News & Blog by Alison Booth
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
While I’ve already worked out the ending of the third and final volume of the Jingera trilogy, I’m still figuring out precisely how to get there. I can tell you when it when it will end though -- in 1971 or 1972. And it will also end in October 2011, which is the date my contract says I must deliver the final volume to Random House Australia. Already I know I'm going to be sad to see the characters...
Rethinking the connection between the day job and fiction writing
by Alison Booth on 27 January 2011
Around a year ago, when Stillwater Creek was published, I wrote a blog on this website claiming that there was no connection between being an economist and being a writer of novels. Now I think I was wrong. Logic, a crucial characteristic of an academic economist’s way of thinking, was helpful in weaving together the various stories in The Indigo Sky. As a very simple example, when working out...
People often say that they can remember precisely what they were doing when certain major or shocking events occurred. Events such as the assassination of John Kennedy. The first man on the moon. The death of Princess Diana. The assassination of John Lennon. A pivotal event that I remember very vividly was the release of the Bringing them Home Report.[1] I first heard about in 1997 when I...
The answer to this question is simple: historical accident. When I signed a two book deal with Random House Australia back in 2009, they stipulated that the second book should be either a sequel or a prequel to Stillwater Creek. I flirted with the idea of a prequel; I'd always fancied writing a novel set in Australia prior to Federation. But was it stretching things too far to view a novel set six...
I think a lot of writers have difficulty answering this sort of question about their work because there are so many layers in most novels. For example, I’ve just finished reading the wonderful book by Rose Tremain, a writer whom I greatly admire, entitled Music and Silence. This is a historical novel set in the years 1629 to 1630 at the Danish court, and it is written from many different perspectives. ...
It’s fun living in parallel worlds -- the fictional world that you inhabit at night and at the weekend, and the real world of work, and being able to step in and out of each world at whim. A split personality you might say? No, never... It’s impossible to deny that creating the fictional world is also very hard work. And the fictional world might allow the imagination a free rein but it does...
One of the advantages of historical fiction is the opportunity it gives the writer to research the past. There’s a great delight in going to the basement of the National Library in Canberra and whizzing through the microforms of old newspapers. It is amazing what you can pick up about the time period from old copies of the Sydney Morning Herald! Political detail, fashions, wars, the shipping news,...
We recently we took a Canadian colleague visiting the Australian National University to visit Gundaroo, a delightful little town established in the 1850s and located some kilometres north of Canberra off the Federal Highway. (See http://gundaroo.info/gundaroo/history1.htm for details.) The gift and toyshop there has just expanded into the timber slab house next door. Imagine our pleasure when we...
The pencil versus the laptop computer, and single versus multiple viewpoints.
by Alison Booth on 5 January 2010
Call me old-fashioned, but I love writing with a 2B pencil on a pad of lined writing paper. You can do it anywhere. On the train, at a railway terminal, on the beach, on a bush walk, even lying on your back in bed. And the pencil is light. You can take it anywhere, together with a scrap of paper. But the main advantage is that writing with a pencil seems more spontaneous. Perhaps that’s because...
Random Blogging? What a great title and how tempting to take it literally! Instead, though, I'm going to answer a question that people have been asking me lately: how did you find the time to write a novel when you’ve got a fulltime job? The answer is straightforward (and no doubt common to most writers): I work most of the time. Of course it helps that my kids have left home and my husband’s...
