Could
you tell us what inspired you to write "Below"?
This is a story which had its very beginnings a long
time ago, well before I had thoughts of ever becoming a writer.
I was about 13 when I went on school camp to a place
called Tallangatta, a lovely little town in northeastern Victoria, Australia.
An earlier version of the town was flooded in the 1950s to make way for the
expansion of a nearby dam complex and in certain areas you can see the tops of
trees and so on protruding from the lake surface. When we were there, the water
was particularly low, after some years of drought, and as I stood with my
friends on the edge of the lake, I realised that what I had thought were just
stones beneath my feet were actually the remnants of an old road.
I was completely taken by the idea of setting off
along the road and following it underwater into the town and although I didn't
do that, the image lodged in the back of my mind. When I started writing, I
returned to it at some point, and over many years found a story slowly
beginning to form around it.
I
really enjoyed the build-up of suspense in the novel’s first half, especially
pertaining to that “certain something” Cassie and Liam find beneath the
water’s surface. Was it your intention to keep the mystery submerged, just out
of reach for the reader, much like Old Lower Grange?
I love how you put that, and on reflection, I think
you're right. I say 'on reflection'
because I often don't realise that I've done something until I've done
it (and so the question as to why I might have done it that way comes later
still).
Looking back, I think it worked something like this:
When I realised I was writing a mystery, I wanted
the revelations to be gradual, analogous to the dropping of the water level in
a certain sense. I didn't want a big 'aha!' moment too early; I felt like that
process of a more gradual movement towards suspicion and then awareness was
more authentic for the context, in which I have relatively young children who
have grown up believing certain 'facts' about their world. I wanted that
dismantled slowly rather than abruptly.
I do think that works for the sort of book this is, but I'm also aware that I have
a natural tendency to write like that in a more general sense, revealing things
very slowly in a kind of roundabout way, even when the context doesn't really
call for it. It's a habit of mine I have to consciously work against from time
to time, as it can become quite laborious for readers. Even though I think it
works here, and many readers love it, there are others who have felt that it
takes too long to get to the 'action'. But I can't write for those readers, and
wouldn't try to. Personally, I feel that there's plenty of action early on;
it's just of an interior kind rather than outwardly dramatic events, but for
me, that is equally important – particularly in the early stages of a story
when character and context are being established – and just as compelling. I
guess I'm writing for readers who feel that way too, and thankfully there seem
to be enough of them out there!
Since
you are a self-proclaimed “pantser”, how did all the juicy details of the novel's mystery surface for you?
With great difficulty and over multiple rewrites!
Hearing the voice of the characters is more important to me than knowing what
direction the plot might take, and for me, this became a story worth telling
the moment I heard Cassie's voice saying The day that I was born they
drowned my town, even though I had no idea what her story was going to be.
From that point, there was a very messy and
prolonged brainstorming process that took place in the cracks of other
projects. The image of the drowned town and the voice of Cassie were in my head
and every now and then I would get snippets of ideas or sentences that seemed
to belong to that story, and jot them down in a file, waiting for some kind of
shape to emerge.
[*possible spoilers ahead*]
Somewhere along the way, I realised I was thinking
about secrets and that perhaps there was a mysterious figure in the town who
had left something behind in the old one, something he wanted to retrieve. But
of course it wasn't possible to do that and the council was always telling
people to look forward and so on. And then I started thinking about the
slippage between official discourse and personal narrative and the
council/mayor as symbols of authority and so on. And I came up with Mayor
Finkle as an embodiment of that.
From that point, it was a matter of trying to find a
way of pitting him against Cassie in some sense and that was when I came up
with the character of Liam, who didn't exist until quite late in my thinking.
The roles of those characters evolved during the writing process and that's
something I find very hard to explain, even to myself.
What I tend to do is just write, almost laying out
words like bait until an idea comes along and grabs the hook and I think, Oh!
Maybe Liam has an injury that Finkle caused and what's under the water is proof
of that? And then I write some more and eventually I get another nibble … And
Liam's Dad has a brain injury, a jumbled 'memory' that offers clues?Yes! And
so on again. And every idea presents possibilities but also problems: But
what could be down there? And why would it be there? Why not just hide it
somewhere else? How can it be revealed? Would it still be identifiable? How
could they make connections between what happened and what's in the lake? Would
that even be plausible? Arghhh.
And so on, endlessly. It really does feel a bit like
playing out a fishing line, waiting for something to latch on, and then seeing
how far I can run with that little nibble until it either breaks the line and I
have to try again, or I somehow manage to land it and can see a way clear to an
ending. With this book, there were many false starts, and I spent a lot of time
sitting despondently on the shore wondering why I bother fishing in the first
place when I clearly have no idea what I'm doing.
I
once swam over the tops of dead trees in a man-made lake and the pale, slimy
arms reaching up from the darkness completely freaked me out. Suffice it to say the idea of the fire-tree
in your story was loaded with imagery and emotion for me. Hence my Swimming
Related Questions:
1)
Have you ever swum across the tops of trees?
