My favourite place to write is in a little café called Cirque in New Farm. Upstairs there is a large table by a window with a power point right snuggled up in the corner. In Winter the morning sun streams in there and in summer it is right under the air conditioner. I’ve often joked that the chair “there” in “that corner” is my office!

I’ve been going there to write at least one day a week for the past year and a bit. It is the place I go to hunker down and write. I wrote a difficult magazine article there last year because it was free from distractions. What I also like about Cirque (other than the awesome French toast and berries) is the staff know me there as a ‘writer’ and for my fledgling writer’s ego it is the sort of boost it needs. Last year I would disappear there and pretend I was living in an alternate reality to my own.

When I was 18 I read about a Writer in Residence programme at uni and a string of workshops the WIR was running. It sounded like just the thing to launch my writing out of the confines of high school and into the big wide world beyond.

The first workshop we were asked to bring along a piece of writing. I had written a rather dark piece about an actress and an ex boyfriend of her’s who she had conned with her charms to murder her parents years before. It was called “And Romeo Met Juliet in Hell.”

He told me point blank that my writing was naïve and I needed to go out and live in the real world if I really wanted to write. He did so in ear shot of the other would-be writers there. I was shattered and as I sit here writing this, my cheeks still flush with humiliation. It is criticism I’m still fighting to get over.

I didn’t go back to any more of his workshops and for almost a decade I scribbled away in private too afraid to show anyone my work. I was also too scared to try and link up with other writers. I invested most of my energy in “living in the real world” and very little in the creative world on the page.

Through doing The Artist Way in 2007 I was able to excavate the shame he infected me with and to work through it. I still find it difficult to show my work to others but have realised it is a necessary evil to grow and evolve as a writer. What I have learnt, to take the worst edge of offering my work up to a third party,  is knowing how to dissect criticism so I am able to discern the difference between bad criticism (like the Writer in Residence’s comments) and good criticism (the kind I get from my writer’s group and from my online writing friends.)

I normally write when the opportunity presents itself ie. my son is occupied and I am free to sit at the computer.

Lately I have been dabbling in 4:30am rises and writing then. I’ve found I’m no where near as distracted, far more productive and have a sense of accomplishment launching into my day knowing everything I need to have written for the day has been done by 9:00am. But it is a cruel way to write – especially in winter.

What I like most about blending writing with being a stay at home Mum  is I am no longer precious about my writing time. There is no “perfect” time to write – there are just blocks of time for writing, sometimes small other times large, in between doing the laundry, cooking, playing with my son. The other thing I like is that I’ve learnt to be expedient with my writing. I spend lots of time “writing in my head” so when I do get the chance to sit at the computer or with pen and paper I make the most of it. Writing sometimes feels like purging everything I have been carrying around in my head.

The downside of this is I often don’t get to write when I want to be writing or I am not writing when I’m at my optimum. Stories sometimes go stale, meaning when I do get to the page the initial spark has gone and the frustration mounts. Other times I’m battling to string together coherent sentences because I’m struggling to wake up or forcing myself to be awake. When I’m really tired at night I get distracted easily by the internet and find hours have past with no writing and no useful research – or sleep!

I’d love to be able to treat writing like a day job sometimes – be able to write without being pestered between 9am and 4pm, but for now I am just happy to be able to write at all.

I find writing dialogue the easiest element of writing. A lot of my stories come to me as voices in my head so I feel that I transcribe dialogue more than writing it. Not surprising dialogue constitutes large chunks of my stories. Often my 60+ words a minute typing is hard dressed to keep up with the conversation. Finding out that I didn’t have to have a different version of “said” after every piece of dialogue (and that it is actually bad writing to do so) was the greatest freeing force in my writing and has just allowed the dialogue to flow freely and naturally.

The hardest element of writing would be descriptive narrative. Long passage of descriptions bore me when I read. I find, unless it is incredibly compelling, I mentally skip over descriptive paragrphas and I actually gave up reading In The Name of the Rose after the description of a single door went on for a page and a half. Consequently writing my own descriptive narrative is challenging. I don’t want to write something which others will skip over nor fall back on clichés. I try to harness the use of unique metaphors and allegory where possible. Descriptive narrative is always what I labour and sweat over.

First decade

Of all the books I devoured or was read in the first ten years of my life, it is impossible to pick just one – so I’ve picked two.

