I went to a talk by Australian author Kate Grenville. 
She was such an eloquent speaker with a soft caramel voice that melted in the ear, I believed every word she said. I absolutely adored her Orange prize winning book, The Idea of Perfection, and I often use her writing exercises for my workshops.
What spoke to me most, of all the things she said, was that her current book, Sarah Thornhill, went to 23 drafts! The only reason it wasn’t more was the fact that the publishers were becoming pretty desperate for it. That news should be encouraging to most writers I should think, and she believes the first draft is always the hardest as the rest is just revision. Here is a line from her new book which jumped out, with its beautiful simplicity, whilst she was reading.
…white birds roosting in trees like so much washing.
Here are some quotes I noted down as she talked about her new book and writing in general.
In writing about an illiterate, rural, working class woman: ”The art was to conceal the art.”
She finds “ the world a fascinating place.” And, in researching her plots, she must try “walking on the spot, connecting to the place. I found a little piece of blue and white china. It could have been her tea cup.”
She likes misfits. “The surface is never the story. What is the reality beneath it? All of humanity is in all of us.”
On her schooldays. “I was short-sighted. The world was blurred to me, but a book was vivid.”
Of coming to Britain. “ London freed me. I was in that kind of hypersensitive, skinless place. I wrote lots of short stories, lots of unpublished novels, trying to work out who I was.”
On writing. “ The whole creative moment is absolutely fascinating. You have to leave behind everything you are taught at school all that clever-clever stuff. You need to tune into the other side of the brain and be humbly receptive and not try to ride it like a horse. It is the most incredibly enriching thing in life and you make discoveries you can only make in writing.”
