Getting started

I’ve always loved writing, and before I came to the Faber Writing Academy I’d write snippets, short scenes but never attempted a novel. The closest I’d got was writing the first draft of a novella and after an online scriptwriting course doing two first draft film scripts. I had the idea for The Nancys, the manuscript I worked on during the Faber Writing a Novel course, for ten years – the characters rattling around in my head. I tried to write but found my life would get in the way, I’m a parent with a busy job and I was also studying Post Grad business. When I finished my Masters I decided I wanted to finally prioritise my writing and use that time I had carved

Don’t write alone

I read a write up about Faber Writing Academy in a Saturday paper and to paraphrase Paddy: “you may be good at tennis but would you go and play Wimbledon without some coaching?”. For me, that was a Eureka moment. I had grown up thinking you had to write a novel on your own and then submit it – and if you could do that you might get published, and if you couldn’t do that then you wouldn’t.

Which isn’t true – you do have to write it but you don’t have to do it alone. And I would say now you can’t do it alone, not without any help. Before the Faber Writing Academy, I had no contact with authors or the publishing industry but I knew I should be writing, that it was something I was supposed to be doing.

Don’t stop writing

So fast-forward and I had completed Writing a Novel Part 1 and had signed on for Part 2 when life amped up. Suddenly all areas of my life were competing for my time and I was stressed. I decided to drop out of the Faber Writing Academy. My whole life writing was always the first to go. At this stage I had around 50,000 words of my first draft written. I emailed Paddy and Toni and told them this was what I was thinking of doing. That I’d pick it up again the following year.

They came back to me and said don’t. That they had seen writers do this before and not come back. And they were right, I know if I had left before setting up a writing practice, or completing my first draft, that would have been it for me. All over.

Every step of the way Toni and Paddy and Faber have been there. Not only do you get this great writers’ education and a first-draft done, but you get to be part of a writers’ network.

My class became a writers’ group. We still meet up Tuesday nights at the pub to workshop. Not always everyone, but we are all there for each other, in contact, and I cannot overemphesise the power of that as well.

Get practical skills and insights into publishing

One of the things I love about Faber is you get these brilliant teachers with their own style of teaching and experience. It is practical so you learn tools which you can apply straight away and that are relevant, and you learn about the publishing industry which is vital, with guest lecturers including authors, editors and agents.

You also get the opportunity to have a piece of your work published in the annual anthology which goes out to agents and publishers. Several of us were contacted by an agent to see our manuscripts based on this.

Becoming a writer and getting published

And most importantly you get to claim the title of writer, which I’ve previously written about. And this isn’t even going into the benefits of having an accountable weekly word count which pushes you through your draft, or the workshopping which is terrifying, but also the most fantastic gift.

I didn’t drop out. I completed my manuscript and after rewriting I sent it to that agent who requested it. She came back with a ‘no’ but gave me notes on how to improve it. Later I found her “no” was actually an “it’s not ready yet”. I was grateful and kept working on it using everything I learnt, redrafting, workshopping and rewriting again.

Then I submitted a version of The Nancys to the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished manuscript competition and got a Highly Commended, that in turn led to getting my agent, Grace at Curtis Brown, and from there, and many more drafts later, we sent it out to publishers and I ended up signing with Allen & Unwin.

This novel features lots of laugh out loud moments, and captures the sense of small town prejudice while featuring larger than life characters.
– VPLA Judges’ comments on The Nancys

It changed my life

But if it hadn’t been for the Faber Writing Academy, my classmates, and the two brilliant teachers there’s no way I’d be where I am now with my writing, let alone having a novel come out. It literally changed my life and I thank my tutors, Paddy and Toni, for that.

Rob McDonald is a Kiwi living in Melbourne with his two daughters and an extended family of two baby mommas, an estranged cat, Flower, and Stevie Nicks the chicken. Rob attended Faber Academy‘s Writing a Novel Stage 1 and Stage 2 in 2016. Rob realised while studying journalism that writing fiction, rather than reporting facts, was his true bent. His debut novel The Nancys is published in June 2019, and you can read an excerpt here. Read more from Rob on his experiences with Faber Writing Academy in this blog post on coming out as a writer and in this great interview with Toni Jordan for Melbourne Writers Festival.

The post How Faber Writing Academy helped Rob McDonald write The Nancys appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

The inspiration for stories is a mysterious thing. My story ideas come from a mix of experiences or memories or things I’ve read, seen or heard. These ideas sit in my head for a long time, years even, not doing much. I like to think of them as seeds. Sometimes a new idea, or an event in my life might suddenly trigger one of those seeds to “sprout”.

