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"What Is Creativity?" with Charlotte Wood · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans! Welcome to the show that goes where others don't.
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The show that rejects partisan squabbling and tribal groupthink.
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I'm Josh Zips. I'm your humble warrior princess,
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hunting down the world's most fascinating minds
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to wrestle with one provocative question each week.
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Much of modern culture and politics and media is tailor-made,
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tailor-made to panda to what we already believe and distort what we don't
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to reinforce our biases and exaggerate our differences.
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But change doesn't happen in an echo chamber.
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It's time to leave the mental comfort zone to flex our minds
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and step on some landmines, folks. It's time to have uncomfortable conversations.
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This week on the show, it's like drinking from a cool stream,
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delving into the mind of one of Australia's greatest novelists,
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Charlotte Wood. You may have heard of the book The Weekend.
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It exploded onto the scene in 2019 and was the read of the summer in Australia.
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Charlotte is still fairly young. She's only written six novels.
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She's in her 50s, but it's not like she's the grand dom of Australian literature,
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but she's been shortlisted for Australia's biggest book awards,
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like The Miles Franklin Award and The Stella Prize.
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I first encountered her at the beginning of the pandemic
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when I was broadcasting on ABC Radio and she wrote a beautiful piece
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about the trap of feeling busy and distracted all the time.
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And that resonated with me. I had her on the air and I thought, wow, who is this chick?
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I didn't say chick. Who is this broad? I said, who is this fancy lady?
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I said to myself, and then I thought I got to get it back on the podcast,
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especially since she has a brand new book, not a novel this time,
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but a nonfiction book that deals with all of the kinds of things
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that I was speaking with her about last year.
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It's called the luminous solution, creativity, resilience, and the inner life.
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And my goodness, it was just lovely to have this conversation at a time in my life
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where I'm stressed out about the lockdown. We are all in Australia,
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well, in Sydney and Melbourne anyway, and Canberra.
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Out of our minds about the lockdown, looking forward to the end of it,
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limping towards it. And I don't know about you,
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but I found that one of my coping mechanisms throughout the lockdown
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and the pandemic in its entirety, in fact, has been to find myself
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coming back to the easy distractions of social media.
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And so my head hasn't been in a very good place.
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I'm negotiating a difficult contract about another work thing that's come up.
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I'm struggling with trying to figure out if I'm going to be able to take my kids to see
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their grandparents in the States any time in the human scale future,
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rather than geological time, future.
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And to talk to Charlotte was just a reframing, a retweeking recognition
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that there's mortal life, then distractedness, and worry.
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There is a deep well of creativity and insight.
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If we just choose to take time to tap it.
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I hope this does as much for you as it did for me.
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Enjoy this conversation with Charlotte Wood.
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Tell us about the luminous solution and what inspired this book.
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Well, it is a book about the creative process,
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basically just from my point of view, the way that my own creative impulse has worked
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and sort of developed over a number of years.
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And I, lots of the book has, it comes, sort of started life as pieces
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published in different magazines and newspapers over the last sort of 20 years.
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And I'd often been invited to, you know, my publisher would say,
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why don't you get a collection of, you know, stuff that you've written
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and put it together?
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But I didn't want to put together a collection of, you know,
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just sort of selected writings.
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I wanted there to be a more cohesive kind of feeling about it.
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And then last year, at the beginning of last year,
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and I think I might have even spoken to you about this,
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I published a piece called Fertile Ground about sort of,
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what the inner life means and how to nourish it
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and what might threaten it and so on.
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And that was in the beginning of the pandemic when I was really kind of flipping out
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like everybody about what was going to happen and so on.
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And so I was in this sort of sense of panic and disarray.
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And I realized that I just had to stop and go quiet.
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And just sort of go back into my imaginative inner world
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in the way that I always do when I'm working.
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But I'd sort of lost sight of it in all the panic about COVID.
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So I published that piece sort of asking,
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what is the inner life?
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Why is it important?
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Why do we need it?
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And how to, you know, enhance it for one of a bit of a word.
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And after I published that piece,
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I got so many, you know, emails and messages and things
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from people who were not artists or, you know,
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writers or whatever.
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But who felt really, they really connected with what I'd said in there
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about just attending to your inner world as an important thing
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rather than always turning to the exterior world to be happy basically.
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So after that, I thought, well, maybe it's time for a collection
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that does bring some of the pieces I've written over these together.
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The stuff about making art and what it means and the creative impulse, I guess.
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And then when I brought all these pieces together, quite a lot of them,
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I thought, actually, I don't think that anymore.
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I'm going to rewrite.
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So it's sort of, most of them are either completely rewritten
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or sort of highly edited and changed.
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And then a couple of them haven't been published at all before
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and a couple of the very recent ones sort of remain almost the same.
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But some of them are kind of enlarged and just found
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I have more to say on certain things.
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And what is the answer to sort of giving expression to the creative impulse?
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I mean, I suppose there's not one answer.
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Like everybody, even people who think they're not creative,
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have a creative spark in them, very few people find a way to channel
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that creative spark into a career as creative as writing novels.
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What's the difference?
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Yeah, well, I think the main thing is just to understand
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that you want a sense of creativity in your life.
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And it doesn't mean that you have to be an artist of any kind,
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you know, and I think I say somewhere in the preface
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that if you live your life with curiosity and intention,
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that's what an inner life is.
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And that's what a sense of creativity is.
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But if you do, you know, if you sort of have a nudging,
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niggling feeling that you could have a greater,
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you could pay more attention to your inner world,
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it's almost that's all you have to do is realize that that's what you want.
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And then you have to kind of just be conscious of how you spend your time.
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What sort of things you're putting into your mind?
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And a big part of it is just allowing a sense of stillness.
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A sense of stillness and quiet is something that is really important
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for nourishing a kind of rich inner world.
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But we are really quite frightened of stillness and quiet, I think.
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So we find ourselves just cramming stuff in, you know,
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like we binge on Netflix and we listen to, you know, podcasts
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and even when we're going for a walk,
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we tend to, you know, have our ears filled with, you know, great stuff.
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But that sense of emptying out the mind in order
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to let other things come into it without sort of jamming stuff into it all the time
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is something that I've realized in writing that piece.
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You know, it has to be really practiced and it can be scary
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to go into a very quiet space.
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Well, we also have devices now that are not just interesting
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but are designed to be addictively interesting
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by the world's greatest psychological manipulators in Silicon Valley.
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So I mean, I'm getting to a point at which I'm in a real pickle
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with my relationship to devices, especially in this most recent lockdown in Sydney
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where it's really hard to muster the will to not keep scratching the itch of distraction
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by jumping onto Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or something.
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And I mean, I remember, you're right, you and I spoke
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and I had no idea when this was.
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It actually surprised me to look it up and that it was April of 2020
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that I was on ABC Radio and spoke with you about distractedness
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and busyness in the context of just beginning to emerge
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from the first pandemic lockdown.
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And I wonder whether you think that this stretch of time has been better or worse.
