered in Melbourne for the 20th Anniversary of the Australian chapter of Sisters in Crime. The event was called SheKilda and from Friday night to Sunday afternoon there were panels on a range of subjects, across a range of crime writing genres involving 70+ writers.

Why a women only crime writing conference, you may ask?

In the week leading up to the conference, this question was one of a number of topics addressed on the SheKilda blog. I was very happy to be given the opportunity to submit an entry for the blog and I chose to look at the history of the Sisters in Crime organisation. I was left exhilarated at the progress within the women's crime writing world but also frustrated that many of the same issues that had led to the formation of Sisters in Crime were still there, and that was before I read Andrew Nette crunching numbers in his blog The State of Play!

So, why a women's crime writing conference?

Well, for one thing, we writers don't get out much you know. For most of us it's a solitary life, often spent in pyjamas (am I right Sulari Gentil?) forgetting about OH&S as we slump, hunch and sweat over keyboards, notebooks, or pages. Whilst twitter, facebook and email provide the cyber equivalent of the tea room, where we can stop, have a chat and procrastinate, it's not the same as a real life, honest to goodness, in the flesh meet up.

As Malla Nunn put it,  "There's something about being in the presence of so many smart, bright women." It's inspiring, that's what it is. Listening to so many writers sharing their thoughts, their processes, their take on writing, on crime, on society and politics and work and life - you come away energised, convinced that the stubborn draft you've been wrestling with single-handed isn't going to get the better of you.

Networking is one of those vile, cold, managerial terms, that has (to me) a slightly parasitic flavour to it. I like to think that what took place over the weekend at SheKilda was something less rigid, less vampiric than "networking." I think it was simpatico-ing. A whole lot of solitary souls suddenly recognising one another.

So that was how SheKilda looked from the point of view of an author. I met writers and I met readers. I hope that the readers enjoyed the weekend as much as the writers were.


Saturday night was Davitt Awards night - and over at Fair Dinkum Crime they have already blogged up a good wrap of the winners, who were:

Katherine Howell "Cold Justice" - Best Adult Novel
Penny Matthews "A Girl Like Me" - Best Young Adult Novel
Colleen Egan - "Murderer No More" - Best True Crime


I know that I have special reason to be grateful to the readers - they selected The Old School as The Davitt Readers Choice - for which I am extremely grateful. I even prepared a speech! Which due to a number of factors (2 hours sleep after a nasty bout of gastro overnight, low lighting, forgetting to put my glasses on thinking the font was big enough - it wasn't) I rather mumbled and stumbled my way through before sputtering to an end and slinking away...

No photos as yet, if any come to hand I'll blog them up. Till then keep an eye on some other blogs - Angela Savage has some great pre SheKilda goodness, and was tweeting the #SheKilda news from her iPad. Tara Moss has blogged a summary of the weekend and an excellent comprehensive list of authors' websites.

That's it for now .... I'm off to play with my new best friend.

Thank you Asher Literary Award.

A crime writer and a poet walk into a literary award night ...

... sounds like the start of a "walk into a bar" joke, does it not? Instead it was the start of a really wonderful night down in Melbourne a few weeks back.


When Clem, the ever optimistic Penguin editorial assistant who shepherds the Penguin stable of books into awards, contacted me to suggest The Old School should be put forward for The Asher Literary Award my reaction was curious, closely followed by dubious. 


Curious came first, as I'd not heard about this particular award, but dubious soon followed when I saw that tag "literary" and learnt that I'd need to provide a 500 word "artist's statement."


Just goes to show how you can be totally wrong about just about everything.


I read up about The Asher, and discovered the story of Helen Waltraud Rosalie Asher, a German refugee to Australia in the wake of World War Two, who established an award to recognise women writing on an anti-war theme or issue. 

So, I set about preparing an artist's statement and found that instead of the process being a drag, the opportunity to write about themes and ideas and how the story and plot informed those themes was actually liberating. 

The Old School is a crime novel. It sits firmly within the genre of crime, but when I wrote it I also had many ideas and concerns on my mind beyond just providing a murder plot.

Creating an artist's statement suddenly gave me a chance to explicitly articulate the political and cultural questions I had discovered throughout the journey of researching and writing the book.

So, when I was contacted by the chair of the judging panel Professor Kate Darian Smith and told that The Old School had been declared joint winner with Roberta Lowing's poetry collection Ruin (Interactive Press), well, thrilled, doesn't come close.

And so it came to pass that a crime writer and a poet walked into the Melbourne Writers Festival and walked out sharing an award for literature by women writing on an anti-war theme or issue. 

Thank you Helen Asher for your decision to create such a unique award. 

As writing an artist's statement is not something that you are asked to do everyday, I thought it might be interesting for any future entrants to this particular award to see the approach I took: - 

The Old School is a crime novel that bears witness to the enduring wounds of war. My vision for this work was to use the accessible genre of crime fiction to interrogate Australia’s contradictory, and politically malleable, myth making about war. In recent years we have adopted as our national foundation narrative an act of war that occurred nearly a century ago on the other side of the world. We celebrate the sacrifice that took place on the beaches of the Turkish peninsula, whilst comforting ourselves that such slaughter has never bloodied our land. 

My ambition in the novel was to demonstrate that this national myth is dishonest and destructive. It elevates tales of heroism and mateship in order to sanctify the brutal truth of war while denying the violence of white settlement. It is remembrance without reflection. 

The Old School challenges the nature of our chosen foundation myth through story and characters. Central to the novel are women, immigrants and Aboriginal Australians; characters who defy the national identity constructed by a male military narrative based on an imperial war. The Old School is an account of seeking the truth about murder, about the past and about war. It is fitting to approach these subjects through crime fiction. It is a genre that honours those who seek the truth about the most serious crime imaginable – murder. And after all, what is war but state-sanctioned murder perpetrated on an industrial scale?