Actually, I haven’t, though I’ve imagined doing so.
Something as simple as swimming over lakeweed makes me think about what it
would be like to swim over an underwater forest. I have a fairly vivid
imagination, which comes in handy.
2)
Are you the type who tries to touch the bottom, no matter how deep you
are?
Yes, always.
3)
What’s your favorite swim-stroke?
I’m going to say freestyle. I grew up swimming
competitively (and worked for several years as a swimming teacher) so I have a
decent style and I love that feeling when it all comes together and I’m
powering through the water.
On
your website it says you were awarded a grant to write "Below" from The Department of Culture and the
Arts, Western Australia. Can you tell us
how that came about, and did it place undue pressure on you to produce while
you were writing the book?
I would say that it did place a certain kind of
pressure on me, but I wouldn't necessarily describe it as 'undue'. Writing this
book was quite challenging for me and it collapsed completely on a couple of
occasions. If I hadn't felt the additional responsibility of having received
the grant, there's a good chance I might have abandoned it completely. I'm very
grateful that didn't happen, so the pressure was useful to me, really. It was quite
a good lesson in many ways, as I feel very proud of this book now, despite it
having seemed utterly unsalvageable at times.
Below was
originally released as "Surface Tension"
through Walker Books in Australia. Could
you tell us a little about your book’s journey from Walker Books to its release
on Candlewick? How did the opportunity
come about and how did you feel about the changes in title and cover?
Walker Books Australia and Candlewick Press are
actually 'sister' companies (with their 'parent' being Walker Books UK), so
most titles published by Walker here are considered by Candlewick for US
publication. I've published eight books with Walker and three have been
accepted by Candlewick; there are all kinds of factors that affect whether or
not a book is considered able to 'cross over' into the US market. I'm very glad
that Surface Tension/Below was one of them.
As for the changes in the title and cover, I was
quite nervous about this, simply because I was very fond of both those aspects
of the Australian edition.
However, as things have worked out, I absolutely
love the US cover; if I'm honest, as much as I couldn't have imagined liking
any cover more than the original, I've warmed to the new one so much that I
think I do prefer it. I think the depth of colour is really striking and I love
the way the town beneath the water becomes apparent only as you look closer,
which really reflects the story itself, the way the mystery is slowly revealed
and explored. Something else that's important to me on the US cover is that
both Liam and Cassie are depicted. I never considered this as an omission on
the Australian cover, but as soon as I saw the new one, I thought, “Oh, of
course!”. Their relationship is so important to the book and I'm really glad to
have it represented on the cover.
In terms of the title, I think I do prefer Surface
Tension somewhat. I was concerned that Below was a little dull, but
as soon as I saw it on the cover, I felt reassured. I feel like they work well
as a package and I'm really thrilled with the way the book has turned out.
I should add that I was involved in all these
changes; there was a lengthy consultation process and lots of time taken over
the decisions.
How
does being a poet affect your prose?
It slows me down a lot, for one thing! I’m always
thinking about cadence and whether a sentence has the rhythm that I want and
that can be very time consuming over a long novel. As a poet who's turned to
writing for children, I find that I naturally use poetic techniques from time
to time, and I think this sort of play with language can be of real value to
readers of any age. Editors will sometimes seek to 'smooth out' my prose,
suggesting removal of a word here or there, and while I'm completely open to
editing and my work has benefited enormously from that process, I do sometimes
dig my heels in for what might seem like incomprehensible reasons simply
because I feel like a sentence needs an extra beat, or falling rather than
rising cadence or something like that.
That's on the micro level, I guess, on the level of
language itself. But a broader issue relates to my own priorities as a writer.
And that has to do with my tendency to privilege things like image and idea
over plot. I've heard some writers describe themselves as 'storytellers first'
but that's not how I see myself. The ideas that have the most resonance for me
generally begin with a single, compelling image, and the story becomes in a
sense a scaffolding to hang that on. The story comes to matter, of course, but
I don't really think in those terms to begin with; I'm always writing out of
the central image, and I struggle mightily with plot and structure.
In many ways, at heart, I see myself less as a
storyteller and more as a random scribbler, a collector of fragments, of bits
and pieces of observation; that’s how my path toward becoming a writer began –
in the way of a magpie, gathering shiny bits and pieces of the world, jotting
them down into notebooks here and there – and I think that's where I still feel
most at home.
Would
you indulge us in a few hints about what you are working on now?
I'm in the home stretch of what I think is a Young
Adult novel but might perhaps be upper Middle Grade. It's set in an alternative
society in which girls are kept small from birth in order to tunnel through
mountains to harvest something which is necessary for the survival of that
society. My working title is Set in Stone and in many ways the story is
about belief – about the basis for the ideas we choose to embrace, and what
happens when those entrenched ideas become divorced from their original
context.
I hope that makes sense! It probably sounds a bit
dry but I think there's a good story in there as well as some interesting
ideas, and I guess that's a combination I tend to strive for.