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Let's just talk about you for a second and then we can talk about everybody.
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Better or worse for you at being able to find that stillness.
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Do you mean this second lockdown or the whole time?
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The whole pandemic.
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Look, I have found it really hard because because I'm the same as you
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to the distraction, the daily, especially once we're in lockdown,
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the daily thing of the numbers and watching the press conference and all that sort of stuff
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which logically makes no difference if I watch it or not.
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Makes no difference to anyone but me and it usually is detrimental.
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It doesn't even really matter what the numbers are.
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Actually, once they're above a few hundred, you know that you're not putting the genie back in the bottle.
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I started telling people not to pay attention to the daily case number
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because we're all on this train and there's coronavirus will become endemic
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and we just have to get vaccinated and then that'll be that.
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And case numbers won't matter anymore so stop caring about them.
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That's right.
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Well, in the beginning there's a sense of, well, I should pay attention because, you know,
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see where the cases are.
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I live in an area where there's been, you know, quite a lot of cases here and there.
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So, you know, being responsible and going, oh, was I in that shop at that time, blah, blah.
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But I realized that my sense of sort of calm was returning when I forgot to check the numbers.
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You know, and really that sense of calm only came when I returned to work to,
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and by work I mean writing fiction.
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Because that's where I can go into this sort of state of total absorption
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and, you know, it's an imagined world where if I, the more I do it, the easier it is.
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And during the pandemic lockdown, I too easily left it.
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So, it's still after, you know, 20 something years, 30 years of writing books.
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I still have to practice drawing those boundaries of space and time around the time
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that I want to spend in my imagination.
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Because the whole contemporary world is built, as you say, and especially the technological world,
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its purpose is to destroy your inner world really.
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Its purpose is to fill it up, distract you, make you buy things to make yourself feel better.
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So, and, you know, I'm a, I'm a, absolutely, you pray to all that stuff as anybody else.
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But I know that once I calm down, put the phone away, turn it off,
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put the internet blocker on my, on my, put the Facebook blocker on my computer.
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So, I can't, I deleted my Twitter account some years ago, and I'm really glad I did.
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I do have Instagram, but, and I can be quite compulsive about it.
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And I'm very easily addicted to technological stuff.
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But I've learned the only way to actually, if I'm going to write books, I have to get control of that stuff.
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Because it just doesn't work while writing and then checking Instagram, you know,
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half an hour into my writing day.
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It just, it just destroys that concentration and that, that sort of entry into another,
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on another plane of existence, which is what creativity requires of your thing.
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It's a very good way of phrasing it to say, if I'm going to write books, then I have to X.
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Because I haven't found a way of articulating this problem for myself in a way that is that clear cut.
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Like, I'm quite good at, like, I've lost quite a lot of weight during the pandemic,
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because I made a decision at the beginning of the year that either I was going to get fat
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watching Netflix through the pandemic, or I was going to do something more constructive.
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So my thinking to myself was, you know, if I want to live a long, healthy life and see my kids get married someday
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and feel alive and active, then I can't just eat whatever I want whenever I want and never exercise.
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And that was an easy switch that flicked.
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And yet, on the sort of the temptation of always eating the lolly of digital distraction,
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I haven't found a way to put that in a context where the long term sort of aspiration,
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or not even aspiration, just the simple blunt reality of if I'm going to write books,
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or if I'm going to do X, or if I'm going to survive, or if I'm going to this, then as a logical necessity,
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it's almost a syllogism like I have to make, I have to get, yeah,
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something has to give.
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Something has to give, I have to get my answer around this problem.
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And I think you're in a more difficult situation because when you work in the media or in, you know,
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podcasting or whatever, you feel like, well, I have to be on top of all these other things.
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I have to be, and I used to feel like that about Twitter.
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And when I said I was deleting my Twitter account, I got all these messages from people saying,
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well, it's a real mistake, you know, you're really going to, your career is really going to suffer
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because people won't know that you're out there blah, blah, blah.
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My books got better, I started, I certainly sold a lot more books once I got off Twitter.
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Now, those things are clearly not directly related, but getting focus is just crucial.
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And I think it is hard when you're in journalism or in, you know, broadcasting of any kind.
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You know, you can feel that it's essential that you have your finger on the pulse all the time.
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But I would suggest that that that could work exactly in the opposite way.
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It could just fill up your space in your mind with junk and not allow you to come up with original ideas
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or deeply thought, you know, ideas for projects.
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So I think, you know, if I was working in journalism or some more public world,
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I would have to work out a way of really quarantining my time and space to really protect it,
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and allow that stillness to come in.
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Because I feel like the stillness, I think I said in that early piece, it's not a void, it's a well.
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It will feel itself with interesting things if you don't block it all up with, you know,
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stuff from the outside world all the time.
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So I think it's, you know, as you say, the devices are designed to take you away from your own, you know, stillness.
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I mean, the other thing that they do, and you just sort of touched on it a bit,
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is they make you much less, they make you much more predictable.
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Because the way they're a, they're a kind of reward feedback system.
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So you get stuck in these little loops of what's going viral or what is, what is the most likely to create engagement,
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which means, you know, what, what are people most likely to share comment on or like?
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So things that rile people up or things that reinforce their beliefs.
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So it just makes, it makes one much less innovative because you're following these little looping trends as they feed back on themselves
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instead of finding what is truly unusual or inspiring in the Cosmast to try to share with other people.
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Yeah, and it's also you, one of the reasons I quit Twitter was I became so hyper-conscious of what other people would think of what I was doing.
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So if I write a sentence, I think I could think of 10 people on Twitter who go, oh, can you believe she wrote that?
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Yeah, even if clearly it was only my imagination, but that constant being constantly having a constant torrent of other people's opinions about every single thing that happens in the world,
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whether it's someone's dress or their speech or their book or their anything, you know, the way they looked at someone in a press conference.
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That sort of constant opinionating, I found really draining on my own sense of judgment about what I was doing.
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I had to just, and I also hated my own voice on Twitter.
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I had to be a bit sort of, you know, a bit sarcastic, but a bit, we had to be witty and you had to be thoughtful and you had to,
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it was a kind of performance for me in the end and I just felt sick at the way my own thoughts were colonized by what other people were going to think of every word I said.
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So getting away from that was just this enormous relief and I'm not trying to sound, you know, I mean, I can do the same thing on Instagram.
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So it's not Twitter, but it was my own losing a sense of what Rosalie Gascoine talked about in, she said, when I put up a show of her art, she said, all it has to be self-respecting.
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And what other people think is, you know, neither here nor there.
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But for me, the more time I spend online, the less I am able to know what is self-respecting in my work.
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I have to be by myself quietly to go, yes, that's right or no, that's not good enough or whatever.
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And then, you know, then you come out and you show people before it's finished and what they think and brother.
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But that sense of needing to nurture your own original thoughts quietly until they're sturdy enough to withstand critique and scrutiny from the outside world.
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I just think that for me, it has to be done away from the outside world.
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When you say self-respecting is a great way of putting it, isn't it?
