Craft of Writing: Lyn Yeowart, The Silent Listener

[00:00:26] Pamela: Welcome to Writes4Women, a podcast, all about celebrating women's voices and supporting women writers. I'm Pamela Cook women's fiction author, writing teacher, mentor, and podcast

Before beginning today's chat. I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Dharawal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded along with the traditional owners of the land throughout Australia and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging, and a quick reminder that there could be strong language and adult concepts discussed in this podcast. So please be aware of this if you have children around. Let's relax on the couch and chat to this week's guest.

[00:01:15] Pam: I'm excited to have so many wonderful guests lined up for the first quarter of the year and beyond on the podcast. And if you'd like to hear more about who some of those people are, you can tune into the mini-sode that I released last week, which gives you a little sneak peek into who is coming up.

[00:01:38] Pam: Today's episode is primarily a Craft of Writing episode. And my guest is Lyn Yeowart. It was such a great chat and Lynn and I could have talked all day. I felt like I'd met her. A zillion times and we were best friends. We could've talked so for so long about her writing and her debut novel, the silent listener. There's also quite a bit of heart of writing in this episode as Lynn chats about imposter syndrome and mustering the courage to put her work out into the world. Something must writers, like myself, can totally relate.

[00:02:12] Pam: I hope you enjoy this chat with Lyn. Oh, and a little warning. There is a mild spoiler about the type of ending the book has. There's no specific details about the ending just around the type of ending. So if you haven't read it yet, and you think that may bother you, you might want to save this episode until you have finished this fabulous book.

[00:02:31] Pam: So grab a cuppa, sit back and enjoy my chat with linear.

[00:02:36] Pam: Well, let's start officially, Lynn Yeowart, welcome to Writes4Women.

[00:02:41] Lyn: Thank you so much, Pam. I'm so delighted to be here.

[00:02:50] Pam: Well, we've been trying to tee this up for quite a while and we ran out of time at the end of last year. So it's fantastic to have you here as the first podcast episode for 2022. And I've just finished very recently The Silent Listener. I held off reading so it was all fresh in my mind. I don't know how it would ever not be fresh because it is such a compelling harrowing in very many ways. But just a gripping book. So, congratulations, and a debut book as well. Just absolutely fantastic.

[00:03:20] Lyn: Oh, that's so nice I still have not stopped pinching myself and saying, Oh my God, is this for real? Every time someone says something complimentary.

[00:03:42] Pam: Well, may you never get used to it.

 So, there's so many things I want to talk to you about regarding the book in particular some of the craft aspects of the book, which I really, really enjoyed and really struck me. But before we do that, perhaps if you can tell listeners what the book is about.

[00:04:00] Lyn: The Silent Listener is a psychological thriller about a family that's kind of drowning in lies and fear and deception and secrets. And it focuses on a young girl called Joy who has this strange form of synesthesia and loves words. And it's the story of how she comes to terms with, or maybe doesn't come to terms with, the trauma that she lives through as a child and the ramifications of that, and wrapped up in all of that is a girl who's gone missing. A father who's found dead when he's close to dying anyway (and looks like it's murder) and an accident that happened a long time ago that nobody ever talks about.

[00:04:51] Pam: Very well summed up because there was so much going on and I loved, in particular, the way you drew all those threads together so cleverly. I can't wait to find out a little bit more about how you did that. But before we get onto that could you tell us also about your history in terms of your writing? Because this is a debut novel…we were just talking about how we grew up both of us in the seventies…so it's taken you a while to get your first book out. But what's been your history up until now with writing and publishing?

[00:05:26] Lyn: I may have made very successful living out of writing and editing pretty much anything that you can think of.

[00:05:35] Lyn: So the very smallest things I guess I've ever written are titles for pieces of art and captions for art. Through to textbooks PhD, theses, novels, poetry, corporate stuff like websites, policies, and procedures, media kits, speeches for executives, award applications. You name it, I have written it and edited it, and it provided me with a really good income. I'm not rich, but it's been very steady and you know, satisfying income and I really, really enjoy it. But all along, all I've ever wanted to be all my life is novelist. So it's taken me a long time to do it. Then I look back and I think I should have done it then, I should have done it then, I should have done it then. But, you know, we are just the people we are at every stage of our lives. And sort of echoing what Nikki said in the last episode, was that the last episode of last year?

[00:06:44] Pam: Yeah, it was Nikki Gemmell for sure.

[00:06:47] Lyn: That idea that, you know, Sylvia Plath talks about self-doubt being so crippling in terms of creativity. And that was me, that is me personified. And that is partly because of, without a doubt, the childhood I had where I just wasn't encouraged to do anything. I was never seen as good enough at anything that I did, even though I did pretty well at school academically and I did pretty well at sport as well and things like that. But my dad just had this thing that pride comes before a fall and that, you know, children and especially females were to be seen and not heard. Your opinion didn't count if you disagreed with somebody. Well, there was no disagreement in our household.

[00:07:36] Lyn: We were not allowed to disagree with our father. And this is interesting…I don't think I've talked about this in many other interviews. My mum and dad, when they had their 25th wedding anniversary, I was the only one of their children who was there because my other my siblings didn't want to be around my parents. And in Dad 's speech he said that he and mum had never had a fight in their 25 years of marriage. And I stood there thinking that's because no one is allowed to say anything that you don't agree with. And so, you know, that's how I explained to myself and therefore, I guess others, why it's taken me so long to write a debut novel. Even though I've spent all these years writing and I'd like to think honing the craft a little bit.

