Q&A and Writing Advice

Here are some questions I'm asked regularly about my writing process, as well as advice for aspiring authors:

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

I was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and grew up in the Hills District area of north-west Sydney. I went to university at what was then known as the University of Western Sydney, Nepean (now known as Western Sydney University) and earned a Bachelor of Design degree. I relocated to Victoria in 1999 and have lived in Melbourne ever since.

Why did you decide to become a writer? What has your journey been like?

I was always a very creative kid and spent a lot of my childhood drawing, crafting and creating my own picture books. In high school I started writing short stories, poetry and the beginnings of novels that never seemed to get very far. I really wanted to write a series like The Babysitters Club, or YA thrillers like the ones I enjoyed reading by Christopher Pike, but I had no idea how I could make that my career. There were no creative writing courses offered at university at the time, only journalism, and I didn’t want to be a journalist. So I decided to concentrate on my art skills. When I finished high school I studied a design degree so I could work as a graphic designer. About twelve years into my design career, I decided to try writing something again.

This happened around the time my first child was born. We were buying and receiving lots of picture books at the time, and it reignited my passion for the books I’d grown up with and the many home-made picture books I’d crafted at the kitchen table as a kid. I was running my own graphic design business from home, and I worked when my baby was asleep. But during his daytime naps, there was never quite enough time to get stuck into my design work, so I began playing around with writing picture book stories. I soon realised I also wanted to explore longer-length stories, so I started writing long-hand in notebooks and eventually typed all of these scenes into a Word document. That’s how I started writing novels. I continued working as a graphic designer while I was raising small children, so writing was done in whatever spare time I had left over. It took me about five years to finally finish a complete novel of 85,000 words.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a writer?

Rejection is by far the biggest challenge on a daily basis, whether it’s during the submission process, or unfavourable critiques and reviews of my work. It affects my motivation and my mental health, and takes a lot of energy to overcome.

What is your favourite thing about being a writer?

My favourite thing is I get to be creative every single day and invent characters and plots from my imagination. For a lifelong creative person, it’s such a thrill to see the final package and have it enjoyed by so many people. Meeting readers and hearing how much they enjoyed reading my books is really rewarding.

What is your least favourite thing about being a writer?

My least favourite thing is how much the creative process is tied into my energy levels and self-confidence. Some days I can feel low, flat and uninspired, and it makes it difficult to be productive. Most writers deal with impostor syndrome, where they doubt their own skills and have an internalised fear of being exposed as a fraud. It can be really hard to break through that mindset and keep writing anyway.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?

You don’t need to draft your scenes in order, or write your way neatly from point A to point B. If you’re feeling stuck, just jump ahead and pick up a random scene midway through, then figure out how to write your way into it later. I often jump forward to an action scene or snippet of dialogue, something I know is definitely going to be important to the story, and bang out the words as they’re coming to me. Then I figure out where I want to slot it into the story later and how I’m going to get my characters there. It really helps you get over the mental block of the dreaded white page.

What’s the worst writing advice you’ve received?

‘Real’ writers must write every day, which is simply not true. I agree that having a regular writing routine is essential if you ever want to finish a manuscript, but writing every day is just not feasible for a lot of people due to their families, lifestyles, work situations, health conditions and energy levels. It’s too easy to feel down on yourself about your output levels if you measure it by how many words you write every day. As long as you keep turning up at the keyboard to add words to your manuscript when you can, you’re a ‘real’ writer.

Where do you get your ideas?

I’m inspired by everything around me, from TV shows and movies, to news articles and podcasts, to conversations with friends and other books I’ve read. Anytime I hear about something that interests me and captures my imagination, I write it down (or make a note on my phone) so I can think about it more later. I’ll often start brainstorming one of these random ideas, expanding on the who, what, where, when, how and why of it all, which can then springboard into new ideas and directions. I have Word documents full of random notes about plots and characters, which are the seeds of new stories. Ideas never come to me as a clear lightning-bolt moment – they always grow from something very small that I keep returning to and asking myself more questions.

Why do you set your books in small towns?

I love small-town settings in books, TV shows and movies, and I particularly enjoy Australian small-town stories with secrets and complicated family dynamics at the core. Most Australians have been on some kind of a road trip at some point, and country towns with their close-knit communities are places we recognise and are fascinated by. As a writer, my imagination plays with the undercurrents in small towns, the way their inhabitants all know each other, or at least think they do.

What are your best tips on creating good characters?

Once I have an idea for a plot or situation a character finds themselves in, I start asking myself questions about who they are and how they came to be in this situation. What do they want? What are their fears? What kind of family situation do they have, or what might have happened in their past that influences how they react to their current predicament? Once you start brainstorming these things about your character, you can create someone realistic and well-rounded who reacts and speaks in ways that are unique to them. You might also base some of their characteristics on people you know in real life, but I find the best way to do this is to take one or two qualities from different people and merge them into somebody brand new who has their own thoughts, feelings and mannerisms.

With a large cast of characters, my challenge as an author is to make sure they are so cohesively involved with one another that if you removed a character and what they contribute, the plot would no longer function properly. Every single character needs authentic emotions and motivations or else their actions come across as nonsensical or empty. And if their relationships with other characters shift and change throughout the story, it needs to be logical or else it just seems forced.

What advice would you give students about including better vocabulary in their writing?

Read widely. Read the genres you love, but also try reading in different genres you wouldn’t usually pick up. Also read some non-fiction for something different. There really is no better advice than reading to expand your vocabulary, and it really helps your writing too because you start to understand sentence structure, cadence (the rhythm and flow of sentences), and using words creatively to make your writing more entertaining to read.

Do you have any editing tips?

I always edit my writing as I go, which means I start every new writing session by re-reading what I wrote in the previous session and tweaking it so the sentences are smoother. I also cut any unnecessary words and fix typos. Doing this helps me get back into the right mood and headspace for the story. When I’ve written a number of scenes or a large part of the story (and especially when I’ve finished the whole book), I find it best to put my work aside for a couple of weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes to edit, because it’s much easier to see where you need to fix things or cut words out when you’ve had a bit of time away from it. Once you’ve done this, it’s good to then pass it on to a trusted friend, another writer or keen reader, who can read your story and give their feedback about the plot and characters, any parts that don’t make sense, and any grammar errors you may have missed. You can then polish the story again based on their feedback. There are plenty of books and websites available about improving your grammar and sentence structure, and things to avoid like passive writing. And if you join online writing groups and forums, you can ask other writers for advice.