The rather strange idea for a story about a boy who can’t stop growing and an encyclopedia set had been in my head for almost a decade but It wasn’t until I was writing my previous novel A Most Magical Girl that it started to call me. “Write me. Write me,” it said. “Everything will be ok if you just write me.” When I finally sat down to write, the character Lenny was there waiting for me. I felt immediately comfortable in her voice. She was ready to tell her story to me.

I think the memory that most inspired Lenny’s Book of Everything was the encyclopedia set that we owned. It was purchased when I was about eight and it was a huge deal in our household. We loved that encyclopedia set until it fell apart! My siblings and I spent countless hours exploring those pages. This was an age before Google or the internet. As an eight-year old I remember being so excited to have all this knowledge within my reach. It felt like the whole world had moved into a bookshelf in our dining room.

Memories of my own childhood also inspired the story. Lenny’s Book of Everything is set in the 1970s, which was when I grew up. I loved thinking about the comics I read and the cartoons and television I watched. I thought a lot about my family and my close relationship with my brother and sisters. I remembered how we fought and played and cared for each other and how much we made each other laugh.

Perhaps the trigger that caused all these thoughts and ideas to “sprout” though, was a recent experience. Before I began writing Lenny’s Book of Everything I was dealing with grief because my mother had died. I was thinking a lot about the experience of caring for her and losing her. I was thinking about love. I was thinking about what an amazing thing it is to be alive and living in this wonderful world. I think all these things came together at the right time to help me create the story of Lenny’s Book of Everything.

Read more about how the loss of her mother inspired Karen Foxlee’s writing in this piece in the Guardian, while you can learn more about the book below, or by checking out these reviews from adult readers and youngsters who are universally falling in love with the book. You can also discover how the gorgeous cover for Lenny’s Book of Everything was created in this blog post.

The post Karen Foxlee on the inspiration behind Lenny’s Book of Everything appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

Nichola Beukes was our inaugural Faber Writing Academy scholarship winner for Patti Miller’s True Stories course, and here she shares her experiences of the course and the development of her writing.

There is a delicious anticipation upon entering a secondhand bookshop: the thrill of the chase! I breathe deep, and always pause to get my bearings: stroke a spine lightly here or there; pull out something interesting as a curiosity. What will I find today? Are catalogued sections well ordered or do I need to keep an eye out behind random pillars and dig through teetering piles in obscure corners? Used books are a particular delight as they are more likely to carry the detritus of the former owner’s life – ticket stubs, lists of various sorts (often housekeeping), contemporary newspaper clippings: anything pressed into use as an urgent bookmark, then forgotten. And, ahhh, the smell…

My writing is similar. Anticipation when I first sit down to write, a few random forays searching through shelves in my mind for the precise moment frequently just out of reach; if I’m lucky sight, taste, smell, hearing and touch will kick in, and then the jittery sense of recognition when suddenly everything coalesces. As a life writer this can be a terrifying process when you open an innocuous-looking paper parcel in your memory and it turns out to have very large pointy teeth.

Nine months ago, my friend Meera and I took a joint decision to support each other as she studies and I write. It was Meera who prodded at me to apply for Patti Miller’s True Stories at Faber Writing Academy and Patti who led me gently but firmly into a life writing. Patti is a no-nonsense and highly inspirational guide, whose celebration and enjoyment of memoir writing is infectious. Her practical advice is excellent, with plenty of opportunity to try out the skills she lays out. The class atmosphere is nurturing and supportive, but crucially, honestly critical. Agent and editor guest speakers also illuminate the business of writing, but it is Patti’s kind and honest tutelage that finds all her students making great strides in their own writing, taking what they need from her and each other.

What did Patti teach me? Naturally, many things, but the standout concept that changed my writing practice is the critical difference between showing and telling. This has had a knock on effect on so many areas of my work: the judicious, conscious use of either; the challenge of offering enough to the reader, controlling with a cinematic quality; and particularly the need to let go and trust the reader to do the work. The sweep of your life may well be like millions of others, but the details are what make it unique. Paraphrasing Patti, be awake to your life and the world around you. Trust the reader with those details and let them do the work of interpreting your senses.

Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Wole Soyinka asks “How far back should memory reach?”.  Are these my memories, my siblings’ memories, my parents’, grandparents’, neighbours’ memories? Am I true to myself and them? I have pondered on this throughout Patti’s course and my current interpretation is that I need to follow my feelings of heightened risk in memory wherever those take me, pointy teeth notwithstanding, because there I find truth. My fellow students and I can all remember moments in class when classmates risked everything and opened up a memory into a moment of brilliant writing. The punch of recognition of the human spirit is visceral. And the joy of it is that for each person it is different. It does not necessarily need drama, sometimes a quiet infiltration is perfectly sufficient and utterly believable.

Patti Miller’s True Stories runs again at Sydney’s Faber Writing Academy in 2019, from February to May, with applications now open – including applications for our scholarship.