[00:08:31] Pam: Yeah, really interesting. Isn't it? The psychology around the whole self-doubt thing, because as you say, you have had a very successful career as a writer across the whole range of different genres and styles and everything. Yet when it came to that much more personal creative process, that's when the self-doubt really kicked in.

[00:08:52] Lyn: Absolutely. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because I know that I can craft a sentence and it's going to be grammatically correct. And hopefully not have too many typos, which I think is a whole different ball game. But yeah, the thought of penning something and putting it out there... so I was always on and off kind of dabbling in creative writing. So always things on the computer or in the proverbial bottom drawer. I never thought any of it was any good, so I never did anything with it. Even once, I wrote a children's book and everyone in my kids' school read it and loved it and the kids illustrated it and looking back, I think it was pretty good. Anyway, in a burst of very rare self-confidence I actually rang an agent - that was in the days when you used to be able to look them up in the white pages under agent. I rang this agent and I explained to her what I had done and that every kid in the book in the school had read it and really loved it. And she said, ‘Yeah, send it to us. We'd  love to read it.’ And you know, I never ever did

[00:10:05] Pam: Oh, really? So, you could get that far, but not take the next step.

[00:10:10] Lyn: No, I just drowned in self doubt and I just never did it.

[00:10:16] Pam: It's incredible isn't it?

[00:10:19] Lyn: At that point, I was actually running a business in corporate communications.

[00:10:25] Lyn: We probably had about at that point about 12 people working for us. And it wasn't like I was some totally shy, withdrawn little hermit, but I still just couldn't take that last step and actually put it in an envelope (which I would have had to have done in those days) and send it to her.

[00:10:48] Pam: Well, it's never too late Lyn, you could always dig out that children's book.

[00:10:53] Lyn: Yes, I might! If anyone is really interested, particularly my own publishers Penguin, it's called Alexander the Pirate. And it's full of amazing adventures, of course. J

[00:11:10] Pam: So with all that going on Lyn, did you have bits of The Silent Listener that you'd written over the years? Or was it more a decision, ‘Right. I'm going to write this book’ and then you started. And when was that?

[00:11:25] Lyn: I was writing little short pieces, not even short stories. Now we might call them flash fiction or, you know, just sort of little scenes. And a lot of it was around processing the legacy of having lived with my dad and having had that childhood. And I had a contract at that time as a technical writer - I've done a lot of technical writing too. And the person who happened to be sitting next to me in this particular contract, also as a technical writer, was a poet. And so, we started talking about our creative writing and he said, 'Oh, let's share, let's show each other some work'. Cause he had been published and won some awards and stuff like that.

[00:12:08] Lyn: Anyway, I started showing him these pieces and he was really complimentary and he said, 'You should put all of them together and write a novel'. And I thought, 'Could I? Could I?'

And so I just kept writing and that was about 20 years ago. I just kept writing and writing and writing. And then maybe about 11 or 12 years ago, I went and did a Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Melbourne uni. And then I followed that up with a Master's in Creative Writing at Melbourne also. And sometime in all of that, I decided, ‘Yeah, I'm going to write a novel and I'm going to start telling people I'm writing a novel’. So I admitted to it.

[00:12:51] Pam: Owning it.

[00:12:52] Lyn: You know, that can be a good thing to do or not so good thing to do. But anyway, I did it and I had some great feedback from some of the lecturers at Melbourne you know, including people like Arnold Zable and Tony Birch. And that was much needed affirmation for me that someone of that calibre could say, 'This is really good writing'.

[00:13:14] Lyn: So I just kept going and going and going, and then trying to kind of put all of those scenes into the form of a novel, which is very different. And then I went to some novel writing master classes, run by Anthony Jaak in Melbourne. And that was also very affirming, met some other great writers from every stage of the writing process, from emerging like I was with nothing published, through to quite well known authors. So that was nice to be sort of in that milieu, feeling that, 'Oh, if they could do it, maybe I can do it too'. And just sort of picking up on a little bit more about what it taught, which was a lot of perseverance and a lot of resilience and a lot of determination.

[00:14:09] Lyn: And giving up other things that you might want to do instead, or just having that focus and saying, ‘This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing’. And that particular, in the fairly large cohort of writers in the Masterclass, they were all, again, all very complimentary of what I had been writing. And I got to a point where I thought ‘I can't actually back out now because I'd be letting all of those people down’.

[00:14:35] Pam: They'll come chasing me. J

[00:14:37] Lyn: Yeah. I didn't think that! They won’t let me give up. So I just kept going and going and going and going, as I say. And then then at one point I got in touch with Jacinta De Mase who subsequently became my agent, and is my agent now. And, that was a really nice process as well. And yeah, I think at every point along the way, you kind of think, 'Yeah, maybe I can just take the next step. I'll just do the next step. I'll just do the next thing' and just projecting yourself into a future where maybe you actually have that novel and you're holding it in your hand.

[00:15:15] Lyn: Something that I tried to keep in mind and doing things like formatting it on the page, the way that it would look, if it was printed and just things like that, that helped you keep making it a reality.

[00:15:29] Pam: Yeah. That's true. Taking all those steps towards actually being a novelist?

[00:15:34] Lyn: Yes.

[00:15:35] Pam: So once you were willing to the writing of this book, did you like intentionally think, ‘I'm writing a crime thriller?’ Was that your intention all along?

