TRANSCRIPT: Kate Forsyth - "Anatomy of a Novel"
On The Convo Couch with Kate Forsyth
Pam: Kate, thanks so much for being on rights for women today and welcome.
Kate: Thank you so much for having me.
Pam: It's going to be really wonderful to talk to you today about The Blue Rose and your writing process you and your sister Belinda, I think were among our very first guests on Writes4Women
Kate: Look how far you've come isn't it wonderful?
Pam: We have been keenly watching your progress over the last few years and all the fantastic books you've had out in that time. So today we are going to focus on The Blue Rose and our listeners are definitely in for a treat with this talk about your writing process because we know that you are a master storyteller. I've done one of your workshops and got so much out of it. So, could we start with your idea for the novel for The Blue Rose? Could tell us a little bit about where that came from?
Kate: Absolutely.
The Blue Rose is a story of impossible love set in France and China during the time of the French Revolution. The first seed of inspiration came to me while I was reading a book about the history of the Rose. I am a rose fancier, which means that I love roses. I only have quite a small garden because I live in the city in Sydney, but I cram as many roses as I can into my small space. So, I am reading this book about the history of the Rose and I discover that the first truly blood red rose was brought from China in 1792 supposedly by an English Nursery man. It was hybridised in France and is the ancestor of all the red roses that we have today. Whenever you're given a red rose on Valentine's Day and it's that beautiful vivid scarlet, it is a descendant of this one fabled rose of China. This just really, really struck me as fascinating because surely there were red roses in Europe before 1792 and if there wasn't what was it doing being brought back from China by Englishmen when 1792 was right at the beginning of the French Revolution, and France and England were at War. To understand why this then generated the tension, the desire, the obsession that leads to the writing of a novel. I've always been fascinated by the French Revolution ever since reading The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities as a teenager and I've always been fascinated by the symbology of the rose. These kind of paradoxical layers of meaning. So that little spark of inspiration fell onto well primed kindling and that's what led me to writing the book. So, it was the synergy of those two ideas coming together and sparking the story.
People often say, where did you get the idea for the novel. I find that it's not one idea but two ideas that spark something for you and then it kind of bursts into flame. And then it's your job to keep feeding that flame with more inspiration, with more curiosity and wonder. Long-form fiction or indeed long-form non-fiction takes so much out of you. It's almost like a long illness writing a novel, you know. It devours you and afterwards you need a period of convalescence, which is what I’m in right now. I'm convalescing this month before I start a new book.
Pam: I love that. I love the tinder and flint description. That's a great way of thinking about it. Did this book have any origins in a fairy tale as a number of your previous books have had?
Kate: It didn't have its origin in a fairy tale, but it certainly draws upon a fairytale and so you could say that was the third great idea. As soon as I read this, it was single paragraph, in 1792 an English nurseryman brought back this fabled red rose from China and it was the ancestor of all modern roses. So immediately I thought, I can see this idea of a story of impossible love or difficult, unattainable love which was set in France during the French Revolution because at the heart of that paragraph is a mystery. How did this red rose come to be brought back from China and why would it be hybridised in France and not in England? To hybridise it simply means to take a rose and breed it just as you would an animal if you were breeding a dog for strength or speed. You look for different qualities in that dog. If you're breeding a rose you’re looking for different qualities. In this particular case. It was a colour. That's extraordinary. Blood red colour. So that was my first idea, but I had an enormous amount of work to do before I could develop my story. So of course, what I began to do is, I began researching the French Revolution and researching roses. Researching the quest to bring back plants from China. I knew at the beginning that I was going to have a French heroine and a British hero. The countries were at war, (or would soon be at war) and that my hero would travel to China and he'd bring back his red rose to his beloved in France.
That was at the core of my early, earliest ideas. And so while I was reading and thinking and daydreaming and playing with ideas, I was searching for fairy tales. I spent a lot of time reading French fairy tales because I knew the story was going to be set in France, but nothing changed for me, nothing sparked for me. I also began to read Chinese fairy tales. Nothing sparked for me. Nothing chimed for me. It was a fascinating exercise. I was reading French love poetry and Chinese love poetry but I was just playing and exploring which is what the early stages of research is often like, and then I stumbled in just the most serendipitous manner upon this fairy tale called The Blue Rose. And it's a literary fairy tale, which means it was invented. It doesn't come from a known old tradition, but the idea of a blue rose is actually ancient because it's impossible. There are no such things as blue roses because roses do not have the gene that carries a blue colour. For centuries, at least from the 11th or 12th century a blue rose has been a symbol of the impossible and in particular of impossible love, unattainable love, because of course the rose has for at least 2,000 years been a symbol of passionate love.