Born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Nichola Beukes has degrees from Harvard and the University of Kent at Canterbury, neither of which prepared her successfully for the realities of living in a multicultural, cross-generational household dominated by a domestic landscape of Parkinson’s and dementia. Her small daughter and the recent addition of a fearsome hound are helping her keep perspective, assisting her in creating space for her writing and flexing her planning-while-walking muscles. She is currently writing her memoir, the story of growing up in a white family living and working in black communities at the height of Apartheid South Africa.

The post Writing True Stories with Patti Miller appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

First up, here’s Davina to explain the book:

This title celebrates the joys, triumphs and tragedies of a first birthday party. This milestone is becoming ever more celebrated in our culture as modern parents feel the need for champagne and a pat on the back for surviving their first year of parenthood. While the text is minimal, the subtext explores themes of community, family, friendship, the passing and marking of time, and the importance of ritual.

Birthday Baby follows a group of children from extreme excitement to inevitable cranky breakdown, and in following this journey, young readers will find themselves and their own emotional landscape within Freya’s gorgeous illustrations, which capture the sweetness, humour and pathos of the baby’s world.

I wrote this book with my friend and fellow author, Jane Godwin. Jane and I share a love of – and fascination with! – babies. I think that’s one of the reasons we’re such good friends. We are often sending each other text-message photos of cute and funny and interesting babies we meet, and remembering cute babies we have seen on our travels around the country as authors. While I don’t have children myself, my friends are all at the age where they are having children, so I am attending a lot of first birthdays. Seeing so many babies all together, each so full of expression and personality, each so beautifully dressed, was definitely an inspiration for this book.

Jane notes why all those interesting babies will appeal to other little readers:

The essence of the book is the many personalities and moods of babies, and the fact that a baby’s mood or emotional state can change in a matter of seconds! The story is intended to capture all the funny and intense moments that babies go through in the drama of their daily lives.

Can a baby book verge on being too cute? I’m loving this little scene though. @allenandunwin @janiegodwin @davina.bell

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Aug 21, 2017 at 9:46pm PDT

Babies love looking at other babies, and we wanted a book where the baby ‘reader’ would delight in recognising and exploring all the situations and reactions of the babies in the book. Our aim was to have a book where each baby was demonstrating a very recognisable emotion or personality trait so that other young readers could recognise these and it would be helpful in the recognition of mood in others. It would be a great book to give to a baby on their first birthday, a first book of empathy!

with Davina adding:

We had previously collaborated with Freya Blackwood on another picture book, Hattie Helps Out. Something about Freya’s work perfectly captures the essence of childhood, and we thought that she would be able to beautifully convey the emotions and expressions of the babies in this story.

I’m in my happy sketchy place, drawing babies and toddlers this time. Such variety and joy brought by picture books. Definitely the best job EVER! With @janiegodwin and @davina.bell

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Jul 10, 2017 at 6:38pm PDT

A bumbling tumble of babies! With @janiegodwin and @davina.bell and @allenandunwin

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Aug 3, 2017 at 10:59pm PDT

Freya describes her thoughts behind illustrating the book, and trying a new technique to bring the babies to life:

Being a book for very young children, the illustrations for Birthday Baby needed to be bright. I felt the best way to achieve this was to use oil paints for the babies’ clothing.

Trialling some clothing colour.

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Jul 19, 2017 at 8:45pm PDT

Rather than just painting the babies’ clothes straight on them, I tried to get some texture into the illustrations by using little lino blocks for each outfit. This meant a fair amount of lino block cutting, and sore hands, but the authors of the book, Jane and Davina, happened to be visiting us in Orange one day, so I put them to work with lino tools, and we soon got through the bulk of the work.

Lots of block prints. Sore hands and back. No desire to cut or print lino for a while. @allenandunwin @janiegodwin @davina.bell

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Nov 19, 2017 at 1:14pm PST

I then printed each little garment for each page, using a fast-drying oil paint. These prints were scanned separately from the pencil and watercolour drawings of the babies and backgrounds, and the whole lot were composited digitially. It was a great little experiment and I think the final result looks lively and bright.

Today I’m just playing with paper dolls.

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Jul 19, 2017 at 9:18pm PDT

Working out how to get the brightest colours.

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Oct 9, 2017 at 6:44pm PDT

It’s been a lengthy process to dress these babies, but along the way I have learnt to use the computer as a glue stick!