[00:15:46] Lyn: No, no, no, it wasn't. And I always just thought I was going to write some amazing, you know, great Australian novel that was very literary and I don't know, highbrow or something. I don't know. This is definitely also part of the legacy of having grown up with my father that if you were going to do something, you had to be the best. And that if you weren't the best, then it wasn't good enough. So that also was a bit of a stumbling block because you know, I'm not going to write the best novel ever written in Australia.

[00:16:20] Lyn: So therefore kind of channelling my father, I'd be thinking, well, 'Why do it then if it's not the best?' That was also a big stumbling block. So I did start off trying to write the great Australian novel. And then in this Masterclass that I was in, I'd become friends with J.P. Pomare and I looked at what he had done. So when we met, he was in the final throes of writing Call Me Evie I'd read some of those chapters, before the book came out. And one day I just thought, 'I like what he's done.' And I helped him with an article that he was writing for a journal or something and there was a line in that, that really stood out for me. He wrote that his passion was literary fiction, but his day job was to write commercial fiction. And I thought, 'Gee, that's really smart. He knows what he's doing. It's not as if he's giving up his love of great literature.’

[00:17:28] Lyn: Anyway, so I kind of had this idea that maybe I could do that. And then one day while I was writing, literally Shepherd, Alex Shepherd the cop, popped in. Because I had this dead body that was obviously with suspicious circumstances about the death. And I thought, 'Well, I have to have a cop.' Anyway, so Alex arrived on the scene to become known as just Shep from his last name. And I thought, 'Yeah, I'm going to go with this. I'm going to see where it takes me'.

[00:17:58] Lyn: It's not what I planned to do, but I'm going to see where it takes me. And I just sort of had Joshua's success. And of course you can't help but think about people like Jane Harper and the many great Australian crime writers. And I thought, 'I don't want to do a procedural as such, but I'm prepared to have a few suspicious deaths and disappearances and so on and kind of have that compelling page turning element’.

[00:18:33] Pam: And I guess once you go down that path too, like you say, with the detective and then the dead bodies and the investigation, you're sort of pushing more into that genre, aren't you? Because there's so many different ways it could go really?

[00:18:45] Lyn: Oh, absolutely. And I have this sort of picture in my mind that every time we write a word or a scene or a conversation between characters, that at every point we have thousands of possibilities of where that scene or that story or those characters could go. And every time we choose one, while we're pruning off all of those other thousands, we're also creating another whole set of thousands.

[00:19:12] Pam: That's true.

[00:19:14] Lyn: I think we've got this endless thing of kind of forked roads and lots of directions every time. So I also think that means that when you're writing you make a decision, ‘Yeah, I'm going to go down this path’. That when you start going down that path, if it's not working, you come back and go down one of the other thousands of others. And, I think that, again, there's a good and a bad side of that. It's really liberating to think that you have endless possibilities, but then it can be daunting to have endless possibilities because you don't know maybe which one is going to work best for these characters, this scene, or whatever it might be.

[00:19:55] Pam: That's so true. You know, those two ways of looking at it brings to mind when I was interviewing Holly Ringland last year. And she was talking about this whole idea of fear around writing, because she feels that (as we all do) very intensely and she'd started playing around with the idea, 'What, if it's not fear? What if it's just actual curiosity?' And, if you turn it around and look at the flip side and think, 'Okay, what can I be curious about rather than what can I be afraid about?'

[00:20:28] Pam: And it's that idea, isn't it, of which way you choose to go with all those possibilities?

[00:20:34] Lyn: I love that. That's fantastic. Curiosity instead of fear. I think a lot of writers need to overcome this whole range of fears and putting that twist to give the positive spin is terrific.

[00:20:49] Pam: And I love the way that you described it too. It's all those little bits of a web reaching out in different directions.

[00:20:56] Lyn: That's great. That's fantastic. I love that.

[00:21:00] Pam: Let's talk a little bit about Joy as your main character in The Silent Listener. You have alluded already a couple of times in this interview, (and I know in previous interviews I've read and listened to) you've talked about the book having an autobiographical element. How much of you and your experience would you say is in Joy and what happens to her in the book?

[00:21:22] Lyn: Do I have to put a percentage on it? That's a tough one. And I'm going to sit on the fence and say about 50%,

[00:21:28] Pam: Quite high for a fictional character.

[00:21:34] Lyn: Yeah. I think that well, certainly elements of Joy, like her love of words and dictionaries and things like that, that is absolutely me. I'm a word nerd. And the family that 's depicted in the novel is pretty much the family that I lived with. There were some structural changes: I never had a sister. I had two brothers, I have two brothers. And the physical description of the farm is pretty much a hundred percent accurate, with the dam, with the water lilies and the eels and snakes and the rubbish tank. And the wall hanging...

[00:22:15] Pam: Oh, really?

[00:22:16] Lyn: Absolutely that wall hanging was over the kitchen table. The original big brother. You know, just that idea that someone is watching and listening to everything you do is really very daunting for children. It doesn't matter whether you're in your room by yourself or over at the dam where there's nobody else or whatever. Wherever you are, someone is watching and listening and making judgements about you.

[00:22:46] Lyn: So all of that is true and I did sort of have that kind of slightly… I'm going to say kind of warped view of how everything in the Bible sat in the real world, that concept of heaven and hell. The devil was a far stronger image in my head in terms of what he was like visually and what he did than God ever was, you know?