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And when you say that you didn't like your voice on Twitter, how did you find your voice in the first place when you started writing?
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How did you find what gave you self-respect?
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In fiction, you mean in books?
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Yeah.
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Well, wherever you want to take that, I mean, when you read it, when you're an adolescent, just trying to forge a career in writing and find yourself.
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Yeah, when I was at university, I started doubling in it.
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Look, I feel like I wrote a few books before I found it, actually, and published a few books.
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But I guess, when I finally realised that what I have to do is actually say what I think.
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But I don't have to say what...
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It was kind of a revelation to me that when I wrote what I felt was true in inverted comments, meaning that might be in a fictional sense,
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if it wasn't being pretentious or if it wasn't always having an eye on what the response might be.
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If I actually focused on what I thought or what I saw in my imagination, then it becomes self-respecting.
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But if I was always sort of second-guessing, well, I can't write that because that sounds like so in a book or I can't write that because this writer I really admire wouldn't like that.
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Or I can't do that because that kind of thing doesn't sell.
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But all that stuff, that second-guessing just undermines any real substance that you have.
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You know, do occasional bits of teaching and stuff.
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I just say, just tell the truth.
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Tell the truth about yourself.
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And I don't mean write autobiography, but I mean...
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I've seen this happen in writers a lot, that your first book you write in this kind of naive innocence,
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where a lot of the time you don't think anyone's ever going to read it because you think you'll never get published.
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And so you kind of are a bit more free to just do your own weird thing.
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So then that might get published and get noticed or not or whatever.
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But then you sort of become ashamed of what you've done because you realize that it's not like all the other proper books and proper writers.
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And so you spend the next while sort of running away from that as far as you can to try and write something that you think other people will like or that will sell or that will bring you some respect or whatever.
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And you can get further and further away from the actual sort of true sense of who you are as an artist.
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And then I sort of, my theory is it's about three or four books in where people realize that that hasn't worked anyway.
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That didn't work to get you all the things you thought it was going to get you.
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And then, and they become quite disillusioned.
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And then they go, you know what, I'm just going to do what I fucking want.
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And I don't care if nobody reads it.
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And then quite often that's the book that, you know, suddenly there's a response to because they've given up on seeking approval because it never works.
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And then ironically the thing that gets you a privilege to, but then it's really hard to hold that hold your nerve on that, on that approach to go.
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Okay, that works. So now I'll do it again, you know, like I do think being really sincere in your sincerely expressing your own preoccupations.
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No matter whether other people think that's weird or boring or stupid or I do think it's the only way to actually get any satisfaction out of being an artist.
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You can't guarantee anything except your own pleasure in the process.
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Once a book is published, it's almost none of your business what happens to it.
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And I think it's a mistake to try and control what happens to it up, you know, just sort of, we'll certainly to go reading, you know, looking at what people say on good reads and whatever is just a recipe for disaster.
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You write your book or you make your, you know, ceramic pot or your podcast or whatever, you put it out there and then you go back to work.
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Because obsessively following whether anyone likes it or it didn't like it or whatever, you know, I mean, I didn't know about in podcasting, but I just think the genuine impulse.
25:29
It's interesting. I once heard Conan O'Brien talking about his philosophy about his late night show where he was saying he had to give himself some compassion about whether or not each show was going to be good because he's such a perfectionist that if he wanted to do each show the way that he wants to do it, he'd never be able to do a show.
25:48
So he thinks of each show as a piece of a mosaic and by the end of his life, yeah, he will have produced this mosaic and he doesn't know yet what the mosaic will look like.
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But, you know, he can't fret each piece too much, but just do the best job you can with the piece and eventually all the pieces will fit together into something.
26:10
I think that's exactly right. And I often talk with, you know, newer writers about the body of work. That's what you think about.
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So each book is going to be a different thing and you know, you might succeed or fail in whatever terms you decide equals success or failure.
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But the interesting thing will be the body of work at the, when you've written all the books you're going to write, what does it say about you? What have you discovered?
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And I do think that exploratory impulses to think to follow and focus on not what will the book be like, but what am I discovering? What interests me? What do I want to find out?
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What am I looking for for my own interest? And often with me, it'll be sort of a form thing like it'll be, so say with my last novel, the weekend, there was a very shifting point of view, which I hadn't done.
27:10
I was sort of technical stuff. And I can, you know, get a lot of satisfaction out of just trying that sort of stuff. And then, you know, yes, writing all the kind of the content for one of a better word is one thing.
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But the way I do it is often what will sustain me through, you know, years of writing a book, tinkering with the form.
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And just learning how to do it, learning, I do think looking at your work as, you know, people, I've often been surprised, I say, I feel like I'm just starting to learn how to write.
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And I've published, you know, how many, I don't know, eight books or nine books or something there. I was like, I'm starting to get a handle on it. But only just, you know, and then it's interesting to keep doing it.
28:03
When you talk about like your preoccupations express your own preoccupations, sometimes I think there's a creative people doubt whether or not their preoccupations are interesting because they're not being expressed by other people necessarily or maybe you focus on the preoccupations that you hear other people expressing, which you also share because presumably those are universal because you've heard other people express them.
28:26
And you don't want to express your weird little preoccupation that you've never heard anyone else express because that by definition is non universal.
28:34
And that reminds me of a piece of writing advice that I got from a writing coach in the States who said that you just have to remember that the specific is universal.
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If you try to be universal, you'll end up being sort of pat and like unoriginal.
28:53
Yeah, it's a generic generic exactly. If you talk about something that's universal that's very, very, very specific to you, maybe no one else will have felt that exact thing, but because you're articulating so precisely a human experience, it'll resonate with them in some way.
29:10
Yeah, I think I'm check off said that in the particular is the universal right.
29:15
I'll just credit my American writing teacher with that you check off the short trip.
29:21
Check off one note.
29:23
He's on fine.
29:25
I just forgotten what I was going to say, COVID brain is real.
29:31
That's all right. We can come back to that. What's your attitude towards your earlier work?
29:39
Oh, well, you know, from that response, it doesn't sound like pride is there like, you know, do you cringe a bit for your younger self or what?
29:52
Oh, I certainly cringe for my younger self. I feel I feel I feel the way I were looking at, you know, a young woman who's just out in the street.
30:04
I think, oh, you poor little thing. You'll be alright.
30:07
You don't have to try so hard. Look, I feel proud of them for what they are, but you know, you get better at your craft, you get better, you get more confident.
30:21
I mean, you still lose all of that every time you start a book, but I feel, you know, I think they're fine.
30:27
And I haven't, you know, I said we would never go back and reread them, for example.
30:32
But every now and again, if I'm asked to read something from an old book, I do get a little surprise thinking actually that's not bad, you know, that I just, but I guess I'm always just looking forward.
30:45
I'm not that interested in thinking about what I've done before, because I'm usually trying to work on something that I haven't done before.
30:58
And often, as I said, that'll be sort of technical.
31:03
So you're not a, are you an nostalgic person? I mean, this also dovetails with the weekend, the book that you mentioned, which is about aging.
