Before I wrote my first novel, The Star on the Grave, I was an advertising copywriter by profession. But I had always wanted to write something significant. A movie.
In 2008 I decided the time had come to record my …
Events
The Grueling Climb of Feedback: A Guest Post by Lindsay Bartels
The biggest struggle for me in writing my first book, the memoir Imogen in Waiting, came after the first draft, when the craft of redrafting began. To do that I felt I needed to expose my story of having …
Memoir – to write or not to write? A Guest Post by Cynthia Banham
A little while back I announced to my writers’ group, surprising us all, that I was done with memoir. Having published two, most recently Mother Shadow, I’d decided that a third –something I’ve been working on since 2020, a …
Writing about people you have unfinished business with: A Guest Post by Julia Lawrinson
‘That must have been cathartic.’ This is the sentence I hear most when I tell people I’ve written a memoir.
Some days, it is true. Putting shape to a life that has been messy, traumatic, bizarre, and entertaining by turns …
ON THE (WRITING) POWER OF RESTRAINT: A GUEST POST BY JOANNE FEDLER
You would think that at this ancient stage of my writing career, working on a rewrite of a book would get easier. Bring Us Home from Sorrow is my seventeenth book, a memoir about losing my mother to ovarian cancer. …
On identity and gatekeeping: A Guest Post by Susan Blumberg-Kason
The moment after I signed with my first literary agent, I immediately went to my website to add those coveted words: “Rep’d by…”. After four years of querying agents for a memoir, I felt I had finally made it into …
Who Gets to Speak at Writers’ Festivals?
A version of this post was first published at Australian Financial Review
During the Adelaide Writers Week scandal – the removal of Randa Abdel-Fattah from its schedule, then an apology and an invitation for 2027 AWW – my predominantly literary …
Writing a Book While Everything Was Falling Apart: A Guest Post by Simon Tedeschi
When I started writing my novel Turin, I believed I understood what the book was about. It began with my grandfather, a Jew from Turin who was forced to leave everything behind after Mussolini’s racial laws. For a long …
Writing as the World Changes: A Guest Post by Andra Putnis
The world we start writing in is never the same one we inhabit years later as we seek to finalise our work and publish. Fast moving global conflicts, political ruptures and the rapid pace of climate change have made this …
Finding the (not-so-fine) line between history and fiction: A Guest Post by Merav Fima
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that it would be interesting to imagine a meeting between the four great female English novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. She …