[00:23:18] Pam: Because that's what you were told.

[00:23:20] Lyn: Absolutely. The way that (from memory and I might be wrong) the Bible depicts hell is far more graphic. And detailed, far more detailed than the way that heaven is depicted. But nobody ever actually describes what heaven is like. But we do have these images of fire and brimstone and eternal damnation and horror and hate and all of that sort of thing. So, I had those very strong visual images in my head of hell, but not of heaven or God. So, I think 50%, but hopefully I'm not quite as damaged as Joy became, and I didn't seek any revenge.

[00:24:14] Pam: Yeah. You have to read the book, everyone, to find out about that. J

[00:24:21] Pam: So, obviously our characters do tend to develop as we write and even if we've got autobiographical elements in there, they take on this whole persona and become this person within their own right. As you were writing the story, how did Joy develop for you? And were there surprises along the way like, 'Oh, wow, this is who she is'. How did that happen for you?

[00:24:44] Lyn: I think Joy did stay pretty constant. I had always been writing scenes with the young joy and then the adult Joy.

[00:24:50] Lyn: I always had Joy coming back as an adult to reap revenge in some way, shape or form - that changed considerably during the writing. But that idea was always there. So Joy didn't change very much, but some of the other characters did I guess. And I suppose I'm thinking perhaps about Shepherd, who never, ever existed or not for a long time. And for a long time, neither did Wendy Boscombe, the girl who goes missing. So she also popped into existence when Joy was cleaning out the shed after her father died and she's sort of thinking about selling everything. And she looked at the chest that had allegedly these expensive tools in it. And she thought...and you know, you're just writing, like your fingers are just moving and the words are coming out on screen.

[00:25:44] Lyn: And it seems such a sort of cliche, or falsehood, that things just happen without you thinking about them. But honestly, I wrote this thing that the father had said that ‘the tools in the chest would cost an arm and a leg’. And then Joy thought about an arm and a leg and thought, 'Oh, that chest is big enough to hold more than just an arm and a leg, it could hold a whole body. And maybe that's where Wendy Boscombe is. And then I'm thinking who the hell is Wendy Boscombe? But then I did the whole thing about, 'Okay, so let's just introduce this idea of this girl who's gone missing called Wendy Boscombe. And then I thought, ‘Oh, I have to go right back to the beginning and kind of thread that through, it can't just happen halfway through when she's clearing out the shed. And then the whole thing about Wendy Boscombe just grew and grew until it became quite pivotal.

[00:26:46] Pam: Yeah. A big part of the plot. I want to get back on to something about Joy in a minute, but that brings me to this point of all these different threads that you had, which I imagine (not ever having really written a crime novel) when something like that comes up for you…do you stop at that point and go back and start threading that in and then get back to that point and move forward again? How did you handle that in your drafting and revision process?

[00:27:12] Lyn: Really good question. I did a bit of both, so sometimes I'd just think, 'A h, okay, I've got this character, Wendy Boscombe, who's ‘gone missing', and sometimes I would just write a note. So, I had this foolscap notebook beside me and if I thought, right, I need to do something in another time thread or even the same time thread, but back in scenes that I'd already written. Whether they occur chronologically before or after writing, I'd just make a note, 'Must weave in Wendy Boscombe' so that I wouldn't lose that idea in my head. And then maybe I would finish writing that scene and then think, ‘Okay, now I'm going to go back and pick up and work on that note’. And then sometimes of course, when I was working on that note, something else would happen and I’d think, ‘All right, now I have to do that and I'd write that down. So, at one point I reckon I had about four or five pages of these one or two line notes about things that I had to do. And then I thought I needed to get a little bit more organized with them. So I put them all into word and I put them into the relevant time thread

[00:28:22] Pam: Ah, good idea.

[00:28:23] Lyn: So, I kind of got to a point where I guess I had a complete manuscript and I thought, ‘Right, now I'm just going to do each of these one by one. And as I did each one, I highlighted in green to remind myself that I had done it. I kind of didn't want to delete it just in case. I don't know why just in case: looking at it might have triggered something else. So, I just highlighted in green and I didn't necessarily complete each of them in the order they are in on that note, because I didn't have to do it that way. I did a little bit of both, but sometimes I would think, 'Right, I'm just going to go back and make that one change that I have to make back in chapter two to make what I'm writing in chapter 20.'

[00:29:11] Pam: Cause it's sort of a domino effect, isn't it? It can change everything about that thread and other threads as well.

[00:29:17] Lyn: Yeah. And after I had signed the contract with Penguin, Bev cousins, my publisher there, made a pretty significant suggestion to the plot and I was a little bit resistant at first because I thought it actually would change a little bit about who Joy was. And I said, ‘Let me go away and think about I’t.

[00:29:39] Lyn: And she said, ‘I don't think you'll have to make many changes to the actual manuscript, just maybe in the last quarter or so’. Anyway, I went away and I rang her up a couple of days later. I said, ‘Okay, I don't think I'll do exactly what you suggested, but what if I do this instead?’ And she said, ‘Oh, that's even better. Yeah. Yeah. Run with that, run with that’. And she said, ‘I still don't think it'll take you very long to do’.

And I kept track of how long it took me to do, because that's what I do for my clients. I write down how to do things. So I started keeping track of how many hours I was working on it when I made that decision to when I'd finished making all the changes that came out of that one change. I had done something like 400 hours.