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Nov 30, 2017 at 2:32am PST

Davina has fond memories of her day helping Freya with the illustrations:

Jane and I visited Freya right when she was in the middle of doing the illustrations for the book. She was using a brand new (for her) technique called lino cutting, which is like making little stamps that you dip in ink and press onto the paper. She was using these for the babies’ clothes instead of painting or colouring them. We all sat out together in the sunshine at her table and cut out the little stamps from blocks of rubber. Around us, her greyhound and rabbit wandered through the garden as we chatted about being children’s book creators. It is one of the happiest working memories of my author life.

lino-cutting with @freyablackwood in the sunshine

A post shared by Jane Godwin (@janiegodwin) on Oct 17, 2017 at 6:48pm PDT

I think for once I’ve actually succeeded in implementing a different technique! All little outfits are the cutest lino block prints. And thanks to @janiegodwin and @davina.bell and their exceptional lino cutting skills, I might even make my deadline! @allenandunwin

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Nov 7, 2017 at 6:00pm PST

A sleeping baby in a picture book can only mean one thing- I’ve reached the final page! @allenandunwin @janiegodwin @davina.bell

A post shared by Freya Blackwood (@freyablackwood) on Nov 10, 2017 at 9:58pm PST

And here’s the three wonderful picture book creators together again at the launch of Birthday Baby in Melbourne:

with good mates @freyablackwood and @davina.bell chatting all things picture books. Thank you everyone who came along and special thanks to @little_bookroom for hosting such a fun evening #birthdaybaby @allenandunwin @courageous_pages

A post shared by Jane Godwin (@janiegodwin) on Aug 7, 2018 at 6:22am PDT

Or that should be, Happy birthday Birthday Baby book!

For those interested in creating books for children, Jane Godwin & Davina Bell are our tutors for the Faber Writing Academy course Getting Published as a Writer for Children in Sydney on September 8 and Melbourne on September 15. This one day course will help answer questions about what publishers are looking for, how to polish and submit work and much more.

The post Creating Birthday Baby appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

I have the occasional fantasy where I know exactly what my writing process is. Where I sit down with a list of directions – Step 1, Step 2, etc – and all I have to do is follow that list and I’ll end up with a book.

Ha.

Writing a novel is a curious mixture of art and craft. They’re both essential – take out the art and you end up with something that’s meticulously structured but boring. Take out the craft, and what’s left is interesting but chaotic.

I always find it really interesting trying to work out how a character goes from one state of mind to another, e.g. from believing intensely in something to disbelieving it. If it happens too quickly it’s not convincing. And if it’s too easy, it’s boring. Second draft is full of these challenges, which is one of the reasons I love it. #therogues #secretguardians #childrensnovel #fantasy #adventure #kidsbooks #kidsbookstagram #author #kidlit #bookish #bookstagram #instabooks #adventure #authorlife #seconddraft

A post shared by Lian Tanner (@liantannerbooks) on Jul 24, 2017 at 11:32pm PDT

Trying to make sense of the second act of #secretguardians. At the moment it’s just a huge muddle. So I’ve spent the morning drawing lots of boxes with arrows going in all directions. At some stage it has to fall into place. #therogues #secretguardians #childrensnovel #fantasy #adventure #kidsbooks #kidsbookstagram #author #authoratwork #authorsofinstagram #kidlit #bookish #bookstagram #instabooks

A post shared by Lian Tanner (@liantannerbooks) on Jun 21, 2017 at 8:17pm PDT

It’s the art side that makes it impossible to follow a list of directions. It’s the art side that gives a story its heart.

It’s the craft which makes that heart accessible to the reader.

So every book has its own process. But there are certain stages that seem to remain constant. The first is a period of daydreaming, when I’m wandering vaguely through the world waiting for an idea to strike me. Or maybe waiting for another idea to strike me – because I find that the most interesting books happen when two conflicting ideas bump up against each other and create sparks.

A city full of overprotected children/a dangerous museum.

A ship that carries the hope of the world/a cult of rabid anti-machinists.

A town suffused with magic/a population that refuses to believe in it.

The second stage is the accumulation stage. I’m still daydreaming, but now I’ve got a central idea for other ideas to flock to, like stray cats sniffing their way towards a bowl of bacon. This is one of my favourite parts. There are lots of ‘aha’ moments, lots of butchers paper, lots of waking up in the middle of the night and fumbling for the notebook beside my bed.

I usually plot a bit. It gives me a sense of security to know how the story is going to begin and end, and what the major turning points are. But there always comes a point with plotting where I grow impatient and want to start writing. And however detailed my plot, it never survives the first draft …

… which I no longer call the first draft. These days, it’s the play draft or prenatal draft. Something that encourages me to muck around and not pin things down too quickly. It’s the finding-out-the-story draft, discovering the layers and the depth and the relationships between people, and the quirks and contradictions that make those people who they are.

Cold mornings at the keyboard. #tasmania #winter #authoratwork #mittens #merinoandpossum

A post shared by Lian Tanner (@liantannerbooks) on Aug 27, 2017 at 5:12pm PDT

But I grow impatient with that too. Once I’ve got a sense of the whole story, I want to start shaping it. I want to strengthen some bits and get rid of others, so that the story shines through. That’s when I start using more serious names like Second Draft and Third Draft.