It was such an amazing discovery as soon as I read it, I knew it was a fairy tale that I was going to be using. It all fell very neatly into place for me. One of the most astonishing things about being a creative artist is the power of synchronicity. So how when you go looking for something you always find it, but you often find it in the most eerie and astonishing way, and it feels like magic. It is exactly why it feels like you're meant to be writing this book and that all the stars are aligning to bring to you what you need. And I know it's a manifestation of magical thinking and that. as humans we search for meaning and we can we search for synchronicity in the world, but I still love it.
Pam: Me too. So, you've got the research you talked about, you know, all the reading and the dreaming of the story. Do you spend a fair bit of time doing all that side of things before you even put pen to paper for the actual novel itself?
Kate: Yes, I do. It takes quite a long time because the research can be slow and I don't yet know what I need and I'm really always coming from a base of very little knowledge. You know the old adage write what you know, well, I don’t. I never do. I write what I want to know. Oh, I write what I'm curious about, what interests me, what fascinates me. It's a journey of discovery which I really, really love. I learned so much that I didn't know before and I find that fascinating. I knew quite a lot about the French Revolution in that I've always been interested in it. I already had a few books about it. I studied it at school so I had quite a good basic general knowledge about the French Revolution. But I knew nothing about China, nothing about Imperial China in particular. At the time the French Revolution China was ruled by an emperor.
It was a tyranny. It was an extremely codified society where you're born into a social class and there was very little opportunity to break out of that social class. China was closed to the West so it traded with the west but basically all the merchant ships would sail from Europe and elsewhere and they would sail to Macau. Macau was a walled enclave so that many of them lived in Macau for the trading season. And again, they had a walled enclave so they never actually stepped foot on Chinese soil. The merchants brought the produce, so tea and silk and porcelain and flowers to the merchants. The missions had very little control over what they were buying. They could only buy from what was offered to them.
It was absolutely fascinating and I got completely lost down the rabbit holes of reading about China because even though my hero was British he was seeing it through an outsider's eyes. I still needed to understand the society myself. So the long answer to a short question … it's great. It would be maybe six months to a year and I call this process daydreaming the story to life. I don't like to start writing until it's urgent in me. I actually stop myself from writing too early because if I don't know my characters well enough if they're not fully-realised living people in my imagination then they seem like puppets on the page. If you start writing too early, I find it takes quite a long time for them to come to life and it's really, really hard to rewrite puppets into people, right? I think everyone, every creative artist, sees it differently but this is how I feel, how I work. I actually try and delay starting the book for quite a long time until I feel like I hear their voices and I can see them. And it's not just character, it’s the world as well. You need to burst into it. And then once you feel that you've really immersed yourself you can then put that down on the page. I find I don't start writing until I have a really, really strong sense of my story, of its shape, of its thematic structure. It’s very important to me to know its beginning and an end and its key turning points. If I do that then I tend to write swiftly, fluidly. And joyously. I want to be writing in a state of flow where I'm filled with excitement and energy and inspiration and a sense of what I'm doing and where I'm going. I will still make a thousand moments of discovery and epiphany and the story will grow and change from what I had expected. I'm not saying that my story is fixed. I'm just saying that I come to it feeling empowered to write it.
Pam: And so, as part of that process do you actually write character sketches before you start writing the story?
Kate: I spend an awful lot of time building character because my ideas come to me as stories. For some writers, it's a character that comes to them and they write the story out of the character. The story comes to me and I create the character to carry my story. So that's how I work. That's how ideas have always come to me which means that I need to build character. I need to create character. That's an important part of my creative process. So, how do I do it? Yes, I have character outlines for my major characters, but I don't sit down one day and answer questions. It's much more organic than that. I'll be thinking about my character. I'll be thinking about how I can create them. I'll start to read books that are going to help me understand my character. I'll have all sorts of visual clues. I think about what they look like, what they might be like. I think about what star sign they are. I create what I call an idiom dictionary where I start collecting words and phrases that they might use which will be idiosyncratic to them and to no one else in the book. For example, with The Blue Rose I had a French heroine who spoke English. When she was speaking (her name is Vivian) she would speak English to David who is my sexy Welsh gardener and she would speak French elsewhere. So I actually needed to have to two sets of dialogue for her. When she was speaking English she would search for the right word. She would find English idioms difficult. Just one example in English, if we think that someone should learn not to speak out we say ‘bite your tongue’. But that's not a French expression. In France children are told to “turn your tongue nine times in your mouth”.
