How to Write Gripping Stories That Stand Out with Nikki Gemmell
“I write to provoke, to get people thinking. I want there to be beauty and tenderness, but also a ripping punch that grips readers and makes them question the world.”
Buy WING
🎧 Struggling to find your unique voice or create stories that truly resonate? Wondering how to weave big ideas into page-turning narratives?
This week on Writes4Women with @pamelacookwrites, best-selling author @nikki.gemmell shares the secrets behind her latest feminist literary thriller, Wing, and how she transformed personal experiences into powerful, compelling fiction.
💡 Here’s why you don’t want to miss this episode:
✨ Build unforgettable tension: Discover how Nikki crafts layers of suspense and mystery, weaving together themes of friendship, gender politics, and generational divides.
✨ Write with authenticity: Learn about her unique approach to second-person narrative and why it creates such an intimate, immersive experience.
✨ Channel personal experiences: Nikki shares how journaling and reflecting on her own life fuels her stories, including Wing, which reimagines the darkness of the Australian bush and explores the complexity of female friendships.
✨ Stay inspired: Hear how Nikki balances a prolific writing career with family life while creating works that resonate deeply with readers.
🖋 Get Inspired. Get Encouraged. Get Writing.
🎧👉 https://pod.link/1275851144
Connect with Nikki
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and Year-End Reflections
00:46 Personal Writing Updates
01:51 Upcoming Writing Retreats and Courses
03:23 Introducing This Week's Guest: Nikki Gemmell
04:36 Nikki Gemmell's Literary Journey
07:07 Deep Dive into 'Wing'
18:26 Exploring Female Friendships and Dynamics
26:36 Differentiating Fiction from Column Writing
26:57 The Power of Second Person Voice
28:02 Distinctive Literary Voices
28:43 The Influence of Poetry
29:53 Writing and Reading Habits
30:48 Favorite Poets and Inspirations
31:34 Capturing the Essence of Settings
37:46 The Role of Social Media in 'Wing'
40:17 Reflections on Gender Equality
43:24 The Journey of Finding the Right Title
45:57 Balancing Writing and Making a Living
If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review or consider subscribing to our Substack.
Transcript
This transcript is provided as a companion to the audio episode and has not been edited.
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of rights for women. The almost. Last episode of 2025 for rights for women. And it is. Wednesday, December 11. As I record this episode is going out this week. We're almost there. We're almost at the end of the year. And it's been a very interesting, busy. Amazing year had a great year on right swimming, but I'm going to do a wrap-up episode next week and hoping to get a few of the guest hosts on board to talk about their years. What they're reading what they're recommending over the Christmas holidays.
[00:00:39] And just a general wrap-up for the podcast. So stay tuned for that. That will be out next week. The very last week before Christmas. On my own personal writing front. My news is that I have done my final revision of a place to call home the third book in the Blackwater lake series.
[00:00:55] And that has now been sent off to my audio publisher, Belinda. And yeah, it's just always such a relief to get through those last edits. It's you really over the manuscript? Both. Time, you get to that final edit. And I'm really happy to finish the story and just to have brought the story of that character that I've taken through three books now. Eve Nichols who started off in Blackwater lake. Continued her story on quite unexpectedly.
[00:01:21] But I did that a couple of years ago now to the ashes and now to finish off that part of her story. But the part that will be the end for me. In a place of her own and those books will all be out next year. In print, probably coming out and Kindle in the early months of the year. And then all of my books will be back out in print with brand new covers.
[00:01:41] Very excited about the new covers with Vinci books in June, around the middle of the year. So I will keep you posted about that. Just wanted to also remind you that if you are a writer and you're thinking about doing a writing retreat, or even if you haven't thought about it up until now, I have the next chapter writing retreat running from April 10 to 13. In beautiful Kurrajong in the blue mountains, the foothills of the blue mountains.
[00:02:07] So very accessible from Sydney at Corona house. We had a great time up there earlier this year with the group that I hosted up there for the retreat and doing it all again from the 10th to the 13th of April. That's up on my website. Pamela cook.com.edu. You can pop on there. There are limited. There's a couple, I think, of single rooms still available.
[00:02:28] But there are other rooms where you can share, bring, come along with a writer, friend, meet some new friends and taking 12 people in total. Three spots have already gone. So there are nine spots left for a writing retreat in April, and perhaps you can put it on your Christmas list and there is a payment plan.
[00:02:45] You don't have to pay everything upfront. You can pop onto the website and have a look for that. I'd love to see some rights for women listeners there. That would be amazing. And don't forget that my turn up the tension course is also available until the end of the year. On special at $199 for the whole eight modules that have lifetime access to. I will be breaking that up into smaller components going forward. You will maintain that lifetime access.
[00:03:10] If you buy the whole course. So pop on there. If you are looking for a writing course to take your writing to the next level. In the new year. Or even starting before Christmas, if you've got some time on your hands. Now, let me get onto this week's guest on the podcast. Out last. Formal guests, for the year. And that is Nikki Gemmell.
[00:03:32] Now I had the pleasure of chatting to Nicki, ah, probably about a month or so ago now about her new release wing, where I interviewed her at. A book event at Waringa mall library. And it was really great to chat to Nikki. Again, this time around for the podcast, she is just so full of life and enthusiasm for writing and so real and honest about the writing life.