Sometimes I write these drafts fast, sometimes I write them slowly, depending on the book. Sometimes I spend half an hour daydreaming between each paragraph, and sometimes I go off on completely the wrong track for a week or so before I realise it’s a dead end. But I try to keep a light hold on the story so that I’m still discovering things right up to the end.

And then, when it’s all done, and the book handed in and edited and proofread, I start again, looking for ideas that strike sparks. And indulging myself in the fantasy that I’ll be able to write this new book the same way I wrote the last one.

Lian Tanner’s most recent book is the first in The Rogues series, Accidental Heroes, with the second Secret Guardians coming later this year. The Hidden series was recently republished, and you can learn about the process for redesigning these covers here. Learn more about Lian’s writing over on her blog, and learn more about the craft of writing with Faber Writing Academy.

A post shared by Lian Tanner (@liantannerbooks) on Oct 7, 2017 at 3:28pm PDT

The post Lian Tanner on her writing process appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

All writers have a distinctive voice, which conveys a sense of their individual being on the page. Voice is how the writer ‘sounds’ as the narrator, the person telling the story. It is constructed by personality and experiences and is unique to each writer.

Your writing voice will reveal more about the kind of person you are than anything you write about because it contains your characteristic approach to yourself, others and the world. If your approach is laconic then, probably, your voice on the page will be laconic; if your approach is playful then your voice will be as well. Your voice on the page will be most at ease when it echoes your speaking voice.

But which speaking voice? We all use different voices for different people and different situations. When we speak to our mothers, we will no doubt use a different voice from the one we use for a lover, different again for our employees, or boss, our children, sisters, or the shop assistant at the department store. We each modify our voice according to the relationship, showing different aspects of ourselves each time, so much so that when we have to speak at the same time to two different people with whom we have widely different relationships it can be very awkward! So how do we know which voice to use when we are writing for an unknown audience?

And then there are all the inner pressures on voice. All the books you have read can get in the way and influence you to write in the voice of writers you admire; if you try to write in a ‘literary’ voice, you may end up sounding as if the books you’ve read are stuck in your throat. Or you might be worried about what people will think of you and your voice will become stiff and ‘proper’; or hiding something and your voice becomes jerky and evasive; or trying to please everyone and your voice becomes bland and over-sweet; or feeling angry and sorry for yourself and your voice becomes accusing or manipulative; or feeling superior or righteous and your voice becomes distorted with pride.

But you do have an authentic voice, the one you use when you feel accepted, when all the aspects of yourself come together, the voice you use when talking to someone whom you trust and with whom you feel ‘at home’.

Four tips for finding an authentic voice

1. Imagine that your only reader is a trusted friend. Someone who accepts you as you are, someone with whom you can talk about anything without self-consciousness. You don’t have to try to impress them, but neither are you self-indulgent as you may be in a diary or journal.
2. Try not to imagine what other people will think of you when they read your story. Everyone will think something different—we can’t control that in life, let alone on the page. Every time you think Oh, what will my mother, or sister, or the woman at the yoga class think? firmly put it aside and keep writing!
3. Try not to manipulate the reader. That is, try not to get them to feel sorry for you, or angry for you, or impressed and amazed by you. Let your stories speak for themselves. Most readers react strongly against a voice that is pushing them to feel in a certain way.
4. Read your writing out aloud to someone else or onto a recording device every now and then, to check the voice. See if the rhythms and expressions sound like you. Or ask someone else to read it aloud to you to see how it ‘sounds’.

This is an edited extract from Patti Miller’s Writing True Stories, a complete guide to writing autobiography, memoir, personal essay, biography, travel and creative nonfiction. For those in or around Sydney, Patti Miller‘s True Stories course runs at Faber Writing Academy early each year, with a scholarship available, while you can also meet Patti at our Sydney Open Evening.  

Hear Patti discuss her discovery of memoir; the unreliable narrator of memory; the richness of uncovering the Australian indigenous culture and the memoirs of white settlers on Conversations With Writers:

The post Patti Miller on Finding Your Voice appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

As a child I often daydreamed about being a writer. I used to write on any scrap of paper I could find, until finally when I was fifteen I got a typewriter for my birthday. I really wanted to be the next R L Stine or Anne M Martin and most of my writing from these days was in this frame of thinking. Fast forward to adulthood (and thankfully the days of laptops) and instead of writing teen fiction, I’ve instead written a gritty, confronting and shocking memoir about my childhood and early adulthood. Not quite what I had planned, but still, a writer all the same.