[00:30:27] Pam: Oh my goodness. I thought you were going to say maybe 40, maybe? 400 hours!

[00:30:37] Lyn: And it's not to say that was the only thing I did. I kept doing other things, but I had this one big thing about Joy that I had to change. And so it changed nearly every piece of dialogue that she had.

[00:30:54] Lyn: So it's really the big reveal at the end of the book.

[00:31:00] Pam: I’ll keep you online when we say goodbye. Cause I want to know what that is!

[00:31:04] Lyn: And I've talked about this before to other people too, that one of my all time favourite books is Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier.

[00:31:11] Pam: Mine too. I absolutely love it.

[00:31:13] Lyn: Yeah. And what I love about it (and there's lots of things I love) but one of the things I really love about it is how the characters words in the dialogue and so on, they have more than one meaning. So when you don't know the twist, you just read it thinking A is the case. But when you find out what the truth is, and you go back and read it, you think, ‘Ah, yeah, okay, there's a different meaning’.

[00:31:46] Lyn: And it's not that the character has lied or deliberately tried to mislead you in this case, (mostly of the new Mrs. De Winter). It's the way that Daphne Du Maurier crafted all of those sentences. And I thought, That's what I needed to show every sentence. Not every sentence, but a whole lot of things that Joy says and conversations Joy and Ruth have and conversations adult Joy, and George have, and so on… a lot of them have to have those double layers of meaning.

[00:32:23] Lyn: And, I became perhaps a bit obsessed with making sure that they all worked and that…I'm going to say very carefully constructed thinking about things like the use of pronouns perhaps, or people's names or, you know? So I really tried to be very careful about all of that, and it took a long time.

[00:32:48] Pam: Ah, that's amazing. It's great for people to hear that and to know how long this sort of stuff can take…and that was after you'd signed the contract. So, this was in the revision process with Penguin?

[00:32:58] Lyn: Yes. Yes. And to Penguin's credit you know, before we signed the contract I was talking one night on the phone to Bev for the first time we'd ever spoken and she was already planning the publication schedule (which was really amazing).

[00:33:16] Lyn: I didn't have a contract or anything at that point, but I was getting pretty excited so that was in about may of 2019. And the book came out in February, 2021. So that was about 18 months between signing and publication. And she said, ‘One of the things we want to do is make sure that we've got plenty of time to make it the best book that we can make it.’

[00:33:41] Pam: Brilliant.

[00:33:41] Lyn: And that really was both a privilege and a luxury. And then of course, in 2020 was when the virus hit and the pandemic. The whole world went crazy, but I lost a lot of my day job work. It meant that I had this incredible amount of time to do all of the edits, so you know both good and bad again.

[00:34:14] Pam: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned that Joy has this really interesting form of synesthesia, which is something that's always fascinated me. I've spoken to a number of authors now that have written characters with various forms of synesthesia, which is a sensory thing, isn't it? About how they see and interpret the world in different visual or sensory ways.

[00:34:38] Lyn: Multiple sensory ways. Most of us only get one, we smell something and that's it. But other people smell things and also have a sensation. Or, we say a word and that's the end of it. But other people see colours, images. It's really amazing.

[00:34:55] Lyn: Do you have that?

[00:34:56] Lyn: I wish I could say yes, but I don't. My daughter has, what I say is the common garden variety where every letter and number for her has a unique colour.

[00:35:10] Pam: The colour. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the one I've read the most about, but I just wanted to read a little bit so people can hear how this operates for Joy. And it's the scene where she's talking to Mrs. Felicity, who is the mother of her friend Felicity and the whole family become the Felicities for Joy. And she says:

(Pam reads excerpt)

 'When I see the word elephant, I see a thick brown battered book with curled up pages.

     Mrs. Felicity looked up from the pot she was scrubbing and Joy could tell she was intrigued, o she continued. ‘But sometimes it's not a picture. Sometimes it can be a feeling. Like when I read butterfly, I have that feeling you get, when you think that one day you're actually going to die.

     Mrs. Felicity raised her eyebrows at that one.

     “Is there something wrong with me?’

     ‘Well, Joy. I don't see any pictures when I see words, although I might think about what an elephant or whatever it is, looks like, and I don't get feelings either. Not when I see the word for something beautiful, like a butterfly. I think you just have a very special understanding of words.

     ‘What do you mean?’

     (Pam) And then Mrs  Felicity goes on to explain and then Mrs. Felicity asks:

     ‘Are there any other words that you have images for?’

     ‘There are hundreds. One of my favourites is blurb. It's a swing in a playground at least 50 feet high because it ends where it starts but takes you somewhere you've never been before.’

[00:36:35] Pam: And then she goes on to talk about nectar is an Archway made of silk, and sublime is a soft round lump of Christmas cake icing, tucked into your cheek and melting… just such beautiful descriptions Lyn.

     And I just wanted to ask you about that. It must've been such a joy (pardon the pun) to write those sections about the way Joy's mind operates.

[00:36:59] Lyn: I absolutely loved it. And look, I don't have that synesthesia, but I have to tell you that every single image came to me really easily. I just relished thinking about them. Perhaps the best part of writing the book. It was like they were sitting there waiting for me to write. Not once did I think, ‘Oh, I don't know what this word would be’. It was just sitting there waiting and I also liked it because it relieved…I thought of this a long time ago, but when I was doing my Masters, I think at Monash and writing the novel as part of my thesis…I remember thinking that it relieved a lot of the bleakness that was there at that point. It was fairly; it is pretty dark. Well, it's still dark. It was really dark.

