On The Convo Couch with Carrie Cox & Meredith Jaffé
From Journalist to Author
In the Intro
Show Host, Pamela Cook shares her writing progress on her upcoming novel, Out of the Ashes, and sets herself the ambitious goal of writing 10,000 words this week.
Discussing what to do when you feel stuck, Pam emphasises the importance of asking for help—whether that’s from a writer friend or by reading a recommended craft book.
A craft book Pam’s found useful this past week is The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. Using the tips inside, she’s been able to refine her story's structure. The book also underlines the importance of defining the main action that propels a character's transformation throughout the narrative.
If you’d like to learn how to propel readers through your own novel, the latest round of Pam’s popular online writing course, ‘Turn up the Tension’ begins on October 4th. Previous course participants have loved using the insights they gained from the course to enhance narrative conflict, tension and pacing in their work.
Stay tuned for the insightful conversation between Meredith and Carrie.
Episode notes
Ever wondered about the journey from journalism to fiction writing? Allow us to introduce you to the awe-inspiring author, Carrie Cox, who has skilfully navigated this transition. Carrie opens up about the evolution of her writing career, sharing the source of inspiration for her novels Afternoons with Harvey Beam and Storylines. She delves deep into the themes of the human condition that she boldly explores in her writing and offers a peek into the narrative arc of her debut novel.
In our thought-provoking conversation, we examine Carrie's approach to character development and theme exploration in her work. We scrutinize how physical appearances and vulnerability can shape our way of engaging with the world and throw light on the cathartic power of storytelling as a form of emotional healing. Carrie unveils the real-life influences that have sculpted her story, and the unique challenges and triumphs of creating a wellness retreat for her protagonist, Nessa.
As we draw to the close of our enlightening discussion, we dissect the significance of humour in writing, and its role in setting the rhythm, pacing, and maintaining relationships between characters. Carrie shares her unique writing process and reveals how she strikes a balance between plotting and letting the story naturally unfold.
We also touch upon the importance of writing residencies, the hurdles of publicity, and marketing for a Western Australian-based writer, and the crucial role of sensitivity readers in the writing process. Carrie's journey is a testament to the transformative power of storytelling, the influence of character development, and the magic that transpires when we let our stories lead the way. Join us for an episode brimming with valuable insights, advice, and inspiration for all aspiring authors.
Episode Chapters
(0:10:48) - Exploring Themes of Aesthetic Beauty
(0:18:18) - The Power of Stories and Vulnerability
(0:23:10) - Creating a Fictional Wellness Retreat
(0:30:51) - Characters and Themes in a Novel
(0:40:55) - The Importance of Humour in Writing
(0:53:11) – Varuna Residential Program and Location's Impact on Writing
(1:00:55) – Carrie’s Book and Online Platform Discussion
Transcript
0:06:27 - Meredith
Hello, my name is Meredith Jaffe and I'm pleased to be taking over the Convo couch here at Writes for Women again quite a few times this year as one of the guest presenters and doing one of my all-time favourite things, which is to interview fellow authors. And today my very special guest is Carrie Cox. Carrie is a journalist and an author based in Perth, western Australia. She has published a non-fiction book, you Take the High Road and I'll Take the Bus, which is based on her weekly satirical column Carry On, which ran for 10 years and was syndicated into six newspapers. She's also had two previously written novels prior to the one we're talking about today Afternoons with Harvey Beam and so Many Beats of the Heart. Her latest novel is Storylines, which I've described because I got to puff quote it as an impossible, beautiful novel that delicately balances the joy and pain of what it is to be human.
0:07:24 - Carrie
Carrie Cox, congratulations and Storylines and welcome oh thank you so much, Meredith, and thanks very much for having me. I love the podcast. I listen all the time.
0:07:34 - Meredith
That'll be music to Pam’s ears. Let's start at the beginning. In a way, you're a journalist by trade. How did you come to pick that as your career in your early days?
0:07:44 - Carrie
It was a long time ago, but I only ever really had one skill and one love, and that was it's not really a skill, it's a thing, and that's words. I was a voracious reader as a child, encouraged by Grandma, who was a big reader and a volunteer at the library. She would take me to the library with her and I'd hang out for hours amidst all these stories. So, I found that stories really transported me to great places from a very young age and I dreamed about writing my own.
When you're at school and if you do alright in English, back in those days, the guidance counsellor would recommend that you probably do journalism, which back then was still a viable trade and a good one. It sounded a lot surer than saying I might just write books. No guidance counsellor or parent was recommending that, it just wasn't even an option.
It sounded a lot surer than saying I might just write books. No guidance counsellor or parent was recommending that, it just wasn't even an option.
So, it sat with me for several decades as an unscratched itch. It took me a long time to venture into fiction, but I loved journalism and I still do, even though the landscape has changed so much it's hard to get your head around. But the currency of journalism remains stories and human stories, and that's still what motivates me, and I loved my career and still have no regrets about it, not actually. To be honest, I do regret not writing fiction earlier and I do say to other young writers that I meet now don't wait. I thought I had to wait till I was 40 to have some license to tell a story. There was some critical mass of life experience before you were allowed to say anything, and I don't think that's true at all, and some of the best writing I've read in recent years have been from young people.
0:09:36 - Meredith
Totally. I totally agree and, unlike you, I wish I had not listened to the inner voice saying don't. I'm also curious how you came to be writing a weekly column and 10 years is a long time for column writing. So how did the column come about?