I guess I always knew I had this big sensationalised story lurking inside me that potentially could make a good book one day; and of course I knew that I loved to write, but I just didn’t know how to tie those two things together and make my story come alive on the page. I had read that often a book is either sensationally written or just sensational….but hardly ever both and I was very conscious that my story was sensational. I wanted to make sure that the calibre of my writing matched the sensationalism of my story because I knew in my heart I didn’t want to share it if I couldn’t do myself justice.

I learned of Patti Miller’s True Stories memoir course at Faber Writing Academy just after giving birth to my second son. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I applied anyway and was accepted. I quickly worked out that if I fed the baby and ran out the door and ran straight back out the Faber door after the class, I could get home in time for the next feed….making it somewhat workable. I had my heart set on it working.

Each Friday morning, over the months of the course, I became part of a group of writers who soon became good friends. Together we learned so many skills and techniques and week by week I became increasingly focussed on my end goal of writing an actual book. I wrote my first two chapters over the course of the classes, which were (positively) reviewed by the class. This gave me the confidence and a baseline drive to work from when I was eventually out on my own.

In my book, The House of Lies, there are some very confronting issues and scenes in the story arc and I really believe that Patti Miller’s True Stories course was crucial in developing the skills to do this in the way I really wanted to do it. Patti taught me to just get it all out on the page, as if no one else but me was going to read it, and then she also taught me how to pull it all back into shape for the reader.

With a diverse range of characters in my book (some very lovable ones and a few others much less so), I found the course extremely helpful in mastering how to write the characters without judgement or slant, so that the reader can make up their own minds.

For example; there is no eloquence in me writing a character as an angry witch, and just hoping or presuming that the reader will take my word for it. I had to learn how to write without imposing my own thoughts or opinions; to show the reader each character through dialogue, body language etc and allow the reader to determine their own thoughts about the character themselves. I had to write trusting my reader, before I really even trusted myself.

The other skill I found my feet with in the class was the ability to change voice. This was really crucial to writing The House of Lies because my voice changes constantly throughout the story; starting as a six year old and travelling through my teenage years into young adulthood. I had to change my voice in order to make sure that the reader could truly experience things with me. I had to write without the cloud of hindsight or wisdom of adulthood overshadowing the story.

The Faber Writing Academy course set me on journey where the thought of NOT finishing my book wasn’t an option anymore. And today, just a few years after completing the course at Faber, I am lucky enough to call myself a published writer.

Renee McBryde majored in Community Welfare at university. She has worked in the community services sector for the last fifteen years, primarily working with disadvantaged children. Renee currently works in Child Protection for the Northern Territory government. She also teaches various Community Welfare courses to upskill other professionals within the sector. Renee lives in Alice Springs with her husband and children. The House of Lies is her first book. 

Patti Miller‘s True Stories course runs at Faber Writing Academy in Sydney early each year, with a scholarship available for 2018. She has recently published an accompanying book, Writing True Stories. which offers a complete guide to writing biographies and autobiographies, memoirs, essays, travel tales and more. 

The post Trust the reader appeared first on Things Made From Letters: the Allen & Unwin blog.

In 2005, Sydney’s Justice & Police Museum hosted City of Shadows, an exhibition of early twentieth-century police photographs recovered from a flooded warehouse. Many of the accompanying files that would have given the photographs context had been lost, so they were mostly selected for their provocative compositions, the half-stories they told and the eerie, alter-Sydney they invoked.

Visiting the exhibition was like witnessing a séance. From the walls of the museum, forgotten ghosts of the city gazed through us. For many of the photographs’ subjects, this would have been the only time in their lives they’d been photographed, and so—despite the trauma of their recent arrest—they’d made the most of it, dressing in their best clothes, possibly performing their role as criminal for a camera associated with the burgeoning popular art form of the movies. Even in the mugshots we did not see the deadpan expressions we have come to expect; instead we saw emotion—either performed, or caught when the subject was off guard.

I left the exhibition with the accompanying book, and later poured over the photographs for traces of suburbs I thought I knew. One picture in particular captured my attention: a mugshot of a man in a cheap suit and tie, his short hair combed into a sideways part. What struck me most was the melancholy that haunted the man’s eyes. He seemed to be performing his normalcy, not his criminality, and only just managing to hold himself together.

I flipped to the back of the book to read a brief footnote:

Eugenia Falleni, 1920, Central cells. When hotel cleaner ‘Harry Leon Crawford’ was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife three years earlier, he was revealed to be in fact Eugenia Falleni—a woman and mother who had been passing as a male since 1899 …

Turning back to the portrait of the sad man, his face—or my perception of his face—morphed into that of a woman’s. But in the moment that he, the sad man, morphed into she, the ‘cross-dressing murderer’, I have to admit that the thrill I felt was associated with my own jolt in perception, like the moment Escher’s black birds turn into white birds, flying in the opposite direction.

