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Pip Williams on the challenges of writing her latest novel, The German Ward · The Book Deal

• 0:09
  Speaker 2: The Book Deal Podcast Where you will discover the inspiring stories behind your favorite books.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: We interview seasoned and debut authors as well as publishing industry professionals to bring you the best tips and advice on how to get that elusive book deal.
• 0:25
  Speaker 4: So no matter what stage of writing you're at, we've got you covered.
• 0:29
  Speaker 4: I'm Tina Strachan.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: I'm Madeleine Cleary.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: And I'm Natasha Rai.
• 0:34
  Speaker 4: And join us as we pull back the curtain of published authors.
• 0:37
  Speaker 5: One deal at a time.
• 0:43
  Speaker 5: The Book Deal podcast acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and waters which it's recorded on, and pays respect to their elders past, present, and emerging.
• 0:56
  Speaker 10: Pip Williams is the author of social research, essays, and memoir, but is best known for her internationally bestselling novels, The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho.
• 1:05
  Speaker 10: Her books have won a number of major book awards, and The Dictionary of Lost Words was chosen for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, became a New York Times bestseller.
• 1:13
  Speaker 10: Incredibly, Pip's books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
• 1:17
  Speaker 10: Pip Williams is often cited as a highly successful example of being plucked from the slush pile.
• 1:22
  Speaker 10: I'd intended to discuss this with Pip, but we just ran out of time, so do look up some of Pip's older interviews where she discusses this great story.
• 1:31
  Speaker 10: I'm speaking with Pip on the eve of the launch of her third novel, The German Ward.
• 1:36
  Speaker 10: And from a personal perspective, it was a thrill to sit down with this eminent Australian author, as one of the reasons why I pitched my work years ago to my now publisher, Ruby Ashfield at Affirm Press, was because of Pip and her books.
• 1:48
  Speaker 10: This is a wonderful chat on structure, craft, and why Pip is drawn to history to tell her stories.
• 1:55
  Speaker 10: I hope you enjoy.
• 1:56
  Madeleine Cleary: Hello, Pip Williams.
• 1:57
  Madeleine Cleary: Welcome to the podcast
• 1:59
  Pip Williams: Oh, thank you for having me, Madeleine.
• 2:00
  Pip Williams: It's just lovely to be here
• 2:02
  Madeleine Cleary: We're chatting on the eve of the release of your third novel, The German Ward, which I absolutely adored, and I'm curious to know these days how you prepare for what will be a massive tour and a release, um, and whether experience makes this all a bit easier
• 2:18
  Pip Williams: Uh, I think experience, um, in some ways experience does make it a lot easier because, um, I now have had an experience of, um, what I call the circus which is book tour.
• 2:32
  Pip Williams: But actually not as much experi- experience as you would, um, think because Dictionary of Lost Words came out on the eve of COVID.
• 2:40
  Pip Williams: In fact, it came out two days after we all went into lockdown.
• 2:44
  Pip Williams: Um, so I had no book tour for, for that novel.
• 2:50
  Pip Williams: Um, it, it was all spent doing exactly what we're doing now, just sitting in front of my laptop for an hour every now and then, you know, in my pajamas, but a nice top and a bit of makeup and, um And that's how I spent, you know, that first year or so of that novel.
• 3:08
  Pip Williams: I didn't go to any festivals.
• 3:09
  Pip Williams: I didn't do any library events, nothing like that, uh, until much later.
• 3:14
  Pip Williams: So it wasn't until my second novel was published that I experienced the joy and fatigue of, of a book tour.
• 3:23
  Pip Williams: Um, and having experienced it, I, I do know what is to come, and I'm very excited for it.
• 3:32
  Pip Williams: I, I'm really looking forward to it.
• 3:34
  Pip Williams: There's always a little bit of trepidation because the book's not really out there in the hands of genuine readers yet.
• 3:41
  Pip Williams: It's been in the hands of I didn't actually send this book out for endorsements, so it hasn't even necessarily been read by other writers, uh, yet.
• 3:53
  Pip Williams: Uh, it's been read by obviously lots of people at the publishing house and my, my partner and, um, one or two close, close friends, and my sister, who just loves everything no matter what.
• 4:07
  Pip Williams: I have a wardrobe full of clothes that my sister has convinced me looked fantastic on.
• 4:12
  Pip Williams: And I can assure you they don't.
• 4:15
  Pip Williams: They do not look fantastic on, so you know, I have to take my sister's praise with, um, you know, with a certain skepticism sometimes.
• 4:25
  Pip Williams: She just loves me, so she loves
• 4:26
  Madeleine Cleary: That's what sisters are for, aren't they?
• 4:28
  Pip Williams: It's exactly what they're for.
• 4:30
  Pip Williams: Um, yeah, so I haven't had a lot of readers yet and, and so I'm, I'm a little anxious about that.
• 4:37
  Pip Williams: Uh, but I'm really looking forward to talking about it and to meeting readers, um, and, and chatting to people in signing queues, and seeing other writers.
• 4:49
  Pip Williams: Um, you know, I, I live a relatively isolated life from writers until I, until I start talking about a book I've written and I go to festivals and, and that's when I catch up with, with other writers.
• 5:02
  Pip Williams: Um, so that's, that's the fun part as well.
• 5:05
  Madeleine Cleary: That is, it's a joy, isn't it, to speak with other writers.
• 5:08
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, well, uh, hopefully I can allay your concerns, Pip,'cause I don't think you've got anything to be worried about in terms of the reception'cause I absolutely adored The German Ward, so congratulations.
• 5:18
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, it's such a beautifully written, tender novel full of desire and love, and it's quite devastating as well at times, and I think that just pulls at the heartstrings.
• 5:29
  Madeleine Cleary: So yeah, a huge congratulations, Pip.
• 5:31
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, can you tell us a little bit about it?
• 5:34
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 5:34
  Pip Williams: It's, um-- So it's, like you said, it's my third novel, and in fact, people who have read either of my previous novels will be familiar with the main character.
• 5:44
  Pip Williams: Her name is Tilda, and she was a character in both of my previous novels, but she had a secondary role in those novels.
• 5:53
  Pip Williams: Um, she was a suffragette and an actress.
• 5:55
  Pip Williams: Uh, and quite frankly, I didn't want to give her too much time on the page because women like her have had a lot of time on the page, if you like.
• 6:04
  Pip Williams: Um, and it r- wasn't really until I sent her to war and, um, I suppose complicated her life that she became more interesting to me.
• 6:15
  Pip Williams: And, um, in my previous novel, um, she writes letters home to, to the main characters of that novel from an army base in the north of France called Etaples, which is a town in the north of France.
• 6:29
  Pip Williams: It was the largest army base in, um, British-- off, off British soil in British history.
• 6:37
  Pip Williams: Enormous, in fact.
• 6:38
  Pip Williams: Um, and those letters sort of became the scaffold for this novel.
• 6:44
  Pip Williams: Um, I don't think of it as a trilogy at all.
• 6:48
  Pip Williams: Um, it, it doesn't, it doesn't sit with the other two novels in the same way.
• 6:52
  Pip Williams: It's not in Oxford.
• 6:53
  Pip Williams: It's not about words or books.
• 6:56
  Pip Williams: Um, it is all about that one character who became really interesting to me because of how her experience of war and that place complicates her confidence and her sense of self and, um, and all of those things.
• 7:15
  Pip Williams: Uh, and, and so it will be familiar, but it will also be different.
• 7:19
  Pip Williams: And also the structure is quite different to, to the other novels.
• 7:24
  Pip Williams: It's completely standalone, so it doesn't-- it makes absolutely no difference whether you've read the other books or not.
• 7:31
  Pip Williams: Um, but if you have read the other books, there'll be one or two references that you'll, you'll just be familiar with.
• 7:36
  Pip Williams: You'll, you'll understand,
• 7:38
  Madeleine Cleary: I'm, I'm so glad you, you said that actually, Pip, because, um, I actually messaged Ruby and I said that it feels different to The Dictionary of Lost Words and to Bookbinder of Jericho.
• 7:47
  Madeleine Cleary: They very much feel like a companion and this, this, yeah, it's got the allusions to it, but, um, perhaps it's because it's in Etap, set in Etapla and it is quite different.
• 7:59
  Madeleine Cleary: Even the mood feels a little bit different as well
• 8:02
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 8:03
  Pip Williams: This is, I, you know, I set out wanting to just write a straight love story.
• 8:07
  Pip Williams: Um, in a way I wanted to see whether It was a challenge as a writer.
• 8:11
  Pip Williams: I wanted to see whether I could write a love story that was, um Mature and grown up and sophisticated in, in a way.
• 8:20
  Pip Williams: When I say that, what I mean is I didn't want it to just be a, um, I suppose an, an, an uncomplicated, uh, you know, lacking in nuance love story that was just on the page for you to sort of get from, we're not in love, but we will be by the end.