Unlike the national myth in which the foreign dead are but a rumour, The Old School tracks the tragedy of a Vietnamese family through decades of war. It is told through the eyes of a young Australian-Vietnamese police detective, Nhu “Ned” Kelly, who discovers the truth of her family history; of three sisters who made three choices on how to survive in war. A Buddhist nun who joins the ranks of the martyrs who self-immolated for peace, another who joins the North Vietnamese to fight for independence and resolve the shame of a father who collaborated, and the third, Nhu’s mother, who chooses to leave and start afresh in a new land with an Australian soldier who can longer bear to do his duty. 

This modern war is interwoven with an investigation into the discovery of two bodies buried in the footings of a building in Bankstown. It is 1992, the year of the Mabo High Court ruling and Paul Keating’s Redfern park speech. As the excavation at the crime scene burrows deeper into the past, a son discovers his mother, a 1970s Aboriginal Land Rights activist, was murdered over of a piece of land already stained with Aboriginal blood. When Aboriginal bones dating from a white-settlement era massacre are discovered The Prime Minister’s words, “We committed the murders” take physical form.

Society demands each act of murder is investigated, the guilty punished, justice served. The Old School demands the same of Australia’s sentimental attachment to its stories of war.

It's almost summer (well it's almost the end of winter).

I don't do winter well. It's probably no coincidence that the rather long silence on the blog roughly corresponds to this Sydney winter, which has been extra cold, extra wet and extra miserable.

So it's probably also not a coincidence that having had my first outdoor swim of the new season at North Sydney Olympic Pool today in glorious mid-twenties temperature, I find myself back at the blog and doing a bit of an update.

Much too much to catch up on.

There was a lovely writing residency up at Varuna in the late autumn.

There were log fires, red wine, delicious food, quiet times writing in Eleanor Dark's studio

and long walks, that always seemed to end up somewhere that served good coffee and homemade chocolates.

Then there was the Sydney Writers' Festival where I had a marvellous opportunity to talk about crime with Shamini Flint and Nicole Watson, moderated by Mark Dapin in front of a knowledgable crowd. It was also the opportunity to experience first hand the "Oh my, that other writer's autograph queue is looooong" moment that all writers must face.

In our case, we were up against one of the SWFestival's BIG stars, Michael Cunningham. As our little crime panel wandered in and sat down we saw a long queue, a very long queue. It went out the door and down the stairs of the Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay. A few hardy souls of the the criminally minded found their way in and we signed, with delight.

Then as we scurried left the room, past that long, long line, we were waylaid by some delightful audience members clutching our books, unknowingly caught at the back of Mr Cunningham's queue (and possibly thinking to themselves, "Wow, these crime writers are coining it!")

Since then, I've been lucky to have shared microphones with Kirsten Tranter, James Bradley, Georgia Blain and Mardi McConnochie, at a series of "When Genres Attack" events with Shearers Bookshop. These events are an ongoing project that will be growing, and spreading, to many indie bookshops. It's a chance for writers to provide some of that extra je ne sais quoi that customers can get at a bricks and mortar bookshop, that the online experience just can't deliver. And that is, a good night out, in good company, taking part in a good conversation about books, writing, reading, and storytelling in all its forms.

There are more events coming - and I'll be updating the events page in the next day or so.

Then of course there is Book 2, which has been preoccupying my mind as I work through the editorial feedback from my thoughtful and insightful editor Jo Rosenberg. I say pre-occupied, as the winter blues have had me riddled with good old fashioned old self doubt.

Amazing what a difference one afternoon sitting in the warmth of the outdoor office, listening to the churn of the pool with the manuscript on the knees, can make.

Pages were struck through boldly, new bits added, structure starting to take a bit of a hopeful shape. Roll on spring and summer.

One of the many distractions to working on novel structure 24/7 has been my new role as Writer-in-Residence at North Sydney Council.

This has given me a space to work in, at the beautiful Don Bank Museum - a mid 1800s wooden house in North Sydney's CBD, surrounded by high-rise.

It has also given me a project - My Place at The Pool. As part of the North Sydney Olympic Pool's 75th Anniversary, I'm working on a way of collecting words and images about it from the people who love it. Drop in at the blog and add yours.

There is more news, a short story in the works, and an online writing course that's got me rather excited and adding to the deadlinitis, some future teaching news, and more.

But I'll save that for the next blog.

At this stage I'll close with some rather lovely news that arrived this week.

The Old School has been shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award along side two very fine books Line of Sight by David Whish-Wilson, and Prime Cut by Alan Carter (both Western Australian stories and writers!)

Congratulations to both David and Alan, two very fine books. If you haven't read them, go, do it now.

I'm also thrilled that my mate Angela Savage has made it two out of two with her second book, The Half Child, being shortlisted for the main Ned Kelly award. She's side by side with Chris Wormsely's Bereft and Geoffrey McGeachin's  The Diggers Rest Hotel. Angela has written a fabulous book, handling issues of culture and society in Thailand, doing what crime fiction does best.

That's it for now, more soon.

Go big or go home .....

... or you could go to the Sydney Writers' Festival, in May.

I'm looking forward to talking about crime fiction, The New School of crime fiction no less, with Shamini Flint, Nicole Watson and Mark Dapin, on 22 May.

Come along it should be fun.

And continuing the go big or go home theme, well sometimes, go small can be good too.

Coming at the end of May - The Old School in B format.

Same number of words, in a smaller and sexier spine.

 

Loving the new blue look, the nice words and that gorgeous little Penguin shimmying on the spine.