31:13
I don't think I'm nostalgic at all. I mean, I almost, I only realized recently that I just hate even thinking about the past.
31:22
I don't know that that's a particularly good thing or a healthy thing, but I just, I'm not interested in it.
31:29
So, and I'm not nostalgic in the, you know, I'm not sentimental about, I don't know, old photos of peeping stuff or whatever, I'm proudly chuck it all.
31:42
My husband and I were telling me to sort of tussle about getting rid of stuff. You know, it's like, oh, somebody gave you this. I'm like, yeah, but you don't want it.
31:52
So I'm not, I don't think I'm nostalgic.
31:57
There's a word I think in Japanese that means the anticipation of future nostalgia towards something that you're going through now.
32:07
And I am constantly feeling that because I have toddlers.
32:12
And so in amid the sleeplessness and stress and anxiety of the pandemic and parenting, I am constantly told by parents of older children or grandparents, you know, cherish these moments, you know, that they go by so fast, kids grow up so quickly.
32:30
It's the, you know, the moment of your life that you're going to wish you could revisit, don't be on your phone while they're playing with each other at the playground, because you'll give, you'll give all of the kings, you know, gold to be able to parachute back into your skin right now in 20 years time and watch them and cuddle them and hug them and pick their brains for thoughts.
32:49
And yet that's not the experience of most parents with toddlers. I mean, most parents with toddlers are focused on getting them dressed and ushering them out the door and taking care of all of the things that need to be taken care of in daily life.
33:02
And so I'm keenly aware like that I'm living in a dream scape that my future self, hopefully assuming I lived that long, will look back on with a deep sense of nostalgia.
33:15
And yet I can't quite muster that rose hue. Well, it's right now.
33:21
It takes energy, right, to do that. I mean, that's a kind of mindfulness thing, isn't it? To say, well, appreciate, appreciate this moment, whether it's with your kids at the park or, I don't know, eating an apple or whatever.
33:38
And that's hard because we are so conditioned to think about the future or the past, you know, that sort of anticipating or ruminating.
33:49
And especially the future, I guess.
33:55
Well, maybe especially the future for you, but there are other people who live entirely in the past, recrimination, regret, you know, could have been, would have been should have done that.
34:05
Yes, and then others who feel constantly about what will come.
34:09
Where do you live time wise and how do you cultivate a connection with the present?
34:16
Well, I mean, the biggest thing that I can do, not that I do always do it, is just turn off the technology, get offline, basically, get offline.
34:26
But I, and I had a little rule for myself through the lockdown of every day, and I haven't done it every day, but I'm trying to every day, I have to go analog and outside.
34:40
So get outside as much as possible. I've got a tiny, tiny little sort of pocket garden, courtyard garden, which I am so incredibly grateful for during this time because I'm doing this kind of micro gardening, you know, I can look at every damn leaf in that garden now what it's doing.
35:01
But for me, those things, doing things, like cooking, gardening, reading, but probably the things that have really kept me saying during the lockdown have been the cooking and the gardening and doing stuff that's physical.
35:19
I too, you know, we've got an exercise bike, especially when we're so much bloody baking that I've never done before.
35:29
If I'm going to make biscuits five times a week, I've got to get on the exercise bike five times a week.
35:37
But I think that being online too much is a really, really destructive for me personally, not just because of the distraction, but it feels like I'm eating too much sugar, you know, when I'm just scrolling endlessly out of boredom.
35:54
And it really destroys my concentration or reading properly. It does something bad to my concentration, which is already skew if enough because of COVID.
36:08
But that kind of hyper vigilance and hyper anxiety and everything about, I mean, I feel like you can walk out the door and you can feel anxiety.
36:15
Not so much in these last couple of weeks, but when things were really just zooming upwards in the numbers, there was a lot of tension just in the air.
36:24
Yeah.
36:25
No, that's gone.
36:26
And a login outside is my mantra.
36:30
That concentration, I mean, gee, you know, I found it hard to read long fiction.
36:39
I got to say I'm ashamed to admit that my ability to, I haven't read, I haven't finished a novel since the pandemic began.
36:49
And I, the other day, I had a half day without the kids because my partner was taking them out and I thought, I'm going to sit down and watch a movie.
36:57
I'm going to watch like the Godfather part too, like a big classic movie that I have somehow never gotten around to seeing.
37:06
And even that was hard.
37:10
Like 40 minutes in.
37:12
I'm reaching for my phone for no reason at all because my consciousness, yeah, my concentration has been fragmented into these.
37:21
There was, there's a great quote by the guy who wrote deep work, Carl Newport, who, I assume it's a guy, could be one of them.
37:30
Who says that social media has fragmented time into shards too small to construct a meaningful life out of because they, you know, shards too small to have the self reflection that's necessary and the sense of purpose that's necessary to construct a meaningful life.
37:50
You know, this can be the last moment that we bang on about how bad social media is, but I am noticing, if I'm noticing this in me who normally has a pretty good focus, then what's the consequence for society and culture of an entire population being unable to digest long complicated deep ideas.
38:15
Yeah, or just sit there, you know, and, and I mean, reading requires you to go into that still space that I talked about at the beginning.
38:24
That's what reading is, you know, it's, so it's no surprise that it's, you know, no one can read at the moment or read anything beyond.
38:33
And also, you know, there's a kind of rise of novels that are written in little fragmented, I think, deal if I can cause a bricks of text, there's not even paragraphs anymore, they're just sort of a little fragmented lump and then space and then another dissociated lump of text in a space.
38:54
Really? And I think that's what this can craft me by. What is that?
38:57
Well, there's a whole bunch of books like Jenny Offel's book with her.
39:03
Of course, there's books that I've been obsessively reading and rereading through the pandemic, Deborah Levy's book, the cost of living and real estate, which are, you know, almost sort of diary style.
39:16
And they're great, but they're, but they're, I think there is a move away from the sort of big solid narrative now, and it's a sign of what how fragmented we feel at the moment.
39:29
And that's not a bad thing. I mean, novels are there to express the culture, you know, so.
39:39
But I do think, I wonder if there'll be, if there'll be a backlash against those kinds of books sometimes soon, whether we'll grab back to the big, you know, Hillary Mantell style time.
39:55
I certainly hope so. I hope so.
39:58
Who were your heroes when you were younger? What made you want to do what you did?
40:05
They were writers.
40:11
My early sort of model writer Kate Gremble was a huge hero of mine.
40:19
And my writing hero sort of change all the time. I mean, I feel like I'm quite skittish kind of person really in lots of ways.
40:28
So whatever book I'm working on, I have a new sort of model at the moment, I think it probably would be definitely, but in Australia, people like Helen Garner was a great sort of guide, not that she ever knew about it.
40:46
You know, women novelists who were writing sort of contemporary fiction, who were just writing about, you know, the words they lived in really meant a lot to me.
41:01
And then recently, I've moved more towards other art forms as sort of models or influences, I guess.
41:12
So visual artists a lot, the visual artists are really look at their work and it helps me make my work.
