Byron Bay Writers Festival
If you’re heading to the Byron Bay Writers Festival and you’re interested in writing (you poor sod), it may behove you to check out the Nuts & Bolts professional development workshop for writers.
BBWF Nuts & Bolts is proudly sponsored by The Australian Writer’s Marketplace, and programmed and chaired by Queensland Writers Centre. Now in its fourth successful year, BBWF Nuts & Bolts will provide a full day of information for beginner/emerging writers seeking to develop the craft and business of writing.
This year it has the distinction of containing not one, but two Groths. They’ll never know what hit them.
Date: Thursday 5 August
Time: 10am – 4pm
Venue: SCU ROOM, Byron Community & Cultural Centre, Byron Bay
I’ll be on the afternoon panel on digital publishing, kicking off at 1:00pm. This session will include four presentations, with a moderated Q&A.
Presenters:
- if:book Australia representative: Digital publishing overview
- Rob Collings, publisher: Digital markets: opportunities and marketing
- Simon Groth: an author’s experience in digital publishing
- Alex Adsett, publishing contracts specialist: New business models: risks and rights
Darren’s session is on after mine, so he gets the last word. Typical.
Read MoreQWC Blog Tour
Since Somewhere back in October, the Queensland Writers Centre has been quietly winding its way through the blogs and backwaters of Queensland’s writers. Today the bus has parked outside and a ragtag bunch of blog tourists are welcomed in. Make yourselves at home. The coffee machine is on, but I can only do two cups at a time.
Anyway, to answer your questions…
Where do your words come from?
I could be a smart arse and say ‘the English dictionary’, but instead I’ll respond in the spirit of the question.
The words come from characters and scenes. The better I can imagine those two things, the better the words. Words come easily when I have characters I know well bouncing dialogue off each other. That stuff is fun. Other times I can be moving so slowly through a scene or stretch of narrative that I wonder how the hell I will ever get to some kind of conclusion. Such stretches are hard, but inevitable in a big manuscript. My only hope is that it won’t be obvious in the final draft which bits came in the blink of an eye and which bits contain blood and sweat and other body fluids that no one wants to see on a page.
Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I grew up in Mitchelton: a standard Brisbane suburb in the shadow of a shopping centre. We literally lived a block away from the thing. I spent much of my childhood watching the place expand like the Blob, devouring land as it went. I went to school next door to it. On weekends I rode my bike illegally through its carparks (ah, those days before Sunday trading…).
Mitchelton has little literary tradition that I know of (though I heard Janette Turner Hospital lived there for a while), but then both my brothers and I have ended up writers. I think it’s a combination of genetic predisposition and clearly some kind of social engineering experiment conducted by the the city council on our suburb during the seventies and eighties.
Right now, I’m in exile by the beach (it’s a nice exile), but in a few short weeks I’ll be back in the city surrounded by good coffee, restaurants, and extended family (that’s not necessarily in order of importance…or maybe it is…let me think about that).
What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
I don’t tend to decide that stuff until very late in a work’s composition and I don’t usually overload that first sentence with Dickens or Tolstoy style witticisms. I looked up the first sentence of the new novel and it’s not all that flash (and my editor has suggested a new intro anyway). I looked up the last and realised that it will probably remain the final sentence regardless of whatever further work will go in, so here it is:
Brisbane is beautiful this time of year.
At least I can keep that line in now.
What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Pretty much anything from the Twelves. If I had to choose one, it would probably be To Kill A Mockingbird. If it meant though that, like Harper Lee, I would never write another novel? That I would have to really really think about. That would be a classic deal with the Devil, wouldn’t it?
What are you currently working towards?
A balance of work and life with some kind of writing taking the fore in the work side. Simple.
Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…
…assured. Readers will continue to read. Writers will continue to write. And there will be something in between that we call a “book”.
