It’s interesting, after days of listening to various writers talk, to watch certain themes emerge – particularly the ones you’d least expect. One surprising thread of conversation across the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers’ Festivals was the mixed blessing of finding a niche as a writer.

Kathy Charles, author of Hollywood Ending (and former entertainment publicist) wrote a ten-point manifesto on branding yourself as an author in the lead-up to the publication of her novel. One of the things she advocated was to find your niche by becoming ‘that writer who …’ (She positioned herself as ‘that writer who writes about dead celebrities’.) During our MWF session, ‘The Author as Brand’, she reflected that, with experience, this hasn’t always been a helpful strategy. Yes, she’s had lots of publicity, helped by a ‘sexy’ hook. (Note: in media language, ‘sexy’ has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with pulling power.) But she’s also found herself in the experience, more than once, of wanting to talk about her novel, but instead being called to talk about celebrities – reflecting on dead icons or burnt-out starlets. And while Kathy has the publicity know-how to gently steer the topic around to her book (or at the very least name-drop it), it’s frustrating. She also half-rued the fact that she’s become ‘the author who writes about branding’, meaning her MWF session was on marketing rather than the book.

James P. Othmer, also on the panel, agreed wholeheartedly. He spent twenty years working in advertising, working his way up to creative director at New York’s Young & Rubicam – all the while dreaming of writing novels. After a lot of hard work and several stumbles along the way (including when his agent told him she was quitting to go to clown school), he finally got a publishing contract for his first novel, The Futurist, and quit the day job he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with. Perth’s UWA Press bought the rights to James’s second novel, Holy Water, because they loved it. The rights to Adland, his memoir of his time in advertising (and a look at where it’s going) were, he indicated, an afterthought. Yet, in all his interviews and at most of his festival sessions – both Melbourne and Brisbane – he was asked to talk about advertising. His publisher, he said, was a little frustrated, as they really love and want to push Holy Water.

In Brisbane, during a panel on America and how it influenced the writing of the panellists, James (who was joined by Joe Bageant and John Birmingham) said, with a sigh, ‘this is the first time here I’ve had a chance to talk about something other than Don Draper and The Gruen Transfer’ – a comment he repeated a few times during his session. (Making me cringe, as I’d excitedly talked to him on the way to our session about having just read the 1960s adman memoir that Mad Men was based on, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbour, and how much I’d enjoyed reading it in conjunction with his book. James was a perfect gentleman about it, but it was clear that he was weary of the whole subject.)

In a MWF session on young people and the media, Emily Maguire talked about the fact that she is known as a writer on young women and sex, thanks to her phenomenally successful non-fiction book Princesses and Pornstars and its young adult version, Your Skirt’s Too Short. This is, of course, fantastic, she said – she’s really interested in this subject and loves writing about it. And she gets lots of commissions as a result. But the flipside is that she’s interested in all kinds of topics, but the only subjects editors want her to write about fall under this umbrella subject. She’s pitched other stories to editors, but they never seem to be picked up. She acknowledged it’s not the worst problem to have – but it’s frustrating for a writer trying to move into other areas. Kathy Charles made the same point during ‘The Author as Brand’, saying she hadn’t thought about the fact that it might be hard to follow her own interests as a writer as a result of deliberately branding herself as a certain kind of writer.

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1. Keep your notebook within arm’s reach at all times

On Saturday, KYD were hosting an afternoon of 15-minute events at Magazine – a Yarra-side shipping container, done up like a Fitzroy bar. One of those events featured Estelle Tang (our online editor) interviewing Ben Law and Michaela McGuire on humour writing. Just seconds into the talk, I was itching for my notebook, but had left it at the front of the stage and couldn’t get it without being excruciatingly rude (and ruining the video of the event being recorded by Ben’s mum, who was sitting next to me in the front row). So, I simply tried to commit two crucial moments to memory, scribbling them down post-session.

1) Asked about how she’d developed her ‘voice’ as a humour writer and if she’d consciously constructed it, Michaela said, ‘My style is dry and scathing, so I find if I’m a jerk about myself, it’s okay to be a jerk about other people.’ This rang true: it’s a golden rule of likeable humour writing, but she put it perfectly.

2) Ben Law, responding to a question about how he manages to write about people he knows without ruining relationships, quoted David Sedaris’s advice to him during an interview – Sedaris had said he tries to write about people who don’t read. This made the crowd laugh, as intended, but there’s a grain of wisdom in it too. (I guess I liked it because I’ve been guilty of applying that handy maxim myself.)

On a more serious note, Law added that he allows his family to vet his writing about them, and admitted he was lucky, as a writer, that they are generally pretty accommodating. He also said that even though his writing is very revealing – including writing about his mother’s descriptions of childbirth and what it does to a woman’s vagina – and it may seem that he has no boundaries, he does in fact have quite careful boundaries, with certain things he doesn’t say about his family and their experiences, things they want to keep private. I thought this was a really interesting point, and one I’ve heard before from renowned autobiographical writers – that good writing in this genre has the illusion of no boundaries, but is generally really frankness within particular (personally negotiated or judged) boundaries.

2. Never, ever categorise a gathering of fiction writers who use humour in their work as ‘Comic Fiction’. Or they will rebel.