[00:37:56] Pam: I was going to say… J

[00:38:00] Lyn: It had no relief back then. And then I had this idea of Joy who loves dictionaries and words, creating her own dictionary and having these images coming into her mind. And I just thought, ‘Oh, this is wonderful. I love this’. And for a long time in fact, (you know, I've had lots of working titles) one of the titles was My Beautiful Dictionary.

[00:38:23] Pam: Right? Yeah. I could see that. But that actually leads into my next question, which was about the whole tone of the book. As you say, it's dealing with abuse (childhood abuse) and massive trauma. The setting is largely quite bleak. You know, it is crime; it's a thriller so it's got all that darkness in there. But you do have these light moments where we see Joy actually being happy, always away from her family and often with the Felicities… but my question, which I think you've partly answered, is did you deliberately look for ways to balance that darkness with other sort of bits of hope and light?

[00:39:07] Lyn: Yeah, I really did because I did know that it was very bleak and you know, look at books like A Little Life… I just don't think we can put out books that are totally bleak. And I still have some interesting issues and conversations with people about the ending of the book. I did have to decide, I don't know if this is a spoiler or not, but I did have to decide whether I was going to give it a happy or sad ending or maybe an optimistic ending or poignant ending.

[00:39:45] Lyn: Again, we have lots of possibilities and I was having aconversation with my daughter about it, who'd read a fairly complete manuscript by then. I think after I'd signed the contract. I can't remember now. And she's an adult, so it's not like I was asking a 10 year old, and we talked about the ending and various kinds pf possibilities. And I remember we were in a cafe and we looked across the table at each other and we said, ‘Hmm, it has to be like this’. Or I said that, and she said, ‘Yeah, I think it does’. And that's how it went down.

I'll just say in my next novel, that's not going to be the case. The next novel is going to end on an up note. I hope I haven’t given too much away.

[00:40:40] Pam: I'll put a little spoiler alert at the beginning of the chat. We haven't given a lot away, but you know, a bit about the vibe, I suppose. The other thing I wanted to ask you about regarding that whole darkness thing Lyn, is that obviously it is fairly autobiographical…you were writing about a character who experienced childhood trauma, some of which you had been through yourself. How did you cope with that during the writing process?

[00:41:08] Lyn: Look, interestingly, it wasn't too difficult. A: because it was all sitting there. I didn't have to make up that material. The thing that I did have to do was actually wind it back a bit sometimes because in some of the writing workshops I was in, I would present something that I had written, which was based on fact. And people said to me ‘This would never happen. You've got to take that out.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that's sort of really bizarre’. But I did take that stuff out. I will say also though, that some of the worst elements perhaps in the book or some scenes, certain parts of it were in my real life not as bad as in the novel. So, I was both winding back and then upping the ante which is weird in itself. Both existed, but I think it was relatively easy because as I said, it was sitting there waiting for me, the material was there, the scenes were there, the events and the acts on the part of my father were there. And in a sense, I've felt, you know, it's a bit of a cliche, but it was a cathartic exercise. I felt like there was some sort of expunging or purging of those things that had sat inside me because I had never, ever told anybody about them.

Pam: And that's really interesting too.

[00:42:48] Lyn: I had lived with shame about that. I had never wanted to tell anybody what it was like growing up in that house. And I used to look at other people who had, you know, lovely homes and families, who were obviously loved and given confidence and so on. And I couldn't understand it. And also I just couldn't then say to those people, ‘My life was like this’. I really felt ashamed of it. You know, in courts and in media and so on people look at people who've been sexually abused or been victims of horrendous events and say, ‘Well, why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you speak up? Why is it taking 20 years? If it's true, why didn't you say anything?’

 And I think that there's that thing of people might not believe me. And that is true in The Silent Listener and true in my life as well. But also, you’re drowning in shame. How do you find the words to express what is happening to you when you were a child?

[00:43:57] Lyn: And you know, you won't be believed or no one will pay any attention to you or the power dynamics are not in your favour. And of course we have to think about people like Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins, all of those people and victims of sexual abuse at the hands of people in churches and other institutions. And so on. And, I know that this is true because I've had people, friends and strangers, come up to me at writers' festivals and they've told me that they had similar childhoods and one woman said to me, ‘I was reading your book. And I just kept thinking, how does she know that this happened to me?’

[00:44:43] Pam: I just got goosebumps when you said that.

[00:44:45] Lyn: I know. And all of them have said the shame…when, you know…everything talks about happy families. It's, it's really difficult to say, ‘Oh, I didn't have that. This is what my family was like’.

[00:45:08] Pam: So writing it must've been actually liberating in a way?

[00:45:13] Lyn: It was and also look, my dad died 20 years ago and I've changed too. Because even as an adult I felt sort of, under his influence while he was alive and hard to kind of break free of all of that. And so it was really only after he died that I felt that I could become the person who I think maybe I should have been all along. It’s a weird thing, thinking and talking about it.

[00:45:48] Pam: Okay. I just want to go into just another craft issue because I know you've got some exciting news around the book as well. The other thing that really struck me about the writing of the book was the way that you used different voices and points of view. So, as you mentioned earlier, there's the younger Joy, who's written in first-person. Then we have George and Joy's mother in past tense because obviously that sort of flashbacks almost to their early years and their marriage as Joy was growing up: I felt more of a distance, I think a deliberate distance from those characters. And then there's Alex Shepherd, of course, who is the detective and we get him in third person. I loved all those changes because I think it gave each of the characters in each of those plot lines, a real individuality. But how did you go about working out those? Or how did you make those narrative choices?