41:21
But they sort of change all the time. I'm trying to think when I was growing up.
41:27
So long ago, I can't remember.
41:32
You grew up in the snowies, did you? You were born in Kuma.
41:37
I was. My dad worked for the snowy mountain ski.
41:41
That was a huge hydroelectric nation building project for non-Australia.
41:47
It was, it was a very big, it was sort of, it was, I feel like I was built in this kind of innocence where it was just this grand heroic kind of idea.
42:00
Whereas now I would not feel like that about hydroelectric schemes at all.
42:05
Well, yeah, maybe American listeners might think of the Hoover Dan or something like that as a hydroelectric, the snowy, the snowy river scheme.
42:13
But it was kind of interesting country town to grow up in because it was a very small place, but it had a much more kind of multi-cultural population compared to most Australian country towns, I think, because of all the immigrant workers who came to build the snowy mountains.
42:32
So it was, I mean, not that, not that, you know, the grand cultural mix was actually celebrated, of course, because it was Australia, it was sort of like, oh, it's pretend that we're all white.
42:50
That was so more, they were mostly northern European, so they were, but yeah, it was, it was, I didn't really great childhood actually, it was very free.
43:04
What's your relationship to Kuma and that part of the world now?
43:10
Well, I don't have a very strong relationship. My parents died, both died quite young, so I don't have family there or anything anymore, and I haven't been back much, but I do have some friends still on farms.
43:26
So when I left school, I worked on the local newspaper, and I hung out with lots of nice people who, lots of farmers, and probably the main thing that people I knew did.
43:40
So I still have friends there, but I don't go back there very much just because my family sort of all left there, really.
43:52
What was the impact of your parents dying young, how young were you?
43:57
I was 19 when my father died, and I was 29 when my mother died, and I had left by then, but then he went back and she was sick.
44:08
It was very catastrophic, really.
44:13
You know, I think for anyone to lose a parent when they're relatively young, it defines your whole life.
44:25
I mean, I was 19. My younger sister was 13, and that was, I think, really.
44:31
You know, if I think now of my many nephews and nieces, even the ones in their 30s, I think, well, they couldn't lose their parent, that would not be tolerable.
44:45
So I guess, but I also think I probably, I don't know that I'd be writing if my parents had lived, which is a weird thing to say, but after my mother died, I had, I mean, I'd always liked writing.
45:03
I'd always loved reading more than anything, and then I sort of dabbled in writing at University Arts, and my dad had died, and my mum was still alive.
45:11
And I did writing classes, and I really liked it, but I didn't really take it very seriously.
45:17
And then once my mother died, I had that feeling that lots of people will recognize after, sort of, you know, big event like that, where life separated really clearly into important things and unimportant things.
45:33
And I knew immediately that writing was important to me, and I wanted to commit to it and do something with it, not just sort of think, oh, one day I'll get around to that.
45:45
Because I also thought life is short, I know now, life is very short.
45:50
I'm now three years older than my father was when he died, and a couple of years off, my mum was 58, so in a couple of years I'll be her age, and to me now that feels, you know, I've always thought, I've always thought life is very short.
46:08
So I had to just do what I want to do, because, and I still feel that way, you know, that I think I probably had a consciousness of death from younger age than lots of people do.
46:26
It hasn't been a terrible thing, it's been, I mean, it was terrible thing to lose our parents, but being that aware of how short life is, I think, is a really good thing, because it means that I tend not to dig around.
46:42
Yeah.
46:43
If I want to do something, do it now, because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
46:48
It's amazing how removed most of us are from that instinct, I'm glad to hear you say it.
46:54
There's an app that someone has produced that pings you with notifications at random intervals, telling you how many weeks you have left to live if you live the normal life expectancy.
47:07
Oh, man, I think I could do it out there.
47:10
And there's only like 4,000 hours or something that you.
47:13
Yeah, yeah.
47:14
I don't know.
47:15
No, no, it's not hours, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's 4,000 weeks, I think.
47:22
See that you go, that's my.
47:24
4,000 hours.
47:25
4,000 hours is very much of it.
47:28
I actually am dead.
47:30
I didn't.
47:31
You should listen to it.
47:33
It's 4,000 weeks.
47:35
Actually, the only person who's been on this podcast twice is the author of the book 4,000 weeks.
47:40
Oliver Birkman.
47:41
Oh, I love him.
47:43
Is one of the books.
47:44
What was the book about optimism that he.
47:48
Yeah, happiness for people who can't stand a point of thinking of the end of the book.
47:53
That was the sub time.
47:54
That's right.
47:55
Yeah, no, I thought he was great.
47:57
Yeah, Birkman, listen to Birkman's two episodes of this because he's very good at that.
48:02
And there's also an addition to the app.
48:04
There's a company that produces a, a poster for your room with, it's a grid with little dots
48:11
with little squares on it.
48:13
And each square represents, I think, a week or is it a day and it's a whole block of squares
48:20
that's, that total the average life expectancy.
48:24
And it'll, it's shaded in where you are, where you're up to.
48:28
Oh, God.
48:29
On that.
48:30
Well, see, that could be, that could be great.
48:32
And it could also be the opposite of what you need.
48:37
Like that, that thing that I was talking about before about entering into a sense of stillness
48:41
and not like not producing madly all the time.
48:45
I guess not filling yourself up, but also not thinking, right, I've got to do this many.
48:49
This many books and this many podcasts and, you know, if I'm not achieving in that mad way,
48:56
then that's not good for your sense of creativity either.
49:02
Like I think that you need the ability to squander time.
49:07
Right.
49:08
And to, to do nothing.
49:12
I'm really bad at doing nothing.
49:15
But to, you know what, years ago, I wrote a book called The Writers Room.
49:21
It's a collection of interviews that I did with other writers.
49:25
And the writer, Joan London, who I absolutely love, West Australian writer,
49:30
she really seemed to embody to me the idea that you allow your work to come.
49:37
And I was like, oh, I thought you had to wrestle it to the ground.
49:41
Yeah.
49:42
Yeah.
49:43
So the kind of sense of letting go of the need to control things.
49:48
And when I have really gotten in the right rhythm to do that,
49:53
it really works where a book will start to tell you how to write it.
49:57
If you just kind of let go of the reins enough and stop trying to, you know,
50:04
will it into existence if you just allow it to come,
50:09
rather than forcing it to come, that is the whole thing.
50:13
So it's, it's beautifully.
50:15
You say that because that also your, what you're pointing to with regards to creativity
50:21
has a parallel with all of the Bergman points to with regards to happiness,
50:26
which is that if you make it the end goal,
50:30
if you try to chase after it too hard,
50:32
you squeeze the soak too hard, it slips out of your hand.
50:35
Like there's a certain deafness and lightness of touch that's necessary
50:38
to allow it to come to you,
50:40
that happiness should be a byproduct of doing other things.
50:43
And in the same way, maybe creativity is a byproduct of getting in touch
50:47
with something that doesn't necessarily feel like creativity at the time.
