Six questions for Margo Lanagan
JA
July 08
Margo Lanagan is the author of three collections of short stories – White Time, Black Juice and Red Spikes. She has won numerous awards and prizes, including two World Fantasy Awards, as well as the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Her latest novel, Tender Morsels, has been published to popular and critical acclaim by Allen & Unwin. Spike sat down with her over the digital divide to find out about the Grimm’s Fairytales, looking sideways at a work-in-progress, and her other life as a technical writer.
What’s a typical day spent writing like for you? Can you describe your routine?
I start as early as possible – before breakfast, before anyone else in the house gets up. I get in a couple of hours at the kitchen table then, if I can. Lately, with the mornings being so coooold, this is next to impossible. Still, if it’s not a day job day, I go to the Writing Room (two blocks from home) and get started as soon as I can after breakfast. I take hard, crunchy things to eat (carrots, Vita Weats) – much better than grinding my teeth down to stumps as I work, or chewing my lip to shreds.
I write my first drafts in longhand, because it feels more natural, less worky – also to delay the onset of RSI and other computer-usage-generated injuries. I can generally go for 4-6 hours before the brain-fade lets me know I’m done for the day. When I’m in full flow I aim for 10 x A4 pages, which is 3000-3500 words.
Afternoons and evenings are for exercise, drinking, slobbing, socialising, typing up manuscripts, emailing, answering interview questions and generally trying to be an organised sort of person. Sometimes I even read! But mostly my reading-time (leisure, as opposed to obligatory reading of several kinds) is restricted to 6 x 15-minute train trips a week, and a bit of a spell before sleep at night. I don’t have any particular rules about the books I’m not allowed to read when I’m in the middle of a novel. At the moment I’m reading ‘The Slap’ (like every other woman on the train-commute) and Barry Jonsberg’s ‘The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull’.
If we made a surprise visit to your workspace, what would we see?
~ Looks around ~
A nice neat writing table, with birthday cards on it for cheer, but otherwise ONLY the things I need for this story I’m working on – a larger, much messier table for writing-related scrapbooking, which I haven’t done for weeks, although I’ve been converting people to it by the dozen at the workshops I’ve been running. Pile of literary magazines (NOT the Meanjins – they’re at home by the bedside, some of them awaiting closer attention). A wall of shelves, half-storage, half-work-related; boxes of books across the top, reference books farther down, piles of manuscript with post-its sticking out all over them. A mantelpiece full of photos, award plaques, souvenir-y stuff. A filing cabinet with the World Fantasy Award bust on it, draped with a shell necklace that was draped on ME when I was in India. A wonderfully bad painting on the wall, of a cat catching a bird, which I made my son buy for me for Christmas, from a charity shop, for $10, because it tickled my fancy. A green rug, where I do my Pilates (not often enough). A much-too-comfortable couch, where I nap (too often). A chest, containing pillows, and a sleeping-bag-cum-quilt, for napping (hidden away so as not to tempt me, but sometimes o-so-necessary!). Tiny stereo speakers. A fan heater (going full bore, this time of year). Doors out to the kitchenette, louvred windows there, opening into the trees. Me, on the couch, typing and peering over my spectacles at you.
Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’? How does this help/hinder your writing?
Oh, I have a day job, three days a week technical writing, currently for the University of NSW. It helps because it keeps a trickle of money coming in; also because it stops me climbing into my own navel and disappearing totally inside myself and my own obsessions. It makes me converse with more normal people. It makes me go on trains and buses and acknowledge that there are other people in the world, with lives that are different from, but just as important as, my own. And many of those lives don’t have books in them; or they have enormous textbooks in them (MACROECONOMICS or MUSIC AND EMOTION) rather than novels or short-story anthologies.
On the other hand (whine), it takes up a lot of TIME, you know? When I could be writing works of genius. And completing them so much faster. Or so I tell myself.
However, day job work tends to make me more efficient – and possibly, even, more productive, I hate to admit – because I have to plan, and organise myself around an already-given shape to the day. If I start with nothing, I can just faff away whole weeks looking sideways at the work-in-progress and not doing anything about it.
How did the idea for Tender Morsels start for you?
It came from a very tight deadline, a confidence crash, and a hurried read through a few Grimm’s fairytales. You can read about the genesis here, and here, and here.
Do you keep a writer’s notebook (or equivalent)? If so, can we take a peek – what’s something you jotted down recently?
“Perhaps she is any woman propelled by rage and disappointment into the radiant light of new illusions.” Guardian review of Barbara Trapido’s ‘Sex and Stravinsky’ (Helen Dunmore)
General Pants, 197 Pitt St.
“‘Tell me about it,’ said George, meaning the opposite.
On the side of a van: “coir jute seagrass sisal wool”
Finally, what’s the last book that you loved, and why?
Kate de Goldi’s ‘The 10 PM Question’ (Longacre Press, Dunedin, 2008), a YA novel about a boy (not just any old boy – Frankie Parsons) who worries about everything, including his mother, who is pretty much imprisoned in the house by the state of her own mind. Kate’s characters are like Ursula Dubosarsky’s, and like US author Anne Tyler’s – sharply, kindly, surprisingly, truthfully, beautifully well-drawn. Life is never easy for them, and they are just trying terribly hard to make a good go of getting comfortably through each day. The story is funny, and awkward, and sweet, and then towards the end it just jumps in and minces your heart in your chest. I’m not a big weeper over books, but I had to take a couple of nights off, then steel myself for an hour or so’s blowing and snorting to get to the end of this book.
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Comments
08 Jul 10 at 15:42
Your Writing Room sounds divine, colour me envious of a space purpose-built for writing.
Great interview, thank you both! (:
...10 Jul 10 at 11:59
Not purpose-built, Phill – just purpose-rented. But it is divine, certainly.
...27 Sep 10 at 8:56
Are you the Margaret Lanagan who was writing a history of women pilots, “Spirit & Dash” in 1991? If so, can you please tell me where I can read this. I am an aviation historian, and my book is “First Females Above Australia – first 100 years of Australian women pilot firsts”. I am interested in your aviation background. Please let me know. Thank you.
...27 Sep 10 at 8:59
Are you the Margaret Lanagan who was writing a history of women pilots, “Spirit & Dash” in 1991? If so, can you please tell me where I can read this. I am an aviation historian, and my book is “First Females Above Australia – first 100 years of Australian women pilot firsts”. I am interested in your aviation background. Please let me know. Thank you.
...24 Nov 10 at 19:45
Hello there, Rosemary – I’m sorry to take so long getting back to you; I didn’t realise your comment was here!
I was researching a history of women pilots for a while, but in the end it didn’t come to anything – bringing up children and inviting a mortgage into my life took over, and then fiction writing. I was coming at it more from a historian’s point of view than an aviator’s. Congratulations on sticking with your own book – I’m very glad someone has published the story!
All the best, Margo.
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