Tony Wilson, Marie Munkarra, Andrew Humphreys, David Musgrave and Peter Rose made it abundantly clear during their session that they not only hated its title, ‘Comic Fiction’, they felt insulted by it. As I took my seat, a few minutes late, they were taking it in turns to talk about why they were unhappy. ‘You think comic fiction, you think “funny, and that’s all it is”,’ said Andrew Humphreys. ‘You don’t want to be seen as somebody who’s just trying to make people laugh.’ Tony Wilson said that as a writer who writes humour, he often ‘feels bludgeoned’, like he’s not being taken seriously as a writer, though he takes his work just as seriously as any other writer. ‘All of us would say we’re writing satirical fiction,’ he said, and the panel generally agreed they would’ve been happy if the panel was titled, ‘Satirical Fiction’. Andrew Humphreys (who said he writes ‘dark comic fiction’) joked in response to an audience member who asked what the authors would like their session to be called, that it would be, ‘Insecure Writers About Comedy Who Want to Be Taken Seriously’.

It was, despite the title fracas, a really interesting session, with a range of thoughts on using humour and fiction – and some interesting reflections on the role of humour by some of literature’s greats. Andrew Humphreys and Peter Rose admired Evelyn Waugh, particularly Scoop, and Humphreys controversially called Brideshead Revisited ‘Waugh’s worst book’. Rose said that in the modern age, ‘too much categorisation goes on’ and pointed out that ‘a strong pulse of humour’ runs through the works of many classic writers. Talking about whether they use autobiography in their work, Humphreys said ‘no one wanted to publish’ the most autobiographical book he’d ever written – the reason given was that the characters were ‘so horribly unlikeable’. Since then, he’s steered away from autobiography in his work.

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The Melbourne Writers Festival kicks off today. And if you see an author or publisher looking grey this morning, it’s likely because they stayed too late, drank too much or both at last night’s Text Publishing party, an annual pre-MWF tradition.

KYD editor Rebecca Starford left early to read over her questions for an interview with DBC Pierre today (for KYD Issue 3). Which led to a wine-fuelled chat about interview techniques, and more specifically, Robert Coleman’s interview with Bret Easton Ellis for Three Thousand, which is set to become a cult classic of journalism, sort of in the ‘so bad it’s good’ school. And no, I’m not being mean – Coleman freely admits it. And he’s a very good sport indeed to have published the interview, in which Easton Ellis, after having busted him for not really knowing what he’s talking about, proceeds to (very amiably) ‘teach [him] a lesson’ and turns the tables on him, becoming the interviewer. Despite not having researched his interview, he’s obviously a smart guy – and canny enough to know that this trainwreck of a profile is also a compelling read.

B – Be yourself, be your unclever self. Why can’t you just let go of the irony!? Let go of the ‘I’m with Bret Easton Ellis’ kind of vibe?

R – Okay, here we go … I’m going to put something out there.

B – Put it out there…

R – I haven’t read too much of your stuff.

B – GOOD! Finally! Finally, a journalist tells me this! Do you know how much more relaxed that makes me? Good!

R – Okay so I’ve read about three-quarters of Less Than Zero and I’ve watched American Psycho…

B – That’s your preparation?

R – Yep. So I’m not even close to the gushing.

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Melbourne bookseller Leanne Hall won last year’s Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for her beguiling debut novel, This is Shyness. KYD associate editor Jo Case spoke to her on the eve of the book’s publication – about the book, the tenuous boundary between adult and young adult writing, the business of being a teenager, and her writing process.

J: Leanne, your writing in both your short stories and books is often realist in style but also has those fantasy elements which veer into the eerie. I wonder what it is about that kind of writing style that attracts you?

L: I don’t think it attracts me – I think it’s just the way I write. If I try to write straight stories, those other elements just creep in and I almost don’t identify them as being unusual or magical or slightly odd elements. To me they’re just in there, and it’s only when people read it that I realise that there are other strange things in there – and I’m like, but that’s not strange at all. It’s just there.

Honestly, when I do write my stories, I feel like I’m writing something really real. I feel like it’s just reality that I’m representing – which of course it isn’t. I don’t know what that says about my brain or what my everyday life is like.

J: Yeah, in everyday life you just walk into another suburb and it’s all dark.

L: It says a lot about me, doesn’t it? Like, that’s just normal, that’s how I experience the world.

J: No, I think it says something about your storytelling style. You’ve obviously written both adult and YA stories. Do you have a preference? And when you sit down and write, do you know which it’s going to be? Or does it just come out that way?

L: I think it comes out that way. I guess all my short stories have been adult in nature, but that just says a lot about the venues for short story publication in Australia. There’s very few anthologies or magazines or journals that will take stories that have a children’s or YA audience, so your only outlet are things for adults, so that’s what I write. But really it’s a matter of what you call it or how your present it. I mean, some teenagers could read some of my short stories, and that could seem like a story for them, but it’s just in a publication that adults are reading. Read more

In the current Overland, Cate Kennedy has published a fascinating essay on the distractions of the internet – and the various ways it impedes creative writing. It encourages a lack of inhibition – and worse, a lack of reflection and analysis. It privileges currency over depth. The rush to get words and thoughts published online makes them less considered, less polished.

She quotes Wells Tower, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith warning of the dangers of the internet – all recommending that fiction writers work at a computer not connected. Wells Tower says:

‘As writers … we need to care hugely about each word, each syllable, its valences, its music, and we need readers who care enough and read closely enough to be susceptible to our art. I think the internet is noxious to this sort of aesthetic transaction.’

I see the wisdom in all of this. I agree with all these observations. And yet. My own experience offers a twist on this cautionary tale – not a rebuttal, but another dimension to what the internet can offer creative writers, beyond fact-checking and news gathering. Read more