Read MoreTwelves Part Two – Songs (Not Beatles)
Okay, so this is where you live and die by your twelves. I was a music tragic long before being a literature tragic, so this was a hard list to compile, especially when iTunes can now summarily describe your music collection as 16 days and 14 hours in total running time. And that discounts some of my more unfortunate CDs buried deep in old nappy boxes (I’m sure the single of that Chumbawumba song is still there somewhere, hey I bought it for my wife!).
Anyway, here’s the list, ordered chronologically apparently. So my musical taste begins in 1970. That of course leaves out the Beatles. My first entry in this list was a Beatles song, then they claimed second spot. By the time I got to five, all of them Fabs, I hived that list off onto its own twelve and concentrated on everyone else. Even then, I had to limit each artist to one song, so Mercy Street pipped Family Snapshot (and about half a dozen others), Train In Vain only just edged out English Civil War, and so on.
Before you hang shit on me for including Jethro Tull, any song that skewers school and religion has already started ahead: ‘I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong, He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.’ Brilliant!
Oh and Bedford might seem an odd choice, but that song gets the added bonus of having been seen live at the RNA showgrounds on New Year’s Eve 1991 on a bill that included the Sharp. Sigh.
Another strange thing is that the list ends in 2000. Why? I guess songs have to go through a longevity test before they make the twelve. It means I’ve had to cut out some more recent efforts from Radiohead or the Eels. It also means the Flaming Lips miss out altogether since their best stuff is only three years old.
I was also pleased that there’s only one premature death by suicide in there. The Hottest 100 had two suicides and one premature death by accident just in the top five. I’m pretty partial to Nirvana, but seriously, people, get over it. Elliott Smith would have still made the list, even without his horrific end and why he didn’t make the said Hottest 100 I’ll never know. How quickly we forget.
The only other thing worth saying about this list is how pleased I am that the word ‘motherfucker’ is in it, and I didn’t have to resort to ‘Dance Motherfucker Dance’ by the Violent Femmes (as good as that song is).
- Trouble – Cat Stevens
- Wind Up – Jethro Tull
- Misty Mountain Hop – Led Zeppelin
- Train In Vain – The Clash
- Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel
- Bedford – Custard
- Birdhouse In Your Soul – They Might Be Giants
- Paranoid Android – Radiohead
- Black Bugs – Regurgitator
- Waltz #2 (XO) – Elliott Smith
- Owen’s Lament – Augie March
- It’s a Motherfucker – The Eels
So there it is sans Beatles. Can you guess what’s coming?
Read MoreCollaborate
Among the ridiculous number of simultaneous projects I currently have on the go, a quick thought on collaborations.
I used to play in a band. A duo really, but we wrote a lot of music together, always collaboratively. Sometimes we split the music and lyrics (I rarely wrote lyrics by the way, I’m very much a prose writer), but usually we collaborated on everything. One of us would come to a rehearsal with an idea and we’d piece the song together bit by bit. Usually we came up with something that sounded better than if we had worked alone. I depend on that sounding board to write music and one of the reasons I don’t any more is because I don’t have a collaborator.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late because I’ve just completed work on my first collaborative piece of fiction with my brother Darren.
We have tried collaboration before a few times. We tried taking alternate chapters. We tried taking on different characters. Nothing really worked and I consigned the whole endeavour to the ‘revisit one of these days’ file. Little did I know Darren was hatching his own variation on the concept.
Despite its prevalence in other arts, collaboration is an unusual idea in fiction. I can’t think of more than a handful of collaborative novels. And yet all writing is a collaboration to some extent, even if it’s just a writer-editor effort.
What we eventually hit on was taking alternate drafts. The result was similar to writer-editor only with the editor taking a far more active role adding character layers and additional narrative. Our model was less ’50 per cent text each’ and something more like what Joel and Ethan Cohen do: share the writing credits where one or the other might take the lead on any individual project. Seems to work well for them. Why not us? We are already brothers after all.
Darren is spruiking ‘Concentrate’: the debut novel for young readers by the Brothers Groth over on his site so check it out.
Read MoreThe Books