[00:03:55] And it was just really interesting to find out what the inspiration was for wing. Her new feminist literary thriller. And to just mull over some issues to do with the writing. And if you are a subsect subscriber, you will get a little bonus interview with Nikki in your sub-state newsletter. This week, always remember that if you're a paid subscriber, the place to find that little bonus interview that comes out each week is at the bottom of the subs tech newsletter.
[00:04:21] There will be a subscriber only section, and you'll be able to access that. Don't forget, you can support rights for women on sub stack as a free subscriber or a paid subscriber where you will get lots of bonuses. So it would love to see you over there. Now, let me tell you about Nikki. Nicki Kamal is the best-selling author of 13 novels and four works of nonfiction.
[00:04:44] Her books have been translated into 22 languages. Her distinctive writing has gained her international claim and the French literary magazine Lira has included her in a list of what he called the 50 most important writers in the world. Those of Billy's will have a significant influence on the literature of the 21st century. Nikki pens, a weekly column for the Australian newspaper.
[00:05:07] She also writes novels for children.
[00:05:10] Full books by Nicki Schiffer, cleaved, the bride stripped bare, and the book of rapture made the long list of favorite Australian novels as chosen by readers of the Australian book review. And I have to say that shiver was that's Nikki stay boon novel was one of the books that first made me want to become a writer when I read it.
[00:05:28] And I saw the way that Nikki use such crisp evocative language. I thought that's how I want to write. I'm not sure that I've actually achieved that. But it's always great to have those role models in our writing lives. And Nikki is definitely one of mine. Shiva also is possibly coming to our screens very soon.
[00:05:47] And Nicki is working on the Nikki is working on the script for that. The screenplay for that. Her most recent release wing is a compelling literary novel about the fault lines in female friendships between mothers and daughters, older and younger generations and men and women. Written in Nikki's unique, poetic style.
[00:06:05] It's an important feminist story. If what it means to be a woman in today's world. And that is definitely something that is in Nikki's wheel house. Her last novel the ripping tree, which I absolutely loved historical fiction with also a feminist flavor. Took her into a new space, but she's back to writing feminist contemporary fiction.
[00:06:26] And from the sounds of this interview, that's definitely where she's staying for a while. Grab a cup of pop on your walking shoes and your headphones, whatever it is that you do when you listen to rights for women. And I hope you enjoy this interview with Nikki Gemmell.
[00:06:39] Pamela: Nikki Gamal, . Welcome to Writes for Women. It's so good to have you on the podcast and I had the pleasure of chatting to you a few weeks ago at a library event and we talked about Wing and I'm very excited to be able to do it again.
[00:06:52] Pamela: So welcome.
[00:06:54] Nikki: Thank you, Pam. It is so lovely to always talk to you. I love your wisdom and your kind of deep thinking about books, so thank you.
[00:07:03] Pamela: Aw, thank you Nikki. That's so lovely to hear. We are here today to talk about Wing your new release, which has been out for about, what, five, six weeks now? Yep.
[00:07:15] Pamela: Yeah. And as I told you when I met you last time, I absolutely devoured this book. I just, when I first started it, I thought, oh, this is gonna be really different. This is really interesting and it's got so many issues and so many great thing things in there that really are meaty and great to just dive into and the way you write the story is brilliant.
[00:07:35] Pamela: So can you tell the listeners, first of all what it is about?
[00:07:40] Nikki: It is about? Okay. It's a literary thriller. It's a feminist literary thriller. It's a riffing on the seminal work picnic and hanging rock. The Joan Lindsay novel, which of course became the Peter Weir film. But it's an updated version of that.
[00:07:57] Nikki: So think four Aussie school girls in year nine, year 10, age 15 or 16 get lost in the Australian bush on a school camp. A male teacher goes in to find them. The girls eventually return, but the teacher doesn't. What happened? Will he return? What on earth went on? Out there, who's guilty, who isn't? It's picnic and hanging Rock meets promising young women meets Prime of Miss Gene Brody and a dash of Lord of the Flies in there.
[00:08:33] Nikki: I just wanted to pour everything into this that I've observed about females, womanhood, young women, since what I did with the brides strip bear. This is my journey of womanhood. 20 years on. So there's a lot in there. It's not just a thriller. It's a lot more than that.
[00:08:54] Pamela: There is so much in there, Nikki, you are so right.
[00:08:57] Pamela: And I love that mashup that you mentioned there about, picnic Hanging Rock and Lord of the Flies. It's got all of those elements in there. And I loved that Echo of picnic at Hanging Rock in the book. I remember just loving the movie the first time I saw it and I, being so mesmerized by this idea of the girls disappearing and then the way it was portrayed in the film in this kind of really ethereal, spooky way.
[00:09:20] Pamela: Yes. And you really capture that sense of, , I guess the dark, the potential darkness of the Australian bush that has appeared in so many different ways in our literature. Is that something that has always Yes. Fascinated you?
[00:09:34] Nikki: Yes, absolutely.
[00:09:36] Nikki: It's the little boy lost, the little child lost trope. It's our ultimate fear the settler colonial idea of our loved ones getting lost in the Australian bush and will they ever return. And I was fascinated by that fascinated by picnic and hanging rock in many ways.
[00:09:53] Nikki: But I wanted to give the girls agency. So that is one of the big differences between Joan Lindsay's version and my version. This is very much. A modern day exam, examination of gender, politics, generational differences. Mothers and daughters, the dynamic between teachers and students, male teachers and female students.
