Sunny Garden

Interview questions: Benjamin Law

There's an ongoing theme with awkwardness in your novels - does this reflect more your personal experiences or what you observe in other people?

Oh god, maybe it's me. Partly anyway. It just took me years to be brave enough to put any of these insecurities out there, but it's amazing how common these feelings are.

I thought that so many novels deal with 'the big issues' that we needed to see more space devoted to the regular issues, plenty of which are big enough. Awkwardness, vulnerability, interpersonal clumsiness, all of that.

Why do you think so many people - young and old(ish), male or female, Australian or German, relate to your books so well?

I think it's because they're about people - people who lead lives they can relate to, and that have regular amounts of the regular crap that life can have. Sometimes it's general, sometimes it's very specific. Sometimes - wherever they're from - it's the first time they've read about someone who feels just the way they do. People tell me different things. Sometimes they just pass the books on because they've found them funny, other times they give people Zigzag Street as a kind of therapy if they've just been dumped. It varies, and I like that.

Your range of media is widening - CDs and live television appearances being two examples - so with your increasing influence, are you going to use that to push political and social consciousness or is that just not your arena?

A really interesting question. And one that I'm suddenly starting to have to think about myself. I don't think social issues will necessarily make a dramatic appearance in the fiction I write, but maybe they're starting to have more of a bearing on my life. I think the first time was when I was invited to speak at a native title rally and I realised, yes, I'm a UK-born white Australian writer of comic fiction, but here's an issue that matters to me too, and I felt grateful to be included, really.

If I've got a firm view on something, I'm now much more prepared to give it. If I can get involved in something and do some good, I'm now much more likely to be pro-active and really try to achieve something. Maybe there are a number of factors that are part of this, including things like being more confident than I used to be, and more aware of how to handle the media side of it.

Politically, I've been involved in campaigning against a GST on books and for an Australian republic. In terms of social issues, there are some issues I'd like to give more time to, particularly issues of equity. Quite a few involving health - I'm involved in the Mater Hospitals' forthcoming 'Star of Lights' fundraising and community support venture. I think health in indigenous communities, particularly remote indigenous communities, is something we should all be concerned about and should see as a national priority.

I'm also getting involved in Warchild, a group that is involved in fund-raising and awareness-raising to do with the issue of the plight of children in war zones. I know it's really obvious to say that children are suffering in thirty different war zones right now, but we can't afford to get fatigued about it, just because we see it a lot on TV.

I guess there are also cultural and identity issues. In the 80s in Brisbane there were hardly any published novelists. I never met any, and setting out to become one was a pretty lonely thing. Now there are quite a few of us here, and much more support, and I don't think it'll ever be the way it was again. But we have to keep working at it, and I want to be part of that.

With contemporary communications technology, there's no real reason why you can't live anywhere you want and have a career as a writer. I think it's good that there are more of us here now showing what's possible. I think globalisation presents some opportunities if you don't live in a city that thinks it's the centre of the world, but it also presents challenges - mainly the challenge of avoiding being swallowed up. It's important that we keep telling our own stories, and maintain a culture that supports that.

I try to get involved in these things as much as I can, but I'd like to do more. There just isn't a lot of time left over once I allow for writing and travelling.

Are your protagonists ever going to be female or a different race or would doing that lead to a contrived novel? (Unless you have, of course, had a female protagonist - in which case, excuse my ignorance).

I had a female protagonist or two in Headgames, but not in a novel. It's a good question. My editor has dared me to do it, and I've got a few ideas in mind with female central characters. I think it'll happen one day, but when it happens naturally.

In the last few years, I've been interested in presenting some male perspectives that I haven't seen a lot of in fiction.

Is there a lot of pressure from the powers that be (publishers, friends, etc) to write a formulaic book that really isn't your style?

None at all. What a relief. I've been lucky. People didn't start buying my books until I'd found a style that worked for me, so perhaps it'd be more likely that the powers that be would be putting pressure on me to do more of the same and not take too many risks. But they aren't doing that either.

But I don't like to talk to them much about the ideas early on, so it's as though I'm not inviting them to have their say until I'm good and ready. Having said that, when they do have their say it's worth listening to. My publisher and editor really get what I'm doing and I find the editorial process really productive. Sometimes, in the course of playing around with things, they come up with some really funny stuff, as well as giving me a lot good things to think about. The only pressure they place on me is the pressure I place on myself - to get the most out of any idea I'm writing about.

Are there a lot of characters through your novels that are actually drawn from real people, down to the last detail?

Very few, if any. And I think even if I set out to do that, the character would change in the planning and writing of the novel. In the end, the book has to be written with the book in mind, rather than my real world. Hence, it's best to regard it all as fiction, other than instances where I've specifically said otherwise.

What are you long term aims through your work?

As far as the writing itself goes, maybe something simple like 'to be the best writer I can be'? At a totally practical level maybe something like 'to keep this paying like a job for as long as I can'. I'm enjoying the writing, I'm still learning things and I'm certainly not bored. I think that's a pretty lucky position to be in.

For about fifteen years, my one aim was to get published. Then I got published, and suddenly I had to find a new aim. I'm enjoying what I'm doing now - other than some of the time-management aspects - and I think there's plenty of scope for me to keep doing it for a while. I don't think it's easy if you set out planning to change the world. Maybe it's easier if you set out hoping some people will be glad they've read what you've written. Occasionally, they tell you much more. I think a lot of us have a very small number of books that mean more to us than anything else we've read - that have changed the way we think about things or about ourselves. To hear from someone that you've made that list as far as they're concerned is a pretty big reward. As far as where I get to 'through my work' goes, we'll see. In a way, I like not knowing these things and saying yes to some of them when they come along. That's how I got to go to India, do the CD, play Livid. It's how I've had the chance to get involved in some issues that I think are important.

So I should aim to keep writing fiction, and to write more for film, and to take a little more control of my life, but also be open to opportunities. And not fill in all the blanks until they're ready to be filled.

And out of interest - After January and Zigzag Street are both books on our school curriculum, and all the English teachers lord you no end It's a genuine pity that you can't make it to Voices on the Coast next year. But that's what fame, jetsetting, caviar and Chardonnay leads to.

Ah, but it all, paradoxically, just makes you miss the comforts of home. In the end, Chardonnay's fine, but a plane is just a place to sit still for an implausibly long period of time and caviar is just fish eggs.

But my publishers are learning to adjust to me. They know the tour goes better if they hold back on the luxuries and give me Thai food, fruit and somewhere to run, and if they let me wear my old comfortable shoes.

Continue reading

Disclaimer:
Sunny Garden is designed, written and maintained by Liz Perkins, in cooperation with Nick Earls, Penguin Books and Random House Australia. Any questions about Sunny Garden should be directed to Liz

All original contents are © Liz Perkins.