[00:46:52] Lyn: I think by luck more than anything else. I had always been writing young Joy in first person because of that sort of autobiographical thing. And then one day, I honestly can't remember when, I thought I think I need to change to third person to give myself a bit of distance and because Joy isn't me, and there are things that are happening to Joy and things that she's thinking about and doing that Lyn never did do or think or behave in that way.

[00:47:25] Lyn: So, I wanted to create that distance. I always think we have author and then we have narrator and then we have character and it can all be the one, or they can be separate, or in different combinations. I really wanted to them separate especially young Joy. But when I started writing adult Joy, for some reason, I wanted that in present tense first person. I wanted that immediacy and to be seeing inside her brain a bit more.

[00:47:59] Lyn: And, from a writing perspective I wanted to be able to move from one to the other, from this chapter to this chapter, and be consistent with the appropriate voice at the time. So hence also then we get Shepherd in first person present tense, because he's in the same timeframe as adult Joy. I wanted to create him in third person when I switched chapters, switched heads and so on. I knew where I was and I could hopefully have different enough voices distinctive and know where I was and what I needed to do in that chapter.

[00:48:50] Lyn: Yeah, I think as I said, I started because I started child Joy in first person, that was a deliberate decision to change and see where that took me. And I remember actually, Tony Birch saying that he had changed a whole novel from, I think, first person to third person or present tense to past tense, or something like that…it was a whole novel. And then (I think I’ve got this right) he did it and then he thought, ‘Nah, I think it needs to be how it was.’

[00:49:21] Lyn: So you have to go down those paths and then be prepared to backtrack if need be.

[00:49:27] Pam: Yeah,I agree. Well, I think it's for anyone listening, if this is something that you think about with your own writing, which point of view to use, which tense, which all that stuff… this is a great book to really have a look at it because Lyn has got all those different voices and tenses in there. And I think it's really interesting to see the way that they can work together, but also also be separate.

[00:49:49] Lyn: Yeah, that's good. Thanks.

[00:49:54] Pam: So before we get onto just a few other things, we can't leave without talking about the setting. You said you grew up on a property very similar to the one in the book that was in rural Victoria.

[00:50:11] Lyn: Yes. In west Gippsland. And it wasn't quite as remote as the house in the farm in The Silent Listener. We were probably only about five miles from the nearest town. But I went to a little primary school and then a slightly bigger high school. But you wouldn't have heard the neighbours scream which was sort of fairly important for me. And it was a dairy farm for a long time. And my mum was a florist and did grow flowers. And so there was always that thing that we did have a beautiful, beautiful garden or gardens. There were gardens here, there, and everywhere, and mum was forever digging up new beds and, you know, alongside of the shed or take down this fence and create another flower bed and plant 70 proteas.

[00:51:02] Lyn: And it was really quite amazing. She was not only a very talented florist and businesswoman, but also had an unbelievable green thumb. So, we had all these beautiful flowers around our house all of the time, which kind of belied what was going on in four walls.

[00:51:24] Pam: And the mud, there was mud.

[00:51:29] Lyn: It was just muddy all the time. And not so many years ago when were going out for mother's day one day with my mum and one of my brothers and his wife…we were driving along and my sister-in-law said, ‘Ah, look at these beautiful green rolling hills.’ Of course it was wet and the three of us, my brother, my mom and I, none of us said anything for like three or four seconds or something. And then my brother said, ‘Huh, I look out there and all I see is mud’. And I found it really interesting that people see so much beauty in that landscape. I get it intellectually.

[00:52:17] Lyn: I understand that it’s these green rolling hills and it's beautiful, but for me, the connotations are so ingrained. I just can't go down there and think, ‘Yeah, gee, this is beautiful countryside’. And when I finished uni, when I was 21, I was sent in those days to Horsham High School as a teacher and I got to Horsham, (I'd never been there or anywhere near there) and it was the exact opposite. It was flat and it was red and it was hot and it was dry. And I absolutely loved it! This is what a beautiful landscape was to me. I'm sure there are people who grew up there who think it's beautiful, but I'm sure there are some who also are kind of plagued by similar connotations that, you know, the rest of us just don't have.

[00:53:12] Pam: Because it's your experience of that landscape? Isn't it? You were so entrenched in that, in the day-to-day chores and your life there, which of course taints the way that you see what's around you.

[00:53:25] Lyn: Absolutely. You know, it's a bit like when you smell something that brings back past.

[00:53:36] Pam: I could talk about this book nonstop as you probably guessed, because I absolutely loved it, but it has been a year since it came out and it's been really interesting to watch Lyn from the outside. When the book came out and I felt like it had a bit of a slow burn for a while (sorry again about the pun) but then it's almost like it did ignite and just take off at some point. You know, it was everywhere on social media…how has the experience been for you over the last 12 months?