50:52
I think that's right.
50:53
And I'm just sort of remembered what I was going to say before
50:56
and I lost my thread.
50:57
It was about energy and following a spark
51:02
of energy.
51:03
And in the book, I've got a, I did a PhD a few years ago
51:08
and looking at cognitive processes of creativity.
51:11
And the kind of main sort of mechanism or way of thinking
51:17
that I've discovered in this little study I did was,
51:21
I called it heat seeking.
51:22
And it was about just learning how to recognize
51:29
when you feel a kind of pool towards something.
51:33
Even if it makes no sense at all,
51:36
you follow that heat.
51:38
And that's how you end up producing a work of art
51:43
or anything in any other form of creativity where you are.
51:49
And it's an exploratory kind of questing thing.
51:52
It's not, I have something to say and I'm going to,
51:55
you know, give it to the world.
51:57
It is.
51:58
I want to find out something.
52:00
What is this weird little?
52:02
So the heat in a writing sense might be an image
52:07
that doesn't even really make sense.
52:10
But you just keep thinking about it.
52:12
You know, your mind keeps returning to it.
52:14
Or it might be a question about, say in the weekend,
52:19
I think one of the things that propelled that book was my question
52:23
about, is it possible to have a really living friendship
52:28
for 40 or 50 years?
52:31
And how, if that is possible, then how is it possible?
52:37
You know, as people change and so on,
52:39
and let each other change or not.
52:42
So that might be the bit of heat that I followed.
52:45
Or it could be just anything that is the little nugget
52:52
that you, the creator, is interested in.
52:57
But quite often you think, oh, nobody else will care about that.
52:59
So I'll just abandon it.
53:02
But I feel very strongly that you shouldn't abandon that thing,
53:05
because that's your little bit of, you know, a gold.
53:09
That's what's going to allow you to stick with the project.
53:11
When are you writing books?
53:12
They take a long time.
53:14
So you need to have some interest and spark of energy
53:19
that will keep you going through the long years of making a book.
53:25
It sounds like you're talking about two different instincts here.
53:31
One is being receptive enough to the muse for one of a better word,
53:36
to allow yourself to hear what it is that needs to be said,
53:40
sort of almost through you.
53:42
Like you're talking about allowing the work to come.
53:46
And then on the other hand, you're also talking about a project of exploration
53:51
where you're trying to pursue a theme, like a 40-year-long friendship.
53:57
Are they a Yin and Yang?
53:59
Are they opposites being receptive to them being curious
54:03
or are they the same thing?
54:05
Well, there's two.
54:08
What I have found in this study that I did in the research I did for that
54:12
was looking at a whole lot of creativity research.
54:15
And one very well sort of documented model is,
54:20
I think it's called dual process.
54:22
It's about two different kinds of thinking.
54:24
So it's divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
54:28
And so the divergent thinking is the kind of loose associative, intuitive dreamy, unconscious mind.
54:39
And I think it's really important for artists and creative people to really pay attention
54:45
to that intuitive, you know, the hunch, the thing that doesn't make any sense,
54:51
but you still keep going back to it.
54:56
So there's that.
54:58
That, to me, is where the heat comes from, that I was just talking about.
55:02
Those little things that don't make sense, but they snag your interest.
55:06
And you keep, they keep coming into your mind.
55:09
Because, and I feel like those things come into your mind for a reason.
55:13
They're there to show you the way forward in your book or your, you know, ceramic pot or whatever it is.
55:23
But then after a certain point, you have to use the other kind of thinking,
55:27
the much more pragmatic, logical, conscious thought, the convergent,
55:33
where you start to narrow.
55:35
So the first, the divergent thinking is very open form of thinking.
55:41
And then after a while, you need to start narrowing it and shaping it.
55:44
And that's where, as a novelist, the craft comes in, you know, the pacing and the, you know, structure and all that sort of stuff.
55:52
But I can't do that pacing and structuring and craft stuff and editing until I've got a certain level of mass of the, you know, dreamy, loose,
56:07
majestic, associative thinking that has yielded just kind of lumps of unrelated stuff, making it sound very clear.
56:18
But it's really unclear that early process.
56:21
I find quite frightening because it is very, it's very uncertain.
56:26
You live in a state of unknowing.
56:29
And that's why it's not comfortable, you know.
56:33
I think that's why we, we turn to, you know, Twitter or whatever to fill up that uncertain space.
56:44
But if you're going to make art, you need to accept that you are living between certainties all the time.
56:52
That's what, that's what it is to be an artist.
56:58
How do you, how much do you structure, like my only experience with writing is in script writing.
57:05
And you would almost always do a beat sheet before you wrote anything of what is going to happen.
57:12
I don't know how a novel gets written.
57:15
How much do you, how do you wrestle those ideas to the ground before you put pen to paper?
57:21
Well, I think script writing is incredibly disappointing in that way.
57:27
Like you can't, from what I understand, I've never written a script.
57:31
But you have to have all that stuff, that structural stuff in place, sort of right from the beginning.
57:38
Whereas I can write a novel for three years, just throwing stuff away, just writing scenes.
57:44
I mean, I feel like the novel that I'm writing now, I've had about five full starts on because of COVID.
57:49
I just, for example, defined the voice.
57:52
And then the voice will be the thing that sort of pushes it along, but I might write 30,000 words and then throw out 25,000 of them.
58:02
Because only a certain bit has this heat or energy that, so it's quite different, I think, from script writing.
58:10
I mean, I think lots of novelists do work in a way that's much more aligned to the way that you wrote a script.
58:18
So it's a very hazy amorphous, just, you know, it's very frustrating, really, to be writing for two years, not knowing if any of it's actually going anywhere.
58:34
But then, you know, you can feel the engine kicking into life.
58:39
And often it takes a year of writing stuff that you know, you're not going to use.
58:45
But I have to write that in order to get to the bit that is going to start the engine.
58:54
I once heard someone write a say that they don't like writing, but they do love having written.
59:00
Do you feel that way or do you like writing?
59:03
No, I love having written.
59:07
I like it when it's going well, but that's very, very rare.
59:11
I like it when I'm fully absorbed.
59:16
And I have to always relearn this every week.
59:20
Every time I sit down to write, I have to remember that the pleasure only comes when you, you know, that, and you would know this, I'm sure, but since we're
59:29
time drops away, you know, that, the flow state sense of the flow state.
59:34
Say, Mahali chick sent Mahali, that guy, the floca, he's one of my favorite dudes.
59:39
And he, you know, that sense of being somewhere else and the work kind of coming through you.
59:50
I've only had a really one very, very intense experience of that slow state.
59:55
I've had sort of minor.
59:58
I had one afternoon this time years ago where it was like I was on some other planet.
1:00:04
It was unbelievable and amazing where I'd been, and I write about it in the book in voluminous solution, where I had been really struggling to finish a novel.
1:00:15
It just felt really lumpy and ungainly and I couldn't make it work.
1:00:19
And anyway, I just worked away as you do.