• 8:42
  Pip Williams: That's, that's not what I was hoping for.
• 8:45
  Pip Williams: I just wanted to see whether I could write a love story that, um, rang true to me, um, and was between older, slightly older, um, characters.
• 8:57
  Pip Williams: So these characters are sort of more in their 40s than in their 20s or 30s.
• 9:03
  Pip Williams: Um, and, and also I wanted to write a love story that was set in a time and place that was challenging to the individuals, but also to the whole notion of love and, and see what happens to a love affair in that kind of a place.
• 9:22
  Pip Williams: Why it happens, in fact, how it happens, and whether it can survive it.
• 9:27
  Pip Williams: Um, those things were really interesting to me.
• 9:29
  Pip Williams: Um, the, the thing that happened was my goal of just writing a straight love story was completely kind of upended in some ways by, um, by I, I just seem unable to write a single simple narrative.
• 9:48
  Pip Williams: So as soon as I started, you know, all of these other interesting threads started to come into the story, and one of them is, is the art of Iso Rae, who is a real Australian artist.
• 10:01
  Pip Williams: She gets a line or two in my previous novel, um, because she's a friend of Tilda's.
• 10:07
  Pip Williams: And, and I realized that if I was gonna write Tilda's story, uh, that, that Iso Rae was a part of that because I had already introduced her as, as Tilda's friend in that place.
• 10:20
  Pip Williams: And that, that became, you know, all-consuming really, that aspect of the story because it's re- it's true.
• 10:28
  Pip Williams: She's a real person.
• 10:30
  Pip Williams: Her art is real.
• 10:31
  Pip Williams: You can see her art in the Australian War Memorial, which is what I had done for the previous book.
• 10:37
  Pip Williams: And I had done that in order to get a sense of what that Army base was like because she's drawn so many pictures of it, and I couldn't find a lot of research that gave me as much detail as her drawings gave me.
• 10:50
  Pip Williams: So that's why I knew about Iso Rae and why I had, um, done some research on her artwork.
• 10:57
  Pip Williams: But when it came to writing this story, I realized that there was an- a whole other story to be told, and it was about the- It was about art,
• 11:06
  Madeleine Cleary: Hmm.
• 11:06
  Pip Williams: and it was about, um, what art observes, what art can do, um, at the time it's made, but also, you know, far into the future long after the artist has died.
• 11:20
  Pip Williams: The impact and resonance of, of an artwork from another time, um, how it is perceived, how it's interpreted, um, what stories, uh, art can tell.
• 11:31
  Pip Williams: And so these are the things that I then wove together in this, in this novel.
• 11:36
  Madeleine Cleary: Mm, amazing, Pip.
• 11:37
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and Iso Rai is such an interesting character, and as, because she is a real person, um, you know, a l- her- I did a little bit of research after I read the novel, and I think someone had said that her paintings were deemed to be too feminine, so she's not your typical war artist, is she?
• 11:55
  Madeleine Cleary: And, and so I'm just interested to know, like, when you did find her work, what, what drew you to her, her art?
• 12:02
  Pip Williams: Well, the thing that drew me, it was quite, um, selfish in a way.
• 12:06
  Pip Williams: Like I said, I was looking at her art so I could have an understanding of, um, that army base, so that when Tilda was writing her letters home in The Bookbinder of Jericho, I had a sense of the kind of place that she was living in and working in.
• 12:20
  Pip Williams: Um, and the reason Isa Rai's drawings were so useful was because, first of all, they're colored.
• 12:29
  Pip Williams: Most of them are colored, so photographs from that time are black and white, so I had a sense of, um, the color of that place, uniforms, the things people wore, you know, um, vegetation, you name it But I also sh- the other thing that, um, she did was annotate her drawings really quite, um, significantly.
• 12:53
  Pip Williams: So she would always date and sign them, but she'd also put the place, and she would also put all of the features that she had drawn.
• 13:01
  Pip Williams: So anything that she thought would, I suppose, um, anchor that drawing in time and place.
• 13:07
  Pip Williams: So there are some drawings that where she, um, says, you know,"The ANZAC camp is in the background." Now, if she hasn't written that, you wouldn't know who those tents belonged to, but I know that those tents belonged to the ANZACs who were, um, in that place.
• 13:24
  Pip Williams: Um, and she, she has clearly signed, you know, she has clearly put the signs, um, that were in that place, so it could be, uh, the Walton Hut, which was a YMCA recreation hut.
• 13:36
  Pip Williams: The cinema.
• 13:37
  Pip Williams: She, she, she has a beautiful picture of German prisoners laying pavement, um, for a railway platform.
• 13:47
  Pip Williams: And I know exactly who they are, what they're doing, and when and where because she's written it all over the drawing.
• 13:54
  Pip Williams: And what struck me is that, um, she was making these drawings, uh, really not as an artist, but because she was an artist, this was her way of recording, um, and, um, and, you know, recording what was going on in that place, just like a journalist would.
• 14:13
  Pip Williams: But her method of doing that, her method of communication was art.
• 14:17
  Pip Williams: Um, and I felt like as I looked at these drawings, that she was doing this for others.
• 14:23
  Pip Williams: She was doing this for me in a way, you know, so that I would be able to look at her drawings at some time in the future and, and be clear about what they are of.
• 14:36
  Madeleine Cleary: Mm-hmm.
• 14:37
  Pip Williams: Um, and when...
• 14:39
  Pip Williams: Yeah, she's described as feminine because most of her paintings, she was a painter, most of her paintings before the war were of women.
• 14:47
  Pip Williams: Um, they, they feature, um, significantly in, in her paintings, and they're very beautiful.
• 14:52
  Pip Williams: Anyone who saw the Dangerously Modern exhibition, which was on in South Australia but then went to Sydney, um, will have seen many of her drawings and paintings actually, um, because it was, you know, one of the few times she's, she's been, I suppose, significantly, um, represented and acknowledged as, you know, as a significant Australian artist from the early 20th century.
• 15:18
  Pip Williams: Um, otherwise she's been largely overlooked, as many, as many women artists were.
• 15:24
  Pip Williams: That was just such a wonderful exhibition.
• 15:26
  Pip Williams: I'd highly recommend if it ever came round again that, um, people seek it out.
• 15:31
  Pip Williams: But, um, it, you know, you can have a look at some of her earlier work, and you can see her focus on, on women and children, in fact Um, but she was a, an excellent painter, and she was hung in the Paris Salon.
• 15:45
  Pip Williams: She was hung in, you know, the, the London Academy.
• 15:49
  Pip Williams: Um, and yet she was not asked to be a war artist by the Australian government.
• 15:56
  Pip Williams: Uh, and the reason she wasn't asked largely was because she was a woman.
• 16:00
  Pip Williams: Um, and, you know, there were other women artists.
• 16:04
  Pip Williams: Jessie Traill was another woman artist who stayed in France, who continued to, uh, live in situ.
• 16:10
  Pip Williams: So these were women who were near the Western Front, living there and, and working for the war effort, if you like.
• 16:18
  Pip Williams: Um, and in fact, they were closer often and, and most of the time than most of the men who were war artists, who, who tended to stay in England and come, come to France, or you'll, you'll go, go to the war zones, um, at different times.
• 16:34
  Pip Williams: But much like artists would today, they'd be sort of flown in then flown out.
• 16:40
  Pip Williams: But-
• 16:40
  Madeleine Cleary: And'cause Izo had actually moved to Étaples with her family as well, and Étaples back before the war was this beautiful artist village, and she's one of the few that did stay.
• 16:50
  Madeleine Cleary: So she knew the environment really well, didn't she?
• 16:53
  Pip Williams: Exactly.
• 16:53
  Pip Williams: So she'd been there since the, um, 1890, early 1890s, perhaps even late 1880s, with her mother and sister.
• 17:02
  Pip Williams: Her sister Alison was also an artist, um, not as acclaimed as Iso.
• 17:07
  Pip Williams: Um, yeah, and when, when the war started, it was a thriving, um, artist's colony, and had been for, for many years, uh, because it's a very beautiful place.
• 17:18
  Pip Williams: Uh, and, you know, the sun sets over the, the River Canche, and it's a, it's a beautiful place.
• 17:24
  Pip Williams: Um, so but when the war started, they all left except for Iso and Alison and their mother.
• 17:30
  Pip Williams: And from what I've read, it's because their mother was too frail to travel.
• 17:35
  Pip Williams: Um, but I don't know how frail she was, because I've also read that she volunteered, as well in the army base,
• 17:42
  Madeleine Cleary: Takes a lot of courage, doesn't it?
• 17:44
  Madeleine Cleary: With
• 17:44
  Pip Williams: That's right.
• 17:45
  Pip Williams: That's right.