The portrait was of an indeterminate person: an unstable man and a reluctant woman at the same time. One look at Falleni’s harrowed expression, however, and the thrill quickly turned into a chill. What would it have been like, to cause these jolts in perception? What would it be like to live your life oscillating between the different roles others expected to see?

About Half Wild

Sydney, 1938. After being hit by a car on Oxford Street, sixty-three-year-old Jean Ford lies in a coma in Sydney Hospital. Doctors talk across her body, nurses jab her in the arm with morphine, detectives arrive to take her fingerprints. She has £100 in her pocket, but no identification. Memories come back to her-a murder trial, a life in prison-but with each prick of the needle her memories begin to shift.

Wellington, 1885. Tally Ho doesn’t need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or a cart driver or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Wellington is her town and she makes up the rules. Papà takes her fishing, Nonno teaches her how to jump fences on his horse Geronimo-life gallops on the way it should, until a brother, baby William, is born. ‘Go and play with your sisters,’ Papà says, but wearing dresses and sipping tea is not the life for Tally Ho. Taking the advice of her hero, Harry Crawford, she runs away.

Sydney, 1917. The burned body of a woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Was she a mad woman? A drunk who’d accidentally set herself on fire? Nobody knows, until-three years later-a tailor’s apprentice tells police that his mother went missing that same weekend, and that his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be. Who, then, is he?

Read an extract below:

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Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk was passed on by everyone in Hollywood in the galley form – does that mean they received a preview copy of the book?

Yes, galleys are the book at the proofreading or copy-editing stage, just prior to being published. All the studios scout the publishers and literary agents to try and get advance copies of a book before anyone else (just like Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada when she tries to get an advance copy of the new Harry Potter book).

Literary agents are implicit in releasing material to producers and the studios. A film sale can drive up the price of publishing rights so it is a common practice. Twentieth Century Fox had a book scout in New York whose sole job was to find those books that could be films – that scout read Fight Club and sent it to the studio in LA, telling them there was a film in the book. The studio executives on the receiving end were unconvinced, concerned the material was too dark. The executives then sent the manuscript to producers to see if someone could find the film (adaptations are never just a filmed version of the book, they are interpretations of the book and the studio needed someone to interpret the book in a way that made commercial sense to them). I read the manuscript and saw the movie instantly. It then took me five months to convince the studio to option the material.

You mentioned you put a group of unknown actors together to do a read-through of the book and then taped the highlights. Why?

I realised the studio was reluctant to option Fight Club. They had an assessment done on the manuscript that concluded the story was too ‘uncomfortable’ and nihilistic to work as a film. I knew I had to counter that opinion by giving the studio a new vision of the story. Of course, no one reads in Hollywood, and particularly for a second time, so I thought up the idea of recording the book on tape – now all the executives had to do was listen! The idea was to give the studio the film before they spent a dime in optioning the material. Of course a read through of the whole book would have taken too long, so I started editing the manuscript and reordering events to make it fit the structure of a studio film.

So you gave them a snapshot of the story and characters to gain their buy-in?

I actually taped the read through – so it was a condensed version of the book on tape (about 50 minutes long). The head of the studio played the tape on her way to her weekend home in Santa Barbara which, as fate would have it, was about 50 minutes of uninterrupted freeway driving. I think the tape gave the studio executives a sense of the dark humour in the story, particularly the narrator’s commentary. It also gave them the power of the story as it builds to its twist ending.

Have you used this technique again with other books you suggested for screen?
It was months of work editing the book, finding the right actors, rehearsing, hiring the sound equipment and, with no guarantee the studio would option the material, a huge risk. I did know the book inside out by the time I had finished, however, and this helped in working with the screenwriter Jim Uhls. The producer’s job is to secure the rights to the material as well as guide the screenwriter in finding the film. I also managed to get Fox to option the Australian novel Lambs of God by Marele Day by attaching Winona Ryder to star in the film. The studio loves material that is packaged with either a director or a star. David Fincher (the director) was attached to Fight Club before the studio stepped up to option the book.

Was the read-through helpful in identifying what the highlights would be – did the process of hearing the characters speak transform them for the screen?

The book is actually a collection of short stories hobbled to together to appear more like a novel. It was disjointed and some of the stories were particularly brutal. The studio had said no initially for good reason. It was hard to see the film in the material. When I did the highlights, I focused on the central theme and cut out elements that were objectionable or tangential to that theme. I then reordered the story to work in a linear fashion. Interestingly, I used the 12 stages of the hero’s journey to lay out this more linear progression (which I discuss in my Transform your Character Faber Writing Academy course). It helped me see the turning points around which the story pivoted. So the editing of the book happened before we taped the read through. It was in defining the structure that I got the story to work both on tape and then in the film. Everyone thinks of Fight Club as being so subversive and left of centre, which it is, thematically speaking, and yet it so traditionally structured; 3 acts, the 12 stages of the hero’s journey. Structure is essential in building the moments that lead to a character’s transformation. Without structure it is just a collection of scenes that builds to little.