1:00:22
And then this one afternoon, I had this several hours of just feeling like I had the entire book in my head.
1:00:33
I knew exactly what to do and exactly where to do it.
1:00:37
I was changing things around. It was utterly effortless.
1:00:43
My brain was incredibly sharp.
1:00:46
And I knew while it was happening, it was like, oh my god, this is really spooky. This is not normal.
1:00:52
And it was, and almost I feel like every other bit of writing since then is an attempt to get back into that state.
1:01:00
Because it was kind of transcendental in some way.
1:01:06
But let's talk about the spirituality of that then.
1:01:09
What, like when you say you've got to allow the work to come, and when you allude to, if people don't have an heard of the flow state and Mikhail Cheeksing,
1:01:17
or whatever his name is, I can to be pronounced correctly, then they can look up the book flow, which is his classic text, about that it's about that state.
1:01:25
It doesn't matter whether you're playing tennis, whether you're writing a book, whether you're, you know, whatever it is,
1:01:31
when you're in a peak state of focus where everything else dissolves away and all that is in front of you is the task at hand.
1:01:41
What is that? What do you make of that? Where is that coming from?
1:01:47
Well, I think it only comes when you've kind of earned it, which is annoying.
1:01:55
I think it comes from a period of sustained attention, like really deep attention, and a practiced way of letting all the, you know,
1:02:09
there's so many things that really interfere with creative thinking, and one study that I came across that I really loved and I changed my own approach to going into a writing day was a meta-analysis of 25 years of mood and creativity research.
1:02:27
And that meta-analysis shows that there were kind of three elements that made up the most creative mood state according to the cognitive psychology research.
1:02:38
And those three things were a positive affect, so, you know, just sort of a positive mood, happiness, or, you know, an up kind of mood.
1:02:48
And they said a slightly elevated activation, or energy level, so, but only slightly elevated, so not super excited and not really totally zen, but just sort of a little bit anticipatory, you know, a little bit just slightly activated as they say.
1:03:09
And the third one was called a promotion focus, which meant focusing on the gains to come rather than avoiding pain.
1:03:20
So, I think they had the analogy and the thing that I read was about a mouse seeking cheese or running away from a predator.
1:03:30
You want the seeking cheese feeling, not the running away from the predator feeling.
1:03:35
So, I sort of had to really change my mindset about, because, you know, for me, the writing process has very often been filled with a lot of fear, a lot of fear anxiety.
1:03:47
And what I really discovered in reading this meta-analysis was that all the things that were my general mode of working, fear, anxiety, kind of agitation, sort of feeling quite gloomy about it, or the least creative mood state according to this research.
1:04:07
So, what I started to do was try and sort of almost fake my way into changing my mood before I sat down to work.
1:04:17
And the way that I sort of translated it in the end was to create a state of slightly excited, curious optimism.
1:04:28
So, instead of going to the desk thinking, oh God, I've got to write today and it's going to be awful because it won't be any good and it's too hard and I'd rather be outside doing something else.
1:04:39
So, just putting that to one side and instead going to the desk thinking, oh, I wonder what I'm going to find out today in my...
1:04:49
I wonder what's going to happen. How interesting. Something cool was in there for me to find.
1:04:55
And I did some of that with the help of a psychologist called Alison Manning, who has a boutique practice working with writers called A Mind of One's Own.
1:05:07
And she really sort of helped me with this, I think she calls it state creation, where you just decide, I'm going to feel like this instead of like that.
1:05:21
Now, of course, at the beginning, you feel like, oh, this is so hokey. It's not authentic. I don't feel like that. So, it's just lying and blah, blah, blah.
1:05:30
But, you know, in the end, it really helped me to be able to keep...
1:05:36
That was especially when I was working on a book called The Natural Waiting, which was a really dark story about misogyny basically.
1:05:43
So, it was not a fun work to be hanging around in.
1:05:47
But, and one thing Alison told me about getting to that flow-stay, getting back to your actual question, was about leaving outside the...
1:05:55
So, I sort of began to conceive of my, going into my novel in progress, was going into like a sort of circus tent, where if I left outside the tent, all the self-criticism and the fear and the doubt and the, you know, sort of self-legulation,
1:06:15
only if those things didn't come in with me could I go in and see this kind of amazing thing unfold.
1:06:22
But, if I brought all that other stuff in, nothing would happen. So, it was a lot of kind of visualisation stuff, but it really, really helped me write that book particularly.
1:06:32
It really actually made it possible to write that book.
1:06:35
It's amazing that we need that when, you know, you've experienced flow, you've had those moments of pure transcendence when you're writing.
1:06:45
You know that the only doorway to get there, to get that cheese, is through the door of sitting your bum down in a chair and starting to write.
1:06:55
And yet, there's tremendous resistance to just sit down and write. You know, you do feel like, if you're not paying a psychologist to help you, to help you think about things in a different way, then the default state for the creative person is to feel like the mouse running away from the predator, not the mouse going towards the cheese.
1:07:16
Even though a million times in a row, you know that sitting down to do the work is the pathway towards the cheese.
1:07:23
I know, it's mad. Why? I don't know from the expert, I was hoping you could answer it.
1:07:30
I honestly don't like it, it's a marvel to me that it still is so hard to...
1:07:37
What are we afraid of? Well, I think we're afraid of that.
1:07:43
So I was just going to say Stephen Pressfield in the War of Art, his classic little handy book about writing, sort of calls it resistance with a capital R and invokes it as almost a demon or a phenomenon that exists in the world that you have to constantly be fighting against.
1:08:01
But I mean, that doesn't make a lot of ontological sense to me, but it resonates with me emotionally.
1:08:07
Yeah, well it resonates with me emotionally too. I think, look, I think it's partially the fear of that stillness because you can sit there.
1:08:18
You know, it's plenty of times I've sat at the desk and nothing has happened, you know.
1:08:24
So it's a, and I think before you talked about perfectionism and that is an absolute killer, that will ruin everything to think, well I can't, I can't, and I think a lot of procrastination and this sort of thing is about perfectionism.
1:08:41
Yeah, it's a feeling that, well, if I sit down at the desk, it's not going to be perfect, so I don't want to do it.
1:08:48
Whereas, you know, I've come, actually came to accept fairly early on that I would never write the books that I really wanted, as good as I really wanted it to be.
1:09:00
But I do think I've learned that you can get better, you know, that talent isn't a fixed, it's not a fixed quantity of something either have it or you don't.
1:09:11
You can develop your talent, you can explore your talent, you can grow it.
1:09:19
But so I think the fear thing against about the fear of stillness, about the fear of failure and our whole culture absolutely hammers into us that failure is not acceptable.
1:09:30
So 90% of my time at the desk is failure, you know, most of the stuff I write I throw away because it hasn't worked, but I have to write that stuff to get to the stuff that does work.
1:09:44
So if we were a lot more accepting of failure as a culture, I don't think there would be the amount of fear around, you know, just making stuff.
1:10:00
That's why I like making food because, you know, half the time it doesn't work, but it goes, you can still eat it.
