‘Children are on the cusp of their lives, they’re only just setting out on their own grand adventures. To offer possibility and hope in our stories can inspire and empower children for the rest of their lives. What an honour for a writer to have this chance.’
‘Sometimes we resist an idea because it doesn’t feel original or brilliant enough, but it’s only when you commit to it, and spend some time exploring it, that you find your connection, start inhabiting it, and then the magic starts to happen.’
‘The more you pitch, the more comfortable you become with rejection, with no response, and with pitching again. Editors want to hear from you, and rejection is never personal!’
‘Research allows us to write about subjects which we are not already experts in… It allows writing to be imbued with the kinds of details which bring the reader into the worlds we’ve created and make those worlds fascinating.’
‘A good opening sentence is simple, raises questions or is surprising in some way. It is an invitation to the reader to enter the story; how you present that invitation is important.’
‘Interior Australia is awash with fragmented perspectives and competing narratives that could only exist there. The best rural Australian novels embrace this by making the landscape more than just setting – they make it as vital to the book as character or plot.’
‘Rereading is an important mode of reading – taking in patterns until they become part of the fabric of your thoughts, learning how language and story and people’s minds work.’
‘The interplay between the desire for brevity and longer forms has always been something poets have been able to play with…poetry is infinitely flexible, it gives us so many ways to reach out to the reader.’
‘This isn’t about clouds parting to beam in words channelled by angelic beings… so much as the process of story-making becoming magnetic and natural. One of the most gratifying elements of writing is getting out of the way of ourselves, to discover what we didn’t know we knew. This happens when we write words and ideas that we might not have believed ourselves consciously capable of constructing.’