• 17:46
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 17:47
  Pip Williams: And they didn't leave that town until the 1930s, and then they left and, and moved to the UK.
• 17:53
  Pip Williams: So she lived there for decades, um, knew it very well.
• 17:57
  Pip Williams: But you can see from her war drawings...
• 17:59
  Pip Williams: So her war drawings are completely different to the paintings that she did prior to the war.
• 18:04
  Madeleine Cleary: they're quite dark, aren't they?
• 18:05
  Madeleine Cleary: They just
• 18:06
  Pip Williams: they're quite dark.
• 18:08
  Pip Williams: Yeah, they...
• 18:08
  Pip Williams: And they're pastels and pencil, uh, crayon, a bit of gouache and watercolor, gouache.
• 18:15
  Pip Williams: I- it's taken me a long time to learn how to say that
• 18:18
  Madeleine Cleary: I wouldn't have known.
• 18:19
  Pip Williams: Gouache.
• 18:20
  Madeleine Cleary: Gosh.
• 18:22
  Pip Williams: I had to ask an artist friend of mine.
• 18:24
  Pip Williams: Um, and, and, and so the materials that I suppose that she had access to during the war were very different, but also the way she was drawing would've been different because she was working.
• 18:36
  Pip Williams: Um, she was volunteering for the YMCA and, um, and so she was drawing between shifts and in the margins of her day, much like many, many women artists have done,
• 18:50
  Madeleine Cleary: And continue
• 18:50
  Pip Williams: are doing now.
• 18:52
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 18:53
  Pip Williams: Um, yeah, they get up early to write, and then they take the kids to school, and then they go to work.
• 18:59
  Pip Williams: So she was doing that, and s- what's really interesting is many of her drawings are at twilight, um, or early in the morning, and probably because that's the only time that she had to sit and work on a drawing.
• 19:13
  Pip Williams: Um, but she's captured the most beautiful things at that, at those times of day.
• 19:20
  Pip Williams: The other thing that I noticed about her drawings was even though her focus, as you said, was very, um...
• 19:26
  Pip Williams: was women and, and children very often, uh, prior to the war- She barely has drawn a woman at all during the war.
• 19:36
  Pip Williams: Really focused on, I suppose, the men's experience of that war.
• 19:42
  Pip Williams: Even though the place she was working in and living in would've been populated by many women, nurses, other volunteers like her, um, uh, townspeople.
• 19:53
  Pip Williams: She...
• 19:53
  Pip Williams: And she did, to be fair, she did draw, um, often draw town scenes as well, where there would be a variety of people, including women.
• 20:02
  Pip Williams: But when she was drawing the camp, she barely drew women.
• 20:06
  Pip Williams: Um, once or twice she included sisters in a group, um, a group drawing.
• 20:12
  Pip Williams: But I found that fascinating as well.
• 20:15
  Pip Williams: Um, and my thoughts on that are varied, and I give them to one of the characters in my novel
• 20:21
  Madeleine Cleary: Mm-hmm.
• 20:22
  Madeleine Cleary: Mm.
• 20:23
  Madeleine Cleary: I can feel Iso reaching through history, um, and that, that she's at your shoulder, Pip, the way you speak about her.
• 20:30
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 20:31
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 20:31
  Madeleine Cleary: really love this woman, and it's wonderful that you've been able to take her story, um, and, and use it, and so lots of people will speak her name now because of this
• 20:40
  Pip Williams: Yeah, I re- I mean, I really do.
• 20:42
  Pip Williams: I really, I really respect her, and I feel like she's been, um, undervalued, um, then and, and now.
• 20:50
  Madeleine Cleary: And now
• 20:50
  Pip Williams: Um, like, like many women that are written about actually by novelists.
• 20:55
  Pip Williams: Uh, it's why I think the novel is such a wonderful vehicle for filling in the gaps that history leaves.
• 21:04
  Pip Williams: Um, because the, the past had no gaps.
• 21:07
  Pip Williams: The past was full of, full of really, you know, ordinary and interesting people who were not valued by the archivists or the historians.
• 21:18
  Pip Williams: And I think fiction, allows us to imagine those lives, uh, in a way that is impossible, um, otherwise, because there is so little information that's been kept about them.
• 21:32
  Pip Williams: Mm-hmm.
• 21:37
  Speaker 9: Hi, my name's Katie Bowman, and I'm the author of Exchange of Heart, which released with Bedford Square on August thirteenth.
• 21:44
  Speaker 9: This rom-com is about Nora and Corey, who can't stand each other.
• 21:47
  Speaker 9: Then one morning, they wake having switched bodies.
• 21:49
  Speaker 9: Nora was raised by her single mother to never rely on a man, and she knew from the moment she met Corey in her finance class that he was exactly the kind of man her mother warned her about.
• 21:59
  Speaker 9: When a promotion at her work opens up, Nora's confident that she's a shoo-in for the position, but loses out to a guy who recently moved from legal into the data analyst sector of the company.
• 22:09
  Speaker 9: When this happens, Nora is understandably angry, but also determined to prove herself to her boss that she is much more suited and knowledgeable when it comes to the senior role.
• 22:18
  Speaker 9: Corey comes from a wealthy family, and he's the finance manager of their insurance company, but he's secretly miserable because it's not the career he wants for himself.
• 22:26
  Speaker 9: One of four brothers, he knows that instead of pursuing illustration, he should begrudgingly go to this soul-sucking job working for his father because if he leaves, one of his brothers will be forced to take over, and he doesn't wanna ruin their lives.
• 22:40
  Speaker 9: As they try to figure out how to switch back, they begin to learn that each other's lives aren't quite what they'd thought, and maybe there could be something between them once they truly understand one another.
• 22:50
  Speaker 9: This book is very heavy on the com side of rom-com because I wrote this book when I was struggling career-wise, just as Nora is in the story, and I wanted to write something lighthearted to laugh about.
• 23:00
  Speaker 9: So I hope that this book finds its way into the hands of someone who might also be struggling, and maybe they just need something easy to make them laugh as well.
• 23:11
  Madeleine Cleary: So for women like, Iso and Tilda in the novel, who've signed up to work as a volunteer or nurse in Etaples in the First World War, you mentioned before, um, you know, squeezing time in between shifts.
• 23:23
  Madeleine Cleary: I mean, Tilda, it sounds like she is working really hard.
• 23:26
  Madeleine Cleary: She's working during the day in the normal ward to help out, and then she's moved to the German ward in the evenings, and she really is working, without any time for herself.
• 23:36
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and so she begins to care for German soldiers who've been captured by the Allies.
• 23:40
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and there's a few moments where Tilda's really grappling with this idea that they're trying to save the very men who not only the Allies have been trying to kill, but also want to kill them.
• 23:49
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, humanity is just full of all these contradictions, isn't it?
• 23:52
  Madeleine Cleary: Is that something you wanted to explore?
• 23:55
  Pip Williams: Oh, absolutely.
• 23:56
  Pip Williams: It's, it's, um...
• 23:57
  Pip Williams: I often think, I, as a writer, well j- I can only speak for myself, but, um, the books I've written so far at least I, I have questions about the time and place or, or events or projects that are happening, um, that I'm writing about.
• 24:15
  Pip Williams: So I was really interested in how the Oxford English Dictionary was made, and whether the way it was made meant that women's voices had been excluded really from the defining of our language.
• 24:27
  Pip Williams: With Bookbinder, I was really interested in, you know, what happens to a, a wo- working-class woman who really desires an education, um, how difficult is that for her to achieve that?
• 24:40
  Pip Williams: And in this, I was very interested in the arbitrariness of, of enemy lines, if you like.
• 24:49
  Pip Williams: So, um, the arbitrariness of who is an enemy at different times in history, um, and how easily we, we turn other human beings into monsters, um, through propaganda and, and we have to do that to fight a war against another group of people.
• 25:11
  Pip Williams: Governments have done this throughout history.
• 25:14
  Pip Williams: They've, they've-- through propaganda, they've turned the other people into animals and monsters.
• 25:21
  Pip Williams: It's, it's, you know, they have to engender hate in, in order for people to do atrocious things and to kill others.
• 25:31
  Pip Williams: Um, you, you kind of have to hate them.
• 25:34
  Pip Williams: And I've been obvi- like all of us, I've been seeing this play out on my television screen, um, in all around the world.
• 25:44
  Pip Williams: You know, Gaza is an obvious example.
• 25:47
  Pip Williams: Ukraine's another example.
• 25:49
  Pip Williams: Sudan is another example that we don't talk about very much or see on the news very much.
• 25:55
  Pip Williams: But there's a lot of other places around the world where these kinds of conflicts, um, are occurring and, and continue to occur.
• 26:03
  Pip Williams: And something that has struck me when I've been watching the news is how often, or listening, is how often health workers, healthcare workers are caught up in these, um, war zones and continue to do their job.