[00:10:18] Nikki: A principal and the whole school body, because the book is written from the perspective the protagonist is the principal of the school. So she's observing everything while trying to maintain the reputation of her school and find her students. One of them, because I wanted to raise the stakes as a novelist, one of them is her goddaughter and the rest of the student body doesn't know that, that she has this secret relationship with one of the girls that's gone missing.
[00:10:48] Nikki: So yeah, there was a lot in there that I wanted to examine and push further than the Joan Lindsay version.
[00:10:56] Pamela: Yeah. You definitely do that, Nikki. And as you say, there's so many different ways in which you up the stakes for this protagonist. That the headmistress of the school.
[00:11:07] Pamela: And of course one of those being that it is a very elite kind of private girls school. Yes. It's a coveted job that she's in, won't give away spoilers 'cause there's other things going on for her in the background. But of course the reputation, as you say, of the school is at stake as well as, primarily the girls' safety.
[00:11:23] Pamela: But she has to go into this mode of trying to make sure that the panic is minimized and that the parents are placated and that the media doesn't get a whiff of, too much of what's going on. So when you are planning a book or when you are writing a story.
[00:11:41] Pamela: At what point do you stop and think about, oh, I need to increase the tension, or I need to up the stakes, or are those things that you plan out in advance, or do they happen for you as the story unfolds?
[00:11:53] Nikki: Pam, this is an awful confession. I've written maybe 20 books and I wish there was a magic formula that worked for me.
[00:12:03] Nikki: Everyone is hard and hard in a different way. My novel before this one was historical fiction. It was called the ripping Tree. It took me 10 years of agony to get that book into the world. It was like, drawing blood from stone. It was hard, it just would not come easily. And that was the book where I thought I am going to plot everything in, so that I begin with a skeleton of the story and I just have to luxuriously spend the time fleshing that skeleton out.
[00:12:35] Nikki: I can remember going down to my local news agent and buying two huge cardboard sheets like, we used to do on school projects when we were at primary school, a marker pen and literally with that marker pen, just writing down plot point by plot point until I got to the very end. And I remember sending it off to my wonderful editor Catherine Mill at Hover Collins, and she was like, the ending needs to change.
[00:13:02] Nikki: And as soon as she said the ending needs to change, everything else unraveled
[00:13:06] Pamela: right up
[00:13:07] Nikki: those cardboard sheets. So that was 10 years of back and forth and back and forth with the editing. But when. Was a different situation entirely. I sold the idea to Harper Collins. It was a couple of paragraphs, it was basically the strap line, which is written here, four days, four girls, one teacher.
[00:13:29] Nikki: What happened? I never really deviated from that strap line. And when I finally sat down to right wing, this one came really strongly. I was really sure what I wanted to write. It just. Flowed in a way that the previous book happened. And I feel really strong about it. And Catherine, my editor does too.
[00:13:54] Nikki: She says, Nikki, this is your group. You are tracking the female journey from my first novel shiver, which was looking at a young woman starting out in her career through to a lot, so many different works that I've done. Brides Strip Bear, which was about a young mother, that was 20 years ago.
[00:14:13] Nikki: And this one, the protagonist is a menopausal woman. Her mental state feels like it's unraveling along with the world around her. She's stepping into invisibility. She's her brain feels like it's fracturing as she's trying to hold a student body, a school together. So I feel like for me, I.
[00:14:35] Nikki: My tuning forks as writers are Annie and o Debra, Levi, Elena Ferranti. They really examine closely the female art, the female narrative through many books from young womanhood through to old age. And I feel like with my books, that's what I'm doing too. And now that I've found my groove, this one came really strong.
[00:15:01] Nikki: And I just knew what I had to write and what I wanted to write. There was a confidence to it. Hopefully, who knows, with my next novel, I'm just crossing fingers that it will be an easier experience too.
[00:15:14] Pamela: It's so interesting, isn't it, that even after all of the novels you've written all the books, nonfiction as well, and all the other writing that you do, that each one is its own kind of challenge and its own process.
[00:15:26] Pamela: There's no ma like you say, there's no magic formula. Of how to write a book. Absolutely
[00:15:31] Nikki: not. They're all very different beasts. And, I just wish I had that magic formula so that it was easier for me. But no, the only thing I would say is in terms of my writing, I've landed on a process of writing small paragraphs, if you can see in wing.
[00:15:49] Nikki: It's small paragraphs of information with a solid line between them. So it's not a regular type of setting out a page. But that in a way is my thought processes of writing. I think in distilled chunks. And then, I'll write out a thought within a chunk, which is maybe four or five lines long, and then I will distill it.
[00:16:13] Nikki: And those are the building blocks for the narrative of wing. And then in a way, I thread the strong narrative through those chunks. Because I very much want readers to turn the page, and I'm loving the fact that people are saying they read the book very quickly. Yeah. Or they couldn't put it down.
[00:16:31] Nikki: Because in a way, what I wanted to replicate was that feeling from my early days of reading childhood and as a young woman, as a young adult, when, I would just read a book and, the whole world outside would disappear and the evening would disappear as I read into the early hours, because I literally had to know what was happening next.
[00:16:52] Nikki: It's been a long time since I've felt that grip. Writing. Writing. And so I wanted to write a book wing, that had that, that gripped the reader if I possibly could.
[00:17:03] Pamela: You certainly pulled that off, Nikki. But I have to say, I, as I loved Wing, but I absolutely adored the ripping tree.
