Excerpts from the interview:
“By 1997 or so I'd written 14 published books -- nine teenage romances, three junior novels, and two YA novels -- and I still hadn't two pennies to rub together, so I had to start thinking whether I wanted to keep writing for this Australian market. What could I write that would fit a larger one, with some aim of a future time when it might be possible to make a living out of writing? The international genres that I felt I could write for were crime, science fiction, romance, or fantasy. Crime fiction has never done it for me, and I wasn't sure I approved of romance any more! So I cast about in science fiction and fantasy. I got a doorstop fantasy, first of a long series, very attractive cover, at the library -- I chewed through the first third or so before I couldn't go on because it was so boring and badly written -- what a waste, I thought! Perfectly good story material turned from gold into straw! So since then my path's been clearer: redeeming some of the clichés of fantasy, and throwing in a little sci-fi and horror on the side.”
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“Short stories are a very different way of writing from novels. For me these are serious forms of escape, momentary but intense forms of escape. They take me right away from the world! I have a nice long commute to my day job, and I wrote all the stories in Black Juice on the train. I did not want to be going where I was going during the day, so I just made sure I was somewhere else completely for that 45 minutes to and from work. Whereas with a novel you have got to sit by yourself in a room, undisturbed for hours and hours, juggling the whole thing and keeping it together, doing a lot of brainwork and continuity.”
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“Some people say 'Singing My Sister Down' sounds Aboriginal, but it was more African than anything else. The genesis was a documentary I saw on our version of PBS, the Special Broadcasting Service, part of the 'Global Village' series (originally French documentaries). This one was about some ex-French colony in Africa where there were these big tar pits right on the edge of town, and sometimes people would drunkenly drive their trucks into the tar, not realize it, and go down. There was also the image that in winter you go there to warm your feet, but you can't stand there too long because you sink. While I was watching, I was thinking of human uses to which that tar pit might be put. You could let all sorts of problems disappear into that pit, couldn't you? And it all went from there. I can honestly say I don't know where its power came from. I know that I cried every time I revised it and proofread it, and I still don't have any armor against that moment when the boy comes out of the pit into his mother's arms. It's not a story I could give a public reading of.”
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“The longer I write, the richer the world becomes with things to write about. You look at young writers and there's that terrible franticness about them: 'I've got this idea, and I mustn't spend it because there may not be another one -- I'll just hang onto this one and work all the juice out of it!' But there are hundreds, thousands, millions of ideas! Everything you notice. In a lot of everyday human life, in small happenings, small and very banal conversations and interactions, there can come something very profound. Some clarifying remark, some reaction that contains the entire character of the person who's talking, or blows open to view some whole unsuspected area of their personality. Just quickly -- and then it goes back to banal. As a writer you have to learn to pin those moments down. When you're writing a lot of short stories, you get better at grabbing them out of the world. You learn to make the right notes, so that you catch the essence of the story, so that when you read it again the idea reinflates itself in your mind.”
