Did you always know you were going to be a writer?No, I didn’t. It never really occurred to me. I sort of fell into it.
Was it hard for you to find a publisher when you first started out?
No, it wasn’t. And I feel embarrassed whenever I say that, because usually it is quite difficult to get a book published. I was in the right place at the right time. In 1997 when I was writing up my Ph.D thesis about New Zealand Vietnam veterans, my supervisor suggested I send some chapters off to see if any publishers were interested. HodderMoaBeckett were; the timing was very good as ‘Parade 98’, the unofficial welcome home for Vietnam veterans, was coming up in June 1998, which meant guaranteed sales. After that I was approached by a lovely man called Ian Watt at HarperCollins NZ who was looking for someone to research and write a book about the impact of Agent Orange on children of New Zealand Vietnam veterans. That book was called Who’ll Stop the Rain.
While I was working on that, I was also working at the Waikato Times as their librarian (I’m not a trained librarian – the job was putting papers away and updating the database with yesterday’s stories) and somehow I ended up writing a regular opinion column and some feature articles. Though I’m not a trained journalist either. But it gave me the confidence I suppose to have a go at fiction, and I started writing Tamar. About a year later I asked Ian Watt if he would look at the manuscript, and, after a bit of a re-write, it was accepted. And I’ve written for HarperCollins NZ ever since.
Where do you get your ideas from?
Well, like everyone else’s ideas, they come out of my head, but most of mine are generated by historical events. Then I think about what it would be like for ordinary people to be caught up in that particular event, and it goes from there. So the skeleton of the story is always real history, and the flesh that fills it out is fiction, to use a slightly gross metaphor.
Do you think you’ll ever run out of ideas?
I doubt it. I hope not.
Do you do a lot of research for your books?
Yes, because the storylines depend on it. But being a historian I thoroughly enjoy the research, so it’s never a problem or a chore.
You say that your books are always historically accurate. Are they really?
I do the best I can to get it right using what’s available, whether it’s primary or secondary sources, oral testimony, site visits or anything else. But perception and memory are as individual as the people who own them, primary and secondary sources almost always have agendas of some sort, and landscapes change over time. History is a very fluid and inexact science. To put it very simply, not everyone, past or present, is going to agree on what it was like, why it happened, or even sometimes when or where it happened. And I do write fiction – only the bones of my books are based on real history. Even I forget this sometimes and get bogged down in actual facts.
Do you find it easy to write?
No. While I do have days when the ideas and words fly out faster than I can type, they’re few and sometimes frighteningly far between. Often I have to push myself to write anything, which is odd, as I like to write. At the end of every day I make notes about what I’ll be writing the following day, which helps, but sometimes it’s extremely difficult to get my bum to stay on my office chair. It’s a momentum thing, I think. When I’m on a roll, it’s great, but if I have to stop for anything, I find it hard to get started again. And, believe me, in life there are quite often things that have to be stopped for.
Do you have the whole story in your head before you start?
I always have the opening scene, and the final scene, but often not the middle – which, unfortunately, is the bulk of the book. This is where I always get stuck, and get the DREADED WRITER’S BLOCK.
What is writer’s block?
I know what it is, but I don’t know why it happens. It’s quite soul-destroying. It makes me check my emails every ten minutes, look up stuff on the internet I don’t need to know, check the word counter when I know I haven’t typed anything new, even do housework. It makes me go shopping, get my highlights redone when they don’t need it, drive around town pricing washing machines though I don’t want to buy one, not get out of bed until lunchtime, buy five fashion magazines and spend all day reading them, spend money I don’t have…
And when I can’t stand it any more, when I’m having anxiety attacks and can’t sleep because my deadline is racing closer and closer, I will absolutely force myself to write a few words, then a line, then another one until I’ve done a paragraph, then a page, and so on. And if this fails, I rearrange my office and turn my desk around. That works, but don’t ask me why. And it only works after everything else hasn’t.
You’ve written books set in both the 1800s and the 1950s. Which is your favourite time period?
I have to say it’s the 1950s, because New Zealand society was changing so much – we were developing into what I see as ‘modern New Zealanders’, and a lot of people who read my books can remember back to that time, which makes it quite rewarding to write about. And easier to research, as there are usually ‘eye witnesses’ still about whom I can grill about what living in that era was like. That really helps me to get an idea of the ‘New Zealandness’ of the time. Naturally I’m not old enough to have experienced it myself. Well, only as a nappy-clad infant at the end of the decade.
But there’s a lot to be said for writing about the nineteenth century, as, after all, what happened then formed us as New Zealanders. I also find the interaction between Maori and Pakeha endlessly fascinating, and something which obviously still has repercussions today.
What do you like to read?
I’m a bit of a crime fan, so I read a fair bit of that. Kate Atkinson is my latest ‘find’ – her more recent novels are witty, clever mysteries intertwined with family drama. I also like Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby series – extremely dry, observant and entertaining. Mark Billingham and Stuart MacBride are also favourites – dark and gritty but funny – plus Minette Walters (especially her earlier novels), Elizabeth George and Laura Lippman. For tales with an eerie Celtic flavour you can’t go past Phil Rickman, particularly his Merrily Watkins mysteries. For humour I like Marian Keyes, Janet Evanovich and Jilly Cooper (odd mix, I know), and also Laurie Graham – so sharp! And for horror I’m a Stephen King fan. Strangely, I don’t actually read that much historical fiction, though Charlotte Bingham writes a good one, and I love Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John series. And I like Roddy Doyle. I read about three novels a week so I could go on, b ut I won’t.
Who is your favourite author?
Pat Barker. She wrote Union Street and The Century’s Daughter (aka Lisa’s England), in my opinion both amazing novels, and the brilliant but not very cheerful Regeneration trilogy.
Can you make a living being a fiction writer in New Zealand?
It depends on where you sell your books. If you can sell a decent number overseas you could do reasonably well. If you only sell them in New Zealand, and even if they sell well, you’ll make less money because the market is much smaller. The answer is, you can make sort of a living, but you can’t pay a mortgage with it, or run a household, or raise kids on it.
Are there any questions you don’t like being asked?
Yes, when someone discovers that I write books and they go, ‘Do you? Would I have read any?’ Well, how would I know what books someone has read and what they haven’t?