Before the perspiration, there’s ...
Five New Zealand writers, short-listed for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards, tell Dionne Christian what is their inspiration
FIONA KIDMAN
This Mortal Boy is a finalist in the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize
How does one begin to write a novel? Usually with some difficulty, I have to admit. For me, it is like a rustling in the undergrowth, something stirs and says “pay attention, this is important”. And, usually, this is a character speaking to me.
For a long time, I have written about characters based on real people in New Zealand history. Although they come unbidden, they often have some connection to my own life. I went to school in Waipu, where the Nova Scotian community was founded in the 1850s by fierce preacher Norman McLeod. He cast a spell over my girlish imagination; 30 years later, he was still telling me to pay attention. So were the women who had followed him across the world. I wrote The Book of Secrets, with the added theme of how women survive against the odds.
Later, came The Captive Wife, about Betty Guard, a woman held captive by Ma¯ ori, after an 1830s shipwreck on the Taranaki coastline. She was a whaler’s wife who lived on Arapawa Island, where my husband taught when he was a young man and I visited with him over the years. Again, it was a survival story, and also, in matters of the heart, the question of whether it is possible to love two people at once. Aviator Jean Batten tracked me down, as it were. She was born where I lived for a long time, in Rotorua. I wrote The Infinite Air as a tribute to her heroism and as an exploration of solitude.
This Mortal Boy was different. It emerged out of an interest in how some young men live their lives, believing they are immortal, yet one terrible mistake can change everything for them and their families. I hadn’t planned to write about this. But I came across a newspaper article about 20-year-old Albert Black, from Belfast, described as “the jukebox killer”, who killed another young man in a fight in a Queen St cafe.
The year was 1955, the same year I left school. That time of moral outrage that followed teenagers came flooding back but it reminded me also of the dancing and the music, Bill Haley & the Comets, rock ’n’ roll, the way we used to dance in the aisles in the picture theatres, snubbing our noses at the establishment. I knew I was hooked, that I couldn’t get away from Albert, or Paddy, as he was known. I knew I would write a novel.
I said that I begin with difficulty. There is resistance, an urge to ignore the sure and certain voices in my ear. At first there will be research. That might take a year or so and may well be costly (to write This Mortal Boy, I travelled to Belfast). Then comes the job of putting together all these fragments on which I will build the story. The time comes when I must shut the external world out and enter into the era which I have chosen to write about. I have to listen to “voices” of the characters, letting them take me over, informing my imagination of what and who they are, to leave the research behind and simply commit to the story. I like the world and the people out there. I resist, because for this time to come, until the work is finished, I must leave them behind. It’s just me and the word.
JOANNA DRAYTON
Hudson & Halls: The Food of Love is a finalist in the Royal Society Te Apa¯ rangi Award for General Non-Fiction
I am embarrassed to admit I am a “purposeful” reader. In early adolescence, I internalised a parent voice that said only slackers and dilettantes read for pleasure. Time spent between the covers of a book had to be justified. Reading was redeemed by a practical outcome — something learned.
I was secretly jealous of friends carried away to other places by the pure pleasure of fiction. Like them, I wanted to give the language of imagination as much weight as the information and ideas words carried. But the puritan in me just couldn’t let it happen.
My worthy book list, however, still transported me. History, I discovered, was a make-believe place and the people who created history were conjured by non-fiction writers. I escaped into what was deemed worthy and factual. I loved history books and period novelists — Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins — and especially biography.
I read biography the way people binge on Netflix. Critic Janet Malcolm may be right when she says the act of writing and reading biography is “transgressive” but I’ll take her “voyeurism and busybodyism” any day. Prurient fascination, however, is only part of what grips the writer and reader of biography. Great biographers are great storytellers and it is the unfolding story that attracts us.
Reading taught me the craft of the biographer; books were my inspiration. When I choose a biographical subject myself, there has to be something in their story that makes me cry. I need to feel grief palpably. Heartache always seems to be the hook that holds me, the point at which my subject’s humanity connects with mine—and will connect with my readers’. There also needs to be a problem, a riddle, something that keeps me leafing through dusty archives and tramping strange streets in search of an interview. The detective in me must be satisfied.
I don’t have to like my subject but I must be able to live compatibly with them. For three, four, even five years, they are the last thing I think about at night and the first in the morning. Biographers are obsessive and not necessarily in a healthy way. They stalk their subject. They rifle through private things looking for secrets. I try to bring my subjects alive to answer the riddle and solve their enigma.
Writing biography demands more of you than you could ever imagine. It takes huge commitment, as well as the capacity to close a door and move on. I would describe myself as a serial monogamist. I have long-term relationships with my subjects (who are usually dead) but then become infatuated with someone else.
But being a biographer isn’t all about intensity; otherwise no one would do it. In
researching my subjects I have read 32 novels by Ngaio Marsh and more than 70 by Anne Perry, and many remarkable recipes by Hudson and Halls. My intentions may have been “purposeful” but the reading was pure pleasure.
