CHARLOTTE WOOD The Writer’s Room: Conversations about writing. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The winner of this year’s Stella Prize brings together 12 conversations from The Writer’s Room journal.
Ten seconds’ googling will find a plethora of writing advice from amateurs and professionals alike. List after list of writing ‘rules’ to follow for success and things one must do to be considered a writer: ‘Never begin a story with the weather’ is a famous example, as is ‘A writer must write every day’. But the same search will uncover just as many arguments against rigid rules and generic advice; a writer, these articles often say, must find their own way to work.
That idea is exemplified in Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room, a collection taken from Wood’s journal of the same name, which was inspired by a desire to conduct long interviews with established Australian writers, and was published bimonthly for three years. The book presents Wood’s interviews with Tegan Bennett Daylight, James Bradley, Lloyd Jones, Malcolm Knox, Margo Lanagan, Amanda Lohrey, Joan London, Wayne McAuley, Emily Perkins, Kim Scott, Craig Sherbourne and Christos Tsiolkas, and reading each is like attending a masterclass.
From insights into a writer’s role in society to more practical considerations such as what a successful day’s writing looks and feels like, the interviews delve into the writers’ experiences. Wood includes an introduction to each interview, which serves both as an overview of the writer’s career and publications for readers who might be unfamiliar with them as well as providing a glimpse of the writer’s personality: Kim Scott is ‘serious and quietly spoken, though he smiles and laughs often’; Lloyd Jones is ‘thoughtful and quiet’; Emily Perkins is ‘charming, funny, self-deprecating and passionate’; Margo Lanagan’s ‘warmth and practicality and humour are a surprising contrast with the shadowy tones of [her] writing’. But even without these introductions, Wood’s skill as an interviewer is such that each writer’s personality leaps off the page.
The respect and affection with which the interviews are conducted, and the willingness of the writers to open up and offer insight into their writing lives, has resulted in the kind of accessible, honest and enlightening conversations about writing that have been absent from the Australian literary scene for quite a length of time.
This doesn’t mean that aspiring writers should read The Writer’s Room hoping to find the magic formula that will make them a published author. As Joan London says, ‘I don’t think there are any shoulds about what makes a writer!’ The interviews show that being a writer is far too individual an experience to boil down into a how-to list. For Tegan Bennett Daylight, ‘when it’s really happening, writing feels like this hilarious private conversation you’re having with yourself’, while Margo Lanagan believes writing ‘feels like the rightest work I know how to do. It feels like the thing I was meant to do, when it’s going well.’ And for Craig Sherbourne, writing ‘can often be confronting and ugly, but that’s part of the beauty too’.
Perhaps the most useful material for aspiring – and even established – writers is to be found in the generosity of the featured authors in sharing their insecurities and concerns about their craft, because it’s in these passages that reassurance can be found: even those who have had many books published come to the next project almost as a beginner, worried that their last work was their last work. Everyone starts from page one every time, and the only way to a finished draft, or a published book, is to write. And then to write some more.
Charlotte Wood The Writer’s Room: Conversations about writing Allen & Unwin 2016 PB 448pp $32.99
Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney. (See her review of Wood’s Stella Prize-winning novel The Natural Way of Things here.)
You can buy The Writer’s Room from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
