I found creative writing when I was young, scribbling things for the school magazine, or poems of unrequited love in a teenage diary. I found it again when I studied literature at university and read my way through ‘the canon’. Back then, I was impressed by T S Eliot, Charles Dickens, Chaucer and George Eliot.
I found writing again when I opened (and closed) a bookshop in the centre of Sydney, with local writers coming in every Thursday night to talk and read and discuss their work, with wine in front of a fireplace. After it closed, I wrote the story of the bookshop. That was cathartic, and fun. So I wrote a story of climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, and of cruising in the Arctic—travel writing was fun too. A hobby.
I found creative writing again when I left a career in a law office and plunged into a creative writing degree. In class, a whole world of writing and reading opened before me, books that had eluded me even through the literature degree and the bookshop years. I found writers I’ve come to treasure: W. G. Sebald, Patrick White, George Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Shirley Hazzard, the amazing Borges, the equally-amazing-in-her-own-way Joan Didion. Then I found contemporary writers that stun me with their innovation and skill: Rachel Cusk, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lucy Ellman, Toby Litt, Anna Burns.
I read more than I write. I gobble up new releases, I go back and tackle the classic books I ‘missed.’ These days I read like a writer—why did she choose that point of view? How did he create that voice? The transitions, the dialogue, the rhythm, the pace, the tension, the characterisation through a telling detail—how do they do it? Reading is like one long and valuable class in creative writing. But of course it’s also a pleasure, a revelation, and a privilege.