• 26:22
  Pip Williams: And I've wondered how they continue to do their job when they have to make such terrible decisions very often with very few resources.
• 26:32
  Pip Williams: Um, you know, they're continuing to try to save people and often, and often they're trying to save the people that they've been told to hate.
• 26:41
  Pip Williams: Um, and I've also wondered, you know, what gets them through?
• 26:46
  Pip Williams: And there's been, there's been various documentaries and interviews and so on with people who've, who've come from Australia or the UK or the United States and they've-- wherever, and they've gone to these war zones to volunteer as doctors or nurses and then come home And, you know, just listening to them, um, has been- has- it struck me how kinda selfless they are.
• 27:12
  Pip Williams: But it's also struck me that, you know, they, they have had to find ways to cope and, and there was-- And I don't know, I, I actually can't tell you their names or anything, but one of the stories that I followed a little bit was a, a doctor who went to Gaza and, and did fall in love and got married.
• 27:29
  Pip Williams: And so I know people in these awful times, I know that, um, all the human emotions can still be experienced, and love is one of them.
• 27:40
  Pip Williams: And it made me curious about the role of love and desire and positive human emotion in, in the worst of times.
• 27:48
  Pip Williams: So that's something that I wanted to explore, and this is a really very long answer.
• 27:53
  Madeleine Cleary: Oh, we love it,
• 27:54
  Pip Williams: But I don't even know what the question was anymore.
• 27:56
  Pip Williams: But I think what I'm trying to say is, for me at least as a writer, I unashamedly bring the questions I have about the time I'm living in to the questions I have about the past.
• 28:10
  Pip Williams: I'm really curious about, um, how those questions, uh, were approached then and now.
• 28:19
  Pip Williams: And, and one of the things I have to do then as a writer is work out whether or not the circumstances of the past would have made any difference to the human response to a situation.
• 28:34
  Pip Williams: If I think,"Oh, yes, the circumstances of the past would have made the response very different," I don't write about that.
• 28:40
  Pip Williams: But more often than not, the conclusion I come to, and it's just my personal opinion usually, but often couched in, in having read enough.
• 28:51
  Pip Williams: The conclusion I come to is that as humans we haven't changed very much, that we still feel the same range of emotions, and we still grapple with the same, same moral, um, questions.
• 29:03
  Pip Williams: Uh, and, and that the circumstances 120 years ago are no different to the circumstances now.
• 29:11
  Pip Williams: Um, and we will respond very similarly.
• 29:15
  Pip Williams: And that's how I then write the chara- write those individual stories, those character-driven stories.
• 29:23
  Pip Williams: Um, it is by looking at what's going on in, you know, around me and in our world today and transposing it to another time.
• 29:32
  Madeleine Cleary: And there's a lot of hope in that as well, isn't it?
• 29:34
  Madeleine Cleary: Because, you know, Tilda and, and Dr.
• 29:37
  Madeleine Cleary: Hening, Dr.
• 29:38
  Madeleine Cleary: Hugo Hening, they're going through some of the most traumatic and difficult circumstances, and yet they find that hope within each other.
• 29:46
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and there is that desire and there is that forbiddenness of it, but it's, it's also really beautiful, isn't it?
• 29:53
  Pip Williams: I hope so.
• 29:54
  Pip Williams: And, but the thing is there's also a question, you know, like all through, you know, the, the narrative, the main narrative is Tilda's...
• 30:02
  Pip Williams: It's almost like a memoir.
• 30:04
  Pip Williams: So i- in really simple terms, um, what I wanted to explore was how we, um, how we record, remember, and interpret the past.
• 30:13
  Pip Williams: And the person recording that time is, is O.
• 30:17
  Pip Williams: Rai.
• 30:18
  Pip Williams: She's draw- she's making drawings.
• 30:20
  Pip Williams: Now, what I've done with her, she's a real person, but what I've done is imagined her in the German ward, and then imagined the sorts of things she might have been observing and drawing.
• 30:31
  Pip Williams: So all of the sketches I write about that are made in the German ward are a fiction of my imagination.
• 30:40
  Pip Williams: But I have, I have imagined them based on what I know of artists in general.
• 30:47
  Pip Williams: Um, the way they, you know...
• 30:49
  Pip Williams: A- as a writer, um, if I'm in a situation that is interesting or perturbing or something I wanna record, I will write notes about it.
• 30:58
  Pip Williams: So if I was in the German ward, I would be writing notes about my experience in the German ward.
• 31:04
  Pip Williams: As an artist, you would be sketching it.
• 31:06
  Pip Williams: And so I've put her in this place, um, imaginatively, and then imagined what she might sketch.
• 31:13
  Madeleine Cleary: Mm.
• 31:13
  Madeleine Cleary: And then imagined what in the modern day an art historian's interpreting as well.
• 31:19
  Pip Williams: Exactly.
• 31:19
  Pip Williams: So it's a-- So what I've done is I've, I've woven together her real artwork with an imagined, um, artwork, uh, body of work.
• 31:29
  Pip Williams: Um, and, and, and in various ways I've, I've kind of separated those two things, so we, we kind of know when I'm...
• 31:38
  Pip Williams: I- in some ways.
• 31:39
  Pip Williams: It- there's a bit of a code when I'm talking about a real painting or drawing, and when I'm talking about an imagined sketch.
• 31:47
  Pip Williams: But what I, yeah, what I was interested in is what might she observe at that moment in time?
• 31:53
  Pip Williams: What might Tilda remember of that moment in time?
• 31:57
  Pip Williams: And what might a modern-day art historian, for instance, sitting in the Australian War Memorial archives looking at these drawings, how might she interpret that moment in time from more than 100 years in the future?
• 32:14
  Pip Williams: Because that essentially is what we're always doing when we're writing or talking about the past.
• 32:20
  Pip Williams: Whether you're a historian or a biographer and you, you're dealing with facts, or whether you're, um, a historical fiction writer, it's all an interpretation, and it's all an interpretation of fragments that have been left to us from the past.
• 32:40
  Pip Williams: History's not the past.
• 32:42
  Pip Williams: The past actually can't be known, um, at all.
• 32:46
  Pip Williams: You know, yesterday can't be fully known.
• 32:49
  Pip Williams: Even if you lived through it, you're, you will re- you will forget some of the stuff that you did yesterday.
• 32:54
  Pip Williams: So even if your own experience can't be fully, can't be fully remembered, um, or objectively interpreted.
• 33:04
  Pip Williams: Um, and so as a, as a novelist this really interested me because I have spent so much time in the archives trying to render, uh, the past, but trying to render it really as faithfully as I can by sticking to the facts that I know to be true.
• 33:24
  Pip Williams: Um, and in this novel I, I examined that.
• 33:27
  Pip Williams: I sort of interrogated that entire process to some extent, and that's what my modern-day character is kind of embodying.
• 33:35
  Pip Williams: Y- yeah, that's what she's doing.
• 33:36
  Pip Williams: This is sort of making it sound quite complicated and it's just not, it's not.
• 33:41
  Pip Williams: But
• 33:41
  Madeleine Cleary: it's a beautifully wrought, um, story.
• 33:43
  Madeleine Cleary: And even Tilda herself reflects on memory, um, and retelling.
• 33:49
  Madeleine Cleary: I think she says at one point that, um, you know, her, her memories, her recollections, they're not, they're not, there's nothing, there's nothing untruthful.
• 33:57
  Madeleine Cleary: It's not a lie.
• 33:59
  Madeleine Cleary: But memory can often be convenient, can't it?
• 34:01
  Madeleine Cleary: And that's how it's sort of reflected, which is a, yeah, I thought it was really beautifully done.
• 34:06
  Pip Williams: Yeah, and you know, there's, there was one line that for me kind of sorta summed up the way she was remem- deciding to remember.
• 34:14
  Pip Williams: There's a scene where I think she, she, she, she loses her temper to some extent and sort of, um, screams or cries and, but says in the memory of it, says,"I wasn't," you know,"I wasn't one for hysterics, but, but he might remember it differently." So what she's sort of saying is that, you know, she may have behaved in a way that she's not willing to remember or put on the record, um, which is what we all do.
• 34:43
  Pip Williams: You know, we all kind of We, you were ta- y- earlier we were talking about memoir and whether memoir can be sometimes considered a novel, um, because it has a narrative drive and, and so on.
• 34:57
  Pip Williams: Um, and memoir is exactly that.
• 34:59
  Pip Williams: You pick and choose what you want to record of, of your own life or, or some past event.
• 35:07
  Pip Williams: Um, and sometimes you embellish and, and sometimes you downplay.
• 35:11
  Pip Williams: Um, and that's just the nature of storytelling, whether you are telling a memory or whether you're telling a fiction.
• 35:19
  Pip Williams: It's, it's what we do as humans.