0:09:51 - Carrie
One of the first newspapers I worked at was in my hometown of Mackay and there was a newspaper called the Daily Mercury. It's now defunct, which is very sad, and they had an editor there for a couple of years who was ex Sydney. So, he had some big ideas to throw upon this rusty old newspaper, one of which was having its first column. And I don't know whether I put my hand up or whether he tapped me on the shoulder because I was full of opinions, but somehow, he gave me a chance and he said to me okay, you have to write six columns before I'm going to give you this gig. I need to read. He just wanted to know that I had more than six opinions in me and that I could write in a column style. And I didn't even know if I could. I gave it a go and he was happy enough and that became the column and then that was after a couple of years run in cystic publications of the Daily Mercury, so other regional newspapers within the APN network.
It was back then and thank God that was before the era of social media. I would not write a column now. I'm not sufficiently emotionally robust to be putting out a personal, unsolicited opinion every week and then wait for everyone to pile onto it. So, it was. We got the occasional letter to the editor. That was it. It was nice and safe. But parallel to that, when I started working in magazines, I was also given a column by a practical parenting magazine called Wern with a View, and that ran for several years as well, and that was a lot of fun too to be able to skewer parenting. To be honest about just how bloody difficult it is.
0:11:29 - Meredith
Sure thing. And did you find? Was it around the time that those things were winding up that you started to turn your eye to fiction, or what was the sort of the stepping stone between journalism and fiction writing it?
0:11:43 - Carrie
wasn't like, I stopped the column and thought, oh, I need a new outlet where I get to write in a more creative voice. There were years and years between that happening. I think when I finally decided to write fiction, it was the story itself. The story was which became Afternoons with Harvey Beane. That story sat with me, that character sat with me until, as writers would know, it gets to the point where you think I've got to do something with this because it's in my head a lot and it's growing and taking shape. And so, the story led me to think maybe I'll give this a go, in a very private, speculative way.
Having mainly done short news articles and feature articles for 25 years, I had no confidence in being able to carry through the narrative arc of a novel, even though I read a lot of them and have always read a lot of them, and that's very helpful. It's a very different thing to try and write that kind of length or that sort of volume or arc yourself when you're so used to short deadlines and to be setting your own deadlines. I'm so used to having people set deadlines for me and I'm very good at, I must say, keeping them. I'm terrified of them, so I keep them. But then when you impose them on yourself it's a different thing because it's just you and you can pretty much ignore it if you want to. So, I did it in a really quiet way and until I had about 35,000 words written of Harvey Beam, and I had no idea whether it was any good at all honestly no idea.
And so, I remember going to a panel at a Perth Writers Festival that had three publishers talking to a large audience and want to be writers, about how you do this thing and how you get published. And I remember there were two publishers from the East Coast. They were basically throwing up all the reasons why you shouldn't have great expectations about getting published and fair call to them, they were managing expectations. But it was disheartening, I must say.
And then this third publisher, who was from Fremantle Press over here in Perth, took a very different view, and the tone of their delivery was “We want your stories. Yes, we won't just publish anything. You still must make a certain grade but bring us your stories.”
At that point in time, I don't think it's still the case. They said we will read 30,000 words, we don't have to read a full manuscript and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is great”. I could just quietly email them this, and if it's rubbish, I will not have to finish it and I won't waste another 40,000 words. Great, what a good deal. So, I emailed it off to them and waited a long time actually, and then I got a call one day at work and they and Fremantle Press said look, we really like this character, Harvey Beam, please send us the rest. And I said, oh my god, thank you great.
And I thought, Jesus, there is no rest. I must write the rest fast while they're still interested. So that was the motivation to finish the novel and to send it, and it ultimately got published. But it's a reminder and I think all writers would agree with this especially early on in your career, to have it's so riddled with self-doubt. To have a glimmer of encouragement and that's what Fremantle Press provided to me halfway through that book is so important. It's such a lonely space to be in when you're just thinking you're working on this very big, time-consuming thing and you have no idea whether it's any good at all.
0:15:29 - Meredith
And what's interesting about that story as well is, like you're saying, oh, fiction writing is completely different to journalism. But I've done columns as well and you've got to admit that that discipline of meeting deadline, of doing a certain word count today, or whatever the parameters are that are put around you, is helpful for writing. Putting the bum in the seat I think Pamela calls it bum glue. So, sit down and go. It doesn't matter if you don't have an idea and you're not feeling the inspiration. You've got to bang out this thing.
0:16:00 - Carrie
Absolutely. There are so many times that you would know when you have to write a column and it's just a week where you there's nothing floating around up there, there's nothing inspiring you, there's nothing making you angry or there's nothing amusing you and you've got other things on and you're just not in the right headspace. But you know what? That deadline is not going anywhere, and so that is that is in my DNA is that you just have to keep touching the work. You have to try and keep it moving forward, even when you're not feeling the love.
0:16:29 - Meredith
Totally. Let's turn to Storylines. The reason we're here today Storylines is your third novel and I guess a nice place to start with this conversation is what the inspiration was for the story.
0:16:42 - Carrie
The inspiration was very much a period of ruminating on several themes. When I say themes, they're elements of the human condition that sort of had me thinking and pondering for a period, and what tends to happen with me is, once I ponder something long enough and explore it, I need to start writing something to make sense of it. So, the themes were one was an idea of aesthetic beauty. What was interesting me was that I sometimes feeling a bit philosophical. I was thinking so many things can be called beautiful, like a landscape can be beautiful, a person can be beautiful, a painting can be beautiful. So, are there actually elements common to these things that do quantify or define beauty? Is beauty an actual, is it a real thing, not just an idea or a subjective construct?