[00:17:10] Pamela: And I was very hopeful when we chatted last time, talking about the ripping tree, and you said, oh, there might be a continuation of that story. Is that still on the cards?
[00:17:19] Nikki: Oh, look, you know what I love the story of the ripping tree. It's historical fiction. It's set a in like the 18, 20 30.
[00:17:28] Nikki: And I wrote it in such a way that there's. An open-ended situation at the end where yes, there absolutely could be a sequel to the ripping tree because when I was finishing it myself after that very hard tenure process, I was thinking, I really wanna write a companion book to this because there's so much more that I say publishers in.
[00:17:56] Nikki: So this is why I went on through wing, which is, I guess it's my groove that I'm more comfortable in. And I find easier to write. So my next book that I'm going to write is in a similar vein to wing. I just feel like it works. It's known I can have fun with it, and it's not agony the way the ripping tree was.
[00:18:17] Nikki: Yeah. I
[00:18:17] Pamela: wouldn't want you to go through that agony again, Nikki. That's alright. Maybe
[00:18:21] Nikki: down the track. Oh, one day. Yeah, exactly. Down the track.
[00:18:26] Pamela: Let's go back to talking a little bit more about some of the things in the novels. So the girls that go missing are part of a group called the Sins. The name coming from one of the girls, cinnamon, who as you mentioned is the kind of secret goddaughter of the school principal who is the protagonist.
[00:18:42] Pamela: It's a really interesting kind of exploration of. Not just with the sins, but with the parents as well, and with the headmistress and her best friend who is SIM's mother, this exploration of female friendship and the dynamics around that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:19:02] Nikki: Yes. So this book is a lot about female friendships too, they've been hugely important in my own life.
[00:19:07] Nikki: I'm fascinated by the dynamic of friendship between women. I've just gone away on a girl's weekend with four of my dearest friends and that we've all just been texting each other last night about how nourishing it was. We feel rested and recalibrated just being in each other's company and, just talking basically.
[00:19:30] Nikki: Talking. It was wonderful. But I've also had friendships that have fallen by the wayside over the years. And, a best friendship that I lost which I still grieve for. I feel like that was one of the most discombobulating and bewildering and traumatic episodes of my life when I lost a best friendship, someone I had been friends with for decades and decades.
[00:19:58] Nikki: And I just feel like I mentally stumbled or fill down a pit, really trying to understand what had happened there, why the friendship was lost. And I thought. I guess with everything that I go through, it's like, it's fuel. It's fuel for my writing, it's fuel for my fiction.
[00:20:18] Nikki: Everything I do, e even my columns on the weekend for the weekend, Australian magazine, as well as my nonfiction and fiction books, they always been, begin with a question, why. Why has this happened? What is the situation here? I write to understand? And so for me, I'm writing in wing about a very tight female friendship that is unraveling.
[00:20:43] Nikki: And a lot of women have picked up on the dynamics of that friendship and just the trauma that you can go through when a dearly beloved person is slipping away from you in terms of a friend. So I was fascinated by that whole dynamic too, with the book.
[00:21:01] Pamela: Yes. And I think it's definitely something that a lot of us, I reckon every woman who reads the book will relate to that in some way or other, and also those the friendships between the girls, I'm an ex teacher and also obviously an ex student. So it really took me back to that kind of school ground, the classroom dynamics between kids and the power plays that go on, in, in groups within schools.
[00:21:25] Pamela: And I think you, you did that so beautifully with showing this kind of really cliquey little group, who, and also taking us into each of their little worlds too as individuals within that. And obviously sin is the leader and the mo one we learn about the most.
[00:21:40] Pamela: But we do get to know who the other girls are too, to some extent. Even though they're missing for a good part of the book, we learn about them, through the protagonist's headspace, through her thoughts, through the interactions with their parents. So I think you, you drew on those kind of power plays and everything that goes on within, particularly in, in girls.
[00:21:57] Pamela: I think.
[00:21:58] Nikki: Yes. And how different they all are. Gabrielle said we all have three lives.
[00:22:03] Nikki: We have a public life, you know how we exist in the world. We have a private life, which perhaps our friends, our closest friends and our family might know. And then we have a secret life. Which no one knows. So I was fascinated by that, the secret life of the principal, also in a way, the secret life of the girls.
[00:22:22] Nikki: And yeah, what they may present to the outside world might not be at all what they are inside. I was also fascinated by relationships between men and women in terms of the missing teacher. He's a man of a certain age. I describe at one point that he's like the Swiss Army knife of men for the female protagonist because she's the principal, he's the deputy principal.
[00:22:49] Nikki: He's the one that, the bloke that you can fall on to change your car tire, fix your shelves. My dad was that kind of man. And, retrieve lost kids from the foot. But what emerges over the course of the story is that the protagonist, a woman in her fifties, sees this man, this, who she's very fond of, she's become very close to, she really relies on, in the work environment, we gradually realize that she sees him in a totally different way to what the school girl, how the school girls see him.
[00:23:22] Nikki: And I was fascinated by that, that, different generations can see someone in an entirely different way.
[00:23:28] Pamela: Couple of things you mentioned there, Nikki. One is this the different levels of the people that we see, what's on the surface can be completely different to what's happening underneath.
[00:23:37] Pamela: And you capture that so beautifully with the protagonist. And I think part of that is your choice of using that second person pronoun you as the narrative voice. And that's something you have done quite often. Can you talk about that decision to, to use that. Second person narrative voice.