• 35:22
  Pip Williams: Um, and so Tilda does that from 20 years in the future.
• 35:26
  Pip Williams: She's remembering that time.
• 35:28
  Pip Williams: Uh, and then Eva is interpreting that time based on very little information.
• 35:35
  Pip Williams: And the novel really, um, allows The reader is the only one that has access to Well, in fact, the reader doesn't have access to the past either, because they're relying on, on Tilda's memory.
• 35:50
  Pip Williams: But they can see where Eva, in the modern time, and Tilda in the past, they can see where they differ in terms of their, um, you know, their rendering of that time and place.
• 36:04
  Pip Williams: And, and that's just
• 36:06
  Madeleine Cleary: I'm so envious.
• 36:08
  Pip Williams: Oh
• 36:08
  Madeleine Cleary: That's what I said to Ruby.
• 36:10
  Madeleine Cleary: I said,"This is a brilliant novel.
• 36:11
  Madeleine Cleary: It's brilliant." And I wonder, have you felt much pressure to follow up with a book like The German Ward after the success?
• 36:21
  Madeleine Cleary: 'Cause y- the success that you've seen with Dictionary and with Bookbinder is extraordinary, and it's not something that's a common Australian writing experience, I would say.
• 36:32
  Pip Williams: No, I feel very grateful.
• 36:35
  Pip Williams: Um, it's-- That's-- I get asked that a lot.
• 36:38
  Pip Williams: My immediate answer is I was protected by COVID to some extent, because Dictionary was the kind of breakout novel, and that happened in, in a vacuum.
• 36:51
  Pip Williams: Um, I'm not on any social media, um, which, which is quite significant in terms of my answer.
• 36:56
  Pip Williams: Because during COVID, I didn't really-- I mean, I got updates from the publisher, um, every f- you know, once a month or something.
• 37:05
  Pip Williams: But I had no, I had no actual interaction with anybody because, um, I'm not on social media.
• 37:13
  Pip Williams: So, um, I didn't-- It's not like I had people talking to me about the book all the time or, um, I didn't get a sense of how it was going in the world other than a few figures that I got from the publisher every now and then.
• 37:27
  Pip Williams: And, and I wasn't going to, to festivals or libraries or anything like that.
• 37:33
  Pip Williams: So I wasn't meeting people.
• 37:35
  Pip Williams: When I did a Zoom, I'd just have one person on the screen.
• 37:38
  Pip Williams: So, you know, it's not like I could see the audience, all that sort of thing.
• 37:43
  Pip Williams: Um, and that's when I was writing Book Binder.
• 37:46
  Pip Williams: So I wrote B- Book Binder in a, in a vacuum, and I was separated from whatever was going on with Dictionary of Lost Words.
• 37:57
  Pip Williams: When Book Binder came out, of course, it was completely different and yeah, we talked about the circus.
• 38:03
  Pip Williams: I sort of went on that wonderful big book tour.
• 38:06
  Pip Williams: And in fact, I, I could have kept going.
• 38:09
  Pip Williams: It's only me sort of saying,"No, I think I need to stop and start writing something else now." Because it's all-consuming, and I'm a terrible multitasker.
• 38:17
  Pip Williams: I cannot-- I can't, I can't be talking about one book and, and traveling around and writing another book.
• 38:24
  Pip Williams: I just don't, I don't function that way.
• 38:27
  Pip Williams: Um, and so yeah, I, I, I kind of didn't feel the pressure with the second book, which is usually when you would feel the pressure.
• 38:38
  Pip Williams: And then with this book, um, I think because for me it was a departure even though, even though people will recognize the main character, it-- to me it is in a different-- It's a different book.
• 38:52
  Pip Williams: Uh, it's structurally different.
• 38:53
  Pip Williams: It was important for me this time to challenge myself a little bit as a writer.
• 38:58
  Pip Williams: I was really keen to, um...
• 39:01
  Pip Williams: Like I said, I wanted to try to write a, a straight up love story.
• 39:05
  Pip Williams: But a- also I wanted to, um, challenge myself in terms of structure.
• 39:09
  Pip Williams: And so this does have a modern-day, I call them interludes.
• 39:13
  Pip Williams: It's not strictly a dual timeline, because Eva's narrative is very much, um- It's very much there to supplement or to support or to add value in a way to Tilda's narrative.
• 39:32
  Madeleine Cleary: they can be really short chapters
• 39:34
  Pip Williams: They're very- yes, exactly.
• 39:35
  Pip Williams: I call them interludes because they're, they're al- they're almost like fragments from this woman's, um, time in the archives, and you don't see her anywhere else.
• 39:46
  Pip Williams: Uh, you do get hints at her backstory, which is important in order to understand her motivations for doing the work that she's doing.
• 39:56
  Pip Williams: But she's not fully Her story's not fully fleshed out.
• 40:00
  Pip Williams: Um, and I did that on purpose because I, I didn't want there to be two competing stories.
• 40:08
  Pip Williams: I wanted there to be one story that was woven together like a plait, if you like.
• 40:14
  Madeleine Cleary: And then come together at the end as well?
• 40:17
  Pip Williams: yes.
• 40:17
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 40:18
  Pip Williams: So it's almost there is actually a mystery that's, that's running through the whole novel, um, which Eva is trying to unravel through the drawings.
• 40:29
  Pip Williams: Um, not a mystery in a crime crime genre sense.
• 40:35
  Pip Williams: It's not.
• 40:36
  Pip Williams: But, but there is a mystery there and, and, you know, it all comes together at the end.
• 40:41
  Pip Williams: Um, and all those threads come together at the end.
• 40:45
  Pip Williams: Uh, but they're very connected all the way through.
• 40:48
  Pip Williams: You know, sometimes a dual timeline, um, the connections of, you know, you don't know what the connections are until you start getting through the novel and then you start noticing how these two different people are related in some way.
• 41:02
  Pip Williams: This isn't like that.
• 41:04
  Pip Williams: It's right from the start, Eva is engaging with what's going on in the past in Tilda's story, um, and in, in Isa Rai's drawings, the real and the imagined.
• 41:15
  Pip Williams: Uh, but I, you know, that was a real challenge for me, um, first to write a modern-day narrative, but, but then to weave it, um, through in the right place
• 41:26
  Madeleine Cleary: with that, did you write it sequentially or did you write each individual, each story individually and then do the weaving?
• 41:35
  Pip Williams: So the way I write in general, so, um, I'm not, I'm not sure I would recommend this, but this is the way I write.
• 41:42
  Pip Williams: I, I do tend to have a sense very early on of the entire story, and, and that's not by design, that's just by nature.
• 41:51
  Pip Williams: So, um, I get an idea for a story, and once the idea's in my head, it, it just sprouts and, and grows a scaffold, if you like, without my intervention.
• 42:05
  Pip Williams: So very relatively quickly I will know where the story's going and how it's going to end.
• 42:13
  Pip Williams: Um, and I'll, I'll know too some of the key beats along that storyline.
• 42:22
  Pip Williams: Um, but what I won't know is, is how these beats are gonna unfold, or the effect that, you know, these s- major scenes are gonna have on the rest of the story.
• 42:35
  Pip Williams: And so, um, the good thing about that is I can then write a scene from any part of the story.
• 42:44
  Pip Williams: So I don't write from beginning to end, I just write the stuff that I am interested in.
• 42:50
  Pip Williams: And so I know It- this is the good part about it.
• 42:56
  Pip Williams: I tend to just write the scenes that I'm interested in writing, because I kind of know where they're going to be.
• 43:05
  Pip Williams: So, you know, I know that, um, ABC is going to happen, and I'll decide,"Well, I'm gonna write C, that's more interesting to me at the moment." You know?
• 43:16
  Pip Williams: I, you know, I wanna write the love scene, I'm- so I'm gonna write that now, even though that might come very late in the story.
• 43:23
  Pip Williams: Or I'm gonna write this really, um, funny scene, uh, because I'm not in the mood for anything heavy today, so I'm gonna write this scene even though that comes maybe, you know, really that's chapter five.
• 43:36
  Pip Williams: Um, so I tend to write like a patchwork.
• 43:40
  Madeleine Cleary: Hmm.
• 43:41
  Madeleine Cleary: I was gonna say it's like a
• 43:41
  Pip Williams: it?
• 43:43
  Pip Williams: is, yeah.
• 43:43
  Pip Williams: And I'm, I'm actually knitting at the moment.
• 43:45
  Pip Williams: I'm making a rug.
• 43:47
  Pip Williams: And so I'm, I'm knitting squares, and that's actually exactly how I write.
• 43:52
  Pip Williams: And even as I knit,'cause they're different colors, I am choosing the color that I feel more, like You- you know,'cause there's some dark colors and there's some light colors, and sometimes I just don't feel like knitting a dark color.
