Author Margo Lanagan chats to the Sydney Writers' Centre

Sydney based Margo Lanagan is author of Red Spikes - a collection of short stories which are read by BOTH adults and teenagers.

It is her third book of short stories. Her second collection, Black Juice, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction and the Ditmar Award for Best Collection and was an honour book in the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Margo has also recently secured a six-figure deal with the prestigious Knopf imprint of Random House for North American English language rights to Red Spikes.

I'm thrilled that Margo took time to chat to us.

Valerie: Red Spikes is a collection of short stories. Can you describe your experiences writing shorter pieces versus getting your teeth into a longer novel? Which do you prefer and why?

Margo: Well, it's a choice between surfing and climbing a mountain. Short stories are perfect when I'm trying to fit writing into a busy life with family, work (as a contract technical writer), writerly-but-not-exactly-writing commitments.

I take a single story idea, poke at it so that it squirms and changes shape in some way, and in a couple of days I can have what I would call a short story.

Novels - a big sigh here, because I've been trying to finish a novel to my satisfaction for about ten years now - well, novels need a more methodical approach, but somehow while I'm working on getting the wordcount up, I have to hold my mind in a particular way that is very similar to the way it hums along when a short story is happening.

The writer George Saunders talks about how, if he plans a story, it tends to die on him, to become pretty much what you'd expect from the opening scene, and I'm a bit the same way.

There has to be a feeling that I'm discovering something along the way. This is just a lot harder to sustain over months of writing on the same story; it's a lot harder to surprise myself.

I wrote a couple of full-length young adult novels that were published and did quite well in the mid-1990s, so clearly I can do it.

Right now I'm trying to work out how to create a novel from the kinds of twists of the imagination that my story collections White Time, Black Juice and Red Spikes came out of.

Valerie: When did you know you wanted to be a full time author and what steps did you take to make that a reality?

Margo: I knew I wanted to be a published author of stories at around age 28 - up until then I'd had poetry published but no prose. I was working as a freelance editor at the time, when a publishing friend suggested I have a go at writing for a series of teen romances her company was publishing, and I thought that would be a useful apprenticeship, because really I had no idea how a person could fill u 100 pages with story.

(That said, I must have had this book-writing intention earlier, because I remember that the main reason I decided to do honours at university was so that someone would make me write a book-length thesis; I knew I wouldn't get that much writing done unless I had someone cracking the whip!)

I wrote about 12 of those romances, 10 of which were published, by which time I was dead sick of that mini-genre and had written my first junior novel, Wildgame, in my head.

I pretty much transcribed that in two weeks, and then I wrote another junior novel, The Tankermen, then the two YA novels, The Best Thing and Touching Earth Gently then a third junior novel, Walking Through Albert, before deciding that I would try a genre (fantasy) where an Australian setting didn't stop my stories from travelling overseas, because otherwise I was never going to make a living from this writing business.

The short story collections are a form of relief from face-to-face tackling of the writing of fantasy novels. They also *are* that novel, in a fragmentary form.

I think, because I've been having so much frustration with novels, I make the short stories carry more of a load than they otherwise would - they have to say everything for me; I'm not reserving my main point, my main statement, for a bigger work.

As for the 'full-time' part of your question - I've had spells where I've written full-time, and I feel a bit ambiguous about it. I think I'm actually better organised when I have to fit the writing in around other things - when I have full weeks to fill with it, my timetable loses shape very easily.

I guess I'm still trying to be a grown-up about this, instead of relying on external structures to keep me on track!

Valerie: What is the most challenging part of the writing process for you?

Margo: I think probably learning not to stick my big beak in and force a story to go in a particular direction has been hard for me. David Malouf recently talked in interviews about stories that emerge like forces of nature versus stories that, you can feel when you read them, are willed into being, and I think I've been doing a lot of fruitless willing in the last decade.

I really wanted to write big books, or series of small ones, and I think letting that desired shape be the guiding principle rather than seeing what came out of me of its own volition was not a good idea.

Just relaxing and letting it happen, instead of hovering over the writing and trying anxiously to get all its mechanical parts in order, would have been a better idea.

Valerie: What is the most exhilarating or satisfying part of the process?

Margo: Exhilarating - probably three-quarters of the way through a story when I have sort-of an idea how it's going to come to a head, but I'm not quite sure how it's going to get there. When I say to myself, 'Okay, I won't finish this now, at the end of the day when I'm a bit tired, I'll come at it fresh tomorrow morning and really *enjoy* the finale.'

Carrying around the knowledge of the nearly-finished successful story with all its possibilities still a little open - that's exhilarating. Any time the writing is flowing is exhilarating, any time the pages are building up.

For satisfaction, there's nothing like having done all you can and made the story the best you can make it, sitting there with a manuscript covered with the final corrections and knowing you got that out, you didn't cramp that force-of-nature's style. You've trimmed where it needed to be trimmed, you've plumped it up where it needed a little more information, you've made all the woolly bits clear, and now the thing can go out into the world; you're comfortable that it does what you intended.

Valerie: How were the stories in Red Spikes conceived (or what were they inspired by)?

Margo: There was no one thing that started them off. I've tried to nail down the little story-triggers that I could remember, in the Acknowledgments at the back of the book, but they are really just the hooks that pull up deeper things from my subconscious, which are really what move the stories along.

There's perhaps more sharing of elements than in the previous collections - gods and religious impulses, babies and their care, dirt and bodiliness - but that's something I look back at and notice, rather than something that speaks of what inspired them.

When a story starts for me, it's quite formless; there'll be some small thing that I'm holding in my mind - like my neighbour's cat coming back after being missing for months - that I know is the key to a knot of thoughts and feelings that the story will partly undo.

When I lose my way, going back to that small thing makes it possible to go on, or to work out at which point I lost the connection. Almost literally there's a gut feeling, the thought, 'This is going to be the next story', and the remark or image that provided the trigger (which can look very insignificant from the outside) and that's about as articulate as my inspiration gets.

Valerie: What would your advice be to aspiring authors who are reading this on how to improve their writing and how to get noticed/published?

Margo: Work reasonably consistently on both writing and reading. Remove as much of your ego from the writing equation as you can, without stopping writing. Be patient. The cream will rise, but
there has to BE cream in the first place; if it isn't rising, there's a chance it's not cream yet.