I was thinking so many things can be called beautiful, like a landscape can be beautiful, a person can be beautiful, a painting can be beautiful. So, are there actually elements common to these things that do quantify or define beauty? Is beauty an actual, is it a real thing, not just an idea or a subjective construct?
And when you do look at some of the philosophy around that, it's fascinating. Also, I think that we are becoming arguably a more aesthetically driven world because of social media, and my kids spend, they live their lives on their phone and everything's visual. Everything is reflected to you about life in some sort of image or video in your phone, and a lot of those are curated and heavily curated and distorted. We live in an era of distortion. We have supermodels putting filters on themselves and I wonder to what extent this distortion of aesthetic beauty affects the way we see ourselves, our self-perception and the way we see others. So that was fascinating for a bit, I suppose.
From a personal point of view, like most women, or like most people, I don't wake up in the morning's world ready. There's a bit of a process involved to make me palatable to this world that does actually judge people on appearances, and in recent years I've had some quite significant cancer scars cut off my face that I choose to cover not particularly well, but it's a little routine that I do each day and when I really am honest with myself about why I do that, because it's actually quite tedious and it takes up time that you don't have and that I'm running out of. It's not vanity, it's 100% not vanity.
It is all about being able to walk in the world and have conversations with people and not have physical scars become a distraction to what I love, which is just genuine human connection and conversation. It's always meant so much to me and so that was part of it as well. Like I thought, what if I amplified that and created this character that really had something significant to heart and how does that affect the way she navigates the world?
The other theme that I was ruminating over was that idea of vulnerability, which has become an emotional buzzword, I think in recent years. We bang on a lot about vulnerability show your vulnerability, just be more vulnerable and it's a nice concept, but I think it's a blunt instrument. I think that just because you're ready to hold up your pain to the world doesn't mean the world's going to be kind on mass, especially in the world of social media that we live in. I think vulnerability needs to be nuanced and a little bit strategic. You need to be confident about the people to whom you show yourself and the forums in which you show yourself and the platforms and the message so that you can receive kindness. And the third theme was just the idea of storytelling being an emotionally healing device.
“I believe the currency of my life is stories.”
I believe that the currency of my life is stories, but I started to think beyond. Them is just these things that we tell each other and then being something a little deeper, an actual means of emotional connection, that can be quite healing. And so I did a lot of research around that and found some really great studies to show that is the case. I was interested to listen recently to a podcast by a woman who teaches stand-up comedy being a form of storytelling, and she wanted to grant to teach stand-up comedy to dementia patients and I was really intrigued because my mother has dementia.
We're really looking at ways to keep her life as full as it can be while it can be and to keep her communicating and telling her stories, because she's a great storyteller and apparently, she ran this course and one of the stars of the course was this quite elderly lady who really loved the comedy. You hand her a prop and she'll deliver a funny line, and when her family came to come and see a performance, they were completely gobsmacked and shocked because this woman apparently had been mute for years and it was this storytelling that had unlocked her. And I think that's true. I think it's stories unlocked stories. These three things were rolling around and what I tried to do in the end was create a story that would allow me to weave those things together, allow me to travel to each of them back and forth, and I didn't know if that was going to be possible, but I gave it a red-hot go.
0:21:53 - Meredith
That's such a great answer. It leads perfectly into my next question. So the story centres around a character called Nessa, and she has a run-down old homestead that has been gifted to her by her father that she turns into a sort of wellness retreat, although you'd have to say at the beginning of the novel that she's not exactly committed to running this wellness retreat.
First of all, I just wanted to start with landscape, so I wanted to start with. Is this a real place that you based it on and because it felt very real on the page and can you also describe to us why this place is important to Nessa, before we actually meet Nessa?
0:22:32 - Carrie
Thank you very much for saying it felt very real because I haven't traditionally written place in a very deliberate way and I didn't know if I'd be particularly good at it, but it did become. Once I had the idea of having this homestead by a dam. I did have a picture in my mind, and it was a conflation of three or four locations in the south of Perth that have a dam, that have a run-down homes, not one particular place, but several amalgamated places. But very quickly and this is the beauty of writing, isn't it? When you write about places, just the process of writing can make it start to feel very real.
And actually I have a very good friend who's a visual artist. She's a very good painter and she was one of the first beta readers of this book, the manuscript, and she took it upon herself to paint Nevada, this wellness retreat, as she saw it in her eye. And when she showed me the painting I was just blown away by how close it was to how I'd imagined it, and then probably not too reliable in that sense because I'm too close to the work. But I showed my husband too, who had also read the book, and he said “Oh my”, this is exactly how I pictured Nevada and I thought that's great because clearly I have been able to paint a picture with words that is believable.
And so why a wellness retreat? Why was this important to the book?
Nessa wasn't committed to it. It was a property given to her by her father that she felt obligated to do something with. But she already had created a life where she could successfully put a wedge between herself and the world. So technically she could have stayed in that life and just continued to live life at arm's length. But I guess that's a pretty boring book and it's a pretty boring life. So she did this sort of with her sister's encouragement.
She did this kind of initially half-baked approach to fashioning a wellness retreat and having no knowledge how to do it. So it becomes this sort of cobbled together red dot retreat. I've been to many of them and yes, it's lovely to have yoga and massages and sound healing and all that. That's all lovely. But what a really great retreat can deliver is this unexpected connection with complete strangers who are also, at the same point in time, looking for something, running from something, hiding from something, or they just need a break, and you can have these unexpected unscripted conversations and moments of connection.
But what a really great retreat can deliver is this unexpected connection with complete strangers who are also, at the same point in time, looking for something, running from something, hiding from something, or they just need a break, and you can have these unexpected unscripted conversations and moments of connection.
