Then the book came out and was short-listed in the young adult section of the Children’s Book Council awards and in one step I went from being no one to someone. Suddenly my book was in libraries, and the publishers wanted the next one, which I was working on …
So I worked and worked, and everything I wrote was published in due course, and I won or was short-listed for awards. Basically, I didn’t do much else in that period. For a while I went to and from journalism whilst editing and writing – I liked it but my stories were what held me. The river had grown a lot wider and I could just focus on it now.
That went on for some years. So many that I thought: Okay, this must be life. It depressed me a little, I am ashamed to say, to think that was it. I was reasonably successful, and from all the indicators it seemed like I would go on being moderately successful. I started to travel, always because of writing, and all that I saw and did was woven into my work. I was content, but somehow I had lost that sharp beautiful painful delight in life that I had earlier on.
Then I went to Estonia to a UNESCO conference to read an excerpt from one of my books and I fell in love and suddenly everything – I mean EVERYTHING – changed. I started living big chunks of time overseas, I had a live-in partner, and then I had a daughter. And all of a sudden I was back to fitting writing in around everything else.
In a funny way, though, I really do miss those wonderful years when all I did was write, and I miss the deep immersion they allow pretty badly sometimes. But I find this life of having to fight for time to write more invigorating and ultimately satisfying. It felt like it was almost too easy for a while. Looking back, I was living this idyllic unreal sort of life where I was detached from reality, not just distracted from it. It was maybe a bit bloodless. But now I am in the midst of life, red in tooth and claw, and when I write, I still hurl myself down the mountain face, hoping not to fly off a cliff or smack into a tree. And life seems painfully, sharply beautiful and precious again …
You divide your time between living in Australia and overseas. How does this ongoing change of environment influence your writing?
It strips you down. It takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to be vulnerable. It makes you see and feel and hear more vividly. And you see and hear and experience things you would not experience any other way.
You’ve created so many memorable characters throughout your writing career. Which of your many characters burns brightest in your mind and why?
Wow, now that is the toughest question because you always feel like you are betraying one character when you name another. I actually can’t do it. I can say why I loved a few of the characters, though the truth is I could tell you why I loved at least one and usually more characters in every book I have written. But let’s choose a few. I like Elspeth because she is like another me. She is the inside me. She is the skin I slipped into when I was fourteen and wanted to think about things, and she has grown with me, though not as fast. She is powerful and prickly and assertive and tall and lean – all the things I am in my imagination. She is brave and truthful and all the things I would be if I were better. She is me as a hero.
Nissa is her in urban guise, but the main character in The Gathering, and the one I like most, is Nathanial, because unlike Nissa he can be soft. I love Billy Thunder because he is the kindest, sunniest, most sheerly good character I have ever created. I love Maruman because of his madness and his sheer bloody-mindedness. I love Mr Walker because he is a pernickity little scold. I love Fork because, in the most true and metaphysical sense, it is shaped by the lives of the people and creatures who inhabit it. I love Little Fur for her gentleness and Crow for his rudeness and, oh, I love Sorrow for his great, terrible mythic sadness.
I guess I am never going to write an anti-hero, but what I like doing is taking a character and making them seem comical or cowardly or silly, and then producing a paradigm shift so that we can see that all of these things can hide incredible courage, depth and blinding beauty of spirit. I always suspect it of my characters, and when it comes I am always shocked and touched by it. I guess that is the thing I love most about writing: the moment when a character I have created reveals the bit of itself that I did not invent or expect. The bit where they take on their own life …
The last instalment of the Obernewtyn series, The Red Queen, isn’t far from being released. How difficult is it to close a series that’s been with you for so long?
It’s further away than my fans or publisher likes. It was supposed to come out this year but I found I just could not work when the book was scheduled and everyone was hanging on me finishing. It was like trying to work in a room where people were shouting at you that you were going to miss the bus. Luckily, Penguin have been able to bear with me and the final book will be coming out next year.
I know some writers can deliver a book exactly when they say they will, but I honestly don’t know how they do it. For me a book is a journey and I don’t know how long it will take. I have a map, but it is sparse and there are so many things to see and learn and explore before I find what I set out to find. I write in order to think and that means I don’t know how long it will take me to figure it out. I think of it as a very organic process but that might be a nice way of saying ‘utterly disorganised’.
Despite the size of the books, I really have to work to fit everything into each one and I cut and cut and cut to do it. It’s hard work but incredibly satisfying, and it is balanced with elaborating and clarifying, because the stories are all very complex. For me the process of editing does not happen after the book is finished but is part of the whole creative process. Finishing will be a wrench in the same way that finishing Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books were a wrench for me, as a reader, or the Narnia books when I was a kid … or Steig Larssen’s Millenium Trilogy. But they must be finished and that is that. And I want to finish them. I want to come to the end of it because I want to know exactly how it will all come out as well. But unlike readers, when I have finished, I will never ever be able to go back through the wardrobe door again. At least, not that door …
Is there any particular ritual involved in your writing process?