Pam: I remember reading that phrase and thinking ‘oh, that's interesting’.
Kate: Yeah. I spent quite a bit of time researching that sort of thing because dialogue is so, so important. And it's so much easier to write dialogue if you capture speaking in their own voices. When you're kind of laboring over it I think you can tell a difference. I can read other people's books and see that they didn't really spend the time. And you can see that the background isn't there? Everyone speaks the same. I believe that you should be able to tell who is speaking without speech tags, without dialogue tags. So that's just something that I do. It does take me quite a long time and it's organic. I don't sit down and say “today I'm going to develop the idiom dictionary for David’. While I'm thinking and reading I have a page in my notebook and whenever an idea comes to me I write it down. Whenever I've got five minutes I might flip through a thing called ‘A Dictionary of The Vulgar Tongue 1811’ and I read through that and if anything chimes for me, I write it down. But I'm a mother. I'm always writing in the cracks of the day, so I don't often have six hours to devote to developing dialogues or character. It's organic, it’s natural, it’s flowing but I do it before I start writing.
Pam: As you mentioned Viviane is the main character in the novel and she's quite a feisty young woman, even when we meet her at the beginning of the story. Within a few chapters, we've also met David who is the love interest in the story. Was this all along going to be a love story for you? Was that your intention?
Kate: Yes, it was always going to be a love story for me. It's probably the most romantic book I've ever written and I mean romantic in the largest meaning of the word. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is, I've been, and I am, deeply affected and troubled by a lot of things that have been happening in our world in recent years. It felt to me that the world needed a great romance and a story that celebrated human love, a story that celebrated the triumph of the human spirit over enormous difficulties, and a story about a young woman who was empowered to change her world.Her journey is one of escaping the golden cage. It just got really, really important to me at this time of so much trouble and confusion, so much tension between the sexes, so much misunderstanding about freedom. This is a book about love and freedom.
Pam: Yes, it is, set against an amazing backdrop of the French Revolution and those tumultuous times. You've got that whole sense of conflict happening in society much like we have now.
Kate: A lot of people don't realize that the French Revolution was really the true birth of feminism. We all witnessed these incredible women's marches that took place all around the world in the past couple of years. So important, so empowering, so inspiring. Yes, to have our voices being heard. I'm a banner waving feminist as anyone who knows me would understand but I'm a humanist as well. You know, what I'm interested in is understanding. The first ever women's march in history was the women's much on Versailles in 1789. This is the first time that women were seen as a political entity and they I mean they marched on Versailles. They took the king and queen of France prisoner and they took them back to Paris with them. I mean, wow, you know amazing, isn't it? But just imagine someone doing that to Trump? Yes. Yes, please, exactly but the king of France was as equally imperious and well-guarded as Trump, as pious, yeah, it was it's amazing when you think about that. Underneath all of my books there's always something else going on. Not only was I drawn to worry about the French Revolution because it's a period of enormous, bloody turmoil which appeals to my imagination but because to me the French Revolution is all about enacting change upon the world and I'm what I call a psychic activist. It's quite a term isn't it? I didn't actually invent it. I wish that I did because it's fabulous but there was a movement in the early feminist movement. There was a movement called psychic activism, which is this idea that artists change the world by changing people's minds by rolling up minds and hearts so that you use your art. Taking up swords and pikes and hacking people's heads off with the guillotines is a highly effective way of changing the world except that what happens is that into the vacuum comes more power hungry people. And so one tyrant of the French nobility was replaced with another tyrant, Robespierre and the Assembly.