That could not happen any other way, and that is what Nessa inadvertently creates, and in doing so, she suddenly finds herself in an environment, in a setting where she can perhaps no longer keep the world at arm's length. So we're trying to create something that, like the tested her.
0:25:19 - Meredith
Yeah, and I think it's an important part of the plot too. So when we talk about writing, we often it's really important to remember that whatever landscape you create for your story is an active participant in the story and impacts, I think, on character. We're going to come back to that point. I think it's time we met Nessa. So we've got Nessa is just described, Nessa for us and what she is hiding from the world. So Nessa's.
0:25:47 - Carrie
I pictured her as a 35-year-old woman who is the survivor of a tragic accident, the nature of which reveals itself later in the book, but so she carries with her significant facial scars because of that accident. To what extent they are as bad as she thinks, we're not 100% sure. This is a first-person narrative and it's the first time I've written a first-person narrative. That was an interesting test for me as a writer, but what it enabled me to do was to play around with that idea of reliability of what you're being told and that sort of correlates with that idea of self-perception and how reliable it is in the world that we live in today that is so distorted in the way we project visual images.
Nessa, yes, is a woman whose life has irrevocably changed and her means of coping and continuing to live in the world that she now sees as hers is that is just to. She has shrunk the orbit of her life to something very small. She has her family, basically, which is her sister, who she has a very interesting, close, complicated relationship with her niece, lily, who is her sister's daughter, her parents, one of whom is dying, and she has she works in an aged care home. That is her primary job before the wellness retreat took off and she has a colleague there called Campbell and they have an interesting friendship, and he probably doesn't realize that he’s her only friend.
What I found and I'm late to the party on this but is that writing in the first person made me know this character so much faster than any other character I've written. It is a great device for doing that. You get that. You nail the voice, and it feels real much earlier. That was my experience. That's so interesting.
0:27:37 - Meredith
As you said earlier, you also drawing on personal experience, with some scars that you've got on your body, on your face. I was wondering, in terms of the writing, was that, was it a personal experience? Was that something that you pushed yourself to the edge to get deeper and deeper onto the emotional plane of Nessa? Or was that something that you had to step away from to get perspective on her behaviours and her feelings and as really effectively body dysmorphia? How did the writing process of that work for you when it partly is a deeply personal? So you're drawing on personal story to populate or to form a character.
0:28:19 - Carrie
I think there's two things there that I've learned about myself. One I do find it helpful to wade towards the difficult things through writing. Writing itself enables me to get close to those things in a safer way than other ways of dealing with things. So there is that, but also that I temper the closeness that I have to the difficult things with humour. That is how I cope with life. I am always the person to make the inappropriate joke out of humour. That's just me. And I think that, Nessa, I've given her and her sister that similar sense of humour, a little bit self-deprecating, a little bit inappropriate at times, because it is, for all its flaws, a very helpful coping device.
0:29:10 - Meredith
Interesting. So I was wondering too, in the era that we live in writing, where so many manuscripts are run through the lens of a sensitivity reader did you and I've read a couple of things lately where I was surprised that they went through a sensitivity reader because that person had lived experience. Did you feel, or did your publisher feel, that you needed to also run it by someone who had similar experiences to Nessa?
0:29:36 - Carrie
I don't really make it clear that in researching the book I had done a lot of that work in making sure that I had spoken to people with whom this is a very like for people whom this has been. They've had a traumatic experience that has impacted them physically, whether it be a physical disability, not necessarily a facial disability.
I contacted organisations there's one in the UK in particular that is just about people living with serious scarring and looked at a lot of their resources, a lot of their real-life case studies. My publisher was confident and because also the last book I had written had a character with a disability and I was very careful about researching that responsibly and with real people and with an inch of its life, I think they know that I do take that responsibility very seriously and because I come from a journalistic background. Researching your topic, it just becomes I would never write about anything that I hadn't already done the work on. So, this one didn't go through a sensitivity read. The last one did. But I think it's because the publisher was already confident that I was not approaching this in any kind of flippant or uneducated way.
0:30:51 - Meredith
So, I wanted to touch back on a character you just talked about before and that's Lily, who's Nessa's niece. She plays a very important role in the story in terms of the plot and in terms of that mirror, as you're talking about, reflecting on Nessa perhaps a different or distorted reality to the way Nessa sees the world. As you said about your own teens, and my teens are the same obsessed with their phones over obsessed with social media type platforms. What were you thinking about when you're creating Lily?
0:31:24 - Carrie
So I wanted to look at someone who could similarly have a self-perception problem or a self-perception issue, without necessarily having something like what Nessa is living with. That a distorted self-perception can exist in anyone, and it's more likely these days because of the social constructs around us that we've created, and I guess I'm hashtag social media predominantly, but in many ways, every part of life is more visual these days and more snap decision-making about making instant decisions about someone's value or worth based on an image, and what a difficult environment to grow up in as a young person. It is saturated. It is the way they live.
So I wanted to have a young character who has literally grown up from day dot in that sort of setting and actually views herself as, in her words, hideous, and it's clear to the reader that she's not. So there's, I guess if you want to put a label on it, it's body dysmorphic disorder, and when I did some research on that, the rates of diagnosis of that in recent years have grown exponentially. So there's something going on there that I wanted to explore, and I wanted to set up this relationship between Nessa, who has no children of her own, with Lily and how, and set up the way in which they might be able to impact each other and challenge each other about what you really look like and how you really feel about yourself, and how much it really matters.