[00:23:56] Nikki: Yes. Now, Pam, as we said before, I don't have a set formula for how to write books.
[00:24:00] Nikki: No, that's right. So what always happens with me is I never intend to use the second person, which is, you did this, you did that. And I usually start with the first person, and then I'll read it through and I'll go, oh, it's too indulgent. It's I, there's too many, I, it's all through the manuscript.
[00:24:21] Nikki: And then I'll change, I'm like, Goldilocks, and then I'll change it to the third person. As in, they did this, they did that. And as I read it, it's like it's losing the immediacy. It's too distanced from the whole process. And then for some reason, I always settle on the. You did this, you did that.
[00:24:43] Nikki: I did it. I think the first book I did it in was the Brides Strip Bear. I, that was the similar process of trying to settle on the Voice, which always takes me a little while with my books. And as soon as I found the you with brides Strip Bear, everything just fell into place and I flew with it because the second person gives you a distance, but it also gives you an incredible intimacy with the protagonist that you feel like you've entered their mind and decisions are your decisions.
[00:25:14] Nikki: It's quite disconcerting, but incredibly powerful as a narrative device. And I also find it very freeing as a writer. I just find it clicks when I use the u. The first time I'd ever I ever came across it was Jay McNerney, bright Lights, big City. And usually you can only sustain the second person with a very slim book, a hundred, 150.
[00:25:39] Nikki: Most. And when I read Bright Light's Big City, it was like, oh, I had just entered the mind of, a 20 something Manhattanite male, who's nowhere near my experience at all. But I found, I felt so grounded and solid with the writing and I found for me, that second person really works.
[00:26:01] Nikki: And once again, with Wing, I think I started writing again with the first person and ended up eventually with the second person. And it just felt right. It was solid. And it worked. Yeah.
[00:26:15] Pamela: I think very few people can do it. Nikki, and you do it so brilliantly. Oh, thank you. As a sustained, for the voice of a whole novel, often I would start reading something and after a while with a you, it'd be like, no, I can't get into this. But there's something about the way you do it that just works. So thank you.
[00:26:34] Nikki: Oh, thank you. It might also be that I'm trying to really differentiate my fiction from my column writing.
[00:26:41] Nikki: Which, which every week I have to 173 words for the weekend, Australian magazine. Yeah. And that is because it's column and opinion. That is I, yeah. So perhaps just, writing fiction alongside that. It's just too much. I
[00:26:56] Pamela: Too much. I found that voice, the second person voice, it was, it's like a dual thing for me.
[00:27:02] Pamela: The way it worked. It was like, it's almost omniscient, the voice, like you're doing this and you're doing that, but it's also, as you say, it also is like the voice of the character talking to themselves almost. Which is why
[00:27:15] Nikki: you feel like you don't get into their head.
[00:27:18] Nikki: Which is when I wrote the brides strip bear I had wanted that to be a universal book for every woman. That every woman would relate to that and find something in that for themselves. Second person, the really is a great literary device to achieve that aim. That, you chime with the honesty and the authenticity of it. Yeah. It's just like a, it's I cheapen it by saying it's a narrative trick, but it's just a device that I locked on very early in my career that I could make work for the kind of writing that I was interested in.
[00:27:53] Pamela: Yeah. And it creates that really unique kind of voice for you too.
[00:27:56] Pamela: I think, when you pick it up, oh, this is Nikki Gamal. Yeah.
[00:28:00] Nikki: Oh there you go. See? Love to hear that because for me, I came of age with my writing in a world of very singular, strong or voices. It was like Komack McCarthy, Tony Morrison, Michael, and Darci.
[00:28:16] Nikki: It was all Sal Rushie. Martine. It was all these wonderful writers who had a very strong, distinctive voice. And, you could go into a bookshop and not even look at the cover, flip open the book and just go land on any paragraph and go, oh my God, that's McCarthy or that's Rusty and.
[00:28:34] Nikki: I guess I've always wanted a really strong, singular voice that is very much my own within my writing. So for me that's a wonderful compliment. I'm also very interested in beautiful writing. Poetry is my tuning fork. So I spend a lot of time working my sentences to create duty. Yeah.
[00:28:54] Nikki: And that's beautiful. But you think I've got a distinctive voice in terms of my writing? Oh, absolutely. That's, thank you.
[00:29:03] Pamela: Do you read poetry, Nikki? Are you a big reader of poetry? Because I know in your Instagram posts you are very poetic, you set them out, with your line spacing and everything is like a poem when you're writing an Instagram post, which I love.
[00:29:15] Pamela: But are you a big reader of poetry as well?
[00:29:18] Nikki: Yes, I'm, and it's funny because a few people say my Instagram posts are like a poem, and it's God, I never intend that. It's just a form that I find conveys what I wanna say. It's like I'm interested in punctuation too, and all the and the rhythm, the mentality of a sentence.
[00:29:36] Nikki: So I find setting out my Instagram posts, downwards like a poem, it just it punctuates it for me naturally. I just, once again, like the second person, I find it's a very easy form that I just slip into. But yes, for me, when I'm writing a novel, I can't read other fiction. Okay. And I think that's part of me, I'm worried about that author's voice bleeding into my own, terrified that I'm gonna take some of their words and imagery and unconsciously put it into my own books.
