Nick Earls - How I Write

I write, or at least do the typing part, in a room that was intended to be featureless but is perenially full of junk and unfinished business (and only I know which is which, and I’m guessing much of the time). It’s a purpose-built shed, with low stimulus magnolia walls and no window in my line of sight. My partner once said if I had a window I would stare out of it, and she’s probably right. That’d mean I’d write a lot less and freak the neighbours out when they’re swimming in their pool.

Really, though, my brain is writing most of the time. The writing isn’t just the typing part. It’s finding small ideas and not losing them. It’s watching them cluster together in interesting ways, and creating blanks that need filling. It’s getting a sense of who they might be about, and why. Writing is thinking more than it’s typing.

At first that’s a very divergent process for me – all kinds of ideas come along that might or might not end up in my story, and I leave them in the pile until the time’s right to make choices, judge and cull. There is literally a pile, by the way. I write the ideas down on scraps of paper – backs of things, envelopes, boarding passes – because that way it won’t feel as though I’ve wasted anything if they turn out to be rubbish.

I throw all the notes in a folder and as I start to get a sense of who my people are and what my story might be, the process gets a bit more focused and I start to look into specific things that might help me. Those things can be pretty diverse. For The Fix for instance, it involved reading The Great Gatsby three times, playing a lot of mini golf at the Gold Coast and giving the websites of a range of strip clubs some pretty thorough scrutiny. Imagine if someone had told me when I was fifteen that that would all be essential for my job – I would have wanted to be a writer even more than I already did.

Once I’ve created more possibilities than I can ever use, it’s time to think convergently, to work out exactly who I’m dealing with, and what my storylines will be and how I’ll work them around each other. I have several tools that help me fiddle around with that, including drawing up timelines, mapping it all out on a calendar and setting cards out on the floor. I say ‘cards’ – it’s actually torn scraps of paper. I put each plot line down in my best guess at its order and I walk around them and around them, rearranging them until I can merge my plot lines in the best order.

Then I pick the cards up, sit down at the keyboard (finally) and create my outline, which is often about a quarter of the length of the novel. Then I write my first draft into the outline.

Does this all sound like some crazy anally retentive piece of mental contortion that I should keep to myself? Possibly. I should probably have just said, ‘I write when the muse finds me,’ or some other meaningless beautiful big fat lie. But some of those muse people probably end up staring at walls a lot, and that’s not why I bought these walls. I actually love the process I have to go through of finding and making and playing with the bits of the next possible story. The real art comes in leaving none of that process showing at the end.

The end result needs to feel to the reader almost as if I was never there, and they’re eavesdropping on someone’s thought processes as something very watchable happens to then.

The Fix is out Mon 1 Aug, Random House, RRP $32.95

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