0:32:59 - Meredith
I think you as well know that we sometimes and this is also part of social media. But all of us sometimes put way too much weight on what other people think of us than what we feel our own worth is, and I think both Nessa and Lily in the novel are both battling with coming to terms with accepting who they are Not literally warts and all. But yeah, in a way Lily drives action, but also, she drives healing. But she drives reciprocal, isn't it between Nessa and Lily?
0:33:34 - Carrie
That was my intent. I'm glad that's the takeaway. I think their relationship is important. But it's an example of the bigger theme of the book, which is around how certain connections with people can be completely transformative and life changing. And to shut yourself off from those connections in the way that Nessa had originally done, had done for so long, deprives you a life that could be so much richer.
0:34:01 - Meredith
And that leads perfectly into one of my favourite characters, the lovely Hannah. Who is she to, Nessa?
0:34:08 - Carrie
So Hannah is in the HQ home in which Nessa works. She calls them the residents there. She calls them the lovelies because she's very good with them and she's a genuine empathic person who gives more of her time than she's paid to to really connect with these people for whom life has become very small, and I guess she can identify with that because her life is very small too and I think in that setting too,
I think Hannah is her favourite lovely. She would admit that. She's formed a very special relationship with her and one in which I think Nessa feels that Hannah sees the real her and that she can. She's very safe in that environment. There's no judgement and their conversations are just very rich and real and there's very much a two-way street. Hannah tells great stories and Nessa saves up stories to tell Hannah. They have that currency of storytelling that I think is healing for them both, but particularly for someone like Hannah who is spending life, the remainder of her life, in a nursing home with very few visitors and I know people who are doing that, and it makes me very sad.
0:35:17 - Meredith
But I think it's also important in terms of what your themes and your plot is, is that Hannah pulls her weight as a character. I mean, I guess that's what we're talking around with all these different characters. Hannah pulls her weight because she is at an age where, questionably, society says she's past it, she's no longer beautiful. There's all that kind of there's a sort of some negative storylines that are put out about becoming old and not negating the beauty and the wisdom and the lived experience of older people.
To me when I was reading Hannah and apart from that, she's delightful, she's alive on the page and she brings a lot of humour to the story as well is that I felt that you're also talking about beauty from an old person's perspective, Is that? What you're trying to do.
0:36:05 - Carrie
Absolutely generalising, but as a society we're projecting visibility onto these people, or at least the idea that the way you look now is beside the point of redundant. And I know my mother, for example. She still wants to look nice when she goes out. She wants to feel and I don't mean that in a shallow way at all, because this isn't all of this all of this talk about the setting of beauty and the way we look, None of it is about. It's coming at it from a shallow point of view. It's about how you feel about yourself and how you walk in the world and therefore how the world treats you.
And my mum still wants to be treated with respect and dignity. She wants people to find her stories funny because she's always been very funny, and I just feel I'm very careful to make sure mum still feels very visible and that I say things like oh my god, I love when you put your hair up, mum, or I love those earrings, or I say as much of that as I do about how funny her stories are, because I think none of that society might be projecting the idea that's faded or gone. I know my mum is still a 15 year old girl inside a 75 year old body, and I think my mother-in-law is the same. When you talked to them, they're like I don't know how this happened, Carrie, somehow I got old, but I know who I am still lead me, I still have a crush on Gavin, the boy across the road from when I was 15. So it was captured the sense of just preserving the essence of a person. Even though the shell is fading, there is a life inside that is still rich and full.
0:37:28 - Meredith
And the other character that we just need to touch on, if ever so briefly, because there are more than female characters in this story, and Campbell, of course, is a very important one. As you said before, he works at the nursing home with Nessa and also looks after the lovelies. I think he brings two really important elements to the story. Again going back to heavy lifting with characters. One is the storytelling that he wants to run and does run at the nursing home, but the other one is how he perceives Nessa and how his philosophical take on what beauty is a really important part of developing your story too, isn't it?
0:38:07 - Carrie
Absolutely, and he grew out of the I was talking about when I was ruminating on these themes and I was going down a rabbit hole of looking at the philosophical history of ideas about what is beauty. And in doing that I, that sort of thinking, became the embodiment of this character called Campbell. And he was a small character at first and then he grew because I really liked his coo-kee-ness. He's just a bit of an oddball and I love people like that. I just love people who look at almost everything in a kind of a unexpected left field or third eye kind of way. With those people who are in a room, you can sometimes you can be at meetings at work and you're talking about something really it is ridiculous, but everyone's getting quite passionate about it.
And then it takes this other, there's one person to present that third eye view and look down and go guys, this is ridiculous. Let's you know, let's get real here. Look at the big picture. I love those people and I think Campbell is that person and he, once Nessa gains you know or has his trust and trusts him, she allows herself to, to let him into her orbit and that connection becomes very special because, as we all know, having a really close friend that really gets you and loves you for all your flaws like that's just see, I'm getting emotional that is to me, the most important thing in the world.
0:39:28 - Meredith
Absolutely, and I just think it's. We've spent a lot of time on character because it is a character driven novel. But then I wonder too that in that initial phase, the first draft or even pre first draft kind of phase of it, was it the story that was coming to you or what was it, these wonderful characters that you created?
0:39:48 - Carrie
Yeah, very much. The characters had a rough idea of where I wanted to head and I think I could say, with all three books that I've written, I have had a probably a 60% idea, plot wise, of where I'm going to land. Like I've got a. It's not a fully formed plan at all and it's about 50, 60% and that's enough for me to trust that the rest will come in the writing process. And so far that has been my experience and so with each book I've felt more confident that, okay, I can keep pushing through with these characters and some some obvious or not so obvious resolutions will present themselves. But yeah, a lot about where this ended up did happen in in the process itself, because, as an if anyone is not a writer will know how ridiculous it sounds. But if you're writing, once you get to know your characters well enough, they will tell you where this story needs to go.