This is what we see again and again and again, a huge Revolution, you know the Russian Revolution was followed by Stalin. That's right the same process repeating again and again and again. So, what is a more effective way of changing the world? I believe extremely, passionately that the best way to change the world is by opening up people's hearts and minds and story is the way. Starting with babies is the best way but any form of art is the most effective way of making people think. I feel and walk around other people's shoes for a while. I'm a psychic activist. All of my books have a purpose or function and to me writing a swashbuckling romance, which is what the French were on many many levels … actually I'm writing a fairy tale because I am concealing and disguising. Camouflaging serious purpose inside the story of love, wonder and enchantment.
Pam: I love that description Kate. It’s fabulous. And I know for your previous books, you travelled to a lot of places. When you wrote The Wild Girl you went to Germany and Austria. Did you travel for this book as well, to do some research in France and China?
Kate: I was not going to go to France. I've actually been to France a few times but while writing this book of course I went to France twice and I went to China which was exciting. I’d never been to China before and I took my son with me. He was 20. I thought it was because I didn't want to go to China on my own because I normally travel on my own but I wanted some company and my son was growing into a young man, and I thought it'd be lovely to have some mother and son time. He's always been fascinated by China and had read a lot about it so I thought we could explore together. But as it turned out, this was synchronicity working on my behalf. Once again. travelling with a young man in China now was extraordinary, illuminating to what it must have been like for the British Embassy. At the heart of my book is the McCartney Embassy to China. The British King George the Third sent an ambassador to China in the 1790s to try and open up trade with China. The embassy was a dismal failure. But the embassy brought back from China all sorts of industrial spies. They brought back an incredible amount of information about China which was then used against them in the Opium Wars 15 years later. The British Embassy was the first group of westerners to travel to China. They travelled virtually in disguise. They were dressed in long robes much like the Chinese dressed. They were often quite small in stature and had dark hair and dark eyes and many of the Jesuit missionaries actually camouflaged themselves as Chinese, so they wore the long pigtail and they actually bought them and had them sewn into the hair. The British, I want you to imagine them in their high heels and they're tight satin breeches and their pale skin powdered and patches, blue-eyed, redheaded many of them were wearing wigs. As soon as you saw these Englishmen they were not, could never be seen as being disguised as Chinese.
One of the gardeners who travelled with the embassy was Scottish and his name was David Stronach and I actually took his name for my hero. He was very tall, blue-eyed and had he actually had red hair. And in Chinese folklore in theatre the Devil is always seen in this way. So, my son is very tall. He's about 6’3”, he's very pale, very fair-skinned. He has the most beautiful blue-grey eyes, quite striking and he's a confident young man and everywhere he went people were stopping, turning, staring and pointing. Hmm. Everyone wanted to have photographs with him. He caused a murmur and even gasps everywhere that he went and when we went up into inner Mongolia, which is where the emperor's Summer Palace is and where the British Embassy went, we were having small boys throwing firecrackers at our feet. Signs against evil. Wow, so that was such a great sense of what it was like for David in the at the time. I mean, Beijing which was then Peking, is an extremely sophisticated and cosmopolitan city, but we were still stared at everywhere that we went but in Mongolia there were no other westerners. We were the only white people. There was no English. All the menus were in Chinese and there were no pictures. We went to the grocery store to get some supplies and it was a Chinese grocery store so there were no packaged foods.
Pam: That sense of being totally alien, in a totally alien environment.
Kate: Exactly. And so that was profoundly important for me in helping me develop the chapters in which David and the Embassy are travelling through China, the extraordinary cultural clash and also the English were so complacent, so sure their place in the world, so sure of their superiority and of course in China England was nothing. China was at the centre of the world. The Emperor was a Son of God. In his his subject’s minds the English were nothing and that was profoundly disturbing to the English psyche at time.
Pam: One of the things I always love in your books is the way that you draw the reader into the setting. We are so immersed in the world of the characters. What sort of tips can you give to any writers listening out there about creating that vivid sort of setting?
Kate: Well, I've been asked that question a lot recently. The first thing is, it's key that the world is seen through the eyes of the character. So, we're talking about deep point of view. We don't just describe a scene. For example, if you were to describe the room that you were sitting in you might describe the outside of it but instead you need to describe it through the emotional and psychological nuances of the character who is seeing it. And so, you don't just say ‘a cold wind was blowing’ you say ‘the wind cut through to the bone and reminded him of the snows of the mountain behind his home’. Everything's really getting into that character’s skin and really everything needs to be filtered. It's not you the writer and it's not you the reader who is seeing and hearing and tasting and touching and feeling. It's the character. It's the point of view character. And so, everything has to be filtered through them and also description should never just be flat. To say the sky was blue for example, that tells us nothing. What we want to know is…I'm trying to think how to describe this … what is the emotional resonance? What is happening? How does it make the character feel? But it's only important that the sky is blue if it makes them feel something.