KATE DUIGNAN
The New Ships is a finalist in the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize
It’s not so much about finding inspiration as inducing a mood. I have to get clear of all the mental clutter of my day to let the novel come down like a mist over my head. What’s tricky now, with a fairly busy set of household responsibilities, is to let myself be that irresponsible, purposeless, dreamy, forgetful. To let go of the shopping lists, the swimming lessons, the kindy pick up time and whatever else. Let that drift away. So it’s a relaxing back, not a straining forward.
In 2017, I admit I did quite a lot of relaxing back into reading everything on the internet about Trump and Russia. This might sound hysterically self-justifying but I think the attempt to connect dots in that case, to understand how everything clicks into everything else, feels a bit like what I’m doing when I write a novel. Maybe it was an okay way to warm up. My novel has nothing to do with the current US administration but I was interested in geopolitics and in the way that one historical moment leads to the next.
I use triggers to induce the mood. At my desk I had photos of houseboats in Amsterdam, a PreRaphaelite painting of nymphs gazing at Orpheus’ decapitated head, which I didn’t even like, but it still helped. I listened to music, to Joni Mitchell and The Doors for the 1970s, Bach and Mozart for Peter in his middle age, Che Fu and Eminem for his connection with his child. Melissa Ethridge’s Come To My Window became Genevieve’s song; The New Ships is so male throughout, but that song, which feels wild and needy and angry and female to me, reminded me to hold a place in the book for that energy.
Quotes can be so suggestive. I had this one from Judith Butler up above my desk the last three years of writing this novel: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.” That was my character, Peter, breaking apart, splitting. I read that quote every day.
Having induced a mood, you have to transmute it into words. That’s where – and this took me a long time to learn – you have to be a gentle, firm and very determined coach to your wayward self. You have to sit inside the daydream and make your fingers move over the keyboard simultaneously, and the fingers move the dream, and the dream moves the fingers. Gamifying it is good. The Pomodoro technique worked for me and many variations on word count challenges. And you have to eat protein. Omelettes and Snickers bars got me through that novel.
HELEN HEATH
Are Friends Electric is a finalist in The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
When I began Are Friends Electric? my first point of inspiration often came from popular culture: internet memes, science fiction films and documentaries. These are rife with people intersecting with technology but technology is not rife in poetry.
Perhaps one of the reasons is that “serious” poetry is slow to consider genre-busting. Genrebusting is something that many fiction writers have discussed; Neil Gaiman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elizabeth Knox and Eleanor Catton, among others, have all called for an appreciation of good writing without considering genre.
Although speculative poetry is rare in the mainstream, it does exist. I stumbled across Fleur Adcock’s 1971 speculative poem Gas for the first time while writing my book, finding it disturbing and exciting. Just as popular culture influences literature, so literature influences popular culture. I was excited to realise while watching Alex Garland’s Ex Machina that it was an adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story The Bloody Chamber, itself an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard. I began to see connections between science fiction and feminism.
When I was a young woman, I read authors such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy. They were rewriting history as “herstory”; writing feminist revisionist mythology: literature informed by feminism that engages with mythology, fairytales or religion
Initially, I resisted writing speculative poems; the first half of my collection deals with the actual, the now and often this was weird enough without adding a speculative element. But I began to realise that my responses to representations of women and robots, and to the theorists I was reading for my thesis, needed to enter the speculative realm in the tradition of the feminist writers before me as a way to write about ideas, possibilities and alternatives. Once you start to ask where technology is taking us, speculative writing becomes almost inevitable.
LLOYD JONES
The Cage is a finalist in the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize
Writers are often asked where they get their inspiration. From reading is the quick answer — and from being engaged in the world in a particular way. Inspiration is mostly the result of hard work, then more hard work, and then, if you are lucky, sparks fly.
The elements of story — character, event — meet in language. This is where a story derives its persuasiveness from; it is not just the sound of someone speaking and thinking. It is the sound our deepest selves make. A kind of whispering intended only for ourselves to hear, though the reader is invited to eavesdrop.
Where do characters come from? “Character” is a joint endeavour. The writer offers up a few scraps; the reader does the rest, joins the dots. A reader will read their own experience into a story. For that reason, every character lives in a different way for each reader.
Until I began a memoir (A History of Silence)
it never occurred to me that nearly all my writing is concerned with identity. Some internal keel shifts me about to those areas of human endeavour that turn on some aspect of identity.
In Biografi, I was interested in the state manipulation of identity and the separation of private self from public self. The Book of Fame
is a voyage into self-awareness. The Cage
addresses “othering”, which has reached its apotheosis in our age of population drift and peoples suddenly arriving unannounced and uninvited on national borders.
Hand Me Down World delivers an African refugee from the shores of Sicily to Berlin. Who is this woman? As the author of “her”, I really had no idea so relied on other characters to tell me through their interaction with her. Identity and mistaken identity sit fatally at the heart of Mister Pip. A History of Silence explores foundations and the mistaken idea of place (Christchurch) and my own family’s origin story.
Identity has a pivotal role to play in the The Cage. Two strangers arrive to a small town. Who are they? Where have they come from? They are curiosities at the start – then enjoy a modest celebrity status – then, in their inability to tell their story in a satisfactory way, turn into figures of contempt. The cage they find themselves in is of their own making. The story is written in a kind of bureaucratese – a language that flattones and absolves the wickedness at the heart of the novel.