Tomorrow

I still have the yellow sheets of legal-pad paper where I scrawled down my brainstormed ideas for Every Breath. I vividly remember that brainstorming session: sitting in a camp chair sipping hot tea from a tin pannikin, near the tent where my youngest son was sleeping. We were on our annual pilgrimage to the beach at Christmas time, and my husband had taken the other boys down to the surf so I could have an hour’s peace and quiet. A sea breeze off the cliff ruffled the pages. The midday ticking of insects and pocking of bush pigeons was my soundtrack.

Coming off the high of winning the Scarlet Stiletto Award was like finding my direction: I knew I could write crime well. This new story – this new novel - had to be crime-related, I knew that much. And it had to be real crime – blood and autopsies and homicide, not some cosy mystery for Young Adults. Teenagers want to see what’s real; they want the truth, even the bone-deep truth of murder. And this new story had to be for teenagers. I’d been writing stories for adults for a long time: I wanted to return to my passions.

I tossed a lot of ideas in the bin, on the path towards plot development. But the characters were there from the start, already living and breathing and half-awake: James Mycroft, brilliant, curly-haired, acerbic smoker, and Rachel Watts, a country girl a long way from home.

The characters always come first. They’re people I’m happy to spend time with, people who are already alive in my mind – still growing, still unfolding their wings, but generally self-aware, and definitely talking. Before they even know their direction and purpose they’re already chatting to one another. I spend a lot of time frantically searching for a pen and paper – a notebook, the back of a flyer, a napkin – so I can catch the snippets of existing conversation. It’s a bit like being a listener on one end of a party line. Rachel’s voice came in clearly, defiantly, from that first session: Here I am in the picture from seven years ago – a ten-year-old rural in a blue dress.

On the drive back from our camping trip, returning to the bustle and grime of Melbourne, I realised that the other player in the story had to be the location. Melbourne had to be a character in its own right. My adopted city with its hidden lanes and cobbled road edges and tram-tracked grit, still so exotic to me after all these years. As soon as we got home I started hunting for Peter Temple books, determined to see how others had got it right.

This all makes me sound so organised! I’m not organised, I’m a pantser. I formulate ideas about narrative direction and plot development – the characters hijack me every time. I don’t really mind. Rachel and Mycroft run the show: I’m just sitting here, writing it down.

Every Breath