Pam: Is that something that comes fairly automatically to you now, Kate, that getting into the character skin and seeing the world through their eyes? Is it something that you find when you revise you have to go back and really refine or is it there in the first draft for you most of the time?
Kate: It's always there in the first draft for me. In fact, it is the first draft, if that makes sense. This is why I spend so much time on character before I start writing. So, we were talking about there being three components: character, plot and setting. Right. Now people think that these are three separate things and that they might concentrate on one or the other, but this is completely untrue. They are three cogs in a machine and one drives the other. So setting is crucial in developing character because we are always a product of our time and our place, where we live, where we were born, the culture and the world in which we are born. It shapes our psyche and so you can't develop character without understanding their world and we can't create setting in a book without seeing it through the character’s eyes. And so the two things are not separate, they're the same. And they magnify each other. You can't develop a plot without knowing your character. And you can't develop character without knowing your plot exactly. I'm in the middle of that process now for my new book, working all that out, sort of switching from one to the other and trying to see where it all meshes exactly.
I love a good metaphor, for helping people understand things. So if you've ever been to an optometrist and they're testing your eyes and they drop a lens in and you see more clearly and they drop another lens in and you see even more clearly and then they drop another lens in and now you can see clearly for the first time. The lenses fit over each other to enable you to see your story more clearly. They magnify each other.
Pam: Perfect. So, Kate, once you’re in the draft process, I know that you spend long days when you're drafting and writing. How long would you have spent writing the first draft for The Blue Rose?
Kate: It's always difficult to answer this question in a sound bite because when I spend all day writing, I’m not actually writing but authoring. Writing is just one part of the process of creating a book and so I might spend 12 hours working on the book and I'll cut out 630 words. On paper it looks like I haven't moved forward at all, but in actual fact I've written a lot of work, cut a lot of work. I've played, I've experimented, I've made decisions and I’ve found out things I didn't know before. This is why I'm always a little bit suspicious of people who say, ‘how many words do you write a day?’ That to me shows a naivety about how a work is created. I could spend 12 hours one day and write nine thousand words and then spend 12 hours the next day taking a comment out and putting it back in.
So, I have a plan. I don't I have a rough idea of what I want to happen or what has to happen in each chapter, but this would change and grow. For example, in The Blue Rose the first two chapters was meant to be one chapter, but it grew too long. And so I then had to cut it or I had to expand it. I expanded it. I like to write in a linear fashion but if I reach a point where this gives me problem I'll keep moving forward and let that one simmer for a while and I push forward in the story as far as I can . At the end of the day, I think about what I'm going to write next and I write a little plan.
I think about it overnight and the following day I re-read what I wrote the day before and I push on again. As far as I can. I'm constantly rewriting and redrafting what I've written. Now I might get a new idea and it's here in the story, but I realize I have to set it up, and so I go back. I might not be moving forward in the story, I might just be adding a sentence in 16 different chapters for that set up. What I'm then about to write. I'm really layering in more meaning.
I might have written a whole now thread and then realize it's draining the power from the story, it’s too distracting. And so, I'm going to remove it. I am an obsessive word counter. In my notebooks, I've got a notebook here, I thought I'd show you. Every day in my notebook I write the date and then I make notes as I go along. Then I write how many words. On this day, which was Tuesday the 5th of June I wrote 2059 words and I was working on chapter 20 which is called Hungry Ghosts It’s set on the South China Sea between the 6th of March the 3rd of July 1793. That brought me to a total word count of 70 3281 words. I keep track of everything as I go because maintaining energy over long-form fiction is one of the challenges and anything that you can do to help is good. You need to really be releasing endorphins and so writing a list of what needs to be done and then ticking it off releases endorphins.
Pam: Such a great idea. At the end of our chat I’ll take photos of your scrapbook so that we can put them on our Facebook page for our listeners.
That actually brings up something that I often have difficulty with and is always a nightmare for me because I don't keep track of it, and that’s the timeline. Do you make sure you're on top of that timeline as you draft?