[00:30:11] Nikki: So I just. Put that all aside, but I do find I can read poetry. Which is wonderful. All through my writing, I'm, it just the, that idea of distilling an idea into it, its essence and surprise. I love surprise. I learned so much poetry. Yeah. Yeah. I love my poach and also I'm busy.
[00:30:31] Nikki: I've got four kids it's like I'm trying to be a mom to them as well as getting my own fiction written. It's just it's hard work reading a book. Yeah. But I just, if I've got a spare 20 minutes or half an hour, I can pick up a book of poetry much easier.
[00:30:48] Pamela: Do you have some favorite poets?
[00:30:51] Nikki: Oh gosh, so many. And they're all female. Oh God. Ann Carson Emily Bronte, who am I reading now? So I'm just looking now. See, actually, I'm looking here at all my books. Oh God. Emily Dickinson. I've got books all around me. I'll often end up in a bookstore at, in the poetry department, and I'll gravitate to a books if it's got, a wonderful poetry bookshelf. Oh, joy of Joy bookshelves, which not many do, but they're my favorite.
[00:31:19] Pamela: Yes. It's in it's funny, isn't it? You go in and you look for the poetry shelf and sometimes there'll be a tiny little half a shelf, and then other bookshops, like you say, will have, a whole section, which is always lovely. Yes.
[00:31:32] Nikki: Exactly.
[00:31:32] Pamela: Yeah. And that love of poetry, and you were saying Nikki, you love to play with words and to really capture the essence of something in a word.
[00:31:40] Pamela: And I think that particularly comes through in your descriptions of setting. And in this book in Wing it's set in a really set in the Blue Mountains. It's not, I don't think you mention the Blue Mountains, do you? But it's a very blue mountains ish setting. And so I guess that gives you the kind of permission to really go to town with some of those and it's not purple Pros, it's not overly descriptive, but to really try and capture that sense of the bush and the sounds and the smells and the, all of those things that are going on.
[00:32:10] Pamela: I'm sitting in my caravan as we're recording this and outside all I can hear are cicadas. I dunno if that's coming through. Oh, so lucky. But but yeah, that, that kind of poetic. Approach to the writing is a great way to capture all those different elements in a setting, isn't it?
[00:32:27] Nikki: Yes. Yes. All my books, from my very first one, Shiva, through the Cleve onwards, they've all begun with settings.
[00:32:34] Nikki: So Shiva began with Antarctica. Cleve began with the idea of Central Australia. I find that's what grounds me in terms of my novels. Where is it going to be set? And yes it, it was the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where wing is set which stands in for the Australian bush. Yeah. And all the tropes.
[00:32:55] Nikki: As Australians about the Australian bush. And I not only went there and immersed myself in it, the sounds, the smell, the sky the, the feel of the place. Instagram's been great. There's a wonderful Instagram account called Blue Mountains Explore which, gets you really into, it's this group of adventurous, secret adventurous that go into areas of the mountain that the public doesn't usually go to.
[00:33:24] Nikki: That's, that was good for a group of lost school girls. Yeah. Going into areas that's off the beaten track. And it's just. Ravines gullies and cliff faces and rock pools on the top of cliff faces and bubbling creeks and Oh God, howing trees. There was so much of it there that I, I just, that's how my book began with that idea of place and it's how they all begin
[00:33:52] Pamela: the place.
[00:33:52] Pamela: Yeah. It's funny, as you mentioned shiver there. 'cause that was one of the very, that was the first book of yours I ever read. And I mentioned to you when I saw you last time, it was one of the books that made me think, I really wanna write and I wanna write like this. But I just had an image of an eyeball, as you mentioned, shiver, because there is an image in there, I think right at the beginning, isn't there, about ice and an eyeball.
[00:34:13] Pamela: Yeah,
[00:34:14] Nikki: It's about it's a, the little kind of strap line and it ends with Anna tongue on my eye. She gets a shot of grit in her eye. And then a romantic partner licks her eyeball to get the grit out. And that was something that someone had told me years and years ago had actually happened.
[00:34:33] Nikki: And I thought, wow, that's gosh, something I've never heard of, but also incredibly romantic in a way too. Yeah. So that's why, I'm like a bowerbird. I've got all my, my mind, my journals. So that little image went into one of my journals and then years later I put that into my novel Shiver.
[00:34:53] Nikki: Yeah.
[00:34:54] Pamela: It must have been a really strong image because I haven't looked at that book for quite a long time and it just came to me. So well done.
[00:35:02] Nikki: Well done. Because yeah, that book's on, I'm 30 years old.
[00:35:07] Pamela: Wow. That's amazing. You mentioned journals then, Nikki. Are you a big journaler? Do you do a lot of journaling?
[00:35:14] Nikki: Yes. I am. And I would like to shout out my teacher from decades ago, Mrs. Ting, at my high school when we're in year eight, she handed out to all of us girls these blank journals and she said, right girls, I want you to write something in them every day. I'm going to collect them on a Friday and have a look at them.
[00:35:34] Nikki: And we all went and she said no, I'm not going to read them. I'm just going to flip through and see that you've actually written something because I want you to get into the habit of writing in your journal every day. And lo and behold, I did aged, 13 or 14, whatever it was. I've still got that journal.
[00:35:54] Nikki: That's journal number one. I about, hang on, where is it? Oh look, this is my latest one on my writing desk. Oh, that's
[00:36:02] Pamela: gorgeous. It's
[00:36:03] Nikki: journal number 14. And it's just, I can give you a little. Slip through, it's just that's what I'm writing, yeah. Little chunks of whatever, little observations novel titles or that kind of thing.