I always write my first draft in bound notebooks with a proper fountain pen – I have quite a collection of pens as I buy a new one for each book. I don’t use ink cartridges. I have bottles of ink, which I mix to get the exact shade I feel like writing in. I wrote The Sending in the most beautiful green Waterman pen with green ink, and now I have an unusual and beautiful square pale blue pen. I have mixed a blue ink with a touch of violet to write my next book. I always write in moleskin notebooks that come in packs of three and in three variations of a colour. My favourite place to write in all the world is in my little study that faces the sea over a remote bit of the Great Ocean Road in Australia, preferably with a crackling fire going – I much prefer winter as a season. In Prague, where I live some of the time, I write in the kitchen of our apartment where the sun comes in, and where it is warm enough for my cat to deign to keep me company. But I also do a lot of writing in cafés. I like having life happening around me because writing is such a solitary business.
What tips do you have for budding writers?
Always choose a topic to write about that you actually feel something for. Not a topic you think will impress people. I have run lots of writing workshops in schools and I often notice that people will choose ‘important’ topics. Never make the mistake of thinking the importance of a topic will somehow elevate your writing. In fact your writing has to live up to the topic and, more importantly, your life experience has to feed into it. I remember once there was a class of 12-year-old girls and one of them chose to write about an old alcoholic man dying on a park bench. She felt that was tragic and important and of course she was right, but she did not have any life experience to help her explore the topic. She was not old, she was not a man and she was not an alcoholic. She might know someone who drinks a lot or she might have seen a person in a p
ark drunk so how could she possibly know what brings a man to such a pass? You will write best about things that you know deeply, and you will write best of all if you genuinely care about the topic – if it matters to you. You will write brilliantly if you write about something you don’t understand and use the story to help you delve deeper into it … Great writing is first and foremost an inward journey …
Is there one book that you wish you had written?
Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials or The Earthsea Books by Ursula Le Guin or Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper. They are books I have read many, many times, and which inspire me to be a better writer and to be a better person …
What were your five favourite books as a teenager?
Let me see if I can name only five …
The Lord of the Rings, of course. I love it because it is such a completely imagined world with history, poetry, songs, language, maps. I particularly love the tender and very deep friendship between Frodo and Sam. But perhaps more than all else, I love Tolkein’s physical descriptions of the natural world. Of glades and rivers and vales …
Z for Zachariah, which was written by Robert C. O’Brien but published posthumously in 1973. I love the main character’s simplicity and courage and the beautiful dark descriptions of the end of the world, and the suggestion of hope in her courage.
The Chronicles of Narnia were very important to me. The books resonated very strongly with my own struggle to think about how I fitted or did not fit into the world. Of course I spent half my life trying to find the door into Narnia.
Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting was a great favourite of mine. I loved his grumpiness and his brilliance and longed with all my heart for such a mentor. And of course, best of all, I loved his ability to talk to animals, which I longed to be able to do.
The Land of Far-Beyond was a book that affected me profoundly. Written by Enid Blyton, it is loosely modelled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrims Progress. Both are allegories, or narratives, with a moral meaning, and they revolve around a journey that is spiritual as well as physical – a journey from sin to salvation. I read and reread this hundreds of times as a child, not so much because I loved the story as because I realised that it was doing what I was trying to do in my stories. I was trying to make inner journeys visible. I was trying to make the intangible tangible.
If you could recommend just one book for everyone to read what would it be?
The Flute Player – DM Thomas’s first published novel and winner of the Gollancz / Guardian Fantasy Prize. This novel emerged out of his fascination with Russian poets, and particularly Anna Akhmatova about whom he also wrote. He created a generic figure, a woman, who preserved the truth of the world while chaos reigned all around her. He didn’t want to individualise the characters too much, so there is very little dialogue in this novel. For me, it tells me what I am and what I want to be. I carry this book everywhere I go in the world, wherever I live.
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to my brilliant, tender editor, Nan McNab, without whom my characters would have died of thirst or hunger or been half mad with sleep deprivation, and who would certainly have seen too many full moons. Without whom, in fact, I would be lost.
A warm thankyou to Melinda Dean, who examined a rough manuscript and found many a chink through which the wind would have whistled without her canny eye. Thanks also to Heather Giles, my indispensable helper, who has long been first reader of my manuscripts.
A final heartfelt thankyou to the lovely Penguins: to Jean-marie Morosin who began the journey with us; to Katrina Lehman who rode shotgun to bring us to a timely end; to Cathy Larsen for her fabulous covers; and especially to Laura Harris, who allowed the split that will enable me to finish Elspeth’s story properly.
VIKING
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011
Text copyright © Isobelle Carmody, 2011
Map by Cathy Larsen © Penguin Group (Australia)
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ISBN: 978-1-74253-421-3
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