The Readings Teen Advisory Board was fortunate enough to receive copies of Ambelin Kwaymullina's latest novel and our June YA Book of the Month, Liar's Test. They were invited to interview the author about her book and her writing process, which provided some fascinating insights. Here is their interview:

From Alicia

What motivates or inspires you to write and be an author?  

To be an Aboriginal person is to be surrounded by stories – of our Ancestors, our Countries, and all our relations (both human and not). Not every story is ours to know, or to tell even if we do know it. But in Aboriginal systems, all that lives has stories, and everything lives. What motivates me to write is to honour the strength of my Ancestors, especially those who were denied every opportunity to speak. And I hope that in the sharing of story I am helping to make a world that is a bit better than what has gone before.  

From Saskia

Liar's Test has a wonderfully intricate plot and rich fantasy world – what is your planning process when creating a different world, such as the one in this book?

I’m actually not much of a planner. My planning process before I begin a book consists of a table in a word document with two columns (one column is the chapter number, and the other side is three or four lines about what happens in that chapter). Everything else emerges as I’m writing. I like to let a world breathe and speak. I always write in first person and my process is to discover the world as the protagonist lives it, letting her focus on what matters to her about where and how she lives. 

From Kat

What were the easiest and hardest parts of the story to write, and how did you overcome the challenges in the more difficult parts?

For me, the easiest part of any novel is the characters where I always know exactly what they’ll say and do, without even having to think about it. In Liar’s Test, those characters were Tricks, Granny Silverleaf, and Alethea Silverleaf. Anything involving them was easy to write. But anything to do with how Bell was feeling was difficult, because she’d learned to hide her emotions (even from herself) as a survival mechanism. That meant a sense of what she was feeling never flowed naturally with the rest of the story, which is told in her voice. I overcame it by going over every moment and considering what she’d be feeling in that moment, then weaving that into the narrative. 

From Likitha

I was able to see the influence your identity as a First Nations writer has had on your writing. How did your identity help shape the concepts we saw in Liar’s Test? Are the ideas we see some of your own beliefs?

Liar’s Test is a work of Indigenous Futurisms, which are stories of the future shaped by Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and by our deep knowledge of injustice. So the principles that underlie Aboriginal systems helped to shape the world of Treesingers in the book. These principles include that reality is a living, interconnected whole where human beings are but one strand of life amongst many, and that time is not linear. In the book, plants are Bell’s friends, Ancestors, relatives and guides. They have insights which Bell doesn’t, and she only gets access to this knowledge through nurturing and respecting connections. Plants are also the holders of non-linear time (where ‘near’ and ‘far’ refer not to linear distances but to relative positions in the web of relationships that comprises reality). Through her plant connections as well as Ancestral memories, Bell shifts back and forth through linear time in the book to gain the knowledge she needs to succeed in a quest begun long before she was born. 

Another, more general question, I would like to ask is how do you work on character building? What inspires the characteristics and individuality of each character?

I always feel my characters have much bigger lives than anything that appears on the page; that they hold an existence that extends outside of and beyond the stories I manage to capture in a book. So for me, it feels more like how do I highlight enough of their personalities to convey a true sense of who they are, given that I don’t have the narrative space to incorporate all the details of their much larger lives? It’s more of a meditative, intuitive process, of sitting with the personalities and letting them reveal themselves as I write.

Is writing through the lens of younger or older characters harder, or does it come naturally?

I find teenage characters easier. I suspect I’m stuck somewhere between thirteen to sixteen years old in my head, because almost everything I write comes out about that age. I’ve tried to write fiction for adults a few times but I usually only get a few pages in before it turns into a YA novel.

From Bede

How do you write your own personal values into your work?

There is always a measure of justice in the outcomes to my stories. The architects of cruelty and oppression are held accountable, and those who have stood up to oppression live to see the better world they fought for. I think often of my Ancestors who survived so many profound and terrible injustices but who never stopped believing in a just future.  

From Amelia

Your book is based in quite a short time frame (which I loved, as it felt like I was there for every moment). Did you plan for that, or did it evolve while you were writing?

It came out in the writing. I could have spread the events across a much longer time frame than how things went in the book, if I’d wanted to. But I personally like stories that are twisty and fast-moving, and I think that’s what ended up on the page.

From Alex

What was the naming process like behind the book's characters' names and places?

I usually don’t know names when I start writing, so I put placeholder names in the text – anything will do. Names appear later for me, when I know the characters and the places better than I do at the beginning. 

From Shenelle

What advice would you give to aspiring writers, especially those looking to incorporate cultural elements into their storytelling?

I can only speak from my own experience which is, that I hold myself accountable to ethical standards. To me, that means other people’s cultures are not my source material. I can only draw upon my own culture, and that still doesn’t mean all stories are mine to tell. There are boundaries on knowledge in Aboriginal culture, as well as a continued danger of knowledge being misappropriated when it is revealed. The laws which protect stories in Aboriginal systems don’t exist in Western legal systems, which is part of the reason there are extensive ethical protocols (including the Creative Australia First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts). For my own practice, I avoid sharing any specific cultural information and instead am inspired by the general principles that shape Aboriginal systems, working more in allegory and metaphor.

From Ciara

What was the process like in writing Liars Test? How much research went into the novel? And what are some changes you made along the way?

I was working long hours while I was trying to write the book, so most of it got written late at night, that being the only time I had available. The story was originally a lot longer than it finally turned out and that was the major change, stripping out information about the world that didn’t need to be there. I think spec fic writers usually know so much more about a world than what makes it onto the page (but perhaps some of that info will end up in book 2). 

I didn’t do any research but when I started writing, I was thinking of all the Aboriginal women who came before me. This inspired many of the resistance strategies pursued by Bell Silverleaf and her Ancestors as they fight to survive contexts in which it is not safe to show their power, walk in their strength, or speak the truth of their experiences. The dedication to the book reads: For the Grandmothers/Spiky and strong/Fierce and proud/Warriors all/Survivors all/We who came after/remember. I hope I did them proud.