Was it this experience that created your focus on character transformation or is this something you’ve always recognised as being essential to a good story?

I have always loved stories and films about a character struggling and being better for that struggle. We all struggle at times in our lives and it is good to be reminded that good does come out of it in the end. I think we are drawn to stories of transformation because we secretly all want it in our own lives – only we want it without the pain and struggle – that’s why so many of us stay stuck. Transformation is hard work. Our job as writers is to make it hard for our characters to transform so that when they eventually do it is seen as worthy, as an accomplishment to celebrate. There is no drama in seeing a character change in an instant, from one scene to the next. Of course there are stories where characters go through no change at all … Hamlet possibly… and these stories are tragedies and equally valid as stories. It is transformation, however, that leads us to new places and offers hope for us in our lives. This is why stories are so important, they gives us clues as how to better live our own lives.

Thanks to Ross for sharing such fascinating insights, we are excited to have Ross delivering his new one-day course Transform your Character (using plot & structure) for us on Saturday 29 April in Sydney. Ross knows that readers only engage with a story when they care about the characters, and he reveals the secret to making them care is to show a character’s transformation. It will be a hands-on workshop so bring your characters to work on.

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We’re a little bereft, right now. We’ve spent weeks inside all the Writing a Novel – Second Draft students’ manuscripts, being thrilled by their images and details, entranced by their characters and gripped by their plots. We’ve read them over and over, and we’ve thought about them when we should have been making dinner. This behind-the-scenes engagement is one of the joys of the mentor.

A novel manuscript is a long and involved work—it’s the marathon of creative writing. The author students vary in age and background and profession, and if you passed them on the street, you might think they had little in common. That’s not the case. They are united by their passion and their intellect and their reverence for the elegance of stories and of words. They understand the wonder and agony of time spent quietly making something beautiful out of nothing but their own thoughts and the movement of their fingers on the keyboard.

Despite the solitary nature of the writer’s life, the process of constructing fiction is more collaborative than might be expected. The very act of coming together as a group to learn more about the craft of fiction and to share work with each other fundamentally changes a writer’s understanding and appreciation of how fiction works, and how best to make it.

There comes a point in the career of every writer when they cease to define themselves primarily as a reader. As readers, their first thought is their emotional or intellectual response to the writing. Isn’t that wonderful (or terrible)? The reader thinks. How exciting, or joyful, or sad. In our experience, it’s a distinct moment when they find themselves reading as a writer. When they are reading in this new way, their first thought is completely different. Instead of simply enjoying the piece, and feeling things, the writer thinks: How did they do that? It’s a new response. They’re no longer drivers, merely sitting behind the wheel and turning it so and working the pedals on the floor while the engine does its own thing. Now, they are mechanics. Now they can’t wait to lift the bonnet and see what makes the whole thing tick. They have a new appreciation for the machinery and the intricate parts of the engine, even the smallest levers they’d never thought about before. They long to roll their sleeves up and get to it. As teachers of creative writing, it’s our privilege to help our students find this moment.

Despite being at the very beginning of their writing careers, our Writing a Novel students have found the courage to share their work with us. We, their teachers, are proud of them all.

During our 2016 novel courses, many generous and wise writers and publishing professionals shared their knowledge and experience with us. We’re grateful to them all, but especially writers Andrew O’Hagan, Wayne Macauley, Steven Carroll, Louise Doughty and Ross Grayson Bell, agents Grace Heifetz and Clare Forster, publishers Annette Barlow, Mandy Brett and Aviva Tuffield, and coaches Ailsa Piper and Maude Davey. To the editors and publishers at Allen & Unwin: thank you all for your time and advice. We hope we haven’t taken too much undue advantage of your kindness and proximity. To April Murdoch, Sarah Menary, Emily Ralph, Elise Jones and the rest of the Faber Writing Academy team: you absolutely rock. We’ve loved working with you.

For those who wish to join us in 2017, applications for the Faber Writing Academy courses in Sydney and Melbourne, along with the Writing a Novel scholarships, are open now.

Toni Jordan is the author of four novels. The international best-seller Addition (2008), was a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Fall Girl (2010) was published internationally and has been optioned for film, and Nine Days was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, was shortlisted for the ABIA Best General Fiction award and was named in Kirkus Review’s top 10 Historical Novels of 2013. Her most recent novel, Our Tiny Useless Hearts, was published in 2016. Toni has been widely published in newspapers and magazines and was 2014 sessional teacher of the year at RMIT University.

Cover photo courtesy © Jorge Royan.

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