Wilfred Gordon MacDonald Partridge by Mem Fox
My son has two copies of this book – one from a uni friend before his birth and a bigger copy I bought him last year. It was my favourite picture book from my childhood. Julie Vivas who did the illustrations is also a favourite of mine. Written about Wilfred Gordon MacDonald Partridges quest to find Miss Nancy’s memories it brings tears to my eyes every time we read it. My Nanna  suffered from alzheimers for the last decade of her life and every time I read it I remember her. When I read it with Dylan I am able to talk to him about my Nanna and her memory lives on.

Charlotte’s Web by EB White
I intend to give it to give a copy of Charlotte’s Web to all the children who fall into the broad category of “my family” when they’re all old enough to read it. I doubt it will have the same impact it had on me as a child because they will have all seen the movie before they have a chance to read the book, unlike me who had read it numerous times before I ever saw the animated version on TV.

I love the unlikely friendship between spider and pig, the begrudging alliance with Templeton the Rat and the dark humour he brings to the story plus the amazing feat of spinning words into a web. As a kid living on a farm I was always hopeful I’d catch a word in a dewy web one morning! It is a book which tells without preaching the joy, hardships and triumphs of friendship and how a little ingenuity and creativity goes a long way to solve a problem.

Second Decade

After weeks of struggling to find something meaningful from my teenage years I’ve drawn a blank. Did I read that much trash as a teenager?

I read Virginia Andrews (before she was a franchise of ghost writers!), Lucy Maud Montgomery (when Anne of Green Gables was all the rage) John Wyndam (both for school and pleasure), Judy Blume (when Forever was the closest thing you got to sex education in a Catholic high school), Ruth Park (before Harp in The South was a mini series) and Dean Koontz once I’d left high school.

I read the biography of Mary Queen of Scots and Charlie Chaplin before I was 16. I also read one Sweet Valley High novel which was what ultimately captilauted me to the page as a writer – believing I was better capable of committing plots and characters to the page  than the trollope served up by the Sweet Valley High franchise.

What I discover about my teenage years of reading was I read broadly, across genres and I will encourage my son to do the same. There was an open door policy on my parent’s bookshelf which allowed me to do this and they were avid readers, setting a good example.

Third Decade

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

It took me until my late 20’s, getting a copy for my birthday and the release of the first movie to kick me into reading Lord of the Rings. It was always on my ‘to do read list’ but never really moving anywhere near the top.

I remember as a kid my father having copies of it in the book case. They were bound in rich burgundy leather looking covers and had me fantasising about what they may have been about. The Lord of the Rings always sounded really important to me as a kid. I wondered at one point if he was the dude who controlled the phone ringing!

I will be ensuring my son gets either a new copy or my copy handed down to him when he’s old enough to decide to want to read it (and I’ll tell him it’s ok to skip through all the boring poetry and most parts involving Tom Bombadil!)

It is one of the epic stories of our modern age which I think any person who is serious about books should have read. It was a gift from my father and I would like to keep up the tradition.

Fourth Decade

Stuck here in my fourth decade there are two books I can’t separate – one fiction and the other one non fiction.

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Recommended to me by CW’s co-editor Paul Anderson The Time Traveller’s Wife remains one of my favourite books of all time. I look forward to gifting this book to my soul sister one day when I know she’ll be able to kick back and enjoy it – in twenty years time? She has gifted me many brilliant books over the years and I feel it is time to return the favour. As the greatest love story of our time (in my opinion) I would hate for her to miss out on the rollercoaster of love which is Clare and Henry’s story.

Women Who Run With Wolves by Dr Clarissa Pinkola
This is a feminist dissection and reflection of the fairy tales which have been prominent in our culture for centuries. I learnt so much from reading it and while I was having multiple “a ha?” moments,  I wished someone had have given this to me as a young woman embarking on life in the big wide world. After all, as women we’re no longer given a rite of passage into womanhood and have lost huge chunks of wisdom which was once our inheritance.

I have been gifting WWRWW to women “coming of age” for a few years now. My nieces all got copies for their 16th birthday and my Goddess Daughter has a copy put away for her too. There are always numerous copies in my book shelf waiting to be given new homes. It is one of my must read books for all women – regardless of age or place on their journey.

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