A way with words
Nicky Pellegrino
There are times when it feels as though I pull out my novel-in-progress like knitting. An hour here, a morning there – I’ll stitch together a few lines while I have the chance. When I do get an entire day, uncluttered by other work, I can be overwhelmed by all that empty time.
But you’re so prolific, people say (a word used for popular-fiction writers – literary authors get called “productive”). And it’s true that I’ve published a lot of novels, but I’m not dashing them off. I’m building them slowly word by word, striving for clean, elegant prose that’s easy to read.
But it’s definitely not a breeze to write. No sentence is safe from tinkering. I cull mercilessly – it was no surprise when the delete key fell off my last laptop.
I combine writing novels with my work as a freelance journalist, so it’s a rare day when my writing muscles aren’t flexed. Journalism takes me into the world. I listen to people’s stories, hear their ideas, get a different perspective, and it all enters the great whirl in my head, often coming out later in unexpected ways. Still, it’s a juggle, so I don’t have a writing routine or a typical day and I probably never will.
When I was in my thirties, I had a good idea for a book. It involved travelling to Naples and spending six months in the kitchens of my Italian aunts and then weaving a story around their recipes.
Some day I’ll do that, I decided; some day when I don’t have a full-time job and I’m not too busy.
Back then, I was deputy editor of
New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, and one afternoon I received an email saying broadcaster Angela D’Audney had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. She wasn’t a great friend at that stage, just someone I’d interviewed a few times. Nevertheless, this was my carpe diem moment. I realised life can be short and unpredictable. If you really want to do a thing, it pays to get on with it no matter how busy you are because some day might never come.
So, that evening, I started on my first novel, Delicious. I kept writing whenever I had a spare moment. Nights, weekends, holidays, pulling the odd sickie. And eventually a book happened.
Ten novels later, not a lot has changed. Mainly I write in a studio in the garden. But parts of my new book, A Year at Hotel Gondola, were composed in a fale in Samoa, in a cafe down the road, on the sofa with my laptop on my knee, in a Wairarapa bach. If you want to write, you can’t wait until the conditions are perfect.
Actually, it’s the thinking that’s the important part. For this new book, my main character has turned 50 and run away to Venice, chasing the one thing she believes life hasn’t given her so far. I spent a lot of time mulling over how it feels to get older – that sense of doors closing, that there are things you’ll never do and places you’ll never go. Sorting through those thoughts, considering structure and character, place and tone, I can do in my head while busy with other things – I worked out the mechanics of a previous novel,
The Food of Love Cookery School, while having a particularly painful root canal.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t love to have six uncluttered months to just work on a novel. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing. Even if at times I do have to pull out my work like knitting.
I worked out the mechanics of The Food of Love Cookery School while having a painful root canal.