• 44:05
  Pip Williams: I wanna spend my time with the yellow.
• 44:08
  Pip Williams: And-
• 44:08
  Madeleine Cleary: So, so it sounds like you're a mood writer then, Pip
• 44:12
  Pip Williams: Possibly, yeah.
• 44:13
  Pip Williams: Possibly.
• 44:14
  Pip Williams: And yeah, I do.
• 44:16
  Pip Williams: And, and it's A lot of people talk about follow the heat.
• 44:20
  Pip Williams: Um, you know, follow the heat, follow Write what you're interested in, write what excites you, um, write what gets your pulse racing.
• 44:29
  Pip Williams: And so I That's, that's all I ever do, actually.
• 44:32
  Pip Williams: Which does mean I end up with a whole lot of patches.
• 44:39
  Pip Williams: Um, and eventually you do have to write a few You do have to then crochet them together with a few kind of, you know And that's, that's the sort of, that's the craft, um, of, of the writing.
• 44:56
  Pip Williams: So, you know, the creative part is writing, you know, is, is writing these scenes.
• 45:02
  Pip Williams: Um, but the craft, and often the hardest part, is weaving them together.
• 45:07
  Pip Williams: And, and although I kind of have a sense of where they go in the story, um, I'm not exactly sure until I start weaving them together where the best place is.
• 45:19
  Pip Williams: Uh, so there's a lot of moving stuff around, um, uh, at, in the later parts of, of drafting.
• 45:26
  Pip Williams: Uh, and, and there's a lot of tinkering because if I move something around suddenly, you know, suddenly things are out of place, and so I have to rewrite in order to make sure that, um, you know, the timing is, is right.
• 45:43
  Pip Williams: But when it came to weaving these two narratives together, I, I have to admit that was the hardest part for me.
• 45:51
  Pip Williams: Uh, and it drove me nuts actually.
• 45:55
  Pip Williams: Like I was pulling my hair out'cause And it was the, you know, I'd never done it before.
• 46:00
  Pip Williams: And I'm, I'm not a- I'm not ashamed to admit very late in the piece, um, very late in the piece I actually just Googled dual narratives.
• 46:12
  Pip Williams: You know, thi- sort of like things to remember when you're writing a dual narrative.
• 46:18
  Pip Williams: I just Googled it
• 46:19
  Madeleine Cleary: I'm s- thank you for admitting that, Pip, Pip.
• 46:22
  Madeleine Cleary: I think people are gonna be relieved
• 46:24
  Pip Williams: I realized I had written all of these scenes and I, you know, I had I, it was a pretty complete Well, it was a complete draft actually.
• 46:33
  Pip Williams: A complete draft.
• 46:35
  Pip Williams: And when I draft, I draft fully.
• 46:38
  Pip Williams: So it's not like a 40,000-word draft, it was, it was an 85,000-word draft.
• 46:43
  Pip Williams: Um, and every scene was kind of well edited'cause that's how I I edit as I go.
• 46:50
  Pip Williams: So, you know, I don't write rough scenes.
• 46:54
  Pip Williams: I, I Once a scene is written, it's been edited and it's, it's well-written Um, which is probably a huge waste of time because I then when I put it all together I have to I have to edit it all again because now things are out of place.
• 47:08
  Pip Williams: But anyway.
• 47:09
  Pip Williams: Um, but I realized, you know, I s- really struggling with, with where to place Eva's interludes, Eva's narrative, and I realized I had never learnt how to do this.
• 47:21
  Pip Williams: You know, I haven't I've never read a single thing or done a workshop or anything on, on how to weave two narratives together, so I Googled it.
• 47:31
  Madeleine Cleary: What are the key, what are the things you learnt?
• 47:34
  Pip Williams: oh, well, I learnt You know, I learnt things like, um, it helps for instance to, to When you're, when you're finished, say, y- you know, s- chapter one chapter from the, from the past narrative, if you're going to then have the next chapter will be the modern narrative, it helps to sort of end on, on a, on a little bit of a, a cliff or a, a high point or a, um, you know, something that's gonna keep the reader wanting to go back to that so that And then, you know, there's these, just these little techniques to kind of make sure that those two narratives, um, fit together well.
• 48:20
  Pip Williams: Now I, you know, I can't remember them all now, but it's worth Googling because
• 48:26
  Madeleine Cleary: 'Cause do you find sometimes when, when you're reading dual narrative, it, it, it ends and then you, you wanna keep going, but you're like,"Oh, I don't wanna read this person's narrative now." But then you read through that and you're like,"No, but I don't want that one to end
• 48:40
  Pip Williams: I know.
• 48:41
  Pip Williams: I know.
• 48:41
  Pip Williams: So there's all this that I just didn't know.
• 48:43
  Pip Williams: I d- I didn't know I didn't want those feelings.
• 48:47
  Madeleine Cleary: I didn't
• 48:48
  Pip Williams: a reader...
• 48:49
  Pip Williams: Oh, good.
• 48:49
  Pip Williams: Because I didn't want a reader to go,"Oh, I don't wanna read this.
• 48:54
  Pip Williams: I wanna stay in the other narrative." Um, although I knew there were times when they would.
• 49:00
  Pip Williams: And so for me, Eva's narrative really backs off in the middle of the book, because the middle of the book, um, coincides with the Psalm.
• 49:10
  Pip Williams: And it was a really intense time, and I didn't want the intensity interrupted, um, by, by modern- the modern day.
• 49:19
  Pip Williams: Um, and so, you know, Eva's interludes at that time are s- are far apart, but they're also very small.
• 49:28
  Madeleine Cleary: And at the end, it's almost a bit like taking a breath after the song.
• 49:32
  Madeleine Cleary: It's like,"Oh, okay," and then we go back
• 49:35
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 49:36
  Pip Williams: And so all of these things I had to consider and, and yes, some of that consideration involved googling how you write dual narratives.
• 49:45
  Madeleine Cleary: I love
• 49:46
  Pip Williams: I'm sorry about, I'm sorry about that.
• 49:49
  Pip Williams: But, um, yeah, that sort of ruins the magic, doesn't it?
• 49:52
  Pip Williams: It sort
• 49:53
  Madeleine Cleary: not at all.
• 49:53
  Madeleine Cleary: I think people are gonna find that really reassuring that Pip Williams also Googles how to do things.
• 49:59
  Madeleine Cleary: That, that, that's wonderful.
• 50:01
  Pip Williams: do,
• 50:01
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, you did mention before social media.
• 50:04
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, I've heard your name cited all the time.
• 50:06
  Madeleine Cleary: You're an example of a very successful author who doesn't have socials.
• 50:10
  Madeleine Cleary: Is that deliberate?
• 50:11
  Madeleine Cleary: Can you tell us a little bit about your choice?
• 50:13
  Pip Williams: Oh, it wasn't a choice.
• 50:15
  Pip Williams: I was never on social media, and when I, um, got my first book contract, which was the memoir, um, I said to them,"Oh look, if you want me to go on social media, I will." I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, um, sort of religiously against it or anything.
• 50:32
  Pip Williams: Um, and they I think they just clocked They might have had a We had a quick conversation about it, and they just realized I'd be really shit at it.
• 50:42
  Pip Williams: Because it went I think, and I think this is true, I think it's important that if you are on social media, you, you have to respect the, the, um, conversation and communication that that enables.
• 50:57
  Pip Williams: And because I wasn't already on it and I didn't have a nature that would engage with it very often, because I'm, I, I'm an introvert by nature, um, I really am very happy with my own company.
• 51:15
  Pip Williams: I, I don't need a lot of, um, interaction in that sense.
• 51:20
  Pip Williams: And so I probably would have stayed off it anyway, and then that means I would have been ignoring people, which is worse.
• 51:28
  Pip Williams: You know, inviting connection and then rejecting it is way worse than not, not making it available in the first place.
• 51:38
  Pip Williams: So I think they realized that and, and now, you know, once Dictionary came out, I have to admit I was very grateful I'd never gone on it.
• 51:46
  Pip Williams: Um, so people can contact me by, by e- Actually I, as I say this, I know I'm telling a lie.
• 51:55
  Pip Williams: Up until very recently, people could contact me by email because I had a, an author page which I set, I did set up before sending my memoir out.
• 52:05
  Pip Williams: Because I don't have an agent either, and so, you know, my memoir just got sent to slush piles all over the place until it got picked up by a firm press.
• 52:14
  Pip Williams: And before doing that, I did set up a webpage so that if, if a, a publisher wanted to find out who I was, at least there was something there for them to look at.
• 52:26
  Pip Williams: And that webpage was available up until about three weeks ago.
• 52:30
  Pip Williams: I'm really embarrassed to
• 52:31
  Madeleine Cleary: I did actually Google you, P.
• 52:33
  Madeleine Cleary: I was trying to find your website.
