Realisation

Friday’s events offered up many fruits for gleeful pondering, but one in particular was precisely to my taste. The event came at the end of the day, at which point my body was beginning to curl into itself with exhaustion, but throughout ‘Writing Across Genres: David Malouf, Olga Lorenzo and Tony Birch’ I flickered back to life as the authors spoke about the writing process and the result of sending a piece of work out into the public sphere.

All three writers reflected thoughtfully and informatively upon the act of writing. Olga Lorenzo meditated upon the impact her journalist background had upon her fiction writing, so much so that her first draft of a novel was written almost entirely in ‘journalese’. Olga suggested that the phenomenon of writing and reading can be explained by the fact that “we are desperately seeking to step outside our skin and connect with somebody else”.

Tony Birch expressed that his natural affinity is with the short story as opposed to the novel. He explained how his writing process begins with a story: “I think when you know [you have something to write] is when you can’t shake an idea, it keeps tapping you on the shoulder”.

 

David Malouf proposed that “the novel’s satisfaction is that it can really create a version of an experience”. He spoke about the moment a reader latches onto a particular writer, often as a result of the former recognising in the latter something they haven’t seen in any other writer before. He conceptualised the relationship between reader and writer as a contract, by which “the readers come on board” and the writer is entrusted with the task of faithfully guiding them through the story. It was like a spoken realisation of that thought I’d carried into this festival – to hear the reading experience articulated in the terms in which I’d been thinking of them was almost surreal.