Kate: Do you know the answer to that? Tell me what my answer is going to be …
Pam: I think you're gonna say no.
Kate: No, I do of course I do. One of the very, very first things that I'm doing is starting to build my timeline. This is on page 5 my first notebook, and I don't know if you can see here, I've got a timeline. A timeline of China and then I've got on the side where my characters are and I have a spreadsheet. I know Excel is useful for other things apart from the count. I just find it really, really useful for me because you know, I'm dealing with complex historical periods.
So, yes and all sorts of little things, like what season is it? What was the weather? What phase is the moon in? I write a timeline if I'm writing Children's Fantasy and each book takes place in a week. I need to know how the seasons change over the course of the of the period.
Pam: Okay, so great tip for me and everybody, keep track of the timeline.
Kate: I just think the human brain is astonishing. You know the human brain is about the size of cupped hands and about the weight of a newborn baby. It is capable of so much but when we have so much going on in our lives that we have to think about and remember trying to hold everything that we need to know to create a novel is difficult. This is why language was invented and so by writing it down you catch the ephemeral or you can maintain enormous amounts of information and you can sort them and keep them in order.
My favourite quote is Jacques-Louis Bruges (I know I'm not pronouncing his name properly, forgive me) but he said “art equals fire plus algebra”. So, fire is of course imagination. Intuition, creativity, this enormous flame of inspiration that we are burning but algebra comes from the Arabic and it means to make what is broken and now of course, it means mathematics which means logic and order. When we are creating a book we're taking a multitude of tiny broken pieces and then we are making it whole. It's like one of those Japanese vases that were made with gold and made more beautiful. Most people have no trouble with the fire part whatsoever. Most people are driven by this irresistible compulsion to create the fire. What undoes most creative artists? It's not understanding the algebra. Yeah, that rational side of it which is the part I guess that we use the most in revision, isn't it? You know when we are going through that process. Most people hate editing. Most people hate revising. If you write it better the first time then you don't have to spend months sobbing heartbreakingly as you cut out hundreds of thousands of words and entire scenes and chapters and entire subplots, entire characters you've come to grow and love. If you can manage the algebra right from the very beginning then the editing process is also, I'm not going to say it's not painful and heartbreaking, but less painful and heartbreaking.
Pam: Very true. So once you come to the end of the drafting process Kate do you then do the thing that we're all advised to do and leave it for a little while to give yourself some space from it or are you straight back into polishing and revising again?
Kate: Okay, because I'm traditionally published publishers have that waiting period encoded into how they publish a book. So I don't leave it like I might an edit and I rewrite as part of my process of creating my first draft. When I have got the book as perfect as I can get it at that point in time I send it off to my editors, to my publisher and then they make me wait. It's awful. It’s agonizing but you have an enforced waiting period before you actually see it again because it's in the inbox. This is actually an integral part of how publishers work with writers, it's that cooling off period. So normally by the time I get my edit report, I've already got a list of things. But I also have new ideas. I've had time to think about them. Usually six weeks to three months is how long it takes for you to get a book back and that's been a forced waiting period and it's absolutely essential. It's a kind of cooling off period and it's a time for you to have a rest because you’re always exhausted. It's a time for you to regain a view of what it is that you're trying to do. I mean when you send it off it's a little baby fledgling book and you're so anxious about it and you just want everyone to love it and to be kind to it. By the time the entire report comes back you've had a little chance to disengage. And so you're not quite so protective of it. People think that it's all egotistical, you know, we hate being criticized. It's not us. It's our baby that's been criticized.
Pam: For The Blue Rose for instance, when that came back from your editor, was there very much that you then changed as you went through that next stage of the writing or the revising?
Kate: I take great pride in submitting a clean manuscript. I want my delivered draft manuscript to be a joy to read and to need as little fiddling with as possible, but that said there is always, work to be done. I'm incredibly lucky in that I work with these amazing editors.
I'm just going to pull out my third notebook and at the end of the book I actually put my editorial report. You can see it's about two pages long, which is very short really. I go through and I answer them and as I engage with things I take them off the list. And then I have my final edit. The main thing was a massive plot hole in the middle of the book which my editor picked up on. It was a six-line query, something along the lines of you know, ‘wouldn't they have talked about this?’ Quite often we have these flaws of logic simply because you don't see it at the time. That involved thinking about some aspects of the novel which I would never ever have picked up on my own. That's why again, the publishing system is all about helping the book be the best it can be, absolutely fabulous. To get that insight that I had missed myself, and the book is infinitely better for it because it actually enabled me to set up all kinds of new tensions between characters. It's just part of the process.