But if you're writing, once you get to know your characters well enough, they will tell you where this story needs to go.
0:40:45 - Meredith
Oh, totally, and I think that from character is where you get emotional connection with reader as well. So it is really important to have authentic character on the page. The other thing you touched on earlier, which I think is really important in this particular novel but I think it's a really good take home message for writers and budding writers is the importance of humour in storytelling, particularly when you're dealing with difficult subject matter or darker subject matter. What do you think that humour gives your storytelling that you feel your novels would lack without it? And I guess I'm not talking about the laugh so much as but the mechanics of humour in writing.
0:41:26 - Carrie
I think it's your right. It's not just about making people smile or laugh to take some of the sting out of the harder things. I use humour for rhythmic purposes too. I find that when you're reading your work back, sometimes you get a sense of where there needs to be some lightness. And it doesn't have to be a ha ha moment, it can just be a more subtle bit of levity. And you get it in life too. When things, when you just the room's a bit heavy and we've all been talking about dark things for a while and something needs to happen, someone needs to trip over or something, I find that, yeah, it's very. I find it intuitively. It works for me when I need to moderate the rhythm on the page.
0:42:13 - Meredith
I was just going to say that I think it's a pacing issue as well, isn't it that when you're looking, particularly in the reviewing process, when you're editing, is to look at it and go where are my beats on this page? Is it moving too fast? Is it moving too slowly? Does it need to break the cycle? Does it need? A sprinkle of fairy dust in it, just to take it to another level, doesn't it?
In comedy, humour can work really well and, as we said, not necessarily a gag, but it can just be, a miscommunication, it can be a whole lot of things, and also it's critical to the relationship between Nessa and her sister.
0:42:49 - Carrie
They have this thing that they send to each other each and every day or so. It's called pun hub, and actually a very good. It's on Instagram, and a very good friend of mine back from school days introduced me to it, and even though this old school friend of mine and I we don't live in the same city anymore and we don't we would never have communicated daily in the way that we do now if we hadn't found this thing called pun hub to send each other every day. And so, all of a sudden, our relationship has become much more regular because of this little device, and so I use it between the sisters to keep that connection, even when we know, as the story progresses, that things are awry in their relationship. The pun hub that sending of each other the message each or day or most days just becomes this, this touchstone between them that says things are really bad, but we still love each other Totally.
0:43:42 - Meredith
There's some of you writing the acknowledgements, which I thought was hilarious, no offence, but you have this wonderful line that says it's embarrassingly true that I reached the end of each novel with zero idea of what I have produced. Is this just messy first draft syndrome, or is this something else?
0:43:59 - Carrie
No, this is something else. I wish I knew what it was, but it is. It's like a. It's so true and it is embarrassing, but I'm going to be honest about it. I genuinely I'm like an experimental chef, I think, and I'm throwing all these ingredients together with lots of intent and purpose and effort. It's not just like the Swedish chef and the Muppets. I'm trying very hard to make a good meal in an experimental way, but at the same time, when it's all finished, I it's like I hold up a spoon to a friend and say taste this, and I would be equally surprised if they loved it or hated it. Either of those possibilities are possible in that moment. I just don't. I wish I had more confidence and command over what I'm doing in the process, so that you would get to the end of it and go this is great.
I genuinely I'm like an experimental chef, I think, and I'm throwing all these ingredients together with lots of intent and purpose and effort
0:44:52 - Meredith
But maybe the uncertainty is an important part of it, because that's like the tightrope walking of it, that if you're not taking risks, if you're not willing to fall, then you also won't write anything of great heart either.
0:45:06 - Carrie
Yeah, maybe I've just learned to accept it. Now. I've learned to not be afraid of it, because otherwise it is scary to be sitting there spending all these hours and days working on this thing and knowing that you might get to the end and literally have no idea if you've made a terrible casserole or a fantastic meal.
0:45:26 - Meredith
So does this mean that you're a pantser? What, for you, the process of getting a novel from that messy first draft to a fit enough shape to hand into your agent or your publisher is that? Is that a multiple copy polishing process? You don't live in that state of embarrassment, surely, for the entire novel editing process as well?
0:45:49 - Carrie
No, I think I'm between. I'm a plancer, I guess I'm a 60% plotter, 40% let it happen. And that's just how I am, even though I feel like I'd be much, I'd have a much more stable mindset if I just plotted things out, but it just doesn't work for me that way. So no I. But I am a very slow writer and I think all my years of journalism have meant that I'm terrified of sub editors. I don't want a sub editor to rip my stuff to shreds because it and I've been a sub editor and I know the power that comes with that to just go, ah, it's rubbish. That terrifies me.
So I make sure that the version I send to to my agent is as polished as it can be. And so if they were to come back and say it isn't really working, it's, it wouldn't be because the writing is bad, it's because it would be something fundamental with the story itself. There would be some or a character that didn't quite work. But what I hand over, I'm pretty careful about every aspect of sentence structure, grammar, punctuation. That's the journalist in me, because I think if you make it cleaner, they're more likely to feel the characters than to be stumbling across poorly structured sentences.
0:47:07 - Meredith
I think handing in clean copy to borrow that phrase from journalism, but I'm the same I think handing in clean copy at least allows the story to show on the page and not distract the reader in this case the editor or the agent by annoying stuff that should have been cleaned up. They're not going to be distracted by minutiae when you really want them to tell you is this character properly developed? Have I got a plot hole Is this the best structure for this story. All the really big, big, important building blocks of the story will get lost if you hand in a mess, won't they?