[00:54:09] Lyn: It's been amazing and totally unexpected. I had no idea what I would have to do. And, the whole thing with social media. Like I was on Linkedin and Facebook and that sort of stuff, but this is a whole new ball game. So I've learned a lot, but I feel like I'm living the dream. I'm not wealthy from it of course, but you know, I've been to writers festivals, I had a fantastic launch. I was very lucky with all the timing around COVID and regulations and so on to have an absolutely amazing launch with over a hundred people. Several writers festivals: one in Western Australia at Margaret River, and Storyfest and Bad at Sydney, and Clunes. And I've been on many podcasts and a few radio shows and reviews here and there. And some library talks and all of which I have to say also, I absolutely love, like, I just love it. So doing something like this with you today, I've just been, ‘Oh yes!’

[00:55:18] Pam: That's good because I was a little worried. I thought ‘She's probably so sick of this after a year!’

[00:55:25] Lyn: No, I'm not. I could do this all day every day. It's been fantastic and Dinuka McKenzie, I'll do a big shout out to her. Her debut novel The Torrent comes out today as well. I met at Bad Sydney in December and I told her that today's also the anniversary of The Silent Listener coming out. So we have this sort of thing of twin debut birthday dates for our novels. I told her, ‘Hang on, you, you're in for an amazing ride’.

And yeah, I've been really lucky because lots of people have picked it up and read it and recommended it. And I have to also say Australia’s writing community is just amazing. So supportive in so many ways. I've met so many, people and felt half an hour later we are friends for life and I've really been blown away by the generosity of people, reading it, reviewing it, recommending it. People on panels with me, interviewing me just incredible generosity and a shared love for what it is that we're doing and for books and the ideas that books can provide and the escapism and the joy and even sometimes the bleakness or the poignancy…all of those range of emotions that we can experience when we read.

[00:56:58] Lyn: But yeah, Australia's writing community is amazing. And I'm so pleased, proud, honored - all of those things - that people have so willingly accepted me into that cohort. I have always, always, always had writers up on a pedestal. (thanks, Dad) and never really believed that I would be one. So to be here now is just a total thrill.

[00:57:29] Pam: Good for you. Brilliant. It is out in a B format now too I believe?

[00:57:33] Lyn: Yes, it is out in a B format as of today. So it's a lot lighter and smaller and cheaper. Slightly revamped. Yeah, that's really exciting. And it's been optioned for a screen adaptation. So that actually happened quite some time ago, and the company that bought it is in Sydney and we kept wanting to make an announcement in Sydney but of course I just haven't been able to get to Sydney.

[00:58:36] Lyn: Olivia Humphrey, who was the founder of a streaming platform called Kanopies, which really took off. And Olivia and Diane have joined forces to create a group called storied Storyd. One of the first feature films they're doing is Run Rabbit Run. And they've been involved in lots of others – the Phrine Fisher movie that came out, and several other really good movies like I Am Woman and so on. Anyway, they optioned The Silent Listener and are in the process of putting together a treatment for it. They're very keen, very, very keen for it to go ahead. So that's amazing.

[00:59:17] Pam: That's so exciting.

[00:59:21] Pam: And you are obviously working on another book.

[00:59:24] Lyn: Yes. I signed a two book deal so I'm into the second novel, which is also based on real events, but not my own, those of a friend of mine and also those of many, many, many other women during what was called the baby spook era in America, where unmarried women were often coerced to give up their children simply because they were unmarried. I've done a whole lot of research about it and it's another psychological thriller. So at its core, I guess, a very important social issue wrapped up as a psychological thriller with issues of truth, identity, etcetera. There's a couple of murders in there again. Multiple points of view with this…

Pam: She says with a big with a big smile on her face.

Lyn: I think sometimes I think I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I have learned if nothing else, you just keep going.

[01:00:38] Pam: And had you started that prior to signing the contract with Penguin?

[01:00:42] Lyn: No, I hadn't. I had a couple of other ideas. But Penguin said, no, I go with this one.

[01:00:47] Pam: Well, congratulations, Lyn. It's been so fantastic to chat to you. And as I said, I loved the book. I can see why it's doing so well and why it's being optioned for film and all those things, so well done and good luck with the new one.

[01:01:03] Lyn: Thank you Pam. As I said, I honestly, I just woke up this morning and I thought ‘Yes. Got Pam today!’ This has been fantastic. And I think everything that you do on the podcast, for writers, especially women and promoting not just the book but the craft of writing, is so important. And it's so good for us to hear what other writers are doing and thinking, you know, the self-doubt and the need to keep going, and the tips that you've given writers and all of that sort of thing. So valuable and wonderful. I think you do a great job too.

[01:01:40] Pam: It's so good to know. Thank you. Where can people find you online before we let you go?

[01:01:44] Lyn: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. And I've got a website, which is lynyeowart.com and I'm just going to do a little plug. I've been long listed for this little prize in the UK where the book has come out and and it’s totally up to how many votes the book gets. If you go to my website, (this is probably the quickest way, easiest way of doing it) on the landing page on the homepage, there's a little button that says vote now. If you click on it, it takes it to the website and you just enter your name and your email address. And press submit. And I’d really love it if people would do that because it's the only Australian book that's been longlisted. I think it's sort of for books that might have in the UK kind of gone under the radar a little bit, but kind of trying to help promote, I think that's it. And so thanks to Joffey books, my publishers

[01:03:00] Pam: Definitely! Let's all get out there and get Lyn onto that shortlist at least, and then hopefully all the way.

[01:03:09] Lyn: Oh, lovely. Thank you, Pam.

[01:03:11] Pam: And all the best Lyn. I hope our paths cross in person at some stage. 

[01:03:20] Pam: Thank you. Thanks Lynn.