Pam: Of course. It then goes back to the publisher and we see it with the gorgeous cover and all that sort of thing. You have so many books published now, Kate … how many including or your younger fiction books?
Kate: The Blue Rose is my 44th born in my 22nd year of being published. So that's two palindromic numbers. That makes it sound as if I've had two books published a year, but it's not true. I didn't have a book published at all last year and in a couple of years I had four or five books published. The Impossible Quest which is a children's fantasy is a five books series and four of them came out in one year and one the following year.
I have another series of children's historical fiction, six books again. They came out every three months because I wrote them all before the first one was published which is how I like to hook the reader because when you're planning a series you need a series arc as well as an arc for each book. And then of course, I've had a collection of poems published, a collection of essays published. 44 and 22 seemed magical to me. So, I like to feel that there's some kind of you know synchronicity at work with this book, which means everyone's got to have it and no one's going to be mean to me and not like it! J
Pam: Well, they are loving it because I checked out Goodreads last night and I think they were pretty much all five-star reviews. Congratulations. It's fantastic.
Kate: Thank you so much. I mean the people who like my books love my books and people who don't like my books hate my books. I actually think that's a good thing because I know who am I writing for and I know what why I'm writing and so I only want people to love me, if that makes sense? So, if I'm not your kind of writer, that's fine.
Pam: After 44 books does it ever get old that feeling of having that book put into your hands for the first time and seeing the cover, seeing it all together? Is it still the same for you as that very first time?
Kate: Yes, it is. I mean obviously having my first book published was a truly life-changing event and was a combination of a lifetime of learning and working and struggling and sacrificing and so it was such a piercing joy. It's not quite as intense as it was for my first book, which I think is understandable. Yes, but it's still an incredible joy, and it's a relief as well. I think when you finish a book and then people like it you get this kind of giddy, giddy relief. I grieve at the end of each book because you know, the story and these people have inhabited my imagination for so long and I don't get to write anymore. And that makes me really sad and the more I've loved the book the sadder I feel. I need to be very loving and gentle with myself when I deliver a book. As I said at the beginning of our conversation it can be like coming out of a long illness, so I do a lot of things that give me joy. I do a lot of cooking. I spend a lot of time in my garden. I spent a lot of time walking in this beautiful world in which we live. I spend a lot of time reading for pleasure and reading for comfort. I listen to a lot of music and I try all the things that I love music and art and just nurture myself through this dark period after finishing a book. I want to approach my next book with a great sense of anticipation and joy, and so I need to have that period of grace in between books. But I'm a compulsive writer. I'm an obsessive writer which means I'm always writing and so in the gaps between books I do what I call a little book projects. I might write poetry and my essays. I often write a picture book which then goes on to be published. I have just finished a book, like literally. It was due on the first of November, and I'm now planning a collection of re-told fairy tales, which is a very joyous project for me. There are seven stories. I work on one a week for the next seven weeks which will take me to Christmas, and then I'll start the new book in early January.
I always like to start a new book on a new moon, so I was googling on a new app on my phone, then I put it into my diary. I'll say ‘this when I have to start the new book’. It means I can clean out my desk. I'll move all my French Revolution books out of my study and bring in all my books that I need for the next book. It means that if there's anything else I need to do like update my website or write some blogs or do interviews with lovely people like you, I do them all in this period. Clear the decks.
Pam: Kate, the book that you said you've just recently finished, is that the book that you've been writing about your ancestor Charlotte Waring?