0:47:43 - Carrie
Absolutely. Look, when I say I'm a slow writer, the other thing I do is that I only ever read back the last thousand words I did, and then I polish those each day and then I move forward. I never go back to the right all the way to the beginning during the writing process. So I am finessing the words a thousand words at a time, and so I listened to a lot of podcasts with writers talking about process and they talk about doing X number of drafts and that never quite makes sense to me. It or it doesn't speak to me, because I think I only ever do one draft but I'm finessing it All the way along. I would never write up. I couldn't picture myself writing 80,000 words at pace and then going back and then rewriting or restructuring it all or putting new characters in. I love that some writers can do that, but I couldn't do that.
0:48:34 - Meredith
Yeah, how do you? Because I'm not a one-drafter. We all have stuff that comes easily to us and stuff that we struggle with and I think, as you, the more novels you write on, the more stories you write, that clear it becomes. And also the more editorial feedback you get, the clearer it becomes. What you good at, what you really need to work on and everyone has a different answer for this as well.
I'm gonna put you on the spot now and go when. What are you conscious of when you're in that writing process or reading through process that you know that you tend to be a bit light on or you need to put more effort into? Is it character, dialogue, landscape, structure, plot? What's it for you?
0:49:12 - Carrie
Historically it's been landscape in place, and so that's what I really tried to work on this time, and so I do. I Try to make it that when I, when a deficiency is made aware, is made clear to me about something that I need to work on, I work on it immediately so that it doesn't become just this defining thing, all carries. Not very good at landscape, so I've tried to better that in terms of what I would work on. So what I think I am probably I'm I play it too safe in terms of Structure and form. That is certainly something I'm now aware of, that I've probably played it safe three times now, and so the next novel that I'm working on I'm challenging myself to have, for example, multiple points of view and two timelines, and also a kind of cookie thing where I'm Toying with a bit of writing from the afterlife. Yeah, I'm conscious of my deficiencies, even, especially the ones that I've pointed out myself, because I'm my worst critic or harshest critic, and so I try to work on those things.
0:50:21 - Meredith
But I think it's also some of you to also just touched on. It is really important to approach each novel with a fresh Sensibility and try different things. That and it may or may not work and it may not serve the story best, but it doesn't mean it's wasted time because it means eliminated that Process or whatever as the right way to tell that story. It's not. There isn't one way of doing any of this stuff. It's what best serves story, isn't it?
0:50:49 - Carrie
For sure and so this time I thought to myself yet with Storylines, I thought I'm gonna have a go at writing in the first person because I haven't done that before and see and test myself in that way, and Very early on I realized this is actually the only way to write this particular story, that I could not have written this story in close to third person or any other way. So I was lucky in that respect. I made a choice to try something and then realized that, yet, in Uncharacteristically of me, it was the right choice.
0:51:17 - Meredith
There's many a story where people have told would you want to try writing this in a different third person, first person. Whatever with your writing life? How do you structure that? Do you have to squeeze writing in through other activities? Do you have a dedicated time of day that you can write, a dedicated space? What's some your writing life look like these days?
0:51:37 - Carrie
I've always had to squeeze it in around paid work. And in the last couple of years, for the first time, I've stopped working full-time and started working part-time. So that has given me more writing time. But I still yeah, definitely need to work and I am a morning writer.
I used to be very superstitious about where I wrote, to the point where it was a bit paralyzing and I into the first story, the first book I wrote in a library and didn't think I could write it anywhere else. I became very superstitious about taking my laptop off to the library each day.
For the second one, which was written in COVID, I wrote it in a friend's co-working space that was all COVID safe, and became superstitious about writing anywhere else. And what happened with Storylines is that I finally got over this weird superstition I had and taught myself to write at home, even when I am here, with all the distractions and the ironing pile and the. I've taught myself that, carrie, it's not About place, it's about time, it's just about carving out the time. But I've also learned about myself that I need to write in the morning. I'm not a an evening night person. I've already switched off mentally by then, so I'm Try and get three or four out good hours of the morning, then go off and do something else, go for a walk, get some groceries and then, if I'm lucky, even I'm in the flow I might come back and do another couple of hours or revise in the afternoon. But yeah, I and I also make sure and I think pick Williams recently spoke about this too and I love the way she put it about having a word count each day of one.
I have a similar thing where I think you have to touch the work every day. You just. It's like a marriage. You need to give it some love Every day, even if it's just a little bit and even if it's sometimes not even particularly authentic. I'm just kidding. I just think that if I spend too long away from looking at it, self-doubt creeps in. So momentum is really important to me and I used to test myself with thousand word counts a day, but I don't anymore. I do keep a book by my side that I write my daily word count in. I don't know that for some reason, is visually important to me. So even if it's a day where the flow isn't happening and I just write a hundred words, I still write down hundred words on my little notebook because there's something, it triggers something in me that says Carrie, you're still moving forward and this is a game of inches.
0:53:58 - Meredith
Oh it sure is. You also went on a two week residency. Quite at the beginning of writing this novel, writing Storylines, I was just. I've never been on a residency. I can't even imagine being allowed to go anywhere for two weeks without the family hollering at me about where's the two weeks worth of meals. It's a big chunk of time, like how, what? What was the fantastic thing about it? Did you have to deal with guilt about sneaky? Sure doing something that was for you, when you only oh yeah, so much guilt.