[00:36:19] Nikki: Right up recent times. And I just find it's such a handy way of capturing novel titles character studies, something I might hear on the bus or train a description of a certain tree or a sunset, whatever. It all goes in there. And then I minor it.
[00:36:41] Pamela: Yeah. And in fact,
[00:36:42] Nikki: for which has like.
[00:36:44] Nikki: 16-year-old girls as protagonists. It, I went back to my early journals from high school from when I was 14, 15, 16. Oh really? And even though what I was talking about back then, which was probably Pizza Hut and rollerskating and, that kind of thing, I just wanted to capture the energy of the voice.
[00:37:05] Nikki: And so it was really good to be able to immerse myself again into what it felt like to be a teenage girl. With all the angst and furies and exhilaration and naivety and all of that. I just, how can I slip myself into the character of a teenage girl again? So I actually found my own teenage journals were really helpful so yes, I'm a great journal. I highly recommend them. Fantastic.
[00:37:36] Pamela: One of the things, Nikki, of course, that has changed, you mentioned Pizza Hut and roller skating, and I can definitely relate to that from my youth and ice skating too, as a matter of fact. Yes. One of the things that we didn't have, of course, when we were growing up was social media.
[00:37:51] Pamela: And that is something that is part of the story of Wing, because of course there is, as soon as the girls go missing and the word gets out and it's trying to contain everything on social media, there's also the way that the kids use social media. , at the moment there is this legislation going through to ban social media for kids under 16?
[00:38:11] Pamela: Yes. It's such a complex issue and it's a completely different world that kids are growing up in now. What are your thoughts and what was your kind of I guess your logic or your reasoning in including that or filtering that through the story in Wing?
[00:38:27] Nikki: I wanted to write a very contemporary story social media is a huge component of teenagers lives.
[00:38:33] Nikki: I've got a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old. I look at them and I just think it's unenforceable. I just don't know how it will possibly work. And my little buggers, my adorable little. Particularly my 13-year-old. I just know that he will find a way around it as all his mates will do. My concerns as an adult are that we will also have to somehow give identity documents, to the likes of a Zuckerberg or, whoever.
[00:39:07] Nikki: I find that really concerning. The government's going to go into a year of working out how on earth. This will work. I just think good luck to them. But in terms of wing, I was looking at the very destructive aspects of social media and how adults can infiltrate the child's world.
[00:39:28] Nikki: The principle of the book, she says she's a great trawler of social media accounts to work out what is going on with her students. And I think, it's dangerous out there. But I also, social media can be incredibly connecting too. So we have to be really careful of that.
[00:39:47] Nikki: I know with my teenagers to stave off the loneliness, particularly during the covid years. Social media was incredibly helpful to keep them connected with their mates and with the world. Yeah. So I'm just wearing. But I think, great intentions and good on the government for giving this a shot, but I just think, oh my God, they're creating a rod for their backs because it's going to be very hard to police.
[00:40:14] Pamela: , I agree. It's gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out. Nikki, you mentioned before about wing kind of being, almost a culmination of everything you've been writing about to do with feminism and women's lives and things like that. Yeah. Looking back over the period in which you've been writing both fiction and nonfiction, and particularly I guess since the Me Too movement, and everything that has happened
[00:40:37] Pamela: as a result or around that, what is your take on the kind of state of gender equality, now and where we are now and have we really progressed? What do we need to continue doing? What do you see as the kind of, trajectory I guess, that we're on?
[00:40:56] Nikki: Oh gosh, Pam. And is it a trajectory? I can't believe that, in 24 we, not further along the path. I'm just in the middle of formulating my column, my first column for next year, which is going to appear on January the 18th, a couple of days before Trump is inaugurated. And what happened in terms of early November when he won the election and, young girls around me within 24 hours we're getting memes sent to them from young men.
[00:41:28] Nikki: Your body, my choice, and, and that is just chilling.
[00:41:32] Pamela: Got bumps as you're talking about it. It's just unbelievable.
[00:41:36] Nikki: Yeah. And what year are we in? And then just this morning it's, news out about Afghanistan is that the Taliban is now preventing women from doing medical studies and from being nurses and studying nursing.
[00:41:50] Nikki: And it's what world is this? And why aren't we talking more? And when I was a young woman, I assumed there would be like this great groundswell in terms of an upward traject trajectory towards equality and kind of a new way forward. And kind of optimism. And I feel like in some ways we are going backwards.
[00:42:15] Nikki: Yeah. Or, gain, women are once again down the track, put in their places. So I'm exploring all this, and this is what my next book is going to be about too. It's called Masterclass. So I'm just like. Oh. My eyes are wide open to everything, but I'm not as optimistic now as what I was, as a 20 something woman.
[00:42:36] Nikki: Yeah. Because I just assumed the world got better and better. But I feel like this fight will continue through my daughter's genera, my, her daughter and their daughters after that. It's never ending. Yeah. And it's exhausting for us older women who can see the breadth of our own lives and the breadth of history.
[00:42:56] Nikki: Yeah.
[00:42:57] Pamela: And I think that's why it's so important that books like Wing and, the new one that you're working on and a whole lot of other books that we do continue to look at this and to explore it and to put it out there as part of the conversation. Yes.