Kate: Yes, it is. It's been a year I’ve dedicated to this. A hybrid memoir or you could call it a biography/memoir so basically my great-great-great-great-grandmother Charlotte Waring wrote the first children's book published in Australia. She was an immigrant. She came out in 1926 to be a governess to the Hannibal Hawkins MacArthur family. So that was John MacArthur's brother. On the ship out she met a young man called James Atkinson. They fell madly in love and were engaged within three weeks of meeting. She married him and they were very happy for a period of time and had the largest land grant ever given a New South Wales which was down in the Southern Highlands. They had four children in very quick succession. And when her youngest child Louisa was, I think, six days old James Atkinson died of typhoid. So, Charlotte was left a widow with four children under the age of 6 and the land grant, this huge thousands of acres in the Southern Highlands was left in trust for her baby son. She struggled on alone in in in the late 1830s. She was attacked by bushrangers and in a very violent attack. The man who attacked and her overseer was John Lynch who is called the Belmont Axe Murderer was Australia's first serial murderer, so he killed and raped dozens of people. As a consequence of that attack she married her overseer and this proved to be a terrible mistake because he was he was a violent drunk. She fled, and you know, the children were aged about 12 down to 5 and then she fought an extraordinary battle in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to keep custody of her own children. She fought for six years again and again and again. She ended up winning custody of her children and it was a landmark case in. It was the first time in Australian legal history that a woman was given custody of her own children. It was only the third time in the history of the world, that's how extraordinary it is. She was fined in the court for her impertinence, which I love. She was very tiny. Only five foot one. Anyway, while she was fighting the courts she had no source of income. She was supporting her children by selling her jewellery, her furniture, her clothes, fighting like a tigress. So she wrote her book during this very difficult period. She was a battered wife, a single mother and she was supporting her children at a time when women didn’t do that.
This is the book that my sister and I have been writing this past year. We are telling her story but we're telling it through the filter of our lives and what it was like for us growing up. You know, we're often called literary royalty because there are so many writers in our family. I'm so excited about this book. Such an emotional journey for us.
Pam: That's fantastic. We can't wait to read it. It sounds amazing. When will it be out Kate?
Kate: The book A Mother's Love For Her Children was published in December 1841. 2021 is the hundred and eightieth anniversary and that's why we chose to write the book because we just felt like it was a great opportunity to celebrate her life and her work so it will come out in the latter half of 2021.
Pam: We'll be waiting for that one. And you'll be starting of course on your next book very soon?
Kate: Yes. The new moon in January is when I start my next book. I'm working on the plan while I'm editing another book.
Pam: Kate you have given us so much to think about and so much wonderful information today. If there's just one last thing that you could give as advice to any writers out there who are listening…what would the most important thing for somebody who is pursuing a writing life and writing career?
Kate: It's a really good question one that I often ponder. I'm going to give two pieces of advice. One is, be true to yourself. If you are writing to what you think people want you will please no one. Write what you want to write. Write it with all the passion, all the conviction, all the truthfulness that you can bring to it. And then trust in the fact that there are people out there who will read it. I think this is what is really important because I see so many people going ‘what's hot, what's in, what do people want to publish’ and
‘I'm going to bend myself, I'm going to remake myself because I want to be popular. Just don't, because what's popular one week is not popular the next.
And the second piece of advice that I've got to give to everyone is about courage. Being a creative artist is about testing the limits of your courage every single day. You need to overcome your own fear of failure, your own fear of not being good enough your own fear of being misunderstood. You need to be brave in your creative choices, constantly challenging and stretching yourself. It means that you might fail and that's a big fear, but it's also because what I have discovered in my 22 years of being published is that it is the indomitable spirit who prevails. There are so many people who are heartbroken and give up their art because they have these unrealistic ideas of what it means to be a creative artist. Your choice is simply ‘do I create or do I not?’ and a creative artist creates creates. To travel that path, the difficult path, takes enormous sustained courage. It's not just courage today. It's courage every day. They're my two things: be true to yourself and take courage.
Pam: Thank you Kate, such wonderful advice. Can you just tell us finally where people can find you online?
Kate: Oh, just Google my name. I'm so easy to find. I have a website and I love social media because it's all about sharing my love of books and other things that give me joy with kindred spirits around the world. One of my great joys has been Instagram and I really just post pictures of flowers and water and clouds. It's finding something beautiful every single day.
Pam: I saw your photo the other day of the Australian fiction challenge for November.
Kate: I am actually aiming for 15 books for the month but I've got 30 books in the pile. If I manage to read 15 in a month I will be really proud of myself, but I wanted to kind of give a shout out to all the other authors whose books I won't reach this month. So, I just decided to put every single book into a pile and then I will have to read them because once I start the new book I’ll only be reading related books.
Pam: Well, thank you so much Kate. It's been so wonderful chatting to you again, and we can't wait to read your next book, and the next book, and the next book after that.
Kate: Thank you, darling. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.