Sunny Garden

Interview question: James Connor

Nick, I particularly like your short story 'Green'. I have had the pleasure of hearing you perform it live twice now and I was wondering do you ever get the urge to read it differently? I noted between performances you had improved your delivery. Do you ever want to re-write sections of a short story like this one? Especially as you continue to perform it and thus remain intimate with the story?

These are good questions, because these are issues I didn't realise I'd have to deal with when I started out as a writer but I think they turn out to be pretty important if you're going to read things to an audience.

I think the key is realising that a live audience isn't the same as people sitting by themselves reading a book. Writers need to bear that in mind when it comes to selecting the piece to read and re-editing it on the page to make it work as well as it can live.

I also think I learn more about what I can do with a piece the more I do it. I learn how to pace it better to make the most of any punchlines, and I work out how to save some of the flatter bits or edit them out. So that should make it better the more I do it.

But it also varies from night to night and audience to audience. A more responsive audience is likely to get more out of me.

Interview question: Juji Chew

I was wondering if you had any struggles to get published?

Struggles to get published? That'd be the 1980s for me, and some of the 90s. I had enough struggles that I needed TWO lucky breaks to get me over the line.

It wasn't until Perfect Skin (last year) that I finally had more of my writing published than rejected (about 550,000 words published and 500,000 rejected, I think).

The slow start was partly to do with writing things that weren't publishable, and partly to do with living in Brisbane in the 80s. It wasn't an easy place to be a writer, and a career as a writer looked impossible.

My first break was winning an award with my song writing partner for song writing as part of Brisbane's Warana festival in 1989. That led to me being programmed to do some events at writers' week. Laurie Muller, the head of UQP, was the chair of writers' week, so I worked really hard to impress him. They just rejected a novel manuscript of mine, but he said (based on what I'd done at the festival) that we should talk, and he suggested a collection of short stories. I wrote them, and he published it in 1992.

Unfortunately, most critics hated it and only my mother bought it, so I needed another lucky break.

I wrote my novel Zigzag Street in 1995, but it missed out completely in the Vogel competition (for unpublished manuscripts by writers under 35) and Allen and Unwin (the publishers who select three or four Vogel entries each year for publication) decided not to publish it.

But my short story book had got me an agent and a few commissions to write short stories. It had also led to me being included in the 'young writers' night-time event at the Brisbane Writers Festival. My agent told me there was a publisher from Transworld who would be going along, and they were planning to set up an Australian fiction list. I was told to pick my best live story and create an impression. I gave it my best shot, and the publisher came up to me the next day and asked if she could read my novel manuscript. She published it the following year.

But most things I tried came to nothing. I did plenty of events with small audiences, and got noticed by no one. And I sent off plenty of stories that people didn't want to publish (including the story that got me my Zigzag Street deal).

But I couldn't stop writing, even when it seemed like a stupid thing to be doing. And each year 98 things would fail or take me nowhere, and two things would succeed. So I kept going.

In retrospect, I wouldn't change any of it. Plenty of things still fail, and I'm much more able to deal with it than I otherwise would have been. Of course, they're much bigger things now (both the successes and the failures). It used to be that journals would send my story back instead of paying sixty bucks to publish it, now it's things like a 30 million dollar film deal falling apart just as it looks like it might happen.

But I can handle that, even if those things never happen. And I can keep trying to make them happen. I've seen where persistence has got me, and it's already further than I thought I'd go.

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.