[00:43:12] Nikki: Yes. I write to provoke to get people thinking. I also want there to be a ripping pun in there and there to be beautiful beauty and tenderness and a wing is about love too in many different forms,
[00:43:24] Pamela: let's talk about the title while we're there, because I know that it wasn't the original title.
[00:43:28] Nikki: No. So I did have another title and my darling Catherine Milne and my beautiful first reader, Louise Fatel, who is no longer with us. I know. I'm so sorry. Yeah. The Wing is dedicated to her for Louise, my blazing the second edition. Blue died just before Wing was published. But her heart and her soul is in this.
[00:43:54] Nikki: She loved it. She loved it in every way except for the title. She said to me, I would never buy a book with that in the title Nikki. It's just too angry. It's too masculine. This was the title that I absolutely loved. But anyway so then, gosh, I spent months and months of trying to find another title re going back to reading like Emily Dickinson and Virginia Wolfs and Emily Bronte poems, and trying to get a little sliver of a phrase that would work as a title.
[00:44:29] Nikki: Nothing sat quite right. There was like 40 or 50 different titles. Wow. Some of them down the track, but eventually I just came across wing and there were a few bird references in the book and I thought, oh, wing, I winged by love, tucked under your wing. There's something incredibly tender and hopeful about wing and birds and flying and wanting them to be free.
[00:44:59] Nikki: And kind of the metaphors of that with young women. And I pinged wing across as a suggestion to Catherine Mill, and it was just before we had to really get serious about, the editing and the proofreading and all the rest of it. It was like we really had to make a decision here and as soon as she read, wing, she just went, ah, that's it.
[00:45:19] Nikki: That's it. Yeah. So finally we title, but it was agony coming across it, coming landing.
[00:45:26] Pamela: So you were able to let go of your original choice. You conceded.
[00:45:31] Nikki: Yes. I've tucked it, I've tucked it away, it's in my journal somewhere and hopefully I will resurrect that title down the track.
[00:45:39] Pamela: Good. I look forward to it.
[00:45:41] Pamela: We are gonna wrap up the main part of the interview in a minute. Nikki, I've been chatting to you for a while now and keeping you talking, but we have a few questions for the Substack supporters. Sure. I guess just the last question I wanted to ask you as part of this major, the bigger interview
[00:45:57] Pamela: at this stage of your career, you mentioned, around 20 books you've been writing for a long time. And you are on a roll now. Yes. You've got this voice with wing and you're continuing that on in the next book. Do you plan ahead to what you're gonna be writing or looking towards writing in five or 10 years time?
[00:46:11] Pamela: Or does, is it just a matter for you of each book as it comes to you and you get the energy for that and you go with it and then see what happens next?
[00:46:21] Nikki: Yeah, no, look, I certainly don't plan ahead five or 10 years. For me, I guess it's this working class work ethic within me that I just have to just keep on going because I literally have to make a living.
[00:46:34] Nikki: , both my family, both my mom and my dad. My dad was a coal miner. My mom was a coal miner's daughter. They never finished school, let alone went to university. They left school, both of them at 16 to just go and work because they were expected to do, yeah, they were both very bright, dad went down the pit and mom became a receptionist in her hairdressers.
[00:46:56] Nikki: So I, I guess I have that in me that I just have to keep on working. Yeah. Because I have to provide, writing isn't an indulgence for me. I don't have family money behind me to do it. I just have to make it work somehow, which is why I've always supplemented my novel writing with journalism.
[00:47:16] Nikki: For me now, writing that College Weekend Australian is how I make money to support my family and to buy me time to actually do what I really wanna do, which is write novels. But, there's this sneery thing within the literary world of some people look down at me because I have to write a column at the same time.
[00:47:36] Nikki: It's yeah, it's the only way I can afford to make a living as a writer is by doing that. So for me, there's always this panic when I come to the end of a book and a book's being published of what next? What next? I've gotta keep on going. I've gotta keep. Bringing in the income for my family.
[00:47:54] Nikki: So that's why, I can say to you, I'm working on my next book. I'm contracted for that next book. And that's a big relief to me. Yeah. Because it means I'm financially secure for the next couple of years at least. But then the panic will begin again as I, towards the end of that I've gotta fight again.
[00:48:13] Nikki: Because otherwise I just have to go off. Just, do a full-time job that wouldn't allow me the space and the time to write.
[00:48:20] Pamela: It's interesting you say that about your parents. My mom was the same. She she passed away LA last year. She was 98, but she left school when she was 14 and went into becoming a tailor.
[00:48:30] Pamela: And she was always very determined that we would all get, as much education as we wanted. Three out of the four of my family went to university and my sister, had really great managerial jobs and and for mom, that was always such a regret that she didn't get to continue her education, yeah. Yeah. Same.
[00:48:48] Nikki: Yeah. And my dad. He never understood me writing novels. I remember when in my early twenties I said to him, dad, I really wanna write books. I wanna write novels. And he just said to me, oh, waste of time. That, and for him, writing books was just an arty, farty, airy, fairy kind of indulgence.
[00:49:04] Nikki: Yeah. He make a living out of it. So in a way I've spent my whole writing career trying to prove him wrong.
[00:49:11] Pamela: Yeah. Isn't that interesting? We'll wrap up this part of the chat now, Nikki, we are gonna go on just to do a quick substack chat. So thank you very much for your conversation for being here.
[00:49:22] Pamela: It was a joy. Thank you. Thanks so much, Nikki.