0:54:28 - Carrie
Motherhood is just one long guilt trip, isn't it? But as they're getting older now they're in their late teens I was able to wrestle with my guilt enough to say I'm going to do this, so that that residency was in the Perth Hills, and that's the other thing it was. If I needed to jump in the car and come home, I pulled, and I did. However, I was really surprised at just how much I wrote in that. I had no expectations.
I also thought it could possibly be a giant waste of time and that I might stare at a wall for two weeks because I wasn't around my usual things and I was. I didn't know how it would go, and it was amazing. It was transformative, and it was. I got 10,000 words written, which is a lot for me because I'm a slow writer and it broke the back of the start of the novel, which is the hardest time for me. That is when self-doubt is at its highest. That's when I'm most likely to just go this is rubbish, abandon, start something new. So when you break the back of it like that and you get that 10,000 words is done quickly. I think that was critical to the second book getting written, and it's so much so that I set myself up for the same experience with my next book, which I'm working on now.
I Applied for a Veruna residency last year and was lucky enough to get it. And I knew and I timed it, so I saved starting a new, my new work for that residency because I knew that if things all lined up again, that I would be writing 10,000 words at least for two solid weeks and that it would break the back of the start of a new work. And that's exactly what happened. I recently did that at Veruna. It was like a dream come true for me. That has always been my Narnia Veruna. I spent the first part of every day just going. Oh my god, I'm here.
0:56:13 - Meredith
But it's also camaraderie as well, isn't it? It's not like just to have the freedom to not and not have to cook and a bit to have to sit around at dinner table and talk to people. Yeah, don't go “Oh, my god, you're talking about writing again”.
0:56:22 - Carrie
To the point where I realised from that experience that because the other residency I did was completely alone, I was in a log cabin by myself in the bush, I was waiting to be murdered most nights no one would have heard but this one is, you're all in the same house in Veruna and I suddenly thought, oh my gosh, this is what I. This is what I've never had in my writing experience. I've treated it like this really solitary endeavour that it's just me in my headspace all the time.
And when I came back from Veruna I contacted a friend who's part of a writing group and said to her is there any space the club may become along? And she said, of course. So now I'm in a writing group about five years too late, because I realised that that camaraderie, especially with other people trying to work on stories and grappling with the structure and character, they're great conversations. So interesting.
0:57:19 - Meredith
Obviously because it's strange experience that gap between when they go it's gone to the printers and you can't fiddle with it anymore and then when it actually becomes a real book that's in a bookstore. And I also was thinking about you're in Perth and I've always got the impression from my WA writing friends that it's a very supportive community in Western Australia.
But I also wonder how the publicity marketing that's Unfolding now for you around the book. How different is it for a Western Australian based writer which is for is on the other side of the country from? The majority of the population, and how does that work when you're a WA person?
0:58:02 - Carrie
Yeah, I think it can be like. I'll be honest, it probably is a little bit disadvantageous to be over here. While it is a really supportive Writing and reading community, it is small and we are isolated and so I can sell my book to all my friends and family Over here, but that's only ever gonna achieve so much. So you do need to be cracking these coasts as well, and my publicist is working very hard to do that.
But it it's a numbers game. It's a very expensive flight over there, so she can't…I did say, look, I'll make myself available for events over East, and initially that that was the answer to that was We'll see. So I think it was like we'll see how early reception is, and I have now been, because some early reviews for the book were good. I thankfully I have now been able to secure an event in Brisbane and I know that will make a big difference. I would like to do more events over East, but it's a, it's a numbers game. I'm not a, I'm not Pete Williams and I'm not Liane Moriarty. You can't line up those things with confidence. I'm still very much a new author and each book is a Speculative things. Yes, events would over East would be very helpful.
The other thing is we now live in a very shrunken media landscape. So even when Harvey Bean came out, there were five years ago there were far more outlets for getting a book written up in a magazine on newspaper than there are. Even five years later. We've got one newspaper in Perth one, and which is a tragedy. So that's it for publicity in Perth in terms of media. So it is hard, but, having said that, I wouldn't live anywhere else. I love these days, I love Perth, and the great thing is that when people come to visit you they really know they want to visit you.
0:59:51 - Meredith
Because it's a bloody long way. It is it Comparatively, and so I guess, what's your relationship them? As a former journalist, you've received millions of press releases in your career. What's your relationship with publicity as a writer, as an author?
1:00:07 - Carrie
I still write media releases every day, so that's part of my day job at the moment is I work at a university and I'm writing media releases about research all the time. So I have a great respect for the power of a well-written media release, and I therefore trust my publicist implicitly. She's doing an amazing job and she's getting as much yield as she can, and the rest is about whether or not the book is good enough to be picked up by by readers and pressed into each other's hands. Publicity can only ever do so much. It's a fantastic thing, but I'm, I'm. You can't spin something that's just not good.
1:00:47 - Meredith
So I think books are about word of mouth, ultimately. Yeah and none of us have any control over that, even #booktok.
1:00:54 - Carrie
Yeah, I don't. I have not attempted Tiktok. I can't do another platform. I can't. I've been shedding them, not getting them.
1:01:04 - Meredith
Yeah, me too. I'm such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much, Carrie, got spending some time with us today on the Convo couch. Congratulations on Storylines. I'm a big fan of that book and I'm pressing it into people's hands. It's such an uplifting novel with lots of heart and humour and wonderful characters and it's just. It's just been a real pleasure to talk to you about that book and your process and your background.
For the listeners out there, you can find out more about Carrie. You can find her on Instagram. Speaking of platform, she's @carrieon13, and Storylines, of course, is available from your local libraries and your favourite bookstores. Thank you so much, Carrie.
1:01:47 - Carrie
Oh thank you, Meredith. Thanks very much you.