• 52:34
  Madeleine Cleary: I was like,
• 52:35
  Pip Williams: Oh my g- I'm so embarrassed and I haven't done, I've been too busy to do anything about it, but, um
• 52:40
  Madeleine Cleary: Sure you can pay someone to do that for you, Pip
• 52:42
  Pip Williams: I did pay someone to do it.
• 52:45
  Pip Williams: Uh, and it seems like they've stopped doing what they had to do, and it's, it's, um, it's now disappeared.
• 52:53
  Pip Williams: And I don't know whether that's because I, I haven't paid my fees or whatever it is.
• 52:59
  Pip Williams: My website has completely disappeared.
• 53:02
  Pip Williams: I can't find it, and I don't know how to get it
• 53:05
  Madeleine Cleary: Okay.
• 53:05
  Madeleine Cleary: Well, by the time this airs, this episode airs, Pip Williams will have a, a website everybody.
• 53:10
  Pip Williams: Oh, yeah.
• 53:11
  Pip Williams: I don't know if I will.
• 53:12
  Pip Williams: So, you know, um, I've just got, I've got so many...
• 53:15
  Pip Williams: It's on, it's on my to-do list to find it.
• 53:18
  Pip Williams: Um, I think I have to find the person who designed it, and it was a long time ago now.
• 53:22
  Pip Williams: It was back in 1918.
• 53:24
  Pip Williams: I don't...
• 53:25
  Pip Williams: '18, not 1918.
• 53:26
  Pip Williams: 18...
• 53:27
  Pip Williams: Uh, 2018.
• 53:28
  Pip Williams: See, I, I write historical fiction.
• 53:30
  Pip Williams: All my dates end up 100
• 53:31
  Madeleine Cleary: Just, I asked my husband to set mine up just on, on Wix, so I
• 53:35
  Pip Williams: and, um, my, my partner's a, a gardener.
• 53:39
  Pip Williams: He would have no idea.
• 53:41
  Pip Williams: Um, anyway, I, uh, you know, so the, the best way for people to contact me now is through Simon Schuster unfortunately, but they'll pass it on.
• 53:50
  Pip Williams: But up until very recently, you could email me.
• 53:53
  Pip Williams: Um, and I got a lot of emails, like, and I still...
• 53:56
  Pip Williams: Well, up until the last few weeks I was still getting emails every, every week.
• 54:02
  Pip Williams: Um, so y- And that was lovely.
• 54:05
  Pip Williams: That was just the right amount of contact.
• 54:09
  Pip Williams: But I also knew that the people who had emailed me had made the effort to find me, and then they'd drafted an email, and it was like a letter, and I have never had a negative email, ever.
• 54:22
  Pip Williams: They've all been, um...
• 54:24
  Pip Williams: When I say negative, they haven't all been in praise of my book, but they've all been, um, real communication, real contact.
• 54:33
  Pip Williams: Um, and it's, it's a huge pleasure to respond to those, and that's about the amount of response that I'm capable of.
• 54:41
  Pip Williams: Um, if I was getting messages every day, I, I wouldn't be able to respond very well, so, um, and I would feel bad about not responding.
• 54:50
  Pip Williams: So yeah, so now I'm glad I'm not on social media.
• 54:53
  Pip Williams: But it wasn't a decision at the beginning.
• 54:56
  Pip Williams: It was just sort of m- my nature.
• 54:59
  Madeleine Cleary: I think that's great, and you have to know yourself and your strengths, I think.
• 55:03
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and, and people will also be able to contact you by attending all the events that you're, you'll be doing in the next few months.
• 55:10
  Madeleine Cleary: So
• 55:11
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 55:12
  Madeleine Cleary: email Simon&Schuster, everybody.
• 55:15
  Pip Williams: I'm so sorry.
• 55:16
  Pip Williams: I do, I will, I will fix this.
• 55:20
  Pip Williams: Um, but it's, it's on the list, I promise.
• 55:23
  Madeleine Cleary: it.
• 55:23
  Madeleine Cleary: All right, I'll g- I'll keep an eye out, Pip, and if I do need to contact you, I don't, I'll, there'll be no one I can contact.
• 55:31
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, I was at Sydney Writers Festival back in 2023 and I'm just really interested, uh, quickly to find this, to find out about this.
• 55:39
  Madeleine Cleary: You actually spoke about your writing routine and there was so much laughter because you said progress for you just means getting one word on the page per day.
• 55:48
  Madeleine Cleary: Is
• 55:49
  Pip Williams: it's true.
• 55:50
  Pip Williams: It's still the case.
• 55:51
  Pip Williams: So it's, um Oh, it, it, it came about, you know, there's a, there's a long and a short story, but basically, I, I really My-- When I wrote my memoir, I have to admit I didn't enjoy it very much.
• 56:04
  Pip Williams: I didn't enjoy the writing.
• 56:05
  Pip Williams: I spent a lot of time procrastinating and getting to the end of the day and realizing I hadn't actually started.
• 56:13
  Pip Williams: So I'd procrastinated so much that now I needed to pick the kids up and, and the opportunity was lost.
• 56:20
  Pip Williams: And so most days, I would say, you know, um, nine out of 10 writing days ended up being disappointments and, um, and that actually fed a cycle of poor mental health actually, because I was disappointed in myself.
• 56:39
  Pip Williams: I hadn't achieved anywhere near what I thought I would achieve, and I started with a 1,000-word, you know, goal, and then 750, and then finally landed on the 300, that Virginia Woolf, you know, had a 300-word goal.
• 56:55
  Pip Williams: I couldn't even achieve 300.
• 56:57
  Pip Williams: And so I was constantly, um, underachieving, and, uh, most writers, most people will know what that feels like when you're constantly underachieving.
• 57:08
  Pip Williams: It's, it's a real blow to your confidence, but also to your mental health.
• 57:13
  Pip Williams: It's depressing.
• 57:14
  Pip Williams: Um, and yet I knew I really wanted to write.
• 57:17
  Pip Williams: It's a real, it's a real conundrum because you sort of think,"But I really wanna write." Well, why aren't you writing?
• 57:22
  Pip Williams: Like I used to go,"Well, I don't know why I'm not writing.
• 57:25
  Pip Williams: Um,'cause I don't feel like it." But I love having written, like that was the thing.
• 57:31
  Pip Williams: The times I did actually write were the most joyous.
• 57:34
  Pip Williams: Um, you know, the after effects were, were incredible for my confidence and my sense of wellbeing.
• 57:42
  Pip Williams: So when I started writing Dictionary, I just decided to approach it differently and, um, my, my undergraduate degree's in psychology, so I I just I remembered Pavlov's dogs and decided that, well, the place that I love most in the world is the coffee shop.
• 58:01
  Pip Williams: I just love going to coffee shops, and I love coffee.
• 58:04
  Pip Williams: So I'm gonna take my laptop to the coffee shop and set it up and order my coffee, but I'm not allowed to drink any I can't even have a sip until I've written one word And it, I'm not kidding you, it took me three days to develop a positive attitude to writing.
• 58:25
  Pip Williams: Because y- and the, the thing is, and one word was my, uh, I, that's an honest, um, goal.
• 58:31
  Pip Williams: Um, because one word, it's almost impossible to just write one word.
• 58:36
  Pip Williams: You know, it's, it's, um...
• 58:37
  Pip Williams: I liken it to putting your runners on and walking up, up just to the end of the driveway.
• 58:43
  Pip Williams: That's the goal.
• 58:44
  Pip Williams: You don't have to walk a, a kilometer or two or five.
• 58:48
  Pip Williams: You just need to put your shoes on and walk out of the door, and that's what my one word is.
• 58:54
  Pip Williams: It's putting my shoes on and walking out the door.
• 58:56
  Pip Williams: Because once you've got that far, you've done most of the work.
• 59:00
  Pip Williams: You know, the rest is actually quite enjoyable.
• 59:03
  Pip Williams: Um, but for me, the coffee helped because, and this is also completely true.
• 59:09
  Pip Williams: I would start f- I would think about writing and I'd, and I literally would salivate because I was anticipating the coffee.
• 59:20
  Pip Williams: So, so I tricked myself into becoming a writer.
• 59:26
  Pip Williams: Um, yeah.
• 59:27
  Pip Williams: And I'm, I'm as dumb as a dog.
• 59:30
  Pip Williams: Essentially, I'm as stupid as my whippet
• 59:34
  Madeleine Cleary: and maybe that's what we, we just have to associate ourselves with.
• 59:37
  Madeleine Cleary: We are, we are animals, we are creatures, we like rewards, we like treats
• 59:43
  Pip Williams: I know, I know.
• 59:44
  Pip Williams: And I mean, the problem with when once COVID happened, so I wrote Dictionary before COVID, which was easy enough.
• 59:51
  Pip Williams: But then when I was writing Bookbinder, um, and all the coffee shops closed down, I was I didn't know what to do with myself.