1:10:09
And you can order in, you know, someone also makes something for you, you can throw it out.
1:10:14
But what you're discovering cooking is it almost never is actually inedible.
1:10:20
You might screw it up, but it means it just tastes different.
1:10:26
It doesn't look like the picture, but it tastes great.
1:10:31
So there's no sense of, you know, when I'm cooking or gardening, I don't have that sense of, oh, this has got to be wood enough for, you know, the world to look at.
1:10:44
It's got to be good enough for me to look at.
1:10:47
Yeah.
1:10:48
And experience. And I think if you can take that attitude into stuff that you make professionally.
1:10:56
And as you said, the kind of branding about the mosaic, I love that.
1:11:01
The body of work, that's, that's what's interesting.
1:11:07
There's something about taking, I'm just trying to articulate, I'm trying to, trying to put my finger on what the feeling is for me when I sit down to write something and don't and get distracted.
1:11:22
And it's not, it's not exclusively a fear of not producing the work that I wish that I could perfectionism is part of it.
1:11:29
So obviously, yeah, the work that's in your head that doesn't exist is perfect.
1:11:34
The one on the page is dispoiled and false short of what you're capable of in your, your own brain.
1:11:40
But there's also a sense of self judgment or the little creature on your shoulder.
1:11:48
You're worrying that you're not putting out the, what you should be putting out or that other people are going to, are going to judge it.
1:11:56
And I end.
1:11:58
The solution to that or the remedy there is just I find to do the time to frame it.
1:12:05
And this is I suppose related to the mosaic analogy.
1:12:08
But like all you can do is sit your ass down in a chair for four hours a day or two hours a day or 30 minutes a day or whatever you've given yourself.
1:12:16
I think it was Stephen King actually who told I interviewed Stephen King when I was in New York working and he had been a hero of mine in my teens.
1:12:23
And you know, we sort of got deep into this kind of stuff.
1:12:26
And he was like at the end of the day, if you sit down in front of a computer and you allow that cursor to, to blink, then something's going to happen.
1:12:37
You know, if you don't do anything else, that's fine.
1:12:40
You can sit there and not write if you want.
1:12:43
But the great challenge of writing is not the writing.
1:12:46
The great challenge of writing is carving out that time where you do nothing except the sit in front of the cursor.
1:12:52
Yeah.
1:12:53
Look, I do think that pragmatism.
1:12:56
I've got a chapter in the book called Cat and Baby, which makes sense when you read it, but on intuition versus pragmatism.
1:13:03
And I said in that that for long periods of a book's development, the pragmatist is the thing, the person who keeps the thing on the rails.
1:13:12
You know, all that lovely dreamy unconscious stuff, I love, but that doesn't get a book written.
1:13:17
What gets a book written is turning up and sitting here, asking the chair and trusting in hard work and grit and discipline and routine.
1:13:27
You know, all the kind of unsexy stuff, but a lot of the time that's, that's what gets the work done.
1:13:34
I would argue that the other stuff is what gives the work pleasure.
1:13:40
Yeah, right.
1:13:41
But you need to, I certainly need to be prepared to just stick with it, just literally, just persevere.
1:13:51
Sometimes in writing classes, students have said, well, how do you know if you've got enough talent?
1:13:58
I'm like, well, you don't, you never will know.
1:14:02
But also talent is not what lets you go the distance.
1:14:07
It's actually the perseverance and the determination and the tenacity, because those things will let you grow your talent.
1:14:15
If you don't have the sort of really, just really firm commitment and also make little goals, you know.
1:14:26
Like when I first took writing seriously properly and I went to writing classes and I thought all I wanted to do is finish something.
1:14:35
That was, it wasn't like, I'm going to be a writer and I'm going to be great or anything, I'm going to finish something.
1:14:41
And that was really exciting then, because like, well, that was a really achievable goal to have, just finish something.
1:14:46
And then when I finish it, it's like, okay, now I'm going to send it out to someone.
1:14:52
But I think a lot of the time people start out in a creative field thinking, I want to be a great screenwriter.
1:15:00
And I sort of think, well, you couldn't do him to fail.
1:15:04
If that is your only, you know, you need to do it.
1:15:07
Pretty daunting task. It's on the to do it.
1:15:09
Like I got to get to work red.
1:15:11
I got to, you know, enroll the kids in swimming classes and I got to be the greatest screenwriter who ever lived.
1:15:16
But if you thought, I'm going to go to, I'm going to do a year's worth of screenwriting classes, you know.
1:15:26
That's good.
1:15:27
Yeah, we'll write one page or just sit down for an hour.
1:15:30
Yeah.
1:15:31
Yeah.
1:15:32
You mentioned earlier, we can wrap up here, Charlotte.
1:15:34
But you were talking about how short life is and how that has, how the, your, the fate of your parents has given you an appreciation for that.
1:15:43
Is that, how do you think about your life and longevity?
1:15:47
Do you fear death?
1:15:50
I, look, I would love to say I don't fear death.
1:15:55
Of course I fear death.
1:15:56
I fear death.
1:15:57
I don't fear being dead.
1:15:58
But I, you know, I don't, I don't want to die.
1:16:02
But I, but I want to be ready to die.
1:16:05
That's what I want.
1:16:06
I want to be, you know, I feel like the point of living is to be ready to die when you die.
1:16:14
So that if I died tomorrow, I would think I've done what I want to do with my life.
1:16:19
You know, I've got a really, I've married to a really fantastic person.
1:16:24
I've got a very beautiful family and friends.
1:16:27
I've written a bunch of books.
1:16:31
And that's enough.
1:16:37
That's, you know, I've seen, I've seen people dying close up several times in terms of, you know, over a period of months.
1:16:47
And I've been kind of staggered by their, by their acceptance and their generosity.
1:17:01
There's a, there's a chapter in, in my book about the writer Georgia Blaine, who's a friend of mine and a very, very beloved writer in Australia.
1:17:10
And she died, I mean, 2016.
1:17:15
And she was my age.
1:17:19
And talking to her about her approaching death was the most profound experience.
1:17:27
You know, one of the most, certainly one of the most profound conversations I'd ever had because she kept saying how lucky she felt that she had had, she had a lot of terrible things happen in her life.
1:17:38
But she, she said, I'm lucky.
1:17:41
I've had this amazing life.
1:17:43
And I'm, you know, she was ready.
1:17:46
I found that staggering.
1:17:48
So if I could get to that point, I'd be happy.
1:17:53
And the fact that we get to be here at all is worth remembering that we're lucky.
1:17:58
Absolutely.
1:17:59
The universe could easily have gone on without our presence at all.
1:18:03
Charlotte, it's terrific to talk to you. Thanks, thanks for your time.
1:18:06
The new book is a tremendous solution, creativity, resilience and the inner life.
1:18:11
Let's look forward to being able to go out and have some outer life outside of lockdown as well.
1:18:16
But in the meantime, I can't wait to read the book and thanks again.
1:18:19
Thanks so much, Josh.
1:18:21
You