The books we love best enthral us with characters who jump off the page, a compelling plot, and language that sings.
But it takes a lot of unseen work to produce prose that seems so effortless.
Many of the writers who took part in ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books revealed the nuts and bolts of how they wrote their books, offering insights into their craft, writing processes and how they navigate the publishing industry.
It was a tantalising glimpse behind the scenes, and ABC RN has curated a selection of the best answers.
Dervla McTiernan goes into writing lockdown
Common wisdom divides writers into two categories: plotters, who carefully plan out their narrative, and pantsers, who let the story unfold as they write.
While bestselling crime writer Dervla McTiernan places herself in the plotters’ camp, she acknowledges that this approach has its limits.
“Writing is organic,” the author, whose novels include The Ruin (2018) and What Happened to Nina? (2024), tells ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books.
“You start writing, and the whole plan falls apart because books are stubborn like that; they want to be what they want to be, and it takes a while for you to hear that from the story.”
McTiernan implements a social media blackout as a deadline approaches, even leaving her email inbox unchecked.
“I do nothing but write and write and write right up to the last minute because you’re just trying to get the book as far along as you can, as polished as you can, as sharp as you can,” she says.
“Then it goes to my editor, and I will get a very long, beautifully written compliment sandwich letter, which will say, ‘Dear Dervla, I love your book. It’s amazing. These are the things I loved about it, and here are eight pages about all the things that are wrong with it — but I loved it.'”
Five books in, McTiernan recognises it’s all part of the editing process, but the honest feedback still stings.
“It really does. I’d like to pretend that I’m immune, but I’m not,” she says.
(ABC Perth: Mitch Edgar)
With the edited draft back on her desk, McTiernan begins rewriting. “I will pull it apart second time around; I would quite happily shed 30,000 words,” she says.
“I’m looking for everything I can do to make a story better. It might be there’s not enough scene-setting in this book — you’re not feeling where you are, you’re not seeing the surroundings,” she says.
She’ll do a “scene-setting pass”, picking through the draft, looking for examples of scene descriptions and how she could make them more meaningful or resonant.
At the end of this arduous process, the draft — now in its fourth or fifth iteration — goes back to her editor for copy-editing.
“[The editor] … should just be correcting small errors in the line — so, did you realise that you use the word ‘search’ twice in this paragraph? That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but, actually, it makes a read clunky,” she says.
At this point, McTiernan is — finally — ready to send her novel out into the world.
“It has to be the best book I can write,” she says.
Stuart Turton writes the wrong book first
In his effort to write the best book possible, British author Stuart Turton tells ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books he will “typically write the wrong book first”.
In practice, it means turfing out work that doesn’t hit the mark.
Turton threw away 92,000 words of his debut novel, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle; a 130,000-word version of The Devil and the Dark Water; and the 110,000-word first draft of his latest book, The Last Murder at the End of the World.
While it might seem drastic, Turton doesn’t consider binning an entire draft a waste of time but a necessary step in his writing process.
“I don’t want to feel like there was an idea or a concept or a trick that I didn’t [use],” he says.
Benjamin Stevenson gets every sentence right
You won’t catch Australian author Benjamin Stevenson discarding a 100,000-word first draft.
The author of the hit crime novel Everybody in My Family Has Killed Someone (2022) takes a different approach, writing at a more measured pace and editing as he goes.
He has to be happy with one sentence before he moves onto the next.
“Editing scares me so much that part of the reason I write so slow is because I won’t move forward until everything I’ve done up to that point is, in my eyes, as good as it can be,” he says.
If halfway through the draft, Stevenson realises something isn’t working, he’d rather start over than push through and figure it out at the end in a “big hack and slash” edit.
“My hope is when I get that first draft, it’s already a little bit edited,” he says.
One thing that Stevenson, who also does standup comedy, is happy to cut is jokes.
“I write double the jokes I need, and then I edit them out because I think, at times, brevity is a good partner to wit,” he says.
Jock Serong thinks about the shape of reading
Jock Serong, whose latest book, The Settlement (2022), is the final instalment in a trilogy of historical novels set in the Bass Strait, thinks about reading and writing in geometrical terms.
He tells ABC RN’s The Book Show’s Sarah L’Estrange about his theory:
“There’s this fascinating shape that reading makes — if you’re holding a physical book in your hands, you’re reading pages left to right and from top to bottom, and you’re flipping pages from your right hand to your left hand, and the book moves physically through your hands in that way.
“But as a writer, you’re not subject to those parameters at all. What I imagine myself doing … [is] working in spirals, so that you’re creating worlds and characters and atmosphere, and you’re trying to wind into a point that’s tight and hits really hard, and that’s not remotely square. It’s very, very hard to get it. You know when you’ve done it, and you don’t know why it worked. But that’s the creative aim.”
Susannah Begbie isn’t afraid to ask for help
Susannah Begbie was working as a locum GP on the west coast of Ireland when she got bitten by the writing bug.
Begbie — whose debut novel The Deed was published in May — would fill her letters home with descriptions of the beautiful landscape and retellings of the entertaining stories she heard daily.
“I just loved that process of turning an event or an occurrence into a narrated form,” she tells ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books.
Back in Australia in 2006, Begbie enrolled in a writing course at the University of Canberra and eventually started work on a novel. It took her 10 years to finish.
In 2021, her hard work paid off when she won the Richell Prize, which grants $10,000 and a 12-month mentorship to an unpublished writer.
While it’s not a requirement of the prize, Begbie submitted a completed manuscript of The Deed.
“I’d love it to be a story where I’d only written the first three chapters and had to keep going. But in fact, I had written the whole novel, and I’d already had it edited by a freelance editor,” she says.
Begbie also had external help in writing the synopsis and choosing the title.
“When you’re submitting to something like this, and you’ve never done it, you’ve got no idea what those things look like,” Begbie says.
Her advice is to follow her example and get help. “Get people to give you a hand with it,” she says.
The reward was worth the effort for Begbie, who signed a two-book deal with Hachette Australia after receiving the prize.
“The impact of winning the Richell Prize is that I have a writing career, and before the Richell Prize, I did not, so [the impact is] substantial.”
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