• 1:00:00
  Pip Williams: And luckily I'm in South Australia, so we were still allowed to loiter in our car.
• 1:00:05
  Pip Williams: Um, and I would drive to my local coffee shop and put the order in and, and sit in my car right outside the coffee shop, and they'd just come to the window and, and pass me my coffee.
• 1:00:18
  Pip Williams: And I'd sit in my car for three hours outside the coffee shop because it was still the most sociable.
• 1:00:23
  Pip Williams: It-- I love being alone in a crowd, and one of the things I love about writing in cafes is I'm alone in a crowd.
• 1:00:29
  Pip Williams: And the noise is, I think, doesn't hinder me.
• 1:00:32
  Pip Williams: I think it helps.
• 1:00:33
  Pip Williams: It becomes a kind of white noise.
• 1:00:36
  Pip Williams: But, you know, during COVID when we were all so isolated, I'd sit in my car and the most populated place in the whole town was just outside the coffee shop window where everyone was getting their takeaway.
• 1:00:49
  Pip Williams: And so I'd still have the kind of I'd have the noises of people talking because they had to speak louder because they had to be separated by one and a half meters.
• 1:01:00
  Pip Williams: But there was noise, there was movement, there was color.
• 1:01:04
  Pip Williams: And I would sit there for three hours every day and just keep getting takeaways from the coffee shop because I couldn't work in my home.
• 1:01:11
  Pip Williams: I couldn't...
• 1:01:11
  Pip Williams: I've got an office, but I can't, I can't seem to create in the office.
• 1:01:16
  Pip Williams: I can edit in the office, but not
• 1:01:18
  Madeleine Cleary: Isn't that funny, isn't it?
• 1:01:19
  Madeleine Cleary: I, I actually really enjoy riding on trains.
• 1:01:21
  Madeleine Cleary: I find I get I'm very productive on a train, and I think the noise, the, it's the buzz, it's the energy which I associate my office with work, not with
• 1:01:30
  Pip Williams: Yes.
• 1:01:30
  Pip Williams: Yes.
• 1:01:31
  Pip Williams: I think it's the same.
• 1:01:32
  Pip Williams: And even now, I still associate the, the office creates a certain amount of pressure, whereas the coffee shop, there is, there is so much joy for me at a coffee shop, and there's so much joy around in a coffee shop because most people, most, are having a good time.
• 1:01:51
  Pip Williams: They're, they're with friends or they're enjoying their coffee or whatever it is, or they're, they're working often, but they're, like me, it's a, it's a pleasurable place to work.
• 1:02:02
  Pip Williams: And occasionally I overhear someone having an argument or, you know, you can tell there's a, some tough discussion going on.
• 1:02:11
  Pip Williams: Um, and, and to be honest, it's worth stopping.
• 1:02:15
  Pip Williams: Don't tell anyone this.
• 1:02:17
  Pip Williams: It's worth stopping the writing to listen.
• 1:02:22
  Madeleine Cleary: I
• 1:02:22
  Pip Williams: That's work too.
• 1:02:23
  Madeleine Cleary: that naturally, don't we?
• 1:02:24
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 1:02:24
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 1:02:24
  Pip Williams: We do.
• 1:02:25
  Pip Williams: But I just tap away, and honestly, if you saw my screen, it's all gobbledygook, but I'm tapping away so that they think I'm not listening, but I'm listening.
• 1:02:34
  Pip Williams: Um, just because human, because, because human arguments are so, so telling of You know, they're wonderful.
• 1:02:43
  Pip Williams: They're just fantastic.
• 1:02:46
  Madeleine Cleary: So look out, those who like to argue in cafes, for Pip Williams in
• 1:02:49
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 1:02:50
  Pip Williams: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:02:53
  Pip Williams: Don't look over my shoulder.
• 1:02:54
  Pip Williams: I'm writing in code
• 1:02:55
  Madeleine Cleary: that's right.
• 1:02:56
  Madeleine Cleary: That's right.
• 1:02:57
  Madeleine Cleary: Uh, now I heard that The Bookbinder of Jericho is coming to stage, which is so exciting.
• 1:03:02
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, I absolutely loved seeing Dictionary of Lost Wo- Words performed on stage, so
• 1:03:07
  Pip Williams: oh, I'm glad.
• 1:03:08
  Madeleine Cleary: It was brilliant.
• 1:03:09
  Madeleine Cleary: You must be so excited.
• 1:03:11
  Pip Williams: Oh, it's just so surreal and the timing's bizarre because Sydney Theatre Company announced their season, next year's season on Monday.
• 1:03:19
  Pip Williams: Um, and it's just, you know, two weeks before my next novel comes out.
• 1:03:24
  Pip Williams: So I, you know, I, I'm talking about the play now as well, uh, for Bookbinder, as well as the, this new book.
• 1:03:31
  Pip Williams: Um, and it, it feels very surreal, but I feel very, I feel very blessed essentially, because I think the stage production of Dictionary was just so well done and so loved by readers particularly, but also people who weren't readers.
• 1:03:47
  Pip Williams: It was lovely to, um, to meet audience, people who, who were in the audience who've never read any of my books, and they all enjoyed that theater production.
• 1:03:58
  Pip Williams: Um, and it's pretty much the same team who will be, um, making Bookbinder of Jericho, and I think that's really fitting because as you said earlier, these two novels, Dictionary and Bookbinder are, are companion novels.
• 1:04:13
  Pip Williams: I think of them as sisters.
• 1:04:15
  Pip Williams: They kind of enhance each other.
• 1:04:17
  Pip Williams: So I'm really looking forward to seeing, um, how the play, um, is produced.
• 1:04:24
  Pip Williams: And I, I know because it's the same team that these two theater productions will also feel like companion pieces.
• 1:04:32
  Pip Williams: Um, and I'm really looking forward to that.
• 1:04:34
  Madeleine Cleary: Oh, well, lots of things to look forward to, Pip, in the next few months for you.
• 1:04:39
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, we wish you all the best on your tour and the release of The German Ward.
• 1:04:43
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, before we do finish, though, we always ask our guests for their final top tip for writers.
• 1:04:48
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, what is your f- top tip for emerging writers, Pip?
• 1:04:53
  Pip Williams: Well, my top tip is aim for one word a day, truly.
• 1:04:58
  Pip Williams: And, you know, and find couple Find something that you love that's got nothing to do with writing and, and connect it to writing that one word.
• 1:05:08
  Pip Williams: Um, but my other top tip is, is to ignore this Well, my other top tip is to write what you're curious about, not what you know.
• 1:05:17
  Pip Williams: So in all of my books, the things that I've The reason I have been able to spend three years on a book is because I am genuinely interested in the thing that I'm writing about, and I'm interested because I don't know already very much about it.
• 1:05:32
  Pip Williams: And so the research and the, you know, getting to Like I know nothing about art, um, before I wrote this book.
• 1:05:40
  Pip Williams: I'm not an artist.
• 1:05:41
  Pip Williams: I can barely draw.
• 1:05:42
  Pip Williams: Um, and I didn't, you know And, and also writing about love and desire was new for me, and reading about desire and eros and all of that was fascinating and very, um, instructive in terms of writing in general.
• 1:06:02
  Pip Williams: So I think write what you're curious about.
• 1:06:04
  Pip Williams: The things that you write in terms of what you know are actually human nature.
• 1:06:09
  Pip Williams: We all have a We all know about human nature simply because we're human, and we have friends and family and lovers and work colleagues and so on.
• 1:06:20
  Pip Williams: We all have an experience of what it is to be human.
• 1:06:23
  Pip Williams: That's the bits we write about.
• 1:06:26
  Pip Williams: But I think the content of what you're writing, it's much more interesting for you as a writer to write what you're curious about, not, not the thing that you know so much about that you could Yeah.
• 1:06:39
  Pip Williams: Yeah.
• 1:06:40
  Madeleine Cleary: that's an-
• 1:06:40
  Pip Williams: probably my top tip.
• 1:06:41
  Madeleine Cleary: that's excellent.
• 1:06:42
  Madeleine Cleary: Two amazing tips.
• 1:06:43
  Madeleine Cleary: I mean, you've given us so many tips throughout this episode, Pip.
• 1:06:46
  Madeleine Cleary: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:06:49
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, so Pip's latest novel, The German Ward, will be released in Australia by the time that this episode airs.
• 1:06:54
  Madeleine Cleary: Um, and it's a beautiful story of love and memory amidst the tragedy of the First World War, and it's such a beautiful story, so thank you so much, Pip, for joining us.
• 1:07:03
  Pip Williams: Thank you so much for having me, Madeleine.
• 1:07:04
  Pip Williams: It's been so nice.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker: Thank you for listening to another episode of The Book Deal Podcast.
• 1:07:11
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